There is no doubt that US policy toward the Middle East, specifically the Palestinian Israeli conflict, has been to date a failure and it is very unlikely that the Obama administration will undertake any new steps that will revive Arab affection toward his administration since his term in office is expiring in the coming months even though he may be visiting Saudi Arabia in the near future.
Likewise, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly rejected a US proposal to increase US financial and military aid by 20 per cent to a total $3.6 billion a year. Israel had demanded the increase to compensate for the nuclear deal with Tehran in 2015 which Israel claims has accelerated the arms race in the region and adversely affected their strategic position. A recent book review in The Washington Post “makes it difficult to dispute [the book’s] central premise that American military engagement in the Greater Middle East has not been crowned with success.”
The book, titled America’s War for the Greater Middle East by Andrew J. Bacevich, has been reviewed by Celeste Ward Gventer, a former deputy assistant secretary of defence who reportedly consults on a variety of defence and security issues in Europe and the Middle East. This disheartening situation is giving more Arab support for the upcoming step by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to submit once again this month a proposal for a UN Security Council resolution condemning the expansion of illegal Israeli colonies within the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories. He is due in New York in the coming few days.
The Palestinians are still encouraged by a 2011 UN resolution that agreed by a 14-1 vote that these colonies are illegal and demanded an immediate halt to all Israeli colonies. But the US then vetoed that resolution. Needless to say, the Obama administration cannot continue burying its head in the sand, now that the Israeli occupation is about to mark its 50th year in full control of all the Palestinian territories except for the Israeli-besieged Gaza Strip. Moreover, that year, 1967, also marked the start of its illegal colony expansion into the occupied region without any effective condemnation from the leading Western nations.
Conflict not abating
At present, there are nearly 600,000 Israeli colonists in occupied East Jerusalem, where the Palestinians hope to establish their capital, and the West Bank. What’s more appalling has been the revelation by Peace Now, considered a dovish Israeli group that tracks colony construction, which said that Israel began building, according to the Associated Press, an additional 1,800 new colonies in the West Bank in 2015. Whether the US will once again veto the anticipated UN resolution remains to be seen. This month marks the anniversary of the horrifying massacre in the Palestinian village of Deir Yassin in 1948, when two extremist Jewish militias, Irgun and Lehi, massacred over 100 Palestinians, including women and children. In a statement, the Washington-based delegation of the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) described the massacre as “part and parcel of a systematic plot to depopulate Palestinian villages and empty the land of its people.”
The Palestinian-Israeli conflict in the Occupied Territories has not abated. Human Rights Watch disclosed that the number of Palestinian children being arrested by Israeli police has skyrocketed since last October, when a wave of violence began in the West Bank and Gaza. By February 2016, 440 Palestinian children had been arrested, compared to 182 the year before. As of March, 41 children had been killed. Parents complained that they no longer felt safe letting their children outside to play Meanwhile, Israeli Occupation Authorities (IOA) destroyed 523 Palestinian homes and civilian structures in the West Bank since the start of 2016, with an increase of 275 per cent from last year, according to the Palestinian Centre. The Palestinian news agency, WAFA, reported that extremist Israeli colonists resumed last Monday their provocative tours to Al Aqsa Mosque, a historic Muslim holy compound in occupied Jerusalem. Jewish organisations continue calling for mass visits to the holy site to mark the beginning of the Jewish Passover holiday.
The situation in Gaza remains dire. A UN report underlined that “more than 1,500 children were orphaned, an estimated 27,000 children had their homes completely destroyed and 44,000 children were displaced at the time of the survey.”
Needless to say, Abbas has a major task ahead in securing a unanimous vote by the UN Security Council, hopefully avoiding a second US veto, a step that might be crippled by the ongoing US presidential election.
George S. Hishmeh is a Washington-based columnist. He is a former editor in chief of the Daily Star.
