SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
egypt
Beyond the Myths: Reflecting on Jimmy Carter’s Israel-Palestine Legacy
More than any other U.S. president, he tried to create a better future for Palestinians and for Israeli Jews.
Dec 30, 2024
Former U.S. President Jimmy Carter, who died Sunday at the age of 100, is a man whose legacy will forever be inextricably linked to Israel and Palestine. Yet that legacy will be built as much on myth as on reality, as with so many other aspects of the history and politics of the “Holy Land.”
Carter is remembered fondly by many on the left, and for good reason. In many areas, he tried to govern with humanity, decency, and with regard to people’s rights. Whether due to his own shortcomings or the limitations of the system, he was not always successful, as citizens of Cambodia and East Timor can attest. Still, if he was far from perfect, Carter did still bring principles of human rights into his policy thinking more than any other U.S. president in living memory, and quite possibly in all of American history.
There can be little doubt that Carter’s heart was in the right place when it came to his ambition to resolve what he referred to as the “Israel-Palestine conflict.” Carter spoke often about the need for Palestinian rights to be recognized, but he also repeatedly noted that he was motivated by his affection for Israel and his desire to see it survive, something he did not believe it could do if it continued to oppress the Palestinians.
The most striking thing I recall about Carter—aside from the oppressive feeling his Secret Service guards projected—was the depth of his feeling when he talked about both Jewish history and the Palestinian present, at that time.
Carter had, and often expressed, boundless sympathy for the Jewish people and what they had endured throughout history. But he recognized both that this history did not justify the oppression of another people and that establishing an ethnocentric apartheid state would not end the scourge of antisemitism or the harm that caused to Jews. This was the ethos he expressed in his book, even while it was less visible in his policies as president.
Carter’s view of the issue was, inevitably, shaped by his evangelical Christian background and his thorough immersion in the view of Israel that dominated the United States throughout the Cold War years after World War II. It was a view of Israel that few Palestinians would recognize, but it was also a view that, in the 1970s and 1980s, was still more critical of Israeli actions than the overwhelming majority of Americans.
Carter’s view evolved over the years, as we can see from the two major points of Carter’s engagement with the issue: the Camp David agreement and Israel-Egypt peace treaty of 1978 and 1979, respectively; and the publication of his controversial book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid, in 2006.
Meeting Carter
I had the privilege of meeting President Carter a few years before his book was published. The meeting was attended by about half a dozen progressive leaders in the San Francisco Bay Area, on the UC Berkeley campus.
The most striking thing I recall about Carter—aside from the oppressive feeling his Secret Service guards projected—was the depth of his feeling when he talked about both Jewish history and the Palestinian present, at that time. I’ve met many political leaders, and I’m used to the air of phoniness they project. There was none of that with Carter. If he wasn’t genuinely affected by the suffering he was talking about, he was a much better actor than he ever was a politician.
Carter spoke with pride of the work he put in to get Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat to an agreement at Camp David, and with immense regret that he didn’t do more to secure a better future for the Palestinian people. One can debate the politics and strategy of his actions, and even find considerable fault with them, but it is clear that his intentions toward both peoples were positive.
Carter is seen by much of the Jewish community and many other supporters of Israel as an enemy, the man who forced then-Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to accept compromises that he and the pro-Israel community wished to reject. But as it played out, Carter did more for Israel’s security than any other U.S. president, while unwittingly setting the stage for the steady erosion of Palestinian rights that the Oslo process represented.
Camp David
The result of the Camp David summit and the Israeli-Egyptian peace agreement that emerged from it was that Israel has not faced a credible military threat since the agreement was put in place. Carter understood, as any observer would, that if Israel made peace with Egypt, it would remove the single biggest military challenger in the region and the remaining Arab states would no longer be able to mount a credible threat against Israel. He understood as well that by bringing Egypt firmly into the United States’ sphere of influence, the Cold War balance of power in the Middle East shifted significantly.
Carter, in that case, acted not only in the interests of Israel, but also had a clear American interest in the outcome. The regime of annual aid that has flowed ever since to both Israel and Egypt locked both countries into an alliance, and into a certain degree of dependence on the U.S., a factor that was of great importance in Cold War strategy.
