Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2016, pp. 8-10

Special Report

Israel Gets a Raise Despite Insults to Obama, 50 Years of Violence to Palestinians

By Rachelle Marshall

National pride and respect for international law are no match for political expediency when it comes to America’s “special relationship” with Israel. This was demonstrated again in November, when President Barack Obama and Congress agreed to consider $50 billion in military aid to Israel over the next 10 years—a hefty increase of $2 billion a year. The additional aid is intended as consolation to Israel for a nuclear agreement with Iran that makes Israel safer.

As if this were not irrational enough, President Obama welcomed Netanyahu to the White House on Nov. 9 and again reassured him of America’s unwavering support. Republicans who are calling for cuts in domestic spending are promising even more money to Israel, and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has pledged that if elected, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu will be her first guest at the White House.

Never before have the leaders of a supposed ally been so handsomely rewarded after insulting the president of the United States. In March 2010, on the day Vice President Joe Biden arrived in Jerusalem to deliver Obama’s request for a settlement freeze, Israel announced plans for 1,600 more West Bank settlement units. During the 2012 U.S. presidential campaign Netanyahu openly supported Obama’s Republican opponent, Mitt Romney.

Last winter, as Secretary of State John Kerry was working around the clock in an effort to reach an international agreement with Iran limiting that country’s nuclear capability, Netanyahu repeatedly appeared on American television to denounce the agreement. Finally, in a gross violation of diplomatic protocol, the Israeli prime minister appeared before Congress last March without informing Obama in advance, and urged the lawmakers to turn it down.

Netanyahu’s recently appointed chief of public diplomacy, Ran Baratz, commented on the agreement with Iran by saying, “This is how modern anti-Semitism looks...Obama has pushed us under the wheels of the bus.” Baratz also went after Kerry, saying he hoped “someone in the State Department will wake up and begin to see the world through the eyes of a person whose mental age exceeds 12.”

Netanyahu has learned that such insults quickly evaporate in the memory of Washington politicians, regardless of party. Counting on this fact, during his November trip to Washington Netanyahu spoke before the Center for American Progress, a pro-Democrat think tank with ties to Mrs. Clinton. “I came here,” he told the group, “because I think it’s vital to understand how important it is for me that Israel remain an issue of bipartisan consensus.” He was roundly applauded.

A few members of the organization didn’t buy Netanyahu’s message or approve of inviting him. Joseph Cirincione, president of the Ploughshares Fund, said, “Unfortunately the net result will be that he can leave Washington claiming no harm was done by his efforts to sabotage the national security strategy of the president of the United States and that progressives have forgiven him. But that won’t be true.”

Truth, however, is a slippery concept in Netanyahu’s official statements. While in Washington he said, “We’ll never give up our hope for peace. And I remain committed to a vision of peace of two states for two peoples, a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state.” His words deliberately obscured the fact that the Palestinians have long recognized the state of Israel but refuse to recognize it as a “Jewish state.” In any case, two weeks earlier Netanyahu had told a Knesset committee that “we have to control all of the territory for the foreseeable future...I’m asked if we will forever live by the sword—yes.”

Netanyahu left no doubt of his position when he appointed as members of his government only hard-line opponents of Palestinian independence. As Palestinians were protesting repeated Israeli incursions onto the site of al-Aqsa mosque, Netanyahu’s deputy prime minister, Tzipi Hotovely, told an interviewer, “It is my dream to see the Israeli flag flying there.” Knowing when a cause is lost, Kerry visited Israel on Nov. 24 but did not even mention the possibility of resuming peace talks. Instead he referred to Israel’s right to defend itself “from attacks in the streets with knives.”

Israel’s intransigence, backed by Washington’s unqualified support, has left Palestinians with no hope of independence but only the prospect of continued military occupation and theft of their land. So it is tragic but not surprising that some young Palestinians are willing to invite death by lashing out randomly at any Israelis they encounter.

Regardless of how much or how little harm they do, the Palestinian attackers are almost certain to be shot to death by Israeli forces. As of late November, 16 Israelis had been killed and 110 Palestinians, more than half of the latter in confrontations with Israeli soldiers. According to Amnesty International, several of the killings by Israeli forces “appear to have been extra-judicial executions.”

When two Palestinians were killed during an Israeli raid on the Qalandiya refugee camp in mid-November, the confrontation was reported as “the latest in almost two months of violence.” It would have been more accurate to say that Palestinians have been subject to violence ever since Israel seized the West Bank and Gaza in 1967. Whether the assaults are carried out by Israeli soldiers or settlers, the attackers almost invariably go unpunished.

One exception was the police officer who beat and kicked 15-year-old Tariq Abu Khdeir, an American cousin of Muhammed Abu Khdeir, who was burned to death by a group of Israeli settlers in 2014. A video taken shortly after the killing showed an officer approaching Tariq as he was near his uncle’s house watching a protest demonstration, then kicking and punching the teenager so badly he had to be hospitalized. On his release from the hospital Tariq was detained by police for several days. The officer’s sentence was 45 days of community service.

The killers of Tariq’s cousin Muhammed were found guilty of his murder on Nov. 30, but sentencing was delayed because two of the offenders were minors at the time of the killing, and a third, their 31-year-old uncle who shouted “Finish him off,” is awaiting a psychological evaluation. Muhammed's father, Hussein Abu Khdeir, said he had expected the defense to plead insanity. “We expected from the start there would be no justice in this case.”

Palestinians are not secure even inside their own homes, since on any night Israeli soldiers on a punitive raid might break down their door, drag members of the family out of bed, and smash furniture and other household goods before dragging away a son or a father. Sometimes they grab a child as young as 12 and take him away for interrogation.

Thousands of Palestinian children in the West Bank learn early on that the home that serves as the center of their family life could be destroyed in a few moments by a bulldozer clearing the land for an Israeli settlement. Children in Gaza have the terrifying knowledge that when Israel launches one of its periodic wars on the territory, Israeli bombers seldom make a distinction between family homes and military targets.

The epicenter of this fall’s violence in the West Bank was Hebron, where a third of recent Palestinian deaths have occurred. In the early 1970s a Labor government under Shimon Peres allowed a small group of Orthodox Jews to establish an illegal settlement in the midst of the city of 35,000 Palestinians. Today 400 Israelis live in fortified enclaves inside the city, and hundreds more in settlements that surround the city.

“We know that people are being attacked by settlers every night now,” said Salam Muharam of Doctors Without Borders in Hebron. Children in Hebron show increasing signs of anxiety and trauma, he said, and many of them suffer from tear gas inhalation, since soldiers fire directly into school areas. The soldiers also shoot Palestinians who pose no threat, according to Muharam: “They shout, ‘He has a knife!’ when there is no knife.”

Even East Jerusalem, once a cosmopolitan city and the religious center of the three monotheistic faiths, has increasingly become the domain of Jewish settlers. Massive cement blocks at the entrance of Arab neighborhoods restrict movement in and out, and new checkpoints cause interminable delays. An Israeli cabinet minister recently called for the destruction of all Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem built without a permit. Since permits are impossible to obtain, this would mean destroying 40 percent of the homes.

Israeli forces repeatedly invade al-Maqassed hospital in East Jerusalem, firing tear gas and rubber bullets. On Oct. 30 soldiers forced doctors and nurses to evacuate the neonatal ICU unit, where the most fragile newborns are treated. The next day the Israelis returned, again firing rubber bullets and tear gas. Three patients were injured. Two doctors were taken away for questioning, and nurses were ordered to report to police for questioning.

Chances are that increasingly harsh measures by Israel, and sheer exhaustion on the Palestinians’ part, will eventually end the current knife attacks. But unless the situation changes, there will be future outbreaks—as usual, more costly to the Palestinians than to the Israelis. Imposing sanctions on Israel and withholding aid would require efforts by the U.S. and the international community that neither has been willing to make.

A small move in that direction was a recent decision by the European Union to require goods made in the territories seized by Israel in 1967 to be labeled “made in settlements.” Israeli officials responded in fury, likening the EU requirement to the Nazi order that Jews wear a yellow star. Yair Lapid, head of the centrist Yesh Atid party, said the move “encourages terror.” In fact, the labeling will apply to only 1 percent of Israel’s $13 billion tariff-free exports to Europe.

Fortunately for Israel, if not for others in the Middle East and Europe, a series of ruthless killings by ISIS forces has turned attention away from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict while heightening fears of Islamic terrorists. The killing of 130 people in Paris on Nov. 13 galvanized the Western world into action in a way the killing of 41 people in Beirut the previous day and the mass killing of Muslims in Iraq and Syria by ISIS did not.

Some reactions were extreme. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump advocated the use of waterboarding on Muslim prisoners. Ted Cruz and Jeb Bush urged sending U.S. ground troops to Syria to fight ISIS and accepting only Christian refugees from Syria. Republican governors of 31 states said they would accept no Syrian refugees, and the House passed a bill requiring approval by the secretary of homeland security, the FBI director, and the director of national intelligence to personally certify that each individual refugee from Syria and Iraq is not a threat. There were disturbing reminders of America’s turning away of European Jews before WW II.

Shabtai Shavit, a former head of Mossad, advocated more sweeping action against ISIS. “With this enemy we have to push aside arguments on law, morality, and comparisons of the rights of security and the individual. That means do what they did in World War II to Dresden,” he said. “They” were the Allied bombers that in one night turned one of the world’s most beautiful cities into smoldering ashes, and left thousands of German civilians dead. Military experts said afterwards the attack did nothing to shorten the war.

Hillary Clinton and the Republican candidates for president have pledged to expand the use of military force against ISIS, but Brookings analyst J.M. Berger says trying to eradicate ISIS by military means will only inspire thousands of angry young men now manning checkpoints and doing policing for ISIS to turn to terrorism instead. “The result will probably be a wave of terrorism the likes of which the world has never seen,” he said.

Emile Hokayem of the International Institute for Strategic Studies believes that political and social changes are necessary to defeat ISIS. “ISIS thrives on the failures of Middle Eastern governments,” he maintains. Eliminating it as well as other jihadist groups will require “greater accountability, fair justice, better schools, more job prospects.” Hokayem adds that Europe and the U.S. must do more to integrate Muslims into the larger community. Given the current mood, this is for now only a distant possibility.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Mill Valley, CA. A member of Jewish Voice for Peace, she writes frequently on the Middle East.

SIDEBAR

The West’s Role in the Rise of Militant Extremists

Before there can be any lasting solution to the rise of terrorism, the governments of Europe and the U.S. should examine their own history of domination and exploitation in the region. There seems little doubt of the lasting resentment that exists on the part of many young militants who are aware of Western interventions going back to WW I.

These include the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 that divided the Arab kingdoms between Britain and France, Britain’s bombing of Baghdad in 1920 to put down resistance to British occupation, the awarding of more than half of Palestine to the Jewish survivors of the European Holocaust in 1947, the overthrow by the U.S. and Britain of the Mossadegh government in Iran, the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and NATO’s ousting of Col. Muammar Qaddafi of Libya.˛

The bill for these interventions is finally coming due. ISIS was a direct product of the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, which was intended to eliminate Saddam Hussain’s weapons of mass destruction and the al-Qaeda forces the Bush administration claimed were in that country. In fact, there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and al-Qaeda emerged in Iraq as a response to the American invasion. The even more brutal ISIS was created by former Iraqi army officers in 2004 while they were being held at Camp Bucca military prison after the U.S. disbanded the Iraqi army.

The predominantly Sunni organization gained recruits when the U.S.-backed government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki excluded Sunnis from the government and went back on promises to provide them with jobs. With the rise of ISIS, many former Sunni insurgents became insurgents again, in a larger arena.

Today, with war raging in Syria and fear of terrorism spreading from Africa to Europe, there is an urgent need for U.S. policymakers to acknowledge past mistakes and adopt policies aimed at encouraging economic and social justice and promoting peace. The hopeful news is that diplomats meeting in Vienna in mid-November agreed to set Jan. 1 as the date to start talks between Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and opposition groups, after which a “free and fair” U.N.-supervised election would be held within 18 months.

Yet to be solved is the problem of choosing which opposition groups should be at the table, a problem complicated by the often conflicting national interests of Russia, Turkey and Saudi Arabia, as well as the U.S. Meanwhile, as a young woman told a street interviewer a few years ago, “Maybe if we stop bombing their countries they won’t bomb ours.”—R.M.