For Israel: A Blank Check or Tangled Strings?

 

By David K. Shipler 

First published by Moment Magazine 

           This is an awkward time to attach conditions to the generous military aid that the United States provides to Israel. But it should be considered, not only to curb civilian casualties in Gaza, as some Democratic senators wish, but also to curb Jewish settlements in the West Bank, which have long poisoned prospects for Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation.

           With the exception of the Trump White House, which supported settlements, Republican and Democratic administrations have declared Israel’s settlement policy an obstacle to peace. Yet the U.S. has never used the leverage of the purse to restrain the practice. Since the Oslo accords of 1993, the number of Israeli residents on the West Bank has soared from 110,000 to more than 500,000, the number of settlements from 128 to about 300, now scattered throughout Palestinian areas.

American officials have done little more than complain and wring their hands as Israelis have populated territory that might have formed a Palestinian state, constructing government-subsidized developments whose town houses, schools, synagogues, orchards, factories, and swimming pools have an aura of permanence that belies the term “settlements.” They are satellite cities and sweeping suburbs. They have created such a crazy-quilt of jurisdictions that piecing together territory for Palestinian sovereignty would now require the departure of tens of thousands of Israeli Jews.

Moreover, a thuggish minority of Israeli settlers have tormented their Palestinian neighbors through home invasions and vandalism, destruction of olive groves, and even murder with impunity. They are religio-nationalist zealots operating in a free-wheeling environment of self-righteous extremism. This is not new, just more widespread and unrestrained. It has been going on for at least 40 years, recently escalating to a level attracting international attention as settlers try to terrify Palestinians into fleeing—with some success. At least 11 Arab communities have been emptied so far this year, according to the West Bank Protection Consortium, a monitoring group of non-governmental organizations funded by ten European countries.

The problem may seem purely political and humanitarian, but it has military consequences for Israel. What happens on the West Bank resonates in Gaza, where Hamas ruled and armed itself for the gruesome slaughters and kidnappings of October 7. The Palestinian prisoners whose release Hamas is obtaining in exchange for hostages are virtually all West Bank residents, arrested by Israeli forces there and often held without charge or trial. By remote control, Israeli settlers and soldiers in the West Bank seem to have contributed to radicalization in Gaza, at least to some degree.

Israel's Forever War

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

                Forty-three years ago this month, the United States voted for a United Nations Security Council resolution condemning Jewish settlements in Arab territories captured by Israel in the 1967 war, and demanding that they be dismantled. After an immediate outcry by Israel and its American supporters, President Jimmy Carter backtracked, saying an affirmative vote had been authorized only if all references to Jerusalem were deleted, which they were not. He blamed miscommunication within his administration.

The Israeli cabinet didn’t buy the story, saying the vote “gives rise to deep resentment.” Vice President Walter Mondale was booed at a meeting of American Jewish leaders. And it didn’t help President Carter in his re-election bid that November, although his landslide loss to Ronald Reagan had numerous other causes, including the American diplomats being held hostage in Iran.

                Decades later, it’s clear that Carter was right about settlements being “obstacles to peace,” in the official phase that was used through several administrations. But the U.S. never took concrete action to stop their expansion. It pressed occasionally for construction freezes but never dared to use economic or military aid as leverage. President Trump even supported the settlements; his ambassador, David Friedman, endorsed their annexation by Israel.

The years of negligence have allowed a dangerous sore to fester. At the time of that U.N. vote in 1980, there were about 11,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank; today there are some 450,000. Then, a small and marginal assortment of zealous Jewish vigilantes harassed and attacked Palestinians; today, a widening crusade of armed Israeli thugs holds sway in many areas, as witnessed last week when hundreds of settlers, in retaliation for the murder of two young Israeli men, rampaged through four Palestinian villages, burning cars and houses, vandalizing homes, and terrorizing children—children, who will never forget.

The arsenal of memory is reinforced by the cycle of terrorism and revenge. Its weaponry is ready for deployment by both sides at any hint of compromise. So, as long as clashes on the ground occur between Israeli settlers and Palestinians, no high-level peace agreement can succeed, in the unlikely event that one should be negotiated. Furious hatreds have long been generated at the level of everyday life.

That doesn’t mean that Arabs and Jews have universally hostile relations on the West Bank. Palestinians work on construction crews building settlements, in Israeli-owned businesses, inside Israel itself if they have permission to commute through the border wall that now cuts off the West Bank. Some Arab-Jewish friendships exist.