All of this was lost on Israel’s supporters in the United States. In his book, We Are Not One: A History of America’s Fight Over Israel, historian Eric Alterman described the reaction to Carter mentioning the “legitimate rights of the Palestinian people,” citing Carter’s Press Secretary Jody Powell describing the reaction as “bonkers.” Alterman elaborated:
Democratic fundraising events were cancelled. Representatives of the administration to Jewish groups were shunned. Hyman Bookbinder, the outspokenly liberal Washington representative of the American Jewish Committee, lectured the Carter people, “Obviously you apparently do not really understand what these words mean…‘Palestinian rights’ means the destruction of Israel.” A Harris poll taken at the time found 60% of Jews agreeing with the statement that “the president and his people have abandoned Israel.”
Alterman further noted that the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations at the time, Alexander Schindler, leaked the contents of a private meeting with Carter to the press, a highly unusual betrayal of trust. That generated even more intense controversy and American Jewish anger at Carter, as it was intended to do.
All of this, it must be noted, was in response to Carter’s vision of Palestine being a sort of autonomous adjunct of Jordan, a position not far removed from that of most of the Israeli political spectrum. He was not advocating an independent Palestinian state, an idea which was completely out of bounds in American political discourse of the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Indeed, Carter, in March 1977, said that “the first prerequisite of a lasting peace is the recognition of Israel by her neighbors, Israel’s right to exist, Israel’s right to exist permanently.” Carter never wavered from that position, despite the invective hurled at him by Israelis and Israel’s American boosters for the rest of his life.
When the historic agreement emerged from Camp David, parts of the Jewish community saw Carter in a better light, but this soon faded amid controversy over the sale of fighter jets to Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Jewish leadership got even more enraged when, due to a miscommunication, the U.S. voted in favor of a United Nations Security Council resolution that condemned Israeli settlement in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem. Though Carter said that the U.S. was supposed to abstain and only voted “yes” by mistake, the Jewish leadership, already hostile to him, was not mollified. It’s worth noting, however, that at that time, opposition to settlements was a much stronger U.S. policy, so much so that even the staunchest pro-Israel advocates didn’t expect the U.S. to vote “no” on the resolution. Times have certainly changed.
While the Jewish community was nowhere near large or powerful enough to cause the defeat of an incumbent president, it was a factor in Edward Kennedy’s strong, if ultimately unsuccessful, challenge for the Democratic nomination in 1980 which weakened Carter. Carter had the poorest showing among Jews of any Democratic presidential candidate since 1920, although he still won a plurality of the vote (John Anderson, who ran as an Independent, got 15% of the Jewish vote to Carter’s 45% and Ronald Reagan’s 39%).
Yet, after all of that, and with some continued grumbling and foot-stomping, Israel did manage to make a peace with Egypt; withdraw its settlements from the Sinai Peninsula; secure the annual funding that has stabilized and grown its economy and helped it become the dominant military power in the region; and kept Egypt as a cold ally ever since. Israel has Jimmy Carter to thank for all of that.
Reagan did little but press forward on Carter’s actions until the end of his second term. Ironically, Reagan would, only a few months after taking office, have his own run-ins with Israel’s domestic U.S. lobby, over the sale of the Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) to Saudi Arabia.
Yet Reagan remained beloved among the pro-Israel forces, despite selling a state-of-the-art military system to the Saudis, whom Israel was still extremely unfriendly with at that point; despite his frequent criticism of Israel’s behavior in Lebanon; and despite rebuking Israel for its dangerous attack on the Osirak nuclear site in Iraq in 1981. The difference was that Reagan rarely mentioned the Palestinians and often said nice things about Israel.
Apartheid
“And the word ‘apartheid’ is exactly accurate,” Carter told journalist Amy Goodman in 2007. “Within Palestinian territory, they are absolutely and totally separated, much worse than they were in South Africa, by the way. And the other thing is, the other definition of ‘apartheid’ is, one side dominates the other. And the Israelis completely dominate the life of the Palestinian people.”
