Because We Say So (15 page)

August 30, 2013

The Israel-Palestine negotiations currently under way in Jerusalem coincide with the 20th anniversary of the Oslo Accords. A look at the character of the accords and their fate may help explain the prevailing skepticism about the current exercise.

In September 1993, President Clinton presided over a handshake between Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) Chairman Yasser Arafat on the White House lawn—the climax of a “day of awe,” as the press described it.

The occasion was the announcement of the Declaration of Principles for political settlement of the Israel-Palestine conflict, which resulted from secret meetings in Oslo that were sponsored by the Norwegian government.

Public negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians had opened in Madrid in November 1991, initiated by Washington in the triumphal glow after the first Iraq war. They were stalemated because the Palestinian delegation, led by the respected nationalist Haidar Abdul Shafi, insisted on ending Israel’s expansion of its illegal settlements in the Occupied Territories.

In the immediate background were formal positions on the basic issues released by the PLO, Israel and the United States. In a November 1988 declaration, the PLO called for two states on the internationally recognized border, a proposal that the United States had vetoed at the Security Council in 1976 and continued to block, defying an overwhelming international consensus.

In May 1989 Israel responded, declaring that there can be no “additional Palestinian state” between Jordan and Israel (Jordan being a Palestinian state by Israeli dictate), and
that further negotiations will be “in accordance with the basic guidelines of the [Israeli] Government.” The Bush I administration endorsed this plan without qualifications, then initiated the Madrid negotiations as the “honest broker.”

Then in 1993, the Declaration of Principles was quite explicit about satisfying Israel’s demands but silent on Palestinian national rights. It conformed to the conception articulated by Dennis Ross, Clinton’s main Middle East Advisor and negotiator at Camp David in 2000, later President Obama’s main advisor as well. As Ross explained, Israel has needs but Palestinians only have wants, obviously of lesser significance.

Article I of the Declaration of Principles states that the end result of the process is to be “a permanent settlement based on Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338,” which say nothing about Palestinian rights, apart from a vague reference to a “just settlement of the refugee problem.”

If the “peace process” unfolded as the Declaration of Principles clearly stated, Palestinians could kiss goodbye their hopes for some limited degree of national rights in the Land of Israel.

Other Declaration of Principles articles stipulate that Palestinian authority extends over “West Bank and Gaza Strip territory, except for issues that will be negotiated in the permanent status negotiations: Jerusalem, settlements, military locations and Israelis”—that is, except for every issue of significance.

Furthermore, “Israel will continue to be responsible for external security, and for internal security and public order of settlements and Israelis. Israeli military forces and civilians may continue to use roads freely within the Gaza Strip and the Jericho area,” the two areas from which Israel was pledged to withdraw—eventually.

In short, there would be no meaningful changes. The
Declaration of Principles also did not include a word about the settlement programs at the heart of the conflict: Even before the Oslo process, the settlements were undermining realistic prospects of achieving any meaningful Palestinian self-determination.

Only by succumbing to what is sometimes called “intentional ignorance” could one believe that the Oslo process was a path to peace. Nevertheless, this became virtual dogma among Western commentators.

As the Madrid negotiations opened, Danny Rubinstein, one of Israel’s best-informed analysts, predicted that Israel and the United States would agree to some form of Palestinian “autonomy,” but it would be “autonomy as in a POW camp, where the prisoners are ‘autonomous’ to cook their meals without interference and to organize cultural events.” Rubenstein turned out to be correct.

The settlement programs continued after the Oslo Accords, at the same high level they had reached when Yitzhak Rabin became prime minister in 1992, extending well to the east of illegally annexed Greater Jerusalem.

As Rabin explained, Israel should take over “most of the territory of the Land of Israel [the former Palestine], whose capital is Jerusalem.”

Meanwhile the United States and Israel moved to separate Gaza from the West Bank by closing access to it, in explicit violation of the terms of the accords, thus ensuring that any potential Palestinian entity would be cut off from the outside world.

The accords were followed by additional Israel-PLO agreements, which spelled out more clearly the terms of the autonomy of the POW camp. After Rabin’s assassination, Shimon Peres became prime minister. As Peres left office in 1995, he assured the press that there would be no Palestinian state.

Norwegian scholar Hilde Henriksen Waage concluded that the “Oslo process could serve as the perfect case study for flaws” of the model of “third party mediation by a small state in highly asymmetrical conflicts. The question to be asked is whether such a model can ever be appropriate.”

That question is well worth pondering, particularly as educated Western opinion now follows the ludicrous assumption that meaningful Israel-Palestine negotiations can be seriously conducted under the auspices of the United States—not an “honest broker,” but in reality a partner of Israel.

As the current negotiations opened, Israel at once made its attitude clear by expanding the “National Priority List” for special subsidies to settlements scattered in the West Bank and by carrying forward its plans to build a train line to integrate the settlements more closely into Israel.

Obama followed suit by appointing as chief negotiator Martin Indyk, a close associate of Dennis Ross, whose background is as a lobbyist for Israel and who explains that Arabs are unable to comprehend the “idealism” and “generosity of spirit” that infuse all of Washington’s efforts.

The negotiations provide a cover for Israel’s takeover of the territories it wishes to control and should spare the United States some further embarrassment at the United Nations. That is, Palestine may agree to defer initiatives that would enhance its U.N. status—which the U.S. would be compelled to block, joined by Israel and perhaps Palau.

It is, however, unlikely that the negotiations will advance the prospects for a meaningful peace settlement.

THE OBAMA DOCTRINE

October 4, 2013

The recent Obama-Putin tiff over American exceptionalism reignited an ongoing debate over the Obama Doctrine: Is the president veering toward isolationism? Or will he proudly carry the banner of exceptionalism?

The debate is narrower that it may seem. There is considerable common ground between the two positions, as was expressed clearly by Hans Morgenthau, the founder of the now dominant no-sentimentality “realist” school of international relations.

Throughout his work, Morgenthau describes America as unique among all powers past and present in that it has a “transcendent purpose” that it “must defend and promote” throughout the world: “the establishment of equality in freedom.”

The competing concepts “exceptionalism” and “isolationism” both accept this doctrine and its various elaborations but differ with regard to its application.

One extreme was vigorously defended by President Obama in his September 10 address to the nation: “What makes America different,” he declared, “what makes us exceptional,” is that we are dedicated to act, “with humility, but with resolve,” when we detect violations somewhere.

“For nearly seven decades the United States has been the anchor of global security,” a role that “has meant more than forging international agreements; it has meant enforcing them.”

The competing doctrine, isolationism, holds that we can no longer afford to carry out the noble mission of racing to put out the fires lit by others. It takes seriously a cautionary note sounded 20 years ago by the
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columnist Thomas Friedman that “granting idealism a near exclusive
hold on our foreign policy” may lead us to neglect our own interests in our devotion to the needs of others.

Between these extremes, the debate over foreign policy rages.

At the fringes, some observers reject the shared assumptions, bringing up the historical record: for example, the fact that “for nearly seven decades” the United States has led the world in aggression and subversion—overthrowing elected governments and imposing vicious dictatorships, supporting horrendous crimes, undermining international agreements and leaving trails of blood, destruction and misery.

To these misguided creatures, Morgenthau provided an answer. A serious scholar, he recognized that America has consistently violated its “transcendent purpose.”

But to bring up this objection, he explains, is to commit “the error of atheism, which denies the validity of religion on similar grounds.” It is the transcendent purpose of America that is “reality”; the actual historical record is merely “the abuse of reality.”

In short, “American exceptionalism” and “isolationism” are generally understood to be tactical variants of a secular religion, with a grip that is quite extraordinary, going beyond normal religious orthodoxy in that it can barely even be perceived. Since no alternative is thinkable, this faith is adopted reflexively.

Others express the doctrine more crudely. One of President Reagan’s U.N. ambassadors, Jeane Kirkpatrick, devised a new method to deflect criticism of state crimes. Those unwilling to dismiss them as mere “blunders” or “innocent naïveté” can be charged with “moral equivalence”—of claiming that the United States is no different from Nazi Germany, or whoever the current demon may be. The device has since been widely used to protect power from scrutiny.

Even serious scholarship conforms. Thus in the current issue of the journal
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, scholar Jeffrey A. Engel reflects on the significance of history for policy makers.

Engel cites Vietnam, where, “depending on one’s political persuasion,” the lesson is either “avoidance of the quicksand of escalating intervention [isolationism] or the need to provide military commanders free rein to operate devoid of political pressure”—as we carried out our mission to bring stability, equality and freedom by destroying three countries and leaving millions of corpses.

The Vietnam death toll continues to mount into the present because of the chemical warfare that President Kennedy initiated there—even as he escalated American support for a murderous dictatorship to all-out attack, the worst case of aggression during Obama’s “seven decades.”

Another “political persuasion” is imaginable: the outrage Americans adopt when Russia invades Afghanistan or Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. But the secular religion bars us from seeing ourselves through a similar lens.

One mechanism of self-protection is to lament the consequences of our failure to act. Thus
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columnist David Brooks, ruminating on the drift of Syria to “Rwanda-like” horror, concludes that the deeper issue is the Sunni-Shiite violence tearing the region asunder.

That violence is a testimony to the failure “of the recent American strategy of light-footprint withdrawal” and the loss of what former foreign service officer Gary Grappo calls the “moderating influence of American forces.”

Those still deluded by “abuse of reality”—that is, fact—might recall that the Sunni-Shiite violence resulted from the worst crime of aggression of the new millennium, the U.S. invasion of Iraq. And those burdened with richer memories might recall that the Nuremberg Trials sentenced Nazi
criminals to hanging because, according to the Tribunal’s judgment, aggression is “the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

The same lament is the topic of a celebrated study by Samantha Power, the new U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. In
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, Power writes about the crimes of others and our inadequate response.

She devotes a sentence to one of the few cases during the seven decades that might truly rank as genocide: the Indonesian invasion of East Timor in 1975. Tragically, the United States “looked away,” Power reports.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan, her predecessor as U.N. ambassador at the time of the invasion, saw the matter differently. In his book
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, he described with great pride how he rendered the United Nations “utterly ineffective in whatever measures it undertook” to end the aggression, because “the United States wished things to turn out as they did.”

And indeed, far from looking away, Washington gave a green light to the Indonesian invaders and immediately provided them with lethal military equipment. The U.S. prevented the U.N. Security Council from acting and continued to lend firm support to the aggressors and their genocidal actions, including the atrocities of 1999, until President Clinton called a halt—as could have happened anytime during the previous 25 years.