Nor are the militant settlers the only cause of conflict, obviously. Palestinian leaders have a long history of missing opportunities to move toward reconciliation. Years ago, Israeli proposals were spurned or ignored. The Israeli left’s call of “land for peace” evaporated after Israel unilaterally withdrew its troops from Gaza in 2005 and—instead of peace—got rocket fire as Hamas, the radical Palestinian movement, took power.

And yet, settlements on the West Bank have played a poisonous role in the unending war. Combined with stepped-up Israeli army raids against terrorist cells, settler violence has embittered ordinary Palestinians, with growing numbers promoting armed resistance, polls show. Even though the West Bank is far from a functioning democracy, no Palestinian leader can negotiate fruitfully without the population’s support. It is too easy to strike the match that will light the tinder of outrage.

In a perfect world, anybody of any religion, race, or nationality would be free to live peacefully anywhere, of course, unmolested by those of a different identity. But the Holy Land is far from perfect. It is a place where land is idolized, dogmatism is prized, and history is corrupted. The settlements, then, become instruments of politics and conquest.

 Israelis who move to the West Bank generally go for the subsidized housing, the semi-rural setting, or the religio-nationalist belief that God gave the Jews the deed to that land. But some bent on violence are drawn there by the conflict itself. They have usually been allowed to act against Palestinians with virtual impunity.  

Mixing biblical certainty with anti-Arab bigotry has made some settlements incubators of extremism. It has not been countered by any Israeli government, and won’t be by the current coalition, which includes ideological settlers in the cabinet. As a result, Israeli settlers have become both targets of terrorism and perpetrators of vigilantism.

This isn’t brand new. In 1983, settlers planted bombs in cars owned by the Arab mayors of Nablus and Ramallah; one lost both legs, the other, part of his left foot. A third mayor escaped after the Israeli army got a tip and warned him.

Later that year, a yeshiva student was stabbed to death in the West Bank city of Hebron, sparking a rampage by settlers who trashed and burned stalls in the Arab market. Then six settlers, including three who had been involved in the mayors’ bombing, dressed as Arabs and sprayed automatic gunfire into groups of students at the Islamic College in Hebron, killing three. Three of those settlers were sentenced to life in prison but were released only seven years later.

In 1994, a settler named Baruch Goldstein stormed into Hebron’s Tomb of the Patriarchs and killed 29 Muslim worshipers; survivors beat him to death. He was made a heroic martyr by the radical settler subculture and an inspiration to Prime Minister Yitzhak’s assassin, Yigal Amir, a frequent visitor to settlements. Though not a resident himself, Amir identified with the hard-core settlers’ movement.

Until recently, Goldstein’s picture hung on the wall of Israel’s new Public Security Minister, Itamar Ben-Gvir, an extremist settler who had distributed a flyer of Rabin in an SS uniform and declared, after stealing an ornament from Rabin’s car, “We got to his car, and we’ll get to him too.”

Aside from the misdeeds of settlers themselves, their communities have multiplied and fragmented West Bank territory into disjointed enclaves impossible to forge into contiguous areas under Palestinian rule. By explicit design over decades, Israel has essentially slammed the door on a two-state solution.

That was the goal, the former general Ariel Sharon told me back in 1979, when he was Agriculture Minister facilitating new settlements by building roads, pipelines, and electrical grids. “Security is not only guns and aircraft and tanks,” he said then, years before he became Defense Minister and later Prime Minister. “If people live in a place, they have the motivation to defend themselves, and the nation has the motivation to defend them. As long as these settlements are built, a Palestinian state will not be established in this area.”

Like the term “refugee camp,” “settlement” conveys a misleading sense of impermanence. Both have become perpetual. Refugee camps are now tightly-packed slums where generations have lived. Many Jewish settlements began as tents or mobile homes on Arab villages’ common agricultural land but are now established semi-suburbs of town houses and apartments, schools and synagogues—“facts on the ground,” Sharon used to call them.

Each side has radicalized the other. Whatever harmony some once imagined being possible between the two peoples in two neighboring states is being soured into discord every day. Nobody is trying any more to end the forever war.

Jared Kushner and the Palestinian Pretense

By David K. Shipler

                Jared Kushner’s economic proposal for the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza Strip is comprehensive, bold, and visionary, full of noble goals in commerce, trade, agriculture, manufacturing, road-building, local electricity production, water supply, education, vocational training, health care, women in the workforce, and the arts. Titled “Peace to Prosperity,” it imagines the West Bank as a trading center akin to Singapore or Dubai. Its calls for judicial independence, dependable contract law, anti-corruption measures, and administrative transparency that would be hailed by any “good-government” advocates. It envisions some $50 billion in international grants, loans, investments, and global expertise.  

