Kings (and Queens) of Denial
By Jeffrey Goldberg
The Forward, January 23, 1998
The current state of denial in Jerusalem, New York and Washington:
BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: The denier’s denier, refusing to recognize that handing over Hebron, which betrayed his father’s vision of a Greater Israel, left him looking like a man without principles who might as well just give Yasser Arafat the rest of what he wants.
THE LIKUD PARTY: Israel’s ruling party has not yet realized that, with the Netanyahu era over, Yitzhak Mordechai should be anointed the new Likud leader. Mr. Mordechai, who, with David Levy and Avigdor Kahalani, leads Israel’s sensible Sephardi center, is the best hope for actual progress in the peace process, and his accession would block the rise of Ehud Olmert, Irving Moscowitz’s real estate partner and an all-around mamzer, which he would take as a compliment.
YASSER ARAFAT: The Palestinians are in final preparations to reignite — spontaneously — the uprising, which plays into the hands of the Israeli Right. Palestinian officials told me this past summer that they recognize the tactical hopelessness of confronting the Israeli army with AK-47s, but are eager to try drawing Jewish blood anyway.
THE LABOR PARTY AND THE ASHKENAZI ELITE: In the Ashkenazi leadership circles within the Israeli army, Yitzhak Mordechai was widely known as a stupid Kurd; David Levy, the once and future foreign minister, is often derided in Ashkenazi circles as an idiotic Moroccan. The labor leader, Ehud Barak, a child of the kibbutz aristocracy, tries to apologize to the Sephardim for their treatment at the hands of the Ashkenazi elite, but always winds up sounding condescending. Labor leaders deny they are racists, but then state privately that the Sephardim are superstitious and revanchist. Labor will never win the Sephardi center so long as it fails to grapple with its own elitism.
THE STATE DEPARTMENT: The top reaches of the Clinton administration are divided between those who would link America’s current troubles with Iraq to the Netanyahu government’s head-in-the-sand approach to peace with the Palestinians, and those who object to this linkage, seeing what might be called “creeping Bakerism” in the blame-Israel camp.
The lines are fluid, but the creeping Bakerists include Madeleine Albright and many in her State Department. The opponents include, at times, Sandy Berger, the national security adviser, and Bill Richardson, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, along with the vice president, who desperately needs Jewish support (and who desperately needs any support) for his increasingly quixotic quest to become president. Ms. Albright, who, during her visit to Jerusalem, left Yad Vashem dry-eyed — I’m not much for the guilt-mongering Foreign Ministry habit of schlepping visiting dignitaries to Yad Vashem, but she could have put on a bit more of a show — seems to have convinced herself that America’s relationship with Benjamin Netanyahu is the equivalent of America’s relationship with the State and people of Israel. She has found it convenient, in the short term, to deny that America’s relationship with Yasser Arafat, who is directly responsible for the murder of an American ambassador who was working for the department she now heads, is not on a par with America’s long-term strategic relationship with Israel. And it’s worth remembering that Israel will be the only country in the Middle East to aid America unhesitatingly, should President Clinton be desperate enough to ask, in its upcoming war against Iraq.
THE CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: The CIA labors under the mistaken belief — or has been directed to labor under the mistaken belief — that the Palestinian Security Services are motivated principally by their love of peace and their profound desire to have Jewish neighbors. Thus, the CIA has applied the Albright equivalency standard to its activities in Israel, “brokering” the relationship between the Israeli Shabak and the Palestinian Preventive Security Services as if they were equals. There are many mistakes inherent in this approach; the most egregious is that the Palestinians have shown only a selective interest in true security cooperation, and no amount of CIA intervention has convinced them to act professionally in a consistent manner. The CIA treats the Palestinians as if they were veterans of a pro-American intelligence service and not recent graduates of the Bekaa School of Mayhem-Making. This has only served to delude the Palestinians into believing that the Americans do not, in fact, value their strategic relationship with Israel more than they value their relationship with Arafat’s third-rate Mukhabarat.
THE COMMITTEE FOR A SECURE PEACE: This is one of several Jewish organizations that exist only in full-page advertisements in The New York Times, which sees dramatic revenue increases in times of Mideast turmoil, when American Jewish yentas with fat advertising budgets feel the need to make themselves relevant. The “honorary chair” of this “committee” is Rudy Boschwitz, who for some reason cannot win his Senate seat back from the screwball Paul Wellstone (the Jewish senator least likely to stand up for Israel), and who has taken to placing his name on advertisements stating that President Clinton has “turned his back on Israel.” This is an outrageous charge; President Clinton has proven himself to be Israel’s best friend in the White House when push hasn’t come to shove (the anti-Semitic Nixon was Israel’s best friend when push came to shove). Clinton has not yet faced the test Nixon faced, but there is little doubt in Israel that he would pass the test. Mr. Clinton knows full well that Saddam plans to test his weapons of mass destruction on Israel, and the president will show himself in the coming weeks ready to make war on Israel’s most dangerous enemy in order to protect Jews. That is assuming that he, too, does not succumb to self-denial.