EUROPEAN/AMERICAN RELATIONS: WHO LEADS?
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ethnic backgrounds and ongins, people from the Caribbean, people
from Africa, and so on.
It
would have been truly a multicultural thing,
but I fear that the current circumstances are not likely to lead
to
such a
realization. Now, a country hasn't any friends-it has
interests,
as we
know-and I think Russia has an interest at the moment in being an ally
of America. I think the Russians will pursue, will help very much, the
war against terror, and will al low, as they did in
I99I,
America to use
whatever methods it thinks necessary, and wi ll support whatever actions
America takes against Iraq or Iran, and the same would be true for
Turkey and most of the Central Asian countries, Uzbekistan, and so on.
They are all afraid of Muslim fundamentalism. India is another special
case. India is on the verge of an explosion with Pakistan. As we speak,
there are a million more men on the borders, backed by nuclear
weapons, and it's difficult to see how they can stand down. Meanwhile,
there are inter-communal riots in Gujarat and other provinces in India,
where Islamists take the opportunity to kill Hindus, and Hindus respond
in kind. The Hindus have not been the ones
to
take the initiative.
It
seems to be not in the Islamists' mentality to take on any form of com–
promise with other sorts of people. That's the problem . So I think Amer–
ica can have allies of an expedient kind, in perhaps the short and middle
term, and it may just manage to hold onto England-I mean, the other
way around, England may just manage to hold onto America .
Jacob Siegel:
A question for Mr. O'Brien. I'm a student here. In the
event that Sharon would be succeeded not by the hawkish Netanyahu,
but by Ben-Eliezer, who has a lready put forth the idea of a unilateral
withdrawal, and if Eliezer were to carry out that unilateral withdrawal,
do you think that would be more palatable to the Europeans, coming
from a member of the Labour Party, rather than from somebody whom
they consider hawkish like Netanyahu?
Conor Cruise O'Brien:
I don't really think it would make much differ–
ence . The Europeans who are hostile
to
Israel will be hostile
to
Israel no
matter who is the leader in Israel. Netanyahu wouldn't be more unpop–
ular than anyone else; only different kinds of rhetoric would be used
against him. Israel's European enemies are implacable, and behind them
are the age-long forces of anti-Semitism, now very conveniently dissim–
ulated as anti-Israel. That simply won't go away, it wouldn't even go
away under the kind of arrangements that I have proposed, but it would
become without leverage. Particularly, it would be beneficial to Israel's
relations with America and to anyone else in the world prepared not to