Carter was responding to the resounding criticism of his book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid. The book itself was far less remarkable than the title, which drew an avalanche of criticism to Carter, including accusations of antisemitism. Then-ADL leader Abraham Foxman said, “The title is to de-legitimize Israel, because if Israel is like South Africa, it doesn’t really deserve to be a democratic state. He’s provoking, he’s outrageous, and he’s bigoted.”
Foxman’s statement is bizarre. States, of course, do not “deserve” to be democratic, it is something they either are to a significant degree or they are not. Foxman could not even utter the possibility that Israel was not a democratic state, which, interestingly, was certainly not what Carter was saying either in his book or his subsequent statements and writing.
Jimmy Carter, for all of his missteps, was, at heart, the decent man that Joe Biden liked to claim to be and couldn’t be farther away from actually being.
Carter was trying to warn Israel that it would become an apartheid state if it didn’t change course. This stood in sharp contrast to the claims of Palestinians, who, by 2007, had already been accusing Israel of apartheid for many years. Worse for Foxman was that Carter made the argument that legitimate Palestinian views were rarely heard in the media. Although Carter neither stated, nor even implied, that this demonstrable statement of fact had anything to do with a nefarious conspiracy of Jewish control, Foxman said, “The reason he gives for why he wrote this book is this shameless, shameful canard that the Jews control the debate in this country, especially when it comes to the media.”
Carter knew he was going to get hit for the title of his book. The substance, however, made it clear that he was trying to steer Israel away from its own self-immolation on the altar of its occupation. At the end of his book, he wrote, “The bottom line is this: Peace will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli government is willing to comply with international law... It will be a tragedy—for the Israelis, the Palestinians, and the world—if peace is rejected and a system of oppression, apartheid, and sustained violence is permitted to prevail.”
The woman in Joe Biden’s administration who currently, and undeservedly, holds the position of Special Envoy to Combat Antisemitism, Deborah Lipstadt, said Carter’s book “ignores a legacy of mistreatment, expulsion, and murder committed against Jews. It trivializes the murder of Israelis. Now, facing a storm of criticism, he has relied on antisemitic stereotypes in defense.” The scurrilous accusation is backed up with the same sleight of hand Foxman used.
Carter continued to advocate for Palestinian rights while also, contrary to the assertion of Lipstadt and Foxman, repeatedly asserting that Israel must be afforded a secure existence within recognized and clear borders.
In November 2016, as Barack Obama was preparing to leave office, Carter urged the outgoing president to recognize a Palestinian state, arguing, “The combined weight of United States recognition, United Nations membership, and a Security Council resolution solidly grounded in international law would lay the foundation for future diplomacy. These steps would bolster moderate Palestinian leadership, while sending a clear assurance to the Israeli public of the worldwide recognition of Israel and its security.” It was not the first time he had promoted such recognition.
This was the theme of Carter’s efforts from the 1970s to the end of his days. He was willing to take risks to see that vision come true. Over the years, he and the Carter Center he started made many efforts to heal the breach between Fatah and Hamas, ignoring criticism over talking with Hamas.
Carter’s legacy should be scrutinized carefully and honestly, with the same critical eye as any other president. He made his mistakes, and, as with any president, innocent people suffered as a result. But more than any other U.S. president, Jimmy Carter tried to create a better future for Palestinians and for Israeli Jews. No president before or since has tried as hard or has placed peace ahead of political concerns to the extent he did.
Jimmy Carter, for all of his missteps, was, at heart, the decent man that Joe Biden liked to claim to be and couldn’t be farther away from actually being. The hateful comments that came his way for many years, mostly from the Jewish community but also from the Christian Zionists who share his evangelical beliefs but not his understanding of what those beliefs mean, were horribly misplaced. He cared deeply and tried to do what he could to create a better future for Israelis and Palestinians alike. For that, he’s been called an antisemite. Every person who ever uttered that slur against him owes him an apology. Now would be a good time to send it.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Jimmy Carter, Middle East Peace, and The Man Who Killed My Dog
On how I ended up having more affection for Jimmy Carter than for any president before or since in my lifetime.
