It will take more than a political revolution for Bernie Sanders to ‘level the
playing field’ in Israel/Palestine
US Politics
Eamon Murphy on March 10, 2016 2 Comments
Bernie Sanders at a rally in Los Angeles, October 14, 2015. (Photo:
REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson)
Bernie Sanders has made headlines by committing himself to a fairer U.S.
Palestine policy. “All I can tell you is I will make every single effort to
bring rational people on both sides together so that hopefully we can have a
level playing field,” the senator said at a rally in Dearborn, Michigan—”an
Arab-American stronghold”, in the view of The Jerusalem Post —with “the United
States treating everybody in that region equally.” Sanders’s remarks have been
hailed as something of a breakthrough for the senator, who incurred progressive
ire by arrogantly defending Israel during Operation Protective Edge. But these
latest comments, while certainly extraordinary by the standards of U.S.
presidential candidates (of either party), are noteworthy for their
ambiguity—all I can tell you; every single effort; hopefully; a level playing
field—as well as the essential confusion they reflect: the United States has
been, for decades, a participant in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and
participants don’t level the playing field.
The point is so obvious that it hardly requires supporting argument and
evidence; nevertheless, it’s useful to remind ourselves now and again of
specific examples, so that we remember exactly what we’re dealing with. Bill
Clinton was one of the presidents Sanders mentioned as having “tried their best
to resolve” the conflict, and it’s true that Clinton took a more evenhanded
approach—in the final months of his presidency, after he collaborated with Ehud
Barak to “unmask” Yasser Arafat as no partner for peace at Camp David, and at
the same time that his administration was sedulously resupplying an Israeli
army intent on converting the initial protests of the second Intifada into
armed confrontations (the playing field on which it excels). In this of course
the IDF succeeded, with critical U.S. help; the result was a ruinous bloodbath
that may have forestalled peaceful resolution permanently.
Why? Why would Clinton allow his administration to restock Israel with attack
helicopters, which it knew full well were being used against civilians, even as
he worked to formulate his eponymous parameters, by far the best U.S. attempt
to mediate between the two sides? The answer is something Sanders has never
come close to articulating: that the special relationship persists because of
enduring deep-state ties, not the whims and ambitions of prestige-obsessed
officials or fanatical advocates. If you doubt the dispositive significance of
the military-to-military relationship, consult this tweet by the U.S.
ambassador to Israel—identifying the IDF Chief of Staff and the head of U.S.
European Command as “brothers-in-arms”—or consider the ongoing negotiations
over a new defense aid package, in which this supposedly anti-Netanyahu White
House is set to commit the U.S. to forking over even more than the current
obscene disbursement of $3 billion a year.
A Commitment to Keeping Israel Armed to the Teeth
“For decades now,” Sanders said in Dearborn, “there has been hatred and warfare
in the Middle East, everyone knows it.” But not everyone know why; does
Sanders? The evidence suggests not. In March 1988, early in the first Intifada,
Sanders fielded several questions about the conflict at a press conference.
Then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he was running as an independent for
Congress and had endorsed Jesse Jackson, a supporter of Palestinian rights, in
the Democratic presidential primary. Sanders condemned Israel’s abuse of the
Palestinians with uncommon forcefulness: “The sight of Israeli soldiers
breaking the arms and legs of Arabs is reprehensible. The idea of Israel
closing down towns and sealing them off is unacceptable.” Pressed by a reporter
on how the U.S. could facilitate successful Mideast negotiations, Sanders
responded that aid should be used as leverage:
The United States of America is pouring billions of dollars into arms and into
other types of aid in the Middle East. Has the United States of America used
its clout, the tremendous clout that it has by providing all kinds of aid into
the Middle East, to demand that these countries begin to sit down, and talk
about a reasonable settlement which will guarantee Israel’s sovereignty—which
must be guaranteed—but which will begin to deal with the rights of Palestinian
refugees? That’s the demand that I would make.
Asked if he was calling for sanctions, Sanders answered flatly, “No.”
Again, these remarks are strong by the standards of U.S. politics, then or now,
but Sanders’s criticism was tempered by typical misunderstandings and evasions.
