‘Outrage’ at the United Nations

In Alice in Wonderland, we hear this wondrously subversive quote from the White Queen:

“Why sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”

            That pretty much describes the state of Israel’s outrage regarding the recent U.N. Security Council vote condemning its illegal settlements, and especially the United States’ refusal to block this vote. Bibi Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, called President Obama’s abstention (the U.S. didn’t vote for the measure; it abstained, thus withholding its customary veto which has allowed Israel to avoid the full censure of the U.N. in all past votes condemning it) a “shameful ambush.” This language, and Israeli outrage, thus qualifies as Alice-in-Wonderland thinking, or perhaps better, newspeak. Its sense is patent nonsense, not least because it turns the real situation on its head. Israel is the aggressor here, Israel is the violator of dozens of United Nations’ resolutions condemning its illegal settlements, as the last one did, as “a flagrant violation under international law.” That is, nearly 600,000 Israelis live in settlements, mostly in the West Bank (the presumptive home of a Palestinian state) and East Jerusalem (long allocated as the Palestinian portion of that putatively international city), and every one of them is illegal—an attempt, according to most observers, to literally steal Palestinian land and eventually make a Palestinian state an impossibility. Though the United States has not condemned the building of new settlements as international crimes, it has regularly objected to them as a hindrance to the peace process. Secretary of State John Kerry, in defending the U.S. refusal to veto the recent UN resolution, has said this specifically. The United States, he said recently, was actually standing up for a two-state solution when it abstained, because the settlements make a two-state solution impossible.

            To Israel, however, and to Netanyahu in particular (supported from the sidelines by President-Elect Trump in an unprecedented interference in foreign policy before he takes office on January 20), the U.S. action was a betrayal, an “ambush.” Paul Ryan, Speaker of the House, called it a “misguided hit job.” And the United States Congress, continuing its shameful pandering to a foreign government, on January 5 voted 342 to 80 to ‘support Israel unwaveringly’ and to insist that the United States reject future actions at the United Nations that are similarly “one-sided and anti-Israel.” Several Congress members are going further, pushing the United States to cut the funding that the U.S. provides to the UN (about 22% of the UN budget), just as Israel has done recently. To see how absurd these statements are, consider these points about settlements.

1)    the settlements are in breach of Article 49 of the 4^th Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupier from transferring its own civilians into the territory it occupies. That is because occupations resulting from war must be temporary, not permanent—and Israel’s occupation of Palestine’s West Bank has lasted for fifty years.

2)    the settlements are also in breach of Article 55 of the Hague Regulations, according to which an occupier must safeguard occupied properties and maintain the status quo. Instead, the Israeli settlements actually undermine public order, and inflict major and usually negative changes upon the territory they occupy.

That these are violations of international law is thus clear and evident to any impartial observer. Even Israeli groups like B’Tselem have agreed with such analyses and have called on the government of Israel to suspend all new settlement programs and, at the very least, stop giving financial incentives to Israeli citizens to populate new settlements. B’Tselem has also called for the gradual dismantling of all existing settlements and the resettling of the settler population, including the nearly 200,000 living in Palestinian neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, to legal communities within the borders of the Israeli state. In other words, far from encouraging new settlements, as the current government (supported by the rabid Israel supporters in the U.S. Congress) is doing, this Israeli organization calls for just the opposite: the government should dismantle settlements and adhere to Israel’s obligations under international law.

            But of course, any criticism both inside and outside of Israel, is treated as betrayal, terrorism, anti-semitism, and the ambush of the “only democracy in the Middle East.” As Alon Ben Meir notes in his piece “The Settlements: Self-Entrapment of Existential Proportions,” (Huffington Post Sept. 8, 2016), though Netanyahu claims that the settlements are not an obstacle to peace and a two-state solution,

…In the same breath, he publicly and repeatedly states that the Jews have an inalienable historic right to the entire “land of Israel,” especially the West Bank. As such, Israel is not an occupying power and has the inherent right to establish settlements on any part of its historic land.

