Michael Shaik
Deepening the rift between the United States and Europe, the US government led by President George Bush is supporting Israel's plans to build a further 533 settlement homes in THE West Bank on top of the 1000 construction tenders Israel approved in late August.
Disregarding the opposition of its traditionally pro-Israeli allies, such as Britain and Germany, Washington has accepted Israel's claim that expanding its settlements in the West Bank is necessary to accommodate their "natural growth", a claim that the Palestinians and their supporters in the Israeli peace camp reject out of hand.
Today more Jews are leaving Israel than are choosing to take up the option of citizenship in the Jewish state and many West Bank settlements lie half-empty.
"This is all about redesigning Israel and moving the bulk of it eastwards on to the land on which the Palestinians want to build their state", said Dror Etkes of the Israeli NGO Settlement Watch, quoted in the August 24 British Guardian. "It is a continuation of a process that has been going on for 40 years."
Further straining relations between the US and its European allies are differences over the "separation barrier" that Israel is building through the West Bank. In June, the International Court of Justice ruled that Israel was entitled to build such a wall on the border with the West Bank but not through occupied Palestinian land. The ruling called upon Israel to cease construction of the wall, dismantle those parts of the wall that had already been built on Palestinian land and pay compensation to Palestinians whose lives had already been harmed by the wall.
Last month, the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution by 150 to six endorsing the ICJ ruling. All of the European Union member states voted in favour of the resolution with only the US, Israel, Australia, Micronesia, the Marshall Islands and Palau voting against it.
Washington's support for Israel's latest round of settlement expansion, in direct contravention of Israel's obligation to freeze settlement construction under the roadmap peace process, should prompt all those with an interest in an Israeli-Palestinian peace settlement to reconsider their approach to the problem.
In September, the UN General Assembly will be meeting to discuss how to respond to Israel's refusal to cease construction of the separation barrier. For more than a decade now, UN peace initiatives have been predicated upon the assumption that peace in the region can be achieved by adopting a strictly even-handed approach between Israel, as the occupying power, and the occupied Palestinian population.
This month Professor John Dugard, the UN Human Rights Special Rapporteur reported to the General Assembly that an apartheid regime now existed in the occupied territories that was "worse than the one that existed in South Africa".
Representatives of the Palestinian Authority will no doubt cite his report as proof that the UN's softly-softly approach is a manifest failure and that it is now time to place sanctions upon Israel.
Yet the PA itself should also consider its options in the light of current developments.
The West Bank is only twice the size of the ACT. With Israeli settlers already in possession of the best 55% of its land and 80% of its water diverted to the settlements and irrigation projects in Israel, Palestinian aspirations of ever realising viable a Palestinian state on what remains to them of the West Bank and the tiny Gaza Strip seem more and more like a pipedream.
Over the last year, several Palestinian leaders and their Israeli supporters have expressed the view that, should the settlements continue to expand, their only remaining option will be to work toward the formation of a multicultural democratic Jewish and Palestinian state.
In Australia's case, policymakers might consider the delicate nature of Australia's security and trade interests in the Middle East and whether positioning the country on the extreme right of the United Nations and in defiance of international law is in the national interest.
And the US?
"Don't worry about American pressure on Israel", Israeli President Ariel Sharon said to his foreign minister Shimon Peres in October 2001. "We, the Jewish people, control America, and the Americans know it."
His boast was certainly an exaggeration. The Jewish people are not as homogenous in their loyalties as Sharon likes to believe and the pro-Israel lobby in the US is not synonymous with US Jews but includes a coalition of interests, including its powerful arms industry and the Christian fundamentalist voters of its self-styled "Moral Majority" who believe that Jewish settlement in Palestine and the expulsion of its non-Jewish population are necessary pre-conditions for the second coming of Christ.
Even so, the Democratic presidential/vice-presidential ticket of John Kerry and John Edwards has endorsed the Bush administration's rejection of the ICJ ruling on Israel's separation barrier. While more than US$3 billion a year from Washington continues to subsidise the construction of new Israeli settlements, the world will have to accept that its only superpower remains the main obstacle to peace in the Middle East.
[Michael Shaik is a coordinator for the International Solidarity Movement and a member of Australians for Justice and Peace in Palestine.]
From Green Left Weekly, September 8, 2004.
Visit the Green Left Weekly home page.