Political Spinner

No amount of spin, cosmetic surgery or delusion can hide the growing gap between what Israel wants, what the United States wants, and the potentially destructive outcome of this divergence.

The United States is going through a conflict resolution phase. National energies, along with the agendas of policy making and executive instruments of state, are focusing on trying to find other-than-military solutions to a host of problems around the world. President Obama is opting for leveraging of “soft power” as opposed to “hard power”. The general orientation is in the direction of conciliation rather than escalation, dialogue in preference of belligerency. Hope is in the air.

Israel , on the other hand is locked into a combined cycle of self denial and fear. The entire country is experiencing an ever-deepening anxiety attack about Iran ’s future nuclear capabilities – an anxiety attack that leads inevitably towards an armed conflagration, the results of which are difficult to overestimate. A friend of mine, a politically centralist professor at an Israeli university told me recently: “ Israel is going from Masada through the Holocaust to another Masada .” Since Masada is the ultimate metaphor for national suicide (literal, not figurative), the reference is more than chilling.

Nothing, but nothing at all figures on the Israeli horizon except a determination to do everything in its power arrest Iran ’s march toward nuclear capability. There is no serious dialogue about the alleged threat and none about potential ways to deal with it. No dissenting squeak is allowed to mar the iron-clad consensus. The country is marching toward a military conflict with Iran with a lemming-like determination. Despair is in the air.

This uni-dimensional focus allows Israel to conveniently ignore the closing of the window of opportunity for the “two state solution”. Israeli leaders, and worse than that, Israeli public, have decoupled completely the conflict with Iran from the overall conflict in the Middle East . Of course, no viable alternative to “two states solution” is proffered for discussion in the public sphere in Israel ; amazingly enough, none is demanded/asked for.

Since Iran is using the Middle East conflict as both fuel and camouflage to its larger hegemonic designs (which are not necessarily a threat to Israel), relieving the pressure generated by this conflict will remove much of the energy that feeds the Iranian strategy machine in the region.

The combination of a military conflict with Iran, coupled with continued Israeli occupation of millions of Palestinians, expansion of settlements, increased messianic propensities in the Israeli military and at the highest government echelons, juxtaposed with a super-severe economic crisis (Israel’s exports declined recently by 40% compared to similar period last year), point to a future of incredible agony and loss for the county, the region and the entire world.

Israeli policy makers are building on a “common past” when they assume that America will accompany Israel on its death-wish march. Hopefully, America ’s sights are aimed elsewhere, into a future that includes more talking and less killing. This is where Israeli and American paths diverge; the two countries progressively share less of a common future. America should make this divergence clear to Israel ; it may be the only thing that will cause Israelis to pause and think about what they are doing to themselves and to the world.