The recent past and the ugly present of the Israel-Palestine conflict
Welcome to history. It’s messy.
As we saw with the Ukraine war, standard war rhetoric tends to insist that The Enemy’s action are due to their evil intentions. And when critics look back at how the policy of countries on Our Side may have contributed to the situation, or reflected reckless assumptions, or were just plain dumb are accuse of being pro-The Other Side.
In the Russia-Ukraine War, we’ve seen New Cold Warriors blast anyone who suggested that US and NATO policy may have contributed in any way whatsoever to the chain of events that led to the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2014 and more massively in 2022 were de facto or intentional stooges of Vladimir Putin.
Ukraine had been a major point of concern in the US/NATO-Russia relationship since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. To pretend that US policy had no effect whatsoever on Russian actions and reactions is so silly it’s surprising that people will make the argument with a straight face.1 But wars always bring ridiculous propaganda claims along with them.
The Abraham Accords negotiated under the Trump Administration began a process that the Biden Administration continued with negotiations to forge a close diplomatic relationship between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Although Biden is getting credit that is at least partially justified for restraining Israel from taking reckless action during the three weeks since October 7, he also had good reason to know that this was a risky approach that could potentially lead to a blow-up like what has now actually happened.
Map: Wikimedia Commons
Gideon Levy has been a longtime critic of Israeli policy toward the Palestinians. He warned about Biden’s approach last year:
At Augusta Victoria Hospital in East Jerusalem, of all places, U.S. President Joe Biden signed a death certificate. The two-state solution died a long time ago, and now so has the Palestinians’ strategic choice of relying on the West in their struggle for their national rights.2
The event to which he refers was a visit by Biden to the hospital to announce the US was providing $100 million for six hospitals in East Jerusalem.3 Levy’s dismay wasn’t at the assistance the US was providing to sustain Palestinian health care. It was because Biden was clearly not serious about pursuing the two-state solution that the US still nominally supports:
It’s a president [Biden] who doesn’t bother to correctly pronounce the name of Shireen Abu Akleh, the journalist killed almost certainly by Israel, becoming a national and international symbol. Jamal Khashoggi he knows how to pronounce.
It has since been clearly confirmed that Akleh was murdered by the IDF (Israeli Defense Forces), and the IDF has admitted it.4 Though without holding the killers legally responsible:
A CNN investigation in May last year unearthed evidence – including two videos of the scene of the shooting – that there was no active combat, nor any Palestinian militants, near Abu Akleh in the moments leading up to her death.
Footage obtained by CNN, corroborated by testimony from eight eyewitnesses, an audio forensic analyst and an explosive weapons expert, suggested that Israeli forces took aim at the journalist.
While the IDF admitted for the first time last September that there was a “high possibility” Abu Akleh was “accidentally” shot and killed by Israeli fire, its Military Advocate General’s Office said in a statement that it did not intend to pursue criminal charges or prosecutions of any of the soldiers involved.5
Khashoggi was the American resident and Washington Post journalist brutally murdered by the Saudis.
Levy warned:
The Palestinians no longer have anything to look for in this arena. When Biden quoted from a poem that says how “hope and history rhyme” and threw them $100 million for Augusta Victoria, it was clear that it’s lost with the United States.
With an American president who promises them a two-state solution, but “not in the near term,” you get to the end of the story. You feel like asking Biden: “What will happen ‘not in the long term’ that will achieve this solution? Will the Israelis decide on their own? Will the settlers return on their own? When there are a million of them instead of 700,000, will that satisfy them?
Will America ever think differently? Why should this happen? With the laws against BDS and the new and distorted definitions of antisemitism, the United States and Europe are lost as far as the Palestinians are concerned. The battle has been decided, Israel has all but beaten them, and their fate might be the same as that of the indigenous peoples in the United States.
Alain Gresh also wrote in 2022:
Not since the Arab-Israeli war of June 1967 has their political, diplomatic and social situation seemed so desperate. …
Multiple factors led to the Oslo accords of September 1993: the end of the cold war and the collapse of the ‘socialist camp’; the optimism created by the resolution of various conflicts, from southern Africa to Central America; Israeli society’s exhaustion after years of intifada; and Western public opinion’s reaction to the repression of the Palestinians. The accords were signed by Yasser Arafat and Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin under the aegis of US president Bill Clinton. In essence, the accords stipulated that Palestinian autonomy should lead to the creation of a Palestinian state after a five-year transitional period. Yielding to pressure from the West, the PLO abandoned the idea of a democratic state that covered the entirety of Palestine’s historical territory in which Muslims, Jews and Christians could coexist and accepted a two-state solution.6 [my emphasis]
The Biden Administration has now started talking about the need for a two-state solution again. Essentially, between the Clinton Administration and October 7 of this year, the US made no serious and sustained effort to push for the two-state solution that is still officially US policy. I say “essentially,” but it’s notable that the Cheney-Bush Administration did briefly think they needed to at least look like they were serious about a real peace arrangement in Israel-Palestine:
It is now largely forgotten, but in the fall of 2001, and again in the spring of 2002, the Bush administration sought to reduce anti-American sentiment in the Arab and Islamic world by pressing Israel to halt its expansionist policies in the Occupied Territories and by advocating the creation of a Palestinian state. Following the September 11 attacks, American policy makers believed that shutting down the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, or at least making a serious attempt to do so, would undermine support for terrorist groups like al Qaeda and facilitate the building of an international coalition against terrorism—which might even include states like Iran and Syria.
Yet the Bush administration was unable to persuade Jerusalem to change its policies, and Washington instead ended up backing Israel’s hard-line approach toward the Palestinians. Over time, Bush and his lieutenants also adopted Israel’s justifications for this approach, and U.S. and Israeli rhetoric became similar. A Washington Post headline in February 2003 summarized the situation: "Bush and [hawkish Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon Nearly Identical on Mideast Policy."7 [my emphasis]
And, as Eival Gilady just reminded us:
[A] second option constitutes a continuation of the policy pursued by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for the past 14 years, which has been bolstered under the present government. Netanyahu has acted to torpedo the two-state solution and deliberately weakened the PA; he did not transfer the tax funds due them and has maintained that they are not a partner for negotiations. At the same time, he has allowed funding to be transferred to the leaders of Hamas, built them up as a counterweight to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and even made various commitments to the terror organization as part of understandings drawn up following each round of fighting.
It’s possible that, were it up to Netanyahu alone, he would continue to follow this policy even now: Hamas would be battered but would continue to manage the civilian administration of Gaza, even at the price of a round of fighting every few years. The overriding goal would be to avoid strengthening the PA, to ensure that it does not become ensconced as the leader of both the West Bank and Gaza, and thereby to preserve a situation in which there is no single “address” for diplomatic negotiations – thereby preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state.8 [my emphasis]
The current situation shows how, in practice, conflicts between Israel and the Palestinians can draw the US and other powers into unnecessary and destructive military conflicts. Most Americans are probably only vaguely aware that the US still has military forces in Iraq and Syria, but we do. And others know it:
Islamist militia linked to Iran have continued to strike US bases in Syria and Iraq, intensifying a campaign of violence that will raise fears of a regional conflagration.
The attacks have been claimed by groups either directly controlled by Tehran or sharing the ideology of other groups currently fighting Israel. On Thursday, a US base at Kharab al-Jir in Syria was attacked for the second time in two days, and a base in western Iraq was also hit.
More than a dozen small-scale strikes on US bases in the region have wounded 24 US soldiers and caused the death of one civilian contractor. Washington is rushing anti-missile batteries to the region to protect its principal bases and allies. …
Last week a US warship in the northern Red Sea intercepted missiles fired by Iran-backed Houthi rebels from Yemen, possibly at Israel.9
The US essentially gave up over 20 years ago on actively working for a sustainable peace in Israel-Palestine.
If peace and minimal justice are any part of the US aims for that area, that policy will need to change.
Gay Hinsliff recently noted how foolish and ultimately impossible it is to not look at the history of the current conflict, which didn't begin on October 7:
Is nobody to talk of history even now, in a conflict where both sides are shaped by memories handed down through generations: of persecution and exile, suffering and mourning, the Nakba (or Palestinian tragedy of displacement) and the Holocaust? These stories are too entwined to make sense of one without mentioning the other, and it should be possible to say so without being accused of making excuses for Hamas – as if there was anything on earth that could excuse the slaughter of children in front of their parents, and parents in front of their children. For there’s a principle at stake here that goes far beyond one war.
Alarm bells should ring for liberals whenever we are told to stop trying to understand things, and perhaps particularly things that seem to defy all reasonable understanding, because that is essentially what liberalism is. To try to understand something that you cannot possibly condone or forgive is a way of holding on to our humanity, even in the face of its murderous opposite.10 [my emphasis]
Welcome to history. It’s messy.
Sarotte, Mary Elise (2021): Not One Inch: America, Russia, and the Making of Post–Cold War Stalemate. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Sarotte gives a detailed account of that particular dispute.
Levy, Gideon (2022): In Jerusalem, Biden Signs the Palestinians’ Death Certificate. Haaretz 07/16/2022. <https://www.haaretz.com/opinion/2022-07-16/ty-article-opinion/.highlight/biden-signs-the-palestinians-death-certificate/00000182-07db-d7d0-a3ae-cfdbafd00000> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Sharon, Jeremy & Magid, Jacob (2022): At East Jerusalem hospital, Biden pledges $100 million for Palestinian health care. Times of Israel 07/15/2022. <https://www.timesofisrael.com/at-east-jerusalem-hospital-biden-pledges-100-million-for-palestinian-healthcare/> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
McSweeney, Eoin (2023): Israel Defense Forces apologizes for death of Al Jazeera’s Shireen Abu Akleh for the first time. CNN 05/12/2023. <https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/11/middleeast/idf-apology-shireen-abu-akleh-intl/index.html> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Ibid.
Gresh, Alain (2022): Palestine: still resisting, against all the odds. Le Monde diplomatique English, September 2022, 2-3. <https://mondediplo.com/2022/09/02palestine#:~:text=This%20explains%20why,war%20on%20terror%E2%80%99> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Mearsheimer, John & Walt, Stephen (2007): The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, 2007. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gilady, Eival (2023): There's Only One Viable Postwar Strategy for Gaza, but Netanyahu Has Other Plans. Haaretz 11/10/2023. <https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-11-10/ty-article-magazine/.highlight/theres-only-one-viable-postwar-strategy-for-gaza-but-netanyahu-has-other-plans/0000018b-b611-df42-a78f-bf53a5080000> (Accessed: 2023-10-11).
Burke, Jason (2023): Strikes by Islamists on US bases in Syria and Iraq raise fears of escalation. The Guardian 10/26/2023. <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/oct/26/strikes-by-islamists-on-us-bases-in-syria-and-iraq-raise-fears-of-escalation> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).
Hinsliff, Gaby (2023): If we’re forbidden from looking history in the eye during this horrific war, we’re doomed to repeat it. The Guardian 10/27/2023. <https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/27/israel-hamas-war-palestinians-un> (Accessed: 2023-27-10).