Who Rules the World? (20 page)

The agreement was pretty promising, but almost immediately Bush undermined it. He withdrew the offer of the light-water reactor and initiated programs to compel banks to stop handling any North Korean transactions, even perfectly legal ones.
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The North Koreans reacted by picking up their nuclear weapons program. And that’s the way it’s been going.

The pattern is well-known. You can read it in straight, mainstream American scholarship. What they say is: it’s a pretty crazy regime, but it’s also following a kind of tit-for-tat policy. You make a hostile gesture, and we’ll respond with some crazy gesture of our own. You make an accommodating gesture, and we’ll reciprocate in some way.

Lately, for instance, there have been South Korean–U.S. military exercises on the Korean peninsula which from North Korea’s point of view have got to look threatening. We’d think they were threatening if they were going on, aimed at us, in Canada. In the course of these exercises, the most advanced bombers in history, stealth B-2s and B-52s, carried out simulated nuclear bombing attacks right on North Korea’s borders.
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This surely set off alarm bells from the past. The North Koreans remember something from the past, so they’re reacting in a very aggressive, extreme way. Well, what generally comes to the West from all this is how crazy and how awful the North Korean leaders are. Yes, they are—but that’s hardly the whole story, and this is the way the world is going.

It’s not that there are no alternatives. The alternatives just aren’t being taken. That’s dangerous. So if you ask what the world is going to look like, it’s not a pretty picture. Unless people do something about it. We always can.

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Israel-Palestine: The Real Options

On July 13, 2013, former Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin issued a dire warning to the government of Israel: either it would reach some kind of two-state settlement or there would be a “shift to a nearly inevitable outcome of the one remaining reality—a state ‘from the sea to the river.’” The near-inevitable outcome, “one state for two nations,” will pose “an immediate existential threat of the erasure of the identity of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state,” which would soon have a Palestinian-Arab majority.
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On similar grounds, in Britain’s leading journal of international affairs two prominent Middle East specialists, Clive Jones and Beverly Milton-Edwards, write that “if Israel wishes to be both Jewish and democratic,” it must embrace “the two-state solution.”
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It is easy to cite many other examples, but unnecessary, because it is assumed almost universally that there are two options for mandatory Palestine: either two states—Palestinian and Jewish-democratic—or one state “from the sea to the river.” Israeli commentators express concern about the “demographic problem”: too many Palestinians in a Jewish state. Many Palestinians and their advocates support the “one-state solution,” anticipating a civil-rights, anti-apartheid struggle that will lead to secular democracy. Other analysts also consistently pose the options in similar terms.

This analysis is almost universal, but crucially flawed. There is a third option—namely, the option that Israel is pursuing with constant U.S. support—and this third option is the only realistic alternative to the two-state settlement.

It makes sense, in my opinion, to contemplate a future binational secular democracy in the former Palestine, from the sea to the river. For what it’s worth, that is what I have advocated for seventy years. But I stress “advocated.” Advocacy, as distinct from mere proposal, requires sketching a path from here to there. The forms of true advocacy have changed with shifting circumstances. Since the mid-1970s, when Palestinian national rights became a salient issue, the only plausible form of advocacy has been as a staged process beginning with a two-state settlement. No other path has been suggested that has even a remote chance of success. Proposing a binational (“one state”) settlement without moving on to advocacy in effect provides support for the third option, the realistic one taking shape before our eyes. Israel is systematically extending plans that were sketched and initiated shortly after the 1967 war, and institutionalized more fully with the accession to power of Menachem Begin’s Likud party a decade later.

The first step was to create what Yonatan Mendel has called “a disturbing new city” still named “Jerusalem” but extending far beyond historic Jerusalem, incorporating dozens of Palestinian villages and surrounding lands, and now designated as a Jewish city and the capital of Israel.
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All of this is in direct violation of explicit Security Council orders. A corridor to the east of this new Greater Jerusalem incorporates the town of Ma’aleh Adumim (established in the 1970s but built primarily after the 1993 Oslo Accords), with lands reaching virtually to Jericho, thus effectively bisecting the West Bank. Corridors to the north incorporating the settler towns of Ariel and Kedumim further divide what is to remain under some degree of Palestinian control.
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Meanwhile, Israel is incorporating the territory on the Israeli side of the illegal “separation wall” (in reality an annexation wall), taking arable land and water resources and many villages, strangling the town of Qalqilya, and separating Palestinian villagers from their fields. In what Israel calls “the seam” between the wall and the border, close to 10 percent of the West Bank, anyone is permitted to enter—except Palestinians. Those who live in the region have to go through an intricate bureaucratic procedure to gain temporary entry. Exiting—for example, in order to receive medical care—is hampered in the same way. The result, predictably, has been severe disruption of Palestinian lives and, according to UN reports, a decrease of more than 80 percent in the number of farmers who routinely cultivate their lands and a decline of 60 percent in the total yield of olive orchards, among other harmful effects.
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The pretext for the wall was security, but that means security for illegal Jewish settlers; about 85 percent of the wall runs through the occupied West Bank.
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Israel is also taking over the Jordan Valley, thus fully imprisoning the cantons that remain. Huge infrastructure projects link settlers to Israel’s urban centers, ensuring that they will see no Palestinians. Following a traditional neocolonial model, a modern center remains for Palestinian elites in Ramallah, while the remainder of the population mostly languishes.

