U.S. Allies Ignore Bush and Opt for Peace

By Rachelle Marshall

Palestinian children play in their kindergarten playground in the northern West Bank village of Al-Aqaba, May 27, 2008. The kindergarten is among the more than 70 percent of the village’s structures, including homes and other public buildings, Israel has slated for demolition (AFP photo/Jack Guez).

Intent on marginalizing its foes, the United States has instead ended up marginalizing itself.—Hussein Agha and Robert Malley, New York Times, June 3, 2008

WHEN PRESIDENT George W. Bush spoke before the Israeli Knesset on May 15 he hailed Israel as “a free and modern society based on the love of liberty, a passion for justice, and a respect for human dignity.” At the moment Bush was praising their democracy, the Israelis were holding 2 million Palestinians in Gaza under siege as punishment for electing a government intent on resisting Israel’s occupation.

Two days later, police broke up a peaceful demonstration near Nazareth commemorating the anniversary of al-Nakba (see story p. 18)—an occasion Bush failed to mention in his speech. As the unarmed Palestinian and Israeli marchers, many of them with small children, approached the site of one of the 500 villages obliterated by Israel in 1948, police dispersed them with tear gas and stun guns while Israeli settlers who had come to the scene threw stones. Dozens of the marchers were injured, including two members of the Knesset.

On May 19 police in Jerusalem shut down the radio station RAM-FM, claiming it was not licensed. The station’s South African owner, Issy Kirsh, rejected the charge, saying that because he invested $2 million in the station he had made sure it was operating within the law. RAM-FM had mainly broadcast music, but the manager of the station is a Palestinian, and staff members said that news broadcasts aimed at giving both sides of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Israel’s democratic veneer suffered another crack on May 30 when The New York Times reported that the State Department had withdrawn the Fulbright fellowships from seven Palestinian students because Israel refused to allow them to leave Gaza. The embarrassing news prompted the State Department to restore the fellowships, whereupon human rights groups pointed out that hundreds of other Palestinian students who had also won grants to study abroad have been barred from leaving.

Israel eventually said four of the Fulbright scholars would be allowed to leave but that three others were security risks and therefore could not enter Israel to fly to America. All three of the rejected students had studied at the Islamic University in Gaza, which Israel considers a Hamas stronghold, but they denied being Hamas members and said it was the only institution in Gaza that offered courses in the engineering fields they wanted to pursue. One of the students said security officials had asked him for information about several dozen individuals they said were his relatives but whose names he didn’t recognize.

The main theme of Bush’s speech to the Knesset was the danger posed by Iran, which he referred to as “the world’s leading sponsor of terrorism.” “Some seem to believe that we should negotiate with the terrorists and radicals,” Bush said. “We have an obligation to call this what it is—the false comfort of appeasement.”

The Israelis applauded, but U.S. allies elsewhere are rejecting the policy of isolating their adversaries, and instead are attempting to reduce the danger of conflict by talking with them.

Four days after Bush likened diplomatic contacts with “terrorists and radicals” to the appeasement of Nazi Germany in 1938, the government of Lebanon signed a peace agreement with Hezbollah, ending an 18-month standoff between the two sides that culminated in an outburst of violence in early May. The immediate cause of the fighting was the attempt by Prime Minister Fouad Siniora, with Washington’s encouragement, to shut down Hezbollah’s independent intelligence and communications system. The chief dispute, however, was over Hezbollah’s demand for a greater voice in the predominantly Christian government.

The peace pact, brokered by the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani, allows Hezbollah to retain its communications network and calls for election of a new cabinet, in which Hezbollah will have veto power. Both sides agreed on a new president, army chief Michel Suleiman, who is a Christian. In his acceptance speech Suleiman outlined a defense strategy for Lebanon that would include Hezbollah’s experience in fighting Israel. Hezbollah’s leader, Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah, immediately withdrew his forces from Sunni areas of Beirut, and announced that Hezbollah’s first priority is defending Lebanon from Israel. “We don’t want to control Lebanon [or] impose our ideas on the Lebanese people,” he said.

In a similar break with Bush administration policy, on May 21 the new government of Pakistan signed a pact with militants in the tribal areas bordering Afghanistan aimed at ending the long-simmering conflict between the army and militants in the region. The army agreed to end its attacks in return for the militants’ pledge to refrain from attacking the army and hand over foreign fighters.

