Both books mentioned, are on BARD.
Miriam
Tomgram: Sandy Tolan, The Death of the Two-State Solution
By Sandy Tolan
Posted on October 18, 2016, Printed on October 18, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176199/ ;
Okay, here's your quiz of the day: What country, according to the
Congressional Research Service, has been the "largest cumulative recipient
of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II," to the tune of $124.3
billion, and most of it military in nature? Great Britain, Germany, Japan,
the Philippines? The answer: none of the above. The correct response is
Israel. In the midst of an election campaign in which almost nothing can't
be brawled about, military aid to Israel might be the only nonpartisan issue
left. After all, President Obama, who hasn't exactly had a chummy
relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ascendant
Israeli right, recently agreed to a deal that, even compared to the present
stratospheric levels of military aid to Israel, the White House has termed
"the largest single pledge of military assistance in U.S. history." You're
talking about a 10-year deal (2019-2028) for this country's most advanced
weaponry (and a lot of less advanced but no less destructive stuff as well)
adding up to $38 billion, or about 27% higher than the previous aid package
-- though Netanyahu originally asked for $45 billion, which represents
chutzpah of a major sort).
This was undoubtedly the Obama administration's way of throwing a sop (and
quite a sop it is) to the Israeli prime minister in return for the Iran
nuclear deal, which he so fervently opposed, and to congressional
Republicans who also failed to block that deal (and many of whom are now
relatively quiet but eager to pony up yet more military aid for the
Israelis). In fact, in an era in which hardly a move the U.S. has made
across the Greater Middle East hasn't come a cropper, resulting in
collapsing states and spreading terror movements, you could say that
Washington has had just one genuine success. As befits the reigning arms
trader on the planet, it has poured staggering amounts of weaponry into that
embroiled region. Only recently, for instance, we learned from a study by
arms expert William Hartung that, since 2009, the Obama administration has
offered the Saudis $115 billion worth of arms and advanced weapons systems
in 42 separate deals -- a record even for the Saudi-U.S. relationship -- and
don't forget similar, if somewhat smaller scale sales, often of advanced
weaponry, to Kuwait, Qatar, and other countries in the region.
It's quite a record. (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!) Now, TomDispatch regular Sandy
Tolan, author of Children of the Stone, puts that future $38 billion worth
of weaponry for Israel in the context of the larger Israeli-Palestinian
"peace process" in order to suggest just how bankrupt Washington's policies
in the Middle East actually are. Tom
Throwing in the Towel
What the Bankruptcy of White House Policy Means for the Israelis and
Palestinians
By Sandy Tolan
Washington has finally thrown in the towel on its long, tortured efforts to
establish peace between Israel and the Palestinians. You won't find any
acknowledgement of this in the official record. Formally, the U.S. still
supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But the Obama
administration's recent 10-year, $38-billion pledge to renew Israel's
arsenal of weaponry, while still ostensibly pursuing "peace," makes clear
just how bankrupt that policy is.
For two decades, Israeli leaders and their neoconservative backers in this
country, hell-bent on building and expanding settlements on Palestinian
land, have worked to undermine America's stated efforts -- and paid no
price. Now, with that record weapons package, the U.S. has made it all too
clear that they won't have to. Ever.
The military alliance between the United States and Israel has long been at
odds with the stated intentions of successive administrations in Washington
to foster peace in the Holy Land. One White House after another has
preferred the "solution" of having it both ways: supporting a two-state
solution while richly rewarding, with lethal weaponry, an incorrigible
client state that was working as fast as it could to undermine just such a
solution.
This ongoing duality seemed at its most surreal in the last few weeks.
First, President Obama announced the new military deal, with its promised
delivery of fighter jets and other hardware, citing the "unshakable"
American military alliance with Israel. The following week, at the United
Nations, he declared, "Israel must recognize that it cannot permanently
occupy and settle Palestinian land." Next, he flew to Israel for the funeral
of Shimon Peres, and in a tribute to the Nobel Prize-winning former Israeli
president, spoke of a man who grasped that "the Jewish people weren't born
to rule another people" and brought up the "unfinished business" of the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process. (Peres is remembered quite differently by
Palestinians as an early pioneer of settlement building and the author of
the brutal Operation Grapes of Wrath assaults on Lebanon in 1996.) Not long
after the funeral, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
brazenly approved a new settlement deep in the West Bank, prompting the
State Department to "strongly condemn" the action as "deeply troubling."
Such scolding words, however, shrivel into nothingness in the face of a
single number: 38 billion. With its latest promise of military aid, the
United States has essentially sanctioned Israel's impunity, its endless
colonization of Palestinian land, its military occupation of the West Bank,
and its periodic attacks by F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters using
Hellfire missiles on the civilians of Gaza.
