Go to consortiumblog.com to post comments

Order Now

Archives

Age of Obama
Barack Obama's presidency

Bush End Game
George W. Bush's presidency since 2007

Bush - Second Term
George W. Bush's presidency from 2005-06

Bush - First Term
George W. Bush's presidency, 2000-04

Who Is Bob Gates?
The secret world of Defense Secretary Gates

2004 Campaign
Bush Bests Kerry

Behind Colin Powell's Legend
Gauging Powell's reputation.

The 2000 Campaign
Recounting the controversial campaign.

Media Crisis
Is the national media a danger to democracy?

The Clinton Scandals
Behind President Clinton's impeachment.

Nazi Echo
Pinochet & Other Characters.

The Dark Side of Rev. Moon
Rev. Sun Myung Moon and American politics.

Contra Crack
Contra drug stories uncovered

Lost History
America's tainted historical record

The October Surprise "X-Files"
The 1980 election scandal exposed.

International
From free trade to the Kosovo crisis.

Other Investigative Stories

Editorials

Editor’s Note: Israel’s Likud leaders and their neoconservative allies in the United States continue to dominate the political world of Washington as demonstrated by the Obama administration’s veto of a UN resolution that decried the same illegal Israeli settlements that President Obama himself has opposed.

This continued clout was underscored further when the neocon Washington Post published a lead editorial on Saturday depicting  the villain of this episode as Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, whom the newspaper accused of insincerity on the “peace process” – despite recently disclosed documents revealing that Abbas had offered major concessions to Israel at the bargaining table.

But the Post’s editors ignored that evidence and simply insisted that “Mr. Abbas has mostly refused to participate in the direct peace talks that Barack Obama made one of his top foreign policy priorities – and now [Abbas] has shown himself to be bent on embarrassing and antagonizing the U.S. administration.”

Over the past six decades, this sort of upside-down view of the world has led the United States to violate both international law and its own founding principles – with such actions as the invasion of Iraq and long-term support for Arab monarchs and dictators. This false reality is also the subject of this guest essay by Lawrence Davidson:

The inspiring moments when President Obama appeared before the cameras, and thus the world, to declare that the dictator Hosni Mubarak must step down and the people of Egypt must be given the inalienable right to self-determination are now in the past.

It was a moment when U.S. foreign policy actually appeared to correspond to the foreign reality it addressed. Ironically, it was this very correspondence that made the moment anomalous – something quite out of the ordinary.

Therefore, soon after Mubarak went into involuntary retirement at Sharm el-Sheik, Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was off to Israel and Jordan to confirm that foreign policy would immediately return to its normal pathway.

What is the norm here? Well, it is one where U.S. foreign policy references domestic political reality, like the power of the Zionist lobbies, rather than anything that might serve objective national interests. For all intents and purposes that was Mullen’s message: we are back on the normative track.

And, on Feb. 18, the administration backed up the admiral’s words with deeds. 
 
On that day the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, Susan Rice, vetoed a Lebanese/Palestinian-sponsored resolution in the Security Council that simply stated the truth – that the settlements built and being built on Palestinian occupied territory are illegal and an obstacle to peace.

Except for Israel itself, this is admitted by everyone, including the U.S. State Department. The resolution had over120 cosponsors (just about the entire non-Western world) and the support of every other member of the Security Council.

The only thing wrong with it was that it singled out the Israelis as the culprits and was thus anathema to the politicians in Washington. For the Obama administration, it was a supremely embarrassing moment.

It was so embarrassing that the administration had invested a lot of energy in trying to make sure the moment never came. Someone in the White House, either Secretary of State Hilary Clinton or President Obama himself, called Mahmoud Abbas to tell him that the U.S. had a compromise in the works that would make the objectionable resolution unnecessary.

And what sort of compromise did Washington have in mind? It turned out to be the same old "balanced" position that the U.S. has maintained for years.

The compromise statement would express "strong opposition to any unilateral actions by any party which might prejudice the outcome of negotiations ... and reaffirm that it does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity ... and condemns all forms of violence, including rocket fire from Gaza and stresses the need for calm and security for both peoples."

By surrounding the seminal issue of settlements with all the other references to what the Palestinians might be doing, such a statement would sustain the Israeli position that the Palestinians are also obstacles to peace.

That, in turn, would make this pronouncement marginally acceptable to both those embedded in the domestic reality of Congress and to the men in Jerusalem. Indeed, the Americans had pre-cleared their proffered compromise with Israel prior to offering it to Abbas. The Palestinians, of course, said that such pablum missed the point and they would have none of it.
 
