On Sun, 7 Apr 2002, Seth Ackerman wrote:
> This is a fine explanation of why the Camp David payments started. But
> it doesn't explain the more pertinent issue of US dipomatic support for
> Israel on the political issues of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
I completely agree. That has to be explained by a wider discussion of the American political imaginaire, such as you are engaged in. My point was only that this is largely separate from the question of real strategic interests, to which the suffering of innocents is irrelevant so long as they can't do anything about it.
> Originally, the US supported a two-state solution along the 1967
> borders. Then in 1971-1973, it abandoned that position.
Officially, as you know, that's not entirely true. The 1973 war ended with UN resolution 338, which was essentially a joint call, sponsored by the US and the USSR, to implement resolution 242. And 242 is written into the Camp David accords as being the basis of all negotiations over self-rule in the West Bank and Gaza, negotiations to be held between Israel and elected representatives of the Palestinian people.
But of course you're completely right in substance. The US has stood back while Israel has riddled all agreements as well as the land as full of loopholes as swiss cheese. (One of the few hopeful things in the current atmosphere is how often you are beginning to hear about resolution 242 again. For decades it's been vanished from respectable US discourse.)
I don't think this takes as much explaining as you seem to. Before the US started giving the Camp David money, it didn't have any leverage. After it started giving the money, not giving it would destroy the whole structure with Egypt. Only after the cold war would it seriously contemplate taking it away, and shortly after the cold war ended, Oslo began. Besides, in some ways it's only now that the US is really beginning to understand that the cold war is over, which might be one of the hopeful deep structures in the current conjuncture.
You seem to be presuming that
(1) the US cared a lot during the cold war about being diplomatically isolated, in itself, if it had no other consequences, for which I see no evidence, and
(2) that the US commonly exerted enormous force on allies to do the right thing when they were dead set against it and it was no skin off our nose in material terms, for which I can't think of a single example either.
I think rather what needs to be explained -- and which I'm sure your paper goes some distance toward explaining -- is why the Palestinian plight garners such maddeningly neglible sympathy among the American public, and even more the media, and even more the policy-making elite, when clearly they are the party who been suffering much more all along. In other words, why is it that we essentially demonize the Palestinians while identifying with the Israelis? Which no other country does. If that had been different, then domestic political pressures would have changed, and then our political posturing would have been different. There'd have be a different grandstand to play to. Here I can see where anti-third world nationalism might have played a big role, and I'd love to read what you have to say about it.
But it's not clear to me that even that change would have to have gone beyond posturing into having immediate policy change consequences. It would certainly have provided a more fertile context for it. But up until recently, people hating us overseas because of our policies barely bothered us at all. The world's position on Cuba is even more different from ours than its position on Israel. But we've never cared about that either.
And domestically, American citizens being outraged over the human rights abuses of our proxies has played very little role in the electoral bottom line Our proxies did much worse in Guatemala. No one in the world supported us. But no one here ever paid an electoral price for it. Only the people who lived there paid.
In short, when we're not at war, neither the popularity of foreign policy positions nor their moral rightness has ever bulked very large among the executive's considerations. Think of all the murderous dictators we could have made less murderous with the flip of our finger. Did we ever? We told them we'd like it if they'd stop; and sometime we meant part of it. But we never forced them if they insisted. Israel is no special case in that regard. We've treated them exactly as we've treated all our other allies: free to engage in local repression as they see fit.
> It may seem far-fetched in today's atmosphere, but there's nothing
> unrealistic about the idea of the US calling a Rambouillet-style
> conference with Israel, Egypt and the Palestinians, laying out a
> settlement and threatening to cut off aid / impose sanctions on anyone
> who says no.
Actually that's less far fetched today than it was 20 years ago. During the cold war such intervention would have been unthinkable. Now it's much more thinkable.
> The question is why the US won't do this.
Or rather, why it won't even contemplate it. Again, domestic politics and the alchemy of national identification, which require all the explanation you want to give them.
But leaving out the force part (which I think you're adding to be provocative, because I know you don't think Rambuillet was the right way to conduct policy, nor that the protectorates of Bosnia & Kosovo are a great solution) I think what you're outlining largely is what is going to happen. There is going to be a settlement and we're going to be part of it. I think this because I believe Israel's attempt at a military solution will not work, and that other alternatives (which start with expulsion) are much more dangerous to our interests. (And to Israel's in the long term. If they think making Jordan into a Palestinian state through expulsion is going to improve their security position, they're nuts.)
Oslo resulted from the first intifada. It was an immediate qualitative improvement for both sides compared to what they had just gone through. But it wasn't anywhere near enough for a permanent settlement. The immediate small improvement it offered -- replacing Israeli with Palestinian occupation -- was only signable because they put off all the main issues -- Jerusalem, the borders, the settlements, the water, return -- under the supposition that those things could be settled without war, through confidence-building measures.
They couldn't. That part failed. Maybe in an alternate universe where Rabin didn't get assasinated, they might have gotten farther. In that case, Clinton would have done what he did with Barak and Arafat 5 years earlier, which would have made a big difference. The point Arafat and Barak reached was the beginning of a possible solution, but there was no more time left by that point to continue negotiations, because there were no reserves of trust left (and no time left in office). 5 years earlier hope had been much higher on both sides. Also Rabin had a national legitimacy that no Israeli leader will ever have again (certainly not Barak), and he and Clinton got on famously. So there is every reason to think they could have gotten farther.
But they still might not have gotten far enough to make the difference. And it can be argued that it was all bad faith from day 1. But none of that matters now. The stark fact is, it failed. Which means on the evidence there was no other way than war. Because as it now stands, the only concessions Israel has ever made to the Palestinians were concessions it was compelled to by them because the alternative was worse. In which case, another intifada was always going to have been necessary (in Oslo's default) to produce the second set of concessions that was always going to be necessary to set up a real state. And here it is.
Optimist that I am, I believe that just as the first intifada led to Oslo, so the second will lead something better than Oslo. Something sufficient to found a state on.
But first there will be so much suffering that nobody can stand it anymore.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
I'm an optimist because it's intellectually more challenging. __________________________________________________________________________