Yes, Hamas's crude and occasionally deadly rockets sometimes help provoke
Israeli fire, and human rights investigations have found that both sides
have committed war crimes. But Israel's explosive power in the 2014 Gaza
war, fueled in large part by American military aid and political support,
exceeded that of Hamas by an estimated 1,500-to-1. By one estimate, all of
Hamas's rockets, measured in explosive power, were equal to 12 of the
one-ton bombs Israel dropped on Gaza. And it loosed hundreds of those, and
fired tens of thousands of shells, rockets and mortars. In the process,
nearly 250 times more Palestinian civilians died than civilians in Israel.
Now, with Gaza severed from the West Bank, and Palestinians facing new waves
of settlers amid a half-century-long military occupation, the U.S. has
chosen not to apply pressure to its out-of-control ally, but instead to
resupply its armed forces in a massive way. This means that we've finally
arrived at something of a historic (if hardly noticed) moment. After all
these decades, the two-state solution, critically flawed as it was, should
now officially be declared dead -- and consider the United States an
accomplice in its murder. In other words, the Obama administration has
handed Israel's leaders and the neoconservatives who have long championed
this path the victory they've sought for more than two decades.
The Chaos Kids
Twenty years ago, the pro-Israel hard right in America designed the core
strategy that helped lead to this American capitulation. In 1996, a task
force led by neocons Richard Perle (future chairman of the Defense Policy
Board), David Wurmser (future senior Middle East adviser to Vice President
Dick Cheney), Douglas Feith (future undersecretary of defense), and others
issued a policy paper aimed at incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" advocated
that Israel walk away from its embrace of the Oslo peace process and Oslo's
focus on territorial concessions. The paper's essential ingredients
included weakening Israel's neighbors via regime change in Saddam Hussein's
Iraq and "roll back" in Syria and Iran. The authors' recommendations turned
out to be anything but a wish list, given that a number of them would soon
hold influential positions in the administration of George W. Bush.
As journalist Jim Lobe wrote in 2007:
"[T]he task force, which was chaired by Perle, argued that regime change in
Iraq -- of which Feith was among the most ardent advocates within the
Pentagon -- would enable Israel and the U.S. to decisively shift the balance
of power in the region so that Israel could make a 'clean break' from the
Oslo process (or any framework that would require it to give up 'land for
peace') and, in so doing, 'secure the realm' against Palestinian territorial
claims."
In other words, as early as 1996, these neocons were already imagining what
would become the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. You could argue, of
course, that neither the neocons nor Netanyahu could have foreseen the chaos
that would follow, with Iraq nearly cracking open and Syria essentially
collapsing into horrific civil war and violence, civilians stranded under
relentless bombing, and the biggest refugee crisis since World War II
gripping Europe and the world. But you would, at least in some sense, be
wrong, for certain of the neocon advocates of regime change imagined chaos
as an essential part of the process from early on.
"One can only hope that we turn the region into a caldron, and faster,
please," wrote Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute in the
National Review during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. (In 1985, as a
consultant to the National Security Council and to Oliver North, Ledeen had
helped broker the illegal arms-for-hostages deal with Iran by setting up
meetings between weapons dealers and Israel.) "The war won't end in
Baghdad," Ledeen later wrote, in the Wall Street Journal. "We must also
topple terror states in Tehran and Damascus."
The neocons got so much more than they bargained for in Iraq, and so much
less than they wanted in Syria and Iran. Their recent attempts -- with
Netanyahu as their chief spokesman -- to block the Obama administration's
Iran nuclear deal, for example, went down in flames. Still, it's stunning
to think just how much their strategy of regime change and chaos helped
transform our world and the Greater Middle East for the worse, and to be
reminded that its ultimate goal, at least in those early days, was in large
part to keep Israel from having to pursue a peace deal with the
Palestinians. Of course, there were other benefits the neocons imagined
back then as part of their historic attempt to redraw the map of the Middle
East. Controlling some of the vast oil reserves of that region was one of
them, but of course that didn't exactly turn out to be a "mission
accomplished" moment either. Only the Israeli part of the plan seemed to
succeed as once imagined.
So here we are 20 years later. All around the Holy Land, states are
collapsing or at least their foundations are crumbling, and Israel's actions
make clear that it isn't about to help improve the situation in any way. It
visibly intends to pursue a policy of colonization, permanent human rights
violations, and absolute rule over the Palestinians. These are facts on the
ground that former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Netanyahu, the Israeli right
wing, and those American neocon visionaries fought so hard to establish. A
succession of leaders in Washington -- at least those who weren't designing
this policy themselves -- have been played for fools.
