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Avnery on the irrelevance of Israeli Foreign Ministers
Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit
[A depressing article by Avnery, who has the history to know whereof he
speaks. -NYTr]
sent by Gush Shalom - Nov 2, 2007
http://www.gush-shalom.org
to be posted at:
http://zope.gush-shalom.org/home/en/channels/avnery
Say it with Flowers
by Uri Avnery
REJOICE, REJOICE: the Foreign Minister has decided to set up a special
team for dealing with the "core issues" of peace with the Palestinians.
Yes, indeed. In preparation for the Annapolis meeting, the Prime
Minister has put the Foreign Minister in charge of negotiations with
the Palestinian Authority.
You might well ask: Isn't it natural for the Foreign Ministry to deal
with foreign policy?
Well, it may be natural in other countries. In Israel, it is not
natural at all.
ALREADY IN the first years of the state, the Foreign Office was the
butt of jokes. A friend of mine composed a catchy jingle, that can be
roughly translated as "The Foreign Office / is very im****tant / Because
without it / What would its officials do?"
The state was born in war. Its heroes were the army commanders. The
architect of the state, David Ben-Gurion, laid the tracks on which the
state has been moving to this very day. Until his last day in office,
he was both Prime Minister and Defense Minister. He never bothered to
hide his profound contempt for the Foreign Office.
The whole of that generation was party to this contempt. Real men, with
a Sabra accent, went into the army, became generals and manned the
Defense Ministry. Weaklings, with an Anglo-Saxon or German accent, went
into the Foreign Office, became ambassadors and paper-pushers. The
difference was there for all to see.
That also found expression in personal relations: Ben-Gurion tortured
the first Foreign Minister, Moshe Sharett, whom he saw as a potential
rival. And indeed, when Ben-Gurion decided in 1953 to retire
tem****arily to the desert settlement of Sdeh Boker, Sharett became
Prime Minister. He paid for it dearly: when Ben-Gurion came back from
his self-exile, he trampled on Sharett and, in preparation for the 1956
Sinai campaign, removed him altogether.
He turned the Foreign Office over to Golda Meir, but bypassed her, too.
The Sinai-Suez campaign was prepared by the young ****mon Peres, the
Director General of the Defense Ministry and Ben-Gurion's admiring
servant. He helped to organize the French-British-Israeli collusion for
the attack on Egypt. In return for our readiness to sup****t the French
in their war against the Algerian insurgents, the French gave us the
nuclear reactor in Dimona. All this behind the back of the Foreign
Ministry.
Throughout the years, that's how it went. The im****tant issues in
foreign relations were handled by the Prime Minister's Office and the
Defense Ministry, with the assistance of the Mossad. Our ambassadors
around the world heard about it on the news.
This may not be a peculiarly Israeli way of doing things. These days,
presidents and prime ministers conduct their own foreign policy. Quick
flights, the international telephone and e-mail enable them to
communicate among themselves. In almost all countries, foreign
ministers are fast turning into glorified office boys (or girls).
In our country, this is especially pronounced, because of the central
role the army plays in our national life. In the Israeli card game, one
general outweighs ten ambassadors. The evaluations of Army Intelligence
and the re****ts of the Mossad trump all the papers of the Foreign
Office - if anyone reads those at all.
I COULD NOT help smiling when I read about Tzipi Livni's decision to
set up a peace staff.
51 years ago, one week before the Sinai campaign, I published an
article entitled "The White General Staff", which became something like
my flag****p. It said that since the achievement of peace was the main
task of our state, it was unacceptable that there was no professional
body dealing exclusively with this matter. I proposed the creation of a
special Peace Ministry. The Foreign Office, I maintained, was unsuited
for this task, since its main function was to wage the international
struggle against the Arab world.
To popularize the idea, I said that as a counterweight to the "khaki
General Staff", which prepares war operations, we needed a "white
General Staff", which would prepare for peace op****tunities. Much as
the army General Staff prepares contingency plans for any military
situation, the white General Staff should prepare plans for peace
operations. This staff should be composed of experts on Arab affairs,
diplomats, psychologists, economists, intelligence specialists and so
forth.
Ten years later, I repeated this proposal in a Knesset speech which was
later included in an Israeli anthology of im****tant speeches. I
repeated the observation that in all the huge government apparatus,
with its tens of thousands of employees, there were not even a dozen
officials charged with working for peace.
This was preceded by a rather amusing episode. Eric Rouleau, one of the
most distinguished French journalists in Middle Eastern affairs,
arranged a secret meeting between me and the Tunisian ambassador in
Paris. That was after Habib Bourguiba, the legendary president of
Tunisia, had made a historic speech in Jericho, in which he, for the
first time, called on the Arab world to make peace with Israel. I asked
the ambassador to encourage his president to continue with this
initiative. The ambassador proposed a deal: Israel would use its
influence in Paris to urge the French to improve their relations with
Tunisia (which were at a low) and in return Bourguiba would renew his
initiative.
