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Why a New American Policy for Israel? |
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By John Ripton |
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"Now is the time to compel Israel to make the necessary concessions, to pursue international support for economic development within Palestine, and to address the financial and political corruption among both Israelis and Palestinians that drives the enterprise of occupation."
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Recent announcements from United States and Israeli governments preclude any possibility of genuine progress in the proposed fall Middle East conference on the Israeli-Palestinian front. Historic military assistance packages to most of the potential partners needed to achieve a breakthrough in the current colonial status of Palestinians ensure that no new light will be shed on the Israel-dominated conflict and that the real focus will be on checkmating Iran’s influence in the region, particularly among the insurgents in Iraq. In other words, despite the participation of the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and even the Arab League, the U.S. administration has already stacked the deck against the Palestinians and other oppressed Middle Easterners. Key players Egypt and Jordan are promised $13 billion in military sales over the next ten years. Saudi Arabia and the other Arab Gulf states can expect $20 billion in U.S. armaments and training. And Israel has been promised over $30 billion in military assistance over the next 10 years. The corrupt leadership of every one of these countries can count on American taxpayer complicity in reinforcing their grip over their respective populace in the face of rising poverty and Islamic revivalism in the region. Israel has already introduced the renewed face of occupation of Palestinian territories. Ehud Olmert’s disingenuous release of 250 imprisoned Palestinians and release of funds to the West Bank rump government of Mahmoud Abbas signals that a new round of negotiations is nearly moribund. The Palestinians to be freed are former security personnel loyal to Fatah [1] and the released $100 million for humanitarian reasons is only a partial tax rebate Israel owes Palestinians in the first place. [2] Israel hopes these two gestures strengthen Abbas’ government. In Gaza, where Hamas prevails and as many as 80 percent lives on less than $2 a day, [3] the Israelis promise nothing and continue their military and economic siege of the Palestinians there. While the U.S. public is awakening to the reality that its government’s policies have fueled warfare and terrorist activity in the region, especially in Iraq, the relationship of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the U.S.-Iraq War, to future U.S. standing in the region and world, and, most importantly, to the stability of the region is clouded by our historic ties to Israel. To most U.S. citizens the term “conflict” obscures the long-term struggle between Israelis and Palestinians. It has come to denote a feud between two peoples with legitimate historical claims to the same land. Though it may be argued that this statement has some validity, the term itself does not unfold the political nuances of that struggle or the vital role of the U.S. in supporting Israel in it. Take the recent violence in Gaza, for example. I was told by one editor at a major U.S. newspaper that my blogs from Israel in mid-June this year were not posted on its Web site due to “editorial reasons.” My reports reflected on exchanges between Palestinian and Israeli Jewish students and teachers about the possibilities of achieving a just peace. I also interviewed taxi drivers, bus drivers, tour guides, kibbutz residents, people in the streets from many cities in Israel – Palestinian Muslims and Israeli Jews alike. Subsequently, another editor at the same newspaper informed me that my reports did not meet the newspaper’s expectation of “violence, violence, violence” at a time when the violent strife in Gaza captured the headlines. However, my very first blog reflected on violence in Gaza. But I tried to explain how a Palestinian citizen of Israel living in East Jerusalem viewed it. This young woman asserted that a U.S./Israel-led international isolation of the democratically elected Hamas government of January 2006 ensured that the militant wing of Hamas strengthened its position within the organization. Its political wing and its social programs were essentially denied the development and strength that international engagement with Hamas could have generated. Reflecting on this comment and its related history, I suggested that without Hamas’ participation, and with Israel actively continuing its occupation of the West Bank and its complete isolation of Gaza, no viable Palestinian state would emerge. The Israeli government, I asserted, would exploit a divided, weakened Palestinian populace. In retrospect, it seems clear that Israel gained a stronger position in West Bank politics from the establishment of Abbas’ surrogate government in Ramallah. Many Palestinians recognize this and doubt that either Israel or the U.S. is sincerely interested in Palestinian democracy or independence. International isolation of Hamas after its victory (67 percent of the vote) in the 2006 general elections deeply divided Palestinians. It is considered by many to have fomented the recent civil strife in Gaza, transforming that tiny strip of land next to the Mediterranean