By David K. Shipler
Secretary
of State John Kerry made the speech this week that he should have made three
years ago, when it might have had an impact greater than to antagonize. In a well
reasoned analysis of the harm being done by Israel’s practice of settling Jews
on territory to be used for a Palestinian state, he warned that prospects for
peace were being curtailed. He justified the US decision not to veto a UN Security
Council resolution condemning settlements this way: “If we were to stand idly
by and know that in doing so we are allowing a dangerous dynamic to take hold
which promises greater conflict and instability to a region in which we have
vital interests, we would be derelict in our own responsibilities.”
But
standing idly by while settlements have been expanded is exactly what the
United States has done for decades. It has never put its money where its mouth
is. It has used plenty of words but no real leverage. It has never made Israel
pay for this “dangerous dynamic.”
The most recent punishment, in
fact, was President Obama’s award to Israel this fall of $38 billion in
military aid, which, Kerry noted, “exceeds any military assistance package the
United States has provided to any country, at any time, and that will invest in
cutting-edge missile defense and sustain Israel’s qualitative military edge for
years to come.” Israel gets more than half the entire military financing that
the US provides to the entire world. For this, Obama gets denounced as
anti-Israel by right-wing American Jews and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s
extremist claque.
Words have
weight in foreign affairs, no doubt. And every Republican and Democratic
administration, through Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton, Bush II,
and Obama, has tried—and failed—to sway Israel through vehement words,
criticizing the settlements in the contested territories as “obstacles to
peace.” To that standard indictment has occasionally been added the charge that
the settlements violate international law that governs the rules of war and
occupation, as the recent UN resolution stated.
But no financial penalty has been
imposed. In effect, because money is fungible, American aid goes into one
pocket, freeing Israel to use funds from another pocket to subsidize
settlements through housing loans, roads, power lines, water and sewer hookups,
and security by the army.
What would
have happened if the US, to halt this “dangerous dynamic” that conflicts with
American “vital interests,” had said to Israel: OK, for every dollar you spend
on settlements, you get a dollar less from American taxpayers—a kind of
matching grant in reverse. And if that doesn’t work, you’ll get two dollars
less for every dollar you spend. There would have been a political firestorm in
the US, of course. Israel would have felt cornered and threatened—the opposite
of the sense of security it needs to be conciliatory and take the risks for
peace.
On the other hand, in more moderate
Israeli governments, years before zealous settlers themselves gained cabinet seats,
a more sober calculation might have prevailed, enough to slow or stop the
expansionism, thereby leaving the door open to the option of a two-state
solution.
We’ll never know. Donald Trump has
made clear, through his statements and appointments, that he intends to slam
that door shut. To the extent that he understands what he’s doing, and unless
he changes his mind between tweets, he will be a champion of Jewish settlements
on the West Bank that will chop up territory so that no contiguous land can be
assembled for a Palestinian state. He will thereby make official US rhetoric
coincide with actual practice, which will at least give American policy consistency
and integrity, albeit in the wrong direction.
His son-in-law, Jared Kushner, whom
Trump has toyed with naming to some post involving Middle East issues, supports
settlements, to which his family has reportedly given donations. Trump’s
prospective ambassador to Israel, David Friedman, not only endorses their expansion
but has declared his opposition to a Palestinian state. He denounces liberal American
Jews who favor such a state as “kapos,” the Jewish prisoners coopted into
collaboration by the Nazis. (Friedman seems oddly blind to the genuine
anti-Semitism among so many of Trump’s supporters.)
The territories in question were
captured by Israel during the Six-Day War of 1967. The West Bank remains under
a mixture of Israeli occupation and nominal, incompetent Palestinian civilian
authority, and that’s where the settlement activity now occurs.
The Gaza Strip, by contrast, was
relinquished by Israel in 2005 to Palestinian rule that has proved disastrous. From
that densely populated, impoverished slice of desert along the Mediterranean,
Hamas has rocketed Israeli towns, built tunnels to smuggle in weapons from
Egyptian-controlled Sinai and smuggle fighters into Israel. The bitter
experience has instilled a legitimate fear in Israel that a similar withdrawal
from the West Bank, which is much closer to population centers, would open the
territory to radical Palestinian movements devoted to terrorism.
Kerry made clear that settlements
did not cause the conflict and weren’t solely responsible for the failure of
peace negotiations, which he and Obama tried hard to revive. But Kerry also
documented the pointed, deliberate placing of settlements to balkanize the West
Bank and cut Palestinian populations off from one another.
“They’re often located on private Palestinian land and
strategically placed in locations that make two states impossible,” he
explained. “The more outposts that are built, the more the settlements expand,
the less possible it is to create a contiguous state. So in the end, a
settlement is not just the land that it’s on, it’s also what the location does
to the movement of people, what it does to the ability of a road to connect
people, one community to another, what it does to the sense of statehood that
is chipped away with each new construction. No one thinking seriously about
peace can ignore the reality of what the settlements pose to that peace.”
And
what have Kerry and Obama and their American predecessors done about this?
Talk. Hurl words. Stab with rhetoric. Fight with their hands tied behind their
backs. To use Kerry’s phrase, they have been “derelict in [their] own
responsibilities.”
If only everyone understood and agreed with what you wrote.
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