Israel and Foreign Policy Issues in the Presidential Campaign
By Justin Raimondo
Dale
Sprusansky: Thank you very much. Now we have that fun opportunity to
talk about the 2016 Election with Justin Raimondo. Raimondo is an
author and editorial director at antiwar.com, where he writes a
regular column. He’s also a regular contributor to The American
Conservative and Chronicles magazine. He’s also written a handful of
books on U.S. foreign policy, as well as on the conservative
movement. His talk today is titled, “Israel and Foreign Policy
Issues in the Presidential Campaign.”
Justin Raimondo: Let’s do a little experiment. Now, I realize that
what most people remember about the recent Republican presidential
debates is the vulgarity, the inanity, the name-calling, the
references to hand length. But there have been a few moments of
lucidity—when history has been made, precedents have been set and,
yes, even reasons for optimism have been highlighted, although these
may have been lost amid all the brouhaha and the liberal moralizing.
So on to our experiment. Which candidate said the following: “As
president, there’s nothing that I would rather do than to bring
peace to Israel and its neighbors generally, and I think it serves
no purpose to say ‘but you have a good guy and a bad guy.’ Now I may
not be successful in doing it. It’s probably the toughest
negotiation anywhere in the world of any kind, okay? But it doesn’t
help if I start saying, ‘I am very pro-Israel, very pro, more than
anybody on this stage.’ But it doesn’t do any good to start
demeaning the neighbors, because I would love to do something with
regard to negotiating peace finally for Israel and for their
neighbors, and I can’t do that as well as a negotiator—I cannot do
that as well if I am taking sides.”
Now I’m going to give you a few seconds to contemplate the answer. I
mean here is a rare example of a Republican candidate speaking
reasonably, rationally, in a statesman-like manner, about one of the
most controversial issues in American politics. Here is someone who
has defied the bipartisan consensus on Israeli-American relations,
which is that we must always give unstinting and unconditional
support to a Jewish state. Here is an outright abrogation of the
conditions of the so-called special relationship, that one-sided
love affair that dictates Washington must kowtow to Tel Aviv and
ignore the horrific conditions under which Palestinians must live.
Okay, you had enough time. So what’s the answer? [Laughter] Who
would dare to step on the third rail of American politics and defy
the Israel lobby? The answer has to be Donald Trump, doesn’t it? And
indeed it is. He said it in Houston. He said it in Detroit. He said
it on Fox News. The two other main contenders attacked him for it,
both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, and of course they didn’t have a
substantial criticism. There can’t be any. After all, how can one
argue against evenhandedness? Cruz merely repeated his pledge to
give Israel everything it wants and more, while Rubio repeated the
Israeli Embassy’s talking points: Hamas is evil, Hezbollah is
terrorist, and, of course, moral equivalence is immoral. In short,
it’s the usual nonsense, as if the Palestinians and their local
allies have no right to resist the occupation.
Yet Trump stood his ground. He has repeated his position in at least
two debates and, wonder of wonders, has suffered not at all for it
at the ballot box—which is quite astonishing after the one debate.
They have a North Carolina primary and, “oh, Trump is finished part
99.” And of course he wasn’t, was he? He is the frontrunner by a
country mile, and the only flak he’s gotten over it has been from
the usual suspects, the neoconservatives who you just heard about,
who hated him anyway and are among his loudest detractors. Bill
Kristol’s so-called Emergency Committee for Israel ran an ad
attacking him—but not, interestingly enough, over his support for
evenhandedness in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. They didn’t want
to go there. That’s because Trump has single-handedly changed the
terms of the debate without hardly anyone noticing, and of course
without hardly anyone giving him any credit for it.
Israel is no longer the third rail of American politics—not since
the rise of Donald Trump—which no candidate dare step on for fear of
his or her political future. How did he do it? By simply and
fearlessly telling the truth. Of course, some people did notice—the
Israel lobby, first of all. And in Israel itself panic has set in.
