Pete Buttigieg doesn’t think President Trump was right to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. The disturbing story is here:
Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana and a candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2020 election, denounced Tuesday US President Donald Trump’s recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights, as an interference in Israeli politics, JNS reported.
“There are very legitimate Israeli security concerns,” Buttigieg told JNS, “That being said, I would have, in that situation, had this be part of a negotiated discussion.
“The really upsetting thing about what was done with the Golan Heights was that it was an intervention in Israeli domestic politics.”
“In other words,” he added, “The president used US foreign policy to put a thumb on the scale for right-wing allies within Israeli domestic politics. This is totally the wrong basis for our policy.”
“The bottom line is that when I am president,” Buttigieg concluded, “We will do it not based on US politics and not based on Israeli politics but based on what is best for the security of the Israeli-Palestinian [future].”
When asked about possibly undoing the president’s move, Buttigieg told JNS that he will not “make any declarations now about the future of that status other than to say that on my watch it would not have come as part of the intervention of [sic] Israeli [politics].”
The Republican Jewish Coalition replied to Buttigieg, saying that he “apparently wants Syria to have the Golan Heights, supports a foreign policy strategy that denies reality.”
Pete Buttigieg believes that President Trump’s recognition of Israel’s sovereignty over the Golan Heights constitutes “interference in Israeli politics.” That might be true, if Trump had lobbied for Israel to annex the Golan Heights. But the Golan Heights were annexed by Israel in 1981, 38 years before Trump recognized the simple fact of its annexation. That annexation is not an issue in Israeli politics. At the time of the annexation, 80 per cent of Jewish Israelis supported the move, according to opinion polls, “even if” returning the Golan to Syria would mean a permanent peace with Syria. Now 85% of Israeli Jews would not consider giving up the Golan Heights under any scenario. Ever fewer Israelis believe that a lasting peace with Syria or the other Arab states can be obtained through treaties; the only secure peace with Muslims, they realize, is that obtained and maintained through deterrence. To ensure that, Israel’s military power must be overwhelmingly greater, so as to deter any would-be aggressors. Part of that strength requires continued control of certain territories, and the Golan Heights have always been understood in Israel as critical to its security. According to U.N. Resolution 242, Israel has a right to territorial adjustments so as to obtain “secure” — i.e., defensible – borders. That, according to successive Israeli governments, must include the Golan. And others agree: when President Johnson had the Joint Chiefs send a delegation to Israel after the Six-Day War, in the report they wrote they concluded that Israel had to hold onto the Golan.
The Golan Heights loom high above the Israeli farms beneath, and from 1949 to 1967, Syrian gunners rained fire down on those farms below. Wresting the Golan from Syria was a costly undertaking for the Israelis in 1967, and holding onto the Golan in the face of the Syrian surprise attack in October 1973 was even more difficult. After that history of pain and sacrifice, and remembering how that land was used by the Syrians, nothing will induce the Israelis to give up the Golan. Why not recognize the annexation, and thereby help to “take it off the table” of any future negotiations?
Jewish support for the annexation now stands at 85%; Israelis overwhelmingly agree that, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has said, possession of the Golan Heights, won in a war of self-defense, remains essential to Israel’s defense. It is even more so now that the Iranians have been setting up bases in Syria; imagine if the Golan, in such circumstances, were again in Syrian – or possibly Iranian — hands.
Pete Buttigieg has in the past been criticized at pro-Palestinian websites for being too sympathetic to Israel. Would that it were true. But I don’t see him as being particularly understanding of Israel’s plight. Granted, he’s not part of the “Squad.” He visited Israel in 2018, on a trip sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. Afterwards he did blame Hamas for the wretched condition of the Palestinians in Gaza, but said nothing about Hamas’s firing of missiles into towns and cities – civilian targets — in southern Israel. He did not discuss the Hamas campaign to breach Israel’s security fence, nor did he take the opportunity to note that those Gazans who keep being described in much of the media as “unarmed protesters” in fact flung Molotov cocktails, grenades, incendiary kites, and in some cases even fired guns, at Israeli soldiers. He did not describe Israel’s use of tear gas and rubber bullets to halt the rioting mobs, and the Israeli soldiers who reluctantly found it necessary to use live fire, and only in the most threatening situations. He said nothing about the security situation in the West Bank, nothing about the Palestinian Authority’s “Pay for Slay” program, nor the naming of squares and streets after terrorists. He said nothing about the Palestinian textbooks full of antisemitic venom, nothing about the Palestinian children’s programs where little kids declare their admiration for those who “kill Jews.”
Nor did Pete Buttigieg mention the 140,000 missiles from Iran that Hezbollah has stockpiled in southern Lebanon, or the tunnels dug by both Hamas and Hezbollah to smuggle weapons, money, and fighters. He did mention that the threat from Iran was made clear to him by Israeli officers; he described the situation with that country as “complex”; a less ambiguous denunciation of the Islamic Republic as an aggressor throughout the Middle East, especially of concern to Israel because of its supplying of advanced missiles to Hezbollah, and its attempts to create bases in Syria, would have been welcome.
Judging by his post-trip comments, what impressed Buttigieg the most about Israel was the high-tech modernity of Tel Aviv, that is, the Jewish state, as the “start-up nation.” That is impressive, but more impressive still is how Israel manages, despite every conceivable threat, to remain a wide-open democracy. It’s a place where Arabs serve in the Knesset, on the Supreme Court, in the diplomatic corps and, if they wish, in the military as well. It’s a place where human rights and the rule of law are respected. And in Israel, this occurs even while the people in this tiny country are under a permanent siege: they remain the object of Islamic terrorism, of missile attacks from Gaza, of Hezbollah’s building of terror tunnels, and of bloodcurdling threats from Iran to destroy the country. Its people are resilient, intelligent, and brave. Those qualities are even more noteworthy than their astonishing inventiveness. Buttigieg might have taken note.