The fraud of American "peacemaking"
Clinton is just the latest U.S. leader whose one-sided support for Israel has
doomed the region to bloodshed.
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By Michael Adams
Jan. 4, 2001 | With a couple of weeks to go before he leaves the White House,
President Clinton's last forlorn attempt to pose as a peacemaker in the
Middle East seems doomed to failure. After seven years of a "peace process"
in which Clinton claimed to be acting as a mediator, Palestinian leader
Yasser Arafat said he was willing to consider the latest in a series of
proposals put to him by the outgoing U.S. president, but expressed serious
reservations.
The Palestine Liberation Organization raised three main objections to the
proposals. The proposals made no provisions for a viable Palestinian state,
without which there could be no lasting peace. By permitting them to keep the
settlements they built in the West Bank and Gaza in violation of United
Nations Resolution 242, the proposals effectively rewarded the Israelis for
their illegal colonization effort. And they denied the right of Palestinians
exiled at the time of Israel's birth in 1948 to return to their homes,
although this right is enshrined in the United Nations' Resolution 194,
adopted half a century ago and reiterated every year since.
Even if he wanted to, Arafat would not be able to agree to these conditions
for a peace settlement so blatantly weighted in Israel's favor. His people
would not sanction it, nor would they give up their "Intifada of al-Aqsa"
uprising against the Israelis' continuing denial of their right to freedom
and independence. The fact is that the Palestinians have concluded that
Clinton's "peace process" is in reality a smokescreen behind which the
Israelis and their American patrons have collaborated to frustrate the right
of the Palestinians, accepted by the rest of the world, to
self-determination.
This conclusion is widely shared here in Europe, where many people think that
U.S. Middle East policy is unreasonably biased in favor of Israel as the
result of the influence of the powerful Zionist lobby in Congress. Most
obviously, American compliance with the building of Jewish settlements in the
occupied West Bank and Gaza have plainly made it more difficult to envisage
any possible agreement between Israel and the people whose land it is
occupying. There is an opportunity here for President-elect George W. Bush to
modify the U.S. bias toward Israel and explore the ground for a more
even-handed approach to the problem of establishing peace in the Middle East.
For more than three months now, as violence has flared up all over the West
Bank and the Gaza Strip, the streets of Arab cities all across the Middle
East have resounded to the cry of Arab unity. This has awakened echoes for me
of my first days as a newspaper correspondent in 1955, when I was reporting
the Suez crisis for the old Manchester Guardian.
At that time, the Americans were regarded as friends of the Arabs. Today
things are very different; it's the Americans, along with Israel, whom most
Arabs regard as their enemy. In Cairo and Amman and Damascus, and even in the
sheikhdoms of the Gulf and in distant Yemen and Morocco, voices are being
raised -- spontaneously and insistently -- by ordinary citizens who want
their governments to unite in pursuit of a common objective: to save Arab
Jerusalem from a blatant attempt by Israel, with the backing of the United
States, to hijack the Holy City.
Some people, including President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright, would challenge the assertion that the United States supports
Israel in its determination to hold on to what it has taken by force.
Hasn't Clinton devoted endless hours in his efforts to bring the Arabs and
the Israelis together? Hasn't he been the "honest broker," selflessly
sacrificing all his energies to the search for a just solution to their
quarrel? And is not the reason for his failure -- and you have only to look
at the situation in the Middle East today to understand the enormous scale of
that failure -- due to the obstinacy of Arafat and the refusal of the
Palestinians to accept the terms of peace they have been offered?
That may be the way it looks from 5,000 miles away, but to the Arabs the
situation couldn't be more at odds with that image. They see the American
government pouring money and arms into Israel, to the tune of some $5 billion
a year (far more than the U.S. gives any other country), while the
Palestinians whose lands the Israelis have occupied and whose economy they
have destroyed are condemned to live in refugee camps or, if they are lucky,
to work at menial tasks for Israeli employers. And for those of us who have
been in close touch with the Arab-Israeli problem for many years, this is
very close to the truth.