                This would be nothing to sneer at if it related to reality. But to take it seriously, you have to play Let’s Pretend. So let’s pretend that the West Bank and Gaza constitute a normal country, independent but poor, with no Israeli overlords, and free to accept whatever outside assistance it chooses. Let’s pretend that the Palestinian rulers control their own borders so that people and goods can move easily, as Kushner recommends. Let’s pretend that West Bank land is all under Palestinian authority, rather than being fragmented into leopard-spot jurisdictions favoring expanding Israeli settlements and security concerns. And let’s pretend that the radical group Hamas no longer controls Gaza with a policy of relating to Israel by rockets alone.

                 In that fictional environment, Kushner’s plan is utopian in the best sense of the word. The document is silent on the longstanding Israeli-Palestinian conflict, so depending on how charitable a reader wants to be, Kushner’s effort is either ignorant or presumptuous, either blind to the political resolution that would be required before his proposals can be implemented, or based on an assumption that a resolution will have occurred.

Facts, Fantasies, and Foreign Policy, Part II

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.

The Miscalculations of Shimon Peres

By David K. Shipler

            Shimon Peres has been lionized since his death this week, but the praise has obscured at least two of his grave errors, which damaged Israel’s options for peace with the Palestinians. One was his early support for Jewish settlements in territories captured from the Arabs in the 1967 war. The other was his unwillingness to call snap elections after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995. These two miscalculations, which went unreported in The New York Times obituary, have had lasting effect, and not to the good.

Peres, the last of Israel’s founding fathers, had a long list of accomplishments to his name. He was instrumental in obtaining weapons for Israel before the United States became its chief benefactor, and in getting the materials necessary for the country to develop nuclear weapons. He served in multiple posts, including defense minister, foreign minister, prime minister, and finally president. He philosophized eloquently.

Most important, his aides secretly negotiated with the Palestine Liberation Organization a loose agreement known as the Oslo accords, which led to the PLO’s and Israel’s mutual recognition and opened a way to peaceful coexistence. Peres, Rabin, and PLO chairman Yasser Arafat shared the Nobel Peace Prize, awarded too hastily as it turned out. Ultimately, the Oslo process was violently derailed by extremists on both sides. Ironically, Peres’s mistakes were partly responsible.

Decades before, by facilitating Jewish settlement in occupied lands, he had inadvertently helped give a foothold to a movement that became a zealous force of religio-nationalism, one that today brooks no compromise with the Palestinians. The movement, whose adherents now occupy cabinet positions in the government, reveres the ancient biblical lands of Judaea and Samaria—known to the rest of the world as the West Bank of the Jordan River—captured from Jordan in 1967 and the logical place for a Palestinian state, were it ever to be created. Jews have a historical right to be there, the religio-nationalists argue. And they are there, with some among them committing daily vandalism and vigilantism against Palestinians.

The Problems of Boycotting Israel

By David K. Shipler

            A couple of years ago, a retired Israeli journalist, Yehuda Litani, walked into his favorite local grocery store in Jerusalem and noticed cartons of eggs from a Jewish settlement in the occupied West Bank. He had words with the storekeeper. “I asked the grocer to bring eggs from other sources,” Yehuda told me. “He refused, and I stopped buying there since that day.”

            Such settlements are widely considered by the Israeli left—and officially by the U.S. government—as obstacles to the eventual creation of a Palestinian state on West Bank territory, which was captured by Israel from Jordan during the 1967 war. The settlements have spread and grown into commercial enterprises, and leading settlers have risen into the ranks of the parliament and government. For this and other reasons, the door appears to be closing on a two-state solution.

So Yehuda, who speaks Arabic as well as Hebrew, and who covered the West Bank as a reporter, has mounted his tiny, principled boycott. He has no illusions. “Some of my friends in Jerusalem are behaving the same way,” Yehuda emailed, “but I must say that we are but a small minority—most people do not care about the exact source of the agricultural products they are buying.”

            The question of how and whether to use purchasing and investing power to influence Israeli policy has inflamed some campuses in the U.S. and Europe, mobilized several Protestant church assemblies in the U.S., and alarmed the Israeli government and its American supporters. Boycott proponents comprise all sorts of folks: the idealistic, the malicious, the honorable, the anti-Semitic, those who think they are trying to save Israel from an immoral quagmire, and those who care nothing for Israel’s continued existence.