Dec 30, 2024
In January 1977 the nuns where we used to attend church in Lebanon gifted me the only dog I ever owned, a mutt they’d called Jimmy, after the newly elected American president. American politics was the world’s most accessible entertainment even then, so Jimmy Carter was big news in Lebanon. To those Antonine nuns Carter was something of a sex symbol. He wore his Christianity on his sleeve with a leer worthy of Mary Magdalene, allowing them to lust for him in their heart. In consequence they delivered me a Jimmy more frisky than pious.
Not being a registered Democrat I promptly renamed my new dog to something more presidential (King). Little did I know that I’d end up having more affection for Jimmy Carter than for any president before or since in my lifetime, which began a year to the day after JFK’s assassination. Maybe it’s because Carter was still president when I landed in the United States as a permanent resident in 1979. Inflation meant nothing to me. Gas lines were way shorter than they’d been in Lebanon. No one was shooting at me even in New York City, where we lived at what was to be the height of its post-Prohibition crime wave. It was a great time.
I’d come to admire Carter from another memory in 1978. This was the president who’d managed what no other president before or since has managed. He’d gotten Egypt and Israel to sign a peace treaty and Israel to give up the Sinai, the biggest and last real achievement in Middle East peacemaking since France and Britain turned that region into a hellhole on time-release after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire.
Egypt’s Anwar Sadat thought he was a latter-day pharaoh, but he’d started the impossible by going to Jerusalem and daring the Israelis to the peace table. Israel’s Menahem Begin was (and remained) a terrorist, his hatred for Arabs overmatching in weaponry and violence Arabs’ berserk hatred for Jews. Carter’s skill and smarts, and a self-righteousness almost as distressing as Woodrow Wilson’s, looked past all that in those famous 13 days at Camp David.
Opinion polls told Carter he was nuts. He looked past them. He ignored the imperious convention that presidents should not personally engage in negotiations. Mostly, he looked past the bigoted Kissinger doctrine–that Israel is always right, that nothing in Middle East initiatives ought to be done without Israel’s approval first. The approach had prevailed since Kennedy (Eisenhower, the last president to stand up to Israel, had no use for it) and would prevail again after Carter, as it does to Biden-bloodied day.
Camp David was the exception.
Of course neither Begin nor Sadat gave a shit about Palestinians. No Arabs and no Israelis ever have. They just wanted to remove their militaries from each other’s faces so Sadat could go back to repressing his people and Begin could go back to repressing Palestinians in the rest of the occupied territories. Peace with Egypt was to be the recalibration of repression in the West bank and Gaza. Carter, so often naive, looked past that, too, thinking Camp David was a start, not an end. (Clinton repeated the mistake with the deservedly doomed Oslo accords a decade and a half later.) He took at face value both men’s promises that they’d turn to the Palestinian problem some other time. Maybe Sadat meant it. It’s doubtful. It’s certain Begin, who called Palestinians “beasts walking on two legs” while Rafael Eitan, the Israeli military’s chief of staff, called them “drugged roaches in a bottle,” didn’t mean it.
Sadat was assassinated for signing the Camp David accords. Reagan was elected. The Middle East bored him once he vaguely learned it wasn’t to the right of the Midwest. He cleared the way for more unlawful Israeli colonization of the West Bank.
Begin took advantage, going on an orgy of “settlements”–a sanitizing euphemism that reduces land theft to something like summer camp and that the servile American press uses still. The orgy accelerated under Sharon and Netanyahu, with American money. Begin and Sharon in 1982 invaded Lebanon (with American weaponry) in the deadliest of all Israeli invasions until then, kicking off a 20-year occupation. Begin thought he was getting rid of the PLO. The invasion inseminated the more brutal and indigenous Hezbollah, provoking yet more wars–1996, 2006, 2024–with America turning a blind eye and thousands of Lebanese civilians paying the price, as always.
