Would the isolation of America persuade Obama not to veto?
In contrast to the Zionist lobby in America which has naturally been urging – ordering? - Obama to veto, J Street, the “dovish” Jewish advocacy group which is pro-Israel and more or less anti-AIPAC, is among those who understand that a veto would not be in America’s own best interests. Or Israel’s, despite what its deluded leaders assert to the contrary. In a statement J Street said:
“As a pro-Israel organization and as Americans, we advocate for what we believe to be in the long-term interests of the state of Israel and of the United States… Ongoing settlement expansion runs counter to the interests of both countries and against commitments Israel itself has made,.. While we hope never to see the state of Israel publicly taken to task by the United Nations, we cannot support a U.S. veto of a Resolution that closely tracks long-standing American policy and that appropriately condemns Israeli settlement policy.”
Because J Street almost certainly speaks for far more silent and troubled American Jews than AIPAC does, that’s quite an important statement.
The advocacy group Americans for Peace Now was more explicit in its message to Obama. It not only urged him to avoid vetoing the resolution, it also said this:
“It is indefensible that the Netanyahu government, heedless of the damage settlement activity does to Israel’s own interests and indifferent to the Obama Administration’s peace efforts, has not only refused to halt settlement activity but has opened the floodgates, including in the most sensitive areas of East Jerusalem. In this context, the move by the United Nations Security Council to censure Israel’s settlement activity should surprise no one… Vetoing this resolution would conflict with four decades of U.S. policy. It would contribute to the dangerously naive view that Israeli settlement policies do no lasting harm to Israel. And it would send a message to the world that the U.S. is not only acquiescing to Israel’s actions, but is implicitly supporting them.”
It might well have been their fear of a Tunisian domino effect that helped to embolden the regimes of the sponsoring Arab states to defy a U.S. administration on this occasion. Their challenge to America’s unconditional support for Israel was, as Tony Karon noted, “a low-cost gesture that will play well on the restive street.“ At least for a while, I add. (The truth about the Arab street is that for the past 40 years very many people on it have been humiliated and angered not only by Israel’s arrogance of power and American support for it, but also by the complete failure of their own governments to use the leverage they do have to put real pressure on the U.S. to oblige Israel to end its occupation of all the Arab territory it grabbed in 1967).
If the sponsoring Arab regimes have the will to keep the heat on Washington over the resolution and insist that there must be a vote on it at some point in the not too distant future, and if the number of nations who support the resolution stays firm and better still increases, crunch time for Obama on the Israel-Palestine conflict will arrive.
If and when it does he will have three options: to veto; to order America’s vote in the Security Council to be cast for the resolution; or to abstain. An American abstention would have the same practical effect as a “Yes” vote – the resolution would be passed.
A veto would protect Obama from the wrath of the Zionist lobby and its stooges in Congress. But it would also propel America further down the road to isolation, perhaps to the point where, like Israel, it was regarded as a pariah state by much of the world. Can Obama or any American president really afford that?
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