Editorial: Good friends are intellectually honest, too

Issue of June 5, 2009 / 13 Sivan 5769

President Obama is off to the Middle East where by the time most people read this, he will have delivered his long-awaited speech to the Muslim world from a teleprompter in Cairo.

It seems like a long way to travel to throw Israel under the bus — he could just as easily do the deed from the Rose Garden — but he promised during the campaign to speak to the Muslim world from a major Arab capitol. So off to Cairo he goes, preceded by a stop in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and followed by a visit to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany — all the better to later make nice to Jews feeling outraged by whatever he had to say in Cairo.

Perhaps we’re wrong about the President's intentions toward Israel. National security or other realities he has confronted in office have led several times to alterations in the course he charted during the campaign (military tribunals are one example).

Still, comments this week by the President and by the Secretary of State about freezing all construction in Jewish communities in Yehuda and Shomron were clear and unambiguous. In fact, they represent exactly the course many of us feared Mr. Obama would take. And those who remember Hillary Clinton's smooch with Suha Arafat in 1998 can't be too surprised either, her staunch support for Israel as a senator from New York, proving retroactively to be more about opportunism than Zionism. Upon her nomination to head the State Department we predicted her current stance and we were not alone; nor, unfortunately, were we wrong.

“Part of being a good friend is being honest,” President Obama told NPR on Monday about the tough love attitude he’s taken toward Israel. “And I think there have been times where we are not as honest as we should be about the fact that the current direction, the current trajectory, in the region is profoundly negative, not only for Israeli interests but also U.S. interests.”

On the face of it, he’s not wrong. It is certainly not in Israel's best interest to live in a perpetual state of war. And his goal of better U.S. relations with the Arab world is worthwhile, generally speaking. The problem is that while honesty is part of being a good friend, intellectual honesty is a must-have ingredient of an effective foreign policy, though it seems to be in critically short supply in the Obama administration’s Mideast dealings, so far.

Israel held a major civil defense drill this week, educating Israelis about what to do should they come under attack. A key point was that trouble could potentially break out anywhere at all, not just in Sderot where residents famously have just 15 seconds to find shelter from a rocket attack.

A look at the IDF map of Israel (above) tells the story: 30 seconds to find shelter — a minute or two, three at most — even as the President seems to be leaning for a call to evacuate every community over the pre-1967 borders. That would give Israel an unattractively thin size zero waistline, and roughly no time for its citizens to brace for the further attacks that surely would follow.

Intellectual honesty would require President Obama to acknowledge that it’s not the ’67 borders the Arab world wants from Israel, but everything else, too. That map was delivered to Israeli homes on postcards. Too bad no one dropped one in the mail to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.