The 1994 peace between Israel and Jordan gave Israel still freer rein in the West Bank, once the brief hopes of the Oslo accords–which were supposed to lead to an autonomous Palestinian state–were discarded with Yitzhak Rabin’s assassination by an Israeli terrorist a year later–a Jewish ultra-nationalist, but really the twin of Sadat’s assassins. The so-called two-state solution to which every American president paid lip service and Israel never took seriously died about then, reinforcing what Carter called, with unfortunate restraint, Israeli apartheid.
At home, Carter’s presidency is remembered as a failure. Carter biographer Kai Bird has discredited the myth, documenting too many accomplishments to count. Not that this amnesiac country is interested in fact. The two crises that overwhelmed Carter’s legacy were the oil shock of 1979 and its subsequent inflation, and the Iranian hostage crisis, when 53 Americans were held hostage for 444 days in Tehran after the fall of the Shah. The oil shock was not Carter’s doing. The hostage crisis was.
The Shah was one of the most vain and mass-murdering leaders of the 20th century, a sort of dandy Idi Amin. He was the mutant child of an abominable union between Winston Churchill and the CIA in 1953. He’d been flattered, financed and fellated by every American president since Eisenhower on the cynical calculation that tyrannizing over 40 million Iranians in exchange for blocking Soviet control of the Persian Gulf was ok with them. We finally paid the price. The Shah was ousted by the identically reprehensible but also vengeful Khomeini.
Carter despised the Shah and initially resisted for most of a year letting him into the United States. The Shah was now himself battling what he’d been to his country: cancer. Carter’s aides and Henry Kissinger (as always) kept up the pressure. Kissinger threatened to undermine Carter’s arms control treaty with the Soviets by condemning SALT II before the Senate.
Just as Carter was building what seemed like constructive relations with the new Iranian regime, he gave in and let the Shah check into New York Hospital, despite warnings from the American embassy in Tehran that it would endanger the staff there. It was the single worst decision of Carter’s presidency. Nine days after the Shah entered the United States, Iranian militants took the Americans hostage.
But for one more error–again giving in to hawks with an attempted rescue that ended in disaster in the Iranian desert, with the death of eight Americans–Carter handled the crisis with admirable diplomacy, refusing escalations to safeguard the life of the hostages even at the cost of his plummeting poll numbers.
He might have won their release but for the Reagan campaign repeating the Nixon campaign’s treachery against Johnson in 1968. Nixon go-betweens carried out secret negotiations with the enemy for electoral gain. So did Reagan’s with Iran. It was a preview of Oliver North’s secret negotiations and illegal arms deals with the regime a few years later as Reagan secretly siphoned millions of dollars and weapons to Nicaraguan terrorists he called “freedom fighters.”
As Kai Bird wrote, “now we have good evidence that Ronald Reagan’s campaign manager Bill Casey made a secret trip to Madrid in the summer of 1980, where he may have met with a representative of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and thus prolonged the hostage crisis. If this is true, such interference in the hostage negotiations sought to deny the Carter administration an October surprise, a release of the hostages late in the campaign, and it was dirty politics and a raw deal for the American hostages.”
Of course it’s true: Khomeini released the hostages minutes after Reagan was inaugurated, the day the most scandal-free administration of the 20th century gave way to the most scandal-ridden. It was Fantasyland again in (white) America.
Americans like their country to be run as a theme park. Annoyances like reality, responsibility and malaise have no place. Neither did Carter. The fantasists have been taking their revenge on him ever since, even as Carter’s legend grew in the 43 years since his presidency. He became the busiest ex-president in history, if still the least celebrated and the most shunned. The great conciliator out-hustled some of his predecessors’ actual presidencies (notably the senescent Reagan, Trump and all those zeros between Wilson and FDR), and of course out-living two of those who followed him. I thought he had a good chance of outliving Biden and Trump II. He’s decided otherwise. His one hundred years of solitude are over.
As for King, my dog, I’m glad I renamed him. A year after I left Lebanon he, too, was assassinated. I wouldn’t have wanted to have Jimmy’s death on my conscience. My poor dog was running after a neighbor’s chickens. The neighbor, Khalil, shot him dead. The same neighbor who not long afterward shot his own son, Munir–who had been one of my closest friends–dead. Khalil was finally imprisoned.
