Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, October/November 1997, Pages 9, 83-84

Special Report

The U.S. Lends a Hand As Israel Revives Old Hostilities

By Rachelle Marshall

In the first 14 months after Binyamin Netanyahu became Israel's prime minister, relations between Israel and the Arabs plunged from a high of wary trustfulness to street battles between Palestinian youths and Israeli soldiers, culminating in two suicide bombings in Jerusalem on July 30 that killed 15 people (including the two bombers) and wounded more than a hundred. Although Yasser Arafat immediately condemned the bombing as an "attack against the peace," Netanyahu blamed him for not stopping terrorism, disregarding the fact that Israeli security forces had been unable to do so and that Palestinian police had raided a Hamas bomb factory in Beit Sahour the week before.

As usual, Israel punished all Palestinians for the crime by sealing the borders of the West Bank and Gaza and sending thousands of Palestinian workers home without pay. In addition, the government said it would send troops into Palestinian cities at will, jam Palestinian radio broadcasts, and freeze transfers of tax funds owed to the Palestinian Authority. The announcement was a declaration of war, according to one of Arafat's aides.

The terrorist attack in Jerusalem succeeded only in causing excruciating suffering to the victims and their families, and bringing increased hardship and insecurity to all Palestinians. But however irrational, the bombing was a direct outgrowth of the mounting rage and helplessness Palestinians feel as Israel violates its agreements and continues to rob them of their land. As the hopes raised by Oslo fade, many believe they have nothing left to lose.

Despite the failed policies of the Netanyahu government, the Clinton administration and Congress remain steadfast in their loyalty to Israel, preferring to jeopardize Middle East peace rather than risk their campaign chests and political careers by offending the powerful pro-lsrael lobby.

Washington gives more than financial support to the Jewish state. As if Israeli leaders were not capable of sabotaging the peace process by themselves, the House stepped in to help on June 11 by voting 406 to 17 to recognize Jerusalem as Israel's undivided capital, and a week later the Senate Foreign Relations Committee agreed to allocate $100 million to move the American Embassy to the Holy City. The two actions directly contravened U.N. resolutions declaring East Jerusalem to be occupied territory, and nullified provisions of the Oslo agreement calling for Jerusalem's final status to be determined through negotiations. (See list of representatives who voted NO on the House resolution on next page.)

The House resolution inflamed an already explosive situation. Palestinians had for months protested Israel's continuing expansion of settlements. In many areas of the West Bank and Gaza, settlers under the protection of Israeli soldiers have simply begun bulldozing nearby Palestinian lands and claiming them as their own. While international attention focuses on Israel's decision to build 6,500 housing units on Jabal Abu Ghneim, construction of housing and new roads elsewhere in the occupied territories is proceeding rapidly. Last May alone Israel confiscated more than 7,000 acres of Palestinian land on the West Bank for the expansion of settlements and roads, according to a U.N. Observer Mission report.

The most volatile site of Palestinian resentment is Hebron, where thousands of Israeli troops guard the 450 ultranationalist Jews who occupy the heart of the city. Equally militant Israelis live in settlements in the surrounding hills. Backed by the army, the settlers constantly harass the people of Hebron, attacking them in the streets, smashing their cars, vandalizing their homes and shops. Children and the elderly are frequent victims. A 75-year-old Palestinian woman recently assaulted near her home was barely saved by passersby from serious injury. In July settlers again raided the Yakubiyeh Girls School, breaking furniture, pouring acid on children's desks, and plastering posters saying "Hebron is our city, the Arabs are dogs."

The harassment is aimed at forcing the Palestinians to move away, but it is also an expression of the fanaticism that has characterized the Jews in Hebron ever since 1967, when members of the extremist Gush Emunim movement seized buildings in the center of the city and were allowed by the Labor government to remain. Settlers not only count on protection by the army but immunity from punishment as well. Nahum Korman, a settlement guard who bludgeoned to death a 10-year-old Palestinian boy last October, was released from jail on June 30 to attend the birth of his own son. Korman will roam free while Palestinians arrested for their political beliefs languish in jail for years without a trial.