In the two-plus decades since the 1993 Oslo Agreement, which some believed
would put Israel and the Palestinians on the path to peace, and that "Clean
Break" document which was written to undermine it, the West Bank settler
population has grown from 109,000 to nearly 400,000 (an estimated 15% of
whom are American). The would-be capital of a Palestinian state, East
Jerusalem, is now surrounded by 17 Jewish settlements. Palestinians
nominally control a mere 18% of the West Bank (also known as Area A), or 4%
of the entire land base of Israel/Palestine.
The Palestinians' would-be homeland is now checkered with military bases,
settlements, settler-only roads, and hundreds of checkpoints and barriers --
all in a West Bank the size of Delaware, our second-smallest state. An
estimated 40% of adult male Palestinians, and thousands of children, have
seen the insides of Israeli jails and prisons; many of them languish there
without charges.
Israel has, in essence, created a Jim Crow-like separate and unequal reality
there: a one-state "solution" that it alone controls. The United States has
done almost nothing about this (other than carefully couched, periodic State
Department words of complaint), while its ally marched forward unchecked.
Not since James Baker was secretary of state under the first President Bush
before -- notably enough -- the signing of the Oslo accords has any U.S.
leader threatened to withhold funds unless Israel stops building settlements
on Palestinian land. The phrase "friends don't let friends drive drunk" no
longer applies in U.S.-Israeli relations. Rather, what we hear are regular
pledges of "absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israel's security."
Those were, in fact, the words of Vice President Joe Biden during a 2010
visit to Israel -- a pledge offered, as it turned out, only a few hours
before the Netanyahu government announced the construction of 1,600 new
apartments in East Jerusalem.
"Unvarnished commitment" in 2016 means that $38 billion for what Obama
called "the world's most advanced weapons technology." That includes 33 of
Lockheed's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets, at $200 million per jet, part of
a troubled $1.5 trillion weapons system subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. Other
deadly hardware headed for Israel: cargo planes, F-15 fighter jets, battle
tanks, armored personnel carriers, a new class of warships whose guided
missiles would undoubtedly be aimed directly at Gaza, and more of Lockheed's
Hellfire missiles. If recent history is any indication, you would need to
add fresh supplies of bombs, grenades, torpedoes, rocket launchers, mortars,
howitzers, machine guns, shotguns, pistols, and bayonets. As part of the
agreement, U.S. arms manufacturers will soon supply 100% of that weaponry,
while Israeli weapons manufacturers will be phased out of U.S. military aid.
"It's a win-win for Israeli security and the U.S. economy," a White House
aide cheerily told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.
The Clinton (Trump) White House and Israel
Current policy, if that's the right word, could perhaps be summed up as
weapons, weapons, and more weapons, while Washington otherwise washed its
hands of what was always known as "the peace process" (despite that fig leaf
still in place). Today, functionally, there's no such process left. And
that's unlikely to change under either a President Clinton or a President
Trump. If anything, it may get worse.
During the Democratic primary campaign, for instance, Hillary Clinton
promised to invite Netanyahu to the White House "during my first month in
office" in order to "reaffirm" Washington's "unbreakable bond with Israel."
In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which
labels itself "America's pro-Israel lobby," she was virtually silent on the
Israeli settlement issue, except to promise to protect Israel against its
own violations of international law. She attacked Trump from the right,
denouncing his once-expressed wish to remain "neutral" on the issue of
Israel and Palestine.
In the 1990s, as first lady, Clinton had stirred controversy by uttering the
word "Palestine" and kissing Yasser Arafat's widow, Suha, on the cheek. Now
she fully embraces those who believe Israel can do no wrong, including
Hollywood mogul Haim Saban, who has donated at least $6.4 million to her
campaign, and millions more to the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic
National Committee. Saban, an Israeli-American whose billions came largely
from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers franchise, describes himself as "a
one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel."
Last year, he convened a "secret" Las Vegas meeting with fellow billionaire
Sheldon Adelson, the bankroller of a panoply of Republican candidates and a
huge supporter of Israel's settlement project. Their aim: to shut down, if
not criminalize, the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
movement, or BDS. That boycott movement targets cultural institutions and
businesses including those that profit from the occupation of the West Bank.
Its approach is akin to the movement to impose sanctions on South Africa
during the apartheid era.
