ISRAEL AND THE US SINCE 7 OCTOBER

Danielle Pletka is a distinguished senior fellow in foreign and defense policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), where she focuses on US foreign policy generally and the Middle East specifically. Until January 2020, Ms. Pletka was the senior vice president of foreign and defense policy studies at AEI. Concurrently, she also teaches US Middle East policy at Georgetown University’s Walsh School of Foreign Service. On a visit to Sydney, sponsored by the Australia Israel & Jewish Affairs Council, Danielle Pletka gave an update on relations between the US and Israel during the Israel-Gaza conflict.

ISRAEL AND THE US SINCE 7 OCTOBER

DANIELLE PLETKA

Thank you to all of you. It’s really a pleasure. The Sydney Institute does such wonderful work and has such terrific people, I’m really honoured to be part of it.

I’ve been asked to talk about what I know, so first I’m going to talk a little bit about American politics. I have lived in Washington for almost 40 years, although hopefully you can hear that I come from Australia. Then we can chat about whatever you’d like. The Middle East is my area of specialty. I know it well. I love it dearly. It is a vocation. But I also live in Washington and politics is the name of the game there.

I’m not a big “D” American Democrat, just a small “d” democrat. So, you should understand my perspective. On 6 October, I would have told you that the reaction to a Hamas attack on Israel, backed by Iran, would not have been the reaction that the Biden administration had. And for that, I give full credit to Joe Biden.

I worked at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee back in the day, and Joe Biden was variously our chairman, or what’s called our ranking member, our lead minority representative. Joe Biden is what I call an old-school Democrat. The Democratic Party was the bastion of pro-Israel sentiment in the United States for many, many years, until probably the last 15 or 20 years. We can talk about that if you’d like, and what has happened. But Joe Biden is of that old school. When I look at his administration, I see the people who populate its most important positions. They are all alumni of the Obama administration.

So, to understand the foreign policy of the Biden administration, you really need to do no more than look back at the Obama administration. That’s who these guys are. Obama couldn’t stand the Israelis. He didn’t like Bibi; but the honest truth is he really didn’t like Israel. A lot of American presidents, Ronald Reagan, George W. Bush, were animated by sentiment, a real feeling that Israel was the underdog. Coming from behind. Israel represented everything that America loves – a small doughty democracy, standing up to evil, tyrannical enemies, and defeating them. That’s our story. That’s their story. Especially after 1967. All that really was a strong vein in American politics.

Barack Obama was the next generation from that. He wasn’t interested in that history, didn’t care about it, didn’t like Israel, didn’t think the Middle East was worth an investment. He also thought that everything about American foreign policy for the last 50 years was probably backwards. We had seen everything through the prism of Israel and the Sunni Arab countries. Energy, Saudi Arabia. Remember, FDR meeting with King Abdullah just after the Yalta meetings? That’s the Obama American perspective. As president, Barack Obama told himself that the old style Democrats had it all wrong. The Middle East was a kind of cesspool where nothing had ever gone our way.

For President Obama it was a case of not looking at the Middle East through the prism of Israel and the Sunnis, but looking at the Middle East through the prism of Iran and the Shia. It’s a hyper-intellectualised idea. It’s the kind of thing that you do if you spend a lot of time in university and you don’t spend a lot of time in the real world. That’s fine. And when you say American Middle East policy has not been a shining success, you’re not speaking incorrectly. Barack Obama was obviously the author and believer in the Iran nuclear deal. We can talk about that if you’d like. I’m sure you can guess what I think about this.

Nonetheless, all of the people who came out of the Obama administration, including the current president of the United States, believed that that the Iran nuclear deal was the greatest foreign policy accomplishment of the Obama years. They went on to believe that Trump then ruined it and betrayed it – the best deal you could have. For them, the deal stopped the Iranians having a nuclear weapon. Trump was a disaster. Okay, so that’s who they are.

Our presidential inauguration is on 20 January. Since February 2021, when Joe Biden took over from Barack Obama, the US has completely upended its foreign policy. It has stopped imposing sanctions on Iran, it has allowed Iran to recoup $US85-95 billion in additional oil revenues. This is one of the reasons I get less excited about the $US6 billion in Qatar than some of my colleagues. Recouped billions from illegal oil sales that are sanctionable under US law, mostly to China, by Iran. If you look at the record, and I have very closely, what you see is that there are human rights sanctions, there are some terrorism sanctions, but there are very few oil sanctions that are imposed by the Biden administration. And Iran makes all this money. Now this is a message to the Iranians. The message that we want to do business with you, we’re opening things up, we’re letting you get some money, because maybe you’re going to come back into the deal. Well, of course, the Iranians were having none of it. And it ended up not happening. We can talk about some more of the signals that the Biden administration sent to Iran.

