Israel Is Now America's Closest Ally

By MICHAEL B. OREN

President George W. Bush will soon make his second visit to Israel in less than six months, this time to celebrate the country's 60th anniversary. The candidates for the presidency, Republican and Democratic alike, have all traveled to Israel and affirmed their commitment to its security. So have hundreds of congressmen.

American engineers, meanwhile, are collaborating with their Israeli counterparts in developing advanced defense systems. American soldiers are learning antiterrorist techniques from the Israeli army.

Corbis

John McCain visits the Western Wall in Jerusalem, March 2008.

Israel is the only Middle Eastern country where the American flag is rarely (if ever) burned in protest – indeed, some Israelis fly that flag on their own independence day. And avenues in major American cities are named for Yitzhak Rabin and Golda Meir. Arguably, there is no alliance in the world today more durable and multifaceted than that between the United States and Israel.

Yet the bonds between the two countries were not always so strong. For much of Israel's history, America was a distant and not always friendly power.

Consider the period before Israel's founding in 1948, during the British Mandate over Palestine. Though many Americans, Christians as well as Jews, were committed to building the Jewish national home, their government's policy was strictly hands-off. Palestine, in Washington's view, was exclusively Britain's concern, and the Arab-Jewish conflict was a British headache.

Accordingly, the Roosevelt administration raised no objection to Britain's 1939 decision to end Jewish immigration into Palestine, sealing off European Jewry's last escape route from Nazism. The U.S. indifference to Zionism deepened during World War II, when America feared alienating its British allies and angering the Arabs, whose oil had become vital to the war effort. Deferring to British and Arab demands, America confined hundreds of thousands of Holocaust survivors in displaced-persons camps in Europe rather than let them emigrate to Palestine.

America's ambivalence toward Zionism persisted after the war, as the battle against Nazism gave way to the anticommunist struggle. While a sizeable majority of Americans welcomed Israel's creation in May 1948, policy makers in Washington feared that such support would trigger an Arab oil boycott of the West and the Soviet take-over of Europe. Secretary of State George Marshall even warned the president, Harry Truman, that he would not back him for re-election if he recognized the newborn state. An ardent Baptist whose best friend was a Jew, Truman ignored these warnings and made the U.S. the first nation to accord de facto recognition to Israel. But buckling to State and Defense Department pressures, Truman also imposed an arms embargo on Israel during its desperate war of independence. Later, he arm-twisted Israeli leaders to relinquish land to the Arabs and to readmit Palestinian refugees.

Pressure for territorial concessions escalated under Truman's successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, who also vetoed weapons sales to Israel. His secretary of state, John Foster Dulles, dismissed Israel as "the millstone around our necks," and threatened it with sanctions during the 1956 Suez Crisis. Israel is home to the Middle East's largest memorial to John F. Kennedy, but Kennedy similarly refused to sell tanks and planes to Israel, and warned that America's relationship with the Jewish state would be "seriously jeopardized" by Israel's nuclear program. Lyndon B. Johnson was the first president to invite an Israeli prime minister, Levi Eshkol, to Washington – 16 years after Israel's birth – but he then balked at Eshkol's request for American help against the Arab armies assembling for war in June 1967. "Israel will not be alone unless it decides to go it alone," Johnson replied, implying that the U.S. would not stand beside Israel militarily.

The Six-Day War nevertheless inaugurated a dramatic change in America's attitude toward Israel. Israel's astonishing victory in that conflict instantly transformed the "millstone" into an American asset, a hardy fellow democracy and Cold War ally. Nixon regarded Israel as "the best Soviet stopper in the Mideast," and furnished the weaponry Israel needed to prevail in the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter both ran on platforms highly favorable to Israel, and dedicated themselves to the search for Israel-Arab peace. By the end of the 1970s, an inchoate U.S.-Israeli alliance had emerged, sealed by the existence of a potent pro-Israel lobby in Washington and the extension to Israel of billions of dollars of American aid.

But the relationship was hardly friction-free. Israel's reluctance to forfeit territories captured in 1967, and its efforts to settle them, became a perennial source of tension. Presidents Ford and Carter threatened to withhold assistance from Israel unless it made territorial concessions. President George H.W. Bush denied Israel loan guarantees for resettling Russian immigrants in the West Bank. Israel's security policies also jolted the alliance – Ronald Reagan condemned Israel's bombardment of the Iraqi nuclear reactor in 1981 as well as its siege of Beirut the following year. Americans, in turn, irritated the Israelis with their transfer of sophisticated weapons to Saudi Arabia and their opposition to Israeli arms sales to China.

