How Impartial U.S. Rhetoric Undermines a Two-State Solution

Over 1000 demonstrators marched to the Qalandia Checkpoint on Nakba commemoration day, May 15, 2011. (Photo by: Anne Paq/Activestills.org) Any account of the Arab Spring must include the May 15th “right of return” protests staged by Palestinians at Israeli border fences to commemorate Al-Nakba—the catastrophe—their term for the forcible relocation of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians to Lebanon, Syria, and other parts of the world which accompanied the founding of the state of Israel on that date in 1948. But the Palestinians' struggle has not—and most likely will not—be seen as part of the greater movement for democracy in the Middle East and North Africa, even though they have suffered the same humiliations, repressions and violence as their Egyptian, Syrian, Libyan, and Bahraini neighbors. The lack of recognition is in part because of the United States’ long-held view that the struggle for Palestinian statehood is a conflict between equals—equals in military force and in moral blame for the collapse of decades of peace talks. To argue against such impartiality is not to imply that the U.S. should instead declare one side evil and the other good, but only to say that an impartial approach to an unequal situation is deceptive and wrong-headed. The tortured logic needed to support an impartial view of the Palestinian conflict was most recently displayed when President Obama articulated of his administration’s policy towards Israel in several different venues last week: his major Middle East foreign policy speech on May 19, his White House meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on May 20, and his May 22 address to the American Israeli Political Action Committee (AIPAC) annual policy meeting. Obama’s first step was to find the right rhetorical solvent to remove the historical differences between Israel and the Palestinians. In his May 19 speech, President Obama chose fear: "For decades, the conflict between Israelis and Arabs has cast a shadow over the region. For Israelis, it has meant living with the fear that their children could get blown up on a bus or by rockets fired at their homes, as well as the pain of knowing that other children in the region are taught to hate them. For Palestinians, it has meant suffering the humiliation of occupation, and never living in a nation of their own." Fear, as we have seen in the War on Terror, is an unquantifiable threat that can be felt by anyone at any time without regard for the actual possibilities of a threat materializing. The rhetoric of fear is particularly effective in this situation because it sidesteps the reality of a massive inequality of force between Israel and the Palestinians. Thus, it does not matter that Israel has a modern military, nuclear capability, comes in sixth in the world in annual military expenditures as a percentage of GDP and receives billions of dollars annually in military aid from the U.S., while terror groups like Hamas and Hezbollah have no where near that level of support. The equally legitimate fear on both sides of the Green Line provides a foundation for assigning equal moral blame to both parties for the failure of the most recent round of peace talks. Obama acknowledged this in his speech: “My administration has worked with the parties and the international community for over two years to end this conflict, yet expectations have gone unmet. Israeli settlement activity continues. Palestinians have walked away from talks.” Strangely, Obama’s last sentence does not give any reason for the Palestinians to have walked away from the talks. In fact, the last round of peace talks in the fall of 2010 collapsed because Netanyahu, under pressure from hard-line members of his ultraconservative Likud party, allowed a 10-month moratorium on the expansion of Jewish settlements in the West Bank to lapse despite the prior warnings by Mahmoud Abbas, the President of the Palestinian Authority, that he would not engage in peace talks unless the moratorium was in place. Further attempts to blame the Palestinians unequivocally for not compromising—as Netanyahu did in his speech before Congress on Wednesday (which is discussed in more detail in Miles Kampf-Lassin’s recent ITT List post)—are undermined by information contained in the so-called Palestine Papers: 10 years worth of diplomatic documents from peace negotiations leaked to Al-Jazeera in January 2011. The documents clearly show Abbas' Fatah party has been repeatedly wiling to accept very poor terms from Israel on important issues for their own political gain. For example, in 2008, the Fatah led Palestinian Authority engaged in secret negotiations with Israel to release some of the thousands of Palestinians in Israeli prisons in exchange for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, held by Hamas. In the end, only 198 Palestinian prisoners were released and Shalit remains in Hamas custody to this day simply because neither Fatah nor Israel wanted to give Hamas any kind of political victory, no matter how small. Even more damaging to Fatah was the so-called 'Napkin Map', which showed that its negotiators proposed an “unprecedented land swap to the Israeli government, offering to annex virtually all of the illegal Israeli settlements in East Jerusalem.” In the end, America’s explicit insistence on an impartial approach to the Palestinian conflict gives Netanyahu and other hard-line Israeli politicians implicit approval for their reactionary tactics. Acknowledging the inequalities that exist would not mean having to unreservedly support one side or another. Taking a tougher line on stopping Israeli settlements in the West Bank as well as a more receptive approach to the recently aligned Hamas and Fatah parties could isolate reactionary elements on both sides of the debate. In any event, without a change in the dynamic, Israeli, Palestinian and, by extension, U.S. citizens will continue to be “yoked to Netanyahu’s angry expansionism.”