The Charade Continues

March 09, 2010

Nicholas Berry

Vice President Joe Biden is in Israel ostensibly to push the Israeli-Palestinian peace process leading to a two-state solution and to reassure Israelis that the United States stands with them against Iran.

Actually, he is there to maintain an illusion.

Israel has no intention of allowing a Palestinian state. It continues its spectacularly successful stratagem of dividing the Palestinian polity, thus weakening its authority and preventing it from having the coherence to negotiate a binding agreement. Being soft on Fatah and hard on Hamas produces different and conflicting policies by the two Palestinian power centers. They are as antagonistic to each other as they are toward Israel. On the day before Biden’s visit, the Israeli Defense Ministry announced the construction of 112 new housing units in the West Bank settlement of Beitar Ilit, violating a 10-month moratorium Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced in November. A large bloc of Palestinian housing is being demolished in East Jerusalem to make way for a park and 1,600 new homes. The Israeli prime minister has just days ago announced the Israeli takeover of “historic sites” on the West Bank. He has also ruled out the Israeli withdrawal from the Jordan River valley, about 23 percent of the West Bank. Apartheid? One can argue the use of this sullied word, but whatever word fits must describe a nation held captive.

President Obama is no fool. He is perfectly aware of the political situation both in Israel and the United States. They require that the issue of Middle East peace be finessed. Obama has visited Egypt, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, but not Israel. Why expend political capital in a hopeless task? Why raise false expectations, as he did last year in Cairo? Why put substantial efforts and prominence toward Middle East peace on his foreign policy agenda?

At last count, all of Obama’s national security advisors, both civilian and military, counsel that an Israeli-U.S. or U.S.-Israeli war with Iran would be devastating: with high casualties and material loses, ineffective, financially horrendous, spiking oil prices, easily countered and spurring actual weaponizing by Iran, image destroying around the world, and without a clear and tolerable end game. The United States will go through the motions – sanctions and propaganda – but will not countenance a war.

In addition, Obama will not go to Jerusalem, will not endorse Israeli expansion, and will not add any luster to the image of Netanyahu.

Yet, the show must go on.

Obama has given special envoy George Mitchell the role of active mediator in the upcoming “proximity talks” and a cameo role for Biden. Professions of U.S.-Israeli solidarity are tailored to assuage Israelis and pacify America’s Israeli supporters. Biden noted in a guestbook upon arrival that the bond with Israel is “unshakable,” and in the company of President Shimon Peres and the press commented that there is “no space between the United States and Israel in terms of security. None.”

All hot air.

And the Israelis know it.

No U.S. president has been as distrusted by Israeli elites as is Obama. They see his hands-off approach as distinctly unfriendly, as highlighting the unilateralism and expansionism of Israel’s right-wing government, and as sullying Israel’s image in the United States. What the Israelis see as their being “ignored” – a word common in Israeli discourse – is deeply resented. “While we welcome Vice President Biden, a longtime friend and supporter of Israel,” said Danny Damon, the deputy speaker of the Knesset, “we see it as nothing short of an insult that President Obama himself is not coming.

But, in truth, Obama sees Israel as an albatross and as a potential trigger for initiating a catastrophic conflagration.

Of course, he will never say it.

Personal postscript: Those of us who support Israel as a Jewish State and the necessity of a Palestinian state to preserve Israel as such, are dumbfounded by the shortsightedness of Israel’s political elite. Aren’t they aware that encompassing five million or so Palestinians within Israeli controlled territory will inevitably lead to a civil rights movement pressing for a bi-national state? Apartheid with Bantustans for the Palestinians is simply not durable. Palestinian leaders have been telling the Israelis this for the last two years. Just today, March 9, Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, repeated the warning that this seemed likely to be the last chance to achieve a two-state solution, indicating that if it failed, there would be no choice but to insist that Israelis and Palestinians share the same state.

Nicholas Berry is Director of Foreign Policy Forum