With Saban's millions destined for her campaign war chest, Clinton wrote to
her benefactor to express her "alarm" over BDS, "seeking your thoughts and
recommendations" to "work together to counter BDS." Yet it's a nonviolent
movement that aims to confront Israel's human rights abuses through direct
economic and political pressure, not guns or terror attacks. Would Clinton
prefer suicide bombers and rockets? Never mind that the relatively modest
movement has been endorsed by an assortment of international trade unions,
scholarly associations, church groups, the Jewish Voice for Peace, and Nobel
Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu. At the root of BDS, Clinton has hinted
darkly, is anti-Semitism. "At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise
across the world," she wrote Saban, "we need to repudiate forceful efforts
to malign and undermine Israel and the Jewish people."
As for Trump, some Palestinians were encouraged by his statement to MSNBC's
Joe Scarborough that he might "be sort of a neutral guy" on the issue. He
told the AP: "I have a real question as to whether or not both sides want
to make it. A lot will have to do with Israel and whether or not Israel
wants to make the deal -- whether or not Israel's willing to sacrifice
certain things." Yet Trump subsequently fell in line with Republican
orthodoxy, pledging among other things to move the U.S. Embassy to
Jerusalem, a litmus test for supporters of the hard right in Israel, and a
virtual guarantee that East Jerusalem, at the center of the Palestinian
dream of statehood, will remain in Israel's hands.
In the short term, then, the prospect for an American-brokered just peace
may be as bleak as it's ever been -- even though U.S. officials know full
well that a just solution to the conflict would remove a primary recruiting
tool for jihadists. For the next four to eight years, American leadership
will, by all indications, shore up the status quo, which means combining all
that weaponry and de facto acquiescence in Israel's land grabs with,
perhaps, the occasional hand-wringing State Department statement.
"With Patience, Change Will Come"
However, like Jim Crow, like South African apartheid, the status quo of this
moment simply can't last forever. Eventually, the future of the region will
not be left to the self-proclaimed "honest brokers" of Washington who
lecture Palestinians on the proper forms of nonviolence, while offering no
genuine alternatives to surrender. Given the long history of Palestinian
resistance, it is foolhardy to expect such a surrender now and particularly
unwise to slander a movement of nonviolent resistance -- especially given
what we know about the kinds of resistance that are possible.
Whether by peaceful resistance or other means, the status quo will change,
in part simply because it must: a structure this twisted cannot stand on its
own forever. Already AIPAC's monumental attempts to scuttle the Iran deal
have led to humiliating defeat and that's just a taste of what, sooner or
later, the future could hold. After all, young Americans, including young
Jews, are increasingly opposed to Israel's domination of Palestinian lands,
and increasingly supportive of the boycott movement. In addition, the
balance of power in the region is shifting. We can't know how Russia,
China, Turkey, and Iran will operate there in the years to come, but amid
the ongoing chaos, U.S. influence will undoubtedly diminish over time. As a
member of a prominent Gaza family said to me many years ago: "Does Israel
think America will always protect them, always give them arms, and that they
will always be the biggest power in the Middle East? Do they really expect
they can maintain this hold on us forever?"
A popular Arab folk ballad, El Helwa Di, promises a penniless child who has
placed her life in God's hands: "With patience, change will come. All will
be better."
Perhaps it will prove useful, in the end, to abandon the illusions of the
now-terminal two-state solution, at least as envisioned in the Oslo process.
In the language of those accords, after all, the words "freedom" and
"independence" never appear, while "security" is mentioned 12 times.
In a regime of growing confinement, the Israelis have steadily undermined
Palestinian sovereignty, aided and abetted by an American acquiescence in
Israel's ongoing settlement project. Now, at least, there is an opportunity
to lay the foundations for some newer kind of solution grounded in human
rights, freedom of movement, complete cessation of settlement building, and
equal access to land, water, and places of worship. It will have to be
based on a new reality, which Israel and the United States have had such a
hand in creating. Think of it as the one-state solution.