into a poverty-stricken population of 1.5 million Palestinians literally fenced-in and under siege by the Israeli Defense Forces. Gaza’s walled-in border is an active militarized zone with the ongoing threat of Qassam missiles launched from Gaza into Israel and Israeli air strikes and land incursions in Gaza. In addition, in the last year Israel arrested many of the elected representatives of Hamas and today actively pursues resistant Hamas leadership in the West Bank. Yet the lynchpin to peace in the Middle East is establishing a prospering Palestinian state and a secure Israel. Restive Arab and Muslim populations throughout the region are disturbed by the deep corruption in their own states. Most of these populations abhor the military support the U.S. provides many of these repressive states as well as the military interventionist solutions and isolationist policies the U.S. pursues throughout the region. A fall conference that does not include Hamas is unlikely to lead to a viable Palestinian state, no matter if the U.S., E.U., U.N., Russia, and the Arab League all participate. Radical elements in Hamas will likely be strengthened and those who sympathize with them more alienated by the U.S. and Israel as well as other states that accede to their initiatives. Hamas won in the Palestinian elections of 2006 largely because its older rival the Fatah organization led by Yassir Arafat and now Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen to Palestinians) proved ineffective in negotiating a Palestinian state. In addition, Israeli and U.S. support for Abbas, compounded by his own opulent lifestyle, were confirmation for many Palestinians that the political leadership of Fatah was corrupted and irreparably compromised. Fatah had committed its political future to the ill-fated Oslo negotiations and the Beilin-Abu Mazen Document of 1995 and the Wye River agreements of 1998. Whatever incipient progress might have resulted from these processes was completely undermined by Israeli Prime Minister Barak at the Camp David meeting in 2000. Barak insisted that Arafat and the PLO adopt a “final agreement” and “an end of conflict” declaration calculated to negate the critical provisions of UN Resolutions 242 (Nov. 1967) and 194 (Dec. 1948). [4] Such an agreement would eliminate the former resolution’s stipulation that Israel withdraw its military forces from occupied territories and the latter resolution’s recognition of Palestinian refugees’ right of return to the land from which they were driven after Israel’s founding in 1948. Thus the Palestinians would have no basis in international law to negotiate Israeli troop withdrawals or acquire compensation for lost properties. Barak added that the failure of Arafat to accede to Israeli “offers” would lead to further violent conflict. Arafat had no choice but to reject Barak’s ultimatum. Since then, Israel with U.S. collaboration – under both Clinton and Bush – has ensured that the Palestinian National Authority could never lead to a truly autonomous Palestinian state. Though Abbas negotiated it and Arafat agreed to it, the Beilin-Abu Mazen Document (1995) [5] had already compromised Palestinian independence. Under the agreement no independent Palestinian defense forces would be organized until after 2007 and even then Israel would participate in determining the nature of this force (see Article IV). Israel acknowledges that the West Bank and Gaza are the intended Palestinian State under the UN Partition Plan of 1947-48 but does not consider its broad military presence in these territories as “occupation” since a Palestinian state was never formed and Jordan, which annexed the West Bank after the 1948 war, never fully incorporated the West Bank. This interpretation has permitted Israel to ignore 1949 Geneva Convention principles outlawing settlement of territories by occupying forces except for security reasons. At Camp David Barak demanded Palestinian endorsement of these principles. It is little wonder, then, that a more militant generation – one that rejects the Fatah representation of Palestinians’ aspiration for independence – emerged from the heat of the First Intifada (1987-1993) to resist Israeli aggression and rival Fatah for Palestinian leadership. In the wake of the Islamic revivalism and anti-western sentiment flowing from the 1979 Iranian Revolution, U.S. persistence in arming Israel, enabling its occupation of Palestinian territories, only aggravates the sources of conflict and assures escalating violence over the long run. While no one can justify the killing of innocents in suicide bombing attacks, neither can one justify the state terrorism of tanks crushing houses and jets bombing defenseless communities. Duplicitous negotiation and issuance of ultimatums, as Barak demonstrated at Camp David, even the censorship Arafat imposed to keep Palestinians unaware of what he had negotiated away prior to 2000, only promises further resentment, distrust, and hostility. When Arafat rejected Barak’s ultimatum – sacrifice future claims against Israel concerning refugees and allow Israeli settlements and security forces to remain in a new Palestinian state or face greater violence – the die had already been cast. Arafat became virtually superfluous. Israeli forces bombed him into seclusion in Ramallah, making him a prisoner in the Palestinian Authority’s headquarters. Hundreds of checkpoints were set up in the West Bank and Gaza. Since September 2000 Israeli tanks have bulldozed over 4000 Palestinian homes; not one Israeli home