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Monday, Nov 9, 2009
Make no mistake, recent polls show Americans still despise PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat, condemn the tactics of suicide bombers, and blame Palestinians for the current wave of violence. Yet they remain strangely open-minded about the Palestinian struggle and uncomfortable with Israel's West Bank invasion -- especially with Sharon's continued defiance of Bush after he called for Israel to withdraw its troops. News footage of the devastation of the Jenin refugee camp, broadcast widely on cable news stations Tuesday, may well shift public opinion even more.
It's already clear that an increasingly open debate is underway here about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It's a debate the conservative press has long tried to stifle. As Eric Alterman recently wrote at MSNBC.com, "For reasons of religion, politics, history and genuine conviction, the punditocracy debate of the Middle East in America is dominated by people who cannot imagine criticizing Israel."
You know who they are: William Safire of the New York Times; George Will, Charles Krauthammer and Michael Kelly at the Washington Post; Lally Weymouth of Newsweek; Martin Peretz of the New Republic; Daniel Pipes and Andrea Peyser at the New York Post; Peggy Noonan and Robert Bartley at the Wall Street Journal; William Kristol of the Weekly Standard; Mortimer Zuckerman at U.S. News and World Report; Morton Kondracke, Fred Barnes, Brit Hume and Tony Snow at Fox News; and William Bennett, a paid CNN contributor, just to name a few.
They still cannot imagine criticizing Israel. But others can. Conservatives could not have enjoyed watching pro-Israel advocate Daniel Pipes getting grilled recently by Fox News' self-styled blue-collar moderate Bill O'Reilly. In what until recently would have been considered an unthinkably aggressive stance regarding Israel, O'Reilly, who's made no secret of his suspicion of American Muslims post-Sept. 11, belittled Pipes' claim that the Israeli incursion into the West Bank was analogous to America's bombing of Afghanistan, took issue with his suggestion that 90 percent of Palestinians "want Israel destroyed," and pressed Pipes about what people were supposed to think when they saw Page 1 photographs of Israeli policemen clubbing peace activists in Tel Aviv. (Of course, Fox News also adopted Bush spokesman Ari Fleischer's suggestion that suicide bombers be called "homicide bombers," to make clear that they're killing others, not just themselves -- a case of pandering to the pro-Israel side that might counter O'Reilly's rare independence.)
Meanwhile, MSNBC's Chris Matthews, usually a fan of the mainstream's conventional wisdom, recently derided the claim that Arab leaders would privately welcome a U.S. action in Iraq, as "neo-con claptrap." Matthews has gotten increasingly fed up with uncritical defenders of Israel as well as proponents of an immediate Iraq invasion. Both O'Reilly and Matthews pride themselves on their scrappy, common-sense approach to politics, so their change of heart spells trouble for staunch defenders of Ariel Sharon.
Perhaps more worrisome for the Israeli media lobby is that, at least for the moment, it has lost some of its pull inside the White House. And worse, lost it to its least favorite Cabinet member, Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Just as the current crisis was unfolding, the Weekly Standard's Kristol, along with more than two dozen other conservatives, sent Bush an open letter advising him how to proceed. The letter suggested that the U.S. treat Arafat as a terrorist, that Bush give Israel unconditional support, and that he move ahead swiftly on his plans to topple Saddam Hussein.
To date, none of those recommendations have been embraced, which is why the Israeli punditocracy in America has been lashing out at the White House, washing its hands of Powell's trip and publicly ridiculing the administration. While there's some suspicion that Powell does not have full White House backing for his peace mission, the fact that he's there at all, meeting with Arafat, riles pro-Israel hawks in the press.
"Colin Powell's upcoming trip to the Middle East is bound to fail embarrassingly," read one recent Wall Street Journal Op-Ed column, by Reuel Marc Gerecht. "Powell's trip to the Middle East is shaping up to be a disaster," agreed Kristol at the Weekly Standard, even before Powell had set foot in Israel. "Bush is continuing the bankrupt policy of treating Arafat as a legitimate leader and seeker of peace," complained George Will in print.
Almost as bad for the neoconservatives was the fact that the Bush administration, led by Powell's State Department, altered its Middle East policy at least partly because of the chaotic unrest on the Arab street, as frustration over the Palestinian problem erupted into violence in capitols throughout the region.
That's anathema to neoconservatives who adopted the views of Princeton's Bernard Lewis and Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins, and spent months arguing that the Arab street was irrelevant ("a con" as Ajami put it) and ought to be ignored by the White House.
