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**DECEMBER 14, 2023**
On the Prospect website
Progressive Caucus Opposes Defense Bill Over Excess Spending, FISA
Extension
The caucus is recommending that members vote against the perennial
defense authorization bill, in part because it could extend warrantless
spying through this Congress. BY DAVID DAYEN
COP28 Punts on Emissions and Migration Challenges
Negotiations went off the rails and barely recovered, if that. BY
GABRIELLE GURLEY
Corporate Headhunters Shouldn't Control Who Can Be a Fed Reserve Bank
President
We need a democratic process for appointing leaders of regional Fed
banks. BY KENNY STANCIL & DYLAN GYAUCH-LEWIS
Meyerson on TAP
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**** Condition U.S. Aid to Israel on a Modicum
of Israeli Realism
If Israel keeps endangering itself by rejecting a two-state solution, no
level of U.S. aid will keep it safe.
For more than 30 years, the official policy of the American government
(with some deviation during the Trump presidency) has been to support
and promote a two-state solution to the problem of Israel-Palestine. The
Oslo Accords, which established a process by which a viable and
independent Palestinian state could be established alongside Israel, was
one of the genuine achievements of Bill Clinton's presidency. But for
a right-wing Israeli's assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak
Rabin, who championed the accords, they might have led to something like
a durable peace or at least a modus vivendi in that vexed land.
Neither the Israeli far right nor the Palestinian extremists ever
accepted Oslo; each favors a religiously homogenous regime that runs
from the river to the sea. The Israeli far right now dominates
Israel's government, and that government's leader, Bibi Netanyahu,
is now more explicit than he's ever been that no Palestinian state
will ever be established. Down in the polls-
**very**down in the polls-after having Hamas's October 7 murder raid
occur on his watch
**and**after refusing to accept any responsibility for having had that
happen, Bibi plainly hopes his extreme anti-Palestinian posture will at
least win him back the support of the Israeli right. As Israeli
columnist Nahum Barnea noted
in the centrist newspaper
**Yedioth Ahronoth**, "He failed as Mr. Security and he failed as Mr.
America. Maybe he'll succeed as Mr. Never Palestine."
Which raises a question for the Biden administration and the United
States more generally: Why should we support Israel so long as its
policy is fundamentally at odds with ours, and with our general support
for legitimate national aspirations? Why should we continue to give it
aid? Why should we continue to veto United Nations resolutions premised
on promoting two-state solutions?
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I don't regard such a shift in policy as anti-Israel; I regard it as a
necessary form of tough love. Plainly, Israel's policy of opposing a
Palestinian state has not worked, as numerous acts of terrorism, two
intifadas, and the October 7 raid have made all too bloodily clear.
There's no reason whatever to believe that it will work going forward.
To the contrary, were Israel to accept a viable Palestine on the West
Bank, it's clear that its leading Arab neighbors, most particularly
Saudi Arabia, would normalize relations with it, and the global "Kick
Me" sign that Israel has affixed to its butt could be removed. (Some
kicks would surely continue, due partly to the endurance of
antisemitism, but they'd be fewer in number.) Such an accord would
require Israel to relinquish a number of its West Bank settlements, but
the majority of Israelis (those who live within the nation's Green
Line accepted borders), having experienced the rule of the settler and
ultra-Orthodox extremists in Bibi's Cabinet, don't appear all that
keen on forfeiting their lives and livelihoods to the demands of those
zealots.
Despite Biden's continued (though, one hopes, for not much longer)
support for Israel's war in and on Gaza, a rapidly expanding rift has
emerged between the two nations on the postwar status of Palestinians.
The U.S. has called for extending the authority of the Palestinian
Authority to Gaza; Bibi's government flatly opposes any form of
Palestinian control there. Biden now vociferously supports efforts to
revive and actualize the two-state solution; Bibi vociferously opposes
it. Biden can very plausibly argue that his suggested course is the only
course that will guarantee a measure of Israeli security; all polling
suggests that a majority of American Jews would agree with him.
So why continue to support a nation that refuses to save itself?
Conditioning U.S. aid on Israel having the good sense to understand that
its own viability is linked to the viability of its neighbors would be
tough love at its finest.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
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