was destroyed in that same time. Over 10,000 Palestinians languish in Israeli prisons today. The Palestinians hold only one Israeli soldier. Four times as many Palestinians than Israelis have died in the fighting since 2000; eight times as many Palestinian children as Israelis. There have been 7600 combat-related injuries among Israelis and 31,000 among Palestinians. A security fence surrounds Gaza. Intrusive walls divide the West Bank, separating Palestinian families, lands and villages, keeping people from their jobs. The Palestinian economy has shrunk by one-third since 2000. Unemployment among Palestinians is 40 percent and growing, estimated as high as 70 percent in Gaza earlier in the year, probably even higher now that the main commercial road into the area has been blocked by the Israeli military. [6] Predictably, elements within both Hamas and Fatah radicalized their resistance to renewed Israeli aggression. Israel and the United States, backing President Mahmoud Abbas of the older Fatah generation, were actually those who demanded the 2006 Palestinian elections. Nevertheless Israel and the U.S. immediately rejected the democratic results. Israel – it bears repeating – detained and jailed elected Palestinian representatives of the Hamas Party. Fatah, however, still controlled the executive offices and the civil service including the security forces. Much of Hamas was isolated in Gaza and prepared for a showdown with Israeli and/or Fatah forces. Hamas was correct in concluding that the U.S. and Israel intended to nullify Palestinian “democracy” if a more radical government was elected. Israel, like the U.S., often employs terrorism as a guise to achieve political and military advantage. They have both sown domestic fear of terrorism to justify the use of overwhelming force against those opposing their interests. The U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and last summer’s aerial destruction of Lebanon by Israeli Defense Forces tragically demonstrate this point. The arrogance of power almost always eschews negotiation in favor of military solutions. Israel’s long-standing conflict with the Palestinians clearly delineates the path that a ‘war on terror’ takes. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan underscore the fact that ‘war on terror’ as state policy only escalates terror. Of course any nation or community of people has a right to defend itself against aggression. Terrorism is real, state or non-state terrorism. But Hamas, Fatah, Israel and the U.S. all use this principle to justify their use of violence, always cloaking it in the language of self-defense and/or national security. They have each invoked it to disguise naked grasps for power over people and resources. But the only way to peace is through nonviolent response to injustice. Those with limited resources tire of unfulfilled promises, resenting those with means who are unwilling to share the material bases on which equality, democracy and social justice may be achieved. Those with more resources are either sheltered by privilege or turn a blind eye to the injustice they see. Paradoxically, however, the lessons the powerful must learn often are found among those with less power and means. Hezbollah and Hamas, while engaging in terrorist activities, also provide services that give people hope: establishing schools, feeding children, building homes, providing health care. This reality is strategically instructive in two ways. First, it suggests that neither Hezbollah nor Hamas is monolithic, that neither ignores the importance of meeting basic human needs, that either is open to political engagement despite the disparaging view broadly accepted in the West that conflict and progress in their views are wholly determined by fundamentalist religious motives. This realization opens the way for negotiation as an effective tool for inspiring reform and achieving compromise. Second, it highlights the fact that meeting basic human needs – assisting poor communities in overcoming their material deprivation and providing opportunities for education and training – are the keys to building trust among peoples. U.S. citizens are shielded from these realities by mainstream media. Technological innovation in the communications industry is essentially geared toward eliciting demand and consumption of goods and services in the marketplace. Mainstream journalists are “embedded” in U.S. troops in Iraq. Mainstream media reports of events in the Middle East offer little or no historical perspective and seem oblivious to the cultural and political differences distinguishing one society from another, one group from another. The U.S. public can readily identify the GEICO gecko and Calvin Klein jeans but knows very little of the Dome of the Rock and the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Thus, while U.S. officials waited for freighters to ship heavy equipment purchased in the U.S. to Lebanon for reconstruction efforts after the destruction wrought by the Israeli Defense Forces last year, Hezbollah representatives were already handing out Iranian-supplied cash to rebuild homes, clinics and repair roads with local material resources, equipment and labor. It is difficult to evaluate or even consider the true costs of U.S. policies through the smokescreen of official disinformation emanating from Washington and mainstream information dominated by commercial motives. The U.S. spends more than $7 million a day in assistance to Israel, most of it in military support. That averages to $2.5-$3 