He blamed Arab governments for their confrontational stance, bizarrely singling
out the dependably accommodating Hashemite kingdom: “Let’s not forget the role
of Jordan, and King Hussein—you know, sometimes we concentrate on Israel, you
still have an autocracy there, you have a king.” (Since then, Sanders seems to
have gotten the memo on Jordan, perhaps the very next year during his stay at
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government: during a debate in January he called
Abdullah II “one of the few heroes in a very unheroic place.”) More seriously
disordered is the notion that the U.S. government would even be interested in
pressuring Israel to recognize indigenous rights. This betrays a profound
naiveté about the sources and aims of foreign policy: the potential subversive
effects of national liberation, in a region where U.S. hegemony depends on
suppression of the popular will, have always militated against support for the
Palestinians. The U.S. was willing to use its massive “clout” to broker Mideast
agreements in its own interest—like the peace between Israel and Egypt,
achieved by Sanders’s other presidential good guy, Jimmy Carter—but Palestine
was off the agenda for reasons deeper than Sanders seemed to perceive. Why
would the U.S. cut off arms shipments, as the candidate suggested it might,
when Israel’s utility as a strategic asset depends on its being armed to the
teeth and primed for war?
Achieving Mideast peace “is not an easy task,” Sanders averred in Michigan,
“but it is a task we must pursue. We cannot continue to have, for another 60
years, the kind of hatred and conflict that exists in the Middle East.” In
fact, the Israel-Palestine conflict would be one of the simplest geopolitical
disputes to solve: the contours of a possible solution have been widely
understood for decades, and only U.S. backing allows Israel to escape the kind
of international pressure that would soon see it implemented.
From the U.S. standpoint, Sanders’s emphasis on hatred as a feature of the
conflict amounts to mystification. Hatred exists in every intercommunal war;
this one is kept alive not by human emotion, but the imperatives of empire.
“The United States has got to play a leadership role in what is a morass,”
Sanders argued in 1988, “what has been year after year, war after war, of
conflict.” But the U.S. has done exactly that, and from the era of Kissinger
onwards endless war has been the intentional result. The strategic calculus
that leads the U.S. to rely on force as its primary tool of statecraft in the
region, with Israel as our principal deputy, is not going to change next year;
if Sanders is unable to explain, or even comprehend, this deeply immoral
reasoning, there’s little chance he’d be able to alter a policy with such huge
material and ideological momentum.
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It will take more than a political revolution for Bernie Sanders to ‘level the
playing field’ in Israel/Palestine
US Politics
Eamon Murphy on March 10, 2016 2 Comments
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Bernie Sanders at a rally in Los Angeles, October 14, 2015. (Photo:
REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson)
Bernie Sanders has made headlines by committing himself to a fairer U.S.
Palestine policy. “All I can tell you is I will make every single effort to
bring rational people on both sides together so that hopefully we can have a
level playing field,” the senator said at a rally in Dearborn, Michigan—”an
Arab-American stronghold”, in the view of The Jerusalem Post —with “the United
States treating everybody in that region equally.” Sanders’s remarks have been
hailed as something of a breakthrough for the senator, who incurred progressive
ire by arrogantly defending Israel during Operation Protective Edge. But these
latest comments, while certainly extraordinary by the standards of U.S.
presidential candidates (of either party), are noteworthy for their
ambiguity—all I can tell you; every single effort; hopefully; a level playing
field—as well as the essential confusion they reflect: the United States has
been, for decades, a participant in the Israel-Palestine conflict, and
participants don’t level the playing field.
The point is so obvious that it hardly requires supporting argument and
evidence; nevertheless, it’s useful to remind ourselves now and again of
specific examples, so that we remember exactly what we’re dealing with. Bill
Clinton was one of the presidents Sanders mentioned as having “tried their best
to resolve” the conflict, and it’s true that Clinton took a more evenhanded
approach—in the final months of his presidency, after he collaborated with Ehud
Barak to “unmask” Yasser Arafat as no partner for peace at Camp David, and at
the same time that his administration was sedulously resupplying an Israeli
army intent on converting the initial protests of the second Intifada into
armed confrontations (the playing field on which it excels). In this of course
the IDF succeeded, with critical U.S. help; the result was a ruinous bloodbath
that may have forestalled peaceful resolution permanently.
Why? Why would Clinton allow his administration to restock Israel with attack
helicopters, which it knew full well were being used against civilians, even as
he worked to formulate his eponymous parameters, by far the best U.S. attempt
to mediate between the two sides? The answer is something Sanders has never
come close to articulating: that the special relationship persists because of
enduring deep-state ties, not the whims and ambitions of prestige-obsessed
officials or fanatical advocates. If you doubt the dispositive significance of
the military-to-military relationship, consult this tweet by the U.S.
ambassador to Israel—identifying the IDF Chief of Staff and the head of U.S.
