Has there been a change in American policy toward Israel since the Bush administration took office? To many observers, the answer to that question is so self-evidently yes that even asking it seems foolish or disingenuous. Yet according to the line coming out of Washington, if anything is self-evident it is that no substantive change has taken place at all. The United States, we are told in official statements and in private assurances, is still committed to the same goals it has always pursued. Thanks to the Gulf War, however, a new opportunity to realize those goals has presented itself and—here is the only difference—the Bush administration has moved with unprecedented determination and skill to take advantage of it.

In making this case, the Bush administration and its apologists point to a number of continuities with past American policy. Take, for example, the most visibly contentious problem in the recent relations between the American and Israeli governments—the issue of Jewish settlements in what Jerusalem calls the “administered” territories of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District and what Washington calls the “occupied” West Bank and Gaza. The administration and its apologists say, accurately, that George Bush’s opposition to the building of such settlements is consistent with the stand of his predecessors, both Republican and Democratic, all the way back to Lyndon Johnson, who was in the White House when Israel first conquered these territories in the Six-Day War of 1967.

How indeed, they ask, could it have been otherwise? After all, in helping to draft and then basing its policy on Security Council Resolution 242 of 1967, the Johnson administration clearly and explicitly contemplated an eventual Israeli withdrawal to the boundaries which had defined the Jewish state before the Six-Day War. To be sure, allowance was made for minor adjustments that would enhance the security of those boundaries, which meant that Jewish settlements serving a clearly defensive military purpose (along the lines of the Allon plan) could perhaps be justified in American eyes. But any other Jewish settlements, and especially those built in densely populated areas, were always anathema to the United States, suggesting as they did that the Israelis might be sneakily engaged in a policy of creeping annexation.

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Lending credence to this reading, Lyndon Johnson’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, recently described an exchange he recalls having had in the aftermath of the Six-Day War with Abba Eban, who was then Israel’s Foreign Minister. According to Rusk, Eban told him that even though Israel had always assured the United States it had no expansionist ambitions—assurances which the United States had in good faith passed on to the Arabs—the Israelis had now changed their minds, thereby (in Rusk’s words) making “a 20-year liar out of the United States.”

Whether or not Rusk’s memory of Eban’s statement is accurate—and I must say that it rings wrong to me—it shows that even in an administration as friendly to Israel as Johnson’s, there was a strong animus against any hint of an Israeli right to settle in, let alone to exercise sovereignty over, any of the territories that had been taken by Israel in the Six-Day War: the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan; the Sinai desert and the Gaza Strip from Egypt; and the Golan Heights from Syria.

If, the apologists for Bush continue, this was so under Johnson, it was all the more evident in the administration of his Republican successor, Richard Nixon. Attempting to pursue a more “evenhanded” policy toward the Arab-Israeli conflict than the Democrats had supposedly done, Nixon’s first Secretary of State, William P. Rogers, proposed a plan that was based on much the same conception of “trading land for peace” as is now shaping policy under the Bush administration (though the land in question then included the Sinai desert, as well as all the territories still in contention today).

Furthermore, the Bush apologists say, when the Democrats, under Jimmy Carter, returned to the White House in 1976, it became obvious that “evenhandedness” was no longer a Republican monopoly. Both Carter’s Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, and his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, were firm believers in the need to push Israel back to the ’67 borders (again, with minor modifications). And it was during the Carter administration that a first large move was made in that direction, with Israel’s return of the Sinai to Egypt under the Camp David accords of 1978. Yet far from being satisfied with this achievement, Carter and his advisers grew almost as angry with Menachem Begin over the issue of settlements on the West Bank and in Gaza as Bush and his people would later be with Begin’s successor as Prime Minister of Israel, Yitzhak Shamir.

Finally, we are reminded, even under Ronald Reagan, who by general agreement was the friendliest to Israel of any American President ever, the United States went on objecting to the building of new Jewish settlements in the occupied territories. True, the Reagan administration quietly dropped the dubious charges that the settlements were illegal under international law and also an “obstacle” to peace, but it still characterized them as “unhelpful.” Not only that, but the so-called Reagan plan (which was actually developed by his Secretary of State, George Shultz) represented an updated version of the “territory-for-peace” approach of the Rogers plan. While it, too, foundered on the rock of resistance from the parties—in this instance, the Syrians turning out to be the main obstacle—Bush and his apologists can still cite it as yet another precedent for their own policy.

But what about the extraordinary level of pressure the Bush administration has exerted, most notably in trying to force Israeli compliance with American conditions for a peace conference, and with the American wish for a freeze on settlements, by delaying a previously promised loan guarantee needed by Israel to house Jewish immigrants from the Soviet Union? Here too, the Bush apologists reply, there are precedents. For example, Nixon once held up a promised delivery of Phantom jets to Israel and—even more to the point—just before the futile Geneva Peace Conference on the Middle East of 1973, he threatened to postpone an aid package “as insurance of Israel’s good behavior.”¹

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All this is true, but it is also misleading. For the deeper truth is that a change has taken place in the treatment of Israel by the United States.

