Look eastward, Tony

Editorial

The Democratic party's recent takeover of the United States Congress has caused havoc among headline writers. Everything has changed, according to media reports. President George W. Bush will not be able to complete the more radical elements of his agenda and progressive Americans finally have a ray of hope for realizing some long-deferred goals.

American foreign policy vis-a-vis the Iraq war seems certain to alter with the change in congressional leadership. Though the president is the commander-in-chief, the election on Nov. 7 was as clear a signal as there can be that the American people do not support the current course of the war. Who could? Whatever legitimacy or lack thereof there may have been to enter this conflict, the execution of the war has been a disaster. If there were easy answers, some politician would have come up with them.

On the positive side, one thing that will remain unaffected, largely, is American foreign policy toward Israel. In the United States, support for Israel is a generally bipartisan policy, not a Republican phenomenon guided by neo-con ideology. It is a national policy guided by the need to support a democratic, pluralist nation struggling against a genocidal, totalitarian, theocratic enemy.

From a Canadian standpoint, the Conservative government's principled stand with Israel has been easily lampooned as mimicking the Bush agenda. This facile dismissal of pro-Israel policy will become more difficult when American policy toward Israel is articulated from the centre-left by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, as well as from the White House. Perhaps Canadian political parties will even take a cue from their ideological siblings in the Democratic party and soften their anti-Israel (or in the case of the Liberal party, dithering) policies.

Meanwhile, change is emerging from Bush's largest ally, the United Kingdom, with Prime Minister Tony Blair now calling for the world to turn its attentions from Iraq to Israel-Palestine. This cannot be good news, if only because failure in one region in the Middle East is being used as an excuse to divert attention elsewhere. Worse, to suggest that Israel-Palestine is the lynchpin to larger Mideast peace is to obfuscate reality. The Israel-Palestine conflict is not a legitimate fight over borders and miscellany like security fences or settlements. This is an anti-Jewish jihad that will be resolved to the satisfaction of most of the Arab world only when Israel ceases to exist. By attempting to divert attention away from the real issues, Blair legitimizes this jihad and invites further catastrophe.

If attention needs to be diverted from the Blair-Bush foreign policy disaster, there is a legitimate diversion to the east. We hardly need to legitimize and encourage the anti-Zionist orgy as a decoy when Iran, whose only significant foreign policy plank is the obliteration of Jews, is weeks away from nuclear capability. Blair, who once might have imagined himself a modern-day Churchill, seems destined by his own design to become a modern-day Neville Chamberlain. Seeking to pacify unpacifiable enemies of not only Israel but pluralism, democracy and nonviolence, Blair plays with a fire he cannot hope to contain.

Of all people to point this out, Binyamin Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister, spoke at the General Assembly of the United Jewish Communities, in Los Angeles Nov. 13.

"It's 1938, and Iran is Germany, and it's racing to arm itself with nuclear weapons," Netanyahu declared. "Same tendencies: to slander and vilify its victim in preparation for slaughter. Ahmedinejad takes his cue from Hitler, and no one cares. Every week he talks about erasing Israel from the map, and no one says anything."

It is not fair to attribute to Blair silence over Iran's nuclear threat. He has spoken up about this. But to suggest, as he does, that the key to resolving larger Middle East issues is Israel-Palestine is to cede ground to those whose primary objection to Israel is its Jewish nature. How soon even the world's leaders forget that Israel has placed on the table more than fair offers to resolve every reasonable issue articulated by its enemies. The result was six years of intifada. Long-term resolution of the Middle East conflict is, sadly, a far way off and depends much less on anything Israel does than on a major shift of Arab, Muslim and world opinion to simply accept the Jewish reality in a tiny sliver of the Middle East. With Iran preparing to nuke the Jewish state, any world leader who suggests the problem lies with Israel deserves to be condemned.

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