Israelis didn’t know what they were watching. Israel was undermined in several ways by the Administration — all of which will play out later.
1. Rice and the President both said the problem was the “occupation that began in 1967.” This erases the Arab rejection of the establishment of Israel and assumes that Arab rejection and Palestinian terrorism would cease if the occupation did. A total restructuring of history to Israel’s detriment.
2. Stephen Hadley said this is the right time for “peace” because the Israelis have given up the idea of “greater Israel” and putting “settlers” on the West Bank — making the point that Israel had been wrong up to now and only now, if Israel understands that it has to make concessions, can there be peace. No obligation on the part of the Palestinians to concede that they were wrong, although Hadley did say that these Palestinian leaders want to make things better for their own people — no obligation to do anything for Israel. Hadley also said this was the right time because Israel had understood that a democratic state for the Palestinians would a) be just and right and b) could lead to the acceptance of Israel by the Arabs. He thus erased the entire Oslo experience in which Israel agreed to a Palestinian democratic state and was repaid with terrorism culminating in the 2000-2004 war, and said acceptance of Israel is conditional on the creation of Palestine. Israel’s legitimacy is no longer a fact, but a future condition based on Israeli concessions. It lets the Palestinians off the hook — the would have had a state had they not proven to be corrupt terrorists, but he lays the blame only on Israeli determination to prevent the state from being born.
3. Hadley and the President both said the people were tired of terrorism on both sides — enough said, but the important thing is that it erased the Palestinian war against Israel from 2000-2004.
4. Rice said she understood both sides because as a black child in the segregated south she knew about both the bombings that scare Israelis and the humiliation that besieges Palestinians. Except that the bombings that scare Israel are the result of Israeli “occupation of Palestine” (see above), meaning that the Israelis are analogous to white southerners who were afraid of violence from the people they oppressed. It was the obligation of the white southerners to change their behavior so that the black community could then forgive them and everyone could move on. The analogy stinks for Israel. As for humiliation, again Israel is put in the position of being the white southerners who humiliated the black people and had to stop.
I don’t expect the Israelis to catch the nuance of American political thinking, but we have to.
