India, the Most Pro-Israel Country

India, the Most Pro-Israel Country
by Daniel Pipes
April 3, 2009

A study undertaken on behalf of Israel’s foreign ministry by an international market research company found that India is the most pro-Israel country in the world, beating out the United States by two percentage points.

The study, undertaken as part of the “Branding Israel” project, looked at what it calls the world’s 13 most important countries and included 5,215 interviewees. Asked a series of questions, participants graded their sympathy for Israel on a 1-to-10 scale. Some results, given in terms of percentage expressing sympathy to the Jewish State:

58% India
56% United States
52% Russia
52% Mexico
50% China
34% Great Britain
27% France
23% Spain

Comment: The Indian statistic is not the only striking one – note the continent of the countries clustered at the bottom and how much lower their numbers than those of Russia and China. Just as the U.S government should rethink its military alliances, so might Israelis take a fresh look at the globe. (April 3, 2009)

The dilemma of the “good” Muslim – Deepak Chopra

“If hundreds of millions of Muslims oppose Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, where are the street demonstrations, outraged lawmakers and judges? When the funds of the ruling class in every Arab country are diverted, either openly or barely in secret, to support extremists, jihadis, and “freedom fighters” who are actually terrorists, the hope for making an alliance with “good” Muslims quickly turns sour. “

The dilemma of the “good” Muslim
Deepak Chopra

Monday, April 13, 2009

Even before his inauguration, President Obama signaled a change of attitude toward Islam. He renounced the term “war on terror” and has never even flirted with another right-wing favorite, “clash of civilizations.” Since taking office he has addressed the Islamic world with respect — a key concept in that culture — and recently declared in Israel that the United States is not at war with Islam and never will be.

This shift in attitude seems like exactly the right one. But it has infuriated some people, not all of them on the right. The attacks on 9/11 were used by the Bush administration to deliberately inflame opinion against the Muslim world. All of us have been overwhelmed with negative images that reinforce prejudice and hatred. How does one ease images of riots in the Arab street, American flags set on fire, women being stoned for adultery, suicide bombings, berserk clerics, and the whole incendiary image of “them,” an alien enemy that stands for everything barbaric and backward?

The key to change lies in ourselves, naturally, since we know rationally that the extremists and jihadis form a tiny minority among the billion Muslims across the globe. But to reach a state of accord, we also need an image of good Muslims to offset the bad.

Who is the good Muslim?

At this moment, the image is clouded. One can’t help but think back to Germany and the rise of Hitler. Hitler made quite clear his intentions, used violence from the first moment, and called upon the general anti-Semitism prevalent at every reach of European society. There was no room for “good” Germans to claim they were quiescent, unknowing, or not in agreement. By the same logic, “good” Southerners didn’t know that blacks were being mistreated.

Likewise, good Muslims have no defense for tolerating anti-Semitism and the oppression of women. One of the most powerful points Obama made on his recent European tour was that ordinary French and Germans entertain a casual anti-Americanism that is nonetheless insidious. I imagine that’s how many Arabs feel about Israel. They wouldn’t lift a hand to attack Israel, and they realize full well that Israel has a right to exist. Yet by casually allowing their neighbors, relatives, students, and countrymen to foment virulent anti-Israeli sentiments, the damage is done. It is all the more insidious for being casual.

So for us to believe in good Muslims, we need more. We — and here I mean the entire world — need the vast majority of Muslims to wake up and then to stand up. Fear is the greatest ally of terrorism, but denial comes in a close second. The rise of al-Jazeera and al-Arabia brought uncensored news and opinion to the Arab world for the first time. Free speech without fear of reprisal was a huge step forward. Yet all too easily “free” went the way of “good,” as these media outlets fell into lockstep by portraying Israeli violence out of balance with the threat of terrorism, by casually exploiting the U.S. as invaders and crusaders, and by not speaking out sufficiently against ruthless oligarchs and military regimes.

I do not monitor these outlets every day. Like everyone else, I depend on professional analysis of the situation, and therefore specifics get turned into generalities. But it seems to be agreed that the Muslim press and news media are slanted to tell their viewers and readers what they want to hear (the same thing happens in the West, too). The point is that little public incentive is offered for good Muslims to find their power of protest. If hundreds of millions of Muslims oppose Al-Qaeda and the Taliban, where are the street demonstrations, outraged lawmakers and judges? When the funds of the ruling class in every Arab country are diverted, either openly or barely in secret, to support extremists, jihadis, and “freedom fighters” who are actually terrorists, the hope for making an alliance with “good” Muslims quickly turns sour.