Sandy Tolan, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the international
bestseller, The Lemon Tree, and of the acclaimed Children of the Stone about
one Palestinian's dream to establish music schools under Israel's military
occupation. He has reported from more than 35 countries and is professor at
the Annenberg School for Journalism and Communication at USC. His website
is sandytolan.com, his Twitter handle, @sandy_tolan.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Sandy Tolan
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176199
Tomgram: Sandy Tolan, The Death of the Two-State Solution
By Sandy Tolan
Posted on October 18, 2016, Printed on October 18, 2016
http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176199/ ;
Okay, here's your quiz of the day: What country, according to the
Congressional Research Service, has been the "largest cumulative recipient
of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II," to the tune of $124.3
billion, and most of it military in nature? Great Britain, Germany, Japan,
the Philippines? The answer: none of the above. The correct response is
Israel. In the midst of an election campaign in which almost nothing can't
be brawled about, military aid to Israel might be the only nonpartisan issue
left. After all, President Obama, who hasn't exactly had a chummy
relationship with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ascendant
Israeli right, recently agreed to a deal that, even compared to the present
stratospheric levels of military aid to Israel, the White House has termed
"the largest single pledge of military assistance in U.S. history." You're
talking about a 10-year deal (2019-2028) for this country's most advanced
weaponry (and a lot of less advanced but no less destructive stuff as well)
adding up to $38 billion, or about 27% higher than the previous aid package
-- though Netanyahu originally asked for $45 billion, which represents
chutzpah of a major sort).
This was undoubtedly the Obama administration's way of throwing a sop (and
quite a sop it is) to the Israeli prime minister in return for the Iran
nuclear deal, which he so fervently opposed, and to congressional
Republicans who also failed to block that deal (and many of whom are now
relatively quiet but eager to pony up yet more military aid for the
Israelis). In fact, in an era in which hardly a move the U.S. has made
across the Greater Middle East hasn't come a cropper, resulting in
collapsing states and spreading terror movements, you could say that
Washington has had just one genuine success. As befits the reigning arms
trader on the planet, it has poured staggering amounts of weaponry into that
embroiled region. Only recently, for instance, we learned from a study by
arms expert William Hartung that, since 2009, the Obama administration has
offered the Saudis $115 billion worth of arms and advanced weapons systems
in 42 separate deals -- a record even for the Saudi-U.S. relationship -- and
don't forget similar, if somewhat smaller scale sales, often of advanced
weaponry, to Kuwait, Qatar, and other countries in the region.
It's quite a record. (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!) Now, TomDispatch regular Sandy Tolan,
author of Children of the Stone, puts that future $38 billion worth of
weaponry for Israel in the context of the larger Israeli-Palestinian "peace
process" in order to suggest just how bankrupt Washington's policies in the
Middle East actually are. Tom
Throwing in the Towel
What the Bankruptcy of White House Policy Means for the Israelis and
Palestinians
By Sandy Tolan
Washington has finally thrown in the towel on its long, tortured efforts to
establish peace between Israel and the Palestinians. You won't find any
acknowledgement of this in the official record. Formally, the U.S. still
supports a two-state solution to the conflict. But the Obama
administration's recent 10-year, $38-billion pledge to renew Israel's
arsenal of weaponry, while still ostensibly pursuing "peace," makes clear
just how bankrupt that policy is.
For two decades, Israeli leaders and their neoconservative backers in this
country, hell-bent on building and expanding settlements on Palestinian
land, have worked to undermine America's stated efforts -- and paid no
price. Now, with that record weapons package, the U.S. has made it all too
clear that they won't have to. Ever.
The military alliance between the United States and Israel has long been at
odds with the stated intentions of successive administrations in Washington
to foster peace in the Holy Land. One White House after another has
preferred the "solution" of having it both ways: supporting a two-state
solution while richly rewarding, with lethal weaponry, an incorrigible
client state that was working as fast as it could to undermine just such a
solution.
This ongoing duality seemed at its most surreal in the last few weeks.
First, President Obama announced the new military deal, with its promised
delivery of fighter jets and other hardware, citing the "unshakable"
American military alliance with Israel. The following week, at the United
Nations, he declared, "Israel must recognize that it cannot permanently
occupy and settle Palestinian land." Next, he flew to Israel for the funeral
of Shimon Peres, and in a tribute to the Nobel Prize-winning former Israeli
president, spoke of a man who grasped that "the Jewish people weren't born
to rule another people" and brought up the "unfinished business" of the
Israeli-Palestinian peace process. (Peres is remembered quite differently by
Palestinians as an early pioneer of settlement building and the author of
the brutal Operation Grapes of Wrath assaults on Lebanon in 1996.) Not long
after the funeral, the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
brazenly approved a new settlement deep in the West Bank, prompting the
State Department to "strongly condemn" the action as "deeply troubling."
Such scolding words, however, shrivel into nothingness in the face of a
single number: 38 billion. With its latest promise of military aid, the
United States has essentially sanctioned Israel's impunity, its endless
colonization of Palestinian land, its military occupation of the West Bank,
and its periodic attacks by F-16 fighter jets and Apache helicopters using
Hellfire missiles on the civilians of Gaza.