I hastened home and arranged an urgent meeting with the Foreign
Minister, Abba Eban. He brought along Mordechai Gazit, the chief of his
Middle East department. Eban listened to what I had to say and answered
with a few non-committal words. When he had left, Gazit burst out
laughing.
"You have no idea how this place works," he said, "If Eban had taken
this thing seriously and ordered his office to prepare a re****t on
French-Tunisian relations, they wouldn't be able to find anyone to do
the job. In all the Foreign Office there are perhaps half a dozen
people dealing with Arab affairs."
So I made that speech, and later talked about it with Prime Minister
Levi Eshkol, and later with Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin - but nothing
came of it. That's why I allow myself to be a bit skeptical about the
initiative of Ms. Livni.
LATELY, THE former Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, has published a
book about the profession of diplomacy. He asserts that the great
Foreign Ministers had a much larger impact on history that the kings
and captains of armies.
I am not one of the great admirers of this man, who is of my age and,
like me, was born in Germany. Sometimes I just wonder what would have
happened if his father had emigrated to Palestine and my father to
America. Would I have turned into an ego-maniac and war criminal, and
he into an Israeli peace activist?
But I am quite ready to accept the central thesis of the book: that no
serious foreign policy is possible without a clear and consistent
long-term aim.
The Israeli Foreign Minister has no such aim. She speechifies, declares
and announces, but it is not clear where she would be leading our
foreign policy, if she were indeed allowed to lead it. After two years
on the job, her political image is pale and blurred.
One time she tries to outflank Olmert on the left, another time on the
right. One day she speaks about the necessity to deal with the "core
issues", another day she says that the time is not ripe for a final
settlement. She sup****ted the recent Lebanon war, but now she
criticizes it severely. After the publication of the Winograd
commission's interim re****t, she called for Olmert's resignation,
intending to replace him herself, but when that little putsch-attempt
collapsed, she remained in his government and continues to bear
responsibility for his actions and omissions.
Livni detests Olmert, and Olmert detests Livni. True, both come "from
the same village" - Ehud's father and Tzipi's father were both senior
members of the Irgun. Both were raised in the same right-wing political
atmosphere, both drank from the same fountain. When Livni's mother died
a few weeks ago, they stood next to each other at the funeral and sang
the Betar anthem: "Silence is garbage / Sacrifice blood and soul / For
the hidden glory]" (Betar, which still exists, was the right-wing youth
movement that gave birth to the Irgun.)
The mutual loathing between Ben-Gurion and Sharett and between Rabin
and Peres is now repeating itself. These relation****ps have a major
impact on policy, in accordance with the famous dictum of Kissinger:
"Israel has no foreign policy, it has only a domestic policy." (It
seems to me that this is true for most democratic countries, including
the US.) Israel's foreign policy emanates from domestic considerations:
Olmert is determined to survive at any cost. Since his government
includes extreme right-wing and even fascist elements, any real
movement towards peace would lead to its dissolution.
IF A GOVERNMENT has no long-term aim, how does it conduct policy?
Kissinger does not seem to give an answer to this. I do have one: When
there is no conscious aim, an unconscious one takes control, a
pre-existing aim that provides a direction as if by itself, by force of
inertia.
The genetic code of the Zionist movement leads it to struggle with the
Palestinian people for the possession of the whole of historical
Palestine and the expansion of Jewish settlement from the sea to the
river. As long as it is not supplanted by a national resolution to
adopt another aim - a clear, open and long-term decision - it will go
on following this course.
No such resolution has matured and been adopted. The ministers speak
about other possibilities, babble about the "Two-State Solution", toss
around diverse slogans, make declarations and issue statements, but in
reality, on the ground, the old policy continues unabated, as if
nothing has happened.
If another decision had been adopted, the change would have been
far-reaching - from the "body language" of the government to the tone
of its voice. At present, the tones that make the music are still those
of the Betar anthem.
Is there any evidence of Olmert's intention not to take any serious
step towards peace? Indeed there is. It is his decision to put Tzipi
Livni in charge of the contacts with the Palestinians.
If Olmert wants to achieve a historic breakthrough, he will make sure
he himself gets full credit for the achievement. If he turns it over to
his rival, that means it has no chance at all.
LAST WEEK, the Dutch government approached the Israeli Foreign Office
with a request to enable Palestinian flower-growers in the Gaza Strip
to ex****t their wares to the land of the tulips.
Tzipi Livni, the Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs,
was unable to fulfill this modest request. The army forbade it.
Contrary to the well-known expression, they do not believe in saying it
with flowers.
*
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