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News Analysis Bush embraces Sharon's vision
April 29th, 2004 -- Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon met President Bush on 14 April and came away a very happy man. At the end of the meeting Sharon tucked away two coveted assurances that Bush’s father would not have dreamed of conferring 13 years earlier in Madrid. Bush declared Palestinian refugees could return only to a new (presumably limited) Palestinian state and not to homes and land in Israel. He also stated that some “currently existing Israeli population centres” in the West Bank — a startling euphemism for settlements — could remain despite formal US policy holding for years that such settlements were either illegal or at least obstacles to peace. In exchange for these assurances, Sharon declared that he would relocate settlers and troops from the Gaza Strip and four West Bank settlements. Columnist Thomas Friedman declared that the Palestinians would “have a chance to build a decent mini-state of their own in Gaza”. Administration spinners were similarly upbeat, but in their haste to note that the settlers’ champion was dismantling settlements they failed to recognize the fact that Gaza will be little more than an enormous open-air prison with no control over its borders, air space or maritime access. Ripping up years of policy The Gaza disengagement on its own could have served as a positive starting point to jump-start negotiations, but the quid pro quo Sharon secured upended years of US policy and more clearly than ever placed the United States solidly on Israel’s side. The American government can make no further claim of “honest broker” status. Its standing in the region, already low, slipped several notches more. Four days later, Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the presumptive Democratic candidate for the presidency, made sure Americans knew that he agreed with Bush’s stance. Asked by Tim Russert on NBC’s Meet the Press whether he supported Bush in breaking with the policy of six predecessors by allowing Israel to keep land seized in the 1967 war and with the assertion that refugees cannot return to their homes, Kerry said yes. When asked whether he supported this “completely”, he again said yes. For Democrats, but particularly for Arab and Muslim Americans concerned about US policy on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, there is no place to go, there being not a nickel’s worth of difference on the matter between the two candidates. A vote for Ralph Nader, who is running this year as an independent rather than as the Green candidate, will feel to many like a vote wasted. Kerry seems to be banking on the fact that Arab and Muslim Americans will remain so angry with the president over his Iraq policy that they will overlook the senator’s willingness to abandon international law and decades of US policy on Israeli settlements. Rather than denounce Bush for wholeheartedly endorsing a right-wing Likud policy that exposes the US as a fraudulent broker, Kerry appears more intent on making sure he comes across as every bit the supporter of an expansionist Israel as his rival. Meanwhile, Bush climbed in the polls following his meeting with Sharon. The Bush-Sharon agreement effectively closes yet another avenue to Palestinians looking to effect change without resort to violence. With the United States now negotiating on behalf of the Palestinians — Saeb Urayqat wryly noted in a Washington Post op-ed that Bush had taken his job — diplomacy no longer appears to be a viable option. Crushing Palestinian aspirations Legal options have also been closed to the Palestinians. In February the US argued against Palestinian efforts at the International Court of Justice to stop the Wall Israel is erecting inside the West Bank. On top of this, non-violent efforts by Palestinians, Israelis and citizens of other nations face increasing suppression and heavy-handed responses. Repressive measures strikingly similar to the tactics employed by Bull Connor during the American Civil Rights Movement are being ignored or downplayed by both the American media and American politicians. Overall, the message from the White House is that the Palestinians do not have a legitimate cause. By systematically closing off other roads to change, the Administration is implicitly pushing Palestinians in the direction of violence. A more ill-considered policy would be difficult to devise, even without taking into account possible domino effects in Iraq and the wider region. Israel’s finance minister, Benyamin Netanyahu has already pocketed the American concession on settlements and is racing to entrench still more settlements east of the “separation barrier”. He has openly stated his plans to invest in these settlements, receiving no rejoinder from the US that such bad-faith manoeuvres would be unacceptable. The stated Bush policy, already a radical departure from years of considered precedent, also is a logical impossibility. The Administration clings to United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 at the very time that it has sidelined these resolutions by accepting Israel’s seizure of West Bank territory. Resolution 242 expressly emphasizes “the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, and yet by saying Israel can retain settlements the US is clearly contradicting a core aspect of the resolution, allowing Israel to retain territory so acquired. Lost on all is the irony here: Bush Senior gathered his armada partly on the plea that Saddam Hussein must not be allowed to hold on to territories acquired by war. Defining Iraqi sovereignty Yet the substance and meaning of words seems to matter less and less in Washington policy circles. The same demeaning of language is taking place in Iraq regarding the 30 June date of transition to Iraqi sovereignty. Asked on CBS’ Face the Nation whether Iraqi sovereignty would be real or symbolic, Sen. Carl Levin (Dem. Mi) replied: “There’s a real disconnect here because Bremer said it’s going to be a transfer of full sovereignty. He was very explicit about that, and yet at the Armed Services Committee there was talk about more limited sovereignty being restored to Iraq.” No matter how it is spun, Iraqi sovereignty is not real sovereignty if the United States, and not the Iraqi governing entity, determines whether the American military can strike locations such as Faluja and Najaf. No Security Council resolution will obscure this basic fact. And, to be sure, no Iraqi leader (not even Ahmad Chalabi) will have final say over the actions of the US military. Not satisfied with spinning the meaning of Resolution 242 and the definition of sovereignty, the Administration has tackled Bob Woodward’s book, Plan of Attack, and is trying to make the case that the book casts Bush in a positive light even as it runs roughshod over central figures close to the president. Prince Bandar bin Sultan, the Saudi ambassador to Washington, was, according to Woodward, more closely involved in to the decision to go to war than Secretary of State Colin Powell. A lame-duck Powell denied the claim. Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld fares no better. According to Woodward, Rumsfeld told Bandar in January 2003 that he could take a US decision to go to war with Iraq “to the bank”. Rumsfeld tried to obfuscate the matter — in fact, the Pentagon’s transcript expurgated the nettlesome exchange — but the defence secretary was undone when Woodward provided a transcript of his own. The account damages Bush’s claim not to have made an early decision to go to war with Iraq. Perhaps the only honest words of the fortnight came in Bush’s news conference of 13 April, when he allowed: “I wouldn’t be happy if I were occupied either.” This, presumably, is the case. Yet his actions of the next day, with Sharon at his side, give every indication that while occupation would be unacceptable as a reality of life for him, the Palestinians had better get used to it in the West Bank. Hypocrisy and the convenient oversight of international law now drive US foreign policy in the Middle East. No words, whether substance or spin, can hide the ugly truth from people in the region. Meanwhile, back at home, truth has become a far more malleable construct. For now, Bush and Kerry appear content to walk hand-in-hand on the truth as they see it in Israel/Palestine. On 29 April, however, Vice President Dick Cheney was due to lead Bush by the hand to a constructed truth to be jointly told — or concocted, as the case may be — to the commission investigating the terrorist attacks of 11 September. |
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