To cut a long story short, this was the administration that if you had asked me on 6 October what they were going to do if the Iranians sponsored a massive attack on Israel by one of their terrorist proxies, I would have imagined the Biden administration they would have said much along the lines of “deplorable, terrible, loss of life awful, but you know, we must understand the context”. I would have thought the president of UPenn could have written a good statement for them. But that’s not what happened. And the main reason is because of Joe Biden. Now, I didn’t vote for him and I don’t think he’s the smartest man in the world. We could go on here. Yet, Biden was having none of it. He is, as he says, a Zionist. And he doesn’t say it with any shame, with any of that left-wing university sort of, you know, “but I mean, of course, you know, well, yes but”. No. He says, “I support the State of Israel”.

I now believe that in the Biden administration, Biden has stood — to use the William F. Buckley phrase – athwart his team, and said, stop. I’m with them. In spite of policy after policy being dictated by his Obama staff, including the slow rolling of support for Ukraine and a lack of a resolute policy towards Russia, including the lack of a strong policy towards China, and so on.

Quietly, there has been huge pressure. And this is a phenomenon that’s familiar, because it’s happened to every left-wing party in the world. So, Biden is standing atop a party in which the base, our beloved expression, doesn’t really agree with him about his Israel policy. We have an election next year and it’s a pretty fraught campaign. And over the last two months, Joe Biden has lost ten points with his base over Israel. Losing ten points with your base is not a good thing. A leader is suddenly surrounded by all these people who disagree ideologically with his policy. They might want you to get re-elected because you are stopping the world from ending and a dictatorship from being reinstated with Donald Trump. But it is a leadership that is facing the prospect of losing money, and states like Michigan, and so on. He has already lost the New York Times and The Washington Post.

Quietly, the team in the White House has started to say to the Israelis, “We’re with you, but hurry it up, slow it down. Fewer airstrikes, more door-to-door fighting. Yeah, we know more of you’re going to die. But then again, we can stick with you longer if more of you die.” And you’ve seen those numbers accelerate. The numbers are going up. Palestinian deaths are going up. Hamas, the Ministry of Health lies, overestimates, lies. On the other hand, numbers are in the thousands. And not the single thousands. So the pressure is building. There are letters, protest, internal dissent memos in the Department of State from hundreds of foreign service officers saying, “You’re doing the wrong thing. I don’t support you. I’m against you. I can’t believe you’re doing this.”

These are the pressures that are building on Biden. As well, there is the United Nations and the Obama people in the administration. I was asked today why Joe Biden is more responsive about the West Bank and Gaza and Palestine to his constituents, while the Republicans don’t worry about it as much? The answer is because they’re two very different parties. The Republican Party, for good and for ill, is a very grassroots party now. It’s a party of middle America. It’s a party of the working class, non-college educated white people and minorities, increasingly. The Democratic Party is a party of coastal elites and university graduates. It’s the same in Australia.

The base of the Democratic Party is very important. And winning an election is about – not my words, but the words of many people I know – the future of democracy in America. You’re going to have to break a few eggs. So, you believe in Israel, you believe in its right to defend itself. You don’t like Bibi, but you’re a Zionist. But you’ve got to win the election. And this is more important. This is existential. So, the pressure is building. I can’t tell you when it’s going to break, but I can tell you in the last 24 hours, you saw the evidence of it. That Joe Biden started changing his tune. “This is what I said to Bibi, you’ve got to minimise casualties, you got to get out.” That will get stronger.

Somebody asked me how is that going to be done? There are a lot of ways. First of all, the Americans don’t have to do it themselves. They can let our European allies speak out or the United Nations, the UNWRA. the UNHCR and every other UN agency that American pay the vast amounts to finance, speak out. The US can stop shipping weaponry as a fast pace or stop holding the line against people who hate Israel. All the while, you know, standing strongly against antisemitism, for example.

And so that is what the future looks like. That’s why Israel is on the clock. And they know it. I didn’t like it when Biden said, “Do not do the stupid things that we did after 9/11,” in large part because I don’t know what he thought he was talking about. But there’s a vein of truth in that. The Israelis have still not gotten beyond the horror. And it’s not vengeance. It’s the need to deal with the people who did the worst things you can imagine and worse. I’ve deliberately not watched the footage from October 7, but everybody I know who has, has been changed. And I say that not in a light Hollywood way. These are things you can’t forget. These are the things that Dwight Eisenhower when he walked into concentration camps could not believe. It’s the phrase, the inhumanity of man to man.

