Who Rules the World? (28 page)

After this exercise in mowing the lawn, a cease-fire agreement was reached yet again. Repeating the now-standard terms, it called for a cessation of military action by both sides and the effective ending of the siege of Gaza with Israel “opening the crossings and facilitating the movements of people and transfer of goods, and refraining from restricting residents’ free movements and targeting residents in border areas.”
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What happened next was reviewed by Nathan Thrall, senior Middle East analyst for the International Crisis Group. Israeli intelligence recognized that Hamas was observing the terms of the cease-fire. “Israel,” Thrall wrote, “therefore saw little incentive in upholding its end of the deal. In the three months following the cease-fire, its forces made regular incursions into Gaza, strafed Palestinian farmers and those collecting scrap and rubble across the border, and fired at boats, preventing fishermen from accessing the majority of Gaza’s waters.” In other words, the siege never ended. “Crossings were repeatedly shut. So-called buffer zones inside Gaza [from which Palestinians are barred, and which include a third or more of the strip’s limited arable land] were reinstated. Imports declined, exports were blocked, and fewer Gazans were given exit permits to Israel and the West Bank.”
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OPERATION PROTECTIVE EDGE

So matters continued until April 2014, when an important event took place. The two major Palestinian groupings, Gaza-based Hamas and the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority in the West Bank, signed a unity agreement. Hamas made major concessions; the unity government contained none of its members or allies. In substantial measure, as Thrall observes, Hamas turned over governance of Gaza to the PA. Several thousand PA security forces were sent there, and the PA placed its guards at borders and crossings, with no reciprocal positions for Hamas in the West Bank security apparatus. Finally, the unity government accepted the three conditions that Washington and the European Union had long demanded: nonviolence, adherence to past agreements, and the recognition of Israel.

Israel was infuriated. Its government declared at once that it would refuse to deal with the unity government and cancelled negotiations. Its fury mounted when the United States, along with most of the world, signaled support for the unity government.

There are good reasons why Israel opposes the unification of Palestinians. One is that the Hamas-Fatah conflict has provided a useful pretext for refusing to engage in serious negotiations. How can one negotiate with a divided entity? More significantly, for more than twenty years, Israel has been committed to separating Gaza from the West Bank, in violation of the Oslo Accords, which declare Gaza and the West Bank to be an inseparable territorial unity. A look at a map explains the rationale: separated from Gaza, any West Bank enclaves left to Palestinians have no access to the outside world.

Furthermore, Israel has been systematically taking over the Jordan Valley, driving out Palestinians, establishing settlements, sinking wells, and otherwise ensuring that the region—about one-third of the West Bank, including much of its arable land—will ultimately be integrated into Israel along with the other regions that Israel is taking over. Hence remaining Palestinian cantons will be completely imprisoned. Unification with Gaza would interfere with these plans, which trace back to the early days of the occupation and have had steady support from the major political blocs, including from figures usually portrayed as doves, like former president Shimon Peres, one of the architects of settlement deep in the West Bank.

As usual, a pretext was needed to move on to the next escalation. Such an occasion arose with the brutal murder of three Israeli boys from the settler community in the West Bank. An eighteen-day rampage primarily targeting Hamas followed. On September 2,
Ha’aretz
reported that, after intensive interrogations, the Israeli security services concluded the abduction of the teenagers “was carried out by an independent cell” with no known direct links to Hamas.
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By then, the eighteen-day rampage had succeeded in undermining the feared unity government.”

Hamas finally reacted with its first rockets in eighteen months, providing Israel with the pretext to launch Operation Protective Edge on July 8. That fifty-day assault proved the most extreme exercise in mowing the lawn—so far.

OPERATION STILL TO BE NAMED

Israel is in a fine position today to reverse its decades-old policy of separating Gaza from the West Bank and observe a major cease-fire agreement for the first time. At least temporarily, the threat of democracy in neighboring Egypt has been diminished, and the brutal Egyptian military dictatorship of General Abdul Fattah al-Sisi is a welcome ally for Israel in maintaining control over Gaza.

With the Palestinian unity government placing U.S.-trained forces of the Palestinian Authority in control of Gaza’s borders and governance possibly shifting into the hands of the PA, which depends on Israel for its survival as well as for its finances, Israel might feel that there is little to fear from some limited form of autonomy for the enclaves that remain to Palestinians.

There is also some truth to the observation of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu: “Many elements in the region understand today that, in the struggle in which they are threatened, Israel is not an enemy but a partner.”
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Akiva Eldar, Israel’s leading diplomatic correspondent, adds, however, that “all those ‘many elements in the region’ also understand that there is no brave and comprehensive diplomatic move on the horizon without an agreement on the establishment of a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders and a just, agreed-upon solution to the refugee problem.” That is not on Israel’s agenda, he points out.
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Some knowledgeable Israeli commentators, notably columnist Danny Rubinstein, believe that Israel is poised to reverse course and relax its stranglehold on Gaza.

We’ll see.

The record of these past years suggests otherwise, and the first signs are not auspicious. As Operation Protective Edge ended, Israel announced its largest appropriation of West Bank land in thirty years, almost a thousand acres. Israel Radio reported that the takeover was in response to the killing of the three Jewish teenagers by “Hamas militants.” A Palestinian boy was burned to death in retaliation for the murders, but no Israeli land was handed over to the Palestinians, nor was there any reaction when an Israeli soldier murdered ten-year-old Khalil Anati on a quiet street in a refugee camp near Hebron and then drove away in his jeep as the child bled to death.
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Anati was one of the twenty-three Palestinians (including three children) killed by Israeli occupation forces in the West Bank during the Gaza onslaught, according to UN statistics, along with more than two thousand wounded, 38 percent by live fire. “None of those killed were endangering soldiers’ lives,” Israeli journalist Gideon Levy reported.
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To none of this is there any reaction, just as there was no reaction while Israel killed, on average, more than two Palestinian children a week for the past fourteen years. They are unpeople, after all.

