Thomas L. Friedman has the credentials to make judgments about U.S. politicians and their efforts to win the Jewish vote.
First, Friedman is Jewish. Much more important, he is a long-time student of the Middle East who has spent months on end in Lebanon, Israel, Jordan and other nations in the region. His phone calls to Jewish leaders get answered.
So when Friedman writes with disdain about Mitt Romney’s pandering to militant Israelis to win votes and campaign donations, he deserves to be heard. He said:
“ . . . Much of what is wrong with the U.S.-Israel relationship today can be found in that Romney trip. In recent years, the Republican Party has decided to make Israel a wedge issue. In order to garner more Jewish (and evangelical) votes and money, the G.O.P. decided to ‘out-pro-Israel’ the Democrats by being even more unquestioning of Israel. This arms race has pulled the Democratic Party to the right on the Middle East and has basically forced the Obama team to shut down the peace process and drop all demands that Israel freeze settlements. This, in turn, has created a culture in Washington where State Department officials . . . are reluctant to even state publicly . . . that settlements are ‘an obstacle to peace’ for fear of being denounced as anti-Israel.
“Add on top of that, the increasing role of money in U.S. politics and the importance of single donors who can write megachecks to ‘super PACs’ — and the fact that the main Israel lobby, Aipac, has made itself the feared arbiter of which lawmakers are ‘pro’ and which are ‘anti-Israel’ and, therefore, who should get donations and who should not — and you have a situation in which there are almost no brakes, no red lights, around Israel coming from America anymore. No wonder settlers now boast on op-ed pages that the game is over, they’ve won, the West Bank will remain with Israel forever — and they don’t care what absorbing all of its Palestinians will mean for Israel’s future as a Jewish democracy.”
Friedman goes on to quote Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak as saying that the U.S. is providing Israel with advanced weaponry and intelligence cooperation and “doing more in regard to our security than anything that I can remember in the past” and then remarks that Romney missed an opportunity to learn by refusing to go to Ramallah and meet with Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas, where he could have “shared publicly what he would do to advance the peace process.”
Friedman passionately believes — both as an expert on the region and as a Jew — that “it is in Israel’s overwhelming interest to (find) creative ideas for a two-state solution. That is what a real U.S. friend would promise to do.
“Here is what I know: The three U.S. statesmen who have done the most to make Israel more secure and accepted in the region all told blunt truths to every Israeli or Arab leader: Jimmy Carter, who helped forge a lasting peace between Israel and Egypt; Henry Kissinger, who built the post-1973 war disengagement agreements with Syria, Israel and Egypt; and James Baker, who engineered the Madrid peace conference. All of them knew that to make progress in this region you have to get in the face of both sides. They both need the excuse at times that ‘the Americans made me do it,’ because their own politics are too knotted to move on their own.”
Friedman ended his essay with this lecture to American politicians in both parties:
“ . . . Stop feeding off this conflict for political gain. . . . Stop making things even worse by telling the most hard-line Israelis everything that they want to hear, just to grovel for Jewish votes and money, while blatantly ignoring the other side. There are real lives at stake out there. If you’re not going to do something constructive, stay away. They can make enough trouble for themselves on their own.”
