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Is Israeli Settler Colonialism and Apartheid Poised for Victory or Defeat?

13 Jan

“These are the basic lines of the national

government headed by me:

The Jewish people have an exclusive

and unquestionable right to all areas of

the Land of Israel. The government will

promote and develop settlement in all

parts of the Land of Israel – in the Galilee,

the Negev, the Golan, Judea and Samaria.”

         Benjamin Netanyahu, December 30, 2022

Anyone with but half eye open during the last several decades should by now be aware that of the existence of an undisclosed Zionist Long Game that preceded the establishment of Israel in 1948,  and remains currently very much alive. It aims at extending Israeli sovereignty over the whole of Occupied Palestine, with the probable exception of Gaza, excluded for demographic and biblical reasons. The significance of Netanyahu’s publicaffirmation of this previously secretive long game is that it may be reaching its final phase, with him presiding over the far right governing coalition that is poised to pursue closure. 

Should it matter that Netanyahu’s claim of exclusive Israel’s supremacy on behalf of the Jewish people over the whole of the promised land is in direct defiance of international law? Additionally, Netanyahu’s statement is also perversely at odds with Biden’s stubborn insistence, however farfetched, on reaffirming U.S. Government support for a two-state solution. This zombie approach to resolving the Israel/Palestine struggle has dominated international diplomacy for years, usefully allowing the UN and its Western members to maintain their embrace of Israel without seeming to throw the Palestinian people under the bus while doing just that. Netanyahu’s brazen avowal of Israeli unilateral expansionism foregoes these earlier diplomatic charades to placate world public opinion to put Israel’s intentions of unilaterally finishing the Zionist Project. Such a forthright approach challenges the UN, the Palestinian Authority, the Palestinian people, governments around the world, and transnational civil society to open both eyes and finally acknowledge that the two-state solution is dead. This does not mean giving up on a peaceful solution based on political compromise, but it does suggest shifting such hopes from two-state proposals to a single unified confederal, secular state with coexisting dual homelands for the two peoples based on equality of ethnic entitlements to Palestine as often conceived from ‘the river to the sea.’ Such a state would have a single governance structure upholding the fused sovereign rights of a post-Zionist, presumably renamed, state premised upon equal citizenship and human rights for Jews and Palestinians.   

In fairness, it is true that this Zionist Long Game has only recently become fully apparent to all but the closest observers of the struggle. Throughout the 20th century this design of progressive expansionism was hidden from public view by a combination of Israeli control over the public narrative and U.S. complicity, which deceived especially diaspora Zionists by assuming that Israel was open to a political and territorial compromises and that it was the Palestinians who were mainly responsible for the failures to accept reasonable diplomatic proposals prefiguring Palestinian statehood. Such an interpretation of the stalemate was always deeply mistaken becuase it underestimated Israel underlying ambitions. 

The Zionist Project from its very beginnings, more than a century ago, proceeded by stages to accept as final whatever was politically attainable at any given time, before moving quietly and quickly on to the next stage in fulfillment of its long-range colonization plans. Zionism never convincingly gave up its guiding commitment to establish a Jewish state that exercised sovereign control over the whole of ‘the whole of the promised land,’ itself a misleadingly precise reading of Judaic biblical tradition that could be concretized in any way that the Israeli leadership preferred.

This pattern of expansionist priorities should have become evident in the periods following the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and after World War II. The infamous colonial Declaration had pledged British support for ‘a national home for the Jewish people’ in Palestine. This pledge was made credible during the British mandatory period by accommodating ballooning Jewish immigration, which coincided with the rise of antisemitic fascism, most visibly in Nazi Germany, but extending to much of the rest of Europe. 

After World War II came the UN partition resolution (UNGA Res. 181, 1947), which not only ignored Palestinian rights of self-determination by partitioning the country without a prior referendum, changing the status of the Jewish presence from ‘national home’ within the state of Palestine to a sovereign Jewish state on fully half of Palestinian territory, and then failing to take effective responsibility for implementing the portions of the UN proposals more favorable to Palestinians. This internationally devised ‘solution’ was greeted positively at each stage by the Zionist formal leadership, but rejected by representatives of the Palestinian people and by neighboring Arab governments. This regional rejectionism led directly to the 1948 War, which resulted in the catastrophic dispossession of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians, known to its victims as the nakba, ending with a ceasefire that increased Israel’s share of Palestine from 55% to 78%. The dispossession of such a large number of Palestinians was integral to the Zionist commitment to make Israel not only Jewish but democratic.  It was understandably thought insecure to suppose that Israel could remain an ethnic democracy without a substantial Jewish demographic margin, and this could not be obtained except by dispossession, by coercive means to the extent necessary. From early on, Zionist zealots believed it desirable for security and nation-building to work toward a Jewish Only state, and that goal may resurface in the months ahead, not only to achieve ethnic purity, but to quell worries about Palestinian ‘demographic bomb.’

The next step in carrying forward the Zionist Project resulted from Israell’s victory in the 1967 War, which drove Jordan out of the West Bank and East Jerusalem (and Egypt from Gaza). II also dispossessed another large number of indigenous Palestinians, a course of events known among Palestinian as the naksa. The 1967 War also resulted in Israel’s prolonged occupation of the territories occupied during the short war, and it was the beginning of an Israeli version of ‘triumphalism,’ which also made converts among foreign political elites in Washington previously worried that full support for Israel would alienate the Gulf oil producers. 

The occupation by law and political consensus at the time was expected to be temporary (a matter of a few years at most) but the establishment of many unlawful Jewish settlements encroaching on what had been projected as a coexisting Palestinian state in the West Bank and East Jerusalem strongly suggested that all along Israel’s leadership envisioned permanent arrangements with an end game in mind that did not include viable Palestinian statehood encompassing the West Bank heartland. Israel stalled over the years by complicated demands for border adjustments being agreed upon prior to any withdrawal. And somewhat later on, with a show of temerity, Israel contended that the West Bank was ‘disputed territory’ rather than ‘occupied territory.’

Another strong straw in the wind back in 1967 was Israel immediate declaration and enactment of a sovereign claim over the whole of an enlarged Jerusalem as the ‘eternal capital’ of the Jewish state, signaling its unwillingness to trust an outcome of post-1948 diplomatic negotiations (or to uphold the Jerusalem portion of the UN Partition Plan), which had originally envisioned East Jerusalem as the capital of the co-equal Palestinian state, before backpedaling and accepting the idea of the holy city being divided between the two peoples. This incorporation of Jerusalem into Israel proper was repeatedly rejected by overwhelming votes in the General Assembly, duly ignored by the Israeli government, but again Israel found that it would suffer no adverse consequences by defying international law and General Assembly majorities.

There were many lesser displays of virtuoso salami slicing by Israel of Palestinian rights and expectations in the subsequent 55 years. The Oslo diplomatic process lingered and languished for more than 20 years after the 1993 hyped handshake between Rabin and Arafat on the White House lawn, which was the most notable stunt by Israel along these lines designed to show the world that Israel remained open to achieving a negotiated sustainable peace. 

With the benefit of hindsight, it seems clear that in the Israeli strategic imaginary ‘peace’ was never what Oslo was about. The real basis of Israeli support for Oslo, besides satisfying international pressure to manifest a willingness to engage in some semblance of negotiations, was to gain the needed time to make the Jewish settlement movement large and territorially diffuse enough to become irreversible. Such an obvious assault on the two-state mantra should then have sounded the death knell of two-state duplicity, although it was overdue by 40-50 years. Yet the curtain was not lifted then or since.  The continuing international avowal of adherence to a two-state solution, until the present, was mutually convenient for both the Israeli and Palestinian leadership and for friendly foreign governments, and even for the UN that was far too weak to insist on Israeli compliance with international law in the face of Euro-American unwavering refusal to authorize any pushback in the UN Security Council.  

Israel’s 2018 Basic Law proclaiming the supremacy of Jews in ‘the promised land of Israel,’ including the whole of the West Bank, moved a giant step closer to revealing the integral goals of the Zionist Project as openly endorsed by Netanyahu to coincide with the swearing in of his fourth go at being the Prime Minister. As argued here, the essential elements of such a project had preceded its public endorsement by more than a century, but for an Israeli head of state to dramatize the commitment as openly was new, and politically of great significance.

Yet, despite this series of monumental successes of this Zionist Long Game is from some perspectives more problematic of completion than it has ever been, strange as such assertions might be regarded from a purely materialist view of politics. The Palestinian people have held firm in their commitment to self-determination throughout, while enduring a century of being tested by large-scalle Israeli settler encroachments, as aggravated by Palestinian disunity and inadequate representation at the international level by the quasi-collaborative leadership provided by the Palestinian Authority. The spirit of resistance and struggle has been sustained by a Palestinian deep culture of steadfastness of sumud as reinforced by global solidarity initiatives and a generally supportive global public opinion, as well as by Palestinian resistance and gllobal solidarity, which although sporadic never disappeared.

Additionally, the weight of evolving historical circumstances has enabled the Palestinians to achieve important victories in The Legitimacy War being waged by the two peoples for the control of symbolic and normative spaces in the wider struggle, against all odds, is being won by the Palestinians. Over the course of the last decade the international political discourse has increasingly accepted the Palestinian narrative of Israel as ‘a settler colonial state,’ a damaging assessment in an era where colonialism elsewhere was being dismantled by the weaker side militarily, suggesting the unrecognized leverage of law, morality, global solidarity, and nationalist mobilization in out maneuvering a militarily superior adversary.

My previous comments on this latest, possibly terminal phase, of the Zionist Project, is further illuminated if interpreted through the lens of settler colonialism. As Patrick Wolfe, the leading academic expositor of the concept, and others point out, a settler colonialist undertaking eventually falters and collapses unless it manages to eliminate or at least permanently and radically marginalize and pacify the native population. Settler colonial successes in Canada, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand confirm this hypothesis as do the most prominent instances of failure, South Africa, and less clearly, Algeria. Given this historical record, I anticipate feverish Israeli attempts in the near future to achieve a further massive dispossession of the Palestinian people. In an important sense, the nakba should be understood as a process rather than an event back in 1948, to be culminated during the 2020s by a new surge of dispossession tactical moves.

Beyond allegations of settler colonialism, and more carefully documented, the accusation of apartheid directed at the Israeli state, which had long dismissed as the irresponsible screams of those that wanted to destroy the Israeli state, became validated by an emergent civil society consensus. Over the course of the last six years exhaustive reports prepared under the auspices the UN (ESCWA), Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even the fiercely independent Israeli NGO, B’Tselem issued reports documenting with care and professional skill the apartheid allegations. As memories of the Holocaust faded and wrongdoing toward Palestinian rights became harder to shove under the rug, world public opinion especially in the West, became somewhat more sympathetic to and convinced by the Palestinian narrative, and as significantly, by the relevance of the South African precedent that became harder to ignore. 

Further symbolic Palestinian victories included widespread diplomatic recognition of Palestinian statehood by many governments in the Global South, admission of Palestine to non-voting membership in the UN, access as a state party to the International Criminal Court and its 2021 judgment authorizing the investigation of Palestinian allegations of international crimes in Occupied Palestine after 2014, and at the end of 2022, approval by a wide margin of a General Assembly Resolution requesting an Advisory Opinion from the World Court in The Hague on the prolonged unlawful occupation of Palestinian territories amounting to a deprivation of the Palestinian right of self-determination. The 2022 HRC appointment of a high-level Commission of Inquiry with a broad mandate to investigate Israel wrongdoing was also a revealing UN turn in favor of the Palestinians. Such challenges to Israeli administration of the Occupied Palestinian Territories only occurred after decades of UN frustrations arising from Israeli non-compliance with international humanitarian law in the OPT as set forth in the 4th Geneva Convention devoted to belligerent and refusal to cooperate with UNHRC Special Rapporteurs.

Israeli and its puppet NGOs, UN Watch and NGO Monitor, recognized the gravity of these largely symbolic delegitimizing developments, as did the Israeli government. Israel was intelligently responsive to the risks to its own viability as a Jewish Supremacy state by the collapse of the apartheid regime in South Africa due to pressures brought about by a blend of resistance, symbolic delegitimation, and global solidarity initiatives. Accordingly, Israel and its militants fought back, with total support of the U.S. Government, but not substantively, recognizing the costs of bringing about further scrutiny of the substance of Israel’s policies, practices, and racist ideology. Instead, the Israeli pushback focused on attacking the critics and their institutional venues, including even the UN, as antisemitic, and in the process smearing conscientious legal experts and even international civil servants and the institutions themselves. This has created a sufficient diversionary smokescreen to enable Biden and top EU bureaucrats to keep faith with both sides by championing the hollow prospect of ‘two states for two peoples’ when even they must know by this time that such a policy is moribund, and no longer is of much use as a public relations tactic. This assessment is truer than ever now that an apparently cocky Netanyahu has publicly told foreign political leaders to their faces that Israel no longer is interested enough in the two-state ploy to underpin its credibility. This leaves Israel’s most ardent supporters out in the cold with no place to hide their formerly respectable pro-Israel one-sidedness.

Given this line of interpretation, contrary to media commentary, Netanyahu, rather than being burdened, is likely pleased that his governing coalition is heavily dependent upon the rightest extremism of the Religious Zionism (RZ) and Jewish Power bloc. In the present context RZ, led by Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvar seems useful, if not natural allies of Likud in launching this culminating phase of the Zionist Project. This last phase involves territorial consolidation over the whole of the promised land and likely moves to inflict further dispossession of Palestinians—on the scale of a second (or intensified) Nakba—from their native lands. Seen in this way, the Netanyahu declaration above amounts to a virtual road map, hopefully from his point of view with RZ taking most of the heat for its inflammatory, openly racist, and likely violent implementation.

Given this background, the present context should be understood differently than the prevailing mode of reporting that stresses the difficulties for Netanyahu of heading the most right-wing and extremist government in the history of Israel. Mainstream journalism remains sympathetic with Netanyahu’s situation of supposedly being forced to rely on a coalition that gives dangerous influence to RZ. In opposition to such thinking, I believe having RZ entrenched in his governing structure actually strengthens the hand Netanyahu wants to play. 

It is instructive to notice that most of the regrets up to now expressed in the U.S. about the extremist successes  in the 2022 Israeli elections are devoted to their possibly negative impact on support for Israel in the liberal democracies, especially, among the predominantly secular dominant communities that largely shape  attitudes toward Israel in the European and U.S. Jewish diaspora. The probability of intensifying suffering inflicted on the Palestinians hardly ever is mentioned, and almost never evokes Western empathy. Such slanted presemtations has always slighted the successive stages of the Palestinian collective trauma that has obscured their Orientalist erasures throughout the struggle.     