Fueling Protests

The anger generated among Palestinians by such injustices helped fuel the protests that broke out throughout the West Bank following the House vote on Jerusalem. In Hebron, Israeli soldiers confronted stone-throwing Palestinian youths with barrages of rubber bullets and live ammunition, seriously injuring more than 200 Palestinians, including a seven-year old girl and a 13-year-old boy who was shot in the stomach, and four television cameramen. On the second day, after 28 Palestinians were injured, Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat blamed Israel for provoking the protests. "We have warned Netanyahu several times," he said, "that [his] measures will lead to violence, chaos and bloodshed. It is impossible to have peace and settlements and land-confiscation at the same time."

As if to underscore Erekat's charges, Israelis came up with new provocations. When tensions in Hebron were at their height, Israeli undercover agents disguised as Arabs were found to be crossing into Palestinian sections of the city where they beat and arrested suspected protestors.

Although Palestinian officials expressed anger at the presence of Israeli agents in Palestinian-controlled areas, undercover squads have continued to enter West Bank cities and make arrests. Meanwhile, Israel stepped up house demolitions, destroying 49 West Bank homes in one two-week period. In East Jerusalem, spontaneous street demonstrations broke out after Israeli police and tax collectors raided homes and shops and confiscated goods and other belongings from Palestinians they claimed owed huge amounts in back taxes—taxes most merchants regard as arbitrary and discriminatory.

In Hebron the violence escalated after an Israeli woman, with help from local settlers, hung posters depicting the Prophet Muhammad as a pig. For the first time since the latest round of protests began, two Israeli soldiers were wounded by pipe bombs. On the same day, soldiers wounded more than 35 Palestinians with rubber bullets and 6 with live ammunition. In Nablus, 30,000 Palestinians turned out for a rally organized by Hamas at which the crowd burned Israeli and U.S. flags and shouted for revenge.

The protests ended in mid-July after Israel shut down Palestinian shops in the center of Hebron, barricaded the main artery, Shalala Street, with massive concrete blocks, and barred access to the city by Palestinians from elsewhere. Israeli Radio reported that President Clinton had also put pressure on Yasser Arafat to call off the demonstrations. The calm was only temporary, however. The Palestinians' anger at the betrayal of their hopes, and Israel's stubborn efforts to hold onto the West Bank, remained a combustible mixture waiting to burst into flame. A few weeks later, two Palestinians with bombs attached to their bodies turned a Jerusalem street into a nightmare of blood and mangled flesh.

Before that attack once again froze peace talks, Clinton had hinted at his July 9 press conference that the U.S. might favor skipping interim talks between the two sides and moving directly to discussion of final status issues. When Netanyahu broached this idea last February on a visit to Washington, the Palestinians swiftly rejected it—with good reason. By skipping the interim negotiations and the phased withdrawals of Israeli troops called for by the Oslo agreements, Israel would enter the final negotiations still in control of most of the West Bank and with no need to make any concessions. The talks could drag on endlessly while Israel swallowed up more land and spread Jewish settlements— irreversible "facts on the ground"—from the Green Line to the Jordan River.

The situation is especially urgent for the Palestinians because Israel's Master Plan calls for taking more than 3,000 acres of land belonging to 5 villages east of Jerusalem and annexing them to the massive settlement of Ma'ale Adumin. The loss of this land would leave the villages entirely surrounded by Israeli territory, with no space to expand. The Palestinians still have a chance of retaining this area through interim negotiations, but once Israel annexes them to Ma'ale Adumin they would be outside the scope of discussion until the issue of settlements is taken up in final status talks.There is virtually no possibility that once the expansion of Ma'ale Adumin is underway Israel will ever give up any part of it. Both Israeli political parties oppose dismantling existing settlements, and Netanyahu's goal in the final status talks is to make certain this never happens.

He recently put forward what he calls the "Allon Plus" plan, an expanded version of an old Labor Party proposal that would give Israel permanent sovereignty over more than 60 percent of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and its environs, the Jordan Valley, and all West Bank settlements and roads leading to them. Israel would also retain control of all water sources, which currently supply Palestinians with a fraction of the water piped to settlements and to Israel, and at triple the cost per cubic meter. The proposal is aimed at pleasing Israelis, including the far right, rather than achieving peace with the Palestinians. In fact, if Allon Plus turns out to be the basis of Israel's negotiating position, the peace process will be back where it was before Oslo, with no common ground between the two sides on which to build an agreement.