Read that again. Despite the fact that the Israelis have occupied Palestinian lands illegally since the 1967 war, and despite the fact that every rational observer regards those usurped Palestinian lands as the basis for peace via a two-state solution (where Israel would keep its lands behind the green line and the Palestinians would get the West Bank, Gaza and eastern Jerusalem for their state), Netanyahu dismisses all of this by recourse to the old “land of Israel” argument. ‘It’s in the Bible.’ ‘It’s in our book.’ ‘God gave us this land (hence the historic written-by-God right to the entire “land of Israel” or Eretz Israel) and we therefore own it— regardless of the Palestinians who have lived and worked this land for generations.’ Therefore, war or no war, UN or no UN, “Israel is NOT an occupying power” and can therefore establish settlements anywhere it chooses on its God-given land. And it can push and separate and create Bantustans for Palestinians who are nothing but interlopers squatting on God’s land anyway. And finally, as has long been the position of the extreme right in Israel—like Naftali Bennett of the Jewish Home Party, AND David Friedman, Trump’s choice to be America’s Ambassador to Israel—settlement expansion is really the tip of the spear of annexation of the entire West Bank into the longed-for Greater Israel that will do away with Palestinian statehood and Palestinians entirely.

            So when the United Nations Security Council passes a resolution that disputes Israel’s right to do whatever it wishes with its land and the ‘squatters’ who live there, it goes berserk (along with the white supremacist toadies in the U.S. Congress), and shouts “ambush” and “hit job” and “monumental betrayal.” And it gets the President-Elect to vow that once he gets into office, the United States of America will go the distance to support Israel’s God-given right to steal all the Palestinian lands it wants or needs to cement its European-based claim to dominance in the Middle East. End of story.

            Meantime, we who can read and who know the history of this most outrageous, most openly-fascist heist of a country in modern times, can only shake our heads and wonder how long this—the real outrage: the theft of Palestine from its indigenous people—can go on. And how a world that calls itself “civilized” can allow it, can encourage it to go on.

Lawrence DiStasi

The Truth of Bibi's Lie

Every time one thinks that the rabbit hole of U.S.-Israel relations has reached its nadir, something comes along to dig it even deeper. This past week’s election in Israel is the latest ‘something.’ In the weeks leading up to the elections, Prime Minister Netanyahu evidently feared that his mandate for a fourth term was in trouble, and he resorted to extraordinary expedients. First, he flew to the United States to give an impassioned speech to a cheering U.S Congress in the attempt to torpedo in advance the Obama Administration’s current attempts to reach a nuclear agreement with Iran, and to raise the specter of a new war. Still not satisfied, and fearing the desertion of his right-wing supporters, Bibi began to make desperate fear-mongering statements about the Palestinian threat: on the day before the election, he said openly what he had hinted at before, that there would never be a Palestinian state so long as he remained in office. Then he raised the fear level even higher, insisting that Israeli Arabs (who are citizens of Israel) were coming out to “vote in droves,” and indeed being bused to the polls by left-wing organizations intent on destroying the Israeli state.

            Each of these statements elicited a storm of criticism, both from President Obama’s White House, and from many European leaders, several of whom indicated that if Israel under Netanyahu was foreclosing the possibility of a Palestinian state—the core of U.S. policy for resolving the “conflict” between Israel and the Palestinians for decades—then the United States (and Europe) might have to rethink their policy of defending Israel, especially with vetoes in the United Nations. Nonetheless, Bibi plunged gaily onward, and when the election results were counted on Wednesday, he emerged triumphant once again. His fear-mongering and war posturing had apparently worked just as planned. The Israeli people, or enough of them to give him the victory, responded to the ‘security crisis’ he had evoked, and backed to the hilt both his racist remarks about Palestinian voters and his open repudiation of any idea of Palestinian statehood.

            But of course, that wasn’t the end of it. For Bibi Netanyahu is nothing if not a pandering, pusillanimous, prevaricating politician. Reading the alarm in both Israeli and foreign councils about what his remarks predicted, he knew he had to “walk back” what he had said so openly. And the walking back began almost as soon as he made his victory statements. He wasn’t going back on his commitment to Palestinian statehood, he insisted. He had merely said that conditions for that statehood, at present, were “not achievable.” As he said to ABC News, “I was talking about what is achievable and what is not achievable. We have to have real negotiations with people who are committed to peace.” Ah yes. Bibi wasn’t saying anything new (which he was, and only a craven press would let him get away with such open, outrageous lying): he was just re-emphasizing what he, and Israeli politicians, have always said: we need a partner for peace. We need someone we can rely on to uphold a peace agreement. And that someone would, naturally, be some brave quisling willing to ‘recognize Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.’

