Kerry’s Attack on Israel: A Failed Attempt to Divert Attention from Obama’s Disastrous Foreign Policy

Kerry’s Attack on Israel: A Failed Attempt to Divert Attention from Obama’s
Disastrous Foreign Policy
By Prof. Hillel Frisch, January 2, 2017
BESA Center Perspectives Paper No. 390

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY: Secretary of State John Kerry’s attack on Israel last
week represents a vain attempt to deflect attention from the Obama
administration’s failed foreign policy. Kerry’s fixation on the Palestinian
issue explains why Russia, with one-tenth the GDP of the US, has emerged as
the winner in Syria against both US and Israeli interests and why Iran, its
ally, has come to control two more Arab capitals by proxy. Instead of
promoting core US interests, Kerry has squandered efforts on promoting a
two-state solution that has failed to materialize since it was first
proposed by the Peel Commission eighty years ago. Hopefully, the next
administration will give core US interests their due and find creative ways
to deal with the fallout of a Palestinian national movement that has failed
for 100 years.

In US Secretary of State John Kerry’s recent speech, in which he attempted
to defend Washington’s abstention on the UNSCR resolution against Israeli
settlements, he sounded more similar than ever before to the European
leaders who reflexively condemn Israel. The similarity is rooted in a
predicament shared by both the US under Obama and the EU – a weak and
ineffectual foreign policy. Obama’s and Kerry’s “European” orientation has
reduced American influence in world affairs to its lowest point since WWII
and most certainly since the Vietnam War.

Just as the Europeans cover up their geostrategic weakness by ganging up on
Israel, so too have Obama and Kerry zeroed in on Israel and the Palestinian
issue as a means of covering up the abysmal failures of their foreign
policy. Unfortunately, Israel is saddled with the costs of those foreign
policy failures.

Kerry noted that the US concluded “an historic $38 billion memorandum of
understanding that exceeds any military assistance package the United States
has provided to any country, at any time, and that will invest in
cutting-edge missile defense and sustain Israel’s qualitative military edge
for years to come.” True, but he neglected to mention that most of those
funds will go to meet the dangers of an aggressive Iranian policy.

Tehran has been emboldened by a $50-100 billion windfall resulting from the
unfreezing of its assets in Western capitals, a bonanza orchestrated by
Obama and Kerry. Israel knows full well that much of that windfall will be
used to buy Russian state-of-the-art anti-air defense systems. This will
make it much more difficult for Israel to attack Iran when it goes nuclear
(which it inevitably will). Those systems will also be used to augment
Hezbollah’s massive missile inventory in southern Lebanon, which is aimed at
Israel’s major population centers.

Israel is also paying dearly for Obama’s debacle in Syria. For the first
time since the 1980s, Israel is severely constrained in its mastery over the
skies by a strong Russian air force presence in Syria, a state of affairs
the Obama administration did nothing to prevent. Incredibly, President
Vladimir Putin, the leader of a country with less than half the population
of the US and one tenth its GDP, has led a winning Russian-Iranian-Syrian
coalition against an ineffectual US. Tensions have only increased among
Arabs, Kurds, Turkey, and the US. The Arab-Kurd standoff in Syria runs the
risk of driving many Arabs into an alliance with IS.

Kerry’s speech might have inadvertently explained why the US failed in
Syria. “We have committed our influence and our resources to trying to
resolve the Arab-Israeli conflict because, yes, it would serve American
interests to stabilize a volatile region,” he said. But consider the state
of the region in 2011 and beyond. How could the Obama administration justify
committing so much effort to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict when the
bloodletting and instability in Syria were one hundred times worse? Or when
Iranian allies took over Beirut, where the Iranian/Hezbollah candidate
became president? Or when pro-Iranian Houthis took over San’a? Wasn’t the
formation of an Arab coalition to wage a destructive air war in Yemen the
product of an American policy failure?

Kerry naively believes it is Israel’s obligation to take incredible risks to
appease a failed national movement, which, in 1936, 1947, 1979, 2000, 2007,
and 2009, rejected every opportunity it was offered to make peace with the
Zionist movement and later the State of Israel.

But he must know through his advisors that the Palestinians have been going
through their own civil war for the past ten years. The only reason it is
not as bloody as its Syrian counterpart is the presence of Israel, which
separates the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas’s dictatorial rule
from Hamas’s Islamist theocracy in Gaza. Both governments excel at brutally
suppressing one another’s supporters in their respective territories.

In shedding tears over the Palestinians’ plight, Kerry cannot dispel the
truth that life expectancy in Gaza is a respectable 75 years and electricity
is available in almost 100% of homes – a far higher economic welfare rate
than that enjoyed by one-third of humanity, including most of tropical
Africa. Fifteen thousand Gazans have received critical medical care in
Israel’s hospitals, just as they receive Israeli electricity (for which they
rarely pay).

Kerry informs us that the Arab states are committed to the two-state
solution. If so, why did Jordan annex the West Bank when it ruled over the
area between 1948 and 1967? Why did Egypt maintain military rule over Gaza
during that period? Are they really committed to a Palestinian state, which
their mutual nemesis, Hamas, is likely to take over, just as it took Gaza
from the PA in 2007?

In 2017, the world will be commemorating 80 years of failure to bring a
two-state solution to fruition. Four generations have passed since the Peel
Commission, and numerous opportunities have been missed due to Palestinian
and Arab intransigence.

It is time to lay the idea of a two-state solution to rest. The US and the
international community should be thinking of new solutions. The Palestinian
Authority’s billions can be diverted, for example, toward the creation of a
transnational space linking the West Bank to Jordan and Gaza as well as to
the greater Arab world. That is but one avenue worthy of exploration. A
world that invented the smartphone and the internet should be able to come
up with others.

No amount of doting on the Palestinians can hide the fact that the Obama
administration’s foreign policy pursuits have been a failure, and no amount
of scapegoating Israel will hide the growing force of this assessment in the
years to come.

Prof. Hillel Frisch, a senior research associate at the Begin-Sadat Center
for Strategic Studies, is a professor of political studies and Middle East
studies at Bar-Ilan University.

BESA Center Perspectives Papers are published through the generosity of the
Greg Rosshandler Family