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.
