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alon pinkas
Biden Can Rein In Israeli Violence Against Palestinians—But Will He?
The United States, because of its unconditional support for Israel, no matter the latter's crimes and violations of international and U.S. law, bears enormous responsibility for Israel's behavior.
Mar 06, 2023
In an analysis for Haaretz last week, former Israeli diplomat Alon Pinkas asks a pertinent and important question: "When will the U.S. stop pretending that things are normal in Netanyahu's Israel?" It's a rhetorical question, but nonetheless crucial after the United States embarrassed itself yet again by touting a completely phony "agreement" reached in Aqaba, Jordan, between the far-right Israeli government and the quisling Palestinian Authority while Israeli settlers were burning the town of Huwwara. But Pinkas addresses this question, ultimately, with an equally empty line: "Friends don't let friends rescind democracy."
The sub-headline on the article, taken directly from the piece itself, is the beginning of where Pinkas goes wrong. "It is not the U.S.' responsibility, moral duty, or place to alter the authoritarian trajectory of Israel. But it is equally negligent of the Americans to act as if nothing is happening."
Pinkas' view is representative of many who are currently criticizing Israel either for the first time publicly or in harsher tones than they ever have before, in light of Israel's assault on its democracy for its Jewish citizens. But it elides a broader, more incisive view of the trajectory Israel has been on since the birth of the Political Zionism movement and how the seeds of the current government were not only planted long ago but have been evident in the treatment of Palestinians by that movement all along. Indeed, that misguided view is intrinsic to much, though not all, of the protest movement in Israel, the criticisms from some of Israel's more liberal supporters, and, especially from American and Israeli opposition leaders.
Ultimately, of course, Israel is responsible for its own behavior and policies. But the notion that the United States bears neither responsibility nor moral duty to change Israeli behavior for the better is thoroughly misguided. The only real question is whether the Biden administration would use the leverage it has to, if not bring Israel fully to heel, then at least to rein in Israel's violence against Palestinians, attempts to subvert the status quo in Jerusalem, ongoing efforts to annex the West Bank, and its ongoing strangulation of Gaza.
U.S. responsibility
The United States, because of its unconditional support for Israel, no matter the latter's crimes and violations of international and U.S. law, bears enormous responsibility for Israel's behavior. Moreover, the U.S. has, with Israel's full cooperation, established itself as the only acceptable "broker" between Israel and the Palestinians, and as such, is the only body in the world with enough influence, power, and leverage with Israel to credibly press the Jewish state to change its policies. The U.S. is, therefore, absolutely obliged as both a moral and practical matter to "alter the authoritarian trajectory of Israel."
In fact, for most of Israel's existence, the United States has supported it financially, and, at significant diplomatic cost, in international arenas, writing a blank check to Israel and creating the cancerous "special relationship" and "unbreakable bond." This does not make Israel act as it does, but it does give it the ability to act with impunity. That is an enormous incentive for Israel not only to maintain its harsh and illegal policies, but to consistently push the envelope of its brutal treatment of the Palestinians. That gift of impunity is what establishes U.S. culpability and creates not just the moral responsibility that Pinkas denies the U.S. has; it also, and more importantly, creates the practical need for the U.S. to act if the situation is not to deteriorate further and faster. No other country or international body can rival the United States in the array of options it has at its disposal to incentivize Israel to change, even if Washington refuses to use them.
This isn't new. It has been the case, certainly since before the 1967 war and arguably even before the state of Israel was established through the devastation of Palestinian society, the nakba, from 1947-49. And that's one of the problems with Pinkas' thinking.
U.S. abdication
By asking when the U.S. will recognize the current government as "abnormal," Pinkas implies that the new Netanyahu government is unique. In terms of domestic Israeli politics, that's true. The assault on the Israeli judiciary is certainly new, even if Netanyahu has been building toward it out of fear of prosecution for his massive corruption for years. Rhetorical attacks on the Israeli legal system are as old as the state itself, but actual structural changes meant to rob the judiciary of its power relative to the rest of the government are new, and the protests throughout Israel are the result.
But while Benjamin Netanyahu's new partners, Itamar Ben Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich, have escalated the size and scope of routine attacks on Palestinians, they are not doing anything new. These incursions by both the army and the settlers are regular practices, and they were escalating long before this government came into power. It's worth remembering that 2022 saw the largest number of Palestinians killed by Israel since 2005. That was not under Netanyahu, Smotrich, and Ben Gvir, but the supposedly more "moderate" and centrist governments of Naftali Bennett and Yair Lapid.
Similarly, while Netanyahu flirted with an accelerated annexation of the West Bank in 2020, the process of gradual annexation of the occupied territory has been underway since 1968. By putting the West bank under Bezalel Smotrich's civilian authority, a line was crossed, and, as Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard put it, it amounted to "de jure annexation of the West Bank."
In the face of all this, the United States is silent. Pinkas talks about some words of rebuke from Washington but what mild rebukes have been issued have been overwhelmingly directed at the Israeli assault on its own judiciary. There was no rebuke of the Israeli army for its routine practice of protecting settlers as they assaulted Huwwara, for instance.
Three letters to President Joe Biden are circulating in Congress. One by Senator Peter Welch (D-VT) is unusually direct in its criticism of the Netanyahu government, and the other two, whose contents are not yet public, are also firm in calling on President Biden to save the two-state solution. And therein lies the problem. The fact that Welch is justifiably considered bold for bluntly stating that "as far as the Netanyahu government is concerned, the two-state solution is dead" reflects the desperate clinging of American officials, elected and otherwise, to a two-state solution that is neither politically nor physically feasible any longer is a big part of the problem.
An even more serious problem is that none of the letters express any more concern for the wanton attacks on Palestinians than the Biden administration has shown.
Rep. Ilhan Omar's statement of concern about the harm to both Palestinian and Israeli civilians was the only such statement from any member of Congress expressing concern about the assaults and killings of both Palestinians and Israelis.
What the U.S. could do
Pinkas argues that a U.S. president could confront Israel without any political cost. While this is not exactly correct, it is closer to reality than is generally believed. The myth of the political cost of criticizing Israel—although based on very real factors like an exceptionally effective lobbying apparatus and a huge imbalance in campaign contributions between pro-Israel PACs and those that support Palestinian rights or even just a more even-handed U.S. policy—has taken on a life of its own, growing far bigger than the reality.
Pinkas' piece omits any recommendations for American action, only a defense of the idea that the U.S. could act if it wanted to. He refers to a "menu" of actions the United States could take if it wished but never specifies any items on that menu. Similarly, Americans for Peace Now spoke of the "large toolbox" the U.S. has to show its displeasure with the current Israeli government but didn't go on to recommend any specific actions.
It should be clear by now that the Biden administration does not want to confront Israel, regardless of the depth of its crimes. But it is also becoming clear that he is soon going to have to do something. It might be nothing but theater, or it might be something substantive. But the pressure from within his own party is growing, and Biden will, correctly, look extremely weak if he tries to maintain his silence on Israel's actions, no matter how many chummy pictures of Chuck Schumer kissing up to Netanyahu circulate.
The idea of ending military aid to Israel remains impossible, but conditioning it on compliance with U.S. law and human rights norms is an idea that is no longer outside of all discussion in Washington. Still, it will still be a long while before even that obvious step is taken if it ever is. But that is not Biden's only option.
One alternative is to halt work to expand the so-called Abraham Accords, the deals the United States has brokered between Israel and various Arab dictatorships to normalize relations even without any agreement with the Palestinians. Without robust U.S. involvement, it will be very hard to expand the Accords, since the real prize for the Arab autocrats is access to Washington, especially to its weapons market. This is not a small thing, as international investors are already starting to feel nervous about investing in an increasingly illiberal Israel. That makes expanding the Abraham Accords an even higher priority for Netanyahu.
Biden can also slow other business cooperation that the U.S. government facilitates, which will certainly fuel concerns in Tel Aviv that are already starting to boil about the potential of Israeli tech companies and leaders in the field leaving the country as it moves too far to the right for their tastes. There is also the loan guarantee program, currently approved to run through FY 2023, which provides a big boost to Israel's credit rating. A loss there, amid so much financial uncertainty, would certainly impact Israel.
Taking any of those steps would send shock waves throughout Israel, because, even if they are not devastating by themselves, they would imply that the U.S. may take even more steps, as the blank check has been rescinded. And any of them are politically feasible for this administration.
Biden still won't want to take such steps, but with enough political pressure, he may have to. It will be crucial, if such pressure does build, that advocates for Palestinian rights not allow them to focus only on the issues for Jewish democracy. They must include an end to the U.S. ignoring Israeli escalations, at the very least.
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US, Russia & Syria: The Problem With Faking It
Oct 10, 2015
The great danger of faking your ability to do something in the public square is that someone with an actual desire to the job you are pretending to do might come along and show you up.
This is what has just happened to the US in Syria with the entrance of Russia into the fight against ISIL.
And as is generally the case with posers caught with their pants down, the US policy elites are not happy about it.
You see, the US strategic goal in Syria is not as your faithful mainstream media servants (led by that redoubtable channeler of Neo-Con smokescreens at the NYT Michael Gordon) might have you believe to save the Syrian people from the ravages of the long-standing Assad dictatorship, but rather to heighten the level of internecine conflict in that country to the point where it will not be able to serve as a regional bulwark against Israeli regional hegemony for at least another generation.
How do we know? Because important protagonists in the Israelo-American policy planning elite have advertised the fact with a surprising degree of clarity in documents and public statements issued over the last several decades.
The key here is learning to listen to what our cultural training has not prepared us to hear.
In 1982, as the Likud Party (which is to say, the institutional incarnation of the Revisionist Zionist belief, first articulated by Jabotinsky in the "Iron Wall" that the only way to deal with "the Arabs" in and around Israel was through unrelenting force and the inducement of cultural fragmentation) was consolidating its hold on the foreign policy establishment of Israel, a journalist named Oded Yinon, who had formerly worked at the Israeli Foreign Ministry, published an article in which he outlined the strategic approach his country needed to take in the coming years.
What follows are some excerpts from Israel Shahak's English translation of that text:
"Lebanon's total dissolution into five provinces serves as a precedent for the entire Arab world including Egypt, Syria, Iraq and the Arabian Peninsula and is already following that track. The dissolution of Syria and Iraq later on into ethnically or religiously unique areas, such as Lebanon is Israel's primary target on the Eastern front in the long run, while the dissolution of the military power of those states serves as the primary short-term target. Syria will fall apart, in accordance with its ethnic and religious structure, into several states such as in present day Lebanon...."
"Iraq, rich in oil on the one hand and internally torn on the other, is guaranteed as a candidate for Israel's targets. Its dissolution is even more important for us than that of Syria. Iraq is stronger than Syria. In the short run it is Iraqi power which constitutes the greatest threat to Israel. An Iraqi-Iranian war will tear Iraq apart and cause its downfall at home even before it is able to organize a struggle on a wide front against us. Every kind of inter-Arab confrontation will assist us in the short run and will shorten the way to the more important aim of breaking up Iraq into denominations as in Syria and in Lebanon. In Iraq, a division into provinces along ethnic/religious lines as in Syria during Ottoman times is possible. So, three (or more) states will exist around the three major cities: Basra, Baghdad and Mosul, and Shi'ite areas in the south will separate from the Sunni and Kurdish north."
"If Egypt falls apart, countries like Libya, Sudan or even the more distant states will not continue to exist in their present form and will join the downfall and dissolution of Egypt.
"There is no chance that Jordan will continue to exist in its present structure for a long time, and Israel's policy, both in war and in peace, ought to be directed at the liquidation of Jordan under the present regime and the transfer of power to the Palestinian majority."
Yinon's vision reappeared in the now infamous "Clean Break" document from 1996, authored by a consortium of US and Israeli "strategic thinkers" that included Richard Perle, Douglas Feith and David and Meyrav Wurmser, which was meant to serve as a foreign policy guide for the first administration of Benjamin Netanyahu.
The text is nothing if not obsessive regarding the need to seriously debilitate Syria's ability to act in any way is a pole of regional influence in the in the area.
"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq -- an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right -- as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions."
"Most important, it is understandable that Israel has an interest supporting diplomatically, militarily and operationally Turkey's and Jordan's actions against Syria, such as securing tribal alliances with Arab tribes that cross into Syrian territory and are hostile to the Syrian ruling elite."
And as Dan Sanchez has recently shown, David Wurmser went into even greater detail about the need to balkanize Israel's northeastern neighbor in articles published in approximately the same time period, talking quite openly in one essay about "expediting the chaotic collapse" of Baathist Syria.
Then there is Wesley Clark's famous speech, given in 2007, in which he revealed the true strategic aims of those running US foreign policy in the wake of the September 11th attacks. In it, he tells of a conversation he had at that time with a Pentagon official who admitted that the real plan was "to attack and destroy the governments in seven countries in five years".
Those countries, according to Clark, were: Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Iraq. In the same speech, he explicitly ties the hatching of the plan to Richard Perle, head of the cadre of people who wrote in the "Clean Break" document of the paramount importance of putting Israel in position to "shape its strategic environment".
On September 5th, 2013, Alon Pinkas, the former Israeli Consul General in New York and well-connected member of Tel Aviv's conservative policy elite described the Syrian conflict in the following terms in the New York Times:
"This is a playoff situation in which you need both teams to lose, but at least you don't want one to win -- we'll settle for a tie,....Let them both bleed, hemorrhage to death: that's the strategic thinking here. As long as this lingers, there's no real threat from Syria."
I don't think it can get much clearer than that. The US-Israeli plan in Syria never been about helping anyone in that country, but rather insuring its effective dismemberment so as to further the perceived "strategic interests" of the Jewish state.
As Tomas Alcoverro, the longtime Mideast correspondent of Barcelona's La Vanguardia newspaper, wrote on 9 October 2015, in reference to the combined Russian and Syrian government attacks carried out during the previous week: "If this joint offensive is successful, the US plan for continuing the war of attrition until both sides are exhausted, will lie in ruins".
Yes, the US and Israelis have been "faking it" in Syria for a good long time now. And Putin has come along and called their bluff.
And they are not happy about it. This is why the ongoing campaign of demonization against the Russian leader is being ratcheted up--if that's possible--to still higher levels of intelligence-insulting hyperbole.
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