Multiple Realities 
 
The concept of multiple realities is the key to understanding American behavior when it comes to Israel/Palestine.

Thus, on Feb. 17,  it was reported that Republican House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, Democratic Minority Whip Steny Hoyer, Republican House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (a rabid anti-Castro Cuban American), the committee’s ranking Democratic member Howard Berman, Middle East subcommittee Chairman Republican Steve Cabot, the subcommittee’s ranking Democrat Gary Ackerman, and others were insisting that Obama "pledge to...veto any U.N. Security Council resolution that criticizes Israel regarding final status issues."

The reason, Cantor and Hoyer stated, is that the fault lies with the Palestinians for rejecting "the difficult but vital responsibility of making peace with Israel through direct negotiations and instead advocate for anti-Israel measures by the United Nations Security Council [that are] counterproductive and unacceptable."

U.S. politicians can only say these things because their audience is first, the Zionist lobbies themselves (from whom they desire political support and fear political opposition), and second, a largely disinterested and ill-informed American public that doesn’t know enough to judge the veracity of the comments.

So, while their position does reflect the rather shabby political reality in Congress, their characterization of the reality under which Abbas and his fellows operate is all wrong.

The other reality (i.e. the real one) has recently been revealed by the leaked Palestine Papers. These show very clearly that the men whom Cantor and Hoyer accuse of avoiding "direct negotiations" had been in just those sort of talks but a short time ago.

At those negotiations, Abbas and his colleagues offered Israel everything short of their very souls. Whereupon the Israelis had simply walked away and recommended more building on stolen land. That left the Palestinian "leadership" in its own domestic political bind.

For while the American politicians have to answer to lobbyists, the Palestinian leaders now have to answer to an increasingly angry citizenry.

At this point one can ask if, according to the congressmen, it so necessary for the Palestinian politicians to "take up the difficult but vital responsibility of making peace with Israel," why should it not be equally required that American politicians take on "the difficult but necessary responsibility" of shaking off their corrupt dependency on Zionist dictates so as to pressure the Israelis to make a just peace?

The whole thing makes no sense unless one takes into consideration: multiple realities and the politicians’ propensity for hypocrisy and double standards.
 
The result of all this was that on Feb. 18, the UN representatives of three-quarters of the nations on earth went about their business in muted disgust at the cowardice of the world’s greatest power. They probably avoided making eye contact with Ambassador Rice who had played the role of the good soldier.

Hanan Ashrawi, a respected and very smart member of the PLO Executive Committee, had said that an American veto would be "a direct affront to the international community and the requirements of peace." And so it was.

But then, that is the rest of the world’s reality, which has yet to penetrate the Washington Beltway. Inside that Beltway, it is the requirements of domestic politics, and not that of peace, that holds sway.
 
In the meantime, in the far off land of Palestine, the Israelis announced the plans for 120 new settlement units to be built in occupied East Jerusalem.

The politicians in Jerusalem play to yet another "reality" – one shaped by ideology and power. The ideology is Zionism, the claim of historic Jewish ownership of these lands even though they had been inhabited for centuries by Palestinians. The power, at least in part, is made in the USA.

It is strange how history sometimes repeats itself. If, in November 1947, the UN had voted against the partition of Palestine it would have made no difference to the Zionists who were then determined to make Israel a reality come what may.

And, on Feb. 18, if the Security Council had voted in favor of the resolution describing settlements as illegal, it would have made no difference to the Israelis who are determined to make Greater Israel a reality come what may.
 
This reality of multiple realities has created this mess. And, it is going to take more than UN resolutions to bring everyone concerned into the same world.

The key group here is not the Palestinian politicos nor even the American politicians. The key group is the Israelis.

It is their ideologically driven “reality” that has to be reconstructed. When that happens, the American politicians will meekly follow along. And how is this to be achieved? Through the necessity of a slow but sure isolation of the Zionist state and its ideologues.

This process of isolation will relentlessly raise the cost of the Zionist “reality” until it is too great to bear. The process has already begun and will continue until racism is a dead issue in Israel whatever its ultimate borders.

This struggle is now in the hands of a worldwide movement of civil society. And that movement will be the one to decide the ultimate reality in Israel/Palestine.  

Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America's National Interest; America's Palestine: Popular and Offical Perceptions from Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.

To comment at Consortiumblog, click here. (To make a blog comment about this or other stories, you can use your normal e-mail address and password. Ignore the prompt for a Google account.) To comment to us by e-mail, click here. To donate so we can continue reporting and publishing stories like the one you just read, click here.

Back to Home Page