Senator Schumer's Courageous Gambit to change the dynamics with the US, P.M. Netanyahu and Israel's stance in Gaza.
A lot has happened since Schumer took to the Senate Floor on Thursday, March 14. Here's my take on what has happened.
Dear Citizens and Elected Officials:
A lot has happened since I posted my essay on Wednesday the 13th of March. Let’s start with Senator Majority Leader Schumer’s speech on Thursday, the very next day. I’ve kidded people that it was my phone call to Schumer’s office late on Wednesday afternoon which prompted him to do this, but seriously, I’m sure he had been working on the idea and testing it for a least a couple of days prior to that. And my plea to him, whom I instinctively went to because of his intelligence and my perception of his decency despite his closeness to Wall Street writ large - was this: If the logic of PM Netanyahu’s policies were carried out all the way to the elimination of Hamas (an impossibility I think, given the military dynamics, the facts on - and under - the ground) the world would see 90,000 dead Gaza residents and 270,000 injured based on where we are now with estimates of 10,000 of Hamas’ soldiers killed out of 30,000: very rough estimates to be sure.
Well, here is the link to Schumer’s entire speech, read for yourself from the Times of Israel: https://www.timesofisrael.com/full-text-of-senator-chuck-schumers-speech-israeli-elections-are-the-only-way/
I think, not being an “expert” in the details of all the struggles there around Israel’s founding in 1948 but being a citizen who has followed along perhaps closer than average due to the extensive coverage given in the NY Review of Books since its founding in the early 1970’s and its especially long and detailed articles about the two major attempts to have a peace process, that Senator Schumer is laying out a pretty conservative case for the right of Israel to exist on historical grounds, and some form of Palestinian state as well, though of course, one without military means.
I would think with so many scholars all over the political spectrum on the many “nodes” - contested nodes - which the Senator emphasizes, someone could rebut, qualify or support them as their own judegments dictate. I can live with most of Schumer’s points - the question is whether Palestinians and Arabs more broadly can as well, and here we come back to the late Mr. Yassir Arafat (1929-2004) walking away from the Camp David meetings late in the administration of Bill Clinton, walking away on July 25, 2000 - these meetings being the last gasp attempts to build on, or perhaps better, rescue the Oslo Accords from 1993. Here is where scholars would have to step in to scrutinize Schumer’s historical outline. Looming up as deeply contested points are the right of return for Palestinian exiles, East Jerusalem territorial and religious issues, how much land the Palestinians have given up overall from their hopes…the question of the boundaries from the 1967 war…enough for books galore on these issues alone.
But having said all that, what Schumer did was still courageous to criticize policies he sees as leading Israel and possibly, the US, to a foreign policy disaster and more bloodshed in the Middle East.
And the responses to his speech prove that it was a gutsy call: universal Republican condemnation, Netanyahu’s outrage at interference with another democracy’s choices (you have to put AIPAC on a shelf somewhere in the desert but not in US politics to swallow that line) and even Maryland’s new Senate Candidate, Republican Larry Hogan writing the exactly predictable response in the Wall Street Journal today, March 17, 2024, which I will not bother to link to.
And Senator Cardin’s response to his fellow champion of Israel, the senior Senator from New York: well, a very muted five paragraphs the following day, up on his own Senate website, citing Schumer’s courage but not really endorsing his stance on Netanyahu.
In my March 13th posting of a 2100 word letter I wrote to Cardin after his “Washington’s Farewell” speech in the Senate, I pointed out that Washington’s comments about political parties and staying away from foreign entaglements carried more weight in the overall speech than Cardin’s defense of US-Israel ties by emphasizing Washington’s analogy on not betraying personal friends. And going further to prove my point is the fact that when Washington wrote his address in 1796 for US neutrality in foreign affairs aside from short emergency arrangements, he was walking a fine line in betraying old friends himself from our Revolution, not the least of which was his “adopted son,” General Lafayette. It was the events after France had written its new Constitution and the Rights of Man/Citizens in 1789, the violent turn the Revolution took after 1791, the Terror, which tells me that Washington was writing no nation a “blank check” of loyalty covering everything they did after the initial friendship. Terror or not, France being the only other major Republic of the day, was soon fighting all the enraged monarchs in Europe: Prussia, Austria-Hungary, Britain, Russia…but even those fearsome odds could not overcome the repugance felt by some in the US towards the Guillotine and methods of the Civil War in France itself. And it got worse, as in France’s conduct in fighting in Spain, brutal guerilla tactics and atrocities on both sides in the Peninsula War. The world has some famous artwork testifying to that, the prelude to Guernica from the 1930’s. Therefore: no blank checks for former allies, remembering here even the fact that it was French supplies, French troops and then France’s naval intervention which allowed the new Republic to triumph at Yorktown (1781), and even given that Washington remained in touch with the French volunteers who served as officers under him, later intervening to save the imprisoned Lafayette’s life when he was unable to walk the tightrope of shifting loyalties required to negotiate the swings in French Revolutionary politics.