U.S. Obstruction

Although only outside pressure can help resolve the present impasse, the U.S. has taken little action other than to obstruct efforts by the U.N. to intervene. On July 15 the General Assembly voted for the third time in four months to condemn Israel's continuing expansion of settlements in the occupied territories. The resolution also laid the groundwork for a possible boycott directed at Israel. As usual, only Israel, the U.S. and Micronesia voted no. A week earlier, after U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan reported that Israel's failure to stop construction was "particularly serious" because of its effect on peace, Israeli officials called his report "hostile and one-sided" and accused Annan of "fomenting an anti-lsrael policy."

While defending Israel at the U.N., the U.S. was undertaking an action even more damaging to Middle East peace. In late June, as Turkey and Israel flaunted their new military alliance by holding naval maneuvers just off the Syrian coast, the Pentagon announced that the U.S. Navy would join them. At a meeting of Arab foreign ministers on June 25, Syrian Foreign Minister Farouq Shara expressed pained surprise that the U.S. would take part in provocative military exercises so close to Syria when it purported to be a sponsor of Arab-lsraeli peace talks. As the war games were taking place, the Knesset further undermined chances of peace with Syria by tentatively approving a bill requiring that return of any part of the Golan Heights be approved by a two-thirds majority of the Knesset.

Netanyahu and his colleagues have no reason to make peace with Syria or stop seizing Palestinian land as long as Israel can count on unstinting financial and diplomatic support from the U.S. Since Israel's early days, the single most important factor in determining U.S. policy toward the Jewish state has been pressure from the organized Jewish community, which makes sure Israel gets first call on U.S. aid as well as support on the international scene. Because American Jews have the power to influence U.S. policy, the Israeli government is also obliged to listen to them. When the Knesset attempted to pass a law this summer giving Orthodox rabbis a monopoly over conversions in Israel, Reform and Conservative Jews in the U.S. sent a delegation to meet with Netanyahu, challenged Orthodox Jews by including women in a prayer service at the Wailing Wall, and threatened to cut fund-raising for Israel. Within a week, Knesset leaders agreed to freeze the conversion bill, and chances are it will not be revived.

An outpouring of equal concern from American Jews over Israel's refusal to pursue a just peace settlement could have a powerful effect on both Israeli and U.S. policy but has not been forthcoming. In a column that appeared in the Northern California Jewish Bulletin on June 13, Ha'aretz correspondent Ori Nir accused American Jewry of "deafening silence concerning the state of Middle East peace." Without backing from the Jewish community, he pointed out, Clinton has no incentive to put pressure on Netanyahu. "If American Jews don't care," Nir asked, "why should a lame duck president?"

Many Jews both in the U.S. and in Israel do care, but unfortunately they are not being heard. Hundreds of Israeli and Palestinian women held a five-day festival in Jerusalem last June calling for "two capitals for two states," but the press reported only that the Irish singer Sinead O'Connor had canceled an appearance at the festival because of death threats.

Even less notice was given to a report prepared by Jerusalem Watch and distributed by Americans for Peace Now last spring that exposed Israel's widely publicized claim that construction of Har Homa would include 3,015 housing units for Arabs. In fact, according to Jerusalem Watch, "not one single additional housing unit for Palestinians will be funded directly or indirectly by the government." New roads that Israel plans to build in connection with Har Homa will "theoretically" make 3,015 building permits available to Palestinians, but the obstacles to obtaining such permits are so great that Israel is likely to grant no more than 200. The report points out that since 1967, when Israel annexed East Jerusalem and expropriated more than a third of its land from the Palestinians, the government has constructed 40,000 housing units for Israelis while building none for Palestinians.

The facts spelled out by Jerusalem Watch add up to a harsh indictment of Israel's takeover of East Jerusalem and its subsequent treatment of the inhabitants. The contradiction between Israel's record of exploitation and oppression of the Palestinians since it achieved independence and the popularly accepted view of the Jewish state as a beleaguered democracy suggests that one of the major obstacles to Middle East peace is the gap between myth and reality.