These are painful truths, but they need to be told. Otherwise, the festering mistrust and hatred of Islam will never change. The left will look the other way while the right keeps throwing fuel on the fire. The plight of good Germans became tragic, and they emerged from the conflagration ashamed, guilty, and impotent. It would be doubly tragic to see that happen in the Islamic world.

Deepak Chopra is the author of over 50 books on health, success, relationships and spirituality, including his most recent novel, “Jesus: A Story of Enlightenment,” available now at http://www.deepakchopra.com

India most sympathetic towards Israel, says study

India most sympathetic towards Israel, says study
PTI,  Saturday, April 4, 2009

Jerusalem: Amid burgeoning defence and trade ties, sympathy for Israel has also seen an unprecedented growth in India, where the Jewish state enjoys the highest level of support, pushing the United States to the second position, according to a study.

The study commissioned by Israel’s foreign ministry and conducted by an international market research company has shown that 58 per cent of Indians are sympathetic towards Israel, compared to 56 per cent in the US, daily Yediot Ahronoth reported.

The study was undertaken as part of the “Branding Israel” project and aimed at looking into Israel’s international stature at what researchers characterised as the world’s 13 most important countries, including the US, Canada, Britain, France, China and Russia.

Other countries that showed significant sympathy towards Israel included Russia (52 per cent), Mexico (52 per cent), and China (50 per cent).

While Britain (34 per cent), France (27 per cent) and Spain (23 per cent) emerged as the least sympathetic countries towards the Jewish state.

The participants in the study were asked a series of questions and were instructed to grade their level of sympathy for Israel on a 1 to 10 scale.

The same participants were later presented with several ‘branding videos’ on Israel before being asked more questions in order to see whether their opinions changed after watching the clips, the daily said.

The videos focussed on many aspects of life in Israel, including the beaches, landscape, culture, food, technology, and religious sites.

The study showed that a total of 51 per cent of the respondents said that their views about Israel changed for the better after watching the videos.

The percentage of respondents who perceived Israel as an aggressive state is said to have subsequently dropped to 21from 35 per cent while the percentage of respondents who perceived Israel as a creative country rose from 24 to 40 per cent after watching the clips.

Israel finds more sympathy in Europe

Israel finds more sympathy in Europe
By Robert Marquand
The Christian Science Monitor
January 8, 2009

Concerns about Islamist threat have influenced traditionally pro-Arab
Europe’s view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Paris – European Union leaders this week flanked Israeli Foreign
Minister Tzipi Livni as she told the world’s news media, “We are all
opposed to terrorism.” For many observers in Europe, the moment
underscored a little-noted but ongoing convergence between European
and US-Israeli thinking – despite the tragedy and challenge that Gaza
presents.

For decades, Europe was a Middle East counterbalance – generally
sympathetic to Palestinians as the weaker party, critical of an
unqualified US backing of Israel. The Palestine Liberation
Organization had offices in Europe. France’s Navy helped Yasser
Arafat escape Tripoli in 1983. Europe backed the Oslo Accords, and
saw the Palestinian cause as a fight for territory and statehood.

Yet Europe’s traditional position on the Arab dispute has been
quietly changing: It is gravitating closer to a US-Israeli framing of
a war on terror, a “clash of civilizations,” with a subtext of
concern about the rise of Islam – and away from an emphasis on core
grievances of Palestinians, like the ongoing Israeli settlements in
the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and “occupation.”

Causes for the shift are complex and manifold, and in no small way
associated with the rise of Muslim populations in Europe. But since
Sept. 11, the discourse and psychology in Europe has shifted, with
pro-Arab support “diluting and weakening,” as Karim Bitar, with the
International Institute of Strategic Relations in Paris, puts it –
and converging with US-Israeli framing of a fight against terror.
[Editor’s note: The original version misspelled Mr. Bitar’s name.]

“There is convergence on goals [terrorism] between Europe and the US,
and a remnant of divergence on means [military logic],” argues the
French intellectual Dominique Moisi. “The Europeans are less pro-
Islamic Muslims now than before, after 9/11.

