|
by Peter A. Belmont / 2010-03-30
© 2010 Peter Belmont
| |
After Gen. Petraeus announced that the US’s failure to bring about Israeli/Palestinian peace was harming US military and diplomatic efforts, it became likely that President Obama would change US Middle East policy from one of giving in to Israel to one of pressuring Israel in the interest of peace.
To accomplish this, president Obama will need to use real, forceful actions—and not mere words—to bring Israel to the peace table in good earnest.
To acquire the political power to use such forceful actions, the president will need to engage in an educational project which will help the public to understand the need for peace and the impediments to peace—which include the US Congress.
He should get started soon—Congressional elections are upon us.
|
|
Recent events suggest that President Obama has determined on a sea-change in American policy with regard to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. The long-standing vice-like grip of AIPAC and other pro-Israeli lobbying efforts on the US Congress and, via Congress, on administrations since President Eisenhower’s, seems to be weakening. The idea, preposterous on its face, that Israel’s and America’s national goals have always been and will forever be identical is being asserted with less and less conviction by Congresspersons who had long seemed to be representing Israel rather than their own constituents wherever Israeli interests were involved.
For many years, either for legal reasons or from human rights concerns for the Palestinian people living under occupation or because they could see that the settlements made peace-making harder, American presidents have asked Israel to halt its settlements-building policy in the territories—the occupied territories—that Israel, then aged 19, had captured from its neighbors in 1967 and, apart from the Sinai which was returned to Egypt, has held for the following 43 years.
The presidents made these requests rather politely and meekly, given AIPAC’s political power. Israel ignored these requests and, indeed, resisted admitting that the territories it captured in 1967 are in fact “occupied territories” in the sense of international law. Israel has, instead, developed various circumlocutions and euphemisms for “occupied”, calling the territories “administered territories” or “disputed territories”. These verbal games do not change the juridical facts. See the wikipedia article on the Israeli settlements. The reason it matters is that occupiers, such as Israel, are neither permitted, under international law, to seize and confiscate property in the territories they occupy nor to settle their own citizens in the occupied territory. Israel has done both for 43 years, illegally seizing land on which to build settlements and highways and a wall, and illegally settling its citizens as colonists within occupied territory. These settlements were not done as military responses to threats and do not in fact advance Israel security in any way its armed forces cannot do better without the settlements. For all these years the US has used its veto in the UN Security Council to frustrate any attempt by the international community to enforce the international law. Such was the power of Israel, acting through AIPAC and other lobbies, on the US and, by its stranglehold on the US, on the world.
All this may be changing. Apart from any concerns for Palestinian human rights or for the Rule of Law, always a low-level concern during these 43 years, a new concern has entered which bids fair to dominate US policy-making. The new concern was spoken aloud by Gen. Petraeus on March 16 when he testified to Congress that the US’s favoritism for Israel and its failure to resolve the Israeli/Palestinian conflict (presumably with a just and lasting peace, as called for by UN SC Res. 242 of 1967) is harming the US’s military and diplomatic efforts throughout the Middle East. Bluntly, US soldiers are dying unnecessarily because the US is seen by insurgents as part of the problem rather than as part of the solution of the I/P conflict.
Before the Petraeus doctrine, if I may so call it, entered the policy-making arena, the human-rights and Rule of Law concerns in US administrations, if it existed at all, was insufficient motivation to oppose the powerful forces of AIPAC, et al. The Petraeus doctrine, however, could by itself motivate a change of policy and could, if human rights and Rule of Law concerns were advanced simultaneously by President Obama, give new life to those concerns and also help the president explain to the public why the Israeli occupation and settlements must be ended.
Assuming that President Obama is well persuaded by the Petraeus doctrine and also, perhaps, by human rights and rule of Law concerns, he faces a difficult and fascinating political and diplomatic problem acquiring and applying power to be applied to Israel sufficient to persuade that country to retreat from a policy (the greater Israel policy) developed over 2/3 of the country’s life-time, the policy which accounts for Israel’s eagerness to violate international law in order to build settlements all over the occupied territories. In order to acquire and apply such power—and much power may be needed to redirect a recalcitrant Israel—the president must first persuade Congress. And he must consider, too, that he may need to give Israel several non-verbal “pushes” to get to an acceptable peace. These pushes must be real action (or the credible threat of real action), because Israel has never responded to mere words, even or especially from US presidents. (Israel knew that a president’s hands were tied by Congress and knew that Congress’s hands were tied by AIPAC.) Therefore, if threats against Israel to be made later are to be credible, the first “push” must be a strong action which the president can make and for which he can find support (before or after the fact) from the Congress and from the American people.
I suggest that what the president must do, therefore, is some extensive teaching.
He must teach the Petraeus lesson to the American people so they can teach it to the Congress (at the next elections). He should also teach about the international law and the human rights realities “on the ground” and underlying that law which make Israel’s settlements and wall illegal. He should let the public simmer about the 40 years during which Israel ignored repeated US requests not to build settlements. He should explain why the Israeli claim to have “annexed” East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights was null and void as a violation of international law which forbids the acquisition of territory by threat or use of force. He should remind the American public that Israel had never exercised sovereignty over the occupied territories before 1967 and could not make a claim to be recovering territory which it had once held and later lost.
He should somehow let the public see that principled presidential foreign policy initiatives were stymied by Congress over all those years, again setting the stage for public redirection of Congress. He can raise the question of whether the right US policy should be limited to a call for stopping new Israeli settlement building (and stopping Israel destruction of existing Palestinian housing) or whether the better policy would be a call for a roll-back of all existing Israeli settlements, with recall of all settlers to Israel’s pre-1967 territory. By getting the US public ready for a “push” with respect to the settlements, he can make a “push” in that direction credible before the fact and politically manageable when he needs to make it. He can, without any difficulty, teach that the settlements never advanced any US interest and that Israel built them despite this fact and in the face of repeated requests from presidents who asked Israel to refrain from building settlements.
This teaching should begin soon, because the long Congressional election season is already upon us.
I believe that the American public will be a far better ally for the president than the Congress, at least initially. We should recall that it was the public and not the Congress that stopped the Vietnam war. (Initially, Congress will continue to behave like the servants to AIPAC, et al., which they have been for 40 years. As time passes, they will flex their wings and discover that they are neither prisoners nor slaves of a foreign power, as they have long acted, and will be freed of this particular obsession.)[1]
Let me close by saying that I believe that Jewish Americans will support these changes of policy when they see that the president is not working to destroy or to delegitimize Israel but merely to end the occupation and make an Israeli/Palestinian peace which, although 43 years late, is still possible. Such a peace will cost Israel nothing but its greater-Israel (settlements) project. If and when Jewish Americans begin to speak up in large numbers in favor of an end to the occupation and removal of the settlers, other Americans will be able to see that it is not anti-Semitic (as many had thought) to speak up for Palestinian human and national rights, and will speak in their far greater numbers to their Congresspersons. If the president manages his educational program well, there might (on this front at least) be “peace in our time.”
-----------
[1] I am not concerned here with the lobbying and electoral power of the corporations. One problem at a time.
|