Biden’s undoubtedly unconscious embrace of such Orientalist insensitivity to Palestinian rights, much less acknowledging Palestinian legitimate aspirations should have been expected. The evasive wording of Biden’s statement congratulating Netanyahu, warrants scrutiny: “I look forward to working with Prime Minister Netanyahu, who has been my friend for decades, to jointly address the many challenges and opportunities facing Israel and the Middle East region, including threats from Iran.” In the same text, the American president asserts that “the United States will continue to support the two-state solution and to oppose policies that endanger its viability or contradict our mutual interests and values.” What struck me most, although by now I should have known better, was the absence of even a small gesture of recognition that these developments might have a negative relevance to Palestinian wellbeing. Often silences convey meanings better than do words of explanation with the hope of winning approval.

Despite all, most pro-Israeli commentary analyzing the shift to the right on the part of the Israeli voting public attributes the extremist outcome in the November elections to some combination of the perceived absence of ‘a partner’ in the search for peace, the Israeli security-first response to Palestinian ‘terrorism,’ the rising influence of the religious right within Israel, the emboldening effects on Israel of the normalization agreements (so-call Abraham Accords) reached in 2020 during the last months of the Trump presidency, and even Iran’s threat to Israel. Undoubtedly, these contextual factors were influential in persuading a larger segment of Israeli voters to swallow their dislike of a governing coalition that gave strong influence to RZ, interpreted in some circles as the foretaste of a now plausible Jewish theocratically-tinged fascism. Overall, it seems enough Israelis gave priority to their hopes for a unilaterally imposed Israeli ‘victory’ scenario to the hypocritical uncertainties of the diplomatic status quo that is disinterested in negotiating a political compromise with its Palestinian counterpart. My main point here is that the shift to the right was opportunistic and pragmatic rather than reactive, resulting in most media accounts missing the relevance of the commitment of the Israeli religious right to the completion of the Zionist Project in the near future. 

My own encounters with liberal Zionist opinions in America emphasized a belief that Israeli good will with respect to a political deal with the Palestinian had run into a brick wall of Palestinian hard line opposition, an indirect validation of the ‘no partner’ excuse, or at best, blaming both sides for diplomatic failure in an asymmetric situation where one side was the oppressor and the other the oppressed. This view was accentuated by the entirely unreasonable, accompanying insistence that Israeli’s closest ally and geopolitical source of security serve as intermediary in all ‘peace’ negotiations. Nothing exhibited Palestinian weakness or lack of strategic judgment more dramatically than this willingness to rely on such a flawed diplomatic process for their prospects of realizing such basic national rights as self-determination.

While these factors have been endlessly analyzed in piecing together a coherent, exoteric or public narrative, the real story—the deep roots of these developments—is in my view yet to be told. This is because the true account of the evolution of the Zionist Project before and since the establishment of Israel is bound up with an esoteric or secret Zionist narrative that links the successive stages of Israeli expansionism to an overarching vision. This esoteric narrative centered on a strategic plan for the ideologically coherent and steady unfolding story of Israeli expansionism, which involved a pragmatic suppression of disclosing the utopian character of Zionist Project of recovering all of Palestine during a period when such ultimate goals seemed hopelessly out of reach due to the prevalence of rampant nationalism and the widespread decline in the geopolitical leverage and political acceptance of colonialism.

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Palestine is Winning the Legitimacy War

19 May

[Prefatory Note: This opinion piece was published in Middle East Eye on May 18,2021, and republished in Il Manifesto  and The Wire under different titles. It attempts to contextualize the current violence directed against Gaza in earlier Israeli provocations. It also takes note of Israel’s reliance on excessive force in its attack upon an essentially helpless Gazan civilian population of over two million people trapped inside a crowded and unlawfully blockaded enclave. The communal violence between Arabs and Jews in Israeli towns and villages, the unity displayed by Palestinians inside and outside the occupied territories, the protests at the borders of Jordan and Lebanon, the Jewish dissent from Israeli criminal assault on Gaza, and the greater receptivity of the Western media and even the US Congress to Palestinian grievances different than past interludes of severe violence. The future will tell us whether finally an inflection point in the Palestinian struggle has been reached in which the path to peace is cleared by the fusion of resistance from within and solidarity from without.]

The Last Stand of Settler Colonialism: Apartheid Israel

The current crisis of Palestine/Israel deepens and widens as casualties mount, smoke from destroyed buildings blacken the sky over Gaza, rioting on the streets of many Israeli and West Bank towns, Israeli police disrupting worshippers in the Al-Aqsa mosque compound and protecting extremist Jewish settlers shouting genocidal slogans ‘death to the Arabs’ in their inflammatory marches through Palestinian neighborhoods. Underlying this entire eruption of tensions between oppressor and oppressed were the flimsy legalized evictions of six Palestinian families long resident in the Sheikh Jarrah. These evictions epitomized the long Palestinian ordeal of persecution and banishment in what psychologically remains their homeland. While this mayhem continues the lights have remained scandalously dim at the UN. Western leaders pathetically call for calm on both as if both sides shared equal blame, while perversely affirming the one-sidedness of ‘Israel’s right to defend itself,’ which supposes that Israel had been attacked out of the blue.

Is this but one more cycle of violence exhibiting the unresolvable clash between a native people overwhelmed by a colonial intruder emboldened by a unique religiously grounded settler sense of entitlement? Or are we witnessing the beginning of the end of the century long struggle by the Palestinian people to defend their homeland against the unfolding Zionist Project that stole their land, trampled on their dignity, and made Palestinians victimized strangers in what had been their national home for centuries? Only the future can fully unravel this haunting uncertainty. In the meantime, we can expect more bloodshed, death, outrage, grief, injustice, and continuing geopolitical interference. What these events have made clear is that the Palestinians are withstanding prolonged oppression with their spirit of resistance intact, and refuse to. be pacified regardless of the severity of the imposed hardships. We also are made to appreciate that the Israeli leadership and most of its public is no longer in the mood even to pretend receptivity to a peaceful alternative to the completion of their settler colonial undertaking despite its dependence on a weaponized version of apartheid governance. 

THE HASBARA NARRATIVE

For Israelis and much of the West the core narrative continues to be the violence of a terrorist organization, Hamas, challenging the peaceful state of Israel with destructive intent, making the Israeli response seem reasonable as both a discouragement of the rockets but also as a harsh punitive lesson for the people of Gaza designed to deter future terrorist attacks. The Israeli missiles and drones are deemed ‘defensive’ while the rockets are acts of ‘terrorism’ even though Israeli human targets are seldom hit, and despite the fact that it is Israeli weaponry that causes 95% of the widespread death and destruction among the over two million civilians Gazans who have been victims of an unlawful and crippling blockade that since 2007 has brought severe suffering to the impoverished, crowded, traumatized Palestinian enclave long enduring unemployment levels above 50%.  

In the current confrontation Israel’s control of the international discourse has succeeded in de-contextualizing the timeline of violence, having the effect of leading those with little knowledge of what induced the flurry of Hamas rockets to believe falsely that the destruction in Gaza was a retaliatory Israeli reaction to hundreds of rockets launched by Hamas and Gaza militia groups. With abuses of language that might even surprise Orwell, Israel’s state terrorism is airbrushed by the world along with the rebuff of Hamas’ peace diplomacy over the past 15 years that has repeatedly sought a permanent ceasefire and peaceful coexistence.

For Palestinians, and those in solidarity with their struggle, Israel knowingly allowed the subjugated population of East Jerusalem to experience a series of anguishing humiliations to occur during the holy period of Muslim religious observances in Ramadan rubbing salt in the a wounds recently opened by the Sheikh Jarrar evictions, which had the inevitable effect of refreshing Palestinian memories of their defining experiences of ethnic cleansing days before the annual May 15th observance of the Nakba. This amounted to a metaphoric reenactment of that massive crime of expulsion accompanying the birth of Israel in 1948, culminating in the bulldozing of several hundred Palestinian villages signaling a firm Israeli intention to make the banishment permanent.

SOUTH AFRICAN APARTHEID

Unlike South Africa, which made never claimed to be a democracy, Israel legitimated itself by presenting itself as a constitutional democracy. This resolve to be a democracy came with a high price tag of deception and self-deception, necessitating to this day a continuing struggle to make apartheid work to secure Jewish supremacy while hiding Palestinian subjugation. For decades Israel was successful in hiding these apartheid features from the world because the legacy of the Holocaust lent uncritical credence to the Zionist narrative of providing sanctuary for the survivors of the worst genocide known to humanity. Additionally, the Jewish presence was making the desert bloom, while at the same time virtually erasing Palestine grievances, further discounted by hasbara visions of Palestinian backwardness as contrasting with Israeli modernizing prowess, and later on by juxtaposing a political caricature of the two peoples portraying Jewish adherence to Western values as opposed to Palestinian embrace of terrorism.

WINNING THE LEGITIMACY WAR

Recent developments in the symbolic domains of politics that control the outcome of Legitimacy Wars have scored several victories for the Palestinian struggle. The International Criminal Court has authorized the investigation of Israeli criminality in Occupied Palestine since 2015 despite vigorous opposition from the leadership of the Israeli government, fully supported by the United States. The investigation in The Hague, although proceeding with diligent respect for the legalities involved, was not openly engaged by Israel, but rather was immediately denounced by Netanyahu as ‘pure antisemitism.’

Beyond this, the contentions of Israeli apartheid, which only a few years ago was similarly denounced when an academic report commissioned by the UN concluded that the allegation of apartheid was unequivocally confirmed by Israeli policies and practices of an inhuman character designed to ensure Palestinian victimization and Jewish domination. In the past few months both B’Tselem, Israel’s leading human rights NGO, and Human Rights Watch, have issued carefully documented studies that reach the same startling conclusion that the Israel indeed administers an apartheid regime within the whole of historic Palestine, that is, the Occupied Palestinian Territories plus Israel itself. While these two developments do not alleviate Palestinian suffering or the behavioral effects of enduring denial of basic rights, they are significant symbolic victories that stiffen the morale of Palestinian resistance and strengthen the bonds of global solidarity. The record of struggles against colonialism since 1945 support reaching the conclusion that the side that wins a Legitimacy War will eventually control the political outcome, despite being weaker militarily and diplomatically. 

The endgame of South African apartheid reinforces this reassessment of the changing balance of forces in the Palestinian struggle. Despite having what appeared to be effective and stable control of the African majority population through the implementation of brutal apartheid structures, the racist regime collapsed from within under the combined weight of internal resistance and international solidarity. Outside pressures included a widely endorsed BDS campaign enjoying UN backing. Israel is not South Africa in a number of key aspects, but the combination of resistance and solidarity was dramatically ramped upwards in the past week. Israel has already long lost the main legal and moral arguments, almost acknowledging this interpretation by their defiant way of changing the subject with reckless accusations of antisemitism, and is in the process of losing the political argument.

Israel’s own sense of vulnerability to a South African scenario has been exposed by this growing tendency to brand supporters of BDS and harsh critics as ‘antisemites,’ which seems in the context of present development best described as ‘a geopolitical panic attack.’ I find it  appropriate to recall Gandhi’s famous observation along these lines: “first, they ignore you, then they insult you, then they fight you, then you win.”  

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Trump Induced Normalization Agreements with Gulf Monarchies: Is This What Peace Looks Like?

18 Sep

[Prefatory Note: The following post is based on two interviews with a Brazilian journalist, Rodrigo Craveiro, who publishes in Correio Brazilensie. The questions posed seek commentary on the normalization agreements reached between Israel and two Arab countries, United Arab Emirates (UAE) and Bahrain. My responses have been modified and enlarged since the interviews on 17-18 September 2020. These normalization agreements are being perceived from a variety of angles depending on the agendas of the various political actors. In the present context it seems a win for Israel and Trump, and a loss for the Palestinians and Iran, but will these assessments hold up when again Israel moves to foreclose Palestine’s future by proceeding to fulfill Netanyahu’s most solemn and oft-repeated pledge?]

 

Trump Induced Normalization Agreements with Gulf Monarchies: Is This What Peace Looks Like?

 

Interview #1

 

1– Trump signed with Israel, UAE and Bahrein a deal today and told this represents a change  in the course of history. “After decades of division and conflict, we mark a dawn of a new Middle East. We take a major stride towards a future in which people of all faiths and backgrounds live together in peace and prosperity”, said Trump. How do you see the meaning of two Arab nations accepted to sign a deal with Israel?

 

These normalizing moves on the part of UAE and Bahrain, under pressure from the U.S., are a form of symbolic politics‘ that have weight because they are reinforced geopolitically by being so ardently promoted by the Trump presidency. By way of contrast, the 130 or so diplomatic recognitions of Palestine as a state by governments around the world have had little significance because they lack political traction to make anything concrete and substantive change.

 

Trump’s bravado is at best an exaggeration, and at worst a shortsighted and misguided prediction about the future. This agreement expresses the interests of these two Gulf regimes that want to concentrate their power to confront the Iranian challenge, and need Israel, with U.S. backing to do this, but the Arab people remain committed to the Palestinian struggle for basic rights. There are other motivations, including the acquisition of weapons, economic relations with Israel, and being seen as willing to please the U.S. Government, at least so long as Trump is in charge. It is largely symbolic as these governments were increasingly cooperating with Israel in any event, making the claim that this has brough the region closer to peace, indeed ‘a dawn’ seems fanciful. It is not a breakthrough but a symbolic victory for Israel, and a symbolic defeat for Palestine. Nothing substantial has changed, but the atmospherics of regional politics could make a difference either mobilizing a popular movement of opposition to suck a betrayal of the Palestinian struggle or leading to a cascade of normalizing initiatives by other countries, particularly Saudi Arabia. Whether this kind of development would lead to longer range adjustments in the region and beyond is highly conjectural at this stage, and depends on many unknowable factors.

 

 

2– Do you believe Trump is using this deal mostly for pushing votes in elections? Why?

 

Trump is motivated by his immediate interests in. the November election, but also by his dual strategy of being an autocrat at home and a self-promoting peacemaker internationally. I doubt that this signing ceremony attracted much attention, and is unlikely to swing many votes in Trump’s direction. The main election issues involve Trump’s controversial personal style as leader, the outlook for the economy, and the tensions between unrest in the cities, police racism, and middle class fears of disorder.

 

3– What would be the consequences of such deal for Middle East?