European Command as “brothers-in-arms”—or consider the ongoing negotiations
over a new defense aid package, in which this supposedly anti-Netanyahu White
House is set to commit the U.S. to forking over even more than the current
obscene disbursement of $3 billion a year.
A Commitment to Keeping Israel Armed to the Teeth
“For decades now,” Sanders said in Dearborn, “there has been hatred and warfare
in the Middle East, everyone knows it.” But not everyone know why; does
Sanders? The evidence suggests not. In March 1988, early in the first Intifada,
Sanders fielded several questions about the conflict at a press conference.
Then the mayor of Burlington, Vermont, he was running as an independent for
Congress and had endorsed Jesse Jackson, a supporter of Palestinian rights, in
the Democratic presidential primary. Sanders condemned Israel’s abuse of the
Palestinians with uncommon forcefulness: “The sight of Israeli soldiers
breaking the arms and legs of Arabs is reprehensible. The idea of Israel
closing down towns and sealing them off is unacceptable.” Pressed by a reporter
on how the U.S. could facilitate successful Mideast negotiations, Sanders
responded that aid should be used as leverage:
The United States of America is pouring billions of dollars into arms and into
other types of aid in the Middle East. Has the United States of America used
its clout, the tremendous clout that it has by providing all kinds of aid into
the Middle East, to demand that these countries begin to sit down, and talk
about a reasonable settlement which will guarantee Israel’s sovereignty—which
must be guaranteed—but which will begin to deal with the rights of Palestinian
refugees? That’s the demand that I would make.
Asked if he was calling for sanctions, Sanders answered flatly, “No.”
Again, these remarks are strong by the standards of U.S. politics, then or now,
but Sanders’s criticism was tempered by typical misunderstandings and evasions.
He blamed Arab governments for their confrontational stance, bizarrely singling
out the dependably accommodating Hashemite kingdom: “Let’s not forget the role
of Jordan, and King Hussein—you know, sometimes we concentrate on Israel, you
still have an autocracy there, you have a king.” (Since then, Sanders seems to
have gotten the memo on Jordan, perhaps the very next year during his stay at
Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government: during a debate in January he called
Abdullah II “one of the few heroes in a very unheroic place.”) More seriously
disordered is the notion that the U.S. government would even be interested in
pressuring Israel to recognize indigenous rights. This betrays a profound
naiveté about the sources and aims of foreign policy: the potential subversive
effects of national liberation, in a region where U.S. hegemony depends on
suppression of the popular will, have always militated against support for the
Palestinians. The U.S. was willing to use its massive “clout” to broker Mideast
agreements in its own interest—like the peace between Israel and Egypt,
achieved by Sanders’s other presidential good guy, Jimmy Carter—but Palestine
was off the agenda for reasons deeper than Sanders seemed to perceive. Why
would the U.S. cut off arms shipments, as the candidate suggested it might,
when Israel’s utility as a strategic asset depends on its being armed to the
teeth and primed for war?
Achieving Mideast peace “is not an easy task,” Sanders averred in Michigan,
“but it is a task we must pursue. We cannot continue to have, for another 60
years, the kind of hatred and conflict that exists in the Middle East.” In
fact, the Israel-Palestine conflict would be one of the simplest geopolitical
disputes to solve: the contours of a possible solution have been widely
understood for decades, and only U.S. backing allows Israel to escape the kind
of international pressure that would soon see it implemented.
From the U.S. standpoint, Sanders’s emphasis on hatred as a feature of the
conflict amounts to mystification. Hatred exists in every intercommunal war;
this one is kept alive not by human emotion, but the imperatives of empire.
“The United States has got to play a leadership role in what is a morass,”
Sanders argued in 1988, “what has been year after year, war after war, of
conflict.” But the U.S. has done exactly that, and from the era of Kissinger
onwards endless war has been the intentional result. The strategic calculus
that leads the U.S. to rely on force as its primary tool of statecraft in the
region, with Israel as our principal deputy, is not going to change next year;
if Sanders is unable to explain, or even comprehend, this deeply immoral
reasoning, there’s little chance he’d be able to alter a policy with such huge
material and ideological momentum.
This is from Mondoweiss.