“We also see that even American Jews are not entirely at peace with
what Israel is doing. There’s more criticism of Israel than before,
in American opinion; and in Europe there is less support of what the
Arabs are.”

In the Gaza conflict, “European diplomats see a crisis with no exit
point,” says a senior French scholar with extensive Mideast
experience. “They think if the Israelis can put out Hamas and put in
Abbas, that would be wonderful. They don’t see Hamas as Palestinian
nationals, but as Islamic.”

A Euro-American convergence leaves European Union diplomats
supporting Palestinians on “shallower emotional and humanitarian
grounds,” says Mr. Bitar, “helping people survive, hoping economic
improvement is enough, and forgetting the old issues of substance,
and Israeli occupation. The two-state solution is nearly dead.”

Europe itself is not the Europe of decades past, dominated by French
diplomacy, with its Arab ties. There are 27 nations. Eastern and
former Soviet states, like Poland and the Czech Republic, often take
American positions on foreign affairs. As Prague took over the EU
presidency last week, it issued a statement that Israel’s actions in
Gaza were “defensive” – later backing down under French and British
censure.

In Scandinavia, traditionally pro-Arab states have found social
tensions with new Muslim populations – the crisis in Denmark over a
cartoon of the prophet Muhammad, for example – and public support for
Arabs is down in polls. In Europe today, nearly all major leaders –
France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, Germany’s Angela Merkel, Britain’s Gordon
Brown, and Italy’s Silvio Berlusconi – are seen as leaning toward
Israel. The lone pro-Arab leader is Spain’s José Luis Rodríguez
Zapatero.

“There is a general ‘Arab fatigue’ in Europe,” says Denis Bauchard,
an adviser to the French Institute for International Relations in
Paris. “The Palestine issue continues, the violence continues, the
Palestinians are divided, and it just creates a kind of fatigue.”

“Europe fears an Islamist threat, whether internal or external, and
this has begun to change the overall views on the Israel-Palestine
conflict,” says Aude Signoles, an expert on Palestinian movements at
the University of La Réunion in Madagascar.

A Pew Global Attitudes poll in 2006 found that French sympathies were
evenly divided (38 percent) between those sympathizing with the
Palestinians and with Israel, marking a doubling of support for
Israel and a 10 percent gain for Palestinians over the previous two
years. In Germany, 37 percent sympathized with Israel – an increase
of 13 points over 2004 and more than double those who supported the
Palestinians.

To be sure, Europe retains deep reservoirs of solidarity with North
Africa. Public opinion here is outraged by the Gaza inferno. There is
widespread condemnation of the Israeli attack, including by French
President Sarkozy. European media have been overwhelmingly
sympathetic to the Gazans, even while being barred from entering the
Strip.

More fundamentally, says Antoine Sfeir, founder of the Middle East
review “Cahiers de L’Orient,” European leaders understand the
political realities in Israel, the problems of a state attacked by
rockets, and the need to protect citizens. Even if he disagrees with
the framing of the issue, “The Europeans don’t see this as a
Palestinian thing. They see it as a Hamas thing,” he says. “In fact,
this is not about terrorism; it is a war between Israel and
Palestinians that is being called a war on terror.”

Ironically perhaps, Europeans were the most vocal critics of the Bush
administration-coined phrase “war on terror.” It is seen as
overreaching and simplistic while being used to sanction wars like
Iraq.

Yet since Sept. 11, a discourse that advocates a tough confrontation
with Islam has emerged in Europe – based in part on Samuel
Huntington’s “clash of civilization” theory – in such venues as the
French magazine “Brave New World.” Sarkozy has been congenial to
these points.

Authors include former leftists like Pascal Bruckner, André
Glucksmann, Olivier Rolin, and Bernard-Henri Lévy who supported the
war in Iraq and view Islam as a creeping form of totalitarian
ideology moving into Europe. The most recent issue contains an homage
to Mr. Huntington, who died last month.

Bitar argues that “Islamophobia” feeds a popular confusion in Europe
about Muslims. “Hamas, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda are all viewed as the same
thing. Europe used to see the Arab conflict as about territory. Now
it is shifting towards the global war on terror, Islam versus the
West, clash theory.”

Mr. Moisi dissents from the Huntington thesis. His recent book “Clash
of Emotion,” describes a West characterized by “fear” and an Arab
world characterized by “humiliation.”