What about the celebrated peace process then, which started seven years ago
with that famous handshake on the White House lawn between Yitzhak Rabin,
then Israel's prime minister, and Arafat? Surely all these meetings at Camp
David, the Wye River Valley and, more recently, Sharm al-Sheikh were attempts
by the Americans to reach a fair compromise between the Israelis, with their
anxiety about security, and the Palestinians, who wanted to win their
independence. On the face of it, yes. But in reality the peace process (lots
of process, but no peace) has consisted of a series of piecemeal deals
proposed by the United States and Israel acting as one team and reluctantly
accepted by the Palestinians on the basis of "concessions" by the Israelis,
which were, in fact, never made.
The clearest illustration of the insincerity of Israel's approach to the
peace process is to be seen in the Jewish settlements established by
successive Israeli governments all over the occupied territories. When the
Israelis won their sweeping victory in 1967 and occupied the West Bank,
including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, the U.N. Security Council
debated long and hard before reaching a unanimous decision about the peace
that should follow. That decision -- expressed in the famous Resolution 242,
to which the United States was a party -- called for a bargain between Israel
and the Arabs. The Arabs were to recognize Israel's right to exist in peace
and security and the Israelis were to withdraw their forces "from territories
occupied in the recent conflict."
But within weeks of the ending of "the recent conflict," the Israeli
government established the first Jewish settlements on land confiscated from
Arabs. This was against the spirit of Resolution 242 and it was illegal under
international law, which forbids an occupying power to colonize the
territories it occupies -- as is clearly stated in the Fourth Geneva
Convention of 1948.
This matter of the Jewish settlements is one of which I have a good deal of
personal knowledge. In January 1968, I was in Jerusalem on a fact-finding
mission and went to see the Palestinian mayor, who was still in office in
East Jerusalem. (The Israelis deported him a few months later, without any
pretext or accusation of ill-doing.) As we talked, an aide came in to tell
him that the Israeli government had announced the confiscation of 800 acres
of Arab land on Mount Scopus, overlooking the old walled city. On it they
were to build in the following years the first of the settlements with which
they gradually altered the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs in the
city that they were to claim as the "eternal and undivided capital" of the
Jewish State, brushing aside the rights and the feelings of the Palestinians
whose ancestors had lived there for centuries. In May 1968, the Security
Council "deplored" Israel's unilater!
al action and called on it to undo it.
The U.S. abstained, but when the council adopted an even stronger resolution
in the following year, the U.S. voted for it, making the resolution
unanimous.
But the rebuke meant little to the Israelis, who pushed full steam ahead with
their unabashedly illegal project in Jerusalem. Before the end of 1968 the
Israelis also expanded the settlement projects into the other occupied
territories -- effectively thumbing their nose at Resolution 242. At that
time, there was ample opportunity for the United States, with its
unparalleled connections with and influence over Israel, to put a stop to a
process that was obviously damaging to any prospect of peacemaking between
Israel and its Arab neighbors. Instead, the United States did the reverse.
Rather than using its ample resources as a superpower to pressure Israel into
making peace with its neighbors, the United States took on the task of arming
it. The pledge by President Lyndon Johnson during the presidential election
campaign in the autumn of 1968 to sell Israel 50 Phantoms, then the most
advanced strike aircraft in the world, shocked and alienated the Arabs. By
the time Richard Nixon, who replaced Johnson in the White House in January
1969, confirmed the sale, the damage was already done.
It was an action that had reverberating and fatal consequences. Not only did
it cause consternation in the Arab world, but more ominously it encouraged in
the Israelis the dangerous mood of expansionism that had gripped the nation
in the wake of its blitzkrieg victory in 1967. Incidentally, it also
signalled the involvement of Lebanon in a conflict to which previously it had
been only a bystander; the day after the announcement of the Phantoms deal,
the Israeli air force raided Beirut airport in reprisal for a guerrilla
attack on an Israeli airliner in Athens, and destroyed 13 civil aircraft on
the ground.
