Friday, March 29, 2024
Miles from the Mainstream
D. R. ZUKERMAN, proprietor

Will President Obama End Sanctions
on Iran -- and Apply Them
Against Israel?


May 5, 2015 --

So the U.S. will sit by while the United Nations Security Council passes a resolution imposing "peace" terms on Israel.

That is the message LPR takes takes from word, April 27, that the Obama administration, at the UN (and elsewhere?) will turn its back on Israel if she does not sufficiently back "the two-state solution." If the U.N. Security Council imposes "peace" terms on Israel that Israel would be suicidal to accept, will anti-Israel sanctions follow?

Threats of sanctions against Israel are nothing new. They go back to the first year of the Arab-Israel War . A threat of sanctions against Israel was embodied in a Security Council Resolution 61, adopted November 4, 1948, demanding a pullback of military forces in the Negev -- a demand that fell more heavily on Israel than Egypt, the opposing force in the area.

Indeed, threats against Israel from the Truman administration (which liked to remind Israel how good a friend it was to her) go back to the opening round of this war, now in its 68th year.

A document in the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) series -- 1948, Volume V, Part 2 -- relates Israeli Foreign Minister Moshe Sharett's account of an unofficial comment from a British official to an Israeli indicating that the Arab intention, refusing peace with Israel, was to force Israel to her knees and to plead with the Arabs for mercy. I sense the ongoing vitality of this mindset in current demands for boycott, divestment and sanctions against Israel.

In the days of the Truman administration, it was generally believed that the president was a good friend of Israel, while the State Department was hostile. Documents in 1948 and 1949 FRUS volumes indicate that President Truman could be duplicitous towards Israel and, at times, downright unfriendly.

The State Department, under Secretary Marshall and Secretary Acheson, was rather adroit in having it's Mideast cake, and eating it, too. Consider the State Department's uses of the UN partition plan, a plan that the Truman White House supported, over State Department opposition.

In June, 1949, the Government of Israel -- a Labor-led government, mind you -- responded to great pressure from the Truman administration by pointing out that Israel received no support from the US or the international when the Arabs rejected the UN General Assembly plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish State and an Arab state -- the source of calls, today, for two-state solution, it should be noted. (There were no calls for "a two-state solution" the 19 years that Jordan held the West Bank.)

Notwithstanding State Department opposition to implementing partition, and after Israel withstood Arab aggression, the Truman administration pointed to the rejected partition plan as the basis of delimiting the territory of Israel.

The State Department contended that if Israel held territory not assigned by the partition plan to the Jewish state, it must relinquish other territory it held under the partition plan. The aim, here, was to deprive Israel of the Negev so that the Britain could have a land bridge linking Egypt and Transjordan (now Jordan).

Additionally, the partition plan envisioned the internationalization of Jerusalem. The Truman administration continued to support that idea and evidence of that support remains with us today in the refusal of the United States to maintain its embassy in Jerusalem.

It should be noted that prior to the November 1948 election, the White House position was that Israel could not be subject to territorial adjustments without her consent. Notwithstanding that White House view, the State Department interpreted it to mean that if Israel sought "additional" territory, it had to to accept territorial trade-offs . This view, obviously, ruled out "additional" territory for Israel as a result of military gains, establishing the quaint notion that the Arabs were to enjoy rules of engagement shielding their anti-Israel belligerency from risk of territorial loss.

Readers of the Government of Israel's strong response to pressure from the Truman administration, May-June 1949, are, I believe, justified in concluding that the administration did not take kindly to the indicated assertions in the Israeli reply that the Jews withstood Arab assault by dint of their own efforts. (FRUS documents on the Arab-Israel War include statements by U.S. officials sympathizing with Arab belligerents for the "injustice" they endure; indicating, too, that Israel must make it possible for the Arabs to "save face.")

The State Department in 1949 must have been livid reading that Government of Israel response which also noted that Washington had supported Egypt's membership on the Security Council notwithstanding Egypt's aggression on Israel. (The FRUS documents indicate that at least some State Department officials did not regard Egypt's invasion of the Negev as aggression.)

The FRUS documents I have seen, dealing with Israel, 1948-1949, suggest a patronizing State Department mindset towards the Jewish state. By and large, however, the 1948-1949 documents are free of the ad hominem attacks of the sort directed by Obama administration officials, and some congressional Democrats, towards Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Perhaps, however, these attacks have more to do with Netanyahu's conservative politics than his views on Israel's relations with the Palestinian Authority, and Hamas and Hezbollah.

Today's signal that President Obama is preparing to turn his back on Israel, at the United Nations tells me that the idea, in 1949, that Israel must be forced to her knees to plead for mercy retains vitality. That France is preparing to introduce the anti-Israel resolution at the Security Council should suggest to the Jews of France that they should consider Prime Minister Netanyahu's advice -- and leave the country before the next round of French anti-Semitism, probably this summer.

A new aspect of hostility towards Israel, from the left, is outrage that Prime Minister Netanyahu wants Israel to be regarded as a Jewish state. Here, too, another example of the hypocrisy of the anti-Israel crowd. The 1947 UN Palestine Partition Plan called for a Jewish state and an Arab state in Palestine. Please note, LPR clicksters, that the partition plan did not call for a Leftist state and an Arab state in Palestine. Does President Obama, or, say, Senator Patrick Leahy (a Netanyahu denouncer) object to the " Islamic Republican of Iran"? LPR doesn't think so.

How soon, then, the ending of U.S. sanctions on Iran -- and the start of U.S. sanctions of the Jewish State of Israel (until she is forced to her knees to pleads for mercy from the Jihadists, of course)?