Nov 7, 2019

Using American aid to exert diplomatic pressure on Israel is widely considered an extreme and drastic measure. In the early 1990s, when President George H. W. Bush demanded that Israel freeze construction in the settlements as a condition for US guarantees for a $10 billion loan that Israel sought to help it absorb a wave of immigrants from the former Soviet Union, the earth shook and the right-wing government collapsed. But the possible use of military aid (the economic aid was stopped in 2008) as a pressure tactic on Israel was always the province of marginal elements in the American political arena. Both parties viewed US support for Israel’s defense as a sacred cow. That all went by the wayside last week.

Two leading Democratic contenders for the presidency, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, announced that as far as they were concerned, the cow was no longer sacred. Addressing the annual J Street conference on Oct. 29, Sanders proposed conditioning the aid on a change in Israel’s Palestinian policies and shifting part of the $3.8 billion US aid package to humanitarian relief for the Gaza Strip’s two million residents. Warren cited the precedent set by Bush of linking US guarantees to Israeli construction across the Green Line.

The crisis in relations between Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir and Bush contributed in no small measure to the 1992 election victory of Israel’s Labor party led by Yitzhak Rabin. Are the indications of a similar crisis harbingers of a transformation in the Israeli public opinion and progress in the peace process with the Palestinians? Or was Senator Michael Bennet was right when he warned at the J Street event that cutting US aid could backfire and strengthen the Israeli right and undermine prospects of an Israeli-Palestinian agreement?

Al-Monitor directed these questions to three former senior Israeli politicians and diplomats. Danny Ayalon, who served as deputy foreign minister from 2009 to 2013 and before that as Israel’s ambassador to the United States, represents the relatively moderate stream of the Israeli right. Sanders’ remarks, Ayalon told Al-Monitor, reflect ignorance and a lack of understanding of US interests. “There was good reason that [Vice President] Joe Biden strenuously objected to that position and why President [Barack] Obama unconditionally increased military assistance to Israel,” he stressed. Ayalon expressed regret that a senior and seasoned senator “is being dragged into erroneous positions by radical elements in the Democratic Party that are unsupported by a majority of the American people.”

Arye Mekel, who served as Shamir’s diplomatic adviser during the crisis with the Bush administration and subsequently as Israeli consul general in New York and ambassador to Greece, told Al-Monitor that Sanders and Warren’s remarks “are perceived here as anti-Israel, which disqualifies them from any contact with us.” Mekel believes that while Israel was under pressure from a US president at the time of the crisis over the guarantees, the pressure now is being exerted by two politicians who Israel considers leftists and in any case, in his estimation, likely to drop out of the race. “Israeli public opinion has not changed since the 1990s and if anything, it has shifted to the right,” according to the retired diplomat. Mekel further believes the average Israeli does not know the details and cannot tell the difference between the cuts in US economic aid and in US military assistance.