Lebanon, like the rest of the Middle East, could have used a few dozen Carter Centers: “Waging peace. Fighting Disease. Building Hope.” So could the United States, a nation proudly and vindictively becoming more Begin than Sadat, more Khalil than Carter, by the day.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Biden’s Bear Hug of Netanyahu Is Undermining His Middle East Goals
The alliance of U.S. partners in the region with Israel against Iran that Washington has long worked for seems to be coming apart at the seams.
Sep 18, 2024
At least one thing is now obvious in the Middle East: The Biden administration has failed abjectly in its objectives there, leaving the region in dangerous disarray. Its primary stated foreign policy goal has been to rally its partners in the region to cooperate with the extremist Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu while upholding a “rules-based” international order and blocking Iran and its allies in their policies. Clearly, such goals have had all the coherence of a chimera and have failed for one obvious reason. President Biden’s Achilles heel has been his “bear hug” of Netanyahu, who allied himself with the Israeli equivalent of neo-Nazis, while launching a ruinous total war on the people of Gaza in the wake of the horrific October 7 Hamas terrorist attack on Israel.
Biden also signed on to the Abraham Accords, a project initiated in 2020 by Jared Kushner, the son-in-law and special Middle East envoy of then-President Donald Trump. Through them the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and Morocco all agreed to recognize Israel in return for investment and trade opportunities there and access to American weaponry and a U.S. security umbrella. Not only did Washington, however, fail to incorporate Saudi Arabia into that framework, but it has also faced increasing difficulty keeping the accords themselves in place given increasing anger and revulsion in the region over the high (and still ongoing) civilian death toll in Gaza. Typically, just the docking of an Israeli ship at the Moroccan port of Tangier this summer set off popular protests that spread to dozens of cities in that country. And that was just a taste of what could be coming.
Breathtaking Hypocrisy
Washington’s efforts in the Middle East have been profoundly undermined by its breathtaking hypocrisy. After all, the Biden team has gone blue in the face decrying the Russian occupation of parts of Ukraine and its violations of international humanitarian law in killing so many innocent civilians there. In contrast, the administration let the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu completely disregard international law when it comes to its treatment of the Palestinians. This summer, the International Court of Justice ruled that the entire Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories is illegal in international law and, in response, the U.S. and Israel both thumbed their noses at the finding. In part as a response to Washington’s Israeli policy, no country in the Middle East and very few nations in the Global South have joined in its attempt to ostracize Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Worse yet for the Biden administration, the most significant divide in the Arab world between secular nationalist governments and those that favor forms of political Islam has begun to heal in the face of the perceived Israeli threat. Turkey and Egypt, daggers long drawn over their differing views of the Muslim Brotherhood, the fundamentalist movement that briefly came to power in Cairo in 2012-2013, have begun repairing their relationship, specifically citing the menace posed by Israeli expansionism.
The persistence of Secretary of State Antony Blinken in pressing Saudi Arabia, a key U.S. security partner, to recognize Israel at a moment when the Arab public is boiling with anger over what they see as a campaign of genocide in Gaza, is the closest thing since the Trump administration to pure idiocracy. Washington’s pressure on Riyadh elicited from Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman the pitiful plea that he fears being assassinated were he to normalize relations with Tel Aviv now. And consider that ironic given his own past role in ordering the assassination of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi. In short, the ongoing inside-the-Beltway ambition to secure further Arab recognition of Israel amid the annihilation of Gaza has America’s security partners wondering if Washington is trying to get them killed—anything but a promising basis for a long-term alliance.
Global Delegitimization
The science-fiction-style nature of U.S. policy in the Middle East is starkly revealed when you consider the position of Jordan, which has a peace treaty with Israel. In early September, its foreign minister, Ayman Safadi, warned that any attempt by the Israeli military or its squatter-settlers to expel Indigenous West Bank Palestinians to Jordan would be considered an “act of war.” While such anxieties might once have seemed overblown, the recent stunning (and stunningly destructive) Israeli military campaign on the Palestinian West Bank, including bombings of populated areas by fighter jets, has already begun to resemble the campaign in Gaza in its tactics. And keep in mind that, as August ended, Foreign Minister Israel Katz even urged the Israeli army to compel Palestinians to engage in a “voluntary evacuation” of the northern West Bank.
