The usual suspects are quoted in this highly-positive New York Times front-page piece today on Hillary Clinton and the peace talks: Martin Indyk, Abraham Foxman, and Aaron David Miller. You’d think the Times might vary the line-up now and then, especially after 20 losing seasons? Indyk had the Op-Ed page barely a week ago to promote his view that the peace talks are going to work out great, and that Netanyahu has stopped settlement activity.
You have to turn to Al Jazeera to get a contrary American view, a piece saying the talks are unlikely to produce anything, by Robert Grenier, former CIA station chief in Islamabad, ’99-’02, and director of the CIA’s counter-terrorism center. Isn’t Grenier fit for the Times? He joins the list of American realists who say bluntly that the Israel lobby is undermining American security, a bluntness you simply do not find in the Times.
The piece takes apart Indyk’s Op-Ed obfuscations on behalf of Netanyahu, including the house demolition morsel below, then concludes as my excerpt does…
Finally, we are told [by Indyk], the demolition of Palestinian houses in East Jerusalem "is also down" compared to recent years. That’s rather like praising someone for beating his wife less frequently….
From all this, Martin would have us believe that the current moment is propitious for peacemaking.The only conceivable explanation for his mendacity, apart from the desire to see his name in print, is that Martin is continuing to promote the type of ‘American diplomacy’ he championed during his years in the Clinton administration – diplomacy designed to keep pressure off the Israelis while they do whatever they please. Although he doubtless had to make some accommodations along the way in transitioning from an overt lobbyist on behalf of Israel to a foreign-policy apparatchik in the Clinton administration, one always assumed that his basic motives were unchanged. In those years, he had a lot of company, the redoubtable Dennis Ross being most prominent, and most disingenuous, among them. At least Aaron Miller, another of the state department peace-process team members, has had the good grace since his retirement to admit that he and the others saw their role as acting as "Israel’s lawyers".
For those of us who watched the process from close range in those years, it was obvious that Ross, Indyk and the others saw their jobs as consisting of a two-part process: Find out what the Israelis want, and then help them get it.
In this, they could never have succeeded in doing the harm they did on their own. After all, they were merely apparatchiks – viziers serving at the behest of a series of politically craven administrations, of which the current one is merely the latest.
But for those of us who spent our careers trying to protect and defend a country whose security was being systematically and gratuitously undermined by the likes of Martin Indyk, this latest bit of cynical posturing in the New York Times is a lot to swallow. I don’t know who Martin thinks he’s fooling, but I can assure you he’s not fooling us.