            Ali Abunimah in his most recent book, The Battle for Justice in Palestine, has some crucial things to say about this last idea: Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state. This is because, Abunimah points out, this alleged “right” is really an insistence that Palestinians must not only give up their right to self-determination (a right that they, as the indigenous inhabitants of Palestine, have greater claim to than the Israelis who are not indigenous, but rather immigrants from Europe, and indeed, colonizers of the land once belonging exclusively to Palestinians), but also their right to continue as a people at all. Here is how Abunimah somewhat ironically puts it:

            “Palestinian parents are trampling all over Israel’s right to maintain a Jewish majority by having children,” and their babies, by virtue of not being born to Jewish parents, are violating Israel’s right merely by living and breathing. Israelis themselves see the births of non-Jewish babies—whether to Palestinian citizens of the state or in the occupied territories—as an assault on their rights and on the very existence of Israel. The routine use by politicians and media of the term “demographic threat” to describe these babies attests to this phenomenon (p. 23).

So if the Palestinians, to have any chance of a ‘peace process’ leading to a state, are to give up their right to continue (reproduce) as a people, then who would inhabit such a state? If they are to agree to Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state, which, according to writer Joseph Massad, translates into Israel’s right “to colonize Palestinian land, occupy it, and discriminate against the non-Jewish Palestinian people,” then what kind of state, what kind of self-determination can that possibly lead to? The answer, of course, is: none at all. And that is precisely what Israel’s real policy has been for years, and what Bibi Netanyahu, in his desperation before last week’s election, actually let slip from the shadows.

            This position—official Israel’s longstanding and usually covertly-expressed opposition to ever granting the Palestinians a state of their own—has been analyzed and understood for years by most informed commentators on the so-called ‘peace process’ that U.S. negotiators have long promoted. I wrote about this recently in a blog called ‘Fake Process, Fake Peace’ (July 29, 2013), reviewing Prof. Rashid Khalidi’s brilliant analysis of the “peace brokering” done by several American administrations in his book, Brokers of Deceit. Some of what that blog included was the fact that, even in the most-heralded ‘success’ in the American effort, that of the 1978 Camp David Accords, the chief aim of Israeli leaders has always been to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state. In fact, even acknowledging that there is a Palestinian people was written out of the Camp David agreements; for in a January 22, 1978 side letter to Menachem Begin five days after the Accords were signed, President Carter agreed that,

            wherever the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian people” occurred in the text, they “are being and will be construed and understood by you as ‘Palestinian Arabs.’” This was a term of art among those Israelis who denied that the Palestinians were a people. (6)

The seriousness of this denial was reinforced in a 1982 CIA memo (when Reagan was president) cited by Khalidi, which again refers to Prime Minister Menachem Begin:

“Begin asserts that the C[amp] D[avid] A[ccords] rule out the emergence of a Palestinian state. In Begin’s view, the agreements ‘guarantee that under no condition’ can a Palestinian state be created. In practice Begin effectively rules out any exercise of Palestinian self-determination except one that continues Israel’s preeminent position in the West Bank.” (19)

Most importantly, Khalidi made clear that this was the position of not only Prime Minister Menachem Begin, but “the enduring position of every Israeli government since.” So while there has been an almost endless procession of American “negotiators” diligently striving to forge a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine resulting in a secure state for each, this has all been a ruse—a way to drag out so-called peace talks endlessly, endlessly giving Palestinians and the world the illusion that a Palestinian state was right around the corner (as soon as knotty little problems like “facts on the ground” could be ironed out, or a “real partner for peace” somehow found).

            Now it can be seen how Bibi Netanyahu fits perfectly into this long and sordid sleight-of-hand. His real policy—which his fear of defeat forced him to let slip on the eve of the election—has always been the received standard policy of all Israeli politicians and the Israeli people in general. There can never be a Palestinian state, period. To the Zionist project, an independent Palestinian state sitting right next to Israel would constitute an ‘existential threat.’ The fact of Palestinians themselves, whether or not they inhabit a state, is considered an ‘existential’ threat—because ‘these people,’ these Arabs in ‘droves,’ keep having these babies which ‘violate Israel’s right to exist merely by living and breathing.’ Somehow, and this is what successive Israeli governments keep trying to buy time for with their lip-service to the ‘peace process,’ Palestinians must be forced to understand that their ‘right to exist’ does not rise to the same exalted level as the Jewish state’s ‘right to exist.’ Indeed, it does not rise to any level at all. It is, so long as the United States of America keeps supporting the rigged game called the ‘peace process,’ literally ‘nonexistent.’