US and European differences on Israel have been deep and numerous.
The US and Israel have religious and theological sensibilities about
the Holy Land; Europeans view the Palestinian issue through a secular
and humanitarian lens.

America, with an influential Jewish population, has seen Israel’s
security and right to defend itself as central. Europe, without as
weighty a lobby, has stressed UN security resolutions, and
international law for Palestinians that have been a counterbalance.
European academics have not been uneasy with the phrase “state-
sponsored terrorism” to describe Israeli violence against
Palestinians; in America the phrase is seen as far-left.

Europeans saw President Clinton as an honest broker in the Mideast;
President Bush has been seen as wholly aligned with Israel.

Large differences still exist between the two continents on the
priority of the Palestinian-Israeli issue.

“In Europe, we see the Palestinian issue as major, one that, if not
solved, will continue the chaos and violence,” says Mr.
Bauchard. “Americans agree with Israel that the real issue is the
existential threat from Iran. The Israelis built a wall and treated
the Palestinians as unimportant.”

European media characterize the photogenic and well-spoken Ms. Livni
as a moderate – though she emerged from the hard-line party of Ariel
Sharon. “The Europeans really fear what will happen if [right-wing
Likud Party chairman Benjamin] Netanyahu wins in February,” says Ms.
Signoles. “So she is called a moderate, because in Europe, the term
right-wing means violent.”

Signoles points out that the main effect of a Europe that adopts an
American position is that the core Palestinian issues regarding the
cessation of settlements, a shared capital of Jerusalem, and the
right of return “may not be emphasized as before.. [T]he Israel-
Palestine issue is an asymmetric problem, and if the international
community does not raise it and balance it, there is little chance
that the rights of the smaller player will be raised.”

India envies and admires Israel

India’s Israel Envy

Monday, 12 January 2009

Shashi Tharoor

NEW DELHI – As Israeli planes and tanks exact a heavy toll on Gaza, India’s leaders and strategic thinkers have been watching with an unusual degree of interest – and some empathy.

India’s government has, no surprise, joined the rest of the world in calling for an end to the military action, but its criticism of Israel has been muted. For, as Israel demonstrates anew its determination to end attacks on its civilians by militants based in Hamas-controlled territory, many in India, still smarting from the horrors of the Mumbai attacks in November, have been asking: why can’t we do the same?

For many Indians, the temptation to identify with Israel was strengthened by the terrorists’ seizure of Mumbai’s Jewish Center (the Lubavitcher Chabad house) and the painful awareness that India and Israel share many of the same enemies. India, with its 150-million strong Muslim population, has long been a strong supporter of the Palestinian cause and remains staunchly committed to an independent Palestinian state. But the Mumbai attacks confirmed what has become apparent in recent years: the forces of global Islamist terror have added Indians to their target list of reviled “Jews and crusaders.”

Just as Israel has frequently been attacked by rockets fired from across its border with Gaza, India has suffered repeated assaults by killers trained, equipped, financed, and directed by elements based next door in Pakistan. When President George W. Bush’s press secretary equated members of Hamas with the Mumbai killers, her comments were widely circulated in India.

Yet there the parallels end. Israel is a small country living in a permanent state of siege, highly security-conscious and surrounded by forces hostile to it; India is a giant country whose borders are notoriously permeable, an open society known for its lax and easy-going ways.

Whereas many regard Israel’s toughness as its principal characteristic, India’s own citizens view it as a soft state, its underbelly easily penetrated by determined terrorists. Whereas Israel notoriously exacts grim retribution for every attack on its soil, India has endured with numbing stoicism an endless series of bomb blasts, including at least six major assaults in different locations in 2008 alone. Terrorism has taken more lives in India than in any country in the world after Iraq, and yet, unlike Israel, India has seemed unable to do anything about it.

Moreover, whereas Israel’s principal adversary is currently Hamas, India faces a slew of terrorist organizations – Lashkar-e-Toiba, Jaish-e-Mohammad, Jamaat-ud-Dawa, and more. But, whereas Hamas operates without international recognition from Gaza – its legitimacy questioned even by the Palestinian Authority – India’s tormentors function from Pakistan, a sovereign member of the United Nations. And that makes all the difference.

