TheAltWorld An American Chimaera — ‘Peace Requires US Confrontation with Israel’
What if “Israel” just ignores the White House and just ‘does it’ (a massive Nakba)? And calls the bluff that the US would really ‘pull the rug’ from under “Israel”?
David Ignatius records in the Washington Post his visit to the West Bank and how he saw that “Peace Will Require Confrontation With Israel”:
[His visit] was a reality check about what’s possible ‘the day after’ the Gaza war ends. President Biden and other world leaders speak hopefully about creating a Palestinian state once Hamas is defeated (sic). I’d love to see that happen, too. But people need to get real about it … A Palestinian State may seem soothing to hear, but is a version of magical thinking. Standing in the way are the Israeli settlements and outposts laid across the hilltops of the West Bank, their high fences and concrete walls symbolizing their apparent immovability.
“The settlements were put there to prevent the creation of a Palestinian state”, Ignatius is frankly told — and apparently he ‘gets it’. It would require confrontation ‘to unblock it’.
This is so – the settlements have been a block to stop any Palestinian state from emerging. Precisely so. Many years ago, when I was seconded as ‘link’ between President Arafat and the Israeli government, I received an unexpected invitation:
I was asked to tour the most radical West Bank settlements as a ‘guest of Ariel Sharon’, the then-PM.
I was taken by one of the Prime Minister’s closest friends on ‘my’ settlement tour. The latter said to the settler leaders — on each occasion and very explicitly — to treat me as Sharon’s personal guest. They were to speak openly, and to hold nothing back in terms of feelings and opinions.
That, they did not. Out it all poured; ‘radical’ would be to understate matters. They were ‘crazy’; fanatics in fact. The neighbouring Palestinian villages, towards whom a pure stream of contempt and hatred was evinced, were in their sights; it was to be a matter of time until they would be swept away and their land appropriated.
On return to Jerusalem [Al-Quds], my guide looked at me sternly, and said simply, “Do you understand? Do you understand why you were sent on this mission?”
“I do”. No way will those zealots be removed. Even if it were attempted by the Israeli military, it would be a bloodbath, I replied. They have their claws sunk deep into the settlement earth.
“Yes”. That was all that was said.
And now, some decades later and in the softest of tones, Ignatius hints at the elephant in the room: “Peace [indeed] would require confrontation with Israel”. “Biden’s is the latest Administration to confront this reality,” Ignatius concludes.
But the ‘practice’ is the opposite: Biden supports and facilitates “Israel’s” massacre in Gaza, even as he mutters platitudes that “Israel” should continue to bomb; but to bomb more carefully.
Thus far, so good. But then, rather than address what ‘confrontation’ would mean, Ignatius veers off into his own magical thinking: “Is there a happy ending to this story? Probably not”, he muses – before adding ‘soothingly’ how he met so many brave Israelis and Palestinians working together … towards peace … (…. please!)
The two-state solution is, of course, the legal ‘ground zero’. The legal framework — in terms of UNSCR 242 and 338, both resolutions stipulate that a Palestinian state must be established on the lands occupied by “Israel” in the 1967 war. It is the West’s perpetual consensus and speaking point, endlessly repeated, never seriously pursued. Never given deeper thought.
Ignatius must know this: Negotiating a two-state solution is regarded in Washington as the quagmire to end all quagmires. It will not happen; and they know it. They just say it.
The two-state prospect might still be the consensus starting point. But it will not be the end-point. The West Bank, Gaza and Palestinian Jerusalem were conquered. So was the Western Wall. And it is from the Western Wall of Temple Mount, metaphorically speaking, that the demon of eschatology arose. The most devouring of demons. It spawned the settlement enterprise, the Jewish underground, the Haredi ultranationalists — and the Temple Mount Movement.
And a second Nakba (violent ethnic cleansing) now hangs over everything.
Today, greed and fear are the ascendent emotions: October 7 revived something last felt in “Israel” in 1973 — fears that its neighbours and enemies could do away with the Jewish nation altogether, said political scientist Tamar Hermann. When the sense of the people is that they face a threat to the very existence of “Israel”, mixed with fear comes greed; inevitably population removal and appropriation of land becomes one option touted.
“Israel” — from their perspective – has already tried their version of a ‘two-state solution’ — effectively it was an apartheid structure. Today there are 7.3 million Palestinians and 7.3 million Jews living in ‘Greater Israel’, and the Palestinian birth rate is the higher. One-state; two-states — this calculus, for Israelis, has run its course; its prognostication seen as ‘bad’.
The Oslo pillars on which it was assumed the Palestinian state would be built have reversed direction: The first pillar was always demography — the assumption was that demography would push “Israel” to ‘give’ Palestinians their separate ‘state’ side-by-side with “Israel”.
Well, October 7 stopped that. Structural containment, military enforcement and deterrence failed, and demography now pushes in precisely the opposite direction — to clearing the land of all ‘hostile populations’.
The second pillar was that the Palestinians would co-operate on security issues to reassure “Israel” by policing their own people; and the third was that “Israel” — and “Israel” alone — would decide when it had received enough security assurance to ‘give’ the Palestinians their state.
Well, that notion ‘blew up’ in Gaza, in the West Bank and in the North, too. Israelis now fear what resides on the other side of their fences and walls. What if “Israel” concludes that its only course is massive ethnic cleansing as their macro ‘solution’?
How exactly will the US confront this? “Israel” will not be smooth-talked down; it will not be bought-off.
Theoretically, the US has substantial leverage (significant money and significant munitions); but the political paradigm of the Lobby — unreserved Congressional and popular support in US for “Israel” — means that this imputed ‘leverage’ can’t be used without creating a storm within the American political system.
A trial of strength is coming (rather than peace negotiations).
What if “Israel” just ignores the White House and just ‘does it’ (a massive Nakba)? And calls the bluff that the US would really ‘pull the rug’ from under “Israel”?
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