To begin with, there is a new tone in the air. It is a tone ranging from ordinary coldness to the outright hostility that was so vividly manifested in the President’s notorious press conference of September 12, 1991, at which Bush described himself as “one lonely little guy” up against “something like a thousand lobbyists on the Hill” working to prevent him from postponing the loan guarantee for 120 days. For thus playing into the canard that our alliance with Israel is based on the illegitimate manipulation of domestic politics by an all-powerful Jewish lobby, the lonely little guy won his delay. But he also called forth an avalanche of congratulatory mail so virulently anti-Semitic that it reportedly caused him to regret his use of this squalid tactic.

There was, however, no indication that the President regretted another statement he made in that press conference which was in some ways even worse. It was this:

Just months ago, American men and women in uniform risked their lives to defend Israelis in the face of Iraqi Scud missiles, and indeed, Desert Storm, while winning a war against aggression, also achieved the defeat of Israel’s most dangerous adversary.

Now, as George Bush well knew when he made that statement, the Israelis have never asked Americans or anyone else to defend them; all they have ever asked for is help in equipping their own people to defend themselves. If things were different in the Gulf War, it was because, and only because, Bush himself forcibly prevented the Israelis, who were chafing at the bit, from assuming direct responsibility for their own defense against the Scud attacks.

The Israelis were eager to get into the war for three reasons. First, as a matter of national self-respect, they did not want American soldiers shedding blood on their behalf. Second, they were afraid that their passivity in the face of these attacks would undermine the deterrent effect of their longstanding policy of retaliation. And third, they believed—with good cause, given the specialized training their bomber pilots get to execute just such missions²—that they themselves could have done a better job of eliminating the Scuds than was done by the U.S. and its coalition partners.

Knowing all this, George Bush still insisted on holding the Israelis back, supposedly on the theory that their entry would drive out at least some of the Arab members of the anti-Iraq coalition. Yet he must also have known that the Egyptians, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, and even the Syrians, the most anti-Israel of the Arab states in the coalition, had indicated, not once but several times, that they would stay put if Israel were to take defensive retaliatory action against Iraq. Why then was Bush so adamant about keeping Israel out? Some Israelis were derided at the time for the “paranoid” suspicion that, as a way of exerting pressure, he was planning to throw it up to them in due course that Americans had risked their lives in order to defend Israel. But it is these “paranoid” Israelis and not their critics who have turned out to be right.

The worst of it from the Israeli point of view was that the United States, far from eliminating the Iraqi missile threat, had failed to locate most of the Scud launchers during the war and had succeeded mainly in destroying decoys. Last October, therefore, finding themselves vulnerable once again in case of a renewal of hostilities, and now having doubly good cause not to rely on us for their defense, the Israelis undertook a series of reconnaissance flights over Iraq. In response, Iraq protested to the United Nations, at which point the White House, instead of dismissing this as a piece of arrant chutzpah, expressed its “concern about the Israeli overflights . . . to the Israeli government at the highest level.” These overflights, explained the President’s spokesman, might “disrupt the peace process,” and besides they were unnecessary because the United States was already providing Israel with intelligence on Iraq. Yet in view of the very fact that Iraq emerged from the war with so many Scud launchers and missiles intact, the Israelis might be forgiven for doubting that American intelligence is all that it should be in this field or all that is needed to keep Israel secure.

As if this were not enough, the Bush administration shortly thereafter let it be known that it objected to yet another job of surveillance the Israelis had undertaken, this one of a North Korean ship carrying arms—reportedly they were Scud-C missiles with a range of 600 km.—to Syria. “After having failed to destroy Iraqi missile sites aimed at Israel,” an Israeli official commented with understandable bitterness, “America is now extending protection to Syria to set up more accurate and powerful missiles even closer to Israel.”

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In addition to setting a new tone in its relations with Israel, the Bush administration has gone beyond any of its predecessors in the intensity of its preoccupation with the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is, indeed, a preoccupation that seems to border on the obsessive. Thus, at a moment when Saddam Hussein was massacring Kurds and Shiites in one part of the Middle East, the American Secretary of State was spending all his time in a different part of the region where nothing much was going on, shuttling back and forth among Jerusalem, Amman, Damascus, and Riyadh. It was as if, with a conflagration raging in upper Manhattan, the fire department were to send all its trucks to put out a smoldering little blaze in Brooklyn. Nor did such side events as the break-up of the Soviet empire and the collapse of Communism within the Soviet heartland distract Baker’s attention from what he clearly considered a more important priority.