Such rifts have grown increasingly infrequent, however, and today there are few visible fissures in the U.S.-Israeli front. Yet America has never recognized Jerusalem as Israel's capital – imagine if Israel refused to recognize Washington. Powerful interest groups lobby against Israel in Washington while much of American academia and influential segments of the media are staunchly opposed to any association with Israel.

How does the alliance surmount these challenges?

One reason, certainly, is values – the respect for civic rights and the rule of law that is shared by the world's most powerful republic and the Middle East's only stable democracy. There is also Israel's determination to fight terror, and its willingness to share its antiterror expertise. Most fundamentally, though, is the amity between the two countries' peoples. The admiration which the U.S. inspires among Israelis is overwhelmingly reciprocated by Americans, more than 70% of whom, according to recent polls, favor robust ties with the Jewish state.

No doubt further upheavals await the alliance in the future – as Iran approaches nuclear capability, for example. Israel may act more muscularly than some American leaders might warrant. The impending change of U.S. administration will also have an effect. But such vicissitudes are unlikely to cause a major schism in what has proven to be one of history's most resilient, ardent and atypical partnerships.

Russia’s Medvedev takes power

By Neil Buckley in Moscow

Russia’s new president Dmitry Medvedev on Wednesday held out the prospect of a thaw after the democratic restrictions of the Putin era, pledging to develop civil and economic freedoms during a stately Kremlin inauguration ceremony.

But Mr Medvedev takes power amid continuing questions over whether he or Vladimir Putin, the former president who will now become prime minister, will really run the country, and how Russia’s new dual power structure will work.

The 42-year-old Mr Medvedev placed his right hand on the constitution and recited the 33-word presidential oath before 2,400 guests in the gilded St Andrew’s Hall of the Great Kremlin Palace. He is the youngest Russian head of state since the last tsar, Nicholas II.

“I consider my most important task to be the further development of civil and economic freedoms, the creation of new opportunities, as broad as possible for the self-realisation of citizens – citizens who are free and responsible both for their personal success, and for the flourishing of the whole country,” he said in his first speech as president.

“In the last eight years we have laid a powerful foundation for long-term development, for decades of free and stable development,” Mr Medvedev continued. “And we must use this unique chance to the full, so that Russia becomes one of the best countries in the world – for the comfortable, confident and secure life of our people.”

Mr Medvedev repeated commitments made during his campaign to modernise Russia’s economy, renew its crumbling infrastructure and establish the rule of law.

“I will pay special attention to the fundamental role of the law, on which our state, and civil society, is based. We are obliged to achieve true respect for the law, to overcome the legal nihilism which seriously hinders our contemporary development,” he said.

While his predecessor, Mr Putin, is credited with steering Russia’s oil-fuelled economic recovery after the chaotic transition to a market economy in the 1990s, the outgoing president established a closely managed democracy and clamped down on political opposition and press freedoms.

Critics also say Mr Putin undermined his own early commitment to building a “dictatorship of the law” through what was widely seen as a politically-motivated legal assault on Yukos, once Russia’s biggest oil company.

Speaking just before handing power to Mr Medvedev, Mr Putin said he had “made a commitment to work openly and honestly, to serve the people and the state faithfully. And I did not violate my promise.”

The ceremony was shown live on Russia’s two main national TV channels, with sweeping aerial shots from helicopters and crane-mounted cameras of the Kremlin and the Moscow skyline – now boasting modern skyscrapers that did not exist when Mr Putin took power.

Mr Putin is expected on Thursday to be confirmed by the Russian parliament as prime minister, and will also become chairman of the dominant political party, United Russia.

Analysts expect Mr Putin to remain Russia’s most powerful figure initially, though say Mr Medvedev may well use the powers vested in him by Russia’s highly presidential constitution to assert himself over time.

Under the constitution, the president is commander-in-chief, responsible for foreign policy and security issues, and for setting the general direction of policies. The prime minister and government are responsible for implementing policy, especially in the economic field.

While respecting a pledge not to alter the constitution to shift more powers to the premier’s role, Mr Putin has strengthened his future position by ensuring governors of Russia’s 85 regions will report to him, not to the Kremlin.

The European Union and Russia

Divide, rule or waffle

The European Union cannot agree over how to deal with Russia. That suits the Kremlin just fine

SEEN from outside, one might imagine that the European Union (population 495m, GDP of $16.8 trillion) was a rather intimidating neighbour for Russia (population 142m, GDP of $1.3 trillion). Yet the reality is the other way round. In recent years Russia has played a canny game of divide and rule against the EU, building cosy bilateral relations with Germany and Italy especially, but also with Austria, Bulgaria, the Netherlands and Greece.

That makes other countries, and many Eurocrats, uneasy. They would like the EU to bargain more effectively with Russia, particularly over energy. But how? For now, the relationship is based on an outdated partnership and co-operation agreement (PCA), signed in 1997. Talks on renewing it are long overdue. But they show no sign of starting. Last year the obstacle was a Polish veto, prompted by a Russian embargo on Polish meat exports. But that was resolved after a charm offensive by Radek Sikorski, the Polish foreign minister, who was once a notable hawk on Russia.

Now talks on a new PCA are stymied again, this time because of a veto by Lithuania. The Lithuanians argue that the previously agreed negotiating position is too soft and too limited, given what they see as Russia's slide towards autocracy at home and aggression abroad. An EU foreign ministers' meeting in Luxembourg on April 29th ended in deadlock (though it did sign a deal that may clear the way for Serbia, a country wobbling into Russia's orbit, to become a candidate for membership).

Other EU countries are cross with the Lithuanians, accusing them of belated and clumsy diplomacy, and of posturing with an eye to a general election this autumn, in which the ruling coalition is lagging behind pro-Russian parties. The Poles, who agreed to drop their veto of a new PCA in return for a lifting of the meat ban, say they must honour their side of the deal they struck with Russia. Many west European countries also hope that the arrival of Dmitry Medvedev as Russian president could be a chance to put their relationship on a friendlier footing. In any case, the previous negotiating mandate has already been adapted to reflect, at least partly, Lithuania's desire for stronger language on energy (Russia has blocked an oil pipeline to Lithuania's refinery since 2006, claiming that it needs “repairs”).

Yet the Lithuanians want more. They demand explicit mention of Russia's relations with such neighbours as Georgia, citing the Kremlin's increasingly strong support for the breakaway enclaves of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. This week the Russians claimed Georgia was planning to invade Abkhazia and said they would boost their peacekeeping forces, promising to respond forcefully to any Georgian attack. The Georgians have retaliated by threatening to block Russia's application to join the World Trade Organisation. The Lithuanians see all this as an ominous threat to their own security. “We are in the front line. If Georgia goes, we are next,” argues a Lithuanian official.

The Lithuanians also want the EU to be tougher over justice. In particular, they complain that the Kremlin is not helping track down those responsible for a Soviet-backed attempted putsch in Lithuania in early 1991 that killed 14 people and for the execution of eight border guards shortly afterwards. “We have had 22 Litvinenkos and no co-operation from Russia,” says the official. His irritation may be understandable (Britain is also furious with the Kremlin for refusing to co-operate over the murder of a Russian exile with British citizenship, Alexander Litvinenko, in London in 2006). But an unwillingness from Russia to investigate such crimes is nothing new, and is therefore harder to portray as a sinister new twist.

Diplomats still hope to launch negotiations on a new PCA before the next EU-Russia summit in Siberia in June. Reopening discussion on the negotiating mandate may not help Lithuania: some countries want it to be softer, not tougher, says one foreign minister. And none of this seems to bother the Russians much. Their ambassador in Brussels, Vladimir Chizov, says his country would be delighted to deal with the EU if only it would decide what it actually wants. The impasse also makes it easier for national governments to justify doing bilateral deals with Russia. Italy made a barely veiled threat along these lines this week. Greece chose the same day formally to sign up to South Stream, a Kremlin-backed Black Sea pipeline that many see as a direct rival to the EU's own plans in the region. The outgoing Italian prime minister and former European Commission president, Romano Prodi, also said he had turned down (for now, at least) a Russian offer to head the South Stream consortium.

In practice a new PCA is unlikely to make much difference. Despite the obsolescence of the old one, trade between Russia and the EU has more than tripled since 2000. In negotiating a new one, Russia would, on past form, use its bilateral ties with big countries to get its way in what ought to be multilateral negotiations. And it is not clear that any new agreement will stick. Russia has explicitly said that it will not ratify the energy charter it signed in 1994, which would have required it to give third parties access to its gas pipelines. As Katinka Barysch, of the London-based Centre for European Reform, notes drily, “the Russians have a somewhat different approach to law, so whether you can aim to solve all problems with a legal document is open to doubt.”

