U.S. must champion democratic realism in Mideast

By Frederick Krantz

By what must be termed a minor political miracle, owed to the convoluted politics of its proportional-representation electoral system, Israel today, following the resignation of corruption-plagued Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, faces an election on February 10, 2009, instead of a weak continuing Kadima coalition government led by Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni.

It will, given the installation of a new U.S. government led by Barack Obama, be a fateful election.  The key overriding issues facing Israel are, of course, not only the current Gaza crisis, precipitated by Hamas’ mounting rocketing of southern Israel, but the domination of Lebanon by Iranian- (and Syrian-) backed Hezbollah and, even more importantly, what to do about a programmatically genocidal Iran as it gets steadily closer to nuclear-weapons capability (within a year or so, by the best estimates).

But while Israel as a sovereign state must, and will, act to ensure its basic existence and well-being, the new Obama government’s policy towards Israel and, more broadly, the Middle East, is necessarily of paramount medium- and long-term importance.  Leaving aside current speculations about the basic direction of that government, and the relatively conservative consequences of already-announced appointments like Hillary Clinton as secretary of state and the retention of Robert Gates as defense secretary, it is worth stepping back and asking in what, from Israel’s point of view, an ideal new American foreign policy would consist.

(Such theoretical “ideal type” speculation, which of course tends to homogenize domestic left-right political differences within Israel itself, nevertheless has the utility of throwing into sharp relief recent American policy, its failures and successes, and of gauging the efficacy of the new administration’s measures as they become known.)

Most generally, Israel would benefit from, to coin a term, a new democratic realism. What is meant here is not the “big-battalion realism” of the Baker-Scowcroft  State Department “old hands” (purportedly shared by some Obama appointees), but a simple historical-political realism reflecting both America’s democratic values and a clear awareness of the concrete nature and demonstrated dynamics of the Arab states.

While there may be some Arab regimes which are comparatively more “moderate” than others (say, Mubarak’s Egypt and Abdullah’s Jordan), the new realism would recognize that all are undemocratic and unrepresentative, and all have poor, politically excluded Muslim populations which share an antipathy to the Jewish, democratic state of Israel. This “Arab street” reflects an ingrained Islamic anti-Semitism, reinforced by over 60 years of indoctrination by extremist anti-Israel and modern anti-Semitic propaganda.

Often tribally-based Arab regimes, lacking the basic institutions of civil society, are inherently unstable and susceptible to destabilization by popular movements instigated by Islamist groups (Moslem Brotherhood, Al-Qaeda, Wahhabist preachers funded by the Saudis, Iranian-backed Hezbollah and Hamas leaders, and so on). This instability, in turn, limits the political latitude of even the relatively “moderate” Arab regimes (Mubarak, for example, has never made a state visit to Israel, Egyptian and Jordanian citizens are blocked from coming as tourists to the Jewish state, the Saudi leaders refused to shake Mr. Olmert’s hand at Annapolis, and so on).

Given this reality, American backing for the “peace process,” whether of the “Road Map,” Annapolis, or any of the myriad earlier variants, has been both hypocritical and farcical. Fatah leader and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas (Yasser Arafat’s long-time heir and successor), ignominiously kicked out of Gaza by Hamas, is Israel’s and America’s Palestinian interlocutor. But, lacking power, he plays to Israel and the U.S. not out of conviction, but because he is weak, lacks popular support, and is financially and politically dependent on them.

Since Islamist Hamas is “constitutionally” devoted to destroying Israel, and Mr. Abbas is too weak to defeat Hamas, no unitary Palestinian state is in the offing. And even if one were, it would not be in Israel’s interest to allow it—revanchist and violent as it surely would be even under Mr. Abbas (just look at Fatah’s current anti-Semitic, “martyr”-exalting television and radio media, and education system)—to come into existence.  Hence, the current “two-state” notion is entirely utopian, a useful fiction at the moment for all concerned parties—the leftist Kadima government in Israel, the Obama administration, the United Nations, the Arab-oil-centered European Union, the cynical Arab regimes of the Arab League, the anti-Israel members of the Organization of Islamic States (the latter two of which have never lifted a finger to help the Palestinians), and so on.

