A "DEFIANT" Israel delivers a "slap" to President Bush

SHARON DOESN'T WORK FOR BUSH

A "DEFIANT" Israel delivers a "slap" to President Bush with its "refusal" to "obey" Bush's "insistence" - no, his "demand" - that it begin an "immediate withdrawal."

The words in quotes have all appeared in American newspapers, news-channel crawls and wire-service reports in the past two days. They indicate that the U.S. media have decided the story line ought not to be the war between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, but rather a developing rift between the United States and Israel based on Israel's recalcitrance.

Tim Russert went so far as to accuse Israel of a kind of treason against America Sunday on "Meet the Press."

"Gen. Powell, you're a military man," Russert said to the secretary of state. "When the president of the United States says, ‘withdraw without delay' and Gen. Sharon says, ‘Well, we'll begin to expedite things,' is that insubordination?"

Russert captured the spirit of the media reaction with the amazing suggestion that Ariel Sharon somehow is in the employ of George W. Bush. Powell had a surprisingly tough but appropriately dismissive response to this peculiar notion: "Oh, please," the secretary of state said. "Prime Minister Sharon is the elected leader of a democratic sovereign nation."

The idea that Israel is solely a client state with no right of dissent from U.S. governmental opinion derives entirely from the fact of U.S. assistance to the Jewish state.

America now gives Israel about $3 billion in aid - which is, by any standard, extraordinarily generous. But that aid is not exactly what most people - and what most critics of the U.S. relationship with Israel think it is.

Economic aid totals a little less than $1 billion; military assistance, $1.9 billion. But by law, Israel must spend 75 percent of the military assistance, or $1.3 billion, in the United States. That's according to a report by Clyde Mark of the Congressional Research Service.

In other words, Congress uses the Israeli military-assistance money as a kind of domestic price-support for the U.S. defense industry and related companies.

Israel has in fact been slowly reducing its economic dependency on the United States. This year, it is slated to get something like 20 percent less in grant money than it did four years ago.

Does American support for Israel oblige the Jewish state to listen to Washington? Absolutely. And Israel does listen. It listens in ways no country would listen to another country.

It listened in March, when the president declared its incursion into the West Bank following the first spate of suicide bombings "not helpful" - and following that pullback, the suicide bombings worsened.

Indeed, in the past year, Ariel Sharon has shown himself entirely willing to bend over backwards for the United States at a time when U.S. aid is actually far less important to Israel's economic well-being than ever before in the history of the Jewish state.

Israel's gross national product now hovers around $100 billion. It was around $75 billion in 1991, when U.S. aid was almost exactly the same amount it is today.

That same year, when Iraq was lobbing Scuds at Tel Aviv during the Gulf War, the United States told Israel to stay out and not respond. Israel deferred to the current president's father, and for the first time in Israel's history, it did not act in response to aggression on the part of an Arab country.

Prior to 1991, Israel felt entirely within its rights to deny an American request or to reject a U.S. plan for solving the Israeli-Palestinian problem - as it did in 1982, when Secretary of State George Shultz floated the last major U.S. peace proposal. The United States objected strenuously that same year when Israel annexed the Golan Heights, and still Israel did not reverse course.

So why is it so difficult for Israel to disagree with the U.S. government? The answer, as always in foreign policy, has to do with the end of the Cold War. Israel was a vital bulwark of democracy in the Middle East, where the Soviets were working their will through Syria and the PLO.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, Israel seemed to have lost some of its geostrategic value to the United States - and so it has wished to seem loyal as a way of continuing and strengthening this most important of relationships.

In any case, the simple fact of the matter is that Israel is not being "defiant" or "insubordinate." The signals coming out of Washington are amazingly mixed, and they have caused a great deal of confusion about the true intentions and desires of the Bush administration.

The media want Israel to end the war. That doesn't seem to be what the Bushites want, and the Israelis know that.