Mitt Romney might be the only Republican presidential candidate who I can actually imagine being president, and it’s even possible that he wouldn’t screw things up as bad as Bush and Cheney. But if this is his idea of how to think about the Israel-Palestine question, there really is no hope for the Republican Party. His analysis is just cheap demagoguery. If he made this level of argument at a dinner party with James Baker, Brent Scowcroft, and Henry Kissinger, they’d send him to kiddies’ table.
Let’s start off with the fact that even the Bush administration never saw the expansion of settlements in the West Bank as “legitimate.” No administration has ever taken that position. And there is a simple reason for this. While Israel can credibly claim that they have military reasons for holding parts of the territories they conquered in 1967, and they can reasonably ask for certain conditions to be met before returning those territories, the settlement building makes it extraordinarily difficult, if not impossible, for Israel to actually return those territories if those conditions are eventually met. And that is the point; that is the reason that the settlements were built and continue to be expanded. Israel has decided, in effect, that it wants the territory more than it wants peace. Every day that goes by leaves a future Palestinian state will less land and less sovereignty, and less likelihood of ever coming into being.
Now, the United States is either going to change its position about the legitimacy of settlement expansion and fully embrace a Greater Israel strategy with no peace and no Palestinian state, or it has to oppose and condemn the expansion. You’ll note that we did veto the UN Resolution condemning the settlements yesterday, but that is contrary to our position.
US Ambassador Susan E. Rice said that the US vetoed a UN resolution which condemned settlements and called for a freeze on construction should not be “seen as an endorsement of Israel’s settlement policies, which the Obama administration has repeatedly denounced.” She commented that the draft resolution submitted, however, has the risk of “hardening the positions of both sides and could encourage parties to stay out of negotiations.”
Rice added that the resolution risks “undermining US-led efforts to pursue a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.” Rice said that the settlements have, for “four decades” undermined Israel’s security situation and hindered the peace process in the Middle East.
Susan Rice’s language might be a little more blunt, but the same thing could easily have been said by Condi Rice. But Romney doesn’t even address the merits of the proposed resolution once in his column. Instead we get misleading cheap-shots and lazy thinking.
The harm wrought by the Obama administration’s diplomatic decisionmaking is doubly driven home by the fact that it is taking place in that chamber of double-standards, the United Nations. For decades the U.N. has been the epicenter of the worldwide campaign to delegitimize Israel, a campaign that has often devolved into naked anti-Semitism. Democratic and Republican administrations alike have long resisted this vicious business. It was Daniel Patrick Moynihan who in 1975 denounced the U.N.’s “Zionism Equals Racism” resolution as an obscenity, and it was Pres. George H. W. Bush who in 1991 won its repeal. The Obama administration is abysmally remiss in departing from our proud tradition of standing by a democratic ally when the world’s most unsavory regimes gang up on it.
The vote of the UN Security Council was 14-1 in favor of the resolution. Are these the world’s most unsavory regimes?
- Bosnia and Herzegovina- yes
Germany- yes
Portugal- yes
Brazil-yes
India- yes
South Africa- yes
Colombia- yes
Lebanon- yes
Gabon- yes
Nigeria- yes
Russia- yes
United Kingdom- yes
France- yes
China- yes
United States- no (veto)
If our closest allies France, Germany, and the UK all agree with the resolution, can it really be all that unreasonable? This resolution has no relationship to the one that equated Zionism with racism. America has never agreed with that position and voted against it in the General Assembly. America successfully led the repeal effort of that resolution. And because it wasn’t a Security Council resolution, it had no force of law anyway. What Romney is missing is how isolated we’ve become. In the 1975 “Zionism is Racism” resolution, 72 countries voted in favor and 67 countries voted against or abstained. On yesterday’s vote, we used our veto power to overrule the unanimous decision of the 14 other members. And we did it on a resolution that didn’t differ from our policy. We did it to, once again, reiterate our friendship to Israel.
What does Romney want to do about this isolation? He doesn’t say. Is he going to change the U.S. policy towards the occupied territories that has remained unchanged since Lyndon Johnson was in office? He doesn’t say.
It’s because he’s not a serious thinker on these issues. He just wants to score some cheap political points and butter-up the evangelical vote. He ought to be ashamed to publish such vacuous drivel.