Yes, Hamas's crude and occasionally deadly rockets sometimes help provoke
Israeli fire, and human rights investigations have found that both sides
have committed war crimes. But Israel's explosive power in the 2014 Gaza
war, fueled in large part by American military aid and political support,
exceeded that of Hamas by an estimated 1,500-to-1. By one estimate, all of
Hamas's rockets, measured in explosive power, were equal to 12 of the
one-ton bombs Israel dropped on Gaza. And it loosed hundreds of those, and
fired tens of thousands of shells, rockets and mortars. In the process,
nearly 250 times more Palestinian civilians died than civilians in Israel.
Now, with Gaza severed from the West Bank, and Palestinians facing new waves
of settlers amid a half-century-long military occupation, the U.S. has
chosen not to apply pressure to its out-of-control ally, but instead to
resupply its armed forces in a massive way. This means that we've finally
arrived at something of a historic (if hardly noticed) moment. After all
these decades, the two-state solution, critically flawed as it was, should
now officially be declared dead -- and consider the United States an
accomplice in its murder. In other words, the Obama administration has
handed Israel's leaders and the neoconservatives who have long championed
this path the victory they've sought for more than two decades.
The Chaos Kids
Twenty years ago, the pro-Israel hard right in America designed the core
strategy that helped lead to this American capitulation. In 1996, a task
force led by neocons Richard Perle (future chairman of the Defense Policy
Board), David Wurmser (future senior Middle East adviser to Vice President
Dick Cheney), Douglas Feith (future undersecretary of defense), and others
issued a policy paper aimed at incoming Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin
Netanyahu. "A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm" advocated
that Israel walk away from its embrace of the Oslo peace process and Oslo's
focus on territorial concessions. The paper's essential ingredients included
weakening Israel's neighbors via regime change in Saddam Hussein's Iraq and
"roll back" in Syria and Iran. The authors' recommendations turned out to be
anything but a wish list, given that a number of them would soon hold
influential positions in the administration of George W. Bush.
As journalist Jim Lobe wrote in 2007:
"[T]he task force, which was chaired by Perle, argued that regime change in
Iraq -- of which Feith was among the most ardent advocates within the
Pentagon -- would enable Israel and the U.S. to decisively shift the balance
of power in the region so that Israel could make a 'clean break' from the
Oslo process (or any framework that would require it to give up 'land for
peace') and, in so doing, 'secure the realm' against Palestinian territorial
claims."
In other words, as early as 1996, these neocons were already imagining what
would become the disastrous invasion of Iraq in 2003. You could argue, of
course, that neither the neocons nor Netanyahu could have foreseen the chaos
that would follow, with Iraq nearly cracking open and Syria essentially
collapsing into horrific civil war and violence, civilians stranded under
relentless bombing, and the biggest refugee crisis since World War II
gripping Europe and the world. But you would, at least in some sense, be
wrong, for certain of the neocon advocates of regime change imagined chaos
as an essential part of the process from early on.
"One can only hope that we turn the region into a caldron, and faster,
please," wrote Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute in the
National Review during the buildup to the invasion of Iraq. (In 1985, as a
consultant to the National Security Council and to Oliver North, Ledeen had
helped broker the illegal arms-for-hostages deal with Iran by setting up
meetings between weapons dealers and Israel.) "The war won't end in
Baghdad," Ledeen later wrote, in the Wall Street Journal. "We must also
topple terror states in Tehran and Damascus."
The neocons got so much more than they bargained for in Iraq, and so much
less than they wanted in Syria and Iran. Their recent attempts -- with
Netanyahu as their chief spokesman -- to block the Obama administration's
Iran nuclear deal, for example, went down in flames. Still, it's stunning to
think just how much their strategy of regime change and chaos helped
transform our world and the Greater Middle East for the worse, and to be
reminded that its ultimate goal, at least in those early days, was in large
part to keep Israel from having to pursue a peace deal with the
Palestinians. Of course, there were other benefits the neocons imagined back
then as part of their historic attempt to redraw the map of the Middle East.
Controlling some of the vast oil reserves of that region was one of them,
but of course that didn't exactly turn out to be a "mission accomplished"
moment either. Only the Israeli part of the plan seemed to succeed as once
imagined.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608198138/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608198138/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20So here we
are 20 years later. All around the Holy Land, states are collapsing or at
least their foundations are crumbling, and Israel's actions make clear that
it isn't about to help improve the situation in any way. It visibly intends
to pursue a policy of colonization, permanent human rights violations, and
absolute rule over the Palestinians. These are facts on the ground that
former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, Netanyahu, the Israeli right wing, and
those American neocon visionaries fought so hard to establish. A succession
of leaders in Washington -- at least those who weren't designing this policy
themselves -- have been played for fools.