Not only is the expulsion of Palestinians from there now the stated policy of cabinet members like Jewish Power extremist Itamar Ben-Gvir; it’s the preference of 65% of Israelis polled. And mind you, when Israel and Jordan begin talking war you know something serious is going on, since the last time those two countries actively fought was in the 1973 October War during the administration of President Richard Nixon.
In short, Netanyahu and his extremist companions are in the process of undoing all the diplomatic progress their country achieved in the past half-century. Ronen Bar, the head of Israel’s domestic Shin Bet intelligence agency, warned in August that the brutal policies the extremists in the government were pursuing are “a stain on Judaism” and will lead to “global delegitimization, even among our greatest allies.”
The ligaments of American influence in the Middle East are now dissolving before our very eyes.
Turkey, a NATO ally with which the U.S. has mutual defense obligations, has become vociferous in its discontent with President Biden’s Middle Eastern policy. Although Turkey recognized Israel in 1949, under President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of the pro-Islam Justice and Development Party interactions had grown rocky even before the Gaza nightmare. Still, until then their trade and military ties had survived occasional shouting matches between their politicians. The Gaza genocide, however, has changed all that. Erdogan even compared Netanyahu to Hitler, and then went further still, claiming that, in the Rafah offensive in southern Gaza in May, “Netanyahu has reached a level with his genocidal methods that would make Hitler jealous.”
Worse yet, the Turkish president, referred to by friend and foe as the “sultan” because of his vast power, has now gone beyond angry words. Since last October, he’s used Turkey’s position in NATO to prohibit that organization from cooperating in any way with Israel on the grounds that it’s violating the NATO principle that harm to civilians in war must be carefully minimized. The Justice and Development Party leader also imposed an economic boycott on Israel, interrupting bilateral trade that had reached $7 billion a year and sending the price of fruits and vegetables in Israel soaring, while leading to a shortage of automobiles in the Israeli market.
Erdogan’s Justice and Development Party represents the country’s small towns and rural areas and its Muslim businesses and entrepreneurs, constituencies that care deeply about the fate of Muslim Palestinians in Gaza. And while Erdogan’s high dudgeon has undoubtedly been sincere, he’s also pleasing his party’s stalwarts in the face of an increasing domestic challenge from the secular Republican People’s Party. In addition, he’s long played to a larger Arab public, which is apoplectic over the unending carnage in Gaza.
The Alliance of Muslim Countries
Although it was undoubtedly mere bluster, Erdogan even threatened a direct intervention on behalf of the beleaguered Palestinians. In early August, he said, “Just as we intervened in Karabakh [disputed territory between Azerbaijan and Armenia], just as we intervened in Libya, we will do the same to them.” In early September, the Turkish president called for an Islamic alliance in the region to counter what he characterized as Israeli expansionism:
Yesterday, one of our own children, [Turkish-American human rights advocate] Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, was vilely slaughtered [on the West Bank]. Israel will not stop in Gaza. After occupying Ramallah [the de facto capital of that territory], they will look around elsewhere. They’ll fix their eyes on our homeland. They openly proclaim it with a map. We say Hamas is resisting for the Muslims. Standing against Israel’s state terror is an issue of importance to the nation and the country. Islamic countries must wake up as soon as possible and increase their cooperation. The only step that can be taken against Israel’s genocide is the alliance of Muslim countries.
In fact, the present nightmare in Gaza and the West Bank may indeed be changing political relationships in the region. After all, the Turkish president pointed to his rapprochement with Egypt as a building block in a new security edifice he envisions. Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi made his first visit to Ankara on September 4 (following a February Erdogan trip to Cairo). And those visits represented the end of a more than decade-long cold war in the Sunni Muslim world over al-Sisi’s 2013 coup against elected Muslim Brotherhood Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, whom Erdogan had backed.