So, to me, the Israelis haven’t thought forward enough. And it’s going to be very hard for them to do so, because there are no easy answers. It’s not like the peace process. We could all sit down and sort out the peace process in this room, because we all know what the end looks like. It’s just a question of how we get from here to there. This is not like that. This is not an end game that is obvious to any of us. And while there are bureaucrats and peace processes, and apparatchiks, who think they know exactly how to handle the problems by doing what we always did that worked so well. That did not work – it led to October 7.

But if the Israelis do not take the reins in answering this question, it will be answered for them. And they don’t know what the answer is. They can’t figure out how they’re going to be able to do the things they need to do, that they perceive that will be needed. What will be needed in the aftermath in Gaza, and at the same time satisfy the international community? The answer to the question, the eternal question of Palestine. The Israelis need to own this. They need to be forward-leaning. Not caught in the moment. There are 120-130 hostages still there. Many dead, some alive, and they want them back. They want to kill everybody who ever thought that what happened on October 7 was a good idea, and financed it, and supported it, and paid for it. And I’m with them 150 per cent. But if they do not take the initiative within the coming months, the initiative will be taken for them, as it has been over the last 55 years.

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Question: Let’s take what you said about Iran – and I agree with what you say – and go back to the 1930s where we had the notion that we could talk our way to peace but then found we had to bomb our way to peace, and that certain people had to be annihilated on our way to peace. The West seems to be approaching a similar sort of instability as in the 1930s. Even as it fights a war, Israel is a modern democratic society with differing opinions being offered about how to lead. Can a democratic civilisation stand against tyranny? Can we work out how to do it? These discussions are fine. But, in the last analysis, as we found out in 1939, you have to raise the troops. So where do we go in this? It’s really existential for all of us, not just Israel.

Danielle Pletka: It’s a wonderful question. For those of us who pay attention to the world, we look at not just Israel, but we look at what China is doing in the South China Sea, we look at what the Russians are doing in Ukraine. And not just that, we look at the collapse of Africa, the spread of ISIS and Al Qaeda in Africa, which we don’t talk about at all. But if I showed you a map, you would be gobsmacked at how ISIS and Al Qaeda have taken territory and governance throughout Africa. You look at the collapse of governments, the spread of sort of 1970s-style left-wing Marxism in Latin America. You look at the divisions in Europe, and you say to yourself, I feel like I’m in 1935.

We don’t need a strong man to answer these questions for us. And you know, I’m not a glass-half-full person ever, as my family will attest. But I have nothing but contempt for Israel’s people who are demonstrating against the judicial reforms. The judiciary needs reforms, it is untethered to any democratic ideas.

That said, however, we’re the people who win. We are always the people who win. It doesn’t matter. Hitler, Stalin, Lenin, every single one of them, even China, we win. You know why? We’re better. And I say this to people who question how I can talk about the need to do these things in Iraq or Iran. Or, judge me as a cultural imperialist.

I say, “What is it you don’t believe in? Is it religious freedom? Is it women’s rights? Is it political freedom? Is it press freedom? Is it democracy, human rights? What don’t you believe in?” They answer, “Oh, we believe in all those things. Yes. But you know, you can’t force them.” And the answer is, you can’t force them. But you can stand up and tell everybody, actually, that we are better. We are better than Xi Jinping. We are better than Ayatollah Khomeini. We are better than Hamas. We are better than Putin. We are better than all of these people. And that’s not cultural imperialism.

History is on our side every single time. Sometimes you force us to get to kill you. Sometimes you force us to bomb Dresden, or Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Sometimes you push us too far. And we have to stand up and do things that are against our core values in order to defeat a greater enemy. But guess what? If you look at the tide of history, not the arc that Obama loved, but the tide of history, it is 100 per cent on our side. That’s why I never hesitate in these environments to stand up for the things I believe in. You want me to stand up against the ayatollahs? You want me to say that the Uyghurs shouldn’t be in should be in concentration camps? I will say that forever.

One final little asterisk. Remember, we idealise the past. But the consensus of World War II was hard fought. Look at the New York Times orThe Washington Post throughout World War II and how they questioned the war effort. Their indifference to the concentration (death) camps. Criticisms in the best magazines at US policy under the Marshall Plan after the war in Germany.

Yes, of course, minute to minute, it sucks. The fight is awful, terrible people are in charge. But we win, we are better, our values are better. Our government is better. Our people are better. Our media are better. And if you just remember that you can get through harder times.