The agreement, which Pakistanis hope will help prevent suicide attacks inside Pakistan, raised protests from Washington. But Pakistan’s new leaders have made it clear that, in contrast to President Pervez Musharraf, they favor political engagement and economic development over military action as more effective means of reducing violence. When Adm. Eric T. Olson, commander of U.S. Special Operations, met with Pakistani officials to argue for continued NATO operations against militant sanctuaries in Pakistan, he was rebuffed. The governor of the Northwest Frontier Province, Owari Ghani, told him, “Pakistan will take care of its own problems and you take care of Afghanistan on your side.”

A former governor, Khalid Aziz, warned that continued U.S. air strikes inside Pakistan’s border would encourage separatist sentiment and deepen hostility to America among the Pashtun population. His prediction proved correct when on June 10 American war planes bombed retreating Taiban forces and killed 11 Pakistani soldiers inside Pakistan. The Pentagon called the attack “a legitimate act of self-defense,” the Pakistani military called them “completely unprovoked and cowardly.” Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani said Pakistan “vehemently condemned them.’

America’s allies are also rejecting the strictures of Bush’s “war on terrorism” in favor of diplomacy and economic relations with Iran. Indonesia gave Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad a warm reception when he visited this spring, and India has a pipeline deal with Tehran. At their meeting in April, the Saudi-led union of Arab oil states welcomed Iran as a participant and potential trading partner. Turkey is cooperating with Iran in attacking Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq. “We are sharing intelligence, we are talking, we are coordinating,” Turkish Gen. Ilker Basburg said at a security conference in Istanbul.

In Iraq there is growing opposition to a security pact currently under negotiation that calls for continued U.S. control of Iraqi air space, immunity for U.S. soldiers and security contractors, and the stationing of U.S. troops on some 50 long-term bases—many of them undoubtedly along Iraq’s borders with Iran. Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki returned from a meeting with the Iranians in June and declared, “We will not allow Iraq to become a platform for harming the security of Iran and its neighbors.”

A Not-So-Clean Break


An Iraqi woman grieves as the coffin of a relative is placed atop a car outside a mortuary in Baquba, 30 miles northeast of Baghdad, June 23, 2008. At least 10 people were killed when insurgent mortar rounds aimed at police headquarters and the mayor’s office fell on people’s homes instead (AFP photo/STR.)

In May, the French revealed a major break with U.S.-Israeli policy when Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner announced they had established contacts with Hamas. “We must be able to talk if we want to play a role,” Kouchner said on French radio. Egypt, America’s second closest ally in the Middle East, has been holding talks with Hamas for several months in an attempt to broker a cease-fire. Hamas leaders have long called for a truce, but as negotiations dragged on through April and May, Israel escalated the violence. Israel finally agreed on June 17 to suspend the daily air strikes on Gaza that have killed more than 300 Palestinians this year, and gradually allow more food, fuel and other supplies into Gaza. Hamas in return will end the rocket attacks that have so far killed four Israelis, and stop smuggling arms into Gaza from Egypt. Talks on a prisoner exchange were to continue.

The tentative deal raised only limited hopes. Israeli negotiators would put nothing in writing, saying the truce was only “an informal understanding.” Israel has broken truce agreements in the past when it has seen fit, and there is considerable opposition to the ceasefire within the government. Vice Premier Haim Ramon called it “another victory for radical Islam,” and Defense Minister Ehud Barak had clearly preferred a full-scale military assault as a way to stop the rocketing.

The government was meanwhile extending its control over Arab East Jerusalem, which Israel illegally annexed in 1967 and has proceeded to cleanse of its Palestinian population. The Israelis celebrated the 41st anniversary of the annexation by announcing the construction of 1,070 new apartments at Har Homa and Pisgat Ze’ev, both of which are in a part of Jerusalem the Palestinians have long intended to be the capital of a future Palestinian state. When presidential candidate Sen. Barak Obama paid his obeisance to AIPAC at their June convention by saying the city should remain the undivided capital of Israel, President Mahmoud Abbas responded angrily, saying: “We will not accept a Palestinian state without Jerusalem as the capital.”

On May 25, the Israelis offered the Palestinians a “new” peace plan that would leave about 10 percent of the West Bank under Israeli control. The area Israel would annex would still contain all but 80,000 of the 400,000 Jewish settlers, including those living in expanded East Jerusalem, as well as the West Bank’s major water acquifers. Palestinian negotiators immediately rejected it, and Abbas finally indicated that he had had enough.

