HRC is Better for Israel than Gen. Jim Jones

November 30, 2008 by Jonathan Movroydis | Filed Under Israel and Palestinians, Obama administration | Leave a Comment 

The New Republic’s Eli Lake compares Gen. Jim Jones and Sen. Hillary Clinton on Mid-East policy. He first assesses expected National Security Adviser Jim Jones:

In August, Israel’s leading newspaper, Ha’aretz, reported that the draft report challenged Israel’s conception of its security interests in the West Bank as being overly broad, and that the IDF in particular was too dismissive of the Palestinian security services. The newspaper quoted one IDF officer as saying he expected the report would be “very harsh, and make Israel look very bad.” Steve Rosen, the former director of foreign policy for AIPAC who was dismissed from his post after the federal government charged him and a colleague with leaking classified information to the press and a foreign official, told me, “In my experience, when you take a ‘deep dive’ into security issues in the territories, you very quickly come to tradeoffs between Israeli security and Palestinian rights. Successful counter-terror preventive and pre-emptive measures require highly intrusive intelligence collection that is onerous for the population of the area under surveillance. … A third party tries to balance Israeli security and Palestinian rights with a different valence than an Israeli security agency.”

In his interview with Inside the Pentagon, Jones said that the Palestinians should be granted increasing degrees of local sovereignty over the West Bank until an independent state is born–with an emphasis on giving the Palestinians experience with governance. On Sunday, Ha’aretz reported that Jones favors dispatching a NATO force to keep the peace in the interim. That’s a plan that the Israeli government would likely fiercely resist on the grounds that the Jewish state’s defense doctrine has always spurned the presence of foreign troops on its territory and that it could be a reprise of the disasters of the U.N. mission to Lebanon.

Hillary Clinton sees it differently:

Now, consider his potential nemesis, Hillary Clinton. It is true that there is some doubt about where she ultimately lands on the Israel-Palestine question–confusion that followed her famous hug with Suha Arafat. But since becoming senator, she’s been a persistent critic of Palestinian media and schooling, an issue that has traditionally been swept under the rug by the State Department and a central argument the Israeli right has used to warn against the delusions of the Oslo process. Clinton has described the teaching of anti-Israel views in Palestinian textbooks as “child abuse,” and held hearings on the topic in an effort to get the Bush administration to do more on the issue.

By focusing on the underlying tenets of Palestinian culture, Senator Clinton has in a way made common cause with the Bush administration hawks. While General Jones wants to take steps now to empower Abbas and his Fatah party to take over a Palestinian state, Clinton is asking if even the Palestinian moderates are ready to govern. At AIPAC’s annual policy conference in 2005, she said: “How do we expect to have a democratically elected Palestinian government if their textbooks are still preaching such hatred, and this if we allow this dehumanizing rhetoric to go unchallenged? Because what is happening is young minds are being infected with this anti-Semitism, and that is going to run counter to what we hope can happen over the next years as we do work for peace and stability.”

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