DAVID ISAAC: A STATE OF INTERDEPENDENCE
http://shmuelkatz.com/wordpress/?p=773
In a recent column for Bloomberg View, Jeffrey Goldberg writes of statements by former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, who, shortly before his retirement, told the president that Netanyahu was “ungrateful” for the myriad contributions the U.S. has made to Israel’s security.
Goldberg writes: “In a meeting of the National Security Council Principals Committee, Gates coldly laid out the many steps the administration has taken to guarantee Israel’s security … and then stated bluntly that the U.S. has received nothing in return, particularly with regard to the peace process.” (italics added)
The idea that Israel ought to repay whatever security assistance it receives by helping to advance the “peace process” is illogical, given that the Obama administration’s notion of a peace process is that Israel return essentially to the indefensible 1949 armistice lines. You cannot demand as the price for “security guarantees” the end of Israel’s core security guarantee, namely its strategic depth.
Setting aside the former Defense Secretary’s assault on logic, Gates repeats an old slander against the Jewish State, one that Goldberg is only too happy to echo, namely, that the U.S.-Israel relationship is a one-sided grab bag for Israel in which America receives “nothing in return.”
Shmuel Katz dealt with this false charge many times over. As he wrote in “Interdependence in U.S.-Israel Relations” (Global Affairs, 1988):
Somehow, Israel has been made to assume the image of a poor relation entirely dependent on American charity; a relationship that is supposed to justify frequent hectoring and threats…
Shmuel emphasized Israel’s contributions to the relationship. In his Jerusalem Post op-ed “The Big Lie On U.S. Aid” (March 20, 1992), Shmuel wrote of a 1983 study that analyzed Israel’s contributions.
Professor Stephen L. Spiegel of the University of California, who for many years has studied this issue and followed its development, calculated already in 1983 that on a conservative estimate, Israel’s contribution to US security was worth at least 2 percent of the US defense budget – that is, today, about $6b. He was quantifying specific items.
But how far could one quantify, for example, the value of the information on Soviet weapons systems transmitted by Israel to Washington? Estimates by American military personalities, prominently by Gen. George Keegan, former director of US Air Force Intelligence, and by Ariel Sharon, vary from $50b to $80b. Such analyses and transmissions by Israel forced the Soviets to change at least one weapons system.
Asked by this writer if he had updated his analysis, Professor Spiegel replied in an Oct, 2010 email: “I have not done anything like that since then. It would require an entirely new calculus today, so that the old study is totally out of date, and would not necessarily have any relationship to what would be necessary to do such an estimate today, a task which is by its very nature problematic and subject to different interpretations.”
But while Spiegel treats the subject like a hot potato, it seems safe to assume that, if anything, Israel’s contributions to U.S. defense have increased since 1983. As George Gilder notes in The Israel Test (Richard Vigilante Books, 2009), “Before July of 1985, Israel was a basket case with wage and price controls making everything scarce. … As recently as 1990, Israel was a relatively insignificant technology force outside of a few military and agricultural initiatives…”
Israel’s high-tech boom only revved up in the last 10 years. The country has since advanced to become a world technological power, with at least a segment of its private research, (as Gilder notes, private research is far more productive than public research) focused on military developments.
The Obama Administration admits that Israeli technology contributes to America’s defense. In July, 2010, Andrew J. Shapiro, Assistant Secretary for Political-Military Affairs, said in a speech at the Brookings Saban Center for Middle East Policy:
“Israeli-origin equipment deployed on Iraqi and Afghan battlefields are protecting American troops every day. This includes armor plating technology for U.S. military vehicles and unique medical solutions such as the “Israeli bandage”.… It also includes sensors, surveillance equipment, unmanned aerial vehicle technology, and detection devices to seek out IED’s. Many such partnerships and investments between our two governments and U.S. and Israeli defense firms have yielded important groundbreaking innovations that ultimately make us all safer.”
Such remarks by the administration’s own officials should make Israel’s job of countering the canard spread by Gates that much easier. That is, if it will speak up. Israel has remained silent in the past. This was of significant concern to Shmuel, who recognized the dangers a non-response posed to Israel’s collective psyche. In the Global Affairs article, he wrote:
What is no less serious is the spirit of dependence that prevails in a large part of the Israeli public. Even among those regarded as Israel’s “hard-nosed” or “hawkish” citizens there exists a sense of “what can we do? We know that it is wrong to agree to some demands of the United States, but we are, after all, dependent on them.”
Unfortunately, nothing has changed. When asked by Goldberg about Gates’s remarks regarding Netanyahu, U.S. Ambassador to Israel Michael Oren replied, “We have nothing but the highest regard for Secretary Gates, and as allies, we don’t exchange accusations, we have communications. Israel deeply appreciates the excellent security relationship we have with the Obama administration.”
This pablum may seem worldly wise, a diplomatic answer to avoid an unpleasant and unnecessary dust-up. The problem is that more is at stake than a few parting shots by an outgoing defense secretary. Robert Gates has injected new life into a slander that can easily be disproved, but instead is allowed to fester and grow. Oren’s answer may even be seen as corroborating Gates’s statement – Oren asserts Israel has nothing but “the highest regard” for a man who says the U.S. has received “nothing in return” from Israel.
This isn’t worldly wise. It is dumb. It’s an approach that is of a piece with the policy of the official Zionist leadership as it watched the British back away from its obligations under the Palestine Mandate and pretended everything was alright. As Vladimir Jabotinsky, Shmuel’s mentor and hero, pointed out in 1922: “The worst is that the [Zionist] Executive deems it its duty to profess that it is satisfied. This is stupid. Zionism is entirely based on confidence. If we say that the situation is bad, and we are honest, everybody will at once endeavor to overcome the misfortune. But if we are lying and trying to cover up…”
Oren should be forthright. He should say that if the matter is one of gratitude, or lack
thereof, the former secretary of defense missed his target. He should have focused his sights on the Palestinian Authority. It has received $550 million in U.S. aid in fiscal 2011 alone. This corrupt regime refuses to back down from pursuing a UN proclamation of statehood despite requests by the administration to cease. It joined Hamas – a designated terrorist group – in a unity government. It has done nothing to stop anti-Semitic incitement in its media and schools, nor has it stopped its own members from conducting terror attacks.
As the 10th anniversary of 9/11 just passed, it is worth noting that the Palestinian Arab reaction to the fall of the twin towers was to cheer and hand out treats. (That year, the Palestinian Authority received $85 million in US aid.) According to a May, 2011 Congressional Research Service report, “Since the establishment of limited Palestinian self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza Strip in the mid-1990s, the U.S. government has committed over $4 billion in bilateral assistance to the Palestinians, who are among the world’s largest per capita recipients of international foreign aid.”
And yet the Palestinian Authority snubs the U.S. at every turn. Where’s the gratitude? Why did Gates not point this out? These are the questions Oren should ask. He might also note the loss that would occur if the U.S. were to give up its Israel-origin equipment.
Here, Oren could send a list of the items in question to the major news outlets.
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