 

Much will depend on events that will unfold in coming months, including the degree to which there will be renewed Palestinian resistance, even something on the order of a Third Intifada. Also, important will be whether this normalization with Israel is a prelude to an escalated confrontation with Iran. If this occurs, it would change the intergovernmental alignments in the region, but also might induce renewed domestic turmoil culminating in a second Arab Spring. The behavior of Turkey, China, and Russia are highly relevant in shaping either a new regional balance in the Middle East or sparking a new conflict configuration. Also, continuing U.S, military disengagement would alter the overall situation rather fundamentally, although in unpredictable ways. It should be remembered that severe problems of prolonged internal strife currently exist is Yemen, Libya, Syria, and Lebanon, as well as potentially explosive conflicts pertaining to energy resources in the Eastern Mediterranean. The overall regional situation is extremely complicated, and it seems likely that these largely symbolic developments in relations between Israel and Arab countries will not have important lasting consequences, partly because de facto normalization and strategic Arab/Israeli cooperation had preceded this process of formalization by several years.

 

Interview #2

 

 

******

 

1-Bahrein joined Arab United Emirates in signing deal with Israel. In what ways these deals will harm Palestinian cause?

 

These normalization arrangements are symbolically and possibly substantively harmful to the Palestinian struggle and correspondingly helpful to Israel’s long-term efforts to overcome its isolation and questionable legitimacy as a Middle Eastern state. Israel demonstrated the importance attached to normalization by its willingness to put off formal annexation moves on the West Bank in exchange for these formalized moves toward normalization. In doing so, Israel gained feelings of greater security enlarging the scope of peaceful relations with neighbors. Israel also received certain substantive benefits: air navigation overflight rights, touristic and diplomatic interaction, export gains, and enhanced reputation of diplomatic flexibility, especially appreciated by the Trump presidency. Bahrain and the UAE also added to regime security by taking these normalizing steps with Israel through obtaining greater assurances of support from Washington should internal challenges arise.

 

This diplomatic sequence was harmful to the Palestinians from a psycho-political standpoint as the Arab countries had pledged in 2002 to refrain from any  normalization moves until a peace agreement between Israel and Palestine was negotiated, a Palestinian state established, and East Jerusalem was declared as the its capital, enabling Islamic access to al-Aqsa, the third holiest Muslim sacred site. The Arab shift can be understood from three perspectives: to please Trump, to solidify security cooperation with Israel against Iran, and to obtain access to American advanced drones and fighter jet aircraft, and whatever weaponry and training it sought to control internal opposition. Of course, the Arab denial of such motivations, rests on the Israeli suspension of annexation moves toward extending its sovereignty to the West Bank, but this is a temporary concession and draws attention away from the widespread perception, not least by the Palestinians, that de facto annexation had been continually encroaching on Palestinian territorial expectations ever since the occupation began after the 1967 War. An open question is whether a renewed push by Israel for de jure annexation of 30+% of the West Bank will lead to any de-normalizing moves by Arab countries, or strong expressions of opposition in the West, including the United States. The failure of adverse consequences after the U.S. defied the UN consensus by announcing the movement of its embassy to Jerusalem at the end of 2017 suggests that there will be some strong rhetoric but little behavioral pushback, especially if a ‘decent interval’ has transpired and Arab priorities remain as at present.

 

2–Do you see an effort of Arab nations trying to punish Iran even they have to act as treason (betrayal) Palestinian fight? Why?

 

I do not see this diplomatic maneuver in that way, but rather as a way to clear the path to more robust regional cooperation with Israel in confronting Iran, and gaining more leverage in Washington for the pursuit of an anti-Iranian policy. I think it may be more reasonably interpreted as a further indication that Arab priorities and threat perceptions have shifted. This means that Israel no longer needs to be treated as adversary and enemy as a show of Arab solidarity in the face of a European incursion in the form of a Jewish state.  Instead Iran is feared as a regional rival, and has become the primary threat to Arab political arrangements, especially dynastic governance. In this regard, Palestinians are feared, as well, potentially inducing democratizing challenges to these oppressive monarchies that are sustained by sustained by weaponry and support from the West, especially the U.S.. It is important to appreciate that despite decades of rhetorical solidarity with the Palestinian struggle, Arab elites were ambivalent, believing that a Palestinian victory would have negative repercussions for their own stability.

 

 

3–What would be consequences of such deals between Bahrein and UAE with Israel for Middle East geopolitics and for perspective of peace process in future?

 

At present, the US/Israeli governments do not favor a diplomatic solution to the Israel/Palestine confrontation. Israel is not interested in seeking a genuine political compromise involving territory and refugees, and is under no U.S. pressure to pretend otherwise. Israel’s territorial objectives continue to be expansionist, encompassing ‘the promised land,’ which presupposes an eventual de jure annexation of large parts of the West Bank, retention of an undivided Jerusalem as the Israeli capital, and the denial to Palestinian refugees and exiles of any right of return to pre-1967 Israel. If this is an accurate depiction of the underlying situation, there is nothing for the Palestinians to achieve, beyond some easing of material conditions (‘an economic peace’) by accepting the sort of one-sided ‘deals’ put on the table months ago by the Kushner/Trump. Although the Palestinians have been deliberately squeezed economically, especially in Gaza, the gains in Palestinian living standards that  might follow from accepting what is being offered come with an the unacceptably price tag–the surrender of basic rights. It seems highly unlikely after a century of struggle, bloodshed, and displacement that the Palestinian would renounce their quest for basic rights, including the right of self-determination.

 

 

4–Trump is stimulating such deals to isolate Iran but also to gain votes among Israel lobby in US. How do you see such strategy?

 

I do not see any major gains for this latest Trump effort in the Middle East. Objectively, considered, the main American diplomatic gain from these normalization moves seem clearly intended to distract attention from the failure of the much heralded ‘deal of the century,’ which was released under with the more sober title of ‘From Peace to Prosperity.’ It received scant support in the Arab world or among allies in Western Europe. It was widely regarded as so one-sided in Israel’s favor as to be more in the nature of a diktat than a genuine attempt to find common ground between the parties on which to work toward a diplomatic settlement.  I see little evidence that Trump will any significant additional support from the Israeli lobby or Jewish voters. It gives Trump cheerleaders something to boast about, including managing to

achieve the explicit acceptance of a Jewish state as a permanent and legitimate presence in the Middle East without having to obtain the agreement of properly constituted representatives of the Palestinian people. Iran was already isolated in the region, although with respect to Palestine it retains an approach that is supported by Turkey, and increases the plausibility of its claim to be leading the struggle against the remnants of European colonialism in the region. Such a claim resonates with public opinion throughout the entire Arab world, and is not so evident because harshly suppressed by the ruling elites.

 

More concretely, Trump’s foreign policy always welcomes arrangements that include new opportunities to increase the exports of arms merchants, and these agreements, especially with the UAE, include a commitment to provide expensive weapons, while ensuring Israel that its qualitative edge in military capabilities will be retained, thereby creating the possible basis for a regional arms race in the years ahead.

 

Finally, just as Trump seems to gain votes by helping Israel, the Arab monarchies would gain by Trump’s reelection. One ulterior motive for normalization at this time, that is just prior to the November election, is to bolster Trump’s tenuous claim to be a peacemaker in the Middle East.

 

 

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Interpreting the UAE/Israel Agreement on Suspending Annexation

16 Aug

[Prefatory Note: Responses to Interview Questions from Javad Heiran-Nia, an Iranian journalist, on the UAE/Israel Normalization/Annexation Agreement of Aug. 13, 2020.]

Interpreting the UAE/Israel Agreement on Suspending Annexation

 

  1. The UAE and Israel normalized their relations. What are the reasons for this and what effect will it have on regional equations?

Any comment on regional implications of the Agreement is, of course, highly speculative as the real reasons for such an initiative are rarely disclosed by those with the power of decision. In this case the uncertainties are magnified by some central ambiguities in the language of the text, especially the word ‘suspend’ in relation to Israeli plans to annex portions of the West Bank. This territory is considered internationally to be part of Occupied Palestine, and by Israel as ‘disputed territory.’

 

I would offer the following tentative reactions to the Agreement: Israel was motivated by Netanyahu’s effort to justify a delay in fulfilling his election promise to annex large portions of the occupied West Bank territory belonging to Palestine, and the Agreement provided a basis to claim compensatory benefits. Netanyahu was also under pressure to convince Israelis that he could be an effective leader, and achieve peace and security in the region while under indictment for corruption and without making concessions to the Palestinians. The Agreement can be viewed as a victory for hard line reactionary Israeli politics, and also pleased Trump by allowing him to claim credit for brokering a deal that is being touted as a ‘breakthrough’ for ‘peace.’ In this usage, peace refers to Israel/Arab relations, and ignores the unresolved conflict with the Palestinian people and their leadership.

 

It is less clear what motivated the UAE to act at this time. There is speculation that once ‘peace’ with Israel is achieved, the UAE will be eligible to buy advanced weapons systems from the U.S., including the latest military drones. The UAE may have also wanted to strengthen the anti-Iran coalition while Trump remains the American president, fearing that if Biden wins the November election, he might restore the agreement on Iran’s Nuclear Program negotiated during the Obama presidency but repudiated by Trump. It is also plausible that the UAE is making a move to establish its leadership among Gulf countries, and getting out from beneath Saudi Arabia’s shadow.

 

It is possible in order to reach a common understanding the parties agreed not to specify what was meant by the word ‘suspend’ in relation to formal annexation by Israel of West Bank territory. It is also possible that a confidential understanding among the three parties was reached that the annexation freeze would be maintained for at least six months, and that during the next six months could be ended by Israel with U.S. approval, after one year, could be ignored by Israel in moving forward with annexation.

  1. This is the normalization of relations mediated by Trump and this agreement is to be signed in the White House. What propaganda will Trump use for this issue in the presidential election?

As Trump has already claimed, this will be presented to the American people as a demonstration of the effectiveness of Trump’s deal-making diplomacy, as well as securing a victory for Israel in its efforts to achieving normalization with Arab countries without allowing the formation of an independent sovereign Palestine. The location of the signing ceremony at the White House will be a high-profile photo op for Trump, and will be conveyed to the world as a sign of continued American leadership in the search for stability in the region in ways that preserve the strategic interests of the U.S. and Israel. Whether many Americans will be very impressed by such PR showmanship remains to be seen. Some liberal American anti-Trump voices have joined in celebrating the Agreement, including a feverish puff piece by the influential NY Times opinion writer Thomas Friedman that misleadingly treats the Agreement as a ‘geopolitical earthquake’ with a positive and unifying impact on the entire Middle East. Little attention has so far been devoted in the West to how the agreement harms the Palestinian struggle for basic rights or bears on the efforts to exert pressure on Iran to conform to Western priorities.

  1. This agreement, on the other hand, shows the concern of the UAE and Saudi Arabia about a US without Trump. In fact, by bringing Israel into clear security and political relations, the two countries will have more support from the US government. What is your assessment?

It seems that this is an accurate, but not central consideration. These leading Gulf countries had long been cooperating with Israel in a variety of ways, including establishing economic and diplomatic links, cyber-security, and joining forces to exert pressure on Iran and to lend support to anti-government forces in Syria. It is doubtful that the Biden presidency would have challenged these political orientations if he is elected, although a changed leadership would likely review whatever promises or commitments Trump made to induce the UAE to sign the Agreement, and openly break ranks on whether to normalize Arab relations with Israel without the prior commitment by Israel to accept a Palestinian state on the territories occupied in 1967. It remains unclear whether Saudi Arabia was a silent partner to this initiative or feared that it might spark anti-regime activism within its own country, and encouraged UAE to take the lead.

  1. The UAE has announced that the annexation plan has been canceled under this agreement. Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced that the plan to annex the West Bank was still on the table and had only been postponed. What is your assessment?

There seems little doubt that the two parties to the August 13th Agreement want to put forward divergent interpretations of what was agreed upon as it bears on the Netanyahu/Trump endorsement of annexing those portions of occupied Palestine on which unlawful Israeli settlements are currently situated. The UAE to hide its abandonment of the Palestinians in their struggle for basic rights seeks to claim that obtaining the Israeli pledge to suspend its annexation plan preserves the hope for a Palestinian state that encompasses the entire West Bank. In contrast, Israel wants to convince especially its settler movement that the suspension is temporary, and when an opportune moment arises, annexation will go forward on the basis of the assertion of Israeli sovereignty. It should be understood that the territory in question has already been annexed by facts on the ground, and what is pledged by Israel is the ambiguous pledge to ‘suspend’ formal annexation for an unspecified time. The shift from de facto to de jure annexation seems to be connected with the readjustment downwards of Palestinian expectations in the event that some kind of negotiations between Israel and Palestine are resumed in the future. It may be relevant to recall that the UN partition resolution (GA Res. 181) looked to confer about 56% of Palestine to Israel after the end of the British Mandate. At the end of the 1948 War Israel increased its territorial scope to 78% of Paleestine, and it was presupposed in diplomacy that Israel would be expected to retain the territory gained by military operation and Palestinians lowered their goals to achieving statehood on the remaining 22%, which was again further eroded by the outcome of the 1967 War, and subsequent developments (including settlements, separation barrier, and other encroachments, all unlawful).

  1. Doesn’t this agreement mean the failure of the deal of the century? Because the lands that are to be occupied by Israel according to the deal of the century apparently cannot join according to this agreement (According to the announcement of the United Arab Emirates, of course).

In my judgment this UAE/Israel Agreement should not be regarded as the failure of the deal of the century, but its indirect and partial implementation, which looked to vest Israeli sovereignty in 30% of the West Bank. Although Israel has agreed to suspend annexation, I think the best interpretation is that this is a temporary commitment that will be altered within a year, and then a gradual renewal of annexation will go forward, possibly without needing or seeking U.S. approval. The UAE may object, especially if Netanyahu moves too soon to revive annexation plaans, but is unlikely to undo the Agreement so long as it serves its regional strategic interests. The UAE, together with other major Arab governments, had long ago abandoned meaningful support for the Palestinian struggle and adopted policies that moved by stages toward the sort of cooperation that is now normalized and endorsed openly in the Agreement, which has the blessings of Washington and allows Israel to reassure Israelis that it is enhancing security and lessening its sense of being a regional pariah.

 

An alternative view of the Israel/UAE Agreement is to view it as a Plan B that is designed to hide the provisional failure of the parties and the world to accept the Trump plan (From Peace to Prosperity). The new approach pretends that the Agreement is a ‘HUGE’ contribution to peace, as Trump claimed in a tweet. The Palestinians, Turks, and Iranians know better! Also, noteworthy, the parties ignored the relevance of international law. Annexation, whether de facto or de jure was in violation of international humanitarian law, and so Israel & Trump are rewarded for agreeing to suspend what amounts to a ‘money laundering’ operation even if no money was involved.