            If all this were not clear before the past week’s Bibi Show, it certainly should be blindingly, revoltingly clear now.

Lawrence DiStasi

Fake Peace, Fake Process

With the Israeli military again in the headlines, having once more attacked a country, Syria, without a shred of provocation, it is perhaps useful to go over the so-called ‘peace process’ that Israel and the United States keep bringing up to cover their crimes. We are told again and again that Israel is willing to talk peace, but “can’t find a real partner for talks”—i.e. one that will grant Israel’s “right to exist.” We are told repeatedly that the Obama administration wants to be an “honest broker for peace” between Israelis and Palestinians, but can’t find partners willing to make necessary compromises. And so, where Presidents Carter and Clinton and others were able to make apparent progress, neither Obama nor Bush nor Reagan have been able to advance the process, though all have made reassuring sounds about their intention to broker a peace that will result in a Palestinian state. 

            Rashid Khalidi’s latest book, Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Has Undermined Peace in the Middle East, puts all this in perspective. For what Khalidi—a professor of modern Arab studies at Columbia—shows us is that far from being impartial brokers working to reach a just peace, successive administrations in Washington could more accurately be described as ‘Israel’s Lawyers.’  They have been so openly partisan, so eager to please their Israeli clients, so craven in their obedience to whatever Israeli leaders have dictated to them as terms, that they have undermined rather than advanced the cause of peace. Moreover, while many Americans who have thought about the problem posit that it is the Israel lobby and groups like AIPAC that drive America’s middle East policy, Khalidi points out that American strategic interests in the middle East, particularly with respect to Arab oil-producing despotisms, are the policy drivers because the U.S. pays little or no price for its bias in favor of Israel. Though the Arab public rages about this American favoritism, the monarchies that rule places like Saudi Arabia and Jordan and Bahrain, keep their people so suppressed that Washington can safely ignore the people themselves. As we saw when Hamas won, openly and democratically, the right to represent the Palestinians, the thing Washington fears most is Arab democracy. Despots who keep their people controlled suit America just fine.

            To make his point, Khalidi focuses on three “peace episodes” of recent years: the Camp David Accords of 1978 and their aftermath; the Madrid-Washington negotiations of 1991-93 leading to the Oslo Accords; and Obama’s efforts since his election. All three have, of course, failed to bring peace or result in a Palestinian state. Indeed, Khalidi points out in meticulous detail that the chief aim of Israeli leaders has always been to prevent the formation of a Palestinian state. Even acknowledging that there is a Palestinian people has been written out of agreements like those President Carter was forced to sign at Camp David. In a January 22, 1978 side letter to Menachem Begin five days after the Accords were signed, Carter agreed that,

            wherever the expressions “Palestinians” or “Palestinian people” occurred in the text, they “are being and will be construed and understood by you as ‘Palestinian Arabs.’” This was a term of art among those Israelis who denied that the Palestinians were a people. (6)

Khalidi explains that this denial of Palestinians as a people goes all the way back to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 (the foundational document allowing for Jews to have a homeland in Palestine) “which never mentioned the Palestinians by name.” The same kind of linguistic sleight of hand was already incorporated into the Camp David Accords which establish a “Self Governing Authority” for the inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza, giving them “full autonomy” over themselves, but not over the land. The land, that is, was to “remain under full Israeli control.” This was consistent with the Israeli, and especially the right-wing Likud Party’s concept of Eretz Israel, which said that “The right of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel is eternal.”

            Understanding this basic principle—at first hidden in the secret Carter letter—is crucial to understanding all the so-called peace efforts that follow. For if there is no Palestinian people (Prime Minister Golda Meir specifically stated, in 1969, that “There was no such thing as Palestinians….It was not as though there was a Palestinian people in Palestine considering itself as a Palestinian people and we came and threw them out and took their country away from them. They did not exist.” 9), then talk of a Palestinian state is arrant nonsense, a smokescreen. This is why the representative of the Palestinian people, the PLO, with Yasser Arafat as its leader, was completely excluded from the Camp David talks. A people that is not a people cannot even be thought of as having a government, and besides, the PLO were terrorists (until, that is, it became convenient for the U.S. and Israel to consider the Palestinian authority the sole representative of the Palestinians, instead of Hamas, which has now become the “terrorists.”) Then, to make things even clearer, Khalidi cites a 1982 CIA memo (Reagan was now president) that went as follows:

