Dave mentioned an ANSWER-sponsored demonstration in Los Angeles against the current Israeli incursions into Gaza. It's too bad that there isn't a more productive discussion of Israel's actions among both parties in Congress. I assume that most people that will show up for the ANSWER rally will be coming to protest the current Israeli action, not because they endorse the full palate of ANSWER's demands, such as, "An end to all U.S. aid to Israel".
This article gives a very informative background on the current situation. It was written before the current military actions came onto the horizon: What Does Olmert Want? by Amos Elon New York Review of Books 05/24/06 (06/22/06 issue). The New York Review makes a lot of its articles available online for several weeks after publication, but then most of them go behind subscription.
The United States is committed to defending Israel. And for a variety of reasons, most of the them good ones.
But Israel is in no "existential" danger, i.e., literally its existence as a state being in danger. Israel has 100-300 nuclear weapons and by far the most proficient army and air force in the region. However much both sides feel themselves embattled and endangered, Isreal is simply not facing any "existential" threat.
And the US commitment to Israel's security is, in diplomatic and international-law terms,essentially an informal one. The US has proposed several times since the 1967 war a formal defense treaty with Israel. But Israel declined because such a defense treaty would require a definition of borders that could complicate their position on the occupied territories.
The formal diplomatic posture of the US ever since 1967 has been basically that Israel had to eventually withdraw from the occupied territories. In practice, the US has tolerated the settlement policy which is now the main obstacle to peace. But not until the Bush administration did the US take what has been in effect a "hands-off" policy toward Israel. The effects have not been what the diplomats call salutory.
And even the Bush administration has had issues with Israel over arms sales to China, as did the Clinton administration. See this Voice of America news report: US/Israel/China/Weapons 08/15/05. Although it's rarely discussed by our "press corps", the main strategic enemy the neoconservatives focus on is China. And the Bush national security strategies have reflected that focus.
There has been some long-overdue public discussion of the "Israel lobby" in the last few months. Its a political fact right now that neither the Democrats nor the Republicans are willing to lean hard on Israel over the Israli-Palestinian dispute.
But the United States is now involved in Iraq in a counterinsurgency war in one of the most volatile regions of the planet. And, of course, an oil-rich one. We are also backing a Shi'a-dominated Islamist government there in fighting the Sunnis in a civil war, in addition to the insurgency.
That means Israel's actions affect the US, and American soldiers in Iraq especially, in a more immediate way than has usually been the case. Israel's Gaza incursion, whatever the justifications, is one more piece of fuel on the fire of Muslim and Arab hostility to the United States. The Bush administration and Congress should be putting pressure on the Olmert government to make the situation better, not inflame it more in this way.
Juan Cole comments on the incursion:
I am upset about the renewed crisis in Palestine because it is an emotional issue and will spill over into Sunni Arab Iraq. It is likely that pro-Palestinian Sunni guerrillas will kill some US troops specifically to avenge the people of Gaza. This is one reason I am complaining about the massively disproportional character of the Israeli response. It has the potential of further endangering American lives in the region.
And, it is counter-productive. The Israelis can't get back their soldier by destroying electricity plants in Gaza. They can't get more security by depriving Palestinians of security. (my emphasis)
The Amos Elon article linked above has this fascinating biographical note about Ehud Olmert and his wife:
Olmert has had a variable, hardly inspiring career in Israeli politics. From a family that had supported the right-wing Irgun terrorists in the 1930s and 1940s, he was, in the months following the 1967 war, a fiercely partisan hawk. He was a member of several right-wing splinter groups and is said to have coined one of their slogans: "Liberated Land/Remains Forever in our Hand," a rhyme as clumsy in Hebrew as it is in English. In 1973 he was the youngest man ever elected to the Knesset. As mayor of Jerusalem in the late 1990s he became a national figure but provoked a disaster by recklessly ordering the opening of an ancient Herodian tunnel close to the Muslim holy places on the ancient Temple Mount. This caused a predictable three-day battle between Muslim protesters and the police, leaving seventy-nine Palestinians dead and hundreds wounded. On the second day the army had to be called in. Fourteen Israeli soldiers also died. The Palestinians suspected, as they frequently do, that the Jews were about to destroy the mosques and rebuild the Jewish Temple where it had stood almost two thousand years ago.
It was the worst massacre of its kind in East Jerusalem since its occupation by Israel in the 1967 war. Olmert's wife, Aliza, an artist known for her support of the leftist Peace Now, recently told an interviewer that the incident had caused the most serious crisis in their thirty-year marriage. Their children share their mother's political views. One son refused service in the Israeli army. Before the recent elections, she said, she had never voted for her husband. Now she had done so, because, she said, Olmert had undergone "a deep change." She was only sorry it had not happened thirty years earlier. (my emphasis)
The Gaza incursion doesn't seem to be in line with the "deep change" that his wife perceives.
The following is Elon's description of the fatal flaws in Ohlmert's unilateral-withdrawal approach to achieving peace, which would leave large portions of the occupied West Bank with Israeli settlements:
The problem here is that for this new border to gain legitimacy, i.e., permanence, it must be confirmed by the other side. Unilateral steps create neither legitimacy nor security. This was shown a few years ago after Israel withdrew from southern Lebanon. The withdrawal was successful because Israel had withdrawn to the internationally recognized border, and the Israel–Lebanon border is now as quiet as it had not been for years.
The government has recently invited contractors to submit bids for the construction, on accelerated schedule, of new homes for the evacuees in their new locations elsewhere on the West Bank, where they will be protected by the new wall. When completed, the wall will run 759 kilometers. It will then be three times longer than the Israeli–Jordanian border before 1967, enclosing the Jewish state inside one enormous bunker.
The third obstacle is that the new wall will cut off some 200,000 Palestinians in Greater Jerusalem from their relatives, their natural hinterland, their universities, public institutions, businesses, workshops, and the property they own on the West Bank. Tens of thousands of other Palestinians on either side of the wall will be cut off from their orange and olive groves and their fields.
The latest Gaza incursion is not good news for the United States in the Middle East.
