Israel & the neocons

...The critics then declared themselves vindicated...

...Former U.S...

...Yes and no...

...What Lind would like to see is a "debate between those who want to link U.S...

...To read Commentary, the neoconservative bible during the 1970s and 1980s, was to be immersed in an apocalyptic vision of the Children of Light and Children of Darkness locked in a struggle to the death...

...In the neoconservatives' view, George W.'s father made an unforgivable error when he tried to hold hostage a $10-billion loan guarantee to Israel until West Bank settlement construction was halted...

...The largely Washington-based neoconservatives have their own agenda...

...How or why the White House expects the Palestinian Authority to agree to Sharon's demands is an even greater mystery...

...The letter secured the signatures of some three hundred senators and House members, even before the road map was published...

...Is that expectation at all realistic...

...Number 5 states, "The character of the provisional Palestinian state will be determined through negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel...

...Neoconservatives predictably lined up to denounce Oslo, and maintained a barrage of criticism until the process died with the start of the second intifada in 2001...

...The Israel lobby-clustered around the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations-dances to the tune piped in from Jerusalem...

...Neoconservative opposition to Oslo's negotiated peace was no surprise...

...Outraged opposition in the U.S...

...To paraphrase an old auto industry ad, that policy now drives itself.y now drives itself...

...The Palestinian Authority, for its part, must permanently rein in Hamas and other terrorists elements, a task that, despite pledges of a three-month cease-fire, may be beyond its capacity, and could very well lead to civil war...

...It is important to remember that the Israeli and Palestinian leaderships had initiated their negotiations in Norway, without a U.S...

...policy is being fashioned...

...Whether it concerned the Soviet Union or the Middle East, neoconservative rhetoric has been unre-lievedly pessimistic about the possibility of negotiating with what are now called "evildoers...

...Of Americans' ardent support for Israel's right to exist, there is little debate...

...For Jewish neoconservatives, Israel represents the antithesis of those aspects of American society and culture that they have long loathed and demonized...

...Like Israel, the United States gives its enemies no quarter...

...The question is especially pertinent in the bloody aftermath of President George W. Bush's May summit meeting in Jordan with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the new Palestinian prime minister, Mahmoud Abbas...

...The provisional state will have provisional borders and certain aspects of sovereignty...with...Israeli control over the entry and exit of all persons and cargo, as well of its air space and electromagnetic spectrum" [italics added...

...It is hard to see where the road map will lead as long as Sharon holds power...

...Resolution of the conflict will only be possible when Israel dismantles the bulk of its settlements and withdraws from Palestinian territories...

...The neoconservative conviction that American values and self-interest are indistinguishable is a comforting vision, unless you are an Israeli or Palestinian yearning for the days Yitzak Rabin publicly rebuked elements in both organizations when they dragged their feet over Oslo, and they grudgingly caved in...

...Yes, if that means support for Israel's right to exist within internationally recognized, secure borders...

...media coverage of Israel is overwhelmingly favorable, and historically few American presidents have been willing to oppose what Israel says is in its interest...

...Even before the ascendancy of neoconservatives in the Bush administration like Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and Elliot Abrams, Israel was not treated as just another ally...

...By contrast, Israel is seen as unyielding and Spartan, marshaling all its resources for survival and sticking to its course even when the rest of the world (including its main ally, the United States) recoils at its actions...

...government, a paranoid belief sadly widespread in the Arab and Muslim world...

...It's a fair question, though anyone who poses it risks being wrongly accused of being anti-Semitic...

...The collapse of the Oslo peace process is a good example of how destructive neoconservative influence can be...

...In a sense, Israel serves neoconservatives as a theme park, an alternative world where they can project their fantasies of being "tough Jews...

...No, if it suggests that Jews somehow surreptitiously control the U.S...

...So, do Israel's interests drive American foreign policy in the Middle East...

...ambassador to Israel, Martin Indyk, writing in Foreign Affairs, recently predicted "the road map's chances of success are slim...

...Today, with Saddam Hussein ousted, American troops occupying Iraq, and ultimatums being issued to Iran and Syria, the United States looks a good deal more Spartan...

...A good example of this political reality was a letter circulated last year by Israel's right-wing supporters calling on the White House to go easy on Israel in pursuing the administration's road map...

