if Israel can do no right in the eyes of the administration, then there is
no point in bending to its will.

Column One: Exploiting the crisis
By CAROLINE GLICK The Jerusalem Post 02/04/2010
www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=172317

Israel should get off its knees and adopt policies that will enhance its
interests.

There is an element of irony in the crisis of relations between the Obama
administration and Israel. On the one hand, although President Barack Obama
and his advisers deny there is anything wrong with US-Israel relations
today, it is easy to understand why no one believes them.

On the other hand, on most issues, there is substantive continuity between
Obama's Middle East policies and those his immediate predecessor, George W.
Bush, adopted during his second term in office. Yet, whereas Israelis viewed
Bush as Israel's greatest friend in the White House, they view Obama as the
most anti-Israel US president ever.

This contradiction requires us to consider two issues. First, why are
relations with the US now steeped in crisis? And second, taking a page out
of Obama's White House chief of staff Rahm Emmanuel's playbook, how can
Israel make sure not to let this crisis go to waste?

The reason relations are so bad, of course, is that Obama has opted to
attack Israel and its supporters. In the space of the past 10 days alone,
Israel has been subject to three malicious blows courtesy of Obama and his
advisers.

First, during his visit to the White House last Tuesday, Obama treated Prime
Minister Binyamin Netanyahu like a two-bit potentate. Rather than
respectfully disagree with the elected leader of a key US ally, Obama walked
out in the middle of their meeting to dine with his family and left the
unfed Netanyahu to meditate on his grave offense of not agreeing to give up
Israel's capital city as a precondition for indirect, US-orchestrated
negotiations with an unelected, unpopular Palestinian leadership that
supports terrorism and denies Israel's right to exist.

Next, there was the somewhat anodyne - if substantively incorrect - written
testimony by US Army Gen. David Petraeus to the Senate about the impact of
the Arab world's refusal to accept Israel's right to exist on US-Arab
relations.

In the event, the administration deliberately distorted Petraeus's testimony
to lend the impression that the most respected serving US military commander
blames Israel for the deaths of US soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan. After
Petraeus rejected that impression, his boss Defense Secretary Robert Gates
repeated the false and insulting allegation against Israel in his own name.

Finally, there is the report this week in Politico in which nameless
administration sources accused National Security Council member Dennis Ross
of "dual loyalties."

Ross, of course, has won fame for his career of pressuring successive
Israeli governments into giving unreciprocated concessions to Palestinian
terrorists. Still, in the view of his indignant opponents in the Obama White
House, due to his insufficient hostility to the Israeli government, Ross is
a traitor. If Ross wants to be treated like a real American, he needs to
join Obama in his open bid to overthrow the elected government of Israel.

These moves would be sufficient to throw US-Israel relations into a
tailspin. When combined with the administration's ultimatum demanding a
moratorium on Jewish construction in Jerusalem and its threat to coerce
Israel into accepting an Obama plan for Palestinian statehood that will
imperil Israel's security, it becomes abundantly clear that there is no way
to make this crisis go away. There is a crisis in US relations with Israel
today because the president of the United States has very publicly taken a
torch to those relations and he responds to any sign that the flames are
waning by dousing fresh kerosene on the fire.

AND YET, when Obama's personal animus is set aside and one examines the
substance of his actual policies, ironically, there is little difference
between the current administration's policies and those of its immediate
predecessor.

In his second term in office, Bush ignored the significance of Hamas's
electoral victory in January 2006 and its takeover of Gaza in June 2007. The
US expanded its training program for the Palestinian armed forces and pushed
Israel to accept a framework for Palestinian statehood that would more or
less push it back to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines.

From 2004, the Bush administration sought to appease Iran into giving up its
nuclear program - first indirectly through the negotiations that France,
Britain and Germany conducted with Teheran. Then, in 2006, the
administration began direct negotiations with the mullahs.

Bush personally rejected repeated Israeli requests to purchase refueling
aircraft and bunker buster bombs necessary for attacking Iran's hardened
nuclear facilities. And he refused to back Israeli plans to attack Iran's
nuclear installations. So, too, Bush stopped calling for regime change in
Iran. After the November 2007 publication of the falsified National
Intelligence Estimate on Iran's nuclear program, Bush discarded the
possibility of a US military strike against Iran's nuclear facilities
altogether.

In the 2006 war between Israel and the Iranian- and Syrian-proxy force
Hizbullah, ignoring Hizbullah's membership in the Lebanese government and
the Lebanese military's active support for Hizbullah's war effort, Bush
forbade Israel from attacking Lebanese government targets. In so doing, he
forced Israel to fight a regional foe as if it were a local street gang and
so rendered the ultimate result of that war - Israel's first strategic
military defeat - a foregone conclusion.

Despite Syria's open sponsorship of the insurgency in Iraq, its strategic
alliance with Iran, as well as its sponsorship of Hizbullah, Hamas and
al-Qaida in Iraq and Lebanon, the Bush administration sought to prevent
Israel from destroying Syria's Iranian-financed, North Korean-built nuclear
installation. After Israel destroyed the installation in September 2007, the
Bush administration demanded that Israel keep silent about the significance
of the Iranian-North Korean-Syrian nuclear alliance.