 

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The Darkening Sky over Palestine: Storm Clouds or New Dawn?

28 May

The Darkening Sky over Palestine: Storm Clouds or New Dawn?

 

Looking upward, the sky above Palestine has darkened, but whether portending a storm or nightfall is uncertain.

If, de jure annexation will go forward, then the sky is likely to emit thunder and lightning. When the storm passes, nothing will seem changed. Annexation is being discussed as if a game changer yet ‘annexation’ has already taken place in the form of settlements, the separation wall, denial of building and residence permits to Palestinians living in Area C, and long-affirmed Israeli sentiments of biblical entitlement solidified by continued tradition of affirming the territory the British administered as ‘Palestine’ between the two world wars as ‘the promised land’ of the Jewish people. All that changes is retaining what has long been the palpable absurdity of a commitment a to a two-state solution that Israel never wanted in its only legitimate form of two sovereign states, equal in all respects, including security.

Retaining zombie versions of the two-state mantra allowed European governments, liberal Zionists, and the UN to claim that they had not renounced their commitment to peace based on a territorial compromise between the two peoples. ‘The land for peace’ formula never encompassed the breadth and depth of Palestinian justifiable grievances, virtually abandoning millions of refugees stranded for generation in refugee camps. Israel from the outset of the two-state consensus exhibited what can most generously be called ambivalence toward ever tolerating the establishment of even an ‘unequal’ Palestinian state, as distinct from welcoming as now, a Palestinian statelet, and being done with the complaints about the denial of the inalienable right of self-determination. Israel relentlessly created conditions on the ground by its promotion of the overtly unlawful settlement movement that even made the prospect of a statelet seem less like a micro-state such as Andorra, and more like a subjugated South African bantustan.

Increasingly over the years since 1967, it became plain for all but the willfully blind to take note of Israel’s defiant implementations of its unlawful territorial ambitions that made the prospect of a genuine Palestinian sovereignty delusional to the point of irrelevance. Any yet the Palestinian Authority and liberal Zionism in America continue to cling uncritically to the two-state goal by refusals to take proper account of the constantly accumulating facts on the ground and the significance of one-sided security demands in the Oslo negotiations. Long ago it was clear that the best that the Palestinians could hope for was a modified structure of Israeli hegemony, prefigured by the cruelties of Gaza ‘disengagement,’ which in effect would function as a minimal, quasi-sovereign state with juridical equality but existentially as subjugated as during the lengthy occupation of the West Bank. It remains uncertain whether Israel is seeking a hegemonic ceasefire in an agreement mislabeled as ‘peace’ or pursuing an end game that envisioned an Israeli one-state outcome. It was an open question whether in such a ‘solution’ Palestinians would be granted second-class citizenship similar to what has been conferred behind the green line or some sort of third-class variant designed to make sure that Israel never faces the demographic threat of no longer being a Jewish majority state.

Such Israeli ambitions proceeded behind a public relations smokescreen of sweet reasonableness that became no longer necessary when Trump added geopolitical muscle to an Israeli victory scenario, which was not quite explicitly affirmed but packaged as ‘the deal of the century.’ As preceded by U.S. giveaways to Israeli expansion as cutting of UNRWA funding for Gaza, recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel and moving the American embassy, and endorsing the Israeli annexation of the occupied Syrian Golan Heights, Trump’s hyper-partisanship fooled almost no one, not even the PA. It would be an insult to the political intelligence of the Palestinian people to except anything other than a rejection o this poisoned chalice was offered to the Palestinians. Israelis fully realized that what Washington was offering was no deal, but ‘the gift of the century,’ and there was no time to waste as Trump might disappear after the 2020 elections, requiring a return to the slow dance demanded by the American bipartisan consensus that has been the quiet enabler of Israeli expansionist moves ever since Israel was established in 1948, as distinct from the raucous cheerleading emanating from the West Wing of the Trump White House.

What is the nature of this gift so neatly wrapped by Kushner’s stealthy maneuvers? It is a strong-armed attempt to confer legitimacy on decades of unlawful Israeli expansionism and apartheid governance carried on while the U.S. winked in public, and its leaders smiled to Zionist donors in private. What failed as partisan diplomacy during the Clinton/Bush/Obama presidencies has been repudiated. In its place, with only the thinnest of disguises veiling the true nature of the Trump approach, is nothing other than a coercive geopolitical initiative with only a nominal pretense of diplomatic give and take. It is not only Trump + Netanyahu/Gantz that makes this an opportune moment for Israel to crush the Palestinian struggle once and for all. Such an initiative is also helped by the regional confrontation of the Arab Gulf countries with Iran, which leads the governing Arab regimes to throw the Palestinians under the nearest bus, and doing so despite the abiding solidarity of the Arab people with the Palestinian struggle to end their prolonged and insufferable ordeal as victims of Israeli settler colonialism sustained by apartheid structures of governance. For what ends do the Arab governments defy the wishes of their own publics? To please Washington and Tel Aviv, and by doing so, joining forces with Israel to crush the Iranian regional challenge, by inducing its withdrawal from any further active role in regional policies, or more ambitiously, by producing regime change in Tehran.

Will this storm, if it materializes, alter the present play of forces? It seems doubtful. Palestinians, may be discouraged by these dark clouds hovering over their collective destiny, but their perseverance, resilience, and resistance has been demonstrated over and over again for more than a hundred years. Of course, nothing should be taken for granted. If Israel goes ahead with its annexation plans in the West Bank, the Palestinian response will be watched closely as an indicator of the intensity with which la lucha continua. It is possible that Israel will somewhat back down on annexation, at least temporarily, because outsiders, including Jordan, the EU, the UN, liberal Zionism in the diaspora do not want to legalize the facts on the ground almost as much as they do not want to challenge them in any credible manner. Legalization will make the two-state delusion even less tenable than now, and then what? A reluctant acceptance of the lost cause scenario, acknowledging that the Trump/Israel game plan has prevailed, and that the long effort to find a compromise has failed. But will legality confer legitimacy? Or quell resistance? Not for long, if at all.

Here is where the split between the top down perspective of political elites will again diverge further from the bottom up approach of transnational movement politics. The top down approach will grimace, but cave in, implicitly accepting ‘the new normal’ of annexation. The bottom up approach is likely to be enraged and energized, insisting that these moves coordinated between Washington and Jerusalem have no relevance to the status of Palestinian grievances, and merely underscore the criminalization of this move to acquire sovereign rights over occupied Palestinian territory taken by force in the 1967 War. Such a land-grabbing territorial claim was unanimously rejected even in the midst of the Cold War by UN Security Council in Resolution 242, which was repeatedly reaffirmed as the basis for peace in numerous subsequent resolutions, as well as mandating a diplomatic path to peace in Resolution 338 by a 14-0 vote.

Yet might it be nightfall, a long prelude to a new dawn. The sheer injustice of such arrogant geopolitics may be a red line, which when crossed, results in real changes in the balances of forces that will turn out to be helpful for the Palestinian struggle. It is this prospect that has led some stalwarts of the Israeli security establishment and several of the most militant Zionists to break ranks, opposing annexation, at least now for a series of tactical reasons—provoking Jordan, troubling liberal Zionists, alienating Europe, arousing the Arab street, weakening bipartisan support in the U.S., strengthening the BDS Campaign, discrediting the 2018 IHRA (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) definition of ‘anti-Semitism,’ ending collaborative relations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, promoting Palestinian unity efforts, weakening the anti-Iran coalition, and generating a Third Intifada. If some of these reactions occur it will produce a new stage of struggle, which could even lead toward increasing boycotts directed at Israel, and greater mainstream advocacy of sanctions, especially in Europe, which could mean a loss of Israeli expansionist legitimacy rather than its gain, and in time lead to an Israeli search for a better alternative for its own future than annexation sustained by apartheid.

And what is a better alternative? This question can only be answered by the Palestinian people through their authentic representatives. Even so, there are certain preconditions that must be met if the lessons from the past are to have been learned by the mapmakers of the future. The most important lesson involves the recognition that Israel’s security has long presupposed an apartheid framework of Israeli Jewish domination of the Palestinian people as a whole. This means that Israeli apartheid extends beyond occupation to encompass refugees, involuntary exiles, and the non-Jewish minority in Israel. It resembles South African apartheid as resting on the subjugation of one race by another for purposes of sustaining domination in a manner violating international criminal law. This authoritative understanding is set forth in the International Convention on the Suppression and Punishment of the Crime of Apartheid (1973), and listed as a Crime Against Humanity in Article 7(j) of the Statute governing the International Criminal Court.

By ‘a new dawn’ is meant an Israeli change of view as to identity and national security in response to a changed perception of how to improve their overall situation domestically and internationally. There was no moral awakening among the Afrikaner leadership in the early 1990s that led to the previously unthinkable release of Nelson Mandela from prison as preparatory to negotiating the dismantling of the apartheid regime of control established to control the majority African population. It was a recalculation of interests on the part of the white elite governing the country, which went against the assumptions prevailing at the time that the only way for the white domination to persist was by maintaining apartheid and the only way to create peace within and without was by ending apartheid. Israel’s situation is different, reflecting the Zionist imperative to maintain permanently a Jewish demographic majority, the façade of a democratic political structure, and a hegemonic ethnic identity that is coupled with a universal and exclusive right of return. These policy priorities meant that direct control needed to be combined with periodic episodes of ethnic cleansing and a politics of fragmentation. Israel’s early challenges were formidable, maintaining such control and dispersion at a time when European colonialism was under successful attack throughout Asia and Africa, and collapsing despite superior battlefield capabilities. In this respect, Israel has so far succeeded in establishing a settler colonial state of the Jewish people, and has been able to gain diplomatic legitimacy outside its region and through admission to international institutions, including the United Nations.

On the basis of this understanding, it is obvious that ending the occupation would not bring a sustainable peace because its formula of ‘land for peace’ ignores, or at best marginalizes more than five million Palestinian refugees and exiles. Even if that large elephant in the room was to be politely ignored, or minimized, as it was during the Oslo ‘peace process’ or by the UN ‘roadmap,’ it would not be possible to actualize a lasting peace so long as the settlers and their armed settlements retained the best land in the territory that had been set aside for an independent Palestinian state. It is supremely unlikely that settlements on this scale could be dismantled or remain but demilitarized and entrust their fate to the vagaries of Palestinian security control.

Ending apartheid is the only way to end Palestinian resistance, and given the psycho-political realities of the post-colonial world, the fierceness of such resistance will occasion cycles of intensifying harshness of Israeli oppressive control. This has been the meta-narrative of the conflict since Israel established statehood despite anti-colonial historical circumstances, and the Palestine endured the Nakba, as event and process. And if apartheid is ended, transition to a peaceful future would require some formula for a shared destiny based on equality and a reckoning with the past to heal wounds. It is difficult, verging on impossibility, to envisage such a future. Yet anything else dooms both peoples to an unjust social, political, and legal order that can only be sustained or challenged by continued modalities of violent control and resolute resistance. The Palestinian and Jewish peoples deserve more humane prospects, and let us hope that the annexation debacle will force an opening of this gate to a better future that has been kept locked far too long.

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Gangster Geopolitics in the Global Jungle: Annexation Tops Israel’s Macabre Dance Card

16 May

[Prefatory Note: Republication of opinion piece published in Al Jazeera English on May 13, 2020. Link is https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/gangster-geopolitics-israel-annexation-plans-200511154825347.html. The published AJE text has been slightly modified.]

 

 

Gangster Geopolitics in the Global Jungle: Annexation Tops Israel’s Macabre Dance Card

 

 

Annexation Foreplay

 

These are the strangest of times. On this almost everyone will agree.

Lives all over the planet are being torn apart either by COVIS-19 or as a result of its devastating social and economic dislocations. In such a moment, it is hardly surprising that the best and worst of humanity is being showcased.

 

Yet what seems worse beyond even these forebodings is the persistence of gangster geopolitics in its various manifestations.

Intensifying U.S. sanctions in the midst of the health crisis on already

deeply afflicted societies and suffering populations such as Iran and Venezuela is one striking example. This display of the primacy of geopolitics is highlighted by its rejections of numerous high profile

humanitarian appeals for the suspension of sanctions, at least for the duration of the pandemic. Instead of suspension and empathy, we find tone deaf Washington almost gleefully upping its ‘maximum pressure’ policy, perversely grabbing the opportunity to rachet up the pain level.

 

Another dark tale is the macabre Israeli dance around the disruptive lawlessness of the annexation pledge that Netanyahu has promised to implement as early as July, having the assent of his power-sharing rival, Benny Gantz, to proceed without the need to gain the assent of his coalition co-leader. It is not even controversial to insist that any annexation of occupied Palestinian territory directly violates fundamental norms of international law. Maybe because of this, Israel is poised to annex without even attempting to offer legal justifications for overriding the widely endorsed and rigidly interpreted rule that a sovereign state is not allowed to annex foreign territory acquired by force.

 

This instance of annexation additionally involves an extreme repudiation of international humanitarian law as embodied in the Fourth Geneva Convention. It amounts to a unilateral move by Israel to change the status of land in the West Bank from that of occupier, since 1967) to that of its sovereign territorial authority. It also disregards the legal pledge in Oslo II (1995) to transfer to Palestine by stages jurisdiction over Area C in the post-Oslo administrative mapping of the West Bank. And further, such contemplated annexation directly challenges the authority of the UN, which by an overwhelming continuous consensus regards Israel’s presence in the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and Gaza as solely based on force and occupation, making any modification dependent on a prior authoritative expression of Palestinian consent, which is even hard to imagine ever being given. Not only is annexation unlawful, but has the potential to be regionally disruptive, agitating neighbors, especially Jordan, possibly Egypt, and directly challenges the continuing European zombie attachment to a two-state solution.

 

What has generally been overlooked in the extensive commentary on the annexation prospect is that it not only ignores the Palestinian self-determination, it also ‘forgets’ that the UN has unfulfilled promise and responsibility to find a just solution for Palestine that it inherited from the United Kingdom that had been administering the territory between the two world wars. What had been even in the days of the League ‘a sacred trust’ becomes in the era of post-colonial gangster geopolitics ‘wanton disregard.’