billion dollars a year, more assistance than to any other nation in the world. Estimates put the total assistance to Israel since 1948 at $108 billion. The total costs of U.S. support of Israel amounts to $3 trillion, according to Thomas R. Stauffer in the June 2003 Washington Report. Direct costs are far exceeded by indirect costs such as losses of U.S. manufacturers due to Arab boycotts, the oil embargo imposed in response to U.S. support of Israel in the 1973 War, and U.S. sanctions against Iran, Iraq, Syria and Libya. At the same time, tens of thousands of West Bank Palestinians depend on international relief agencies for food assistance and the more desperate Palestinians in Gaza are not permitted even this minimal assistance. [7] A new West Bank government under the sponsorship of Israel and the U.S. – even with the assistance of Arab states – will be weak and subservient to Israeli and U.S. policies. Even if, as some believe, [8] the U.S. and Israel go no further than to propose increased economic assistance to the debilitated Palestinian populace of the West Bank, this would be welcome but not a substitute for addressing the fundamental issues of Palestinian self-determination and the status of Palestine’s refugees in and beyond the occupied territories. Short of radical changes to the status quo any Israeli-U.S. project would surely further divide Palestinians and increase the corruption of the Palestinian leadership as it participates in the governing of a restive population in the West Bank divided from an impoverished, resentful population in Gaza. It invites the growth of al Qaeda-style resistance in Gaza, in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon, and even among Hamas in the West Bank. Moreover, as the relations within the Palestinian community worsen, violence will likely escalate, as it already has in Gaza and in the refugee camps in Lebanon, and deepen the antipathy for Israel felt by Arabs in particular and Muslims in general. Israel and Iran will become openly hostile, threatening Israeli air strikes in Iran. Certainly Iran, for its part, will increase its support of Hezbollah in southern Lebanon and perhaps even assist Gaza Palestinians against periodic Israeli air strikes and invasions. A region-wide crisis involving Iran, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and of course Israel and the U.S. would not be far off. Such a crisis could generate a military conflagration that would dwarf the tragic significance of the current U.S.-Iraq War. Palestinian and Israeli majorities want peace. This was expressed to me again and again on my trip to Israel as I spoke with Israeli Jews and Palestinians in many parts of the country. Both Israeli and Palestinian leadership are corrupted by the military and commercial investment in governing occupied territories so carved up by some 200 Israeli settlements, exclusive roads, checkpoints, military zones and walls that they appear like Swiss cheese on a map. Peace cannot be negotiated under these circumstances. The U.S. must use its decisive influence in Israel to obtain a genuinely independent Palestinian state. Israeli settlements in the West Bank must be relocated within Israel, or at the very least come under Palestinian authority. The colonialist occupation must be systematically dismantled and the security of Israel and Palestine jointly constructed within the framework of the pre-1967 borders. However, Jerusalem needs to be jointly shared at present with an international commission created under the auspices of the United Nations charged with the responsibility of determining its future division or unification. The Palestinian refugee issue can be addressed through an internationally-funded and carefully articulated plan involving broad compensation and judicious restitution. Recent events in the Palestinian village of Bil’in in the West Bank underscore the unfolding cooperation toward peace among villagers, Israeli peace activists and international groups. Every Friday for over two years and a half these three groups of protesters have staged marches and demonstrations against a wall built by the Israeli government – a wall that is distant and separate from the ‘green line’ – confiscates Palestinians’ land and separates Palestinians from Jewish settlements. The protesters combined efforts have pressed the Israeli Supreme Court to declare the wall illegal and require its removal. Although the Israeli Supreme Court has on occasion mitigated the occupation of Palestinian land, as in this case, the same Court has subsequently permitted the expansion of Israeli settlement around Bil’in. [9] Nevertheless the cooperative action at Bil’in demonstrates that not only is their significant nonviolent peace movement in both Palestine and Israel but also demonstrates how with international solidarity this movement can effectively confront occupation. Peace activists in the United States can play a very significant role in publicizing this nonviolent peace strategy and compelling the U.S. government, at the very least, to recognize nonviolent alternatives in congressional debate and in specific deliberations in military assistance considerations. Moreover, it is still possible to open negotiation with Hamas despite its isolation over the past year and a half and the resulting civil strife in Gaza. Palestinians in Gaza are suffering. Now is the time to compel Israel to make the necessary concessions, to pursue international support (i.e. European Union, Russia, and Arab states) for economic