Finally, the Bush administration denied the inherent hostility of the
Islamist government in Turkey. Instead it cultivated the fantasy that this
anti-American, anti-Israel, Hamas-, Syria- and Iran-supporting regime is a
trustworthy ally.

Israel went along with all of these US policies despite their strategic
madness because Israel wanted to be a team player. The Sharon and Olmert
governments and the Israeli public as a whole believed that Israel had an
ally in the Bush administration and that when push came to shove, the
massive risks Israel took supporting the US's policies on Iran, Syria,
Lebanon, Turkey and the Palestinians would be rewarded.

With Obama, of course, things are different. Probably if Obama treated
Israel with the same friendliness his predecessor showered on its leaders,
Netanyahu would have been willing to walk the plank just as Ehud Olmert and
Ariel Sharon did, in the interests of helping the team. But what Obama has
made clear in his mistreatment of Israel is that he doesn't want Netanyahu
to walk the plank for the team. He wants Israel off the team.

ALTHOUGH UNSETTLING, this dismal state of affairs has a bright side. It
provides Israel with a rare opportunity to stop acceding to US policies that
are bad for Israel and the US alike. After all, if the US is willing to
instigate a crisis in its relations with Israel over plans to zone for
housing units in Jerusalem neighborhoods like Ramat Shlomo and French Hill,
then clearly Israel can do no right. And if Israel can do no right in the
eyes of the administration, then there is no point in bending to its will.
Instead, Israel must simply do what it must to secure its interests.

In the hope of winning over the Obama administration, Israel has kept the
Iranian opposition at arm's length. This should end. Israel should employ
covert and overt means to help Iran's Green Movement destabilize the Iranian
regime with the aim of toppling it. At the same time, Israel should employ
covert and overt means to destroy Iran's nuclear installations.

This week, Sen. John Kerry travelled to Lebanon and Syria to raise the
prospects of peace talks between Israel and both countries. Rather than
applaud his efforts, Israel should point out that Hizbullah controls the
Lebanese government and that US support for the Lebanese military and
government strengthens Hizbullah. So, too, Israel should make clear that
since Syrian dictator Bashar Assad is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's Arab water boy,
it is preposterous to call for Israel to surrender the Golan Heights to his
regime. Instead of rehashing the same nonsense, Israel should actively
support Syria's Kurds in their bid for autonomy and champion the cause of
political prisoners languishing in Syrian jails.

Turkey's announcement this week that it supports Iran's nuclear ambitions
should be recognized for what it was: An announcement that the NATO member
state has joined the Iranian axis with Syria, Lebanon, Hamas and Hizbullah.
Israel should respond to Turkey's announcement by announcing a moratorium on
weapons sales to Turkey, and so end its counterproductive attempts to paper
over the fact that its former strategic ally has become its enemy.

As for the Palestinians, rather than succumb to US demands in the interest
of starting doomed-to-fail negotiations with Fatah, Israel should tell the
truth. It has nothing to negotiate about and no one to negotiate with. Fatah's
leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad reject Israel's right to exist. They
support terrorism. They already rejected a "two-state solution" less than
two years ago. Aside from that, they lack the support of their own
electorate, which prefers Hamas's more direct approach to destroying Israel.

Instead of pretending that begging these impotent adversaries for peace
serves its interests, Israel should get off its knees and adopt policies
that will enhance its interests. For instance, given that the Obama
administration views Ramat Shlomo as the equivalent of Eli and E-1, Israel
should build up the neighborhood in Eli that was home to fallen IDF
commanders Majors Roi Klein and Eliraz Peretz and implement its construction
plans for E-1.

Ironically, all of these policies are consonant not only with Israel's
strategic needs, but with the US's own strategic interests. And since Obama's
hostility to Israel is not subject to change, rather than focus on winning
over the White House, the Netanyahu government should devote its energies to
selling its policies to the American people. Repeated polls have shown that
the American public supports an Israeli strike against Iran's nuclear
facilities. By the same token, commonsense policies towards the likes of
Fatah, Hamas, Hizbullah, Syria and Turkey, combined with the unapologetic
assertion of Israel's rights in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria, will find a
strong core of support in the US that can offset some of the damage Obama is
doing to US ties with Israel.

Although much maligned, Emmanuel's call not to let a good crisis go to waste
can be taken as a crass way of saying that every cloud has a silver lining.
Israel did not ask for this fight with Obama. It would have been willing to
keep up the fantasy that Bush's second-term policies made sense. But since a
fight is what it got, Israel has no choice but to strike out on its own. As
it happens, if Israel does so, not only will it protect itself, it will
protect the US from the dangerous policies its leader has opted to pursue.

caroline@carolineglick.com

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Caroline Glick
www.CarolineGlick.com