GUEST COMMENTARY-For those who carefully follow the relationship between the governments of the United States and Israel, the dust-up over Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu's March 3 speech to a joint session of Congress should come as no surprise. In fact, we think the handwriting has been on the wall since last year, and was predicted by Jeffrey Goldberg in his October 2014 article in The Atlantic.
In an attempt to put Netanyahu's speech into its historical-political context, we will describe the current situation in Israel-Palestine and the crucial role of the United States government in supporting the Occupation and the incremental construction of an apartheid state. We'll also analyze several scenarios in which the Israel-Palestine conflict could resolve when (not if) the U.S. government is no longer willing or able to support Israel's long-term settlement program in the Occupied Territories.
In essence, we attempt to explain how the decline of U.S. dominance in the Middle East means that Israel's occupation is not sustainable. Our analysis also offers many new political opportunities to anti-Occupation activists.
Greater Israel on the Road to Apartheid
Israel today, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, is effectively a single state, referred to as Greater Israel by its architects and supporters. Many analysts, such as Jeff Halper, Director of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, have pointed out that this de facto single state is quickly developing a system of apartheid in the territories Israel captured in 1967 during the Six Day War. In contrast, the areas within Israel's 1948-1967 Green Line boundaries have legal and quasi-legal segregation, but not yet full-blown apartheid.
Furthermore, the legal structure of this emerging apartheid state differs between the areas annexed by Israel after the Six Day War (East Jerusalem and Golan Heights) and the territories remaining under direct and indirect military control (West Bank and Gaza Strip). All those living in the former are governed by Israeli civil authorities, while the Palestinians living in the occupied areas are controlled by the Israeli military, unlike adjacent Israeli settlers, who are governed by the same civil authorities running the Israeli state within the Green Line.
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Land Divided
"Israel: A "Moral Democracy" or an "Apartheid State"?
To date over 500,000 Israeli Jews have been moved into the neighborhoods of annexed East Jerusalem and into the occupied West Bank. In most cases they are protected by the Israeli military in heavily fortified towns and cities, euphemistically called "settlements" by the press and even most opponents, although more critics are now referring to them as colonial outposts.
An obvious consequence of the rapid construction of Greater Israel is the deliberate geographical and political demise of a viable two-state solution—that is, an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel. This is because a sovereign Palestinian state is incompatible with an Israeli state occupying the same territory and maintaining an authoritarian military regime that implants and protects hundreds of thousands of Israeli Jewish settlers.
There are also parallel political factors that block the emergence of a Palestinian state, most importantly the recent frankness of Israeli officials who openly oppose a two-state solution, particularly Prime Minister Netanyahu. On July 11, 2014, he declared, "There cannot be a situation, under any agreement, in which we [Israel] relinquish security control of the territory west of the River Jordan [meaning the West Bank]."
Other political factors include the rapid growth of extremely right-wing and often religious Israeli political parties and movements. They have not only infiltrated the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) but also violently intimidate Israeli moderates still committed to a two-state solution. The most important political factor is, however, the U.S. government's carte blanche material and political support for Greater Israel, especially lethal Israeli military attacks designed to weaken Palestinian national aspirations, in particular Cast Lead (2008-9) and Protective Edge (2014).
Despite occasional press statements from the White House and State Department critical of Prime Minister Netanyahu and expanded Israeli civilian outposts and towns in the areas intended for the Palestinian state (by numerous UN resolutions and the Oslo Accords) are unhelpful, the day-to-day construction of Greater Israel's "facts on the ground" has the full backing of the United States government, including both Republican and Democratic administrations. Israel's reliance on a great power is not a new phenomenon, as Prof. Avi Shlaim pointed out in his 2001 book The Iron Wall, Israel and the Arab World, "This has always been Israel's modus operandi, as it was for the Yishuv, the pre-state Jewish community in Palestine." (Read the rest.)
-cw
CityWatch
Vol 13 Issue 21
Pub: Mar 10, 2015