Not only is there a whiff of the obsessive in the Bush administration’s preoccupation with the Arab-Israeli conflict, there is also a touch of irrationality in its determination to bring about a resolution. Before the end of the cold war, it was often argued that the United States had a vital interest in peace between the Arabs and Israel because any outbreak of hostilities could lead to a confrontation with the Soviet Union which might even escalate into a nuclear war. With the end of the cold war, however, the idea of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a tinderbox or a flashpoint has become obsolete. Yet the Bush administration goes on treating the conflict as though it were still as globally dangerous as ever.

Unlike the tinderbox theory, which once seemed reasonable but has been overtaken by events, the notion that settling the Palestinian problem is in the vital interest of the United States never made any sense. Here the argument has been that the Palestinian problem is the “key” to the Arab-Israeli conflict, and as such the main source of instability in a region which is strategically crucial to the United States. Yet the war against the Jewish state was launched by the Arabs long before the existence of a distinct Palestinian nationality was recognized even by the Arab world itself. Nor, during the nineteen years of Jordanian control of the West Bank, did anyone speak of establishing an independent Palestinian state there.

The plain truth is that the Arab-Israeli conflict has from the beginning been rooted in the refusal of the Arab peoples to accept the existence of a sovereign Jewish state in “their” part of the world, no matter where its boundaries might be drawn and irrespective of what its policies might or might not be. Hence the Palestinian problem cannot be the “key” to that conflict (unless this is a coded way of saying, as the Palestine National Covenant still explicitly does, that the only “solution” would be the establishment of Palestinian control not just over the West Bank and Gaza but over the entire territory now under Jewish sovereignty—i.e., the destruction of Israel).

Even less can it be rationally held that the Palestinian problem is the main source of instability in the Middle East. According to one estimate, since 1948, when Israel came into being, there have been nineteen violent clashes in the region having nothing whatever to do either with the Palestinians or with the Jewish state. Among these have been several major wars, most recently the one between Iran and Iraq, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and Desert Storm itself, not to mention such earlier examples as the Egyptian attack on Yemen, the endless factional carnage in Lebanon, and several Syrian aggressions against Lebanon and Jordan.

In the face of this record, there surely is something irrational in the assumption that the Palestinian problem is the main source of instability in the Middle East, and that a solution to it is therefore in the vital interest of the United States.

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Irrational or not, this assumption seems to be the main driving force behind the demand of the Bush administration that Israel “trade land for peace.” Again, there is nothing new in the demand itself, going back as it does to Resolution 242. But where the West Bank is concerned, a new factor has definitely entered the picture since Resolution 242 was framed. In the past the other party to the trade was supposed to be Jordan. But now that Jordan has renounced its claim to the West Bank, it is the Palestinians—who, it is worth remembering, are not mentioned in Resolution 242—to whom this land is to be “traded.”

On this issue as well the Bush administration denies any change in policy. Remaining formally opposed to the establishment of a Palestinian state, it supports the kind of “autonomy” for the Palestinians living on the West Bank and Gaza that was envisaged, with Israeli approval, by the Camp David accords, to be followed, after a trial period of three to five years, by negotiations between Israel and the local inhabitants on the final status of the territories.

At the time of Camp David, the Palestinians contemptuously dismissed this provision. All that autonomy offered them, they said, was the right to collect their own garbage. Naturally they would not settle for so derisory a concession from the Israelis. In fact, they would settle for nothing less than statehood.

It was a perfect example of the famous propensity of the Palestinians “never to miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” But to judge by their behavior in the present round of negotiations, the Palestinians have at last learned better. Finally grasping an opportunity, they now say that they are willing to begin with autonomy as a step on the road to statehood.

Anyone who thinks that this emphasis on final statehood represents a piece of face-saving rhetoric is fooling himself: the Palestinians will not be satisfied with autonomy, and they will do everything in their power to use it as a stepping stone to a Palestinian state. And anyone who thinks that the Bush administration (assuming the President is reelected in 1992) will stick with its opposition to the establishment of such a state has misread both its tactics and its strategy. For like the newly clever Palestinians themselves, the Bush administration almost certainly sees autonomy as the first stage of a process that will lead to Palestinian statehood in the West Bank and Gaza (though, unlike the Palestinians, Bush and his people are likely to opt for some form of internationalization or “Vaticanization” that would keep Jerusalem united instead of dividing it up between Palestinians and Israelis).

One can only speculate as to why Bush and his people are working toward support for a Palestinian state. But considering that Bush’s foreign policy in every area of the world has made stability its highest value,³ and recalling once again that he seems to accept the view that the Palestinian problem is the main source of instability in the Middle East, it is reasonable to suppose that he regards a Palestinian state as the best or possibly even the only way to bring stability to that particular region.

