Why Israel is gaining new friends

Read the opinion piece below in the weekend FT. Would be interested to get JP's take on it.

Why Israel is gaining friends
By Christopher Caldwell
FT
August 6 2005

Thursday's atrocity in the Israeli-Arab town of Shfaram - where an army deserter shot four Arabs dead on a bus before being lynched - is the worst act of anti-Arab terrorism by an Israeli since 1994. It is also looks like the most violent act of resistance yet against the plan by Ariel Sharon, prime minister, to remove all 8,000 Israeli settlers from the Gaza Strip by mid-August. Mr Sharon condemned the outrage as "a despicable act by a bloodthirsty terrorist". But there was no rush in the international media to blame Israel's government or society for it, of the sort one would have expected during the "second intifada" that began in 2000.

This is a sea change. On Mr Sharon's watch, without anyone really noticing, Israel has become more firmly anchored in the good graces of world opinion than at any time this decade. As Mr Sharon sought to stem the Palestinian suicide-bombing campaign in the spring of 2002, he was not merely condemned for excesses or derided as a crafty operator. Mobs of demonstrators, many journalists and even several European politicians compared him, without irony, to the leaders of Nazi Germany. What has changed? Has Mr Sharon undergone a conversion? Or were Israel's detractors of three years ago simply wrong?

Nowhere have attitudes towards Israel shifted more dramatically than in France. Mr Sharon was frostily received by Jacques Chirac, the French president, during his first visit to Paris in early 2001. The years since have been marked by contretemps. Back when he was foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin (France's present prime minister) insisted on treating Yassir Arafat, the former Palestinian leader, as a reliable negotiating partner for peace. Mr Sharon urged French Jews to emigrate to Israel in the light of high levels of anti-semitic violence and intimidation.

And yet, during a pomp-filled three-day visit to Paris last month, Mr Sharon had productive meetings with Mr Chirac, Mr de Villepin and Philippe Douste-Blazy, the new foreign minister. Mr Chirac announced a €1m (£695,000) campaign to improve the image of France in Israel. France, he said, hoped to become Israel's "special partner, in politics, economics and culture". Mr Sharon, for his part, invited Mr Chirac to his ranch, praising the "firm battle he is waging against anti-Semitism", and describing French efforts in that area as a "model".

There are many reasons why France might cultivate, or accept, a closer relationship with Israel just now. Arafat is dead. Iran's nuclear programme has proved as much a diplomatic headache for France as for Israel and its Middle Eastern neighbours. Alleged Syrian involvement in the assassination last spring of Mr Chirac's close friend, Rafiq Hariri, the former Lebanese prime minister, may bring France and Israel's views of Syria into closer harmony. In general, as Le Figaro put it: "France understands the risk of being shut out of the diplomatic game in the Middle East if it is not listened to by Israel."

Both Mr Chirac and Mr Sharon gave a simpler reason for their newfound amity: Gaza. "If anyone had a doubt about Israel's stature in Europe and the world", Mr Sharon told the Israeli press, "this meeting proved that Israel's reputation is good and it's all because of disengagement." Mr Chirac praised Mr Sharon for his courage in undertaking the withdrawal. Should we believe their protestations?

Probably not. Mr Sharon has been able to manage his own party's opposition to his Gaza plan only with difficulty. He has an incentive to use any political chip to sell the plan domestically. And if Mr Chirac is supporting the Gaza pull-out as a bold step, it is a big change from just a year ago, when much of the French foreign policy establishment were treating it as a ruse. In Mr Sharon's hands, the explanation ran, Gaza First could mean Gaza Only, with no provision made for withdrawing Israeli forces and settlers from the West Bank.

The real reason that Israel has been readmitted to the family of western nations reflects ill on the west. It is that, for years, western public opinion blamed Israel for the violence committed against it. As the violence abated, so did the blame. The American essayist Paul Berman, in Terror and Liberalism, was the first to notice that "the suicide bombings produced a philosophical crisis among everyone around the world who wanted to believe that a rational logic governs the world". Suicide bombing had to be about an unbearable injustice. If not, it was a mere homicidal cult - an unbearable thought. Under the slipshod moral reasoning that resulted, the more Israelis the bombers killed, and the more they did it, the more public opinion shifted against Israel. Americans and Britons have recently grown familiar with the carping of those more interested in the "causes" of terrorism than in terrorism itself.

So when Israel clamped down on the West Bank and Gaza, "something curious happened", Mr Berman writes. "As the Palestinian situation grew more desperate, the wave of protest around the world, instead of growing, began to recede . . . The protests rose and fell around the world in tandem with the suicide bomb attacks, and not in tandem with the suffering of the Palestinian people."

Time has vindicated Mr Berman's view. Israelis are today being attacked less in opinion columns because they are being attacked less on buses and in discotheques. They are less victimised by suicide terrorists largely because Mr Sharon's government built a physical barrier between Israel and the Palestinian territories, in the teeth of western opposition. Mr Sharon has behaved as if foreigners will despise Israel if it shows patience and forgiveness and will befriend Israel if it disobeys their urgings. His world view may look topsy-turvy, and it can be condemned as paranoid in a time of peace. It has been proved correct in a time of war.

The writer is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard