September 2012, Pages 16-17
United Nations Report

"Unbiased" Levy Commission Only Serves to Reinforce Israel's Political Isolation

By Ian Williams

An Israeli soldier loads his weapon during June 22 clashes with Palestinian protesters in the West Bank village of Nabi Saleh, near Ramallah. Residents were demonstrating against the confiscation of their land to expand the Jewish settlement of Halamish, illegal under international law. (Abbas Momani/AFP/Getty Images)

At the time of the Oslo accords, the mild-mannered Edward Said was intemperate in his denunciation of Yasser Arafat and the PLO for accepting the deal. I could see there were problems, but thought he was a bit over the top in his rhetoric. Within a year or so, however, it was clear that Said was entirely correct. The government of the Land of Milk and Honey maintained its reputation as the regime of fig leaves and phony diplomacy.
Oslo was not about peace with the Palestinians: it was about breaking Israeli isolation worldwide, and providing diplomatic camouflage for Israel and its supporters in Washington—which of course included the Clinton White House and Congress—to pretend that Israel was seeking peace. The doubling of the number of Jewish settlers while talking about negotiations based on an agreement which pledged that neither side would make any unilateral changes is an example of prestidigitatory diplomacy of a prize-winning kind. Just as the conjuror's patter is designed to lull the audience's attention so they do not focus on what his hands are doing, Israeli diplomatic practice is to keep on nagging and hectoring so that the U.S. can pretend it does not see what is happening on the ground.
But there are other aspects to Israel's continual chatter—above all its leadership's continual attempts to persuade itself that its behavior, despite violating almost every tenet of international law and of Jewish ethics, is really moral and legal.
That was epitomized with the recent commission which "found" that Israel's settlement policy was entirely legal. The commission, chaired by former Judge Edmond Levy, has caused controversy worldwide by finding that Israel is not an "occupier" in the West Bank and that all Jewish settlements are legal—including those even the Israeli government itself calls unauthorized.
We can tell what a responsible and objective body the commission was: it included former Israeli Ambassador to Canada Alan Baker, who lived in a settlement himself and whose law firm had been contracted to prove that very point before he joined the entirely unbiased investigatory committee! The committee was, of course, commissioned by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, whose views on settlements are obvious since he has refused all President Barack Obama's appeals to stop building them!
So the only purpose of the Levy commission is to reinforce Israel's incestuous political isolation, which is analogous to the prisoner in the dock telling the judge, jury and public that he knows the law better than they do. It will certainly have no persuasive effect outside the country.
However this is indeed what Israel has been saying in international fora for decades. Baker correctly asserts that the Levy commission's finding is "no different from Israel's policy statements over the years, including speeches by all of Israel's leaders and ambassadors in the United Nations, as well as in official policy documents issued by the Foreign Ministry." The former persecutor of Richard Goldstone also rounded on the many sane American Jewish critics of the commission for their temerity in what he laughably called helping the "delegitimization of Israel."
What concerns the critics is, of course, the report's shredding of the creative ambiguity that has characterized Israeli policy. If the territories are not occupied and the Geneva Conventions therefore do not apply to them, Israel has to explain to the world—and to itself—why it has refused to allow civil liberties to the Palestinians living in them while extending full citizenship to Jewish settlers outside its legal boundaries.
The critics are concerned that this will pave the way for a one-state solution, which is becoming increasingly attractive to many people on both sides of the Green Line. It is of course what Likud wants but dare not say so, because its vision is to take the land without the people.
Apart from wishing wistfully for divine intervention, a sort of rapture in which all the Palestinians just disappear, there is reasonable suspicion that someone somewhere has contingency plans to make that happen, perhaps under cover of a wider war—say, with Iran—in which the U.S. and others would be indisposed to act. Otherwise annexation makes no sense, compared with the implied policy of establishing isolated quasi-autonomous Palestinian Bantustans that Likud has hitherto been working toward, effectively albeit unethically!

Israeli Attorney Joins U.N. Counter-Terrorism Committee

As usual, while scorning all U.N. resolutions on the Middle East except the one that established Israel and those against Iran and Iraq, Israel's love/hate relationship with the U.N. means that it always crows when it secures a position at the U.N., no matter how minor. The latest appointment, in interesting counterpoint to the plethora of reports condemning Israeli behavior in the occupied territories, was of David Scharia to be legal coordinator for the Security Council's Counter-Terrorism Committee. Before coming to the U.N., Scharia previously had worked for the Israeli attorney general as the lead lawyer for counterterrorism cases in the Israeli Supreme Court.
Of course he is bound by the rules for U.N. civil servants, that they show no allegiance to their state of origin in their work.

What Can Be Done About Syria?

As explosions rocked Damascus, Russia and China vetoed yet another resolution on Syria. Of course, Moscow looks at Libya or Syria and spells them Chechnya, while Beijing spells them Tibet and Taiwan—but it is difficult to see how these vetoes serve anyone's interests. They are, in fact, every bit as counterproductive as all the U.S. vetoes on behalf of its own dodgy client state in the region. Indeed they have the same effect: removing the incentive for an intransigent regime to make the compromises it needs for a lasting settlement.
To all but rabid conspiracy theorists, it is clear that the U.S. does not want to intervene in Syria, even if it would look kindly on someone else taking action. It is not comforting for outsiders to see a country with chemical and conventional weaponry on the scale of Syria disintegrating into the patchwork of sectarian militias that Assad's intransigence seems to be driving it toward.
Even so, "anti-imperialist war" groups in the West have been busily burnishing Assad's revolutionary credentials, even though he had been happy to act as a torture franchisee for Western intelligence agencies, and failed one litmus test for the so-called anti-imperialist left by frequently stiffing the Palestinians.
It is worth remembering the role played by the Syrian Ba'athists in colluding with Phalangist pogroms of Palestinians in Lebanon—Tel-El Zatar being a case in point. Indeed, it is entirely possible that over the years Damascus has been responsible for more Palestinian deaths than the IDF has been.
And of course, like Qaddafi, the Syrian regimes, so eager to condemn their dissidents as "terrorists," were longtime safe havens for indisputably terrorist groups. But that does not stop the dictators clucking about foreigners coming in to fight, or weaponry coming from abroad.
One suspects that many of those reflexively condemning any intervention in Syria or Libya have an icon of Che on their walls. Would they condemn the disastrous intervention of the Argentinean-born, Cuban-backed Che in Bolivia? It certainly showed most of the practical pitfalls of interventionism—but, as always, the principles are expediently flexible in application.
Which begs the question: what can be done about Syria? The only sure thing is that it should be done quickly, and that Moscow's continuing support for the Assad regime has clearly persuaded the latter to fight rather than settle, to the point where there is real danger of a pogrom against the Alawites who dominate the regime.
Moscow could have been part of the solution, and maintained its influence in the region. But this it is going to lose because of its shortsighted policies—and the Syrians will pay the price. It is difficult to see a favorable outcome from the present impasse—and, as the situation deteriorates, it is even more difficult to envisage volunteers for an effective U.N. peacekeeping force venturing into such a Middle Eastern maelstrom. There is a clear case for intervention, but few if any credible candidates—except perhaps Turkey, which has problems of its own.

Ending with a Whimper

Obama Surrenders on Settlements

By Ian Williams, March 1, 2011 Foreign Policy in Focus

The recent U.S. veto of a UN Security Council resolution denouncing Israel's settlement policy is a tragicomic way for the Obama administration to abandon its claim to global leadership. But that is what Ambassador Susan Rice’s “nay” vote on February 18 signifies. The battle for a rational foreign policy in Washington has been over for some time. This veto represents surrender.

In George W. Bush’s days, such a veto would have been much less fraught. No one would have expected any better from that administration. And the erosion of U.S. economic, military, and diplomatic leverage, although underway, had not been made manifest. In those days, the United States did not pretend to care what the rest of the world thought, and there was even less that anyone else could do about it.

How things have changed! The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan might not represent defeat but they are Pyrrhic victories at best, with huge military, financial, and political costs. At the same time, the self-inflicted financial disaster has certainly dulled the luster of the U.S. economic model as the U.S. global position is crumbling BRIC by BRIC.

Across the Middle East, popular uprisings are removing the kleptocrats whose compliance with U.S. policy could be bought. They are also empowering a citizenry whose visceral reaction to U.S. support of Israel is on a par with African reaction to U.S. backing of South Africa’s former Apartheid regime. Indeed, the ouster of Mubarak removed one of the main U.S. levers on the Palestinians. Although Obama did not go to the aid of his ally, his hesitation, influenced by pro-Israeli interests, hardly garnered much street credibility in the region.

This veto also dramatically overturns the pledges that Obama made in his Cairo and Istanbul speeches about a renewed relationship with the Arabs and Muslims in the region. It not only abandons the Palestinians, it also abandons those Israelis who had been fighting for a peace settlement and the growing number of American Jews who have been combating Likudnik belligerence.
U.S. and Israel Isolated

The United States defied no fewer than 130 nations who had sponsored the resolution. Those voting for it included France, India, Germany, Brazil, the United Kingdom, and even Colombia. Given its desperate attempts to avert the resolution, the administration cannot claim ignorance of the significance of the vote or, indeed, the consequences of the veto.

The force with which UN Ambassador Rice attacked the Israeli settlement policy in her explanation of the U.S. vote was perhaps designed to mitigate the international effect of the veto. But it did nothing for U.S. standing, since it simply highlighted the surrender to Netanyahu, who ignored Rice’s stern admonitory statement with the same insouciance that he has brushed off Obama’s pleas. For U.S. friends and allies, the veto sent a strong message that Washington would ignore their wishes and interests when tweaked by a powerful domestic lobby – and that U.S. concern for democracy and international law does not extend to itself or Israel.

The veto also reveals how much the Obama administration's Middle Eastern policy reflects the influence of the former Clinton administration. At that time, the United States shifted from considering settlements “illegal” to labeling them “unhelpful.” Also under Clinton, the United States abandoned support of international law to state that the way forward for Israeli-Palestinian peace must be by “bilateral negotiations.” After such negotiations in Oslo, Israel achieved the normalization of relations with much of the Arab, Islamic, and non-aligned world, and built settlements regardless. Palestinians gave up tangible international diplomatic leverage in return for an interminable process, a road map folded into a Mobius strip that circled around endlessly.

With most Palestinians realizing the inefficacy of armed resistance, the PLO began to build its last line of defense: international law. The Palestinian mission to the UN emphasized the corpus of UN decisions and international conventions against the occupation and the settlements. The parties to the Fourth Geneva convention, the International Court of Justice, the UN General Assembly, all venues where the United States had no veto, reaffirmed the Palestinian position.

Israel was deeply concerned by such moves. That is why, prodded by Israel, the Clinton administration composed the mantra now being recited by Obama’s team, that in effect, international law could and should be disregarded, and the Palestinians should cut a deal. Palestinian leaders have consistently pretended that the United States was an honest broker, even as Washington kept strong-arming them into more and more concessions. Between the veto and the WikiLeaks revelations, they can no longer pretend that this is so.
Wider Consequences

In the wake of the UN vote, the Palestinians will likely mount a more vigorous campaign for world public opinion, which will throw Washington’s subservience to Israeli interests into greater relief. At the UN, speaker after speaker, even the British, looked forward to welcoming Palestine as a member state by this September. In a polite way, U.S. allies were throwing down the gauntlet for another confrontation with Washington.

Israel, meanwhile, finds itself in a more fragile position. If it rejects the new Palestinian state, it will be much more vulnerable to calls for international sanctions, boycotts, and divestments. Significantly, the EU is a much more significant trading partner than the United States, and European publics are significantly more inclined to such measures. So, European politicians will find themselves squeezed between pressure from the public to further isolate Israel and pressure from the United States to back off. After the flotilla conflict with Turkey, Israel has lost whatever friends it has in the Muslim world. There is little prospect of Arab forces marching on Tel Aviv, but clearly the peace is about to get even colder, with less cooperation on policing the border between Gaza and Egypt and even more pressure for a regional nuclear free zone.

The Palestinians can, and very likely will, take up other options to isolate the United States and Israel. It could reconvene the meeting of signatories to the Geneva Convention, or more tellingly, it could reconvene the Emergency General Assembly under the Uniting for Peace resolution that the United States moved to bypass the Soviet veto during the Korean War. That session is currently adjourned, but it would once again emphasize the U.S. isolation.

The more the United States is isolated in its unqualified defense of Israel, the less amenable governments in the region will be to cooperation with Washington, except when it clearly meets their own interests. The future of U.S. military bases in the region – in Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait – will for instance become more tenuous. On a wider level, Obama has lost much of the ground for public diplomacy he had seized when he replaced George W. Bush.

The veto – combined with the tepid and belated response to Egypt, Tunisia, and Bahrain – has also complicated U.S. response to the emerging civil war in Libya. Gaddafi’s regional unpopularity would likely ensure some local cooperation in enforcing a no-fly zone, for instance. But even if it went ahead, it would leave the world with the big question: why does the United States fly to stop hundreds of Libyans being killed from the air, but supplies the planes, drones, bombs, and shells for Israel to kill a thousand Palestinians? Regional public opinion, now politically important, is as likely to assume that U.S. sorties against Libya were flown on behalf of Israel as much as to support Libyan protestors.

Fallen Figleaf- the US veto of its own policy.

Washington Draws a Line in the Sand on Settlements -- With Palestine
By Ian Williams, February 18, 2011 FPIF

It’s tough being a naked superpower when the caterpillars munch away your fig leaf.

In real terms it makes Chamberlain at Munich look like a stickler for principle. The President and Secretary of State of the United States have been pleading and pressuring over Israeli settlements, which Washington opposes.

But who are they pleading with? Who are they cajoling and pressuring? Not the Israeli president building the settlements, but President Mahmoud Abbas of Palestine, to withdraw the Security Council resolution which expresses the sentiment of the entire world -- including the US -- that the settlements are illegal. In real terms it makes Chamberlain at Munich look like a stickler for principle.

To head off this disastrous dilemma heading to impale its Middle Eastern policy, the US had drafted an ineffectual and in any case non-binding statement that admitted to the “illegitimacy” of settlements in the West Bank, but spent more space condemning ineffectual rocket attacks from Gaza.

But Abbas had no option but to go ahead and put the resolution to the vote. It won 14 to one, with US Ambassador Susan Rice casting a veto.

The administration was scared that it would either be forced to support its own policy in the Security Council and thus risk an excreta tempest from AIPAC -- or that it would veto a resolution that it agrees with and humiliate itself in front of the rest of world, including its real allies in NATO.

“We reject in the strongest terms possible the legitimacy of the continued settlement building,” inveighed Rice, while ferociously condemning them as “folly,” bad for Israel as well. However that just reinforced the international message that the Israeli tail was wagging the American dog to vote against its own policy.

A positive vote would have sent a serious signal to Netanyahu not to trifle with his only protector and major paymaster. However, all Netanyahu has had to do is to refer to the even more crazed ideologues who surround him, who will not hear of “concessions” on settlements. But poor Abbas, beleaguered by WikiLeaks showing him trying to kill the Goldstone Report under US pressure and showing what most Palestinians regard as an overflexible, indeed supine, negotiating posture in the peace talks, is assumed not to have a domestic constituency he has to care for.

One would have thought that after Tunisia, Egypt, and Bahrain, this administration would have picked up some hints about diplomacy, not least that diktats and dollars to proxy dictators does not make for stable relationships. But the world’s rapidly attenuating super power was reduced to covering for a coalition of deranged rabbis, likudnik-inclined millionaires, Neocons and evangelical Christian Zionists in the UN Security Council.

It did so in front of a Security Council packed with most of the General Assembly members who have expressed their negative views on settlement over and over again to vote on a resolution sponsored by a wide geographical and ideological range of states -- including many EU and NATO members. The resolution was moved by Lebanon, whose ambassador eschewed inflammatory rhetoric and merely cited successive Security Council resolutions, World Court opinions and Geneva Conventions on the issue not to mention Israel’s own commitments under the Quartet’s “Road Map.”

Tip O’Neill’s dictum “All politics is local” is not always true. For a start, polls show that most American Jews oppose Netanyahu and his settlement policy. But more cogently, the masses of Arab citizens on the streets of their rapidly reforming countries bitterly oppose the settlements, and will draw their own conclusions from the Obama policy.

To stop AIPAC huffing and puffing, the Obama administration is about to lose Egypt, Tunisia and much of the rest of the Middle East and erase the last faint hopes of the region that the US can in any way give genuine support to democracy or international law. The disillusionment is going to be all the more profound because of the betrayal of the spirit of Obama’s early speeches in Istanbul and Cairo. Instead of sending serious signal to Netanyahu not to trifle with your only protector, he is now confirmed in his obduracy. And Arabs and other world citizens are even more convinced of US duplicity.

Obama also has yet another crisis coming. The UK, on behalf of France and Germany as well, promised to do all it could to welcome Palestine as a UN member by this September, thereby pushing yet another hot button for AIPAC -- and thus the administration.