Andrew Bacevich of Boston University has become one of the most talked-about historians/commentators in America this decade — not because of erudition but rather that he has been not only a hostile but a shrill observer of American foreign policy. He treats the deeply embedded notion of American exceptionalism like a random penny you would find in the gutter. Nothing special. What gives the 63-year-old professor of international relations the bizarre cachet of the bearded lady in the circus is that he was a career officer in the U.S. Army. That kind of traditional pedigree does not usually lead mature persons to the left perimeter of the commentariat.
As regularly and dully as distant outsiders speak like intimate family members about Middle East peace prospects during the next round of Israeli-Palestinian talks, with the same lifeless predictability, wannabe mavens, in companion pieces, wax windily about Washington sending so darned much foreign aid to Jerusalem every year.
I am not old enough to remember the last time anyone with a megaphone griped about the bundle of welfare that is annually shipped to Cairo, the Aswan Dam, Paris or wherever Mubarak, the dictator-for-life of Egypt, hides out.
After All We Have Done
Returning to Prof. Bacevich, his Sunday essay in the Los Angeles Titanic, “Courting Israel,” appears mainly to rap Israelis for their nettling ingratitude, all that Washington has done for one of the tiniest countries in the world over the last 62 years, and their response, according to the learned gentleman, is “We will think about it.”
He is annoyed that President Obama had to promise $3 billion worth of aircraft to Israel to tentatively convince Prime Minister Netanyahu to call a 90-day moratorium to “settlement” building in Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem before the Palestinians — who have declared East Jerusalem theirs — will return to the peace talks table.
Sounds as if a piece of logic is missing.
The professor, who appears to be relating a comic-book version of Middle Eastern history in the fore portion of his essay, is furious with the attitude of Israelis whom he accuses of needlessly, frivolously fretting about their safety.
He maintains the country is lockdown safe, as utterly unthreatened as an aging dollar bill lying alone in a bank vault. Prof. Bacevich castigates Israelis for feeling they are vulnerable just because they are surrounded by 21 dictator-run Arab countries who bar Jews from their states and would love to wipe out the Jewish state if only they had more weapons.
Haven’t We Done Enough?
He scorns the Obama administration in an All-I-Have-Done-for-You pose.
He argues it should not be necessary to sweeten the present talks by promising to send Israel 20 F-35 fighters and block all anti-Israel resolutions in the United Nations if they will halt East Jerusalem settlement-building for 90 days so that the Palestinians can return to the talks.
Here is another piece of tortured reasoning that would cause a logician to leap from the top of the Culver Hotel while shlepping a bag of bricks in each arm. Only to someone who questions Israel’s very legitimacy would the above statement make sense.
At his starting point, Prof. Bacevich says U.S. policy in the Arab-Israeli conflict historically has had two objectives:
“To cajole Arabs into accepting Israel’s existence.”
“To allay Israeli security concerns.”
He probably should have stopped when he was winning, but he didn’t.
Prof. Bacevich insists “real progress” has been made on the first point, none at all on the second.
His arrogant conclusion to the first point is: “Peace treaties with Jordan and Egypt have barely dented Israeli apprehensions that destruction lies just around the corner.”
Note to the professor: Walking down the street in either land wearing my yarmulke would reduce my life to the same value as Julian Assange’s.
Even if a Jew could be free in either state, that still leaves 19 hate-mongering governments that pray hourly for Israel’s disappearance before they go to bed.
“What Americans have yet to realize,” he rages, “is this: Nothing that the United States can do will put Israeli fears to rest.
Just because daily rockets from terrorist outposts have been raining into the country for years, just because the Smiling Dwarf in Iran regularly announces his objective is to vanquish Israel while the West blithely responds, “He is just kidding,” why should Israelis worry?
(To be concluded Tuesday)