Hamas is in no position to repay Israel’s air and ground attacks in kind, whereas an Indian attack on Pakistani territory, even one targeting terrorist bases and training camps, would invite swift retaliation from the Pakistani army. Israel can dictate the terms of its military incursion and end it at will, whereas an Indian military action would immediately spark a war with a well-armed neighbor that neither side could win. And, at the end of the day, one chilling fact would prevent India from thinking that it could use Israel’s playbook: the country that condones, if not foments, the terror attacks on India is a nuclear power.

So India has gone to the international community with evidence to prove that the Mumbai attacks were planned in Pakistan and conducted by Pakistani citizens who maintained contact with handlers in Pakistan throughout the operation. While India’s government had briefly hoped that the proof might enable Pakistan’s weak civilian government to rein in the malign elements in its society, the Pakistani authorities’ reaction has been one of denial.

Yet no one doubts that Pakistan’s all-powerful military intelligence has, over the last two decades, created and supported terror organizations as instruments of Pakistani policy in Afghanistan and India. When India’s embassy in Kabul was hit by a suicide bomber last July, American intelligence sources revealed that not only was Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence behind the attack, but that it made little effort to cover its tracks. The ISI knew perfectly well that India would not go to war with Pakistan to avenge the killing of its diplomatic personnel.

The fact is that India knows that war will accomplish nothing. Indeed, it is just what the terrorists want – a cause that would rally all Pakistanis to the flag and provide Pakistan’s army an excuse to abandon the unpopular fight against the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in the west for the more familiar terrain of the Indian border in the east. India’s government sees no reason to play into the hands of those who seek that outcome.

Yet, when Indians watch Israel take the fight to the enemy, killing those who launched rockets against it and dismantling many of the sites from which the rockets flew, some cannot resist wishing that they could do something similar in Pakistan. India understands, though, that the collateral damage would be too high, the price in civilian lives unacceptable, and the risks of the conflict spiraling out of control too acute to contemplate such an option. So Indians place their trust in international diplomacy and watch, with ill-disguised wistfulness, as Israel does what they could never permit themselves to do.

Shashi Tharoor, an acclaimed novelist and commentator, is a former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations.

US equates Hamas to Mumbai terrorists

US equates Hamas to Mumbai attackers
Monday, January 5, 2009

Equating Hamas militants with the  terrorists who struck Mumbai, the White House today said they were despicable human beings taking recourse to violence in order to achieve political ends.

In a media briefing, dominated by the issue of Israel’s incursion into the Gaza Strip, the White House spokesperson Dana Perino was asked if there were differences “between Hamas terrorists and the terrorists, who are attacking out from Pakistan against India”.

“Obviously, they’re two different groups,” White House spokesperson, Dana Perino, told reporters when asked if there was any difference between the two.

“But I think at their base level they are despicable, evil human beings who use violence and murder in order to achieve political objectives,” Perino said.

“So, in that regard, they are the same,” she said.

Video: Pro-Hamas Muslim Demonstration in Fort Lauderdale, Florida — Must Watch

200-300 Pro-Hamas Muslim Protestors in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Have a look at Islam first hand here: https://www.watchobsession.org/

The video at youtube website had over 370,000 viewers and over 5,000 comments!

Radical Islam vision for America: The third Jihad – click here

Many reasons why Arab nations do not absorb the Palestinians and solve the Palestine problem

Israel’s problems are due to its enlightened founders
By Kevin Myers, January 07 2009

The death toll from Gaza is of course, shocking, dreadful, unspeakable;
though it does not compare with the death toll amongst Israelis if Hamas
had its way. Recurring in the current debate are allegations about the
terrible deeds Israelis did in 1948. But that is history. That some of
these wrongs done to Arabs might have been prompted by local Arab
support for the invading Arab armies is irrelevant. Historical
injustices were certainly done in the formation of the Israeli state.

However, far greater wrongs were inflicted in 1945 on the Poles of
Eastern Poland, and on the Germans of East Prussia, the Baltic and of
the Sudetenland. We can go back a further quarter of a century, and look
at the fate of the Christians of Anatolia, and the Turks of Crete and
Thessalonika, or even, at a far lesser level, of the Catholics of West
and North Belfast and the Protestants of Cork, who in different degrees
were dispossessed, murdered, and exiled.

What was the difference between all those expulsions, and the
expulsion — let us settle for the word — of some Arabs from what was
to become Israel? It is that the exiles found homes in the states to
which they had fled, and there they were allowed to work, and become
full and active citizens. Turkey absorbed the Greek Turks, Greece
absorbed Anatolia’s Orthodox Christians, impoverished post-war Germany
absorbed the millions of Balts, Sudetens and Prussians, the Free State
absorbed the Northerners, (even appointing one of them, Dan McKenna, the
head of the Army).