Hence, a truly realist American foreign policy would, recognizing both Arab weakness and internal divisions, would cease playing to unending Arab intransigence, and cease pressuring Israel to make territorial compromises which (like the defunct Oslo Accords) can in fact facilitate terrorism and compromise Israel’s security.  Recognizing its historical, cultural, religious and democratic affinity with Jewish Israel, the new administration would instead apply economic and political pressure on the Arab regimes to accommodate Israel, as a fact of life in the Middle East. It would push client regimes like Egypt towards a “warm” peace and Saudi Arabia, finally, after 60 years, to recognize the Jewish state.  And the U.S. itself would, at last, in an act at once symbolic and concrete, implement repeated congressional legislation and recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, moving its embassy there.

A viable Palestinian state between Jordan and Israel is currently impossible. Hence, the Americans would be wise to adopt a new Palestinian policy.

It would, first, pressure Egypt (which it supports to the tune of almost $3 billion annually) to play a role in overseeing the Gaza Strip (as it did before 1967), and Jordan to provide state functions for the Arabs of Judea and Samaria (as it also did, even beyond the Yom Kippur war of 1973).  Such an American- (and Israeli-) backed Egyptian-Jordanian condominium could easily co-exist with a restored Palestinian Authority presence under Mr. Abbas and/or his Fatah successor.

The U.S. would also accede to the plan of the Likud Party’s Bibi Netanyahu, probably Israel’s next prime minister, to terminate the current impossible “peace process” with its utopian vision of a unified, pacifist Palestinian state, and push instead for gradual Palestinian economic and social development, “peace from the bottom up,” rather than from the “top down.”  Over the long term, such development of civil society would give the Palestinians something they currently lack, a concrete stake in making peace, something to lose, which might then make actual state-building realistic. Over the short term, this policy would also constitute a relatively stable status quo, a kind of de facto peace beneficial for all concerned.

Simultaneously, and more generally, the U.S. should continue George W. Bush’s (recently abated) democratization pressures on Arab regimes, and demonstrate clear support for basic human rights in the region. While not without its utopian dimensions, this policy has born fruit in Iraq, which may well post-surge develop into—in comparative Middle Eastern terms—a tolerably democratic structure. Similar pressure should be exerted on Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon (and Syria), and on the Gulf states, Pakistan and Turkey (whose Islamist government should be disabused of any religious-dictatorial temptations).

No one expects Islamic-rooted and still-tribal societies to become model modern democracies overnight, but pressure for political as well as economic modernization should be a visible and unrelenting component of the new American realism. Here, American pressure on Saudi Arabia to curtail exportation of its radical Wahhabist Islamic ideology and support for Islamist madrassas around the Muslim world, from Indonesia to Bosnia, is long overdue.  Tied to import quotas on Saudi-sourced oil, such a policy could, especially given the current and at least medium-term recession/depression and its negative impact on oil prices, be quite effective.

Finally, America must clearly address the imminent arrival of Iranian nuclear weapons.  Learning the evident lessons of its botched attempts to first limit, then roll back, North Korean atomic weapons development, as well as finally giving up on the United Nations as a possible source of effective sanctions, the U.S. should deliver an ultimatum—backed by NATO and as many democratic nations as it can organize—to Iran: cease enrichment of uranium and plutonium production, or suffer the consequences.  (Here a first, limited and well-publicized step would be to threaten a naval blockade of Iran, preventing it from getting the refined petroleum upon which its fragile economy depends, and then, after a clearly-demarcated time period, to impose the blockade should Tehran not comply.)

If the U.S., re-defining the “peace process,” would act to recognize and mitigate Palestinian, and Arab, anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism, while simultaneously pushing to moderate and modernize Arab society and, acting at the head of a democratic coalition, effectively to blunt the Iranian nuclear drive, it would embody a new, refreshing, and concretely effective diplomatic and political realism in the Near East.

Such steps towards a new democratic realism, some of which are the negation of past and current American policies, would not only ensure the well-being of America’s only real, and reliable, political and military ally in the region, Israel, but would also establish a new-found respect for American power and values, thus reversing the decline of American standing in, and beyond, the Arab and Muslim world.

There are historical moments when doing what is right, and what is effective, coincide. The potential for fresh policies represented by the new Obama administration could be such a moment.  A new, muscular American democratic realism would establish a concrete basis for a truly effective politics of hope, not only for Israel and the Middle East, but for the world.

-Prof. Frederick Krantz is Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research in Montreal and editor of its Daily Isranet Briefing. He teaches at the Liberal Arts College, Concordia University.