On Monday, the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, joined the foreign ministers of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Egypt, and Morocco for a meeting at Sde Boker, the retirement kibbutz and burial place of David Ben-Gurion, the nations first Prime Minister. The meeting had been initiated by the Israeli Foreign Minister, Yair Lapid, with encouragement from Blinken, whose main aim was to reassure the group that the United States is fixed in its commitment to deny Iran a nuclear weapon, and that the not-yet-consummated Iran nuclear deal is the best of available options to do that. The summit was to showcase a strategic alliance growing out of the Abraham Accords, the Israeli journalist Henrique Cymerman told me. To seed the formation of a kind of Middle Eastern NATO to contain Irandeal or no deal.
Israel and its Arab guests registered a certain discontent. No deal currently being negotiated contemplates constraints on the Iranian missile and drone programs. The leaders of the Gulf states have been increasingly chagrined by the lack of a U.S. response to the various attacks that Irans Houthi proxies in Yemen have made on the U.A.E. and Saudi Arabia during the past few monthsincluding, most recently, a strike on a Saudi Aramco facility, on March 25th. Indeed, Saudi Arabia and Jordan were not represented in person at the summit, although their interests were. (The Saudis were the real enablers of the meeting, Cymerman said.) According to Axios, Blinken asked Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, at a pre-summit meeting on Sunday, what alternative Israel proposed to a new dealother than a U.S.-led, premptive strike, which Israel continues to prepare for but, particularly given the situation in Ukraine, the Biden Administration would not want to entertain. Bennett reportedly said that he believed Iran might be deterred from enriching uranium to weapons grade if it knew that the U.S. and European countries would intensify sanctions to the extreme levels they have placed on Russia. Since Israel has not joined in those sanctions, one can only wonder how Blinken received the suggestion.
In any event, Bennett had already stated that Israel did not see itself as a party to the Iran deal. Earlier in March, moreover, as if to prove some independence from Washington, the U.A.E. hosted a state visit by Syrias Bashar al-Assadwho remains in power thanks to brutality abetted by Iran and Russia. The chief U.S. negotiator on the Iran deal, Robert Malley, perhaps signalled acknowledgement of Israels developing partnership with the Gulf states when he announced in Doha, on Sunday, that Washington would not yet remove Irans Revolutionary Guards from the terrorism-sanctions list, and noted that the signing of the deal was not just around the corner.
Two other matters cast shadows on Blinkens trip: Israels occupation of Palestine, especially the continuing expansion of the settlements, and its quasi-neutrality on Ukraine, both of which are a source of tension between Jerusalem and Washington. They may seem unrelated, but each has rendered Israel a sort of outsider among democratic states at a decisive moment. And Blinken chose to finesse both. Bennett has made much of his attempts to mediate between Moscow and Kyiv, but, in addition to remaining aloof from sanctions against Russia, Israel refuses to supply Ukraine with war matrielin order to preserve, Lapid had said, Russian tolerance for its interdictions of Iranian-backed forces in Syria. Blinken, at a press conference with Bennett, tactfully praised Israel for the solidarity that it has shown with regards to Ukraine: joining the United Nations vote to condemn Vladimir Putins invasion; implementing new rules to prevent oligarchs from parking yachts and planesand fortunesin Israel (though Jewish oligarchs who are Israeli citizens, and have Israeli registered property, may well be able to elide them); setting up a field hospital in western Ukraine; and, last and apparently least, Bennetts mediation efforts.
The question of Palestine was largely sidelined at the Sde Boker summit, though few doubt that the Saudis and Jordanians made a show of boycotting it largely to avoid providing scenes of senior Arab and Israeli diplomats hobnobbing for the worlds press, while Israeli occupation forces defended the at times violent settler zealotswhich might have incited further violence in the West Bank and Amman, as Ramadan begins. Alas, that show seems to have been of little value. Eleven Israelis have been killed in three separate terror attacks during the past week. On Friday, a Palestinian man was shot and killed by soldiers in Hebron.
Blinken, apparently sensitive to this gap in the agenda, spent the afternoon before the summit with Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, who called the gathering a harsh attack on the Palestinian people, and decried a U.S. double standard: acting against Russias claims on the Ukraine, while tolerating Israels occupation of Palestinian territories. Jordans King Abdullah II visited Abbas in Ramallah, on Monday, as the summit was taking place. Benny Gantz, the moderate Israeli Defense Minister, wanted to join that meeting, but Bennett, the annexationist Prime Minister, nixed the idea. Blinken, for his part, simply restated his endorsement of a two-state solution, while acknowledging that is not imminent. In the triangular crisis of Ukraine, Iran, and Palestine, the last issue seems the most deferrable at present.
Or is it? The occupation exacerbates Israels hostility with Iran, and the desire to operate against Iran in Syria shapes its diplomacy with Russia. Leaders make strategic, not just transactional, decisions. Deliberately or by default, they define what a country stands for and set its course for a generation. And the leader who made this responsibility most vivid for the Israelis in recent days was not Blinken, or Bennett, but Ukraines President, Volodymyr Zelensky, who addressed the members of the Knesset, Israels parliament, in an impassioned speech delivered remotely on March 20th. Indifference kills. Calculation is often erroneous. And mediation can be between states, not between good and evil, he said. I am sure that every word of my address echoes with pain in your hearts. But he wanted to know why Israeli military help had not been forthcoming. What is it? Indifference? Political calculation? Mediation without choosing sides? Putins aggression, Zelensky said, had made the choice this stark. There is an urgency for democratic solidarity, he suggested, to valorizing a global order in which military power does not determine a neighbors fate.
He might have added that Ben-Gurion himself, in his Biltmore Declaration of 1942, envisioned a Jewish Commonwealth integrated in the structure of the new democratic world. But Zelensky, a Jew, couched his appeal in a way that he clearly thought would resonate with the leaders of a Jewish state. The Nazi Party raided Europe and wanted to destroy everything. Destroy everyone, he told them. Wanted to conquer the nations. And leave nothing from us, nothing from you. Then he said, They called it the final solution to the Jewish issue. You remember that. And Im sure you will never forget! But listen to what is sounding now in Moscow. Hear how these words are said again: final solution. But already in relation, so to speak, to us, to the Ukrainian issue.
Members of Bennetts inner circle responded furiously to the comparison. The Communications Minister, Yoaz Hendel, tweeted that the Nazis genocide of Jews was also carried out on Ukrainian land, implying Ukrainian sympathy for it, and said that the comparison to the horrors of the Holocaust and the Final Solution is outrageous. The Interior Minister, Ayelet Shaked, went further, telling a conference sponsored by the newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth that, while some Ukrainians had behaved decently during the Second World War, Ukraine, as a whole, colluded with the Nazismay their name be cursedin the slaughter of the Jewish people. Bennett echoed Hendel and Shaked, albeit in a more compassionate tone. I cant imagine being in his shoes, Bennett said, of Zelensky, but added that the Holocaust should not be compared with anything, and that Zelenskys rhetoric was misplaced.
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Israel and the Triangular Crisis of Ukraine, Iran, and Palestine - The New Yorker