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Features Sharon gets carte blanche from Bush
April 29th, 2004 -- The exchange of statements and subsequent joint press conference between US President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon on 14 April were quickly likened by Palestinians and their supporters to the Balfour Declaration of 1917 in terms of their potential impact on the future course of the Israel-Palestine conflict. The president effectively freed Israel of its legal and moral obligations to the Palestinian people under international law, as far as the world’s only superpower was concerned. The events of that day are sure to have a major impact on United States policy on the conflict itself and on international law in general, as well as on the US-Israel strategic alliance and the stability of a volatile region. What Bush has embraced is a unilateral plan by Sharon whose stated aim is to relinquish some control over Gaza in order to ease Israel’s security problem there. Gaza, which very few Israelis view as worth hanging on to, has always been a costly venture for the Israeli government because the 7,500 settlers in the territory need a whole division and several battalions to protect them. Under Sharon’s disengagement plan, which Bush has now endorsed, Gaza is to be exchanged de facto for the West Bank, which Israel regards as the real economic and strategic prize. Sharon is proposing a partial withdrawal from an unwanted, overpopulated and poverty-stricken swath of land in return for US acquiescence in a “long-term interim” arrangement that would consolidate and make permanent Israel’s control over the West Bank. The deal smacks of the dismantlement of the Sinai settlement of Yamit in the late 1970s and the withdrawal from Sinai and Sharm al-Shaykh, in exchange for peace with Egypt, which enabled the Israelis to invade Lebanon and deal a crippling blow to the Palestinian National Movement in 1982. From Sharon’s vantage point, the current deal provides him with strategic gains without having to negotiate with the Palestinians, which would inevitably require some concessions. Handing over the West Bank Not unlike Britain during the first world war, the US has offered an explicit endorsement of — rather than merely “viewed with favour” — Israeli sovereignty over the West Bank. By rendering the 1949 cease-fire lines obsolete, while maintaining deliberate silence on the 1967 borders, the US president has, in effect, recognized a permanent Israeli occupation of the 22% of Palestine which Israel did not conquer in 1948. Bush’s move undercuts much of America’s diplomatic work over the past 37 years, creating a dramatic shift in US policy. American diplomacy over that time may have constituted little more than an exercise in futility for the most part, but it was never explicitly at variance with the widely accepted position that the occupation was temporary and that the acquisition of territory by force of arms was impermissible under international law. Although the US, paradoxically, played the role of mediator while acting as Israel’s chief diplomatic backer, bankroller and arms supplier, it nevertheless refrained from conceding publicly that Israel was under no obligation to withdraw from occupied territory. Now, the window-dressing has been abandoned. Bush has brought the US out of the closet and de facto Israeli annexation of much of the West Bank is likely to follow. The occupation is part of what Bush described as “facts on the ground”. Security Council Resolution 242 is history. No more window-dressing Since 1948, American policy on the issue has always had two faces, declared and undeclared. While it always tried, however disingenuously, to masquerade as being in accord with international legality on Jerusalem, the refugees, the occupation and Israeli settlements, Washington’s declared policy has come to deviate ever further from the international consensus. Now, even the pretension of conformity with international legitimacy has been abandoned by President Bush, notwithstanding his hollow and meaningless references to an independent Palestinian state. On the refugee question, the US’ declared policy was consistent until 1993 with the requirements of UN General Assembly Resolution 194 of 1948. That resolution recognized the right of return and/or compensation. In 1993, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright effectively dismissed four decades’ worth of international understanding on the question of Palestine as “irrelevant, contentious and obsolete”. While the policy on refugees has remained vague and cautious over the past decade, Bush’s statement now restricts the Palestinian right of return to truncated and isolated cantons fenced in between Israeli highways, settlements and checkpoints. In endorsing Israel’s refusal to consider allowing Palestine refugees to return to their homes in Israel, Bush endorses the racist demographic imperative that Israel must retain its “Jewish character” regardless of the rights of the indigenous Palestinian people. On the issue of settlements, which international law has long considered illegal, US policy now for the first time accepts their permanency, and hence legality. This should come as no surprise. US policy on the status of settlements has steadily moved closer to the Israeli position: they were “illegal” under Carter, “not illegal” according to Reagan, an “obstacle to peace” under Bush Sr, a “complicating factor in the peace process” in the Clinton years. Now they are “firmly rooted facts on the ground”. Palestinians left out in the cold There is more. The US and Israel are, it is believed, to determine the fate of the Palestinians in bilateral agreements reached