An interesting piece by Chemi Shalev, usually one of the more
reasonable Zionists, notes that, “In their Super Tuesday speeches,
Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio tried to use an Israel hammer to bash
Donald Trump. Cruz sneeringly lambasted him for saying that he would
remain neutral, while Rubio trounced Trump for trying to stay
impartial, as his audience booed accordingly. And Trump? Trump was
racking up victories, amassing delegates, and laughing all the way
to the top of the Republican presidential field. In this way, the
New York billionaire is decimating the conventional wisdom—one of
many—that, in 2016, total and unconditional support for Israel is a
prerequisite for any aspiring Republican candidate wishing to run
for president.”
Remember when the support of evangelical Christians was contingent
on a candidate’s willingness to grovel before Bibi Netanyahu? Poor
Rand Paul, for example—the alleged anti-interventionist,
isolationist and fellow libertarian—had to travel all the way to
Israel, cuddle up to the Israeli right-wing and pointedly ignore the
Palestinians, whom he didn’t even deign to visit. And where did it
get him? Just amused disdain from the Jewish Republican coalition
and a series of televised ads from a dark money pro-Israel group
attacking him for his trouble.
Appeasement, it seems, doesn’t work when it comes to dealing with
the Israel lobby. But one tactic does seem to work—a direct and
honest assault. As Shalev notes in Haaretz, Southern Evangelicals
voted for Trump anyway, and in droves. They handed him victories in
Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Virginia and elsewhere. As Shalev puts
it, “The conception is falling apart. The notion that the Republican
Party is a monolithic bastion of support that will withstand the
test of time is evaporating. The belief that any Republican
president who will follow Obama will be better for Israel is eroding
with each passing day. Faced with the Trump phenomenon, Netanyahu’s
fortress GOP strategy is collapsing like a house of cards.”
[Applause]
So this is what they’re seeing and saying in Israel. The supposed
invincibility of the Israel lobby has been a long time unraveling,
but the process began a couple of years ago, with their first big
defeat over the nomination of Chuck Hagel as defense secretary.
Senator Cruz, in particular, took center stage during this seminal
battle, doing his imitation of Joe McCarthy and impugning Hagel’s
integrity and accusing his supporters of being “friends of Hamas,”
whatever that may mean. It didn’t work, and the Obama administration
grew bolder, taking the initiative and defying the lobby and
becoming more vocal in its criticism of Israel and its settlement
building.
But it took a Republican, it took Donald Trump, to deal the Israel
lobby a death blow, breaking its stranglehold on the Republican
Party and defying the interdict against evenhandedness in dealing
with the occupation. The Israel lobby, for all its legendary wealth
and influence, was always a paper tiger, and it was inevitable that
this would eventually happen. As Shalev points out, there is no
going back. “Every time Cruz and Rubio tried to hit Trump over the
head with an Israel club and nothing happens, it is Israel’s
weakness that is exposed. Every time Trump wins a party primary
without a challenge from his supporters, another nail is driven into
the coffin of the unshakeable alliance between Israel and America’s
deep right.”
That alliance is now being shaken to its very foundations and the
panic extends to a Democratic Party, where Haim Saban, the
billionaire who’s great achievement has been the creation of Mighty
Morphin Rangers, is denouncing Trump as “unreliable when it comes to
supporting Israel.” Calling the Republican frontrunner a clown and
dangerous, he ranted in an interview with Israel’s Channel 2 that
Trump is “dangerous for the world, and since Israel is part of the
world; therefore, he’s dangerous for Israel.”
As Trump would say, okay? [Laughter] And especially dangerous, it
seems, for those who consider Israel to be the moral equivalent of
the entire world.
Says Saban, “It is hard to know what he is thinking. One day he’ll
give an interview to an Israeli newspaper and say, ‘you’ve never had
such a friend in the White House as you will when I become
president.’ The next day they ask him about the Middle East, and he
says, ‘I’m neutral, I’m the U.N., I won’t involve myself.’ You just
don’t know with him. Every day it’s something else.”