 

 

Israelis Insist Annexation is About ‘Security’

 

For all these reasons it is not surprising that even Israeli heavyweights, including former heads of Mossad and Shin Bet, as well as retired IDF security officers are sounding an alarm. Some militant Zionists oppose annexation at this point because it will expose the delusion that Israel is a democracy as well as a State of the Jewish people as worries mount that absorbing Palestinians in the West Bank will in due course threaten Jewish ethnic hegemony. Of course, none of this Israeli/Zionist ‘second thoughts debate’ objects to annexation because it violates international law, sidesteps and undermines UN or EU authority, and ignores Palestinian inalienable rights. All the objections to annexation from within Israel or among Zionist militants are couched by exclusive reference to a variety of concerns about alleged negative impacts on Israeli security. In particular, these critics from within Israel’s national security establishment are worried about disturbing Arab neighbors and further alienating world public opinion, especially in Europe, and to some extent worry about the reactions of ‘liberal Zionists,’ and thus weakening solidarity bonds of overseas Jews with Israel in the U.S. and Europe.

 

The pro-annexation side of the Israeli policy debate also mentions security considerations, especially with respect to the Jordan Valley and the settlements, but much less so. Unlike the critics, the more ardent proponents of annexation are land claimants. They invoke a Jewish biblical entitlement to Judea and Samaria (known internationally as the ‘West Bank’). This entitlement is reinforced by referencing Jewish deep cultural traditions and centuries of historical connections between a small Jewish presence as being continuous and this land being treated as a self-created sacred guardianship. As with Israeli critics of annexation, supporters feel no need to explain, or even notice, the disregard of Palestinian grievances and rights. Annexationist don’t dare put forward an argument that the Jewish claims are more deserving of recognition than are the competing national claims of Palestinians, undoubtedly because their case is so weak in terms of uncontested modern ideas of law, as well as the ethics of territorial entitlement.

 

As has been case throughout the Zionist narrative, Palestinian grievances, aspirations, and even the existence of a Palestinian people is not part of the Zionist imaginary except as political obstacles and demographic impediments. At the same time, all long Zionism has been tactically opportunistic about disclosing the full extent of its project, instead acting in public as if what it could gain under a given set of circumstances was all that it wanted and expected at some future point to acquire. When one considers the evolution of the main drift of Zionism since its inception, the longer-term aspiration of marginalizing Palestinians in a single dominant Jewish state that encompassed the whole of Israel’s ‘promised land’ has never been forsaken. In this sense the UN partition plan while accepted as a solution at the time by the Zionist leadership, is better interpreted as a stepping stone to recovering as much of the promised land as possible. In the course of the last hundred years, from a Zionist perspective utopia became reality, while for the Palestinians reality became dystopia.

 

 

The Macabre Dance

 

How the prelude to annexation is being addressed by Israel and the United States is as dismaying as is the underlying erasure of the Palestinians, except possibly as a restive population to be kept fragmented and as disunited as possible so that their resistance and

objections can be efficiently muted. Israel has already privileged annexation in the Gantz/Netanyahu unity government, making a proposal for annexation to be submitted to the Knesset any time after July 1st. The only precondition accepted by agreement establishing the Netanyahu/Gantz unity government was conforming the contours of the annexation to the territorial allocations embodied in the notoriously one-sided Trump/Kushner ‘From Peace to Prosperity’ proposal, which seems reasonable to treat as tantamount to an outright stamp of approval by the U.S. Government. Even without the disclosure of the Trump peace plan, U.S. approval was hardly ever in doubt. It follows from Trump’s endorsement of Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights in occupied Syrian territory a few months ago.

 

As could be expected, Trump’s America is creating no friction, not even whispering to Netanyahu at least to offer legal justifications or explain away the negative effects of annexation on Palestinian peace prospects. Instead, the American Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, has given a green light to West Bank annexation even before Israel formalized its claim, declaring provocatively that annexation is a matter for the Israelis to determine on their own (as if neither Palestinians nor international law had any relevance). He added that the U.S. will convey its opinions privately to the government of Israel.

 

Perhaps, this is a wily move by Washington. In effect, leaving it to Israel to handle any regional or UN blowback resulting from carrying out this controversial annexation. If an international pushback of any consequence occurs, the Israeli government would have to take responsibility for handling the outcry. In this sense, perhaps the Trump administration is learning the game, by this time seeking to avoid, or at least deflect, the angry reactions directed at the U.S. in the UN and elsewhere after announcing in December 2017 its intention to move the American embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

 

 

Gangster Geopoliticss

 

In the undisclosed background, the calloussness of the annexation initiative seems designed to neuter the UN and blunt international criticism of Israel. It is expected that annexation will be greeted by strong rhetoric of denunciation from several European leaders and possibly candidate Biden, but unaccompanied by any serious push for an international campaign to reverse this taking of Palestinian land. On the basis of past experience, it seems likely that after a few days of media coverage concerns will subside, and the world will move on. Even the Palestinians discouraged by years of fruitless waiting, seem to be suffering, at least temporarily, from a combination of resistance fatigue and ineffectual solidarity initiatives. Such an assessment, is best understood as one more sign that Israel/U.S. relations are being managed in accord with ‘gangster geopolitics,’ and without paying heed to international law or UN authority. Such a pejorative label intends to condemn any annexation such as this one that sweeps law and morality aside while political space is forcibly cleared for land theft.

 

While gangster geopolitics may be extinguishing the last remnant of Palestinian hopes for political compromise and a diplomacy based on a genuine commitment to equity and equality, there are voices of resistance struggling to be heard. I highlight my dissent to annexation by describing this critical response as ‘gangsta geopolitics’ borrowing from pop culture’s ‘gangsta rap’ that fights back from the streets of the world on behalf of the people suffering from racist

police tactics. Of course, this is a metaphor, yet it illuminates an incredible pattern of official behavior that is hard to believe is acknowledged in Israeli public discourse.

 

First, there is the defiant nature of the Israeli annexation claim. Secondly, there is the single qualification that Israel must obtain

a geopolitical stamp of approval from the U.S. Government before going forward with annexation. Thirdly, that the U.S. Government seems to throw the ball back to Israel by saying the decision to annex is Israel’s to make, yet it will give Israel’s the benefit of its private opinion on the matter, presumably on the tactics of timing and presentation, without any consideration of matters of principle.

 

There is a ghostly melody accompanying this macabre dance. Israel tames its unilateralism by a gesture of geopolitical deference, and by this posturing, acts as if the approval of the United States matters as

something more than a political show of support. The U.S. doesn’t question the Israeli logic, yet it doesn’t want to accept responsibility

for a public show of approval, leaving Israel free to act as it wishes although withholding, at least for now, any expression of approval or disapproval with respect to annexation.

 

This leaves unattended the awkward gap between the

Israeli unity government agreement with its requirement to obtain U.S. approval and Pompeo’s demurrer. Whether this will cause any problems as the July date approaches is unlikely, especially as Israel will present annexation as a partial implementation of the Trump proposals. I suspect that the U.S. private message will be one of discreet approval, which Netanyahu will undoubtedly treat as satisfying the agreement with Gantz.

 

What stands out here is the arrogance of the politics of annexation. Not only are the rules and procedures of the world public order cast aside, but the internal discourse on the transfer of rights is carried on as if the people most affected are irrelevant, a kind of ‘internal Orientalism.’ Let’s hope that we who resort to gangsta rap to put these developments in the perspective they deserve, can do more at the time when the annexation move is formalized than gnash our teeth in frustration while observing this lamentable spectacle unfold.

 

 

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 U.S. Policy Toward Israel/Palestine in a Deglobalizing World: A Pre-Pandemic Perspective

7 May

[Prefatory Note: The text below is drawn from my presentation at the TRT World Forum, 21-22 October 2019. The conference theme was ‘Globalisation in Retreat: Risks and Opportunities.’ What strikes me now is how different the world seems only six months later due to the surreal impacts of the Coronavirus Pandemic on all aspects of perception and assessment, the totality of dislocating developments, and the heightening of an existential appreciation of the precariousness of individual and collective experience and of the radical uncertainty cloudinour expectations of the future. Surely my paper would read radically differently if rewritten in ways that took fuller account of intervening developments (the Trump/Kushner Plan) as well as the pandemic]

 

 U.S. Policy Toward Israel/Palestine in a Deglobalizing World

 

Points of Departure

 This paper considers some impacts of the retreat from globalization on the evolution of Israel/Palestine relations, giving special attention to the regressive character U.S. policy toward the unresolved conflict. This retreat is a complex ongoing phenomenon, generating both risks and opportunities, which are changing through time, and the present character of these threats and opportunities will be explored here. A central feature of world order in the course of this retreat from globalization is the rise of ultra-nationalist political leadership in many important countries that has resulted in a generalized withdrawal of support from cooperative responses to global problem-solving, relying instead on transactional bargains between governments as shaped by geopolitical disparities rather than by deference to considerations of international law, diplomatic compromise, and global justice.

 

Despite these recent negative developments, the politics, culture, and economics of globalization should not be romanticized (Falk, 1999), or more specifically not viewed as achieving positive results in relation to the century of struggle by the Palestinian people to address their legitimate grievances. Above all, the Palestinians have endured the denial of their inalienable right of national self-determination and been victimized by the imposition  of apartheid structures of control on the Palestinian people as a whole, that is, whether living under occupation or otherwise. (Falk & Tilley, 2017). The Palestinian people have been victimized by the primacy of geopolitics for more than a century, ever since the issuance of the Balfour Declaration in 1917, which has illustrated the limits of normative (legal and moral) globalization. The retreat from globalization seems to have accentuated the disregard of international law and the authority of the United Nations, highlighted in relation to Israel/Palestine by the release of the Trump/Kushner plan with the absurd claim to offer ‘the deal of the century.’(U.S. Government, 2020). Such a trend if allowed to continue does amount to a severe setback for Palestinian legitimate aspirations, but such a bleak prospect is being challenged by parallel developments.

 

Whether this retreat from globalization is cyclical, soon to be reversed, or a longer-term linear trend is difficult to discern at this time. Its trajectory is highly contingent on the impingement from unforeseeable political, economic, and ecological developments. It may depend on the outcome of such currently unpredictable developments as to whether the Democratic candidate selected to oppose Donald Trump will go on to win the November 2020 elections, and whether the COVID-19 virus can be contained without producing a global economic collapse. As well, it is important to interpret the depth and breadth of this retreat. It certainly reflects a populist reaction of angry frustration against various forms of inequality that led many people to feel disadvantaged by ‘neoliberal globalization,’ and a turn toward demagogic leaders who denounce such developments and point fingers at the imagined culprits, real and imagined. It has also given rise to an affirmation of nationalism as the most existentially relevant political and ideological alternative to globalism. This economistic mood of grassroots alienation also reflects hostile attitudes and disruptive adjustments that pertain to such historically conditioned challenges as global migration flows and trade tensions. Also relevant for achieving an understanding of these recent developments is whether the apparent re-bonding of peoples on the basis of nationalist, and even racist and civilizational conceptions of the outer limits of political community, is integral to the retreat or just a temporary shift in focus away from the global.

 

We need to keep in mind that despite these evident patterns of retreat, the world in many respects continues to be more interconnected and networked than at any time in human history, and these dynamics are continuing, perhaps even accelerating as technology advances, a largely unacknowledged new interconnections in this digitally driven form of ‘globalization-from-below.’ (Slaughter, 2004, 2019) As well, on ecological and health frontiers, climate change and the global spread of lethal disease, remind us that we cannot hope to address effectively the challenges of the contemporary world without strengthening mechanisms of global cooperation. The behavior of the United States Government in leading the retreat, withdrawing from the Paris Agreement on Climate Change and the Nuclear Program Agreement with Iran (JCPOA, 2015) help us to appreciate how dysfunctional from a world order standpoint is a generalized retreat from globalization, and more concretely, what the loss of U.S. leadership in many global policy domains has meant. Such an endorsement of globalization should not, for instance, be understood as the approval of neoliberal globalization as it unfolded after the end of the Cold War. Indeed, this largely under regulated market driven approach to economic globalization greatly contributed to various types of inequality and alienation that led many peoples throughout the world to be receptive to the appeals advanced in favor of ultra-nationalism. In other words, the ultra-nationalism of the present should not be separated from a variety of disappointments brought about by predatory capitalism (Falk, 1999).

 

U.S. Retreat and Israel/Palestine

The reality of retreat bears crucially on the particular conflict between Israel and Palestine as reflected in the shift of the U.S. approach from its earlier pre-Trump role as partisan intermediary to its hyperbolic identity during the Trump presidency as super-partisan deal maker. Such a shift is fully in keeping with the broader pattern of retreat from globalization, but it has some additional distinguishing features. Above all, the personality and style of Trump, as reinforced by the influence of extreme Zionists donors and Evangelical Christians who constitute powerful elements of his political base. Translated into foreign policy this has meant that undisguised pro-Israeli unilateralism has replaced the earlier American diplomatic public stance of peacemaker, which uneasily coincided with the undisguised ‘special relationship’ with Israel. This special relationship meant concretely unconditional support in all security domains, although tempered by occasional murmurs of disapproval as by calling Israel’s periodic moves to accelerate the expansion of its unlawful settlements as ‘unhelpful.’ By way of contrast, in relation to the settlement movement, which struck an Israeli dagger into the heart of the two-states approach, the presidency of George W. Bush and continued under Barack Obama, Trump’s Secretary of State, agreed to close his eyes on their unlawfulness, but only in the context of an agree peace arrangement. Mike Pompeo, abandons altogether the view that the establishment of settlements violates international law without the precondition of reaching an overall agreement(Pompeo, 2020). Beyond this, even before the release of the Trump/Kushner plan, U.S. foreign policy toward Israel after Trump assumed the presidency in early 2017 exhibited a blatant form of one-sided unilateralism with regard to previously unresolved issues: appointing as his principal advisors on Israel and Middle East policy only Zionist extremists (Kushner, Friedman, Greenblatt), moving the American embassy to Jerusalem, recognizing Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights that were widely assumed to be occupied Syrian territory, cutting U.S. funding for UN humanitarian relief efforts in Gaza, and openly embracing Netanyahu’s racist leadership of Israel while turning his back on his Palestinian counterparts and their concerns.

 

Such a pattern of unilateralism is illustrative of the retreat hypothesis because it so directly undercuts not only the earlier somewhat more internationalist American approach, but also so bluntly departs from the global consensus at the UN that favored a negotiated solution that upheld Israel as a legitimate state but based its vision of peace on an agreed establishment of an independent and sovereign Palestinian state that would then be accepted as a full member of the UN. A major component of this consensus was the view that diplomacy would be relied upon to resolve the future of Jerusalem, settlements, the treatment of Palestinian refugees, the fixing of borders, and the overall arrangement of security guarantees. On all counts, Israel has recently moved with the apparent approval of Washington to resolve these issues on its own by completing its expansionist agenda. This coordinated Israel/U.S. provocative postures was dramatized by the movement of the American Embassy to Jerusalem in early 2019, an initiative overwhelmingly condemned to no avail by the UN General Assembly (UNGA Res., 2019). The Jerusalem provocation, in particular, was a direct assault on the earlier global consensus and strong Islamic that had insisted that such issues, and especially the status of Jerusalem, be settled by compromises achieved in a negotiating process so as to give both sides the sense of win/win outcomes.

