Reconsidering Colin Powell’s record on Israel and Iran Moshe Phillips
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“Colin Powell was at times accused of being less than sympathetic to Israel, [but] that was not at all the case,” former Defense Department official Dov Zakheim recently claimed in the Washington Jewish Week newspaper. But a careful examination of Powell’s record shows that friends of Israel in the U.S. had legitimate concerns.
The well-known anecdotes about Powell speaking some Yiddish and serving as a “Shabbos goy” as a teenager are heartwarming. It’s too bad that this seems unrelated to interactions with Israel.
It was Powell who pressured Israel not to respond to Saddam Hussein’s Scud missile attacks during the Gulf War. As missile after missile struck the heart of Israel, as more than 4,000 buildings were damaged and 74 Israelis were killed, Israel’s hands were tied by Powell’s pressure.
In April 2001, Palestinian Arab terrorists in Gaza fired hundreds of rockets at Israeli kindergartens and kibbutzim. Israel hit back at the terrorists. Powell’s response? He publicly denounced Israel’s response as “excessive and disproportionate.”
Abraham Foxman, the longtime national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said Powell’s harsh criticism of Israel was an “overreaction” and “an erroneous judgment about the Israeli action.” Malcolm Hoenlein, executive Vice President of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, said Powell’s language “was inappropriate and subject to distortion by the media.”
In the autumn of 2001, Powell became the first sitting Secretary of State to push for the creation of a Palestinian state.
In the autumn of 2001, Powell became the first sitting Secretary of State to push for the creation of a Palestinian state. Mortimer B. Zuckerman, the chairman of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organizations, called Powell’s position ”a very short-sighted and erroneous policy.”
Zuckerman was right. Creating a Palestinian state would have been a reward for terrorism. Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority was just then in the midst of carrying out the “Second Intifada” against Israel.
That violence included the savage “bloody hands” lynching of two Israelis in the PA capital of Ramallah; the PA sniper murder of a ten month-old Israeli baby, Shalhevet Pass; the brutal kidnap-murder of former Maryland resident Koby Mandell; and, of course, numerous notorious suicide bombings. More than 1,000 Israelis were murdered in the Second Intifada—and Colin Powell’s response was to demand the establishment of a Palestinian Arab state alongside Israel’s narrow coastal strip.
In March 2002, Powell took another public swipe at Israel. In carefully-planned testimony before Congress, he ridiculed Israel’s prime minister for “declaring war against the Palestinians and thinking that you can solve the problem by seeing how many Palestinians can be killed.” That outrageous characterization of Israel’s self-defense actions was a slap in the face of America’s only true ally in the Middle East, at a time when the Israelis were fighting desperately against a massive terror onslaught.
After Powell left office, we learned from the acclaimed biography of him, Soldier: The Life of Colin Powell (by Karen DeYoung), that Powell’s ambivalence toward Israel had deep roots. Powell told DeYoung that he “revered” then-secretary of state George Marshall for his “principled” opposition to President Harry Truman’s recognition of Israel] in 1948.
Coming dangerously close to blame-the-Jewish-lobby rhetoric, Powell twice said (in DeYoung’s book) that “the JINSA crowd” was to blame for the Iraq war. JINSA, the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, had expressed legitimate concerns about Saddam Hussein’s sponsorship of international terrorism. To try to make it seem as if those patriotic American Jews had somehow helped drag the United States into war is outrageous.
Another source of legitimate concern was Powell’s strong support for the nomination of Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense in the Obama Administration. Hagel had a long record of harshly criticizing Israel. In fact, even Ira Forman, executive director of the National Jewish Democratic Council, said Hagel was too anti-Israel to be secretary of defense. The Washington Post reported that Hagel “voted against Iran sanctions in 2004, 2007 and 2008. In 2009 he urged Obama to open talks with Hamas.” Hagel also held friendly talks with Syrian dictator Hafez Assad, and sat on the board of a bank that was investigated for violating U.S. sanctions on Iran.
Finally, there is the question of Powell’s support for the disastrous Iran nuclear agreement, a deal which allowed Tehran to continue surreptitiously developing atomic weapons, and provided the Iranians with $1.7-billion in cash (the infamous wooden pallets episode).
Ironically, Dov Zakheim—who now tells us that Powell was pro-Israel—strongly criticized the Iran deal at the time. Writing in Foreign Policy the day after the agreement was signed, Zakheim asserted that “the Middle East has just become far more dangerous than it was a day ago,” because “None of the initial Western demands, whether regarding enrichment, the number of centrifuges, the extent of inspections, or the timetable for lifting sanctions have been met. Iran will now have access to the latest technology, to international trade, and, most important, to billions of dollars…that sum is enough for Iran both to modernize its infrastructure and double, perhaps triple its financial support for terrorist activities.” As a result, Zakheim pointed out, “Hezbollah’s fortunes have skyrocketed.”
Yet Powell declared on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that “It’s a pretty good deal.” Sure it was—pretty good for Iran. In fact, “terrific” for Iran, according to Zakheim.
Colin Powell did many good things for America, but I, for one, find it difficult to use the term “pro-Israel” to describe somebody who supported a deal that strengthened a regime which seeks to annihilate Israel and sponsors the world’s most lethal anti-Israel and anti-America terrorists.
Moshe Phillips is a commentator on Jewish affairs whose writings appear regularly in the American and Israeli press. He
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