7 Shares 0



7

0







“Any president or Western official to approach the Palestinian-Israeli conflict will collide into the settlers, and that is why they would reach the drastic end where the solution is found in the absence of any solution,” reads a passage from ‘Coups et Blessures,’ or ‘Assaults and Injuries’ in English, former French Foreign Minister Roland Dumas’ recently published book.

Dumas served as Foreign Minister under President François Mitterrand from 1984 to 1986 and from 1988 to 1993, yet his criticisms of the American-Israeli settler lobbying complex are still relevant today.

Today, nearly 15% or one in six West Bank settlers is American and despite increasing international legal pressure against settlement expansion--criminal under the Geneva Conventions which prohibits transfer of an occupying population into occupied territory--the US government has done little to curb the growth of settlements.

In August 2015 an Oxford University scholar and expert on settlements released the aforementioned statistics, showing that at least 60,000 Americans live in illegal West Bank settlements.

Anat Ben, director of development at settlement watchdog Peace Now commented on the numbers, telling Newsweek “Unfortunately, while the Obama administration has been persistently vocal against settlement developments, some 60,000 American citizens are taking an active part in an attempt to make the two state solution impossible.”

And this study left out East Jerusalem entirely, the Palestinian section of Jerusalem that was illegally annexed by Israel in the 1967 Six Day War with Jordan. The United Nations estimates 200,000 settlers live in Jewish-only settlements in East Jerusalem.

There are hundreds of tax-exempt US charities that funnel money to settlements, all technically legal under the US’s limp 501(c) regulations. For example Ariel, an Israeli settlement in the central West Bank approximately 21 miles on the wrong side of the Green Line, received more than $5 million from the American Friends of Ariel charity group. Ariel’s twin city in the United States is Mobile, Alabama, a city with a strong rightwing Evangelical presence, another group of religious ideologues that funnel money and support to West Bank settlers.

Foreign Minister Roland Dumas further asserts in his book that the fraught relationship between Iran and the West is a farce to some extent. Meeting with the former Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Velayati and former president Hashemi Rafsanjani, Dumas stated “The Iranian atomic bomb is in my view similar to the weapons of mass destruction possessed by former Iraqi President Saddam Hussein, i.e. I don’t believe in all of that. I believe that all of what occurred was a misleading of facts.”

Of course, the US-led 2003 invasion of Iraq under the false pretense of Saddam Hussein’s possession of weapons of mass destruction has further destabilized a region already at the behest of Western imperial powers. The decision is now looked upon by the State Department and US Congress as a fundamental mistake, and the fallout has been an increasing terror presence in the ensuing power vacuum--taken up most notably by the Islamic State.

Dumas is correct to criticize the warmongering of the West, and likening the US’s mistaken invasion of Iraq under false pretenses to the scare tactics used over Iran’s nuclear capabilities is an ever increasingly relevant association.

When earlier this year President Obama negotiated and eventually signed the historic accord with Iran that reduces international sanctions in exchange for a massive reduction in enriched uranium stockpiles and centrifuges over the next 10-15 years, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu campaigned vigorously against the deal. In July Netanyahu stated “Many of the restrictions that were supposed to prevent it from getting there will be lifted. Iran will get a jackpot, a cash bonanza of hundreds of billions of dollars, which will enable it to continue to pursue its aggression and terror in the region and in the world. This is a bad mistake of historic proportions.”

This kind of apocalyptic posturing is normal for Netanyahu, but as Dumas outlines in his book, as yet Iran has been a willing participant in the deal and has begun reducing its stockpiles. For all intents and purposes, the deal worked.

But course that won’t stop the Israeli government from purporting racist and doomsday accusations.