The man Olmert and Bush had once called “a partner for peace,” and who had vowed to shun Hamas until it gave up control of Gaza, gave a televised speech on June 4 calling for a resumption of talks with Hamas aimed at restoring national unity, a move Hamas has long requested. After a meeting in Senegal the following weekend, the two sides issued a joint statement saying the meeting had restored “an atmosphere of trust and mutual respect.” Israel’s reaction was to withhold $76 million in Palestinian tax revenues from the Palestinian Authority and threaten to cut off talks with Abbas if he joins in a government with Hamas. But the Palestinian leader is surely aware that there will be no peace agreement as long as Olmert and Bush are in office.

For a brief period this spring, however, it appeared that even Israel had departed from U.S. policy. Israel and Syria announced simultaneously on May 21 that talks were taking place in Istanbul, with Turkish mediators shuttling back and forth between the two sides. The obstacles to agreement, however, remain formidable, and hopes quickly faded. In the past the deal breaker was Israel’s unwillingness to return to Syria all of the Golan Heights down to the Sea of Galilee, which Israel captured in 1967. Doing so would end Israel’s monopoly over the lake as a source of water, and thousands of Israeli settlers who have grown wealthy in the fertile Golan are fervently opposed. Washington opposes any relations with Syria.

It soon became clear that the Istanbul talks were intended only to divert attention from Olmert’s problems. The Israeli press pointed out that Olmert’s announcement of the news came on the same day the police released evidence indicating that for several years he had been receiving envelopes stuffed with cash from a wealthy American financier, Morris Talansky. A week later Talansky told an Israeli court that since 1993, when Olmert became mayor of Jerusalem, he had given Olmert a total of $150,000 for such items as a $25,000 vacation in Italy, luxury hotel suites in the United States, and “expensive cigars, pens, watches.”

Prosecutor Moshe Lador implied the payments were a bribe by pointing out that three days after Talansky paid $4,717 to cover Olmert’s bill at Washington’s Ritz Carlton Hotel, Olmert contacted Chile’s defense minister in connection with a satellite company in which Talansky had an interest. Shortly afterwards Olmert introduced his benefactor to a group of hotel owners to help promote Talansky’s mini-bar business.

Olmert in any case is in no position to complete a major peace agreement. His popularity has been at a record low since the 2006 war in Lebanon, and the Talansky affair represents only one of several corruption charges he faces. Meanwhile, like wolves circling their prey, members of his Kadima party are maneuvering to take his place. “Olmert is losing supporters by the hour,” a party official said. “They understand it’s over for him, and they have to move.”

At this point the probable candidates for his job offer no hope of change in Israel’s occupation policy. Defense Minister Ehud Barak has been waging a relentless war on Gaza and is insisting that all West Bank checkpoints remain in place. Another likely candidate, Transportation Minister Shaul Mofaz, recently threatened that “If Iran continues its program to develop nuclear weapons we will attack.” Foreign Minister Tsipi Livni has disagreed with Olmert only in his conduct of the Lebanon war. Waiting in the wings as ever is Likud party leader Binyamin Netanyahu, the favorite of the extreme right and an ardent advocate of a Greater Israel in all of Palestine.

A spokesman for Peace Now, Yariv Oppenheimer, recently commented that “The only legacy Olmert’s government will leave is the expansion of settlements and turning Jerusalem into an insoluble problem.” There is no question that Olmert and Bush are leaving the Middle East in far more misery and turmoil than when they took office. Israel’s strangulation of the Palestinian economy, its deliberate starving of two million Gazans and indiscriminate killing of thousands of Palestinians, constitute a crime against humanity. Bush’s support for Olmert despite his intransigence and continued settlement construction has made a two-state solution all but impossible to achieve and turned the peace process into a charade.

Meanwhile, Bush has embroiled the Middle East in three destructive wars and brought America to the brink of war with Iran. His “war on terror” launched a culture war against Muslims that has aroused resentment throughout the world. The next president can restore America’s image if he has the compassion and wisdom needed to bring peace to the Middle East and relieve the suffering caused by our past policies. But he must first break the chains that bind our country to Israel and make America complicit in Israel’s crimes.

Rachelle Marshall is a free-lance editor living in Stanford, CA. A member of the Jewish International Peace Union, she writes frequently on the Middle East.