The Third Way: A Different View of the Middle East

My piece, co-authored with Chris Toensing, a response to the John Mearsheimer-Steven Walt paper, “The Israel Lobby” can be found at the Middle East Report web site, or you can purchase the magazine, which would be even better.

I found the article in the Forward this week by Stuart Eizenstat absolutely fascinating. Eizenstat had a great deal to say, and much of it bears listening to, because this article contains many important points and many debatable ones.

Eizenstat is a former American ambassador to the European Union, deputy secretary of the Treasury, under secretary of commerce for international trade, and under secretary of state for economic, business and agricultural affairs. He served as President Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser and as President Clinton’s special representative on Holocaust-era issues.

The overall theme of the article is a plea for rational thinking. Eizenstat discusses candidly the anti-Semitism around the globe, but he says this must be confronted in a thought-out way, not in a panic that we are living in 1938 all over again and that the next Holocaust is around the corner.

He’s right about that, of course. One thing caught my attention in this article early on and that was Eizenstat’s description of the Holocaust. “[Hitler’s] ‘Final Solution’ became official policy later, as a result of both his vehement antisemitism and the failure of the Allied powers to agree to take any additional Jewish refugees, a failure he took as a clear signal that the world’s democracies put a low priority on saving Jewish lives.” (more…)

Amid all the controversy American support for Israel has generated in recent months, between the Walt-Mearsheimer paper, Jimmy Carter’s book, et al, many have lost sight of the damage the Bush Administration’s policies are doing to Israel and to any hope of resolving the ongoing Middle East conflict.

I’ve mentioned previously in this space the interference of the US in Israeli-Syrian relations. The problem is continuing to grow, and is all the more obscene because there are realistic and attainable options, something that is not usually the case with American Middle East policy.

This article in Ha’aretz by Ze’ev Schiff offers both illustration of the problem and some obfuscations and omissions as well.

The visit by Defense Secretary Robert Gates to Israel was already significant for being another in a line of signals that an attack on Iran is not forthcoming. Israel’s message to him was equally noteworthy. (more…)