On Friday night, as the peace talks finally crumbled, BBC television viewers were treated to the spectacle of British opposition leader, Ed Miliband, loping round Sderot, breathlessly explaining that “this is where rockets rain down on Israeli children”’ before greeting a long lost relative who had survived the Holocaust. Miliband has clearly been advised that parroting Israeli propaganda is a sure fire way to get to Number 10 Downing Street.
The West’s uncritical approach to Israel, and the deep roots the pro-Israeli lobby has in the political establishments of most western countries, has undermined the peace process since its inception. There is simply little pressure on Israel to be fair.
Generally, western politicians’ support for Israel is neither well-reasoned nor ethical; it is pragmatic, cynical and self-interested. Don’t forget that until 1947 (two years after the end of the Second World War), British immigration policy in Palestine refused entry to Jews fleeing the Holocaust in a bid to please its Arab allies.
American support for Israel in the 1967 Arab-Israeli war was crucial to Israel’s victory; it was also motivated by two important Cold War aims for Washington. It hoped to militarily weaken what it feared was an emerging, Soviet-friendly, pan-Arab bloc, led by Egypt’s Jamal Abdul Nasser; in addition, supporting Israel gave the Lyndon Johnson administration leverage with the ‘Jewish press’ at home, which had been fiercely critical over the Vietnam war.
Israel seized the Occupied Territories, and its unwavering confidence that it can achieve by violence what it does not warrant by ethical imperatives or international law dates back to those days. As Israeli ‘revisionist’ historian Benny Morris puts it, the Palestinians were not viewed as a serious ‘enemy force’ but as ‘diplomatic nuisance’ until the first armed intifada erupted 20 years later. Only then, after four years of sustained Palestinian resistance, did the peace process began in earnest, brokered, from the outset, by the US.
Reneging on agreements
The 1993 Oslo Accords ushered in a brief period of hope; I was able to visit Gaza after an enforced absence of more than 20 years and was reunited with my family who all believed we were at the threshold of Palestinian statehood. I felt sad that my cynicism with regard to the Israelis did not allow me to share their joy. Three years later, the present incumbent, Benjamin Netanyahu became Israel’s prime minister and the peace process collapsed, never to achieve as much again.
As former US president Jimmy Carter warned in a 2012 interview with the Times of Israel, Netanyahu is the only Israeli leader who has never accepted the idea of an autonomous Palestinian state. Netanyahu’s vision for the future is ‘Eretz Israel’ — one state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan river.
Netanyahu has been uniquely uncompromising; he has shifted the goal-posts, reneged on agreements, used the peace talks as a diversion while thousands of new colonist homes are constructed, and introduced new, impossible, conditions — such as the stipulation that the Arabs, Muslims, Palestinians must recognise Israel as a ‘Jewish state’. It is clear that he does not want peace, but uses the lure of ‘negotiations’ as a means of evading responsibility and control. However, his intransigence is beginning to work against him.The desperately compromising attitude of Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, now casts Netanyahu’s bullying, lack of fairness, arrogance and racism into sharp relief.
Imagine, if Abbas agreed not to join 15 UN bodies the Palestinians were perfectly entitled to join, in order to secure the release of 26 Palestinian political prisoners... and Netanyahu reneged on the deal. When Abbas subsequently went ahead, Netanyahu responded with such overtly racist, neo-colonial anger that one might have thought Abbas was an upstart slave in the American deep South circa 1854. Describing Abbas as ‘drunk with power’, Netanyahu immediately ceased all contact with the Palestinian National Authority (PNA) and announced ‘sanctions’ including withholding the transfer of $100 million (Dh367 million) a month in tax revenue collected by Israel ‘on behalf of’ the PNA. This sort of behaviour does not elicit a sympathetic response, even from Israel’s closest friends.
As another unintended consequence, however, Netanyahu paved the way for the widest international endorsement of Palestinian statehood yet, with UN Secretary General, Ban Ki-moon, personally accepting Abbas’s applications.
(Abbas has yet to apply to become a signatory to the Treaty of Rome, which governs the International Criminal Court, presumably for fear of the Israeli response).
Netanyahu has tested the enduring relationship between Tel Aviv and Washington to the limit. Last Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry unleashed an unprecedented outburst in front of the Senate foreign relations committee; he blamed the Israeli prime minister for the present impasse. He criticised Netanyahu’s last minute refusal to free the prisoners whose release had been decided on, pointing out that Abbas’s credibility depended on him having something to show for the negotiations. Even worse, Kerry felt, was Israel’s announcement that it was going to build 700 new colonies on occupied land; his comment ‘Poof, that was a moment’ is already world-famous.
Polarising attitudes
On Thursday, the Obama administration itself came under fire. A group of former high-ranking US government officials, led by Zbigniew Brzezinski (White House Hawk under Jimmy Carter), issued a statement to the world’s press. ‘Netanyahu’s demands... are politically and morally unacceptable,’ they wrote. ‘And the US should not be party to them.’ They offered the White House strongly worded, practical, advice: on colonies, the US should ‘halt the diplomatic process... until Israel complies with international law and previous agreements’; on illegal West Bank land grabs, the US should not support ‘confiscation of what international law has clearly established as others’ territory’; on the ‘Jewish state... they do not have the right to demand that Palestinians abandon their own national narrative’.
Inside Israel, attitudes towards the peace process are changing and polarising. Ultra hardliners, such as Bayit Yehudi (The Jewish Home) leader Naftali Bennet, are now advocating annexation of the West Bank, ‘settlement [colony] blocs first’. But, of late, the Israeli press has carried articles criticising Netanyahu’s conduct in the peace talks and worrying about the future with headlines such as, ‘Netanyahu wants the peace talks to go on — and on and on’ and ‘Israeli sanctions against the PNA are likely to backfire’. Brzezinski et al ended their statement with a warning that Israel’s lack of fairness ‘fuels a revanchism that sooner or later will trigger renewed violence’. Friends and relatives in Palestine assure me that the mood on the street is angry and desperate — just as it was before the first and second intifadas.
It seems that, worldwide, public opinion towards Israel is undergoing a sea change. As the internet frees up the exchange of information, greater awareness about the Palestinian cause, and grassroots support, is mushrooming. As is the international Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement — a similar campaign helped bring an end to the injustices of the South African apartheid regime. A boycott of Israel by international academics has been particularly effective and, despite strenuous efforts by the on-campus pro-Israel lobby, gained 700 new members in the past two months alone.
Miliband has garnered an unfortunate reputation at home for being rather hapless. His eager-to-please antics in Israel may well prove to be an own goal, and a warning to other world leaders that things are not as they were.
This is the concluding article of a two-part series on the Middle East peace process.
Abdel Bari Atwan is the editor-in-chief of digital newspaper Rai alYoum: http://www.raialyoum.com. You can follow him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/@abdelbariatwan