In the two-plus decades since the 1993 Oslo Agreement, which some believed
would put Israel and the Palestinians on the path to peace, and that "Clean
Break" document which was written to undermine it, the West Bank settler
population has grown from 109,000 to nearly 400,000 (an estimated 15% of
whom are American). The would-be capital of a Palestinian state, East
Jerusalem, is now surrounded by 17 Jewish settlements. Palestinians
nominally control a mere 18% of the West Bank (also known as Area A), or 4%
of the entire land base of Israel/Palestine.
The Palestinians' would-be homeland is now checkered with military bases,
settlements, settler-only roads, and hundreds of checkpoints and barriers --
all in a West Bank the size of Delaware, our second-smallest state. An
estimated 40% of adult male Palestinians, and thousands of children, have
seen the insides of Israeli jails and prisons; many of them languish there
without charges.
Israel has, in essence, created a Jim Crow-like separate and unequal reality
there: a one-state "solution" that it alone controls. The United States has
done almost nothing about this (other than carefully couched, periodic State
Department words of complaint), while its ally marched forward unchecked.
Not since James Baker was secretary of state under the first President Bush
before -- notably enough -- the signing of the Oslo accords has any U.S.
leader threatened to withhold funds unless Israel stops building settlements
on Palestinian land. The phrase "friends don't let friends drive drunk" no
longer applies in U.S.-Israeli relations. Rather, what we hear are regular
pledges of "absolute, total, unvarnished commitment to Israel's security."
Those were, in fact, the words of Vice President Joe Biden during a 2010
visit to Israel -- a pledge offered, as it turned out, only a few hours
before the Netanyahu government announced the construction of 1,600 new
apartments in East Jerusalem.
"Unvarnished commitment" in 2016 means that $38 billion for what Obama
called "the world's most advanced weapons technology." That includes 33 of
Lockheed's F-35 Joint Strike Fighter jets, at $200 million per jet, part of
a troubled $1.5 trillion weapons system subsidized by U.S. taxpayers. Other
deadly hardware headed for Israel: cargo planes, F-15 fighter jets, battle
tanks, armored personnel carriers, a new class of warships whose guided
missiles would undoubtedly be aimed directly at Gaza, and more of Lockheed's
Hellfire missiles. If recent history is any indication, you would need to
add fresh supplies of bombs, grenades, torpedoes, rocket launchers, mortars,
howitzers, machine guns, shotguns, pistols, and bayonets. As part of the
agreement, U.S. arms manufacturers will soon supply 100% of that weaponry,
while Israeli weapons manufacturers will be phased out of U.S. military aid.
"It's a win-win for Israeli security and the U.S. economy," a White House
aide cheerily told the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz.
The Clinton (Trump) White House and Israel
Current policy, if that's the right word, could perhaps be summed up as
weapons, weapons, and more weapons, while Washington otherwise washed its
hands of what was always known as "the peace process" (despite that fig leaf
still in place). Today, functionally, there's no such process left. And
that's unlikely to change under either a President Clinton or a President
Trump. If anything, it may get worse.
During the Democratic primary campaign, for instance, Hillary Clinton
promised to invite Netanyahu to the White House "during my first month in
office" in order to "reaffirm" Washington's "unbreakable bond with Israel."
In a speech to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), which
labels itself "America's pro-Israel lobby," she was virtually silent on the
Israeli settlement issue, except to promise to protect Israel against its
own violations of international law. She attacked Trump from the right,
denouncing his once-expressed wish to remain "neutral" on the issue of
Israel and Palestine.
In the 1990s, as first lady, Clinton had stirred controversy by uttering the
word "Palestine" and kissing Yasser Arafat's widow, Suha, on the cheek. Now
she fully embraces those who believe Israel can do no wrong, including
Hollywood mogul Haim Saban, who has donated at least $6.4 million to her
campaign, and millions more to the Clinton Foundation and the Democratic
National Committee. Saban, an Israeli-American whose billions came largely
from the Mighty Morphin Power Rangers franchise, describes himself as "a
one-issue guy, and my issue is Israel."
Last year, he convened a "secret" Las Vegas meeting with fellow billionaire
Sheldon Adelson, the bankroller of a panoply of Republican candidates and a
huge supporter of Israel's settlement project. Their aim: to shut down, if
not criminalize, the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions
movement, or BDS. That boycott movement targets cultural institutions and
businesses including those that profit from the occupation of the West Bank.
Its approach is akin to the movement to impose sanctions on South Africa
during the apartheid era.
