The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Aaron David Miller speculates that a President Hillary Clinton would be better for the U.S.-Israel relationship than Obama has been. On this I completely agree with him, though I suspect we’d disagree about whether that relationship is working to the benefit of either party at this point. Miller cites Clinton’s experience as First Lady during her husband’s administration, when both Clintons cultivated close relationships with Israeli politicians (Yitzhak Rabin in particular) and when Israel was front and center in U.S. foreign policy in a way that it just isn’t anymore, but he also notes this:
To put it simply, as a more conventional politician, Hillary is good on Israel and relates to the country in a way this president doesn’t. She visited the country for the first time in 1981 and has been as frequent visitor ever since; she has long-standing ties to a wide range of Israeli personalities and has incorporated all of the tropes from Leon Uris’s novel Exodus, including making the desert bloom, etc., into her vocabulary. Unlike Obama, who was not quite 6 years old at the time of the 1967 war (the seminal event that mobilized both the non-Jewish and Jewish communities in support of Israel), Hillary is from a different generation and functioned in a political world in which being good on Israel was both mandatory and smart.
Miller unfortunately doesn’t explain what “being good on Israel” means. Does it mean using our UNSC veto to strike down resolutions against Israeli settlement activity? Because Obama has done that. Does it mean sending billions in military aid to the Israelis to help them “mow the lawn” (i.e., “kill a bunch of people”) in Gaza from time to time? Because we’re definitely still doing that. Does it mean opening our own weapons caches to the IDF when they start to run out of ordinance to drop on Gaza? Because, uh, Obama did that too. These all seem to be the acts of a president who is “good on Israel” in the way I assume Miller meant.
But I get it, I do. An Obama adviser called Benjamin Netanyahu a swear so that means Obama is not “good on Israel,” whatever that means. My question is, so what? Why is “being good on Israel” treated uncritically as a good thing, as opposed to, say, being tough on Israel in a way that puts a finger on the scale and entices the Israelis into serious negotiations with the Palestinians on a real peace effort? Wouldn’t it be interesting if scholars with big megaphones, like Aaron David Miller of the Wilson Institute writing in Foreign Policy, actually considered what decades of “good on Israel” U.S. policy has actually wrought for the U.S., Israel, the Palestinians, or the Middle East in general?
Miller continues:
Let’s be clear. When it comes to Israel, there is no Bill Clinton 2.0. The former president is probably unique among presidents for the depth of his feeling for Israel and his willingness to put aside his own frustrations with certain aspects of Israel’s behavior, such as settlements. But this accommodation applies to Hillary too. Both Bill and Hillary are so enamored with the idea of Israel and its unique history that they are prone to make certain allowances for the reality of Israel’s behavior, such as the continuing construction of settlements.
Yes, again, I have to ask, why is any of this necessarily a good thing? Wouldn’t it be interesting to see what might happen under a president who wasn’t willing “to put aside his [or her] own frustrations over Israeli settlements,” who wasn’t “prone to make certain allowances for the reality of Israel’s behavior”? And no, Obama’s “boy, I’m really frustrated about the settlements, and if you keep this up I’m totally going to, ah, get even more frustrated” routine doesn’t count.
Much of this is political. As veteran pols they are pragmatists. Hillary opined in Hard Choices that she was uneasy with the president’s call for a comprehensive settlement freeze because it would escalate a fight with Netanyahu that the United States probably couldn’t win. And what was the purpose of an unproductive fight with a close but often frustrating ally? Better champion the 10-month limited freeze that Netanyahu agreed to, which is precisely what she did. Should she win the White House, this pragmatic temperament will likely characterize the way Hillary deals with Israel — she thinks strategically and politically.
Hillary’s got a “pragmatic temperament” because…she realizes that the U.S. can’t win a fight with Netanyahu over a settlement freeze? But, you know, the U.S. could actually win that fight. It could, for example, take that $3.1 billion line item dedicated to military aid for Israel in the budget and change it to, say $0.0 billion instead. That would win the fight. Now, it’s unlikely that a given presidential administration could win the fight that way, because Congress would fall all over itself scrambling to restore that funding, but this hypothetical administration could choose to stop exercising its UN veto in Israel’s defense instead. Congress has no say over the UN veto, and that would also likely win a settlement fight. The fact that we’re unwilling to win a fight over settlements is not proof that we couldn’t win it.
Miller welcomes the possibility that Clinton will emphasize a carrot approach to bringing Israel back into the peace process:
She has empathy for the Palestinians too, a fact that got her into trouble in 1998 when in a message to the Seeds of Peace organization she endorsed Palestinian statehood before it was fashionable in U.S. policy. But her real affinity lies with the Israelis. Indeed, like Bill Clinton, the Israelis frustrate her. But she has bought off on the idea that unless you can get Israeli buy-in, there just won’t be a deal. And that means being tough at times but very reassuring most of the time. Vinegar is useful, but honey more so.
Here’s the thing, though: decades of “honey” have produced precisely no Israeli flexibility on the Palestinian question. The Oslo Accords were the closest we’ve come to an actual peace process, and that process was doomed to failure almost from the start given that they allowed Israel to continue expanding its slow annexation/economic strangulation of the West Bank without producing any tangible benefit for the Palestinian people. There won’t be a deal without Israeli buy-in for sure, but there will never be real Israeli buy-in until the U.S. is prepared to do something that redresses the gross imbalance of power and interests between the two parties that are supposed to be negotiating this deal. The Palestinians have nothing to offer Israel and so there’s no cost to Israel from failing to reach an accord. The U.S. is uniquely positioned to create such a cost, but more honey isn’t going to get the job done. Doing so will damage U.S.-Israeli relations in the short-term (a president who attempted this definitely wouldn’t be “good on Israel”), but in the long-run Israel has more to gain from a peace deal, even one to which it’s dragged kicking and screaming, than it does from continued absolute indulgence from Washington.
In short, Hillary would indeed do a better job of managing relations with the Israelis. Whether she’d be able to turn chickenshit into chicken salad — producing Israeli-Palestinian peace, managing the mullahs — is another matter. But a great deal of the gratuitous and unproductive drama and roller coaster ride that has been the U.S.-Israeli relationship would go away. Adults would again be in charge. And whatever else results, that would be a good thing.
In short, Hillary Clinton’s prospective Middle East policy (Israel right or wrong, backsliding into a state of hostility with Iran) would be several steps backward for the U.S. in the long run, and it’s not one of her best selling points. Having “adults” in charge of the U.S.-Israel relationship (at least on this side of it; the children running the Israeli side will most likely still be there) might be marginally better than what we have now (though when you factor in what she’s likely to do with respect to Iran the picture gets much worse), but it wouldn’t be nearly as good as an administration that was prepared to face some hard truths about what a co-dependent, counter-productive mess that relationship has really become over the past 20 years or so.
The Foreign Exchanges Companion 