The U.S. is in a bad place. I don’t mean morally, not if you agree that it’s commendable to defend a nation that just suffered its own 9/11 at the hands of terrorists, and not if you believe the photographic, auditory, and forensic evidence that it was an errant rocket from the Palestinians, not the Israelis, that killed hundreds of innocents at the hospital in Gaza.
But the U.S. is in a bad place because around the Mideast and elsewhere, those arguments fall on deaf ears. It’s not a stretch to surmise that many citizens around the world are disinclined to believe anything Israel says these days, or anything the United States says either. That’s augmented by suspicions that any empirical evidence presented by either high-tech government is a manipulation, a fabrication, a lie.
It doesn’t leave us all alone and it doesn’t splinter every alliance in the Arab world, but it does push us backwards in our long unsteady relationship with the Middle East. With September 11th as our own backdrop, President Biden declared without equivocation that American support for the Jewish state after being struck by barbaric terrorists on October 6th is “rock solid and unwavering.” He was right to do that, and right to reveal our own intelligence calculations about the source of the evidently errant rocket. But if pictures are worth a thousand words, the hug with Israel’s prime minister when Biden arrived Wednesday at the airport in Tel Aviv, right on the heels of the calamity at the hospital, will only amplify the anger and deepen the distrust of a superpower that is now inseparably identified with Israel.
In the longer term, American support for Israel’s goals dilutes whatever goodwill the U.S. had stockpiled in parts of the Middle East. In recent years we have brokered accords between Israel and several Arab nations and, most recently, worked to choreograph a handshake between Israel and Saudi Arabia. On all sides it seemed a new day was coming. Now everyone is polarized. Now all of that is set back. The question no one can answer yet is, for how long?
From what we see on the streets, it could be a very long time. There have been pro-Palestinian protests around the world and now, pro-Palestinian demonstrations are anti-American demonstrations.
The phrase “Death to America,” which used to give me chills when I was in the thick of hostile crowds chanting it in the Middle East, has been heard again this week. That’s how fast things have turned around. When Biden nine days ago called the seizure of hostages and indiscriminate rockets and heartless murders by Hamas “pure, unadulterated evil,” much of the world, including parties that would not necessarily show sympathy for Israel, agreed. But the hospital blast— notwithstanding the evidence that pretty convincingly points to a rocket fired by the Hamas-allied Islamic Jihad— turned that around. Now, anyone and any government still standing by Israel is perceived as indifferent to the plight of Palestinians.
With unceasing descriptions of increasingly dire conditions in the Gaza Strip, the consequence of the Israeli siege that has cut off food, water, electricity, and medicine, goodwill, at least for now, is gone.
But none of this has dissuaded the Israelis from doing what they have to do. It can’t. They won’t ignore the atrocities against them on October 6th. They can’t. Just yesterday they reported that a special force of soldiers that had infiltrated Gaza found two bodies, a 12-year-old Israeli girl named Noya Dan and her almost 80-year-old grandmother Carmela. They’d been burned out of their home on a kibbutz. They’d been kidnapped. They’d been hostages. Now they are dead.
Israeli Defense Forces are massed on the border of Gaza, and Israel’s defense minister said today that soon they will see Gaza “from the inside.” Although public opinion is not moving in Israel’s favor, its existential need to cut off the head of Hamas hasn’t changed. As bloody as that fight is bound to be, the alternative is to suffer another day like October 6th. As Israel’s prime minister Golda Meir reportedly told then-senator Joe Biden 50 years ago during the Yom Kippur War, “We Israelis have a secret weapon. We have nowhere else to go.” It must be noted though, Palestinians would say the same.
There were times over the years that I covered the Middle East when many citizens on both sides of the divide told me that they all wanted the very same thing: peaceful coexistence. The longer this goes on and the more destructive it becomes, the less likely it is that this will continue to be true. The longer it goes on, the more polarized people will be, with anger and animosity only growing. Peaceful coexistence will be as far away as it’s ever been. And the U.S. still will be in a bad place.
Over more than five decades Greg Dobbs has been a correspondent for two television networks including ABC News, a political columnist for The Denver Post and syndicated columnist for Scripps newspapers, a moderator on Rocky Mountain PBS, and author of two books, including one about the life of a foreign correspondent called “Life in the Wrong Lane.” He also co-authored a book about the seminal year for baby boomers, called “1969: Are You Still Listening?” He has covered presidencies, politics, and the U.S. space program at home, and wars, natural disasters, and other crises around the globe, from Afghanistan to South Africa, from Iran to Egypt, from the Soviet Union to Saudi Arabia, from Nicaragua to Namibia, from Vietnam to Venezuela, from Libya to Liberia, from Panama to Poland. Dobbs has won three Emmys, the Distinguished Service Award from the Society of Professional Journalists, and as a 37-year resident of Colorado, a place in the Denver Press Club Hall of Fame.
Yes, but.... There’s long been a predisposition to believe the US is the great Satan and Israel the willing devil. Neither has been too troubled by the pr aspect. All readily fulfill’s Ali Khameni’s objective to derail the Saudi Israel deal--at least for now. And Putin, the real great satan just smiles.