Israel

We've talked a little about oil. What is our second interest in the region?

Israel. I say this without hesitation; it's certainly a factor in the calculation of everyone in the background. The U.S. is committed to Israel. The body politic in America is committed to Israel. What does that mean? It means a couple of things. One is if Israel needs help, whether it's military, political, or economic, the U.S. will be there. If Israel needs a resolution vetoed at the Security Council, the U.S. is prepared to go against fourteen members of the Security Council to veto that resolution. That's the price of that support. That's what it means.

The other side of the coin is that if Israel has the upper hand, as is the case most of the time with the Palestinians, and the Arabs are on the losing side, America is always blamed for empowering Israel. There's no escaping that dilemma. You can't say that America can disengage from the Middle East, because, simply, the U.S. is a player in the Middle East, because of this feature of the relationship, and because of this commitment.

So in that sense, when you say Iraq or Iran are potential threats to allies, clearly they're potential threats to Israel, more than anyone else in the region. Part of the calculation pertains to that. I still don't believe that that has been the issue that has driven the President of the United States, President Bush, in his calculations about Iraq. It has been an issue in the debate. It has been an issue for many parts of the administration. It has been an issue in the political arena, obviously.

That is, support for Israel?

Support for Israel. Clearly, an issue for many people, an issue in the body politic of America, an issue in the debate, and an unstated issue, always, in the debate.

But I don't think that's why the president is probably going to wage war with Iraq. I think he came with that instinct. People speak of what we call the neoconservatives as being the ones who have led the administration to this path. I don't agree with that entirely. I think they have been a very, very important force in the tactics and the strategy that has led to the point where war may be becoming inevitable.

But you're saying it's not because of our support for Israel or the fact that the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog?

What I'm saying is that the president's calculation is not because of that. I think the president came with that instinct. I think some neoconservatives care a lot about Israel.

I see. But he came with the instinct to support Israel?

He came with the instinct to go to war with Iraq.

To go to war with Iraq, okay.

The neoconservatives basically read that instinct and gave it ideological support, political support, and bolstered it, reinforced it, and helped push it forward in a momentum that became unstoppable, ultimately. But I don't think the President of the United States decided, "I've got to go to war with Iraq for Israel." Or even, for that matter, for oil.

I want to clarify one thing about our interest in support for Israel. Help us understand how the Arab world sees Israel and its existence. As a result of the breakdown of the Camp David summit, there is an ambiguity in the air about whether the Arab states and whether the Muslim people of the Arab world are willing to accept the existence of Israel.

Let's look at it slightly differently. Think about what is the source of resentment toward the United States in much of the Arab world, and probably most of the Muslim world. Some of that resentment is not connected to the Arab-Israeli issue. The U.S. is seen as an anchor of a political system that is not serving the people well. That includes other authoritarian regimes and other economic issues, as well as foreign policy issues like the Arab-Israeli issue.

There is resentment of the U.S. in every part of the world, not just in the Middle East, as all the surveys show. They don't have an Arab-Israeli issue in Latin America and in Asia, and yet you have a lot of resentment toward the U.S. But in the Middle East, specifically, the extra passion in the resentment is very much related to the Arab-Israeli issue. In part, the Arab-Israeli issue is not just another issue in this game, it is the prism through which the Middle East sees America, it is an inescapable prism. It's an issue of identity, a collective identity, and it shouldn't be surprising. It has nothing to do with Arab governments liking the Palestinians, or even serving their interests. We know that governments serve their own interests, and often abuse issues. It isn't even about the people themselves willing to sacrifice, individually, for a cause. It is that subconsciously, when they look at the world and they look at America, they look at it through this prism, which has become an identity issue to them in the same way that Israel has become part and parcel of contemporary Jewish identity. If you look at the history of the half century, since World War II, you will find that for Egyptians, for Jordanians, for Syrians, they fought wars over this issue. Every single generation was formed with an imprint on the collective psyche that is related to this issue. And usually a humiliating imprint, a defeat.

So you can understand why every generation since World War II has, in fact, related to this issue in the passionate way that they do. And today, what has happened, particularly since the collapse of the Camp David negotiations, is that they see the bloodshed on a daily basis and it rubs in that humiliation that they all feel collectively. And so America is judged through this prism, and when America says, "We're going to free the Iraqi people from the tyranny of this ruthless dictator in Baghdad," they say, "Why aren't you doing something to free the Palestinian people from the pain that we witness every day?" That's what the focus is on. You can imagine Israelis are focused on their own pain, on the victims of suicide bombings, that's what the television in Israel is going to show. Well, Arab television, today, which is transnational, is going to focus on the pain of the Arabs and especially the Palestinians. So in that sense, it's truly central. It is inescapable. It is something that will continue to define the American relationship with the Middle East, no matter what happens in the Iraq crises.

Does the movement toward peace, toward some sort of settlement, work against that animosity toward America, vis-à-vis the Palestine-Israeli conflict?

Let's put it this way. If you look back at the 1990s -- this is a good contrast, because people in the Middle East thought the end of the Cold War wasn't good for the Middle East. They thought this is going to be an era of American hegemony and, therefore, Israeli hegemony. That was the interpretation in 1989. Then Iraq invaded Kuwait; the game changed. Coalitions were built, and the U.S. found itself in partnership with some Arab countries. And in the 1990s what happened was that the U.S. put forth a moderate plan of a general order that was based on a negotiated settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict, as well as economic development and political support. Throughout that decade, for the entire decade, in fact, people started buying into it, even if they didn't like the terms of it, even if it was messy, even if people thought, "This is not perfect." They thought it was an inevitable course and that it would improve the lot. And as a consequence, you found consolidation of relations has been between many Arab countries and America -- in fact, between many Arab countries and Israel, in every single year, from the year that the Oslo agreements were concluded in 1993 to the year 2000, the number of terrorist incidents in the Middle East went down, according to State Department statistics, every single year. And by the year, 2000, it was the lowest of any region around the world, except for North America.

So clearly, it's consequential. It has, at some point, to bear fruit. What happened in the collapse of the Camp David negotiations in July, 2000, was not only a collapse in negotiations, but also a collapse of a paradigm. It was the collapse of a Pax Americana and the decade of Pax Americana of the 1990s. In a way, we're back to square one now. The question is whether there will be a package like that, that could restore that relationship.

The price that was paid by the failure of that is that people are going to be very reluctant to buy promises anymore. In the 1990s, they bought promises. This time it's going to be harder to sell promises. And, therefore, you need to have more concrete measures more quickly than was achieved in the 1990s.

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