Rashid Khalidi: Bad Faith in the Holy City of Jerusalem
[Rashid Khalidi is Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University and the author of Sowing Crisis: The Cold War & American Dominance in the Middle East.]
The Israeli government’s announcement in March that it would further expand East Jerusalem settlements was just the latest in a decades-old series of calculated slights to the United States.
Since 1967, virtually every time a U.S. envoy has arrived to discuss the fate of the West Bank or Gaza, the Israeli government of the day has bluntly shown who is really boss, usually with a carefully timed unilateral expansion of Israel’s presence in the occupied territories. Since the 1970s, Israel has illegally settled close to half a million of its citizens in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, not to mention building a barrier mainly inside the West Bank on Arab-owned land that is longer and taller than the Berlin Wall.
Given that for a year the Obama administration has sought a settlement freeze in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, it is impossible to interpret the latest announcement of settlement expansion in the city as anything but a provocation. (The alternative explanation -- that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot control his own government -- cannot be taken seriously.) As if on cue, an obedient majority in Congress issued a letter demanding that there be no public discussion of U.S.-Israeli differences. This, however, has not ended the controversy.
Although this episode has revealed that some things never change, it has been unusual in the sense that U.S. administrations usually take great care to avoid offending the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (known as AIPAC). Yet, this year, senior officials suggested that unconditional U.S. support for Israel, far from serving U.S. national interests, may in fact jeopardize them. The Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot reported that Vice President Joe Biden said as much to Netanyahu in March; the message was reiterated in a statement by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in the congressional testimony of the head of the United States Central Command, General David Petraeus, who argued that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples [in the region].”
This is nothing new. It has been true at least since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the first Gulf War, when the last shred of strategic justification for extensive U.S. support for Israel disappeared. After 1991, as the U.S. military presence grew in the Middle East, Washington’s overt bias toward Israel became a growing liability for the United States.
The intense media coverage of the recent diplomatic crisis has largely obscured what is actually happening in East Jerusalem, where the controversy began. As usual, given the media’s obsession with U.S. and Israeli perspectives, there were few, if any, Palestinian voices to point out precisely what each new housing unit, each fresh expulsion of Arabs from their homes, and each new strategic colony in East Jerusalem means for the 200,000 Arabs who live in the city, for the future status of Jerusalem, and for the possibility of a resolution to this conflict....
Read entire article at Foreign Affairs
The Israeli government’s announcement in March that it would further expand East Jerusalem settlements was just the latest in a decades-old series of calculated slights to the United States.
Since 1967, virtually every time a U.S. envoy has arrived to discuss the fate of the West Bank or Gaza, the Israeli government of the day has bluntly shown who is really boss, usually with a carefully timed unilateral expansion of Israel’s presence in the occupied territories. Since the 1970s, Israel has illegally settled close to half a million of its citizens in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, not to mention building a barrier mainly inside the West Bank on Arab-owned land that is longer and taller than the Berlin Wall.
Given that for a year the Obama administration has sought a settlement freeze in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, it is impossible to interpret the latest announcement of settlement expansion in the city as anything but a provocation. (The alternative explanation -- that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot control his own government -- cannot be taken seriously.) As if on cue, an obedient majority in Congress issued a letter demanding that there be no public discussion of U.S.-Israeli differences. This, however, has not ended the controversy.
Although this episode has revealed that some things never change, it has been unusual in the sense that U.S. administrations usually take great care to avoid offending the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (known as AIPAC). Yet, this year, senior officials suggested that unconditional U.S. support for Israel, far from serving U.S. national interests, may in fact jeopardize them. The Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot reported that Vice President Joe Biden said as much to Netanyahu in March; the message was reiterated in a statement by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in the congressional testimony of the head of the United States Central Command, General David Petraeus, who argued that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples [in the region].”
This is nothing new. It has been true at least since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the first Gulf War, when the last shred of strategic justification for extensive U.S. support for Israel disappeared. After 1991, as the U.S. military presence grew in the Middle East, Washington’s overt bias toward Israel became a growing liability for the United States.
The intense media coverage of the recent diplomatic crisis has largely obscured what is actually happening in East Jerusalem, where the controversy began. As usual, given the media’s obsession with U.S. and Israeli perspectives, there were few, if any, Palestinian voices to point out precisely what each new housing unit, each fresh expulsion of Arabs from their homes, and each new strategic colony in East Jerusalem means for the 200,000 Arabs who live in the city, for the future status of Jerusalem, and for the possibility of a resolution to this conflict....