An enabler is someone who encourages, makes possible, or overlooks the unhealthy behavior of someone else. Making excuses for and even staying with an abusive husband is being an enabler. Paying bills for an irresponsible adult is being an enabler. Denying your daughter’s drug addiction, defending your son’s unprovoked fights, even picking up after teenagers is being an enabler.
So it is with the U.S. and the state of Israel. A smart and scrappy group of dispossessed people who only wanted a home—we saw it all in Exodus starring Paul Newman. They so deserved our support. Most Americans learned everything they know about Israel from watching that movie, hearing the theme, rooting for this underdog. Like a favorite child who starts misbehaving, over the years, an empowered Israel committed atrocities on the Palestinians and others, and we in the U.S. looked the other way. When they seemed threatened, we were more inclined to send money and military supplies, so hard-liners dominated Israeli politics and a chronic state of bad relations with the neighbors ensued. The truth is that very many Israeli citizens would prefer to live in peace, but they can’t get the majorities they need to change course, and the U.S. participation (enabling behavior) has a lot to do with that. Now there is such a history of bad events on both sides that this will be an extremely hard situation to heal.
Where do we go from here? For starters, the aid we send should be targeted to encourage businesses in the Palestinian territories that would produce high value added products from Israeli raw materials. There’s nothing like economic interdependence to help people get along. Sending military hardware to this area is like sending guns and ammunition to inner city gangs—not really moving things in the right direction.
And when the prime minister of Israel comes to Washington, the message is not that “we have your back”. We don’t take sides. We have the best interest of all people everywhere