 

In important respects, what this Trump turn represented beyond its affinity with other expressions of anti-globalization, was an assessment that the Oslo diplomacy had been tried and failed, and that it was an opportune time to make a shift toward a more muscular, less consensual, geopolitics.

 

Daniel Pipes, long a Zionist proponent best articulated this approach on his website, Middle East Forum, months before its adoption is slightly less crude form by Trump/Kushner (Pipes, 2017). Pipes insisted that diplomacy had been tried in good faith as the means to resolve the Israel/Palestine conflict, but had failed, and it was time to try a different approach. In his view, conflicts of this sort that prove difficult to resolve by diplomacy are shown by history to be ended only through the victory of one side that then dictates the terms of peace, with the losing side being compelled to surrender its political objectives. Without a glimmer of surprise, it was Pipes’ view that objective analysis identified Israel as the winner, Palestine the loser.  Yet despite this, the conflict dragged on because the Palestinian leadership with its head in the clouds refused to accept this reality. The task of Israel, with U.S. backing, was to intensify coercion until Palestine sees the light and surrenders, and a new normal can be established. Trump/Kushner use a twisted language of ‘peace’ rather than the transparency ofa ‘victory’ to set forth their conception of the end-game in the long struggle. The substance of the plan legitimizes Israel’s territorial and security ambitions and offers the Palestinians what is called ‘a state,’ but is in fact ‘a statelet’ that is nothing more than ‘a Bantustan,’ a shorthand reference to South African way of setting up totally subordinates political entities subject to the rigors of its apartheid structures of control. To encourage the Palestinians to swallow the Kool Aid of the deal of the century, the Palestinians are threatened with unnamed dire consequences if they reject, and enticed with sugar-coated offers of economic development assistance if they accept.

 

It is too early to gauge whether Palestine’s immediate rejection of the Trump/Kushner/Netanyahu victory approach will prevail. This undoubtedly depends on whether such an outcome is endorsed by the Israeli and American election results in 2020, especially the latter. If Netanyahu and Trump both win, then the Palestinian Authority will likely  experience coercive pressures to give up their political ambitions, and opt for a more normalized economic and social life as the best result they can hope for. What is striking from the perspective of the globalization hypothesis is the willingness of the U.S. to depart so unconditionally from the global consensus to support Israel in a manner that seems not only anti-internationalist, but also in all likelihood works against its broader and longer term strategic national interests in the Middle East, which cannot count on the indefinite repression of fiercely pro-Palestinian sentiments among Arab populations. As such, this path to ‘peace’ compounds the retreat from globalization with a costly challenge to stability in the region. This imprudent posture is domestically driven by narrowly parochial interests as epitomized by AIPAC lobbying leverage and Zionist donor pressures on the American political process (Mearcheimer & Walt, 2003). Although these features of the American political scene antedated Trump, his presidency has accentuated their relevance.

 

With respect to the U.S. approach to Israel/Palestine it might not have assumed such an extreme form without the specificity of the Trump election. In other words, retreat from globalization would likely have been present whoever was the Republican nominee in 2016 and even likely, in the event that Hillary Clinton had been elected. Yet the anticipated retreat would have taken place in those circumstances of new American political leadership without breaking the continuity of approach to Israel and the conflict in the radical manner adopted by Trump. The American retreat might have emphasized anti-migrant, economic nationalism, and confrontation with Russia to a greater extent, and possibly less drastic withdrawals from globalist engagements in the security domain. That is even with American leaders other than Trump accepting the politics of retreat, it seems rather likely that policy toward Israel and Palestine would have displayed only minor changes from the Bush/Obama years, probably becoming even more reluctant to  criticize Israel on settlement expansion than was Obama’s willingness to break with his own practice by allowing the 2016 criticism of Israel by the Security Council to reach a decision, abstaining rather than as on prior occasions, using its veto to shield Israel from formal censure even if it stood alone in doing so. It is never possible to be very confident about ‘what if’ conjectures, but nevertheless it seems highly unlikely that had a different president been voted into office in 2016 the approach to Palestinian grievances would have abandoned diplomacy and opted so openly for coercion and unilateralism. (Falk, 2017)

  

What likely would have occurred with the Republican alternatives to Trump in 2016 but not so if Clinton had won is a retreat from what might be called ‘normative globalization,’ which is the most obvious common anti-globalization stance being taken across the globe. What this normative dimension of retreat entails is a general lessening of confidence in and respect for the UN and international law, and a declining reliance on global approaches to problem-solving, whether the subject-matter is trade relations, human rights, migrant flow, or climate change.

 

In such a transactional atmosphere, problem-solving with respect to international conflict resolution relies heavily on coercive diplomacy among states and the geopolitical priorities of dominant states. The effect could be to sharpen geopolitical tensions between the U.S. and China, U.S. and Russia, and possibly give rise to a new Cold War, with regional military confrontations and dangerous escalation dangers. In this set of circumstances, the emergence of autocratic and ultra-nationalist leadership would lead to more pragmatic relationships reflecting geopolitical priorities rather than normative affinities based on shared values and world order commitments.

 

Risks Associated with Trump’s Version of Retreat from Globalization

Superficially, and in the short run, Israel has been a beneficiary of this U.S. shift in diplomatic posture, but there are secondary effects and contingencies that may yet turn out to be favorable to the Palestinian struggle. More concretely, this means that the United States no longer seeks to act in general accord with the international consensus that has been shaped over the decades at the UN and elsewhere, which although reflecting a pro-Israel bias, endorsed the view that this conflict could only be resolved by some sort of negotiated accommodation between Israelis and Palestinians that set the terms and established a process for achieving a sustainable peace.

 

Of course, this shift in U.S. policy reflected several converging factors that resulted in the Trump presidency of which a retreat from the UN consensus and rule-governed global diplomacy was only one element. Other factors included the influence exerted by Zionist donors in American domestic politics and by Trump family members, the softening of the attitudes of Arab governments toward Israel, the reduced Western dependence on Middle Eastern oil, and the heightening of tensions with Iran. Yet the retreat from globalization is of the greatest importance as explaining the disregard of the international consensus exhibited at the UN that had somewhat constrained earlier U.S. policy, yet these limits should not be overstated as they did not prevent the continuous erosion of Palestinian rights and expectations as measured by the rules and principles of international law. That is, despite U.S. global leadership, and endorsement of globalization, in relation to Israel/Palestine an incremental coercive diplomacy that favored Israel was what led to a steady deterioration of the Palestinian position. In this respect the super-partisanship of the Trump presidency removed the pretenses and inconsistencies of normative globalization that had not materially helped the Palestinian side, while covering up the one-sided support of Israel’s political zero-sum agenda. Does this greater clarity give Palestinians new opportunities as well as pose more severe challenges?

 

The United States has for more than 25 years claimed the role of indispensable intermediary in working toward a negotiated peace arrangement between Israel and Palestine. Such a role reflected its global leadership status that was without challenge after the Cold War ended in the early 1990s, as well as Israel’s insistence that if negotiations were ever to occur, they had to be conducted within a framework presided over by the United States. The U.S. status as global leader also corresponded with a renewed emphasis on the Middle East (and East Asia) given the altered historical circumstance. This meant replacing Europe as the strategic site of geopolitical struggle in a globalizing world. The importance of the Middle East for the United States reflected four interrelated concerns: access to the regional oil reserves at affordable prices; ensuring Israeli security; containing the spread of political Islam in the aftermath of the Iranian Revolution (1979); avoiding any further proliferation of nuclear weapons in the region.

 

Given these realities there existed a strong diplomatic incentive on the part of the United States to find a solution to the Palestinian struggle that would alleviate pro-Palestinian pressures without appearing to weaken the ideological and strategic special relationship between the United States and Israel. After years of frustration on the diplomatic terrain, the Oslo Framework of Principles, agreed upon in 1993, seemed to provide a credible path to compromise and peace, consisting of the regional normalization of Israel as a legitimate state within agreed borders and the establishment of a Palestinian state based on 1967 borders, with Jerusalem as the joint capital of the two states, the satisfaction of Israeli security concerns, some kind of compensation as a substitute for the repatriation of Palestinian refugees, and the legalization of most of Israel unlawful encroachments (separation wall, settlements, road network, security zones) on formerly occupied Palestine. This peace dynamic, although sharply favorable to Israel, was viewed as the most realistic political compromise that could be achieved. Its adoption by the most affected parties also silenced  most opposition in international arenas. This new dynamic was celebrated as a major breakthrough, launched with theatrical fanfare by the dramatic handshake on the White House lawn. The famous 1993 picture of the Israeli leader, Yitzhak Rabin, shaking hands with the PLO leader, Yasir Arafat, and a smiling U.S. President, Bill Clinton standing in between, was the iconic climax of choosing this delusionary path to peace. These delusions were challenged two years later by the assassination of Rabin, and even more by the rightward drift of Israeli politics and the growing influence of the settler movement, but the diplomacy dragged on and on, and even the Palestinians seemed lulled to inaction as the diplomacy continued wending its way through a labyrinth without an exit.  

 

What is most relevant to the focus adopted here is that this diplomatic approach under U.S. auspices was superficially respectful toward the international consensus on how to address the conflict—that is, by diplomacy that was framed as negotiations between the parties, and was understood to seek compromises on the main issues in contention (territory, settlements, refugees, Jerusalem, security).  This outlook, supported by bipartisanship in the United States, meaning overwhelming Congressional support and a continuity of approach whether the president was a Democrat or Republican. This Oslo peace process seemed consistent with American foreign policy of ‘liberal internationalism’ that persisted throughout the Cold War, and endured until 9/11 occurred, and being finally discarded by Trump. The Trump orientation may be described as militarist geopolitics and ultra-nationalist illiberalism. As applied to Israel/Palestine this means the Pipes victory scenario presented as diktat with scant interest in enticing Palestinian acceptance. As such, with irony, this most pro-Israeli of all American presidents has ironically fractured Jewish support for Israel, alienating not only progressive Jews but also many liberal Zionists who believed in a negotiated two-state peace agreement (Bishara, 2020).

 

However, to gain a proper attitude toward the Trump stance, it is necessary to avoid an unjustified embrace of this prior American peace diplomacy. it is crucial to identify the weaknesses of an approach that claimed fairness to the Palestinians while strongly slanting the process and its intended outcome toward Israel. As with Pipes, yet skillfully disguised as a compromise, Oslo diplomacy when deconstructed reveals a weaker version of an Israeli victory scenario (Baake & Omer, 20–). By failing to mention a Palestinian right of self-determination or affirm the equality of the two sides, the Oslo framework of principles set in motion a one-sided diplomacy that gave weight to power disparities, a bias further reinforced by having an overtly partisan intermediary. This imbalance was further accentuated by the insistence that Palestinian negotiators swallow all objections to Israeli violations of international law until the so-called ‘final status’ negotiations at the last stage of the process. Palestinians were told that objecting in the present context would jeopardize the negotiations. Israel never ceased building and expanding its network of unlawful settlements and further encroaching on the Palestinian territorial remnant by securitizing the settlements, including connections to Israel, which truly undercut the credibility of negotiations. Beyond this, what were called ‘negotiations’ were basically occasions for Israel to put forward self-serving proposals for conflict resolution on a take it or leave it basis, realizing Israeli goals and neglecting Palestinian priorities, and undoubtedly expecting the Palestinian side to reject. In this period, the two sides also sought agreement in direct secret negotiations that were similarly, yet more explicitly, weighted in Israel’s favor, and indicated that despite the willingness of the PLO to give Israel most of what it wanted by way of keeping its settlements and meeting its security concerns the their Israeli counterparts showed little interest (Palestine Papers, 2—). Even if the two sides somehow had signed such a one-sided peace agreement it might not have produced anything more substantial than a pause in the struggle, in effect, one more periodic ceasefire, and quite likely rejected by both the Israeli and Palestinian publics. Succeeding generations of Palestinians would not be likely to accept the validity such permanent subjugation in what purports to be a post-colonial world order. The wild fires of the ethics of nationalism and the politics of self-determination would almost certainly have doomed an arrangement that left Palestinians languishing in an entity called a state, but lacking in the most elemental aspect of sovereignty, control over its own security.   

 

Even on the Israeli side, the Oslo slant may not have satisfied the implicit Zionist agenda of recovering the whole of the promised land, the biblical entitlement on which Israel’s claims rest, but was temporarily and tactically acceptable as it improved overall prospects to reach such a goal. This helps explain Israeli contentment despite a diplomatic process that seemed a bridge to nowhere, and never acknowledged Jewish biblical entitlement. For Israel the Oslo process was a bridge to somewhere, allowing the country to accumulate many facts on the ground, while further structuring the kind of apartheid state needed to check Palestinian resistance, thereby ensuring the stability of an ethnically based hegemonic social, economic, and political order. For Palestine, Oslo diplomacy proved to be a political disaster despite its initial gift wrapping, as the noose of victimization tightened to the point that Palestinians became virtual strangers, or even captives, in their own homeland, slowly recognizing that when the wrappings were removed the package within was an empty box. Such a dual process of Israel’s gain and Palestine’s loss occurred while the globalization fever remained high, and this one-sided dynamic achieved its momentum years before deglobalization trends became evident.

 

When Trump arrived on the political scene in 2017, the de facto reality of an Israeli one-state solution coexisted with defunct governmental and UN continued adherence to a de jure vision of a two-state outcome. What Trump sought by dropping the pretense of negotiating the future for Israel and Palestine was a changed formula for ending the struggle over the sequel to the British Mandate. Even Trump did not overtly affirm the major Zionist premise of biblical entitlement, using the accepted international terminology of ‘the West Bank’ rather than the promised land language of ‘Judea and Samaria.’ The Trump/Kushner approach legitimized facts on the ground as of 2020, suspending all scrutiny of the lawlessness by which the facts were accumulated. Kushner expressed this outlook clearly in an interview the day after the White House finally released its peace plan: “I’m not looking at the world as it existed in 1967. I’m looking at the world as it exists in 2020.” As well, Trump/Kushner’s deal avoided an explicit endorsement of the analysis of Pipes based on using force to induce the Palestinian leadership to surrender its political goals and accept Israel’s victory in the long struggle between these two peoples to control the identity of the homeland in what had been a Palestinian entity during the Ottoman Empire and the British Mandate.