            “Begin asserts that the C[amp] D[avid] A[ccords] rule out the emergence of a Palestinian state. In Begin’s view, the agreements ‘guarantee that under no condition’ can a Palestinian state be created. In practice Begin effectively rules out any exercise of Palestinian self-determination except one that continues Israel’s preeminent position in the West Bank.” (19)

Khalidi comments that this was not only the position of Prime Minister Menachem Begin, but “the enduring position of every Israeli government since.” So, while there has been an almost endless procession of American “negotiators” seeking to find a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine resulting in a secure state for each, this has all been a ruse, a way to drag out so-called peace talks endlessly, endlessly giving Palestinians and the world the illusion that a Palestinian state was right around the corner (as soon as knotty little problems like “facts on the ground” could be ironed out). In reality,

            the Palestinians would be restricted to talking about and eventually living under the extremely low ceiling of Begin’s scheme for “autonomy” for the people, but not the land, all the while continuing to suffer under a regime of continued occupation. (37)

That 45-year occupation, by the way, illegal under international law, and allowing the Israelis to arrest and imprison and assassinate Palestinians with impunity, establish “facts on the ground” such as hundreds of illegal settlements that split the alleged territory of future Palestine into impossible “bantustans,” and undermine the now-acceptable PLO government by leaving no doubt who is in charge, continues, illegally, to this day.

            Skipping the Oslo Accords of 1993, which, according to Khalidi, only made things worse for Palestinians, we come to Barack Obama. Initially thought to offer the Palestinians their best hope for peace and a state for themselves, Obama has instead become more and more subservient to the demands of Israeli prime ministers and their American proxies. Most importantly, he has accepted the “central element of Israeli’s self-presentation: that the state of Israel and the Israeli people, indeed the entire Jewish people, are in a state of perpetual existential danger”(74). In this regard, yet a new rhetorical term has been added to emphasize this “existential threat”: “lawfare.” The term means what it sounds like: Israel’s enemies using the law, mainly international law, to conduct war against Israel by calling attention to Israeli violations of International Law! To rabid supporters of Israel, this is an illegitimate tactic, comparable to the related tactic of “delegitimization” of Israel (which points out that the blockade of the Gaza Strip, or the use of phosphorus shells against civilians, or detention without trial, or Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, are in fact illegal according to International Law.) There are several pro-Israeli websites that monitor such “illegitimate” legal tactics against ‘existentially-threatened’ Israel. No matter. Israel has never had anything to worry about from Obama, or his emissaries like ex-senator George Mitchell (whom Israeli supporters called “biased” due to his Lebanese descent). Mitchell’s mission was quickly sabotaged by Dennis Ross, Obama’s special assistant for the Middle East. Ross undermined Mitchell at every opportunity, finally triumphing over him by offering Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu outrageous guarantees (F-35 jets, a US veto of a planned UN Security Council resolution on Palestinian statehood if it came up, and long term security guarantees in case of an overall peace settlement) in return for a 3-month settlement freeze. But even the U.S.’s added promise never to ask for such a freeze on illegal settlements again didn’t work: Netanyahu haughtily refused.

            The Mitchell effort essentially ended U.S. peace attempts. All that is left is an Israel that dictates U.S. policy whenever it wishes to, and receives in return absurd validations of its every crime and violation of international law—including its recent unprovoked bombing of Syria. The response has become almost pro-forma: ‘Israel has a right to defend itself.’ Against what? Against whom? Against any perceived threat that it defines as a threat, regardless of the evidence?

            As of now, in other words, there is no Palestinian peace process, just as there has never been a “Palestinian people” as far as Israel is concerned. And with the excision and destruction of the names (the 1992 proposal stated that the peace talks deal only with the people, not the territories, referring to both as “the Arab inhabitants of Judea, Samaria, and the Gaza District), comes the excision and destruction of the people themselves. That is essentially what the United States has brokered with its so-called “peace process:” the slow destruction of a people and their culture, the slow expropriation of their land and property and any hope they might ever have entertained for justice. And all of it has taken place in broad daylight, in full view of the entire international community that makes comforting noises about peace and justice and the right of self-determination.

Lawrence DiStasi