Nothing less than complete and total support satisfies people like
Saban. Anything else is dangerous for Israel. Saban, by the way, is
one of Hillary Clinton’s longtime supporters. He has given her
millions of dollars and is the single biggest donor to a Democratic
congressional campaign. He has a net worth of $3.6 billion.
Now, what’s really significant about Trump’s stance is that, if as
president he tries to make a deal in an evenhanded way and it all
falls through, Israel will be blamed, as Chemi Shalev rightly says
in Haaretz. That’s because for domestic political reasons, the
Israeli leadership cannot and will not make any significant
concessions—which is why they view Trump’s evenhandedness with
absolute horror. That will show the world what Israel is really all
about, deepening the rift between Washington and Tel Aviv, and
perhaps even calling U.S. financial support to the Jewish state into
question. After all, if Trump is critical of having to pay for the
defense of Japan, Korea, and our European allies without getting
much of anything in return, what’s to stop him from taking the same
dim view of our yearly tribute of $3.5 billion to Israel and getting
bupkis for our generosity?
The dam is broken. The great breakthrough is upon us, and the great
irony is that it came about because of a politician widely reviled
by liberals, and especially by Muslims, for his undisguised
hostility to people of the Muslim faith. Who would have thought that
this man, of all men, would sound a reasonable note on the issue of
U.S.-Israeli relations? Yet, history is full of such ironies. I
would advise you not to let your shock at the rather
counterintuitive notion of a reasonable Donald Trump blind you to
the unfolding political reality.
Bernie Sanders, another outsider, has expressed support for a more
evenhanded approach, albeit in much vaguer terms. His stance on the
whole issue of Israel has been given much less prominence by his
campaign; whereas Trump has given voice to his position in at least
two high-profile debates and taken lots of heat for it. An article
in The Intercept by Murtaza Husssain fails to cite Trump’s position
accurately or in full, while noting that this is new territory for
Sanders, who has been supportive of Israel, including even during
the heinous attacks on Gaza in the past. This is to be expected.
Trump’s hostility to Muslims per se isn’t going to endear him to
politically correct liberals who don’t want to give him credit for
anything.
What’s going to be interesting is that both Sanders and Trump are
scheduled to speak at the upcoming AIPAC conference [Audience shouts
that Sanders is not speaking at AIPAC], and so we’ll see what
happens there. And I have to note that our friends at CODEPINK are
circulating a petition urging Sanders not to attend the AIPAC event.
One has to wonder if they’re afraid he’ll continue his long career
of pandering to the Jewish state and its American supporters, while
Trump is surely not going to change or modify his position in any
way, as usual.
The Israel lobby is very concerned about Trump. The neoconservatives
who direct it are vehemently opposed to him because he challenges
the very basis of America’s interventionist foreign policy which
they have supported on ideological grounds, as well as its obvious
benefits to Israel. Trump’s statement that the U.S. was deliberately
lied into the Iraq war has enraged them to the point that neocon
chief strategist Bill Kristol has called for a third-party candidate
to oppose him. Neocon Max Boot has said he’d vote for Stalin before
voting for him. [Laughter] Presumably, he’d write in Trotsky. To a
man, the neocons are frothing at the mouth that Trump is winning
primary after primary, to which I can only add, by their enemies, ye
shall know them. Thank you. [Applause]
I just want to make a comment about Sanders. You’re telling that he
did not accept the invitation to speak, and of course that’s out of
sheer cowardice. I mean, he doesn’t want to alienate his radical
left-wing supporters who are so busy disrupting Trump’s rallies that
they don’t even really care what his positions are. So it’s just
very consistent with his reticence on the issue of Israel. And I
might add that at a town hall meeting on the subject in his district
in Vermont, I believe it is, he once threw somebody out of the room
for daring to ask about his position on the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. So, so much for liberal moralizing on that issue and their
big hero, Bernie Sanders.
