Gorenberg: GOP Candidates’ Israel Views Fall between “Incompetent and Delusional”

David Streeter — January 17, 2012 – 3:20 pm | Election 2012 | Foreign Policy | GOP Presidential Candidates 2012 | Israel | Republicans Comments (2) Add a comment

Israeli author Gershom Gorenberg wrote about what he described as the potentially negative consequences posed for Israel by the worldviews of most of the remaining Republican presidential candidates in his latest article for The American Prospect. Gorenberg wrote:

These candidates would love Israel to death. What’s scary is not just that any Republican from the class of ‘12 is likely to replace Barack Obama’s uneven support for Israeli-Palestinian peace with the George W. Bush-style malignant neglect. It’s not just that the Middle East as a whole is downstream from America: Our region gets swamped by the mistakes made in Washington. What’s really scary is that the way that Republicans-including Ron Paul-talk and act about Israel shows that their grasp of world affairs ranges between incompetent and delusional.

He wrote regarding former Pennsylvania Senator Rick Santorum (R-PA):

Let’s start with Santorum’s statement-video-recorded at an Iowa campaign event-that ‘all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis. They’re not Palestinians. There is no Palestinian.’ It’s worth watching how Santorum reaches this remarkable conclusion…. As a Washington Post fact-checker has noted, Santorum staked out a position more extreme than the official Israeli stance…. [T]he Israeli Foreign Ministry describes the rest of the West Bank as ‘disputed’ territory, not as part of Israel. The explicit reason that even hawkish Israeli politicians haven’t followed through on their desire to annex the West Bank is that they don’t want to offer citizenship to its Palestinian residents.

Gorenberg wrote regarding former House Speaker Newt Gingrich (R-GA):

Newt Gingrich, the supposed historical thinker of the Republican field, believes that the Palestinians are an “invented” people. He volunteered this insight when an interviewer asked him if he is a Zionist. Palestine was never a state, he noted; Palestinians ‘are in fact Arabs ... and they had a chance to go many places’ rather than oppose Zionism….  Keep it simple, says Mr. Gingrich: Either you’re Arab or Palestinian; claiming to be both is a con. At a stroke, the complex, nested identities of the Middle East vanish, making life so much easier for the would-be GOP statesman. In the same interview, Gingrich erases all distinctions between Hamas and the Fatah-run Palestinian Authority. Both ‘represent an enormous desire to destroy Israel.’ Now isn’t that simpler than trying to understand Palestinian politics? Professor Gingrich also alludes to a simple, ethnically clean solution to the conflict: Palestinians could ‘go many places’ in the Arab world. Gingrich describes himself as being ‘pretty close to Bibi Netanyahu’ politically. This may be libelous in how far to the right it places the Israeli prime minister.

Regarding former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney, he wrote:

Besides the long lineup of veterans of George W. Bush’s administration-the folks who brought you the war in Iraq, among other gifts-there’s also a name that appears both as “special adviser” to Romney and co-chair of his Middle East working group: Walid Phares.

In the best case, this shows that Romney didn’t try hard to vet his advisers. The Lebanese-born Phares has made a reputation since arriving in the United States as an anti-terror expert. But as Mother Jones journalist Adam Serwer revealed in a damning exposé, Phares had an earlier career as a top ideologue of the Lebanese Forces, the Christian militia whose part in Lebanon’s civil war included carrying out the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre…. Let’s say that Romney knew nothing of Phares’s past. In American policy discussion, Phares has been one of the salesmen of a conflict of civilizations, of the West against monochromatic Islam. This is close to the ultimate oversimplification of global policy and of Middle East policy in particular. Phares is still named on Romney’s website in the list of advisers-the likely source of appointees if the candidate becomes president.

Lastly, Gorenberg wrote regarding anti-Israel Representative Ron Paul (R-TX):

[T]hen there’s Ron Paul, the man who would eliminate U.S. aid to Israel along with all other foreign aid. Paul’s isolationism is of one piece with his Ayn Randian economics: He’s a man who’d refuse to pay to put out the fire in a neighbor’s house, even if his home and the neighbor’s were built of wood and high winds were blowing. The other guy should have bought fire extinguishers, Paul would say. He offers the ultimate hyper-simplicity: The rest of the world doesn’t even exist.

Presumably due to his low poll numbers, Gorenberg did not write on Texas Governor Rick Perry, who took politicizing the U.S.-Israel relationship to a new low in September when he wrongfully attacked President Barack Obama on the eve of his passionate defense of Israel in front of the United Nations. Perry continues to call for all American foreign aid to “start at zero”—which flies against existing agreements between the United States and Israel—and made a wild statement regarding Turkey—an important U.S. ally and NATO member—during last night’s debate. According to the AP, Turkey responded by “saying Perry’s comments were ‘baseless and inappropriate’ and that the U.S. has no time to waste with candidates ‘who do not even know their allies.’”

Click here to read Gorenberg’s full article. 

 

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