Despite its apparent embrace of democratic norms in 2012-2013, some Middle Eastern rulers charged the Brotherhood with having covert autocratic ambitions throughout the region and sought to crush it. For the moment, the Muslim Brotherhood and other forms of Sunni political Islam have been roundly defeated in Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, and the Persian Gulf region. Erdogan, a pragmatist despite his support for the Brotherhood and its offshoot Hamas, had been in the process of getting his country the best possible deal, given such a regional defeat, even before the Israelis struck Gaza.
Netanyahu’s Forever War in Gaza
For his part, Egypt’s al-Sisi is eager for greater leverage against Netanyahu’s apparent plan for a forever war in Gaza. After all, the Gaza campaign has already inflicted substantial damage on Egypt’s economy, since Yemen’s Houthis have supported the Gazans with attacks on container ships and oil tankers in the Red Sea. That has, in turn, diverted traffic away from it and from the Suez Canal, whose tolls normally earn significant foreign exchange for Egypt. In the first half of 2024, however, it took in only half the canal receipts of the previous year. Although tourism has held up reasonably well, any widening of the war could devastate that industry, too.
Egyptians are also reportedly furious over Netanyahu’s occupation of the Philadelphi Corridor south of the city of Rafah in Gaza and his blithe disregard of Cairo’s prerogatives under the Camp David agreement to patrol that corridor. The al-Sisi government, which, along with Qatar’s rulers and the Biden administration, has been heavily involved in hosting (so far fruitless) peace negotiations between Hamas and Israel, seems at the end of its tether, increasingly angered at the way the Israeli prime minister has constantly tacked new conditions onto any agreements being discussed, causing the talks to fail.
That things have come to such a pass in the Middle East is distinctly the fault of the Biden administration and its position—or lack of one—on Israel’s nightmare in Gaza (and now the West Bank, too).
For months, Cairo has also been seething over Netanyahu’s charge that Egypt allowed tunnels to be built under that corridor to supply Hamas with weaponry, insisting that the Egyptian army had diligently destroyed 1,500 such tunnels. Egypt’s position was given support recently by Nadav Argaman, a former head of Shin Bet, who said, “There is no connection between the weaponry found in Gaza and the Philadelphi Corridor.” Of Netanyahu, he added, “He knows very well that no smuggling takes place over the Philadelphi Corridor. So, we are now relegated to living with this imaginary figment.”
In the Turkish capital, Ankara, Al-Sisi insisted that he wanted to work with Erdogan to address “the humanitarian tragedy that our Palestinian brothers in Gaza are facing in an unprecedented disaster that has been going on for nearly a year.” He underscored that there was no daylight between Egypt and Turkey “regarding the demand for an immediate cease-fire, the rejection of the current Israeli escalation in the West Bank, and the call to start down a path that achieves the aspirations of the Palestinian people to establish their independent state on the borders of June 4, 1967, with East Jerusalem as its capital.” He also pointed out that such positions are in accord with U.N. Security Council resolutions and pledged to work with Turkey to ensure that humanitarian aid was delivered to Gaza despite “the ongoing obstacles imposed by Israel.”
To sum up, the ligaments of American influence in the Middle East are now dissolving before our very eyes. Washington’s closest allies, like the Jordanian and Saudi royal families, are terrified that Biden’s bear hug of Netanyahu’s war crimes and the fury of their own people could, in the end, destabilize their rule. Countries that, not so long ago, had correct, if not warm, relations with Israel like Egypt and Turkey are increasingly denouncing that country and its policies. And the alliance of U.S. partners in the region with Israel against Iran that Washington has long worked for seems to be coming apart at the seams. Countries like Egypt and Turkey are instead exploring the possibility of forming a regional Sunni Muslim alliance against Netanyahu’s geopolitics of Jewish power that might, in the end, actually reduce tensions with Tehran.
That things have come to such a pass in the Middle East is distinctly the fault of the Biden administration and its position—or lack of one—on Israel’s nightmare in Gaza (and now the West Bank, too). Today, all too sadly, that administration is wearing the same kind of blinkers regarding the war in Gaza that President Lyndon B. Johnson and his top officials once sported when it came to the Vietnam War.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular