Ami Chai USA » Who Needs Enemies?

Who Needs Enemies?

By Arieh Eldad

During my childhood in Jerusalem in the 1950s and 1960s, our nursery and grade school teachers used to send us into the streets every few weeks to wave the little flags of various friendly African countries when their respective leaders would honor Israel with a visit. Kol Israel radio used to talk about what a great “friend of Israel” was visiting and the newspapers followed suit. One year Idi Amin was listed as such a friend of Israel; Mrs. Eshkol danced with him, Moshe Dayan and Abba Eban took photos with him. Only when we refused to sell him phantom jets did the crazy, murderous leader turn into an enemy of Israel.

Thus we were also taught to love the “friend of Israel,” the president of France Charles de Gaulle. We swooned over his picture with Ben Gurion. He sold us arms and supported us in the international arena, up to the moment we destroyed the Arab armies in six days against his advice. And when we “stole” our own boats from his Cherbourg, he called us a proud and overbearing nation and betrayed us. Thus ended the friendship.

I remembered all of these things when I read in last week’s Ha’aretz weekend supplement Meir Zamir’s excellent article on “Britain’s Betrayal, France’s Revenge.” Winston Churchill, the person the Jews called “a friend of Zionism,” betrayed the Jewish people, the Zionist cause, the Balfour Declaration and the raison d’être of the British Mandate to build a national home for the Jewish people. Churchill secretly planned to establish a “Greater Syria” to include Eretz Israel (both banks of the Jordan River), Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. This was supposed to be a pan-Arab kingdom serving British interests. The plot failed because France and the United States saw it as a move by Britain, their ally in the World War that had not yet ended, to take over the Middle East. I myself never understood why Churchill, who in 1922 published the White Paper that tore off two-thirds of our national home (the East Bank of the Jordan River) and gave it to the Arabs, was ever called “a friend of Zionism,” and why the Organized Yishuv liked, supported, and toadied up to him. I never understood this but I never bothered researching it. In any case, the cat is now out of the bag. He was not a true friend of the Zionist enterprise, but rather was trying to destroy it. So goes another friend.

Where am I going with all of the above? To George Bush, the president of the United States, “one of the great friends of Israel,” as Olmert calls him. Well, Bush is obviously a friend of Olmert’s: he often pats him on the shoulder and agrees to Olmert’s requests to pressure Israel to give in to Arab demands. But is he a friend of the State of Israel? Undoubtedly the U.S. intelligence services didn’t keep the U.S. president waiting until the recent publication of the Winograd Report, but long ago told Bush that Olmert is the greatest failure and the most corrupt and dangerous prime minister Israel has had in recent times, and that the United States cannot rely on him during a war with Hizbullah and Syria, just as the people of Israel cannot rely on him. If Bush has nonetheless decided to enhance his friendship with Olmert, it can only be because Bush is exploiting him for his own needs, just as Idi Amin used Dayan and Eban, De Gaulle used Ben Gurion, and Churchill used Weizmann. It must be remembered that Bush is the first American president to recognize a “right” of the Palestinians to an independent state. Bush forced Israel to allow Hamas to run in “democratic elections” and helped it gain power. He pressured Israel to remove road blocks in Judea and Samaria, and to take down what are called “illegal outposts.” Like his predecessors who may have been “less friendly” even though they did not give the Palestinians a state, he has refused to move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and he has not freed Pollard. And so, why does the laurel of friendship rest on his head? Apparently because of a commitment to guarantee the security of Israel and not allow Iran to obtain nuclear weapons, even if this would mean American military action in Iran.

Therefore his betrayal of Israel is so profound. Following Israel’s failure in the Second Lebanese War, he dropped this commitment, and as an excuse he released a U.S. Intelligence report, which was understood quite well in Iran: the U.S. was not going to attack a country that had stopped developing nuclear weapons four years earlier. Olmert, whose entire political career is dependant on his “friend” in the U.S., and on the peace-within-one-year that was planned in Annapolis, without which the Israeli Left would not be sustaining him - Olmert will never dare reveal Bush’s betrayal. We face Iran alone. Would that we were also without Olmert; because with friends like these and a prime minister who is a failure at warfare, who needs enemies.