Evelyn Gordon
Analysis from Israel

Obama Scraps Decades-Old Policy of Even-Handedness on Israel

Published May 29, 2011

Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, as Jonathan noted, single-handedly prevented last week’s G-8 summit from explicitly endorsing the 1967 lines as a starting point for Israeli-Palestinian talks. What made this remarkable, however, was not merely that Harper once again provided the lone pro-Israel voice in an international forum. It’s that Harper, rather than the U.S. president, was the one Israel’s prime minister telephoned for help — because Barack Obama has blatantly abandoned a longstanding American tradition of insisting that international forums meet minimal standards of even-handedness.

It’s hard to overstate the significance of this shift. For decades, when Israel wanted help defending its case in an international forum, it dialed Washington. It didn’t matter whether Democrats or Republicans occupied the White House; Washington was always the address.

That’s because successive U.S. presidents all adopted a simple policy: You can’t target Israel while giving the Palestinians a free pass. You can’t condemn Israeli military operations without also condemning the rocket fire or suicide bombings that prompted them; you can’t demand Israeli concessions at the negotiating table without also demanding Palestinian concessions. As then-UN Ambassador John Danforth explained in a masterful exposition of this policy in 2004, that is how America defines “even-handedness,” and it won’t accept anything less.

But it’s precisely this policy that Obama has abandoned – and that Harper has stepped in to defend. As the latter told reporters after the summit, he doesn’t share Israel’s opposition to mentioning the 1967 lines in principle. What he objected to was the G-8’s attempt to make demands of Israel without also mentioning the concessions Palestinians will have to make for a two-state solution.

“You can’t cherry pick elements of that speech,” Harper said, referring to Obama’s May 19 Middle East policy address. “I think if you’re going to get into other elements, obviously I would like to see reference to elements that were also in President Obama’s speech. Such as, for instance, the fact that one of the states must be a Jewish state. The fact that the Palestinian state must be demilitarized.”

Not so long ago, it would have been the U.S. president insisting on that basic modicum of even-handedness. It’s a measure of how far Obama has undercut the American-Israeli alliance that Jerusalem is now forced to dial Ottawa instead.

Originally Published in: Commentary
Original Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/05/29/obama-scraps-decades-old-policy-of-even-handedness-on-israel/
Posted in Uncategorized
Originally Published in:

Original Link:

Subscribe to Evelyn’s Mailing List

Featured Post

Why Israel Needs a Better Political Class

Note: This piece is a response to an essay by Haviv Rettig Gur, which can be found here

Israel’s current political crisis exemplifies the maxim that hard cases make bad law. This case is desperate. Six months after the coronavirus erupted and nine months after the fiscal year began, Israel still lacks both a functioning contact-tracing system and an approved 2020 budget, mainly because Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is more worried about politics than the domestic problems that Israel now confronts. The government’s failure to perform these basic tasks obviously invites the conclusion that civil servants’ far-reaching powers must not only be preserved, but perhaps even increased.

This would be the wrong conclusion. Bureaucrats, especially when they have great power, are vulnerable to the same ills as elected politicians. But unlike politicians, they are completely unaccountable to the public.

That doesn’t mean Haviv Rettig Gur is wrong to deem them indispensable. They provide institutional memory, flesh out elected officials’ policies, and supply information the politicians may not know and options they may not have considered. Yet the current crisis shows in several ways why they neither can nor should substitute for elected politicians.

First, bureaucrats are no less prone to poor judgment than politicians. As evidence, consider Siegal Sadetzki, part of the Netanyahu-led triumvirate that ran Israel’s initial response to the coronavirus. It’s unsurprising that Gur never mentioned Sadetzki even as he lauded the triumvirate’s third member, former Health Ministry Director General Moshe Bar Siman-Tov; she and her fellow Health Ministry staffers are a major reason why Israel still lacks a functional test-and-trace system.

Sadetzki, an epidemiologist, was the ministry’s director of public-health services and the only member of the triumvirate with professional expertise in epidemics (Bar Siman-Tov is an economist). As such, her input was crucial. Yet she adamantly opposed expanding virus testing, even publicly asserting that “Too much testing will increase complacence.” She opposed letting organizations outside the public-health system do lab work for coronavirus tests, even though the system was overwhelmed. She opposed sewage monitoring to track the spread of the virus. And on, and on.

Moreover, even after acknowledging that test-and-trace was necessary, ministry bureaucrats insisted for months that their ministry do the tracing despite its glaringly inadequate manpower. Only in August was the job finally given to the army, which does have the requisite personnel. And the system still isn’t fully operational.

Read more
Archives