But not Israel’s neighbours. No, they herded their fellow Arabs (not
then known as Palestinians) from the former Ottoman province of
Palestine into displaced persons camps, and kept them there. Not for
months, but for decades, causing all kinds of political, cultural and
moral claustrophobia. It was in these camps that the modern notion of
“Palestinian” was born. And though we hear a lot about the walls between
Israel and Gaza and Israel and the West Bank, we don’t hear much about
the walls between those densely populated Arab territories, and the
neighbouring countries of Jordan and Egypt. Arab brotherhood becomes
mysteriously indistinct whenever it requires solid gestures, rather than
words.

The Israelis were told by the UN to leave Gaza. They left Gaza. Their
reward has been to have had thousands of missiles fired into half a
dozen of their cities from the territory they abandoned. And how many
demonstrations have the grisly cast of showbiz anti-Israelis mounted to
protest at these deliberate acts of indiscriminate terrorism? Let me ask
you another question, with a comparable answer: How many Jews are there
in Hamas?

Dear old Hamas, whose foot-soldiers are fed and supplied by EU and UN
humanitarian aid, and armed from across the border with Egypt (which,
naturally, is otherwise sealed to prevent Palestinians from leaving
Gaza). It is admirably honest on one issue: it is dedicated to the
destruction of Israel, and to the extermination of the Jewish infidels
in Palestine. So, the bombardment of Israel by Hamas terrorists is not a
temporary nuisance, but the first step of a genocidal strategy.

And whereas the overwhelming majority of Israelis would regret the
terrible slaughter of, say, the five Balousha sisters by an Israeli
bomb, Hamas would rejoice in a comparable massacre of five Jewish girls.
Moreover, I suspect I will win few friends by pointing out that the
Balousha family had initially left their home, right next to a
Hamas-controlled mosque, after the Israelis announced (as they often do,
to minimise civilian casualties) that all such mosques would be targets
for their bombers. But the girls’ father, Ibrahim, then decided to take
his chances back at home, where the sisters were killed by falling
rubble when the mosque was bombed, just as the Israelis said it would
be.

Such pathological and tragic fatalism in the face of an almost certain
outcome defies all rational analysis. However, it does make stunning
propaganda for the global anti-Israeli lobby. Moreover, all the
arguments about the “proportionality” of the Israeli response are
meaningless. Hamas can do what it likes, without serious rebuke or
protests from the western intelligentsia and assorted celebrities: it is
only when the Israelis reply to the insufferable provocation of
Hamas-missile attacks that we suddenly hear the endless recitation of
the P-word.

But ‘proportionality’ is a meaningless and largely theological concept:
what is a proportionate reply to 8,000 missiles being fired into the
defenceless civilian populations of so many Israeli cities?

Israel’s current problems exist because its founders largely behaved
like enlightened Jews, rather than as Communists and Nazis, or even as
earlier generations of Americans or Australians had done. The Israelis
didn’t expel all the defeated peoples from their lands, but instead, let
many stay. In other words, they didn’t seek the kind of outcome which
the Romans inflicted upon Carthage at the end of the Third Punic War.
And that’s the real point about that much-maligned thing, a Carthaginian
Peace. For one tended not to hear very much from the Carthaginian
Liberation Organisation thereafter.
kmyers@independent.ie

69 page dossier on Mumbai terror attack (Nov 26-29, 2008)

The complete scanned copy of the 69 page dossier on Mumbai terror attacks is contained in three pdf files  published by the Hindu newspaper.

Click here

Gaza Invasion: Who are the friends of Israel?

Monday, January 5, 2009
Israel not without friends
Barry Rubin

The growth of powerful radical Islamist forces has scared a lot of countries. One could (falsely) romanticise the PLO as a progressive national liberation movement. But Hamas, Hizbullah and their patron, Iran, even Muslim countries would agree, are a harder sell.

It’s easy to be misled by elements of Western media and academia that seem to prefer terrorists and radical Islamists to Israel. The diplomatic balance sheet from Israel’s standpoint is quite good, pretty remarkably good, better than it has been for a very long time.

