Yesterday on “Morning Joe,” Zbigniew Brzezinski gave a bravura performance, urgently calling on Obama to help impose a solution on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict before it further radicalized Arab societies, endangering world security. Obama had “dropped” the matter in his first term, Brzezinski said, caving to Netanyahu.
[Obama] needs to get engaged very seriously…. This is a real challenge to get at the heart of the problems… If we simply patch this up… we’ll have a repetition in no time flat. In the meantime, two things are happening in the region which are not going to be reversed easily. US influence is declining, Arab radicalism is intensifying. And that’s not a good augury, either for stability or the future of Israel…
[Obama] engages by abandoning the myth that a peace settlement has to wait until the day that the Israelis and Palestinians can compromise by themselves… Left to themselves the Israelis and the Palestinians will never settle. The Israelis are too strong to make concessions and compromises. The Palestinians are too weak and divided…
Obama started well four years ago, and then he just dropped it… If he waits like Clinton till his last eighth year he’s going to get nothing done, and the region will deteriorate. Because it is deteriorating year after year.
Commentators Richard Wolffe, Jeffrey Sachs, and Dan Senor were in the studio, and Sachs rather ingenuously asked Brzezinski why Obama had dropped it. Brzezinski spoke implicitly of the Israel lobby.
“He kind of folded up. But he can redeem itself… He has [an opportunity] again.. He doesn’t have to worry about the next election. He doesn’t have to worry about fundraising for that election. He doesn’t have to worry about specific constituencies. All he has to worry about is the American national interest first of all and the good future of the region.”
Majorities of the Palestinian, Israeli and “American Jewish” community support a moderate solution in the conflict, Brzezinski said (evidently he means the two state solution, but who’s counting).
Dan Senor lashed out at Brzezinski for saying that Obama’s indifference was politically motivated. It has nothing to do with the American Jewish community or “donations,” Senor said; he’d come to the right conclusions about the conflict.
Sachs and Wolffe had nothing to say about Obama’s collapse. Sachs offered the bromide, “The solution has been in front of us for decades,” while Wolffe, who once served as a moderator at a J Street conference, said that Obama should get Bill Clinton to be his mediator. As if Clinton, producer of a lopsided failure at Camp David, will not be subject to lobby pressure given his wife’s evident ambitions. Wolffe and Sachs avoided that issue entirely. They left the matter of the Israel lobby to the neocon and the realist to argue about. As if there will be any progress on this question in the U.S. without taking on the lobby: as if the two state solution is still alive, as if Israel is not out of control, as if it has not been empowered by rightwing American Jews.
Ilene Cohen relates a similar avoidance by Rachel Maddow on MSNBC:
And for perhaps the strangest coverage of all (that I’ve encountered), see Rachel Maddow’s thirteen-minute rant from Tuesday Nov. 20 program (For the video, click on “Mideast diplomacy engages with new Egypt in key role”). The piece is done with typical Maddow melodrama. But to what end? Looks to me that Maddow was stuck with a story (this latest war) that she had to cover in some way but was left wondering how to do it without criticizing Obama and without saying anything that would trouble the Israelis. Lord, she succeeded beyond her wildest dreams. It has often been said—correctly—of Maddow that she avoids the infamous third rail. Well, here you go; she manages to avoid it even when she’s not avoiding it. This extended non sequitur, in its entirety, would have been better left on the cutting-room floor. But for lots of background about Egypt that you didn’t need, here it is.
From his lips to god’s ears…
This guy is something else. Perhaps more than anyone else, Zbig is responsible for Arab (read: muslim) radicalism in the region, this is the cat who stood in Pakistan in the 70’s and told the Mujahideen to fight for God, and that Americans, being so pious themselves, would support their Jihad. Palestine is a huge problem, but so is the situation in Pakistan, where US Policy is putting tremendous pressure on the military and the moderates, and this in a nuclear state of some 200 million people. Zbig is the father of this policy, and so he’s not likely to talk about it.
@Dan Crowther
I’m not a big follower of zbig but I think he’s been pretty consistent over the past few years in calling for an even-handed approach to I/P by the US. Everyone at high levels of gov’t has gotten their hands dirty in one way or another. I believe the Carter admin. helped fund the ethnic cleansing of East Timor. When people like Carter or zbig come around to a more sane position do we welcome their input or throw them under the bus because of bad choices they made decades ago?
Zbigniew Brzezinski -2003 Soft Zionism?
http://www.newamericanstrategies.org/transcripts/Brzezinski.asp
Brzezinski is right on every point of course and I have noticed before he doesn’t shy from calling it like it is on I-First influence of political money and the Lobby.
The main point is realist in FP circles and even ordinary common sense observers have said for years that a solution has to ‘be imposed’ on Israel by a outside power. If there is something besides the I-Firstdom influence that keeps this from being done I don’t know what it is and have never been able to find it. It’s definitely not in the Israel as a asset to the US claim.
I don’t even know what to say any more about the Israel fetish in our government, politics, policy, all those to blame for it, the media complicity in keeping it hidden and going, or how to overcome it……whatever we are all doing, Jewish dissenters/activist included, it just plain isn’t working.