I cannot believe George W. Bush. His administration’s policy in Iraq is a bloody and dangerous shambles. Afghanistan is slipping back into anarchy. He needs every iota of support he can get from Muslims and Arabs worldwide if any of them are ever to help him survive all this. And at this very point, he suddenly decides to give away the whole store regarding the West Bank, to Ariel Sharon.
How on earth can he be so tone-deaf, cretinous, or just plain traitorous to the worldwide interests of the U.S. people?
Well, the fact that Elliott Abrams is the main advisor whispering into his ear on matters Israeli-Palestinian doubtless has a lot to do with it.
Here’s the deal Sharon got. He pulls his troops and a few thousand Israeli settlers out of Gaza. (Sometime. Maybe.) Okay, it’s not in Israel’s interests to have the troops there at all, getting constantly sucked into the Gaza quagmire. And the vast majority of Israelis don’t give a hoot about the settlements there.
He makes a big show of “dismantling” something like four “settlement outposts” in the West Bank. Well, we’ve seen him go through that charade before. The outposts just get put up the next day; or, they move a few yards one way or the other.
And in return for these amazing “concessions” he gets unprecedented bennies from the President of the most powerful state in the world! He gets Bush’s agreement to the following three key points, as stated in Bush’s letter to him today:
(1) “The United States understands that after Israel withdraws from Gaza and/or parts of the West Bank, and pending agreements on other arrangements, existing arrangements regarding control of airspace, territorial waters, and land passages of the West Bank and Gaza will continue.”
- So, no real attributes of sovereignty at all for whatever “entity” takes over Gaza… It gets fewer powers even than Soputh-Africa’s ill-fated Bantustans. ~HC
(2)”The United States is strongly committed to Israel’s security and well-being as a Jewish state. It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair, and realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian refugees there, rather than in Israel.”
(3) “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949, and all previous efforts to negotiate a two-state solution have reached the same conclusion.”
This last point is presented in a highly disingenuous way. It’s true that during, for example, the Taba talks, some reciprocal border changes were discussed, as part of an ongoing negotiation. But now, suddenly, Sharon gets an apparent carte blanche to hang onto anything he desires in the West Bank.
Equally importantly, the situation of the many still quite illegal Israeli settelements is nudged a further big step towards “normalization”. Ma’ariv, for example, has been reporting that NASA’s California-based Jet Propulsion Laboratory is planning to cooperate on a space-robotics program with a college based in the settlement town of Ariel. (Thanks to Gush Shalom for that tip.) Without strong protests from concerned U.S. citizens, I suppose we can expect many more such attempts to use our taxpayer $$ to continue building u[p the infrastructure of the settlements while also making them seem like “just another part of the worldwide scientific community.”
And then, look at the juxtaposition between Bush’s promises numbers 2 and 3. The four-million-plus Palestinian refugees get to re-settle inside the future Palestinian entity while all their still-outstanding claims aganst Israel itself get summarily squashed (in the Bush version). But where are they to return to? A tiny portion of land– the whole of the West Bank and Gaza between them account for less than 23% of historic Palestine– and now, Bush would see even that portion further, quite radically truncated by the excision from it of the vast new settlement blocs that are “the new realities on the ground.”
(Notice in all this, meanwhile, how nobody even mentions the 200,000 Israeli settlers who are already well settled in to East Jerusalem. But their presence there is certainly an big issue if you ever go to the city.)
Woe, woe, woe! Does Bush have any idea how harmful to the wellbeing of U.S. citizens today’s quite gratuitous actions will prove to be? I suppose not. Though it’s hard to imagine that even he could be so just-plain-deeply-ignorant.