With Saban's millions destined for her campaign war chest, Clinton wrote to
her benefactor to express her "alarm" over BDS, "seeking your thoughts and
recommendations" to "work together to counter BDS." Yet it's a nonviolent
movement that aims to confront Israel's human rights abuses through direct
economic and political pressure, not guns or terror attacks. Would Clinton
prefer suicide bombers and rockets? Never mind that the relatively modest
movement has been endorsed by an assortment of international trade unions,
scholarly associations, church groups, the Jewish Voice for Peace, and Nobel
Peace Prize winner Desmond Tutu. At the root of BDS, Clinton has hinted
darkly, is anti-Semitism. "At a time when anti-Semitism is on the rise
across the world," she wrote Saban, "we need to repudiate forceful efforts
to malign and undermine Israel and the Jewish people."
As for Trump, some Palestinians were encouraged by his statement to MSNBC's
Joe Scarborough that he might "be sort of a neutral guy" on the issue. He
told the AP: "I have a real question as to whether or not both sides want to
make it. A lot will have to do with Israel and whether or not Israel wants
to make the deal -- whether or not Israel's willing to sacrifice certain
things." Yet Trump subsequently fell in line with Republican orthodoxy,
pledging among other things to move the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, a litmus
test for supporters of the hard right in Israel, and a virtual guarantee
that East Jerusalem, at the center of the Palestinian dream of statehood,
will remain in Israel's hands.
In the short term, then, the prospect for an American-brokered just peace
may be as bleak as it's ever been -- even though U.S. officials know full
well that a just solution to the conflict would remove a primary recruiting
tool for jihadists. For the next four to eight years, American leadership
will, by all indications, shore up the status quo, which means combining all
that weaponry and de facto acquiescence in Israel's land grabs with,
perhaps, the occasional hand-wringing State Department statement.
"With Patience, Change Will Come"
However, like Jim Crow, like South African apartheid, the status quo of this
moment simply can't last forever. Eventually, the future of the region will
not be left to the self-proclaimed "honest brokers" of Washington who
lecture Palestinians on the proper forms of nonviolence, while offering no
genuine alternatives to surrender. Given the long history of Palestinian
resistance, it is foolhardy to expect such a surrender now and particularly
unwise to slander a movement of nonviolent resistance -- especially given
what we know about the kinds of resistance that are possible.
Whether by peaceful resistance or other means, the status quo will change,
in part simply because it must: a structure this twisted cannot stand on its
own forever. Already AIPAC's monumental attempts to scuttle the Iran deal
have led to humiliating defeat and that's just a taste of what, sooner or
later, the future could hold. After all, young Americans, including young
Jews, are increasingly opposed to Israel's domination of Palestinian lands,
and increasingly supportive of the boycott movement. In addition, the
balance of power in the region is shifting. We can't know how Russia, China,
Turkey, and Iran will operate there in the years to come, but amid the
ongoing chaos, U.S. influence will undoubtedly diminish over time. As a
member of a prominent Gaza family said to me many years ago: "Does Israel
think America will always protect them, always give them arms, and that they
will always be the biggest power in the Middle East? Do they really expect
they can maintain this hold on us forever?"
A popular Arab folk ballad, El Helwa Di, promises a penniless child who has
placed her life in God's hands: "With patience, change will come. All will
be better."
Perhaps it will prove useful, in the end, to abandon the illusions of the
now-terminal two-state solution, at least as envisioned in the Oslo process.
In the language of those accords, after all, the words "freedom" and
"independence" never appear, while "security" is mentioned 12 times.
In a regime of growing confinement, the Israelis have steadily undermined
Palestinian sovereignty, aided and abetted by an American acquiescence in
Israel's ongoing settlement project. Now, at least, there is an opportunity
to lay the foundations for some newer kind of solution grounded in human
rights, freedom of movement, complete cessation of settlement building, and
equal access to land, water, and places of worship. It will have to be based
on a new reality, which Israel and the United States have had such a hand in
creating. Think of it as the one-state solution.
Sandy Tolan, a TomDispatch regular, is the author of the international
bestseller, The Lemon Tree, and of the acclaimed Children of the Stone about
one Palestinian's dream to establish music schools under Israel's military
occupation. He has reported from more than 35 countries and is professor at
the Annenberg School for Journalism and Communication at USC. His website is
sandytolan.com, his Twitter handle, @sandy_tolan.
Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest
Dispatch Book, Nick Turse's Next Time They'll Come to Count the Dead, and
Tom Engelhardt's latest book, Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars,
and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World.
Copyright 2016 Sandy Tolan
C 2016 TomDispatch. All rights reserved.
View this story online at: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176199