 

The other distinctive feature of the Trump approach was the explicit disregard of Palestinian rights under international law. The American Secretary of State in language rather parallel to the sentiments expressed by Kushner articulated the view that it was time to abandon the earlier U.S. official stance of regarding Israeli settlements on occupied Palestinian territory as unlawful. In Mike Pompeo’s words of explanation, “..arguments about who is right and wrong in international law will not bring peace.” On behalf of the PLO, Hanan Ashrawi articulated anger and frustration in a tone of understandable exasperation: “We cannot express horror and shock because this is a pattern, but that doesn’t make it any less horrific..total disregard of international law, what is right and just, and for peace.” Although Ashrawi’s words resonate with attitudes toward international law pre-Trump and pre-retreat, the discontinuity is not as great as liberal internationalists contend (ICJ, 2004). All through the post-1967 period of occupation, while the settlement process and related encroachments on Palestinian rights and aspirations occurred, the Palestinians were counseled to withhold their international law objections so that the peace process might go forward, and the Israelis were lightly scolded as their expansionist dreams became building projects. In this spirit violating international law was ‘unhelpful,’ but if sustained, could gain legal acceptance as they did in 2004 when the Bush/Sharon exchange of letters (Bush/Sharon, 2004) declared that the settlement blocs would become part of Israel’s sovereign territory in any future peace arrangement.

 

Rhetoric matters, and this overt show of disregard for international law is an integral aspect of this broader retreat from globalization.  Respect for and confidence in international law and procedures is a vital precondition for encouraging globally cooperative approaches to problems that affect the world as a whole. The proudest achievements of liberal internationalism along these lines were based on lawmaking treaties governing such disparate matters as the public order of the oceans, the development of Antarctica, and some aspects of military competition in the nuclear age. With the rise of ultra-nationalism and the decline of global leadership by the United States, world order is again reliant on the pre-1945 state-centric style of geopolitical rivalry, but facing the severe diverse challenges of global scope that threaten the world with catastrophe in the 2020s and beyond.

 

The main risks attributable to this interplay between the retreat from globalization and the super-partisanship of American policy toward Israel/Palestine can be summarized as follows:

–stabilizing Israel’s apartheid state, while denying the Palestinian people basic human rights, particularly, the right of self-determination;

–weakening respect for international law, the UN, and the authority of diplomatic resolution of international disputes;

–expressing the transition in the American global and regional leadership roles from a liberal internationalist perspective to that of rogue superpower;

–lending support to an outcome of the long struggle based on power rather than law or ethic, thereby establishing a very unfortunate precedent for conflict resolution in the 21st century.

 

 

Opportunities Resulting from the New Realities of Retreat and U.S. Hyper-Partisanship

At first glance, the situation following the release of the Trump/Kushner seems totally discouraging. It affirms the form and substance of Israel’s right-wing leadership, whether Likud or Blue/White, and reflects the dominant Zionist agenda reflecting ‘biblical entitlement’ to the whole of the promised land, either by direct or indirect sovereign control. As such it rejects a political compromise. It seems to confront Palestinians with the unhappy alternatives of political surrender or forcible resistance. Paths promising a political compromise, sovereign equality, and resting on international diplomacy seem indefinitely closed. Beyond this, the important Arab governments are silently siding with Israel, and Palestinians are without any realistic prospect of unified leadership. Given the recognition of this situation, it is difficult not to succumb to despair.

 

And yet, the Palestinians show no sign of regarding their struggle as ‘a lost cause.’ Resistance activity remains robust, and no element of the Palestinian leadership seems ready to sign on to the U.S. proposals, despite the temptations afforded by the offers of economic relief, which must be difficult to dismiss given the desperate plight of the 2 million Palestinians living in Gaza and the diminishing sense of national territory in the West Bank, given Israeli accelerating encroachments and Washington bright green light given expansionist ambitions and cruel, coercive tactics.

 

Such an unfavorable context is reinforced by the retreat from globalization. This retreat as complemented by ultra-nationalism has resulted in reduced respect for the authority of the UN, as well as weakened pressures for a genuine two-state compromise at the UN, which is itself supplemented by less willingness to challenge Israeli defiance of international humanitarian law. The utter disregard of Israeli continual reliance on excessive violence at the Gaza border is emblematic of both disregard by the media, UN, and EU for Palestinian rights and Israeli lawlessness.

 

Yet these developments, as paradoxical as it may sound, also have the potential to improve Palestinian prospects. There are two broad explanations. First, the earlier posture in international society had not been helpful to the Palestinian struggle for basic rights. As earlier suggested, Israel acted to undermine the core element in what was regarded as the international consensus, namely, the establishment of a viable sovereign Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital. By allowing the settlement movement to go forward with subsidized government assistance and encouragement the Israeli government signaled its intention to never let go of control over ‘the promised land.’ Even if forced by geopolitical pressures to accept some kind of demilitarized Palestinian state, the obstacles involved in reversing the settlement dynamic in the West Bank and Jerusalem became more formidable with each passing month. Almost as tellingly, the internal Israeli reference points of ‘Judea and Samaria’ of the West Bank along with the unification and formal annexation of Jerusalem as the eternal capital of the Jewish people underscored the Zionist sense of biblical entitlement as the non-negotiable foundation of its claim rather than the mixture of legal, moral, and political considerations that formed the vision of both the consensus at the UN and the outlook project by ‘liberal Zionists’ in the Jewish diaspora (Khalidi, Brokers, 200-).

 

Secondly, the combinaton of releasing the Trump/Kushner plan and its embrace not only by Netanyahu, and the Likud Party, but by Gantz and Blue and White, clarifies two aspect of the overall situation that had been previously somewhat obscure: (1) present prospects of any form of political compromise to resolve the conflict by diplomacy between the parties are dead for the foreseeable future; (2) advancing the Palestinian struggle at this stage depends on sustaining the legitimacy war that uses all means available to react against Israeli lawlessness and immorality, including international judicial tribunals and the UN Human Rights Council and General Assembly (Falk, 2017), continuing various forms of Palestinian resistance to demonstrate that the struggle lives on within Palestinian society, and building momentum in global civil society by soft power means, currently most effectively expressed by the BDS Campaign.

 

In effect, the Palestinian struggle has shifted its center of gravity from its intergovernmental axes to that of the resistance and solidarity. In other words, the role of governments and international institutions, once dominant, is now discredited and subordinated. At some later stage of the conflict, if a balance more favorable to the protection of Palestinian rights is achieved or there is some kind of change of outlook in the United States and/or Israel, then there might again emerge a greater willingness to allow a diplomatic framework to help fashion a mutually acceptable political compromise, but with a major difference. The new diplomacy to have any chance of success in producing a sustainable peace arrangement, must proceed on the basis of the formal and existential equality of the parties, either relying on direct inter-governmental negotiations or by selecting a credibly neutral mediating framework.

 

This alternative more positive framework for conflict resolution not only depends on delegitimation, resistance, and solidarity, it also depends critically on a prior Israeli decision to dismantle the apartheid features of its state structures that now subordinate and victimize the Palestine people as a whole (including refugees, exiles, minority in pre-1967 Israel) on the basis of racial criteria (Falk & Tilley, 2017). Considering the similarities and dissimilarities with the South African experience is also illuminating. The changed balance achieved with respect to South African apartheid was largely achieved by resistance and solidarity initiatives, although unlike the Israel/Palestine conflict, aided by a globalized anti-apartheid campaign. It was a soft power triumph in the end, although that the threat and reality of armed struggle was never eliminated. In the end, the white leadership made a calculated decision that their interest would be better served by accepting what a decade earlier seemed a utopian impossibility—that is, a transition to a multiracial constitutional democracy, which the demographics made clear, would means that the long victimized African majority would control the political destiny of the country. The bargain, a kind of ‘genuine deal of the century’ was a tribute to the skills of Nelson Mandela and the leadership of de Klierk, that made the white minority take their chances based on guarantees of their economic and social rights. Mandela has been criticized for allowing the white to retain their privileged economic position and social status, but without such flexibility, any transition to post-apartheid South Africa would have been violent and bloody.

 

Although Israeli Zionists have genuine demographic concerns given the relative size and fertility rates of the two peoples, their prospects in a secular constitutional democracy for a large share of control over the institutions of governance would remain much more favorable to Jews, provided Jews would not abandon such a post-apartheid state and Palestinians would uphold the rights of the Jews if they were to gain control over the governing process. Undoubtedly, the situation would reflect the context, including geopolitical factors and the motivations, wisdom, and skills of the leadership on both sides.

 

What seems clear, whether the retreat from globalization deepens or is reversed, is that the preconditions of ending Israeli apartheid and accepting commitments to the substance and spirit of equality on both sides is essential to overcoming the present approach premised on a victory scenario combined with the spirit and substance of inequality, which will add to Palestinian suffering without achieving Israeli peace and security. In these circumstances, unlikely to be altered in the near future, the present pattern of control and encroachment will continue.

 

A Concluding Comment

The preceding analysis leads to the conclusion that the retreat from globalization is one factor in altering the nature of the Palestinian struggle, but may not in the end affect the outcome. In the immediate setting, it seems like a major setback for the Palestinians as the Israelis have unambiguous geopolitical support for their most extravagant claims, and there is no meaning countervailing power at either the regional or global levels. Yet in the post-colonial period, a long subjugated people do not give up their dreams of political independence and their grievances of rights denied, especially in the Palestinian as long endorsed by the UN and international public opinion. One development favoring the Palestinians, and evidently worrying the Israelis, is the increasing acceptance of the view that Israel maintains an apartheid structure of control over the Palestinian people and that the Israel needs to be perceived as the last remaining significant settler colonial state. This chance of discourse has been countered by branding activists and critics as ‘anti-Semites’ although their opposition to Israel is nonviolent and unrelated to hostility to Jews as a people, but to the Israeli state as depriving the majority resident population of its rights of self-determination and its overall human rights.

 

Each struggle has its own features, and this is particularly true in the case of Israel/Palestine. A crucial such distinguishing feature is that Israel managed to impose its political will on Palestine with the help of British colonial support, yet able to come to independence as a powerful manifestation of anti-colonial struggle by coercing not only the Palestinians, but making life untenable for the British (Kaplan, 2019). Of course, the last stage of the struggle to establish Israel in the face of Palestinian and Arab opposition were a series of developments in Europe favorable to the Zionist project, especially the moral sympathy arising from Nazi genocidal behavior and the liberal guilt of Europe and North America arising from their failure to challenge German murderous racism. These factors led to the premature legitimation of Israel in 1948, reaching its climax by admission to the United Nations without first resolving Palestinian grievances in a satisfactory manner. Such an attempt might not have succeeded in any event as the Palestinian side refused the idea of partitioning its homeland, and the Zionist side, although outwardly ready to strike a pragmatic bargain never gave up its vision of restoring sovereignty over the biblical homeland of the Jewish people.

 

Finally, the retreat from globalization is too new and contingent, to serve as a basis for anticipating the future as it impacts on the Israel/Palestine struggle. As suggested, present realities suggest that the situation seems to favor Israeli ambitions, but some factors could strengthen the Palestinian position overnight, such as the rejection of Trump in the 2020 American elections, the true unification of Palestinian leadership, or the shift toward democratic populism in the Arab world as foreshadowed by the 2011 uprisings. In the event of a restored spirit of globalization an early undertaking might be renewed attention to Palestinian grievances, and a resolve to take action to complete the policy agenda of decolonization and racial equality that dominated the last decades of the prior century .   

 

 

References

 

Abunimah, A.(2014) The Battle for Justice in Palestine. Chicago,Il: Haymarket Books.

 

Bauck, P. & Omer, M. (eds) (2013)  The Oslo Accords: A Critical Assessment 1993-2013. Cairo, Egypt, American University in Cairo Press

 

Bishara, M. (2020) “U.S. and Israel Vote: Two ‘Racist’ Incumbents and Two Proud Jews,” https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/israel-vote-racist-incumbents-proud-jews-200302062307608.html

 

 

“Exchange of Letters between PM Sharon and President Bush” (2004) <mfa.gov.il>

 

 

Falk, R.A. (1999) Predatory Globalization: A Critique. Cambridge, UK, Polity Press

 Falk, R. A. (2014) Humanitarian Intervention and Legitimacy Wars: Seeking Peace and Justice in the 21st Century. London, UK: Routledge

 

Falk. R.A. & Tilley, V.Q. 2017. “Israeli Practices and the Question of Apartheid.” Beiirut, Lebanon, Economic and Social Council for West Asia (ESCWA

 

Falk, R.A. (2017)  Palestine Horizon: Toward a Just Peace. London,UK: Pluto Press.

 

Falk, R. Blog on Security Council 2016 decision on settlements

 

“Legal Consequences of Constructing a Wall on Occupied Palestinian Territory,” International Court of Justice, Advisory Opinion, 8 July 2004

 

Kaplan, A. (2018) Our American Israel: The Story of an Entangled Alliance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. )

 

Kattan, V. (2003) From Coexistence to Conquest: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict, 1871-1949. London, UK: Pluto Press.

 

Khalidi, R. (2013) Brokers of Deceit: How the U.S. Undermined Peace in the Middle East. Boston, MA: Beacon Press

 

Mearsheimer, J & S. Walt (2002) The Israeli Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

 

Olson, P. (2011) Fast Times in Palestine: A Love Affair with a Homeless Homeland. Seal Press.

 

Pipes, D. (2018) “Achieving Peace Through Israeli Victory.” <www.danielpipes.org>

 

Said, E. W. (2000) The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After. New York: Pantheon.

 

Slaughter, A-M. (2004) The New World Order. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

 

Slaughter, A-M. (2017) The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

 

Swisher, C.E. (2011) The Palestine Papers The End of the Road. Chatham, UK: Hesperus Press.

 

UN General Assembly, Res. ES-10/L.22.  (2017) On Moving American Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem.

 

(2016)“Israel Settlements Without Legal Validity,” UN Security Council Res. 2334,

 

(2020) “Peace to Prosperity: A Vision to Improve the Lives of the Palestinian and Israeli People.” Washington, D.C.: White House.

     

  

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Triple Jeopardy: Refugees/Migrants/Palestinian Prisoners

25 Apr

Triple Jeopardy: Refugees/Migrants/Palestinian Prisoners

 

[Prefatory Note: This post was published in a somewhat altered form in Transcend MediaService on April 20, 2020 under the title “Triple Jeopardy and the Plight of Palestinian Prisoners.]

