What The Post-Bush Era Will Bring For Israel

Itamar Rabinovich, Israel's ambassador to the United States from 1993-1996, writes about an open letter sent to President Bush on October 10, published in the November 8 issue of The New York Review of Books: Failure Risks Devastating Consequences on the importance of the upcoming conference at Annapolis.

The authors of the letter include Zbigniew Brzezinski, the national security advisor in the administration of former president Jimmy Carter; Lee Hamilton, the former chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee; Brent Scowcroft, the national security advisor of former president George H. Bush; and Thomas Pickering, the former U.S. ambassador to Israel.

You get the idea.

Rabinowich sees the the implications of the letter as stretching beyond this year--into the next presidential administration:

The importance of this letter must be sought in two other contexts. The first is the effort to shape the American agenda on "the day after" the presidential elections. This is not the only attempt. Think tanks and other organizations are preparing reports of their own, with all of them aspiring to repeat the extraordinary success of the 1976 Brookings report that was adopted by the Carter administration as its Middle East policy. The day after the elections will see an increase in the efforts to convince the new president, whoever he or she may be, that there is no better way to shake off Bush's legacy than by bringing about a far-reaching change in the Middle East policy of the United States.

Another context is the continuing erosion of Israel's standing in the United States. This does not manifest itself in public opinion polls and in votes in Congress, but rather in the loss of the "moral horizon," the change that has occurred in the standing of Israel, which used to be regarded as an attractive and just state. A clear expression of this is the recent reception of Jimmy Carter's book and of the book written by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt about the Israeli lobby, which not only expressed criticism of Israel's policy but also questioned its legitimacy. Despite the criticism to which they have been subjected, these books are making waves and their authors are appearing throughout the United States. The "letter of the eight" is another link in this chain. [emphasis added]

After all, it will probably be easier to change strategies in dealing with Israel than with Iraq. In Iraq, there has clearly been major improvement there--as attested to by the sudden relative silence of the media on the day to day action there. When it comes to Israel though, there is never a shortage of ideas, usually starting with how much Israel should be forced to give up.

Technorati Tag: Israel and President Bush.