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Where to next in the US-Israel feud?
By Rami G. Khouri
The Daily Star
March 17, 2010

http://www.dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=1&categ_id=5&article_id=112798

I have been in Boston and New York City following the dust-up in American-Israeli relations after the Israeli government – during the official visit of US Vice President Joseph Biden – made two announcements approving the construction of 1,800 new housing units in occupied East Jerusalem and the West Bank.

The controversy has been immense, as far as relations go between the United States and Israel. Rarely do senior American officials say in public or private, as they did in the past week, that Israel has “insulted” the US; accuse Israel of deliberately undermining US-mediated talks; “condemn” Israeli actions; or demand that Israel prove its commitment to the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations just getting under way with US mediation.

All of this is quite new, but it will also be quite meaningless if the controversy turns out to be just another bump in the road in an otherwise solid bilateral American-Israeli relationship in which Israeli right-wing interests and Washington lobbyists have shaped US policy in the Middle East for decades. The serious tone of the current controversy is clear; its potential consequences are not.

The Palestinians and Arabs are largely silent observers in this enterprise, just as they have been the passive victims and invisible people in the broader enterprise of Zionist settler-colonialism that continues to grab and gobble up Palestinian lands. So the attention focuses on the two critical actors and issues that reveal what is at stake here: Israel and its continued colonization of Arab lands, and the United States’ capacity to make sovereign, independent decisions on its Middle East policies.

It would be short-sighted to view this controversy mainly as being about the chances of launching the “proximity talks” this week, as scheduled. It cuts much deeper, to the heart of the nationalist conflict between Arabs and Israelis, and the unique relationship between the United States and Israel. The Arabs and Palestinians believe that they have offered every concession demanded of them, including recognizing Israel’s right to exist, accepting to negotiate and live in peace with it, and accepting a resolution of the Palestinian refugees problem that is negotiated and agreed with Israel (in other words agreeing that only a limited number of refugees will return to their homes within present day Israel). If peace is to happen, movement will have to come from Israel.

This is why settlements loom so large, because they touch the two critical issues at play here: Israel’s colonization policies, and America’s subservience to Israel. The current controversy is also important because of its potential to generate change on these critical issues.

The first issue is about whether there is a dividing line between Israel as a homeland for the Jewish people that Palestinians can coexist with in adjacent states, and Israel as a project of perpetual Zionist colonization that refuses to accept the rule of law as defined by global human rights conventions and United Nations Security Council and General Assembly resolutions. Israel claims the right to build settlements in and colonize all the land of biblical Israel, and it says that all of Jerusalem is its eternal, unified capital. Its settlements-colonies are a dynamic symbol of its total disregard for international law and UN resolutions, and an affirmation of its Apartheid-like insistence on enjoying greater rights than the Palestinians and Arabs in its midst.

At some point, after 115 years of modern Zionism, the Jewish and Israeli people will have to make it clear to the world, and to themselves, whether they are perpetual colonizers, international law abusers, and serial land thieves, or members of a state that seeks only to allow the Jewish people to live in peace, security and normalcy in the land to which they have been attached since they emerged as a distinct people thousands of years ago.

The second issue that the current controversy might clarify is whether the US is able to formulate a policy in the Middle East that reflects genuine American national interests. Can the US break its habit of pandering to pro-Israel groups who blackmail, ideologically terrorize, and intimidate American politicians who fear they will be voted out of office if they stray from Israeli positions? The US has very, very rarely gone against Israeli sentiments and positions. Only once or twice has the US forced Israel to do something that Israel resisted doing, such as withdrawing from the Sinai in 1956. This might be a rare moment when the US – now insulted and angered – actually pressures Israel to freeze settlements totally, with the aim of jump-starting the proximity talks with the Palestinians.

We are in uncharted territory, but also prime political real estate – where the character of nations and the political mettle of the men and women who lead them are being tested in a serious way for the first time in two generations.

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