Yet this is so far-fetched an expectation that it too smacks of irrationality. Indeed, far from being a formula for peace and stability, a Palestinian state would lead in very short order to instability and war. Thus, no sooner would the new state come into being than it would become Lebanonized. That is, a struggle would begin for control between the Fatah wing of the PLO and the Muslim fundamentalists of Hamas—a struggle that would be complicated by the entry of the pro-Syrian wing of the PLO and probably also elements subservient to Jordan and others to Iraq. At some stage, Syria, which regards the entire territory now divided between Israel and Jordan as Southern Syria, would find a pretext to intervene, just as it did in Lebanon. But such a Syrian move would have to be resisted by the Israelis, and war would be the inevitable result, with other Arab states, including Iraq, overcoming their own mutual enmities to join in.

If Israel were to lose the war—and pushed back now to the ’67 borders, it would be much more vulnerable to attack both from the sea and from the Samarian and Judean heights⁴—the Arabs would finally have realized their dream of wiping the Jewish state off the map. If Israel were to win, it would, in a monstrous irony, wind up reoccupying the very territories from which the “peace process” would have driven it—but at the cost of God knows how many thousands of lives.

Of course, other scenarios can be imagined, but none that is even remotely realistic leads to anything but turmoil, terrorism, and war.

No wonder, then, that the vast majority of Israelis, including those who support the Labor party, are so sure that they would be placing themselves in mortal danger if they acquiesced in the establishment of a new Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza.

At the same time, it is also true that most Israelis hate having to rule over another people, and that many of them worry about the corrupting effects of the occupation on their democratic culture. That is why they are so desperately eager to believe in autonomy as a viable alternative to continued occupation on the one side and withdrawal followed by Palestinian statehood on the other. It may well be that Yitzhak Shamir has by now persuaded himself that autonomy is indeed the way out, though it seems more probable that he is only using autonomy to buy time in the hope (à la the famous old Jewish joke) that the king will die or the horse will talk—in other words, that some miracle comparable to the collapse of the Soviet empire will strike the Middle East and open up possibilities of accommodation that are under present conditions either inconceivable or too dangerous to risk. But whether or not Shamir is really serious about the prospects of autonomy, neither he nor anyone likely to succeed him in the near future will agree to withdrawal from the territories in favor of a new Palestinian state.

Unless, that is, the United States were to leave the Israelis with no other choice—say, by threatening to wash its hands of Israel, suspend all military aid, and throw the whole issue over to the tender mercies of the Security Council. One would like to think that the United States would never do such a thing. Yet so pervasive is the idea within our political culture that the Palestinians have a right to their own state (even though they already have one under the name of Jordan, whose population is 70-percent Palestinian), and so convinced are our foreign-policy “experts” that a second Palestinian state on the West Bank and Gaza would bring peace and harmony to the Middle East, that a change in American policy from opposition to endorsement of such a state will be very hard to prevent.

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On the other hand, despite the enormous success of Arab propaganda, which has pulled off the Orwellian trick of transmuting a war by the Arab world against the Jewish state into a war by the Jewish state against the Palestinian people, and despite the relentless Israel-bashing which has become the favorite sport of journalists on both ends of the political spectrum, there is still a great deal of sympathy for Israel in this country. It is a sympathy based on a sense of cultural and political kinship, shared values, and common interests, and it can be appealed to and activated by the argument that forcing Israel to withdraw from the territories in favor of a new Palestinian state would be tantamount to placing that beleaguered and besieged nation in mortal danger.

Placing Israel in such peril is not something the American people would wish to do, which is why there is a good chance that they will stop their government from doing it—provided, that is, an urgent effort is made to open their eyes to the game being played by the Bush administration and to the irrationality of its obsession with and its ideas about the Arab-Israeli conflict.

¹ The words are Henry Kissinger’s, describing Nixon’s motive. Kissinger, who was then Secretary of State, opposed the measure because he was “convinced that desperation would make the Israelis more defiant,” and it was finally dropped.

² For details, see my “In Israel, With Scuds and Patriots” in COMMENTARY, April 1991.

³ See the article by George Weigel beginning on p. 36 of this issue.

⁴ “As the Gulf War proved once again,” David Bar-Illan of the Jerusalem Post recently wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “missiles can do damage, . . . but only occupation by ground forces can bring defeat. . . . Had Israel adopted Washington’s variously named plans of the past 23 years and retreated to the 1967 lines (with minor modifications), Saddam Hussein would have controlled the whole land mass from the Iranian border to the outskirts of Tel Aviv. Absent Israel’s control of the Jordan River and the Samarian-Judean heights, nothing could have prevented pro-Saddam Jordan, and the Palestinian state that would have arisen in the evacuated areas, from joining forces with him.”