What does Israel
need? And what do the self-appointed guardians want for it? To answer the first
question, we note that Israel
pretends to be a nation, therefore it must need what every nation on this
planet needs: to be at peace with its neighbors and the rest of the world as
well as have reasonably good relations with everybody.
As to the answer with regard to the second question, we have
an example of what one self-appointed guardian of Israel wants for it. He is Bret
Stephens who wrote: “Israel Alone,” a column that also came under the subtitle:
“Previous quarrels between Washington and Jerusalem were about differing Mideast
perceptions. Now the issue is how the U.S. perceives itself.” It was
published on April 21, 2015 in the Wall Street Journal.
The subtitle and the introductory sentence instantly reveal
that this is going to be a display of logic so weird it applies not to the
human species of this planet, but to a strange kind of existence from somewhere
else. The introductory sentence reads as follows: “senior Israeli officials are
shot through with a sense of incredulity. They can't understand what's become
of U.S.
foreign policy.” Thus, the guardian who lives and writes in America, and the
leaders who live and govern in Israel hold the view that Israel needs something
having to do not with Israel or its relation with the neighbors and the rest of
the world – but has to do with the way that the U.S. views itself, and the way
that such view determines U.S. foreign policy. Weird indeed.
When someone is powered by this kind of logic, you don't
expect him to explain how Israel
views itself in relation to its neighbors and the rest of the world; or what it
is doing to improve those relations. You expect to see something strange come
out the screwed up mentality of that guardian of Israel . And guess what, this is
exactly what you get from the mind of Bret Stephens who says that the leaders
of Israel :
“don't know how to square Barack Obama's promises with his policies. They also
fail to grasp how … they are astonished by … and they wonder why...”
Wait a minute, you scream as you shake your head at the
computer monitor. What's that about, Bret? He says it's about the nonchalance
of the American administration with regard to Iran 's
power plays, al Qaeda's gains, Assad's use of chemical weapons, the success of
ISIS, and Russia selling
missiles to Tehran .
It is also about the solicitude that the American President has for Ali
Khamenei's political needs while neglecting those of Benjamin Netanyahu. So you
ask: Is that it? That's what defines Israel 's needs? That's what the
Israelis and their supporters have been working on during all these years in
fulfillment of Israel 's
needs as the normal nation it pretends to be? Yup. That's what Israel needed
in the past and hopes to continue receiving in the future.
There is a problem with that approach, says Stephens,
because “the Israelis haven't yet figured out that what America is [now] isn't what America was
[previously].” He goes on to say it may be tempting to wait Mr. Obama out till
someone succeeds him, but quickly warns that this would be a bad idea because
of two reasons. The first is that the current administration is “creating a set
of irreversible realities” in the Middle East ,
he says.
The second reason is that while: “Previous quarrels were
mainly about differing Mideast perceptions; the main issue now is how the U.S. perceives
itself.” Again, the author reminds the readers that what Israel needs is
something which has to do not with the relations it develops with the neighbors
or the rest of the world, but with the way that the U.S. views itself, and how
such view determines U.S. foreign policy.
And he explains all that. Without using words which are no
longer in vogue, he says (using different words) that America used to
believe it could provide for guns and butter; the first to be used abroad, the
second to be consumed at home. But now, Obama believes that the interplay
between the two is a zero-sum game ... an either or situation. Stephens goes on
to whine: “The result is an Israel
that, for the first time in its history, must seek its security with an America that
has nobody's back but its own.”
A moment later, he contradicts himself by saying that up to
the 1967 sneak attack which Israel
mounted against its neighbors, America
was “an ambivalent and often suspicious friend.” He goes on to say that in
light of this, Israel
took strategic gambles because it understood the value of territory and terrain
while throwing to the wind concerns about international legitimacy. He lauds Israel having
constantly taken the military initiative, having acted as a foreign policy
freelancer, and sometimes even as a rogue one. He says all that as if to mean
that Israel
must revive the old approach and take it again.
Well, there is only one thing that can be said about all
this. It is that Bret Stephens is lucky he was too young to utter these words
during those days because were he not, he would have been called a
self-loathing Jew who is also an anti-semite. He would have been ostracized by
the Jewish Establishment and everyone that’s under the control of that
monstrous institution.