...The Israel lobby in the United States is just that: a lobby on behalf of the interests of whatever government presides in Israel...

...Yet as long as neo-conservatives dominate American foreign policy, that debate will not take place...

...Ironically, little remains of the old neoconservative skepticism about the unyielding power of evil empires...

...channel," to avoid intervention by hard-line elements within the American Jewish orbit who opposed any accommodation with the Palestinians...

...In contrast, the neoconservatives, whose bully pulpits are Washington's dense web of think tanks, politically appointed government policymaking posts, and right-wing media outlets, are free agents, unconstrained by policies Jerusalem or American Jewish organizations may adopt...

...As a result, Israel has no need to drive U.S...

...But the neoconservative vision of cataclysmic struggle has never captured the allegiance of more than a minority of American Jews, for whom Judaism's prophetic message of shalom-peace-holds that war is only a last, reluctant resort...

...The president's governing principle has been, above all, not to alienate his political base, and neoconservatives make up an important part of his ideological constituency...

...The one constant in the neoconservatives' relationship with Israel is that they will back any hard-line right-wing Israeli government that offers an opportunity to project the image or reality of American might abroad...

...Each of the antagonists is resolute and undeterred by foreign critics...

...It was a secularized, right-wing vision of arriving at peace through war-not unlike the apocalyptic expectations some Protestant Christians hold about "the rapture," where the reestablishment of a Jewish homeland in the Middle East is to be followed by a "time of troubles" and widespread devastation presaging the Second Coming and establishment of the Kingdom of God...

...Remember, his "acceptance" of the Bush initiative was accompanied by a list of fourteen reservations...

...Of course, stalemate may be precisely what the Bush administration is counting on...

...With neoconservative assumptions guiding the war on terror, the United States has shown itself to be tough, resolute, undeterred by nattering critics-just as Ariel Sharon has been in his dealings with Yasir Arafat and Palestinian Islamists...

...What has happened, though, is that neoconservative fantasies about how right-wing Israeli governments ought to respond to threats to its security have now become the play-book from which U.S...

...None of these developments bodes well for Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations...

...How such an arrangement would differ from continued Israeli control of the territories upon which a Palestinian "state" would be created is hardly clear...

...Yet the interests of the neoconservatives and the Israel lobby are not always identical...

...Yet such a step would make a mockery of Sharon's lifelong "Greater Land of Israel" beliefs, and threatens to shatter his hard-right governing coalition...

...A new American day has dawned, one brightened by the export of "democracy," "freedom," and "liberty," spread, if need be, with Tomahawk missiles, bunker-busters, cluster bombs, and armored columns...

...policy in the Middle East...

...Not as long as the Bush administration's foreign policy is unduly influenced by Jewish neoconservative hawks and their non-Jewish allies, especially Christian evangelicals, for whom Israel is the one country in a volatile region that has never done and will never, never do anything wrong...

...Highly sophisticated, media-savvy, well connected and financed, they concentrate on foreign policy, increased military budgets, and domination of the Middle East and beyond...

...In their view, America is prone to softness and weakness because of its pursuit of material ease, its moral laxity, and its pandering to the socially and culturally aggrieved...

...Pro-peace, anti-Sharon American Jewish groups, which represent the views of the majority of American Jews, have little influence in the White House and Congress...

...Despite the recent lull in the killing and the Israeli pullback in Gaza and Bethlehem, the summit's "road map" to peace is highly problematic...

...Yet as political commentator Michael Lind has pointed out (quoting Tony Smith's book Foreign Attachments: The Power of Ethnic Groups in the Making of American Foreign Policy), Israeli lobbyists' definition of being "pro-Israel" means "that Israel alone should decide the terms of its relations with its Arab neighbors and that the United States should endorse these terms, whatever they may be...

...Congress defeated that initiative, and the maladroit handling of the episode became the stuff of political legend about how not to deal with the Israel lobby...

...Settling that conflict will require a hard slog, not a race across a desert...

...The neoconservatives, on the other hand, are the brains behind America's new imperial ambitions, for which Israel serves as a stationary aircraft carrier and forward launching base...

...It offers no new or innovative formulas for reaching a settlement, and what little hope there is for progress depends on the willingness of the United States to be an impartial broker between the parties...

...support for Israel to Israeli behavior, in the light of America's own strategic goals and moral ideals, and those who want there to be no linkage...