When Olmert goes to Washington

by Caroline Glick
May. 4, 2006 

One of the great advantages of the digitalization of communications 
is that today, everyone who has a computer has access to information 
about events occurring all over the globe. A person sitting in their 
home in say, Jerusalem, can read everything from the Washington 
Post to the Bellingham Herald from Bellingham, Washington. 
Sitting anywhere in the world that has an Internet hook-up, a person 
today can be clued into events taking place from Paris to Timbuktu. 

There can be no doubt that this accessibility has democratized 
communications. Private citizens have gained independence from 
the editorial preferences of the editors of their local newspapers. 
But the vastly expanded availability of information has caused a 
new problem. An individual who follows a public debate in a foreign 
country may think that he understands what is happening there by 
reading that country's local papers or popular Web sites every day. 
And yet, because he is thousands of miles away, he may well 
misunderstand the significance of what he is reading. Almost like a 
child's game of "Telephone," the information he accesses from his 
computer may be misleading because it is written for the locals, 
who in addition to reading their newspapers, also breathe the same 
air as their local reporters.

An example would be an Israeli who, sitting in his apartment in 
Tiberias, kept abreast of events in the US by reading The New York 
Times on-line. From such a reading, that Israeli could conclude that 
the US was losing the war against the jihadists in Iraq and was on 
the verge of retreating. He might also be under the impression that 
President George W. Bush was about to be impeached by Congress 
for having "lied" about the threat that Saddam Hussein constituted 
to the US in March 2003. Finally, such a reader might have the 
impression that the US economy was sliding into a recession 
because of the sharp rise in gasoline prices. 

If that person were not a private individual, but say, the government 
of Britain, the assessment that the US was about to bail out of Iraq 
and impeach Bush would necessarily lead to certain conclusions 
about how Britain ought to be thinking about its foreign policy. 

The problem, of course, is that a reading of The New York Times 
does not provide an individual or government with a clear 
understanding of what is happening in the US or of the significance 
of various debates now raging in the media. For a person to 
understand what he is reading in the Times, he needs to be able to 
understand the cultural context in which the articles are being 
published. Without a cultural awareness of the US, he will be 
incapable of assessing the value of the information he now accesses 
on the Internet. 

The same, of course, is true of Israel. Israel's political debate is 
consistently hyperbolic. Israelis who listen to statements by their 
leaders know that they have to discount much of what they hear as 
exaggerated showmanship. For instance, from 1982 up until 
Ariel Sharon became prime minister in 2001, the Israeli Left 
routinely called him a warmonger, a right-wing extremist and a 
murderer. But no one really thought that any of this was true. 
Israelis understood this to be par for the course for the Israeli 
political debate. 

Yet, for foreigners watching events in Israel and listening to this 
internal dialogue, it couldn't have come as more of a shock when, 
as prime minister, Sharon suddenly began calling for Israeli 
withdrawals from Judea, Samaria and Gaza and carried out the 
withdrawal and expulsion plan from Gaza and northern Samaria 
last summer. After all, for years they had been reading of Israelis 
calling Sharon a clone of Genghis Khan. So here, as with the 
foreigner watching America, the familiarity afforded by access to 
local debates can lead to greater misunderstandings. 

Because of this, it is important for all countries, when assessing 
what others are doing, to think first and foremost about how various 
moves can impact their interests. The domestic policy debates 
carried out in foreign countries should not form the basis of their 
decision-making. 

It is important to note our propensity to misunderstand other 
peoples' national debates today because in three weeks, Prime 
Minister Ehud Olmert will arrive in Washington, DC to present his 
plan to withdraw Israeli civilians and military forces from much of 
Judea and Samaria with the hopes of securing American support 
and funding for his plan. 

Olmert's planned withdrawal presents a dilemma for Washington. 
On the one hand, the US traditionally has supported Israeli 
withdrawals from territories that Israel took over in the Six Day War, 
and Olmert's plan aligns with this customary preference. On the 
other hand, the US is now fighting a war against the global jihad 
and one of its primary goals is to prevent the establishment of 
new bases for jihadist forces. Israel's withdrawal from Gaza this 
past summer fomented Hamas's rise to power in the Palestinian 
Authority and enabled the transformation of Gaza into a base for 
al-Qaida, Hizbullah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. 
An Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria will exacerbate the 
current situation exponentially. 

Were the Americans to base their policies on what they hear in 
the Israeli media, they might conclude that Israel will be destroyed 
if it doesn't vacate Judea and Samaria tomorrow. What they would 
miss is that the debate in Israel about retaining control over 
Judea and Samaria or relinquishing control of the areas to Hamas 
has nothing to do with Hamas, Hizbullah, al-Qaida, or any other 
consideration that might be called strategic. 

