Last night an Egyptian mob stormed the Israeli embassy and the defense minister had to call the US to help get the Egyptians to restore security. The Turks are no longer ruled by the army, and politicians see gain in taking a tougher line. Israel’s going to have to make peace with democracies, or, at least, maintain a peace that isn’t going to roil the neighbors (any more than bad regimes already attempt for their own purposes). There seems to be little reason to expect that past practices will do the trick.
[quote=“NYT”] Israel evacuated most of its embassy staff here at dawn Saturday after six members had been trapped in the embassy for hours by a mob of protesters who attacked and invaded its offices overnight.
The attack was the second time in a month that an angry mob stormed the Cairo embassy and tore down its flag. Coming a week after Turkey expelled Israel’s ambassador over its refusal to apologize for a deadly raid on a Turkish ship, it left Israel was facing crises in relations with its two most important regional allies, with ambassadors in neither country.[/quote]
Apparently, Robert Gates spoke for much of the administration back in May, before retiring as Sec. Defense
[quote=“Jerusalem Post”]
Freshly retired US defense secretary Robert Gates was highly critical of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, calling him an ungrateful ally and blaming him for diplomatically isolating Israel and hurting American interests, a Bloomberg column revealed Tuesday.
The criticism, reported in a piece by Jeffrey Goldberg, apparently peaked after Netanyahu met with US President Barack Obama last May, lecturing him in front of the cameras on the Israeli security situation with a level of “impudence” that shocked many in the White House, including Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
According to Goldberg, Gates later told the president that despite the many steps the US had taken to guarantee Israel’s security - assistance with weapons, defense systems and intelligence sharing, it had received nothing in return, “particularly in regards to the peace process.”
Netanyahu, Gates told Obama, was "not only ungrateful, but also endangering his country by refusing to grapple with Israel’s growing isolation and with the demographic challenges it faces if it keeps control of the West Bank."
Gates’s statments, Goldberg wrote, “articulated bluntly” what many in the administration believe
The column added that Netanyahu had peeved Gates before, lecturing him during a meeting in March on the dangers posed to Israel by US arms sales to Saudi Arabia. Gates reminded him then, Goldberg stated, that the sales were carried out after consultation with Israel and pro-Israel members of Congress.[/quote]Now that Egypt’s iffy, and Turkey’s pissed (did you read about tit-for-tat body cavity searches at the Istanbul airport?), Israel may have to start depending on the Saudi’s and remaining monarchies, if it’s going to continue to follow Netanyahu’s road map to more of the same. So much for complaining about US arms sales there.
So, those advocating more of the same, don’t tell me how does this end; tell me how it even starts to get better. And please, don’t tell me that it’ll get better when the Palestinians turn into perfect neighbors/angels/sheep. What can Israel – the party with the resources, institutions, and functioning political system – do to improve it’s own situation? Waiting for action from the Palestinians, who appear collectively capable of little more than escalation, would seem a bad idea.