Yes, this is pretty much as bad as anything I could have imagined. I was hypothesizing that Sharon didn’t really expect Bush to accede to all of his demands, intending to finagle what concessions he could and reporting back to his fellow warmongers that he tried–after all, remember that idiotically-named “road map” thingie that was supposed to be one of the Bush’s great PR successes w/r/t Israel-Palestine? Guess that thing’s pretty much out the window, huh? Course, you can’t argue with those “new realities on the ground.” What an odious phrase–certainly there’s a place for pragmatic thinking in politics, but not as carte blanche for colonialist enterprises. Very similar excuses were used to justify Euro-American colonialism in the United States and European colonialism in Africa (particularly the British landowners in Kenya). “Well, yes, all these settlers shouldn’t really be here, but now that they’ve established homes here, how could we possibly ask them to leave? It makes what should be a matter of public policy subject to the vagaries of political pressure on corrupt politicians. How can that ever be a recipe for lasting justice?
The entire US national political establishment is deeply corrupted on the I/P issue. We all will pay the price, as helena pointed out. I’ve been following this subject since the 1967 war, and I have a tendency to think that things can’t get worse. But of course they can.
Today’s WP has an article quoting Republican sources saying Bush’s decision to support Sharon is in part a calculation based on the election-year need to win Florida. I’m still capable of being disappointed, though not surprised, by this degree of cynicism even on such major decisions with such far-reaching consequences.
Maxcrat
Seems to me that Bush’s speech isn’t really much different in principle from the Clinton plan or Taba, both of which would have given portions of the WB to Israel because of “realities on the ground.” I don’t agree with everything Bush said – for instance, I think he should have explicitly supported a land swap and fair compensation for the refugees. But his “new policy” isn’t the sea change it’s made out to be, and it leaves plenty of room for the US to demand a land swap later or object to particular settlements or policies. Not to mention that the speech probably doubled Sharon’s chances of winning the Gaza pullout referendum, without which the withdrawal won’t even get off the ground. Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good – there will be plenty of time to press Israel on particular details later (such as the extent of the WB withdrawal and a schedule for transferring control of Gaza ports and airspace).
BTW, I find the term “historic Palestine” somewhat disingenuous, given that the Mandate was a colonial creation that didn’t even last as long as the current reality. I could, with equal justice, refer to the region as “historic Judea” or “classical Israel.” I won’t, though, because peace in the ME will have to be built on short memories all around, and the goal should be a viable Palestinian state rather than vindication of the alleged “historic” rights of either side. Rhetoric about “historic Israel” is the intellectual trap of the national-religious camp, and “historic Palestine” is the same trap for Palestinian maximalists.
Let’s not make the perfect the enemy of the good
All right, “let’s not make the perfect the enemy of a halfway-decent start,” but you know what I mean.
With respect to the refugees, I doubt that more than a million Palestinians will actually repatriate; the two million in Jordan will stay where they are, as will most of those in Europe, the Americas and the Gulf states. Most of the returnees will be those in the Lebanese and Syrian refugee camps, and a Palestinian state in the WB and Gaza would be able to handle that with international aid.
Israel: a two state solution?
So it has come to this and this. David Rowe, Peace Meal Bush’s support for Sharon will erode Arab support
Helena threw some unnecessary Bush-bashing into her anti-Israel rant. Any US president would support the disengagement plan as Bush is. Kerry said that he agreed with Bush’s stance on the disengagement plan.
Israel already tried to negogiate with the PA on numerous occasions. For there to be peace, someone has to step forward and make concessions, and Israel is doing that right now. Now, the offer might not be as generous as some might want it to be, but some considerations must be made. Several towns such as Ariel and Gush Etzion are just too big to dismantle and are well-established. Plus, some places such as Gush Etzion were Jewish before 1948, and the said town was bought by Jews from Arabs. In addition, there was no Palestinian state before 1967 and the UN resolution stipulates that Israel must withdraw to the extent that it has secure and safe borders; it does not say that Israel must completely withdraw from land occupied in 1967.
As for the refugee issue…Jonathan raised an interesting point. I agree that massive populations will not flood to the new Palestinian state. In a related issue, a poll at Bir Zeit University showed that only 10% of Palestinians expelled from Israel proper demand the right of return, which shouldn’t be an option.
When discussing the issue of peace in the Middle East, it is important to remember the interests and concerns of BOTH sides, and not paint a black and white picture that shows Israel as insensitive to the needs of the other side, or vice versa.