It is commonly claimed on all sides that, if the two-state settlement is dead as a result of Israel’s takeover of Palestinian lands, then the outcome will be one state west of the Jordan River. Some Palestinians welcome this outcome, anticipating that they can then conduct a civil rights struggle for equal rights on the model of South Africa under apartheid. Many Israeli commentators warn that the resulting “demographic problem” of more Arab than Jewish births and diminishing Jewish immigration will undermine their hope for a “democratic Jewish state.”

But these widespread beliefs are dubious. The realistic alternative to a two-state settlement is that Israel will continue to carry forward the plans it has been implementing for years, taking over whatever is of value to it in the West Bank, while avoiding Palestinian population concentrations and removing Palestinians from the areas it is integrating into Israel. That should preempt the dreaded “demographic problem.”

These basic policies have been underway since the 1967 conquest, following a principle enunciated by then defense minister Moshe Dayan, one of the Israeli leaders most sympathetic to the Palestinians. He informed his party colleagues that they should tell Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, “We have no solution, you shall continue to live like dogs, and whoever wishes may leave, and we will see where this process leads.”
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The suggestion was natural within the overriding conception articulated in 1972 by future president Chaim Herzog: “I do not deny the Palestinians a place or stand or opinion on every matter … But certainly I am not prepared to consider them as partners in any respect in a land that has been consecrated in the hands of our nation for thousands of years. For the Jews of this land there cannot be any partner.” Dayan also called for Israel’s “permanent rule” (“memshelet keva”) over the Occupied Territories.
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When Netanyahu expresses the same stand today, he is not breaking new ground.

For a century, the Zionist colonization of Palestine has proceeded primarily on the pragmatic principle of the quiet establishment of facts on the ground, which the world was to ultimately come to accept. It has been a highly successful policy. There is every reason to expect it to persist as long as the United States provides the necessary military, economic, diplomatic, and ideological support. For those concerned with the rights of the brutalized Palestinians, there can be no higher priority than working to change U.S. policies—not an idle dream by any means.

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The U.S. Is a Leading Terrorist State

Imagine that the lead article in
Pravda
reported a study by the KGB reviewing major terrorist operations run by the Kremlin around the world in an effort to determine the factors that led to their success or failure. Its final conclusion: unfortunately, successes were rare, so some rethinking of policy is in order. Suppose that the article went on to quote Vladimir Putin as saying that he had asked the KGB to carry out such inquiries in order to find cases of “financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn’t come up with much.” So he has some reluctance about continuing such efforts.

If, almost unimaginably, such an article were to appear, cries of outrage and indignation would rise to the heavens, and Russia would be bitterly condemned—or worse—not only for the vicious terrorist record it had openly acknowledged, but for the reaction among the leadership and the political class: no concern, except for how well Russian state terrorism works and whether the practices can be improved.

It is indeed hard to imagine that such an article might appear, except for the fact that it recently did—almost.

On October 14, 2014, the lead story in the
New York Times
reported a study by the CIA reviewing major terrorist operations run by the White House around the world in an effort to determine the factors that led to their success or failure, with the very conclusion mentioned above. The article went on to quote President Obama as saying that he had asked the CIA to carry out such an inquiry in order to find cases of “financing and supplying arms to an insurgency in a country that actually worked out well. And they couldn’t come up with much.” So he did indeed have some reluctance about continuing such efforts.
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There were no cries of outrage, no indignation, nothing.

The conclusion seems quite clear. In Western political culture, it is taken to be entirely natural and appropriate that the Leader of the Free World should be a terrorist rogue state and should openly proclaim its eminence in such crimes. And it is only natural and appropriate that the Nobel Peace Prize laureate and liberal constitutional lawyer who holds the reins of power should be concerned only with how to carry out such actions more efficaciously.

A closer look establishes these conclusions quite firmly.

The article opens by citing U.S. operations “from Angola to Nicaragua to Cuba.” Let us add a little of what is omitted, drawing from the groundbreaking studies of Cuba’s role in the liberation of Africa by Piero Gleijeses, notably in his recent book
Visions of Freedom.
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In Angola, the United States joined South Africa in providing the crucial support for Jonas Savimbi’s terrorist UNITA army. It continued to do so even after Savimbi had been roundly defeated in a carefully monitored free election and South Africa had withdrawn support from this “monster whose lust for power had brought appalling misery to his people,” in the words of British ambassador to Angola Marrack Goulding, a statement seconded by the CIA station chief in neighboring Kinshasa. The CIA official warned that “it wasn’t a good idea” to support the monster “because of the extent of Savimbi’s crimes. He was terribly brutal.”
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Despite extensive and murderous U.S.-backed terrorist operations in Angola, Cuban forces drove South African aggressors out of the country, compelled them to leave illegally occupied Namibia, and opened the way for the Angolan election in which, after his defeat, Savimbi “dismissed entirely the views of nearly 800 foreign elections observers here that the balloting … was generally free and fair,” as the
New York Times
reported, and continued the terrorist war with U.S. support.
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Cuban achievements in the liberation of Africa and the ending of apartheid were hailed by Nelson Mandela when he was finally released from prison. Among his first acts was to declare that “during all my years in prison, Cuba was an inspiration and Fidel Castro a tower of strength … [Cuban victories] destroyed the myth of the invincibility of the white oppressor [and] inspired the fighting masses of South Africa … a turning point for the liberation of our continent—and of my people—from the scourge of apartheid.… What other country can point to a record of greater selflessness than Cuba has displayed in its relations to Africa?”
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