And one more question: what am I missing, if anything, of the coverage of these events in Maryland, given Ben Cardin’s retiring prominence, the audacious speech given by Senator Schumer, Larry Hogan’s partisan response (remember Mr. Bipartisanship himself?)…I hope somewhere there is a vigorous debate inside Maryland for the sake of its citizens, if not its journalists themselves, but so far, it hasn’t reached my “in” basket - I’ve had to go looking for it - in vain.
Best to my readers.
William R. Neil
Frostburg, MD
PS I almost forgot to ask you to consider reading Nicholas Kristof’s “Opinion” piece in yesterday’s (March 16th) NY Times: “President Biden, You Have Leverage That Can Save Lives in Gaza. Please Use it.” Here: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/16/opinion/biden-israel-gaza.html
The article recalls a 1967 conversation a historian had with Moshe Dayen after the Six Day’s War, Reagan’s angry “ultimatum” to P.M. Menachen Begin in 1982 after a particularly savage shelling of Gaza and the following account of why/how Israel is turning back aid trucks trying to enter the beseiged ghetto called Gaza:
“UNICEF tells me that Israel is refusing to allow it to bring in portable toilets. Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley visited the Gaza border and found that Israel has blocked wataer purifiers. A British member of Parliament said that Israel had blocked 2,560 solar lights.”
This is in the way of an "update" stemming from the CNN interview I just watched at about 3:38 PM with NY Times long time correspondent for military and foreign affairs, David Sanger. Now I'm not a big fan of Sanger, but he did add two points about Chuck Schumer's speech on the Senate floor last Thursday worth repeating. Not headline points but important qualifications. First, Schumer did not call for immediate elections to replace the current Prime Minister, he stated that they should take place after the war "winds down." That didn't change the huge outcry about the speech from Israelis and the Republican Right though; and the second point which ratchets down Schumer's speech a bit was that he didn't call for witholding aid, even American military aid until the anti-humanitarian policies of Israel change... And a third point I should add that Sanger did not mention is that Schumer was not calling for a permament "ceasefire," but rather a limited one to facilitate negotiations for the hostages and more aid flowing to Gaza.
Nonetheless, the speech still stands in my mind, and apparently a lot of others, as the type of precedent shattering public policy moves that will be necessary from both Israeli politicians and whomever steps forward to represent Gaza residents - and I'm discounting the chance it could come from Hamas itself. But one never knows and the historical track record of negotiations and settlements between seemingly intractable and polar opposite political movements and their policy stances calls for us to keep the door open at least at bit.
Here is what I just read this morning at breakfast from Martin Evans book: "Algeria: France's Undeclared War," (2012) an undeclared war which reminds me very much of the US in Vietnam and the Israeli conflicts with Hamas, if not beyond to other malevolent forces/conflicts in the Middle East:
We are talking about "Secret Contacts" between the Republican Front in France and the FLN militants fighting for complete freedom and national independence for the people of Algeria: "In public the language of the Republican Front and the FLN was bellicose. Both called the other instransigent. Both blamed the other for the bloodshed. But in secret there were contacts. .. But the author reminds us that "we must be absolutely clear, therefore, that these contacts never had the status of official negotiations." (page 176). Then on the next page the author states "that these contacts should continue as the war intensified was not contradictory. From Ireland to South Africa recent history is full of governments wo opened channels of communication with organizations they publicly vilified as 'terrorist.'"