Carter's Long Shadow

In the last couple of days, the US has "expressed displeasure" over Israel's intention to build 600 homes in Ma'aleh Adumim, a suburb of Jerusalem, and connect it to the city itself. As Caroline Glick writes, this is very strange given the location and prior negotiations involving Ma'aleh Adumim.

Even when Ehud Barak moved from negotiating with Yasser Arafat at Camp David to begging Arafat to sign a deal, any deal at Taba, he still maintained that Ma'aleh Adumim, located ten minutes outside of Jerusalem, would remain part of Israel. Even when Bill Clinton announced his "final offer" to Arafat in December 2000 that included transferring the Temple Mount to PLO sovereignty, Ma'aleh Adumim remained part of Israel.

But suddenly this week we have the Bush administration, less than three months before the presidential elections, demanding that Israel not build in Ma'aleh Adumim. We have State Department officials and spokesmen skewering Israel for announcing plans to build 600 more housing units in the city with more than 30,000 residents.

In the rhetoric about the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the "peace process" we have heard many times from all quarters that Israel should do nothing to prejudice the eventual outcome; that the final status can only be resolved by direct negotiations. Yet by protesting Israel's building in "settlements", or by stating that the separation fence must follow the 1949 armistice lines, the international community is doing exactly that - prejudging what the outcome should be. The main problem lies in Europe's (and to large extent the US's) acceptance of the Arab propaganda campaign that has turned the status of the West Bank from the legally defined "disputed territories", to the propagandistically defined "occupied territories".

Additionally, Glick points out a key problem in the US acceptance of the Arab argument that all settlements must be removed.

The Bush administration's policy toward the Palestinian war with Israel is that the Palestinians must reform to the point where they become an anti-terrorist democratic society. Once that happens, the US will support the establishment of a democratic Palestinian state that will exist west of the Jordan River and live at peace with Israel.

In the unlikely event that such a transformation of Palestinian society were to occur within the next generation, it is impossible to understand why an additional six hundred Israeli families living in the city of Ma'aleh Adumim will be a problem to anyone. If the Palestinians are democratic and anti-terrorist and therefore willing to live at peace with Israel, then they would surely be able to accept that Ma'aleh Adumim is one of the places beyond the 1949 cease-fire lines that will remain part of Israel forever. And if they cannot accept that position but rather insist that Ma'aleh Adumim belongs under Palestinian sovereignty, then surely a democratic, anti-terrorist Palestinian state won't have a problem with the ten percent of Palestine which is Jewish just as Israel doesn't have a problem with the Israeli Arabs who make up twenty percent of the Israeli population.

Indeed, it would be downright racist for the US to acquiesce to a demand that the peaceful, democratic, anti-terrorist State of Palestine west of the Jordan River become yet another Judenrein Arab state like Saudi Arabia. And if the Bush administration does foresee that the nascent Palestinian state will in fact be Judenrein then they are behaving immorally. Basing a foreign policy on inherently racialist assumptions is antithetical to everything the US stands for. And a policy which assumes that Jews must be barred from living freely in a Palestinian state is racist to the core.

That really is the core of the problems in the Western perception of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The acceptance of the argument that the Arabs will never be civilized is racist in itself, and it is this policy of acceptance of Arab tyranny that has brought us to having to fight the Islamicist threat throughout the world.

While the Bush administration has sensibly discarded this view as so much nonsense, particularly in the post-September 11 world, for some reason, the Bush administration still clings to Carter's view of Israel.

In the months before the US presidential election, it behooves those who desire an American victory against the global jihad to demand that the Bush administration finally discard the Carter doctrine once and for all. Regardless of how inconvenient it may be for appeasement minded State Department officials to accept, the fact of the matter is that Israel and the US are fighting the same war against the same enemies.

In refusing to integrate this reality into its overall foreign policy, the Bush administration is acting as a Kerry administration most certainly would. It is strengthening America's enemies and weakening the cause of freedom throughout the world.