By David K. Shipler
“If the
United States decided it wanted to stand by the Palestinian people, we’d have
our state in forty-eight hours,” Muhammad Arrar told me several months ago. He
was a sinewy man in his mid-forties, a council member in Jalazoun, the West
Bank refugee camp. “Israel is America’s fifty-first state,” he continued, in a
standard line you hear from Palestinians. Then he added a plea: “In America in
the 1700s, a majority of Americans stood up with their weapons and fought, and
they raised their rights of liberty.”
This refrain was on the lips of virtually
every Palestinian I encountered in the camps, in schools, in government offices;
it was a naïve caricature of Israel as a kind of vassal state that could
quickly be brought to heel by a flick of the superpower’s wrist. I tried to
explain the limits of Washington’s power. Nobody accepted my brilliant
analysis. I could see, through their veneer of courtesy, that they thought I
was the one being naïve—or disingenuous.
But the relationship is complicated
and contradictory, and its core—the dollars and hardware that bolster Israel’s
military security—remains undamaged by the recent tiff between President Obama and
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Largely overlooked in the reporting on Monday’s speech by White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough—whose criticisms of
Netanyahu were given front-page coverage—was his affirmation of the
nuts-and-bolts commitment, his impressive listing of the muscular,
technologically advanced weaponry already in the pipeline. He pledged
unflagging support, while criticizing Republicans for holding the defense
budget, which includes aid to Israel, at 2006 levels.
