On Israel, D’Amato twists Obama’s intent

To the Editor:

After reading Al D’Amato’s column “Israel’s Armageddon” (June 2-8), as a Jew, and more important, as a global citizen who seeks peace in the Middle East, I was concerned with the deliberate simplification of the complex situation at hand and D’Amato’s fiery rhetoric, which reeked of political expedience.

People of D’Amato’s stature deserve to be taken seriously — not only because of what they say but sometimes, more importantly, what they omit. Regardless of whether one agrees with President Obama’s proposal, one should at least have the decency to present the facts as they are without twisting them for political purposes that reduce the political arena to the pro-Israel, anti-Israel binary — a dangerously simplistic trend that has thus far failed to bring peace to the region and that unfortunately generates impassioned platitudes without a comprehensive analysis of potentially pragmatic and plausible solutions.

The fact of the matter is that Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu willfully misinterpreted Obama’s statement about the need to renegotiate Israel’s borders in the presence of the president himself, and with Congress as his audience, knowing full well how many members of his audience were likely thinking about how to turn this predicament into a hot-topic issue to raise in their re-election campaigns. Mitt Romney and the Republican bandwagon have already jumped on this opportunity to once again use fear as a means of control and persuasion.

D’Amato accurately pointed out that the U.S. has long been a staunch ally of Israel, but he failed to say that Netanyahu’s behavior, though politically savvy, is inappropriate and unnecessarily provocative for an American ally. What D’Amato left out in his sensational misrepresentation of the facts is that Obama’s proposal is not groundbreaking. Rather, the idea of a two-state solution based on the pre-1967 borders, with mutually agreed-upon land swaps that would enable Israel to include the majority of what Palestinians view as illegal settlements in official Israeli territory, while granting equal amounts of Israeli turf to the Palestinians, is not evidence of D’Amato’s fear-mongering account of Israel’s impending “Armageddon,” but was actually used by Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was key to former President Clinton’s nearly successful peace attempt back in 2000 and is currently the accepted norm in the field of international relations.

While D’Amato applauds U.S. senators for establishing a resolution stating that moving Israel’s borders to the 1967 prewar lines is “contrary to U.S. national security interests,” his omission of the fact that Israel’s continued, illegal construction of settlements on Palestinian lands is as much an impediment to peace as the Palestinian refusal to acknowledge Israel’s existence perpetuates the dismal status quo, which is unequivocally contrary to the interests of anyone who seeks genuine peace in the region.

In dealing with such an emotionally charged issue, it is foolish to assign blame to only one side. Just as it would be foolish to omit the significance of Palestinian attacks on Israel or Hamas’s criminality, it is irrational to ignore that Israel has cut off water access and electricity to Gaza, or Israel’s routine kidnapping of Palestinian civilians and politicians, and other crimes that often go unnoted in the mainstream media.

I raise this issue not because I’m anti-Israel, as D’Amato would likely suggest, but because I believe that if we are to discuss the issue of Israel, we should discuss the issue honestly. I don’t know that Obama’s vision of the Middle East will come to fruition, and I don’t know that his plan is the best one possible for staunch Zionists, but to suggest that he has betrayed Israel and has given Palestine the upper hand is morally repugnant, intellectually dishonest and serves as evidence of the type of cynical deceit that all too often exploits emotionally charged issues. It should have no place in serious intellectual discussions about this complicated global issue.

Scott Elias

Oceanside