This piece by Gwynne Dyer is one of the best assessments of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict I’ve seen. Far from the standard pap you get from the US media, a fiction foisted on us almost daily in which the persecuted and outnumbered Jews fight bravely against a savage horde of crazed Arabs bent on their singular destruction, his essay casts a refreshingly honest illumination on events as they actually are, where the Israelis and their “settlers” are the terrorists, and the Palestinians are the victims in an invasion that finds them ground further and further under the heel of an American-made boot.
First you’ve heard of it? Well, read on…
In a U.S. election campaign that is more about foreign policy than any presidential race in decades, one issue is completely off- limits: the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
George W. Bush and John Kerry both back Israel 100 per cent, and neither man will offer a single word of criticism about Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s “disengagement” plan, even though it means abandoning the notion of a peace settlement.
Once again, the Israeli tail is wagging the American dog.
Last week, Sharon’s chief of staff and most trusted adviser, Dov Weisglass, indulged in a carefully calculated indiscretion in an interview with the newspaper Ha’aretz.
“The `disengagement’ is actually formaldehyde,” he said. “It supplies the amount of formaldehyde that is necessary so there will not be a political process with the Palestinians.” Perfectly true, of course, and yet it was a shocking thing to say out loud.
Sharon was never really going to accept a peace deal with the Palestinians that required giving up most of the illegal Jewish settlements in the occupied territories conquered by Israel in 1967. Indeed, he was the man responsible for starting the settlements in the first place.
Yet, when he came to power in 2001 he inherited the Oslo peace accords, which imagined an Israeli-Palestinian peace based on two states living side by side ・and the Palestinian state was to be created on exactly those territories.
Sharon had to pretend that he agreed with that goal because the whole international community (including the U.S.) supported the two-state solution. Over the past few years the “Oslo process” mutated into the so-called “road map” to peace, but the goal remained the same: Israeli evacuation of the occupied territories and the creation of a Palestinian state living peacefully alongside Israel. In the past six months, however, Sharon has achieved breakout.
“Disengagement” means that Israel will evacuate its settlements in the densely populated Gaza Strip, where 7,500 Jews live surrounded by 1.3 million Palestinians, and four other tiny settlements with only a few hundred people that lie beyond the “security fence” in the northern West Bank.
They never made any sense in terms of the cost of protecting them anyway.
But by abandoning them, Sharon can seem to be making a major concession for peace ・while hanging on to all the other West Bank settlements where the vast majority of the settlers live forever.
Forever is a long time, and Sharon still maintains the pretense that at some future time, when there is a different Palestinian leadership, there might be further negotiations about a Palestinian state.
But Weisglass spilled the beans on Oct. 6, pointing out that he had negotiated an agreement with the Bush administration in late August in which the United States had changed its policy of 37 years and agreed that the illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank would eventually become part of Israel.
The 190,000 Jewish settlers there, he boasted, “will not be moved from their place.”
“What I effectively agreed to with the Americans was that part of the settlements would not be dealt with at all, and the rest will not be dealt with until the Palestinians turn into Finns,” said Weisglass, adding that this would stall the peace process indefinitely.
“When you freeze that process, you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state, and you prevent a discussion on the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem.
“Effectively, this whole package called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed indefinitely from our agenda … all with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress.”
Weisglass said what he did to win back the more fundamentalist supporters of Sharon’s Likud party, who are threatening to abandon the party on the grounds that God gave Israel the land and it must never yield an inch of it.
Bush, presumably, did what he did in order to retain the votes of the extreme evangelical Protestants, estimated to account for a third of the Republican core vote, who believe that God’s plan requires the expansion of Israel and a great war in the Middle East.
But why does Kerry go along with it?
Presumably because his advisers tell him that in a tight election it would be suicide to alienate American Jews, most of whom reflexively support any Israeli government, regardless of its policies, and most of whom are still traditionally Democratic voters.
It all make sense in terms of political tactics, but it commits America to a policy that is contrary to international law and is not supported by any other government in the world except Israel’s.
If Kerry should win, it means he, too, would be shackled to a policy that makes it impossible for America’s European and Arab allies to co-operate in any Middle Eastern initiative he might launch with the goal of extricating American troops from the mess in Iraq.
Gwynne Dyer is a Canadian journalist based in London whose articles are published in 45 countries.