What is hard to understand from reading Israel's media is that the 
country is in the midst of a culture war. Leftist secular messianists, 
who have replaced their peace god which Yasser Arafat destroyed 
six years ago with a withdrawal god, are pushing for the Judea and 
Samaria withdrawal as part of their offensive against religious 
Zionism which is headquartered in the Israeli settlements of Judea 
and Samaria that Olmert's plan will destroy. 

Similarly hidden from the view of an outside observer of Israel's 
political scene is the fact that religious Zionists are responding to 
these attacks by pouting and threatening to take their anger out on 
the IDF. They threaten not to serve in the army or volunteer for 
officer training just to show the messianic leftists that they are 
nobody's fools. They can endanger the country just as well as the 
Left can. 

Israel has had next to no debate either on the strategic consequences 
of the Gaza withdrawal or on the likely security consequences of 
a withdrawal from Judea and Samaria. Such a debate would note 
that the Gaza withdrawal was a failure on every level. It would also 
raise the likelihood that an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and 
Samaria will cause an inflow of terrorists and missiles that will 
place all of Israel's major cities as well as its major highways, 
seaports and Ben-Gurion Airport within missile range from 
Hizbullah forces in Lebanon and Palestinian forces in Gaza, 
Judea and Samaria. 

Aside from that, such a debate would no doubt draw attention to 
the fact that a jihadist takeover of Judea and Samaria would 
cause an immediate danger to the Hashemite regime in Jordan. 
To date, Israeli military control of Judea and Samaria has made it 
difficult for Palestinian jihadists to threaten Jordan. But if Israel 
retreats, there will be no one stopping them from joining forces 
with their counterparts on the east bank of the Jordan River. 

And so, an Israeli withdrawal from Judea and Samaria would cause 
the destabilization of America's two most stable and reliable allies 
in the Middle East. Fuel and other vital materiel for US forces in 
Iraq would no longer be able to be safely transported overland from 
Israeli ports through Jordan into Iraq due to the instability of both 
Israel and Jordan. This would increase American dependence on 
ports in the Persian Gulf. This increased American dependence 
would embolden Iran to cause the US Navy repeated headaches 
in the Straits of Hormuz. Judea and Samaria would be used as 
a terror training base for jihadists who would go on to fight not only 
Israel, but US forces in Iraq. 

Aside from that, just as Israel's retreat from Gaza convinced the 
Palestinians that terror pays and so brought Hamas to power, 
an Israeli retreat from Judea and Samaria leading to the 
destabilization of both Israel and Jordan will be perceived by the 
Arab and Islamic worlds as a strategic victory for the forces of jihad. 
From Paris to Haifa to Islamabad to Baghdad, to Dearborn, 
thousands will answer the call to jihad. 

By the same token, with the momentum on the side of the jihadists, 
the US and its allies will experience unprecedented difficulty in 
attempting to convince Arab and Muslim governments, opinion 
makers, intellectuals and activists to support them. Political and 
cultural leaders who today support the US's strategic goal of bringing 
democracy and liberalism to the Arabs and Muslims worldwide will 
be cowed into silence. After all, whether the US likes it or not, 
the Arab and Muslim worlds perceive Israel as an American client 
state and as a result, an Israeli retreat is seen as an American 
retreat. If Israel is weakened, America is weakened. 

Ilmert has put a price tag of $10 billion on his withdrawal plan. 
Many Israeli economists have claimed that this is a gross 
underestimate of the actual cost of the massive withdrawals he has 
planned and the dislocation of between 50,000-100,000 Israeli 
civilians. Nonetheless, Israel's new prime minister is hoping that 
the Congress will agree to have US taxpayers cover the bill. 
Olmert is also hoping that the Bush administration will recognize 
the lines of his proposed retreat as Israel's political borders. 

America has not hesitated to force Israel to change course in 
everything from building settlements, to not responding to 
unprovoked missile attacks during the 1991 Gulf War, to cancelling 
weapons sales to places like China when the US believed that 
its national security interests were harmed by Israel's action. 
Generally, Israel's leaders have abided by American requests. 
Sometimes, when they felt that Israel's national well-being or 
their political fortunes were at stake, they did not. 

While listening to the Israeli media's coverage of Israel's political 
debate could lead a foreigner to believe that retreating from Judea 
and Samaria is necessary for Israel's future, in fact what they are 
hearing is one side of a domestic culture war. And Israel's culture 
wars should be of little interest to foreign governments trying to 
assess their own interests, just as what The Nation or Mother Jones 
thinks about al-Qaida should have no bearing on how foreign 
governments perceive the threat that the global jihad constitutes for 
their nations. 

Olmert's withdrawal plan will be devastating for Israel's national 
security. But that's Israel's problem to deal with. We elected this 
government and we will pay the price. 

The US has no reason to support this plan that harms its most 
important interests in the region, and in the war against the global 
jihad. When Olmert comes to Washington, the first question his 
hosts should ask him is how can he expect them to support a plan 
that advances the cause of global jihad?