For the next 20 years I visited Israel and the occupied territories at least
once every year and I made a particular point of monitoring the developments
of the Israeli settlement program. In Jerusalem, I watched the buildings
going up on that confiscated land on Mount Scopus, noting the fortress-like
style of the constructions, with stone walls and narrow windows, clearly
designed to fight off any future attempt by the Arabs to recover the stolen
land. I travelled the West Bank and went south to Gaza and on into Egyptian
Sinai, and then north to the Golan Heights in occupied Syria. Everywhere the
bulldozers were at work and Jewish settlers were on the move, the most
aggressive ones, I noted, coming from Brooklyn and other parts of the United
States.
The Brooklyn settlers have been involved in confrontations with Palestinians
whose land they occupy and they are very ready with the firearms they always
carry. Brooklyn native son Benjamin Goldstein is notorious for having gunned
down 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, while he was wearing his uniform as
an officer in the Israeli Army. Goldstein was a follower of Meir Kahane, a
Brooklyn-born rabbi who espoused violence against the Arabs until his
assassination in 1990. Kahane's divisive rhetoric often encouraged militancy
in his disciples. Indeed, Goldstein claimed that he was avenging Kahane's
murder when he went on his rampage. (The bitterness engendered by Kahane
persists today. Binyamin Kahane, who shared his father's ideology, was
murdered along with his wife in the West Bank last weekend.)
The settlers claim that the West Bank, which they refer to as Judaea and
Samaria, was given by God to the Jewish people, and that the Palestinians,
although their ancestors have been there for a thousand years, are
interlopers with no rights. Therefore it is legitimate (some of them would
say obligatory) for them to get rid of the Palestinians. They call this
"cleansing the land." (Hence, the phrase "ethnic cleansing," which in other
contexts Americans consider disreputable. Not here though.)
When Egypt and Syria went to war in 1973 (the "Yom Kippur war") in an attempt
to win back what they had lost in 1967, anger over the settlements was one
factor that provoked them to so risky an adventure.
But it seemed that nothing could stop the Israelis from pursuing a course of
action that plainly indicated their determination not to withdraw from the
conquered lands. And the United States, far from trying to discourage Israel,
gradually moved away from its commitment as a member of the U.N. Security
Council. In American government parlance the settlements were no longer
"illegal," but became merely "obstacles to peace," although it was plain for
all to see that the enormous American subsidies to Israel were, in fact,
helping to pay for them. The touchstone of America's design for the Middle
East was the welfare of Israel -- at no matter what cost to the other parties
involved.
In 1977, Egypt's President Anwar Sadat took the bold decision to visit
Jerusalem and to challenge the Israelis on their own home ground to make
peace. At the historic Camp David summit subsequently arranged by President
Jimmy Carter, Sadat met Israel's Menachem Begin and they worked out the
preliminaries of the peace treaty that led in 1978 to Israel's withdrawal
from Sinai. American officials helped to draft the treaty and took pride in
the achievement of this first peace agreement between Israel and one of its
neighbors. The treaty was supposed to be the first stage in a wider
Arab-Israeli agreement that was also intended to bring an end to the conflict
over Palestine.
But when the applause and self-congratulatory rhetoric died down and the time
came to read the small print of the treaty, it appeared that a clause
forbidding further settlement building had somehow been left out. And what
was Begin's first brash action after his return from Camp David? He
authorized the construction of a new series of settlements. But there was no
audible protest from Washington, which was still drunk from the high spirits
of Camp David.
It was about this time that a rift began to appear between the United States
and its European allies over the best way to handle the Middle East problem.
America's one-sided support for Israel had become so conspicuous that the
European Community, as it was then called, put out the Venice Declaration,
signed in June 1980 by all nine member states, distinguishing and distancing
their attitude from that of the United States. The declaration stated
unequivocally that the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza were
illegal, and that neither side should take any unilateral action to alter the
status of Jerusalem. The nine signatories reaffirmed the Palestinian right to
self-determination, and they expressed their willingness to take part in and
provide guarantees for a comprehensive peace settlement.