 

Double Jeopardy for Refugees/Migrants

Recently reflecting on the plight of refugees fleeing war zones in the Middle East and migrants from sub-Saharan Africa and Central America I was struck by the analogy to ‘double jeopardy.’ As widely understood, double jeopardy is a procedural rule of criminal law that prohibits prosecution by a state of an individual more than once for the same crime. It is deservedly treated as a human right that protects persons from being harassed after judicial acquittal by repeated allegations of the same alleged crime. The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (1966) in Article 14(7) defines double jeopardy: “No one shall be liable to be tried or punished again for an offense for which he has already been finally convicted or acquitted in accordance with the law and penal procedure of each country.” (There are exceptions for acquittals tainted by fraud, confessions by the accused, and the wording of the rule should be corrected for its gender bias implying that it is only ‘men’ who could be victimized by vindictive re-prosecution).

 

For some years, the images of violent border security associated with keeping masses of needy refugees or migrants from crossing international boundaries to reach more peaceful or affluent countries in Europe or North America is what prompted me to sense an analogy to the kind of ordeal that exists when someone wins an acquittal after a long, emotionally and economically costly trial, and is then confronted by a new indictment for essentially the  same supposed criminal offense. In a well-administered democracy, the double jeopardy rule is taken for granted, and prevents such injustices from happening. But what of the world of refugees and migrants?

 

What made the double jeopardy comparison apt for me were these haunting images of doubling down on punishment of those who were not only innocent, but already victimized by circumstances beyond their control, and then again punished for acts that deserve empathy and accommodation, not punishment, if humanitarian values were extended to  refugees/migrants. My existential premise, borne out by some experience, is that persons almost never leave their place of birth and family residence without overwhelming provocation, and are especially hesitant to use their small saving and meager borrowings to embark on a voyage to a distant land with a different language and culture. Most of us, even if dissatisfied with conditions in our native land or our personal circumstances will still not voluntarily depart from the familiarities of family and friends, and of language, traditions, and nationality. Only circumstances of grave danger such as presented by ravaged combat zones or resulting from grinding poverty found in societies that confront residents and entire communities with gray horizons of hopelessness that offer neither safety nor security, can induce most persons to so uproot themselves. In other words, the motivation underlying the emotional reality of the overwhelming majority of refugees and migrants is one of desperation, of grasping at straws and escaping doom. Of course, the small nomadic elites of adventurers, exiles, and expatriates are examples of persons leaving their home countries not from necessity, but in pursuit of the exotic and the paradisiac.

 

This sad depiction of the decision to flee to safety or to search for economic security is then generally accompanied by a treacherous and harrowing journey that often drains the traveler of his or her small savings. Many trips end with death and illness for many in the group, or perilous trips across stormy seas or barren deserts, only to be confronted by a coercive ‘no’ in the form of barbed wire, walls, detention centers, and even live ammunition if and when the destination is reached. To be placed in detention centers with long waits may be the best that can be hoped for by such forsaken souls, often including young children, that experience the depths of insecurity in their homeland, and also along the way that reaches a negative climax when and if the national goal is ever reached.

 

I am not suggesting that this refugee/migrant experience is double jeopardy in a legal sense, but it seems to possess the same ingredients of the unjust repetition of indictment and prosecution, itself punitive, that is prohibited as a part of civilized behavior in a society responsive to the rule of law, and protective of human rights. It is a kind of morally grounded, culturally and spiritually debasing, and often life-threatening duplication of criminal prosecution without any account being taken of human dignity and fundamental innocence of those being victimized, or the ordeal of struggling against a criminal allegation.

 

And yet, moral outrage or a call for compassion does not acknowledge the complexity of the issues raised. Unlike the individuals accused of the same crime a second time, the refugee/migrant does not, as such, pose real threats to the countries that are being expected to act as benign hosts or to extend hospitality to strangers in need. This is notto say that a country does not have the right to deny entry to those with criminal records or contagious diseases, provided due process is accorded, and similarly have authority to insist that those who enter do legally.

 

We live in a state-centric world where international boundaries define the outer limits of community, which has not changed fundamentally no matter how much we hear cosmopolitan sermonizing and ecologically persuasive calls for planetary identity. In such a framework, the citizenry of a country feel threatened in various ways by the influx of large numbers of strangers, especially if their racial and cultural characteristics clash with that of the country asked to show hospitality or grant asylum. The reality of this resistance is producing extremisms of scapegoating and xenophobia, which make moderates search for compromises in the form of requiring lawful entry, quotas, job training, and language and civilizational educational resources. Given the scale of the challenge, and the unlikely emergence of greater receptivity, the main line of an effective and humane response structure should be a large investment in overcoming the conditions in foreign countries that give rise to massive displacement and large numbers of persons desperate to find more sustainable life conditions. Overcoming double jeopardy in these settings depends on a self-interested globalization of responsibility for achieving peace and security, as well as lifting the curse of poverty, and this requires the drastic reform of the way the benefits of neoliberal globalization are distributed much more equitably than in the past.       

 

 

Triple Jeopardy for Palestinian Prisoners at a Time of Pandemic

 

This metaphor for layers of unjust suffering initially occurred to me while preparing a ZOOM presentation on the abuse of Palestinian prisoners in the context of the health dangers associated with the COVID-19 challenge. Such dangers were present for Palestinians under pre-pandemic conditions, but greatly aggravated by Israeli failures to mitigate the additional and aggravated risks that come from keeping around 5,000 Palestinian prisoners in overcrowded prisons where some of the guards and security personnel were reported as testing positive for the virus yet continued to interact with prisoners without prescribed personal protective gear (PPE), and where insufficient hospital and medical capabilities existed in the event that the disease started to spread. This overall sub-par situation was further accentuated in relation to an. estimated 172 child prisoners, many elderly and disabled prisoners, and almost all inmates incarcerated for nonviolent security offenses that should never have been criminalized because of falling within the scope of a right of resistance possessed by persons living under an apartheid regime, which is itself a serious violation of international criminal law. The right to resist Israeli apartheid, at least within the limits of international law regulating violence by reference to choice of targets and other considerations. Israel has not accepted WHO guidelines or a variety of humanitarian appeals by respected NGOs to release at least ‘low-risk’ prisoners as well as those with ‘underlying conditions,’ children, and the elderly.

 

Taking these considerations into account the ‘triple jeopardy’ framing seems justified to underscore the layers of injustice endured by Palestinian prisoners at this time. As the Palestinian writer, Ramzy Baroud, writes, “..all of Palestine has been in a state of ‘lockdown’ since the late 1940s when Israel became a state and the Palestinian homeland was erased by Zionist colonialists with the support of Western benefactors.” To drive the point home, Baroud adds, “In Palestine, we don’t call our imprisonment a lockdown, but a ‘military occupation’ and apartheid.” [See Baroud, “A Palestinian Guide to Surviving a Quarantine: On Faith, Humour, and ‘Dutch Candy,’” Middle East Monitor, April 5, 2020]. In effect, Baroud is insisting that all Palestinians are enduring an unjust ‘imprisonment’ that has lasted for more than 71 years with no signs of abatement, and is itself a punishment of individuals of a certain ethnicity for the ‘crime’ of existing.

 

On this basis, the criminalization of resistance, including nonviolent and symbolic forms, extending even to poem and poets (for example, Dareen Tatour, and her crime, the poem “Resist, my people, resist them”), has resulted in harsh confinement in Israeli prisons, including reliance on such legally dubious mechanisms as ‘administrative detention’ (imprisoning without charges or any due process for extended periods) and the unlawful transfer of prisoners from detention in Occupied Palestine to prisons in Israel [behind the green line], andd out of reach of family members). In effect, the imprisoning of any Palestinian in Israeli jails is Double Jeopardy because it puts Palestinians already punishment by lockdown, displacement, and dispossession behind bars because they dared to assert their right of resistance.

 

The allegation of Triple Jeopardy arises from the failure to suspend or mitigate prison condition in light of the Coronavirus Pandemic, and the related failure to take responsible steps to protect those so confined from contracting a highly contagious and potentially lethal disease. A virtual death sentence hangs over every single Palestinian prisoner for as long as the pandemic lasts, and poses especially acute risks with respect to particularly vulnerable categories of Palestinians living in prisons.

 

 

 Toward Solutions?

 It is not possible to set forth detailed proposals to overcome double and triple jeopardy as depicted. I will only indicate the vectors that point in a direction sensitive to practical and normative aspects of the challenge.

 For Double Jeopardy: seek to accommodate an ethos of hospitality and empathy with a major commitment at the UN and by national governments to take steps to remove the conditions of mass desperation prompting large numbers to leave their homelands, an undertaking ideally funded by a globally administered tax on luxury goods, financial transactions, fossil fuels, and transnational air travel.

 For Triple Jeopardy: release all Palestinian political prisoners immediately, with a sense of urgency, and commit to ending apartheid as the essential step toward a sustainable and just peace based on the equality of rights of Jews and Palestinians.

 

 

 

 

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Trump/Netanyahu Diplomacy: Orientalism by any Other Name

1 Feb

[Prefatory Note: Based on Javad Heiran-Nia’s Interview (1 Feb 2020) on ‘the deal of the century.’]

Trump/Netanyahu Diplomacy: Orientalism by Any Other Name

1-Trump announced at the unveiling of the Deal of the Century, insisting that these proposals are a just plan for peace. Do you think that this plan serves Palestinian interests?

 

This so-called contribution to ‘peace’ requires Palestine to give up its most fundamental rights, and accept a permanent condition of subjugation and victimization. It is framed in such a one-sided pro-Israel manner as if designed to ensure its instant and overwhelming rejection by Palestinian government representatives and by Palestinian public opinion. The plan is nothing other than a thinly disguised geopolitical power play as overseen by Netanyahu and Trump to promote their own political agendas and safeguard their leadership positions, which are currently under fire in both Israel and the United States.

The Trump Plan perpetuates, institutionalizes, deepens, and seeks to validate the current Israeli apartheid state, and also purports to extend legal protection by conferring Israeli sovereignty to land-grabs of those Palestinian territories that have languished under occupation and a variety of Israeli encroachments ever since 1967. The plan reduces Palestinian legitimate presence from the 22% under occupation after the 1967 War to a 15% remnant, essentially the urban Palestinian communities in the West Bank and some uninhabitable land in the western Negev.

 

 

2-One of Trump’s goals for unveiling the plan is to help Netanyahu get rid of his internal troubles. Does this help Netanyahu get into power in Israel, given his possible trial?

 

It seems to express the view, likely to be popular with some voters in Israel, that Netanyahu was able to twist Trump’s arm, as no other Israeli politician could have done, sufficiently to achieve almost everything that the Zionist Movement ever dreamed of achieving—a de facto one-state solution that permanently submits all of Palestine to the direct and indirect control of Israel, declared by the Israeli Basic Law in 2018 to be exclusively the nation-state of the Jewish people, obliterating the rights and equal standing of the non-Jewish minorities. What is called ‘a state’ in the plan’s text is not a state as understood in diplomacy, as it is denied the elemental rights of a sovereign state under international law, and commits the Palestinians living under occupation to permanent Gaza-like conditions and leaves the more than five million Palestinian refugees out in the cold, denying their right of return to wherever their former residences were located.

 

 

3-What should the Palestinians do to counter this plan?

Raise their voices at the UN and elsewhere to make clear that the plan is a farce and a fraud, and worse, an international crime; demonstrate with resolve and telling slogans, including shaming the Arab countries that showed support for the deal; encourage the BDS Campaign to exert maximum pressure; ask governments and the UN to impose sanctions; seek legal confirmation of Palestinian rights at the World Court in The Hague; insist upon a new diplomatic framework to address the Israel/Palestine conflict free from the distorted and absurdly biased leadership provided by the United States over many years, including the pre-Trump period. It is clearer than ever that Palestinian rights will only be achieved by determined struggle, by isolating Israel, by global solidarity pressures, and by holding the Israeli government and its leaders accountable for imposing criminal policies.

 

4-Why have Arab countries such as Saudi Arabia, UAE, Oman, Bahrain, Egypt agreed to this plan?

 

Two main reasons: 1) these Arab governments are threatened by any democratizing movement, especially among Arabs, and fear that the achievement of Palestinian self-determination will destabilize their own oppressive governing arrangements; 2) to ensure continuing support for their anti-Iranian and Sunni regional priorities from the Trump presidency.

 

Such agreement by governing elites is not at all a reflection of popular sentiments in these countries, whose peoples continue to be strongly supportive of the Palestinian struggle, but helpless to influence their autocratic governments.

 

 

  1. 5. This plan is in contradiction with UN resolutions and there has been no consultation with the Palestinian side. How is the US and Israel going to accept Palestine?

 

The Trump Plan not only ignores international law, it makes proposals that flagrantly and defiantly violate such basic provisions as the prohibition on acquiring territory by force reaffirmed in Security Council Resolution 242. Also, by institutionalizing an oppressive governing arrangement that relies on racial discrimination, the plan institutionalizes apartheid, which is defined as ‘a crime against humanity’ in Article 7(j) of the Rome Statute that controls the operations of the International Criminal Court.

 

Israel and the U.S. will first have to agree to dismantle the apartheid elements of the Israeli state as a vital precondition for diplomatic progress toward a sustainable and just peace that reflect a commitment to the equality of Jews and Arabs, of Israeli Jews and Palestinians. Without satisfying this precondition for a peace process, it is delusionary to expect an end to a conflict over land and rights that has gone on for more than a century.

 

 

  1. 6. While Trump calls the plan fair, it has violated the rights of the Palestinian people. Is this plan feasible?

 

It is a plan so manifestly unfair as to be best interpreted as designed to fail, an outcome already prefigured by near universal Palestinian rejection. As such, the Trump/Netanyahu approach apparently relies on its capacity to impose a solution on the Palestinian people, and label it ‘peace.’ Seen more realistically, the plan is a naked attempt to declare unilaterally an Israeli victory and to make the world believe that the Palestinian struggle has become a lost cause, hoping that a kind of bribery provision to the effect that if Palestinians will admit defeat and make a formal declaration of political surrender, their life will become better if measured by living standards. The arrangements offered to the Palestinians as a whole resemble what the people of Gaza have endured since 2007 and what was attempted by South African apartheid in his latter stages through the establishment of encircled, powerless bantustans in remote areas of the country where the African population was required to live in misery and humiliation. Such schemes in the post-colonial world are recipes for violent struggle, and should not be confused with genuine attempts to move by mutual agreement from war to peace or oppression to constitutional democracy. The ‘deal of the century’ turns out to be Orientalism on steroids!

 

 

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