Welcome to Bethlehem
A piece in the New York Review of Books on Condoleezza Rice’s new memoir is weirdly absent the word neoconservative when author Joseph Lelyveld tries to explain why we invaded Iraq–we were seeking to establish a “foothold” in an Arab land with oil. But it does offer some gems about George Bush’s Israelophilia:
[Secy of State Colin] Powell wanted early on to resolve gaping differences with the White House over Israel and the Palestinians at a time of suicide bombings and severe reprisals and plans to augment settlements, which the State Department thought excessive. She was “sympathetic to him because he was on the front line every day.” But, she goes on, “I talked to the President every day, and I knew where he stood.” If there were a policy showdown, she suggests, Powell would have lost. The result “would be so pro-Israeli as to inflame an already bad situation.” The kind of clarity to which the President was given, she seems to be saying, served no one’s interest in that and other cases….
[Later Rice is herself secretary of state, and:] The secretary, who calls her approach “transformational diplomacy,” is hoping for a breakthrough also with the Israelis and Palestinians. Considering that she served the friendliest administration the Israelis will probably ever see, it’s instructive to compare her complaints about Israeli trickiness and maneuvering to those that have seeped out of the embattled Obama White House. Israel was a close ally and a democracy but its leaders were “sometimes a nightmare to deal with”; they had to be warned not to lobby Congress; in any conversation “there was a ‘but’”; they “always seem to overreach”; getting the Israelis “to actually carry through on promises relating to the Palestinians” was a continuing frustration, particularly promises involving Jewish settlements in the West Bank.
On a presidential visit to Israel in 2008, Bush travels to Bethlehem by car rather than helicopter against the wishes of the Israelis because Rice wants him to see “the ugliness of the occupation, including the checkpoints and the security wall…for himself and [because] it would have been an insult to the Palestinians if he didn’t.” The barriers were taken down, the convoy traveled at speed, but Bush got the point, according to Rice: “‘This is awful,’ he said quietly.”
If Bush had displayed a scintilla of intellectual curiosity he wouldn’t have to be dragged – almost literally – by his secretary of state to see the situation. He could have -gasp – picked up a book by a non-neocon, which includes a lot of liberal Israeli Jewish intellectuals, which would explain the situation to him.
Nontheless, for all the talk from likes like Abe Foxman and others about the supposed ‘horrors’ of the occupation, they always fight back when Israel has to give even an inch away. They are simply pro-settlements and what Bush stated as horrible is actually the result of careful and dedicated toil over several decades of major Jewish organizations. The Christian Zionist lobby is merely a few years old, even if the debate in the MSM sometimes gives the impression that they’ve been around forever and are omnipotent.
This is the legacy of Zionism and it’s why Israel can not fight the delegitimization no matter how many PR firms it hires or how many lobby-sympathetic journalists in the media it can count on.
Obama should visit “Greater Israel”, mingle with the populace west of the Green Line sans handlers, where he might well be jeered and called the N-word, then go east of the Green Line where, if he went by car and on foot and mingled with Occupied Palestinians, he would be cheered.
If even a dork like Bush was horrified at the reality of the Occupation, then imagine the effect if mainstream America was informed regularly about the horrendous destruction of the Holy Land and its inhabitants by Israel’s brutal regime. And if they got a whiff of the arrogance of the entitlement Israel demands from the US, while conceding absolutely nothing in return, they would be further repelled. And that is why Israel is entirely uninterested in the effects of its subjugation and dispossession of innocent people, and obsessed by ensuring this message never gets out. It also why Israel is on a loser, as the truth gradually dawns on people, yes even people as challenged as GW Bush. And if it can hit them…
“On a presidential visit to Israel in 2008, Bush travels to Bethlehem by car rather than helicopter against the wishes of the Israelis because Rice wants him to see “the ugliness of the occupation, including the checkpoints and the security wall…for himself and [because] it would have been an insult to the Palestinians if he didn’t.”
OMG–and all these years I’ve been dissing Rice…
Bush should cross the checkpoint on his feet, dresssed as an Arab man, waiting for hours in the long line, in the rain,snow and mud, humiliated by the IDF forces, who would tell him just to shut up and listen, and do what he is required to do, or else…
Then , he would expercience what “an awful” is.
And Rice, in her “memoir” wants to ease her guilt, clear her dirty consciousness???