Argentina

Cristina in the land of make-believe

Dashing hopes of change, Argentina's new president is leading her country into economic peril and social conflict

SHE romped to an easy victory in last year's presidential election by promising to maintain Argentina's impressive economic performance while easing its social tensions and rebuilding its foreign relations. Yet just five months after Cristina Fernández succeeded her husband, Néstor Kirchner, in the Casa Rosada, Argentina is worse off on all three counts. Already, her government looks in disarray. It has provoked a tax revolt by farmers. On April 24th, it lost its most important new face when Martín Lousteau resigned as economy minister over a policy disagreement. The price of Argentina's bonds has plunged as investors show little confidence in the government.

With the economy having grown at over 8% a year since 2003, when it began a vigorous recovery from an earlier financial collapse, Mr Kirchner basked in popularity. He was helped by record prices for Argentina's farm exports but pumped up the economy further, with dollops of public spending and an undervalued currency. He brushed off worries about inflation, strong-arming businesses into freezing prices and ordering an underling to doctor the consumer-price index.

During her campaign, Ms Fernández led some analysts to believe that she would be more moderate than her combative husband. But any such hopes have been quickly dashed. She has kept most of his ministers, his policies and his rhetoric. According to unofficial calculations, inflation has reached 25% (officially, it is 9%).

Ms Fernández shows little sign of curtailing the dash for growth at any price. Mr Lousteau's mistake seems to have been his intention to act on her campaign promise to restore credibility to official statistics. His replacement, Carlos Fernández, is a non-entity. In practice, Mr Kirchner himself seems still to be in charge of economic policy. “We don't want a cooling of the economy because that always brought us unemployment, poverty, exclusion and economic concentration,” he told a recent rally of the ruling Peronist movement.

But overheating and inflation are already bringing Argentines some of these woes—and if unchecked will in time bring all of them. The statistics agency has stopped releasing poverty figures. Using an independent estimate of inflation, the poverty rate has risen from 27% in 2006 to 30%, with 1.3m Argentines descending into poverty last year, according to calculations by Ernesto Kritz, a labour economist in Buenos Aires.

To tame inflation and stabilise the economy, the government needs to allow the peso to appreciate, curb spending growth and energy subsidies, and raise interest rates. The longer such measures are postponed, the more painful and unpopular they will be.

Ms Fernández is already in a weaker position than her husband was. Several recent opinion polls give her an approval rating of only 35%. Mr Kirchner used lavish fiscal transfers to buy the support of provincial governors and mayors. But it is getting harder for his wife to match that.

To compensate for Mr Kirchner's pre-election spending binge, in March she raised taxes on agricultural exports. Buoyed by record world commodity prices and a favourable exchange rate, farmers had hitherto grudgingly accepted the levies. But the tax increase, together with rising inflation, cut the profit margin on soyabeans to just 6%, for example. The farmers launched an unprecedented campaign of strikes, roadblocks and pot-banging protests in city centres.

Taken aback, Ms Fernández's response was tellingly authoritarian and unstatesmanlike. She accused the farmers of greed and, improbably, of seeking a military coup. Government rent-a-mobs of piqueteros (unemployed protesters receiving state welfare payments) were unleashed against the farmers and their supporters. That backfired. “Cristina managed to do in three weeks what Argentina's farmers couldn't over 50 years: unite them,” says Gustavo Martínez of Salvador University in Buenos Aires. The farmers suspended their protests to allow talks to take place. The government seems to be seeking a way to back down.

Even in foreign policy, in which Mr Kirchner showed no interest, Ms Fernández has had little success. Her expressed desire to improve relations with the United States foundered on a complicated campaign-finance imbroglio. Last year customs officers at a Buenos Aires airport impounded $800,000 in cash being brought in by Guido Antonini Wilson, a Venezuelan-American who had arrived on a private plane rented by the Argentine government. Two days after Ms Fernández's inauguration, American prosecutors charged five men who they said threatened Mr Antonini, who lives in Miami, and claimed to have evidence that the money was for her presidential campaign.