development within Palestine, and to address the financial and political corruption among both Israelis and Palestinians that drives the enterprise of occupation. If the violence in Gaza is not enough of a signal that economic development is central to achieving peace, perhaps this summer’s eruptions of violence in the Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and in the Red Mosque in Pakistan will awaken U.S. citizens to the need to demonstrate that peace can be achieved through recognizing the human rights, civil liberties, and dignity of oppressed people. On what other bases should the U.S. predicate a policy in a region of the world where people are in the streets daily demanding an end to corrupt governments, military repression, and U.S. complicity and aggression? Robert Fisk in The Great War for Civilization: The Conquest of the Middle East interviewed Palestinian peace activist and writer/scholar Hanan Ashrawi following the Barak-Arafat Camp David meeting of 2000. She is a moderate and a humanist who believed in the Oslo process and in 1998 founded MIFTA (the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy). Her comments about the ‘peace process’ and U.S. involvement still have relevance today: “The ‘process’ is reinvented all the time to suit Israel. And America thinks all the time that as long as there is a ‘process,’ God is in his heaven. Now the Americans are indulging in crisis management and individual legacies – the people involved in Washington have come to the end of their careers.” [10] Republicans, in particular, do not want to “lose” Iraq. Both major parties support Israel unreservedly and fear Iran’s growing influence deeply. Certainly only U.S. public pressure at this point will force Washington leadership to recognize the exigencies of negotiating a just settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. A very promising framework for the establishment of the state of Palestine and the guarantee of security across Palestinian-Israeli borders was constructed in Geneva in 2003. Dignitaries from both sides, including current members of the Israeli Knesset and former high government and military officials with Palestinian leaders from equally distinguished backgrounds, convened a conference in which they achieved “For the first time in more than 100 years of conflict a detailed and comprehensive solution … which settles the most critical issues to the [Palestinian-Israeli] conflict….” (From the participants’ press release, Oct. 11, 2003). [11] While critics correctly argue that more needs to done to address the concerns of Palestinian refugees outside of the occupied territories, the Geneva Initiative demonstrates that there are participants on both sides who can meet and design a way toward real peace, not just security. The Geneva Initiative delineates borders, explains how to end the occupation, outlines the future of Jerusalem and the administration of holy sites, guarantees compensation and means of restitution for many affected refugees, establishes a transportation corridor between the West Bank and Gaza, and details specific international cooperation in achieving its goals. The agreement is so fully articulated that the signatories declare that its adoption and implementation “can radically change the mood of pessimism and despair, create emotional and political momentum and bring into every Israeli and every Palestinian home the sense of hope, confidence, security, and human dignity.” [12] This very document should be the basis for peace negotiations at the November international conference on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict announced by President Bush. A viable, truly independent, and prospering Palestinian state in peaceful co-existence with Israel is also the key to rehabilitating U.S. standing in the Middle East and the world. The geopolitics of oil and related strategic interests that continue to propel U.S. policy in the region are doing irreparable harm to the security of this nation and the world community. The UN has issued 65 resolutions concerning Israel’s conduct, none aimed at the Palestinians. It is time to step back from our commercial and military commitments to sustaining Israel’s overwhelming military superiority. This will require the mobilization of U.S. citizens to challenge vested Israeli and U.S. corporate interests in sustaining current policies. The powerful Israeli lobby in Washington will need to be faced down. However, progressive Jewish Americans will come forward to support the new policy direction toward Israel and the Palestinians. Ultimately, U.S. citizens must not let the next Washington administration – Republican or Democratic – continue down the same perilous road that the neoconservative denizens of expanding capitalist markets and the corporate beneficiaries of oil and war have taken us. Addressing the broad injustices of poverty and lack of opportunity gradually erodes the bases of terror. This can be achieved in Palestine. And peace and prosperity in an independent Palestinian state next to a peaceful and prosperous Israel is the first step toward a lasting peace in the Middle East and more broadly throughout a terror-ridden world. John Ripton is History Chairperson at Gill St. Bernard's School in Gladstone, NJ and adjunct professor at Rutgers University. He participated in meetings with Israelis and Palestinians in Israel in June 2007. He writes for journals, magazines and newspapers on international affairs.
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