The US-Israeli feud
By Rami G. Khouri
I have been in Boston and New York City following the dust-up in American-Israeli relations after the Israeli government - during the official visit of US Vice President Joseph Biden - made two announcements approving the construction of nearly 1,800 new housing units in the occupied Jerusalem and West Bank areas.
The controversy has been immense, as far as US-Israeli relations ago. Rarely do senior American officials say in public or private, as they did in the past week, that Israel has “insulted” the United States, accuse it of deliberately undermining US-mediated talks, “condemn” Israel’s actions, or demand that Israel take action to prove its commitment to the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations just getting under way with US mediation.
All of this is quite new, but it will also be quite meaningless if the controversy turns out to be just another bump in the road in an otherwise solid bilateral American-Israeli relationship in which Israeli right-wing interests and Washington lobbyists have shaped US policy in the Middle East for decades.
The serious tone of the current controversy is clear; its potential consequences are not.
The Palestinians and Arabs are largely silent observers in this enterprise, just as they have been the passive victims and invisible people in the broader enterprise of Zionist settler-colonialism that continues to grab and gobble up Palestinian lands.
So the attention focuses on the two critical actors and issues that reveal what is at stake here: Israel and its continued colonisation of Arab lands, and the United States’ capacity to make sovereign, independent decisions on its Middle East policies.
It would be shortsighted to view this controversy mainly as being about the chances of launching the “proximity talks” this week as scheduled. It cuts much deeper, to the heart of the nationalist conflict between Arabs and Israelis, and the unique relationship between the United States and Israel.
The Arabs and Palestinians believe they have offered every concession demanded of them, including recognising Israel’s right to exist, accepting to negotiate and live in peace with it, and accepting a resolution of the Palestinian refugees issue that is negotiated and agreed with Israel (i.e., only a limited, agreed, number of refugees will return to their homes in Palestine within present day Israel). If peace is to happen, movement will have to come from Israel.
Settlements loom so large because they touch the two critical issues at play here: Israel’s colonisation policies and America’s subservience to Israel.
The current controversy is also important because of its potential to generate change on these critical issues.
The first issue is about whether there is a dividing line between Israel as a homeland of the Jewish people that Palestinians can coexist with in adjacent states, and Israel as a project of perpetual Zionist colonisation that refuses to accept the rule of law as defined by global human rights conventions and UN Security Council and General Assembly resolutions.
Israel claims the right to build settlements in and colonise all the land of biblical Israel, and says that all of Jerusalem is its eternal, unified capital. Its settlements/colonies are a dynamic symbol of its total disregard for international law and UN resolutions, and an affirmation of its apartheid-like insistence on enjoying greater rights than the Palestinians and Arabs in its midst.
At some point, after 115 years of modern Zionism, the Jewish and Israeli people will have to make it clear to the world and to themselves whether they are a collection of perpetual colonisers, international law criminals and serial land thieves, or a state that seeks only to allow the Jewish people to live in peace, security and normalcy in the land to which they have been attached since they emerged as a distinct people thousands of years ago.
The second issue that the current controversy might clarify is whether the United States is able to formulate a policy in the Middle East that reflects genuine American national interests. Can the US break its habit of pandering to pro-Israeli groups’ blackmail, ideological terrorism and intimidation of American politicians who fear they will be voted out of office if they stray from Israeli positions?
The US has very, very rarely gone against Israeli sentiments and positions. Only once or twice in modern history has the US forced Israel to do something that Israel resisted doing, like withdrawing from Sinai in 1956. This might be a rare moment when the US - now insulted and angered - actually pressures Israel to freeze settlements totally, with the aim of jump-starting the proximity talks with the Palestinians.
We are in uncharted territory, but also prime political real estate - where the character of nations and the political mettle of the men and women who lead them are being tested in a serious way for the first time in two generations.
19 March 2010
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