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Letter to the Editor:

Supporting Israel not just idealistic

As Grinnell's fall semester of 2006 began, the mini-war between Israel and Hezbollah was just winding down, and, as one would expect, many Grinnellians have been keen to offer their views on the conflict and what the U.S. should do about it.

However, most of the views that I have heard have exhibited the same fallacy, all too familiar to those of us who advocate a strong U.S.-Israel relationship.

As the argument goes, the U.S. may be doing "the right thing" in supporting a fellow democracy under siege in a troubled region of the world, but in a post-9/11 world where many not only claim to hate us for our support for Israel, but make good on their threats, maintaining an alliance with the Israelis is just too costly. In other words, American support for Israel is too idealistic.

There are many good counter-arguments to this view-namely, that abandoning a crucial ally makes the U.S. look weak and untrustworthy-but what I would like to do here is just to offer a few concrete examples of how American support for Israel could serve America's interests in the most real and tangible of ways.

First, if America had not been partially responsible for pressuring Israel into withdrawing from the Sinai Peninsula in 1979 and from Lebanon in 2000, insurgents in Iraq would not be causing American and Coalition troops there so much trouble.

After Israel ceded the Sinai to Egypt in 1979 under the Camp David accords negotiated by then-U.S. President Jimmy Carter, a "cold peace" between Egypt and Israel followed, with no major hostilities between the Egyptian and Israeli armies, but domestic factors in Egypt-namely, the rise of Islamic fundamentalism-began to challenge the Egyptian government's grip on power.

What makes these developments relevant for current American policy in Iraq and the Middle East as a whole is the geo-political importance of the Sinai Peninsula.

The Sinai serves as the only land bridge between Africa and Asia and, with the Egyptian government's growing loss of control, the Sinai has become THE major smuggling route for jihadi recruits from Europe's Muslim communities and North Africa into Iraq. The al-Qaida presence on the Sinai has even been deemed stronger than the al-Qaida presence in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime before the U.S.-led "War on Terror" began in the fall of 2001.

Nonetheless, the Sinai does not directly connect the African continent to Iraq, and so the smuggling of fighters, funds and weapons to the insurgency in Iraq must take routes through various Arab states.

One of the most important of these routes is on the Syrian border with Lebanon, in a region of the Bekaa Valley known as Hermel. The networks there are controlled by an infamous terrorist named Imad Mugniyah, who is perhaps the only individual on the planet to have a close working relationship with both the leadership of Iran and Hezbollah, on the one hand, and Osama bin Laden, on the other.

If America had not pressured Israel into leaving the Sinai or from finishing off Hezbollah, none of these developments would have threatened American troops in Iraq, and the ability of al-Qaida and Iran to commit terrorist acts internationally would have been significantly lessened.

Second, one fact about the crucial Persian Gulf region that often goes unnoticed in the American and Western media is that, while the governments that rule over the Arab side of the Persian Gulf are Sunni Muslims, a majority of the population are Shi'a.

Since the U.S. pressured Israel into not achieving a decisive victory in its recent war with the Shi'a terrorist group Hezbollah, many of the Shi'a in the Persian Gulf may begin wondering why they should be afraid of destabilizing their U.S.-allied Sunni governments.

In other words, by pressuring Israel in order to appease Arab and Muslim rage, the United States may have eliminated its most effective deterrent against the spreading of the Sunni-Shi'a civil war in Iraq across the entire Persian Gulf, thus endangering to unprecedented levels both America's supply of oil and our ability to strike Iran, should we choose to do so.

As al-Qaida leader Ayman al-Zawahiri warned America in his recent videotape commemorating the 9/11 attacks, "Do not worry about your forces in Iraq in Afghanistan, they are doomed. Instead, worry about your presence in two places. The first is the Gulf É and the second is Israel".

I hope I have demonstrated that a strong American-Israeli alliance is not just a pie-in-the-sky partnership in today's troubled world. I do not mean to imply that American support for Israel is either well-liked or a panacea, and I realize that some of my conclusions would prompt even most hawkish Israelis and Israel-supporters to have me institutionalized, but I think that we must formulate a foreign policy that places security above popularity.

-Alex Muller '07

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