behind closed doors. Palestinian leaders need not be present when the future of their people is being decided by an intellectually challenged American leader and an Israeli prime minister who was indicted in his own country for his role in the slaughter of Palestinians in Beirut in 1982. This is hardly surprising, either. The Palestinian leadership has been bypassed entirely both over the past four months of US-Israeli negotiations on the basis of Sharon’s so-called disengagement plan and at the meetings leading up to the 14 April press conference. Incidentally, these negotiations were led, on the American side, by Elliot Abrams, a man convicted (and pardoned by Bush) for having lied to Congress during the Iran-Contra affair. The assassination of Palestinian political leader Abd al-Aziz Rantisi only four days after the Sharon-Bush meeting is likely to be seen in many parts of the world as a legitimization of terror by the US. Even Britain, America’s closest ally over Iraq, condemns Israel’s assassination policy as unacceptable and illegal. By granting Sharon a blank cheque, George Bush, acting as partner and accomplice, has forfeited whatever claims the US has to play the role of mediator. Again, the US adhered to what has become accepted practice over the past few decades. Israel provides the framework for a plan, just as it did at Camp David in 1978 and in 1993 in Oslo, which the US endorses. Not only did Sharon sell Bush a recycled version of his 1981 plan to keep at least 50% of the West Bank, relegating the Palestinians to three fragmented entities (Jenin and Nablus in the north, Ramallah in the centre, Hebron and Bethlehem in the south), but he also sought to guarantee American acceptance based on the prevailing strategic realities in the region and the domestic political realities at home. Bogged down in an increasingly bloody war in Iraq, which was urged by Sharon and his Washington allies in the first place, Bush felt he could ill afford to say no to the Israeli leader, who implicitly linked stability in his country to the success of his “separation” plan. Moreover, non-compliance by Bush would have deprived his re-election campaign of critical votes and funds from sectors of the Jewish and Christian fundamentalist communities. One wonders whether a pattern of substitutability of roles is beginning to emerge. Is Israel acting as if the US is its strategic asset rather the other way round? Prejudging final status In another blatant departure from existing US policy, Oslo’s designation of “final status” was summarily dismissed as Bush proceeded to pre-empt and foreclose on the issues falling under that heading. America’s frequently used phrase cautioning against “prejudging” a final settlement evaporated like dust, with Bush’s instincts seemingly fixated on his electoral prospects and his “war on terror”. In conceding final status issues such as boundaries, refugees, settlements and Jerusalem, Bush seemed either ignorant of or oblivious to what his predecessors had put on the negotiating table at Camp David I, Camp David II and Taba, or President Clinton’s speech in January 2001 to a largely Jewish audience in New York. The proposals posited then for Israeli territorial acquisitions to accommodate Israel’s settlers entailed a swap, whereby Israel was under obligation to cede “comparable” land to the Palestinian Authority. Bush’s generous offer takes no account of such reciprocal arrangements, bestowing upon Israel land which is neither his nor Sharon’s to bestow. Nor did Bush utter a sentence about Israel’s West Bank Wall, which his Administration had previously considered, on the record, an obstacle to the peace process. Perhaps he was satisfied with Sharon’s bogus assurance that the 400km structure was “temporary... and will, therefore, not prejudice any final status issues, including borders”. Remarkably, Bush’s policy shift gave the road-map short shrift, despite the hollow reference, and despite the huge diplomatic capital invested in it over more than a year, during which summit meetings were held with Arab leaders, the EU, Russia and the United Nations. It did not seem to matter to the president that the road-map was co-sponsored by the Quartet, which should have been consulted before their enterprise was laid to waste at the behest of Sharon and his allies in Washington. In fact, the road-map process was effectively set aside after it became known several months ago that Israel had stipulated 14 amendments prior to accepting it as a basis for negotiations. Instead of freezing construction of settlements in the Territories, as the road-map stipulated, Sharon, the father of settlements, received Washington’s blessing for maintaining the settlement programme and scrapping the road-map in a deal that Bush calls historic and courageous. By contrast, the European Union issued a statement on 15 April saying it would not recognize any changes to the pre-1967 borders other than those arrived at by agreement between the parties. In conclusion, the 14 April charade was the inevitable consequence of a US policy which has for decades permitted Israel to create facts on the ground, awaiting propitious regional and international circumstances to be consecrated. The collapse of the Soviet Union, together with Arab disarray, and the domestic ascendancy of the neo-conservatives, who were so well able to exploit the events of 11 September, were the exact circumstances Israel awaited. Naseer Aruri is Chancellor Professor (Emeritus), University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His latest book is Dishonest Broker, the US Role in Israel and Palestine, Cambridge, MA, South End Press, 2003. |
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