The president seemed to blame the United States government, rather than its courts, for what she called “a garbage operation” against her. A planned visit to Europe last month was curtailed because of the farmers' protests. While foreign investment pours into neighbouring Brazil, Ms Fernández has done nothing to assure investors that they will enjoy predictable policies while she is in power. The government signed a contract this week for a $3.7 billion high-speed train from Buenos Aires to Córdoba, the first of its kind in Latin America, but it will be paid for with debt.

Ms Fernández still has plenty of time to correct her mistakes. She is blessed with a weak and divided opposition. Her husband has installed himself as president of the Peronist party, still Argentina's most formidable political machine. But the first couple's support is narrowing to not much more than the urban underclass organised by that machine.

After her bumpy start, Ms Fernández is being compared to Michelle Bachelet, the similarly hapless president of neighbouring Chile, with whom she is friendly. But at least Ms Bachelet is making her own mistakes. The suspicion in Buenos Aires is that Cristina is paying the price for her husband's pigheadedness, even if that is something she shares. “The Kirchners' golden age is over,” says Sergio Berensztein, a political consultant. “Now they'll have to get used to it.”

Clinton Plans to Campaign `Until There Is a Nominee' (Update2)

May 7 (Bloomberg) -- Hillary Clinton said she will remain in the Democratic presidential race ``until there is a nominee,'' and argued she would be the strongest candidate to face Republican John McCain in November.

A day after losing to Barack Obama by 15 percentage points in North Carolina's primary and winning Indiana by less than 2 points, Clinton said she is drawing support from women, working- class voters and other constituencies the Democratic Party needs to win the general election.

``I feel good about how I did with Indiana voters and swing voters in both North Carolina and Indiana,'' Clinton said in West Virginia, which holds its primary May 13. ``It's a new day. It's a new state and a new election.''

Clinton is more than 300 delegates shy of the 2,025 needed to claim the nomination and the remaining six contests have a total of 217 pledged delegates at stake. Obama's campaign says he is just 170 delegates from claiming the nomination. Both campaigns are courting the remaining undeclared party superdelegates, Democratic officials and officeholders whose votes aren't bound by the results of caucuses and primaries.

Obama's campaign today said he won over three more superdelegates: North Carolina Democratic Party Chairman Jerry Meek, North Carolina Democratic National Committee member Jeanette Council and California DNC member Inola Henry. Clinton added North Carolina Representative Heath Shuler, according to the News and Observer newspaper.

`Still Early'

Clinton, 60, a New York senator, brushed off a call from former Senator and onetime Democratic presidential nominee George McGovern to drop out of the race. McGovern last year endorsed Clinton, who worked on his unsuccessful 1972 presidential campaign. She declined to say whether she intended to carry the fight to the party's national convention in August.

``It's still early,'' Clinton said at an event in Shepherdstown. She said her husband, former President Bill Clinton, didn't wrap up his 1992 nomination until June.

The last primaries are June 3 in Montana and South Dakota.

Party strategists say there is little chance of Clinton winning unless Obama makes a major gaffe. The former first lady's goal was to capitalize on her victory in the April 22 Pennsylvania primary and come up with a big win in Indiana while keeping North Carolina close. She failed in both.

Pressing Issue

``Clinton had a lot of momentum behind her in the last few weeks, and North Carolina was a reality check that it's still his race to lose,'' said Jennifer Palmieri, who served as spokeswoman for former candidate Democratic John Edwards and was deputy press secretary in Bill Clinton's White House.

One of the most pressing issues for Clinton will be money. Obama, 46, an Illinois senator, has raised record amounts, forcing Clinton to dig into her personal bank account to keep her campaign afloat. Today, aides said she loaned her campaign $6.4 million in the last month, bringing her personal investment this year to $11.4 million.

``It's a sign of my commitment to this campaign,'' Clinton told reporters in West Virginia.

Clinton said she isn't worried about losing the support of blacks who have given about 90 percent of their votes to Obama. They are ``a very important base'' for the party and likely would still vote for the Democratic candidate in November over McCain, a senator from Arizona and the presumptive Republican nominee, Clinton said.

``What we have not been able to count on in the last elections are the voters I'm getting,'' Clinton said.

Exit polls conducted for television networks and the Associated Press showed Clinton winning 58 percent of white men in Indiana, 71 percent of senior citizens and 51 percent of lower-income workers. She also got 56 percent of female voters.

``Working people are part of the base we lost,'' Clinton said.