However, this European protest measure did nothing to discourage America's
partisanship for Israel, even though that partisanship was apparent in the
increasingly hard-line policies of the Israeli government. When Palestinian
misery and frustration boiled over in the "Intifada" popular uprising in
1987, American commentators joined in the universal criticisms of Israel's
brutal reprisals, but the government in Washington, under pressure from a
strongly pro-Zionist Congress, continued its lavish military and economic
assistance to Israel.
Only after the Gulf War in 1991, in which the administration of George Bush
needed and obtained the cooperation of most of the Arab world, did the
Americans initiate an attempt to bring together Israelis and Palestinians in
a bid to work out a peace agreement that both could accept. With the active
collaboration of Secretary of State James Baker, Bush succeeded in persuading
the Palestinians that at last their interests were to be reflected, not
subordinated to those of Israel.
In 1992, with the election of Clinton, it looked at first as though this
even-handed approach was to be continued. After secret negotiations in Oslo
had produced the outline of a peace agreement (without any American
participation), Clinton invited the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to
Washington, where on Sept. 13, 1993, the peace process to which Clinton was
to devote so much of his time and from which he hoped to secure a foreign
policy achievement to gild his fading reputation was launched.
As it unfolded, with promises from the Israelis of the release of Palestinian
prisoners (many of whom are in prison to this day) and of the withdrawal of
Israeli forces from the West Bank and Gaza (which were always delayed and
were accompanied by an almost frenzied expansion of Israel's colonization
program of the same areas), it gradually became apparent to the Palestinians
that they were being taken for a ride. Despite Israeli promises and American
assurances, the Palestinians found themselves no nearer to their goal, while
the Israelis made it plain that they intended to maintain their domination of
whatever kind of Palestinian Bantustan might eventually emerge.
By late summer 2000 the frustration of the Palestinians had reached a
dangerous level and their anger was fueled by the conviction that the
American government, under the hypocritical leadership of Clinton, had
reverted to the traditional policy of outright support for Israel, right or
wrong, and of a corresponding disregard for the rights of the Palestinians.
On Sept. 28, the deliberately provocative visit of Ariel Sharon, the most
conspicuously anti-Arab of all the leading Israeli politicians, to the area
the Israelis call the Temple Mount, but that today houses the sacred mosque
of al-Aqsa (and the Dome of the Rock, the most beautiful building in the Arab
world), touched off a predictable conflagration. So far there is no sign of
its dying down.
The catastrophic situation in the Middle East today is not the result of
Clinton's actions alone, although he bears a considerable responsibility for
it. The fact is that the unconditional support given by successive U.S.
administrations to Israel has encouraged in Israel's leaders of every
political tendency a sense of megalomania, a conviction that they can get
away with that behavior, however illegal and inhumane, without paying the
price. It has allowed the Israelis to impose on the Palestinians a regime so
repressive that it has left its victims without any legitimate means of
redress.
When the new administration takes over in Washington, can the world look
forward to a change in this vital area of foreign policy? Will George W. Bush
be content to follow in the footsteps of his Democratic predecessor, in which
case the present phase of low-level guerrilla activity is likely to develop
into something much worse? Or will he, with his seasoned secretary of state,
Colin Powell, return to the more detached attitude of his father and try to
restore some sort of balance to America's relationship with the protagonists
in the Middle East?
What is needed from Washington is a firm decision to curb Israel's
presumption and to restore to the Palestinians their right to independence
and a dignified existence in the land of their birth. The best way to go
about this would be to take the dispute back to the proper forum for
negotiations, namely the United Nations.
A blueprint for a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine was
worked out long ago in the Security Council's Resolution 242, and the search
for peace should not have been diverted into a fraudulent "peace process,"
with a self-interested American president masquerading as an "honest broker"
but stacking the cards to Israel's advantage. The result has been tragic for
the Palestinians, damaging to the reputation of the United States and
potentially disastrous for the people of Israel.
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About the writer
Michael Adams is the former Middle East correspondent for the Manchester
Guardian. He is an honorary research fellow at Exeter University and lives in
the United Kingdom.
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2001/01/04/middle_east/print.html
