I’ve been engaged in a debate with my cousin from Mexico, who loves how GOP candidates fight over who is a better friend of Israel and who was insisting that they were superior friends of Israel over the current US Administration.
I had tried to explain the following:
That is because you don’t see how Gingrich’s and Romney’s pandering to us (American Jews) ends up hurting the US and Israel. For one, Arabs then feel the US will not be balanced and they stop trusting the US and don’t want anything to do with it. A weak US is bad for Israel. Gingrich denying the Palestinians’ identity is harmful to Israel. For Israel’s sake, it needs to separate from the Palestinians and have them have their State and Israel its State. If Gingrich insists there are no Palestinians, where are all the Arabs living in the West Bank going to go? They are not going anywhere. If Israel annexes that land along with millions of Palestinians, not only will we have a demographic challenge where Palestinians will eventually make up the majority, but also we’ll end up with a balkanized divided country as a permanent condition, as in Lebanon.
Shimon Peres once said something very wise to a group of us: when you negotiate, you need to be careful not to weaken your counterpart on the other side so much that they can’t then do their job. We have a Palestinian government willing to achieve a lasting two state solution. If we keep undermining Fayyad and Abbas, we’ll end up with Hamas alone. Not a good idea.
Even Elliot Abrams, one of the most right wing pro-Israel supporters EVER, mocked Gingrich’s position.
And Romney is just a panderer who will just say what he thinks the particular audience wants to hear. He has no moral compass.
Israel is not well-served by people trying to say they are our friends and making extremist pronouncements.
An analogy is how Iran always says they are friends of the Palestinians and they try to hijack the Palestinian cause, with their extremist positions. They are not helping the Palestinian people, and the moderate Palestinians eventually start calling them on it. But in national conflicts, it is very hard for moderates to call the extremists out, for fear of not appearing as nationalistic. That is why when foreigners try to appear as friends of either side with extremist positions, they harm the process.
I don’t think I was sufficiently persuasive.
Tom Friedman fortunately came to the rescue with this column, which quite painfully highlights the challenges Israel is facing from within and from outside, from extremist ideologues and pandering politicians who’d sell out Israeli democracy and freedom for political or extremist ideological purposes.
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