Of course, I have to add quickly that there are real problems, disagreements, and specific frictions. I’ll come to that in a moment. But first the good news:

Countries with which Israel has great relations: Australia, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, South Korea, the United States, and also those of the European Union and Nato. Moreover, there is a long list of former Soviet Bloc states which understand the difference between a democratic state defending itself and a bunch of ideologically driven, dictatorship-worshipping terrorists. They include the new EU chair, the Czech Republic, and a dozen others, of which Azerbaijan, Georgia, Lithuania and Poland can stand as examples. And last but not least most of sub-Saharan Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

Countries with which Israel has good relations: China, Russia, and Turkey. See details below.

Non-Muslim, countries with which Israel has bad relations: Colombia, North Korea, Norway, Spain, and Sweden. Perhaps you can come up with a few others. Nominations are open.

This description is accurate and should be acknowledged. Please do so.

Now, on to the small print. Friendly countries often have criticisms, for example, they may urge a ceasefire in the Gaza war or show some pressure regarding settlements. Such diplomatic initiatives may make headlines but really don’t amount to much in real terms. Israel’s vital interests are not threatened by such things.

Friends can disagree; a lot of these actions are publicity stunts or attempts to show the countries in question have ‘balanced’ policies. Regarding what is important —— things like normal relations, trade (including military-related equipment), basic support, sanctions against extremist enemies —— these relationships deliver.

Some of these positive relationships depend on which Government is in power —— obviously in France and Italy —— and that’s part of the point. These Governments were elected and thus reflect public opinion. Obviously, Israel was not an important issue in these choices but the results show large elements of policy-making elites are friendly and public opinion isn’t demanding leaders hostile to that country.

In France, the Government of Mr Francois Sarkozy replaced that of the notably less friendly Jacque Chirac. The relationship with the new President has been a good one. While Mr Sarkozy’s soft policy toward Lebanon and Syria have disappointed me —— not to mention the Lebanese moderates who he has failed to back against the Tehran-Damascus axis —— they are not in sharp conflict with Israeli policies. His recent foray into pushing a poorly conceived ceasefire in Gaza indicate his impulsive interventionism (France must act as a great power), but unquestionably his is the most friendly to Israel Government in France over the last half-century.

With China, Israel has a good bilateral relationship though Chinese policies are often problematic. Beijing’s goals, however, in such activities as its arms’ sales (reportedly Chinese-made rockets sold to Iran and then given to Hamas have been fired at Israel) or its reluctance to support sanctions against Iran, include profit-making, a desperate need for oil, and fear that international pressure might be turned against China some day.

China, like many of the other countries mentioned above, has a much friendlier policy partly due to the breaking of the myth that it was impossible to have good relations with both Israel and the Arab world. In part, this was always untrue; in part, changes in the international system —— the Cold War’s end, the peace process, etc —— made it easier to do. Israel’s technological wealth, its impressive military performance, and its influence with the US, among other factors, also helped fuel such shifts.

In addition, the growth of powerful radical Islamist forces has scared a lot of countries. One could (falsely) romanticise the PLO as a progressive national liberation movement. Iran, Hamas, and Hizbullah are a harder sell.

Two other important Israeli relationships are more complex than the rest. Turkey has an Islamist-rooted Government which portrays itself as a Centre-Right party. Many of its instincts are anti-Israel but its performance is not. There are four reasons for this: A policy of friendship with Israel is used to prove the party isn’t Islamist; the party has taken in centrists and conservatives who are pro-Israel; good economic links are mutually beneficial; and, the military —— whose interests cannot be forgotten —— wants a strong alliance. Like other countries, Turkey also knows that cooperation with Israel is necessary for Turkey to play an important diplomatic role in the region. Turkey’s brokering of Israel-Syria negotiations proves it.

Finally, Russia. Again, like Turkey, there are key diplomatic and economic considerations. The Russians benefit from a balanced policy which allows them to maintain good relations with Israel, Syria, and Iran simultaneously. Of course, that is also a problem for Israel, since Moscow sells weapons to Syria, paid for by Iran, which are also passed to Hizbullah. Yet Russia also limits friction by limiting arms sales and supporting some degree of sanctions.

In all these cases, then, Israel’s relations are quite reasonably good. That’s a remarkable balance sheet whose positive elements should not be underestimated.

— The writer is director of the Gloria Center, Jerusalem, and editor of Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal. He is the author of The Israel-Arab Reader and The Truth About Syria.