Israel/Palestine - a Glimmer of Hope? by William Pfaff

Israel/Palestine - a Glimmer of Hope?

William Pfaff

Athens, July 21, 2009 – Alarmed reports in the Israeli press that
the United States has threatened to reduce by a billion dollars the guarantee
the U.S. Treasury customarily provides for Israel state borrowings,
so as to assure for them the best commercial terms, indicate that
the Obama government is serious about halting Israel’s colonization
of the Palestinian territories, and about imposing, rather than
merely inviting, a two-state Middle East solution.

During the next two years Israel would lose more than a
quarter of its U.S. loan guarantees, a sum equal to the estimated
total the Netanyahu government now proposes to spend on the 120 West
Bank colonies, where 300 thousand Israelis live. This penalty
excludes Israel’s borrowing for military purposes, ordinarily
underwritten by the U.S., thus defending President Obama from a
charge of weakening Israel’s security. It is also recognition that
nearly all that Israeli military spending goes to American companies.

This measure seems to have antedated the defiant announcement
by Netanyahu last Monday that Israel will construct a new housing
project for Jews in Arab Jerusalem, the issue responsible for much
current uproar. He declared that Israel can do whatever it pleases
anywhere in Jerusalem since “united Jerusalem” has been pronounced
“the capital of the Jewish people and of the state pf Israel,” and
“our sovereignty over it cannot be challenged.”

This statement followed Washington’s summons of Israel’s ambassador
to the State Department to be told that the construction project
“must stop” as it is illegal (and unofficially, that it is an
unacceptable slap in the face to the U.S.).

Israel in fact possesses no sovereignty whatever over East
Jerusalem, which it seized from Jordon in the 1967 war. Its presence
is as military occupier, and the legitimacy of its presence depends
upon the UN General Assembly partition of Palestine in 1947. That
resolution recognized Israel within defined borders, but also
Palestinian territory outside those borders of Israel, as set by UN
Resolution 181, as belonging to the Palestinian people, who have the
sovereign right to establish their own state there. That includes
East Jerusalem.

These legal considerations, generally neglected by the
international public and deliberately obfuscated by Israel, have
suddenly become relevant for two reasons.

The first, as set out by Henry Siegman, former national director of
the American Jewish Congress, now head of the U.S./Middle East
Project in New York, and the most persistent, conscientious and
learned of American Middle East experts, is that President Barack
Obama has set out to get an Israeli-Palestinian two-state settlement,
and is going about it beginning with an issue where the Netanyahu
government and its Likud allies in the United States are the most
vulnerable, the settlements.

The settlements are illegal in international law, condemned by the
international community, an enormous political and security liability
to Israel, a burden on the state budget, and they enjoy relatively
little support from the American Jewish community and the ordinary
citizens of Israel. The notion that popular support for the colonies
makes them untouchable by the government is, Siegman says, “absurd.”
“Draconian laws” on illegal construction are regularly enforced
inside Israel, and anyone who pleaded “natural growth” as a reason to
be exempted from such law would be told to move: there are plenty of
empty apartments in Israel, where the Jewish population of European
descent is diminishing.

A recent book (The Hebrew Republic by Bernard Avishai) notes that
up to a third of the children of the Israeli elite lives abroad, and
a 2006 study found that 44% of young Israelis “would seriously think
of leaving Israel” if it would improve their living standards.
Siegman says that Obama is determined to establish a settlement
based on UN resolutions, agreements Israel has already signed but
ignores, and international law.

Such a proposal would be powerfully reinforced by the second new
factor in the situation: the European Union proposal made last week
by its foreign policy chief, Javier Solana. This would have the
Security Council set (an early) deadline for Israel and the
Palestinians to agree on a settlement.

If they fail, as they have until now, the Security Council would
employ its own legal authority over the still unresolved Palestinian
partition decided by the UN in 1947, and itself set the borders for
Israel and the new Palestinian state, as well as establishing
Security Council terms for settling the other permanent issues:
Jerusalem, refugees and security.

The responsibility to settle the matter, if the parties can’t do it
themselves, is implicit in the UN resolutions that created Israel and
awarded a right to self-determination to the Palestinians.

If the United States and the European Union join forces to impose
such UN settlement terms, and back them with their combined political
and economic resources, sending an international force to enter the
currently occupied Palestinian territories to establish the rule of
law, assist the Palestinians in building government institutions, and
to assure Israel’s security, this dangerous and endlessly painful
stalemate might at last be ended to everyone’s relief, the profound
benefit of the whole region, and to the credit of Barack Obama and
Janvier Solana.

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