By Rabbi Ben Kamin
SAN DIEGO–There was no particular courage required to excoriate the government of Israel when its housing minister announced the construction of so many new home units in the Jerusalem area exactly when Vice President Joe Biden was arriving in the country to discuss peace talks. Many in the Israeli establishment and editorial community were just as mystified by the timing—even the arrogance.
But no courage whatsoever is required for one nation to tell its primary ally and devotee in the Middle East what to do generally within that ally’s municipal sovereignty (especially with respect to its capital city)—let alone try to micro-manage that ally’s business. Timing is one thing, protocol is another. No courage here—just temerity.
Every American president before Obama, Republican and Democrat, has celebrated our extraordinarily special relationship with this brave and spirited little country.
Israel is boldly democratic, to a fault, and at the expense of its own functionality. It is home to some 120 nationalities and it turns 62 this week without a single US soldier, sailor, or airman ever dying on its soil in a wartime action. This is not Iraq, Kuwait, Vietnam, Korea, or Afghanistan–or Lebanon, where hundreds of American Marines were killed in a 1983 suicide bombing.
President Obama has practically broken his back extending invitations to, declarations of support for, and generally winking at President Hamid Karzai of Afghanistan—known to have been elected by fraud, most highly questionable in the categories of democracy and gratitude. For the better part of a decade, young Americans have been dying in the deserts and mountains of this fractious and bellicose nation of innumerable tribal conflagrations.
President Obama has visited Afghanistan—which is great and surely cheers our brave soldiers there. He has not chosen to set foot yet in Israel, a republic that both mirrors and fawns over America, even while protecting US interests via its military, scientific, biotechnological, and strategic commitments and successes.
The United States recognized the State of Israel within moments of its independence on May 14, 1948. President Harry Truman was clear-eyed and declarative. Every American president since, Republican and Democrat, has celebrated our extraordinarily special relationship with this brave and spirited little country that still fights daily against terrorism and now the announced threat of Iranian nuclear annihilation.
The government of Israel formally recognized the existence of the Palestinian nation on September 13, 1993: I was there at the White House when this happened and witnessed the fateful handshake between Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Chairman Yasser Arafat. It is not the fault of Israel that what is now left, sadly, of the Palestinian nation is an unrecognizable bloody stand-off between Hamas in Gaza and Fatah in the West Bank.
But to now equate America’s entanglements in Afghanistan and Iraq, and the tragic loss of US lives in those places, to Israel’s dangerous equation with the Palestinians is facile at best and libelous at worst. In fact, even as the frustrations and failures of American policy in the Muslim world (including the just-now published government admission that we are not succeeding with Iran) grow, some Americans are simply dumping blame on our friendship with Israel.
This is a blood libel and we Americans have better principles than that.
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Kamin is a freelance writer and author. His Nothing Like Sunshine: A Story in the Aftermath of the MLK Assassination was recently published.