To complete the separation of Greater Jerusalem from remaining Palestinian cantons, Israel would have to take over the E1 region. So far that action has been barred by Washington, and Israel has been compelled to resort to subterfuges, like building a police station there. Obama is the first U.S. president to have imposed no limits on Israeli actions. It remains to be seen whether he will permit Israel to take over E1—perhaps with expressions of discontent and a diplomatic wink to make it clear that these are not seriously intended.

There are regular expulsions of Palestinians. In the Jordan Valley alone, the population has been reduced from three hundred thousand in 1967 to sixty thousand today, and similar processes are under way elsewhere.
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Following policies that go back a century, each action is limited in scope so as not to arouse too much international attention, but they have a cumulative effect and intent that are quite clear.

Furthermore, ever since the Oslo Accords declared that Gaza and the West Bank are an indivisible territorial unity, the U.S.–Israeli duo have been committed to separating the two regions. One significant effect is to ensure that any limited Palestinian entity will have no access to the outside world.

In the areas that Israel is taking over, the Palestinian population is small and scattered and is being reduced further by regular expulsions. The result will be a Greater Israel with a substantial Jewish majority. Under this third option, there will be no “demographic problem” and no civil-rights or anti-apartheid struggle—nothing more than what already exists within Israel’s recognized borders, where the mantra “Jewish and democratic” is regularly intoned for the benefit of those who choose to believe, oblivious to the inherent contradiction, which is far more than merely symbolic.

Unless achieved in stages, the one-state option will prove to be an illusion. It has no international support, and there is no reason why Israel and its U.S. sponsor would accept it.

The question, often raised, of whether the hawkish prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu would accept a “Palestinian state” is misleading. In fact, his administration was the first to countenance this possibility when it came into office in 1996, following those of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres, which rejected it. Netanyahu’s director of communications and policy planning, David Bar-Illan, explained that some areas would be left to Palestinians, and if they wanted to call them “a state,” Israel would not object—or they could call them “fried chicken.”
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His response reflects the operative attitude of the U.S.-Israeli coalition to Palestinian rights.

The United States and Israel call for negotiations without preconditions. Commentary in both countries and elsewhere in the West typically claims that the Palestinians are imposing such preconditions and so hampering the “peace process.” In reality, it is the United States and Israel that insist upon crucial preconditions. The first is that negotiations must be mediated by the United States, whereas any authentic negotiations would, of course, have to be in the hands of some neutral state with a degree of international respect. The second precondition is that illegal settlement expansion must be allowed to continue, as has happened without a break during the twenty years following the Oslo Accords.

In the early years of the occupation the United States joined the world in regarding the settlements as illegal, as confirmed by the UN Security Council and the International Court of Justice. Since the Reagan years, their status has been downgraded to “a barrier to peace.” Obama has weakened the designation further, to “not helpful to peace.”
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Obama’s extreme rejectionism did arouse some attention in February 2011, when he vetoed a Security Council resolution supporting official U.S. policy, which calls for the ending of settlement expansion.
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As long as these preconditions remain in force, diplomacy is likely to remain at a standstill. With brief and rare exceptions, that has been true since January 1976, when the United States vetoed a Security Council resolution, brought by Egypt, Jordan, and Syria, calling for a two-state settlement on the internationally recognized border, the Green Line, with guarantees for the security of all states within acknowledged and stable borders.
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That is essentially the international consensus that is by now universal, with the two usual exceptions. The consensus has been modified to include “minor and mutual adjustments” on the Green Line, to borrow official U.S. wording before it had broken with the rest of the world.
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The same is true of any negotiations that may take place in Washington or take place elsewhere overseen by Washington. Given these preconditions, little can be achieved other than letting Israel carry forward its project of taking over whatever it finds valuable in the West Bank and the Syrian Golan Heights, annexed in violation of Security Council orders, while maintaining the siege of Gaza. One can, of course, hope for better, but it is hard to be optimistic.

Europe could play a role in advancing the world’s aspirations for a peaceful diplomatic settlement if it were willing to pursue an independent path. The European Union decision to exclude West Bank settlements from any future deals with Israel might be a step in this direction. U.S. policies are also not graven in stone, though they have deep strategic, economic, and cultural roots. In the absence of such changes, there is every reason to expect that the picture from the river to the sea will conform to the third option. Palestinian rights and aspirations will be shelved, temporarily at least.

If the Israel-Palestine conflict is not resolved, a regional peace settlement is highly unlikely. That failure has far broader implications—in particular for what U.S. media call “the gravest threat to world peace”: Iran’s nuclear programs. The implications become clearer when we look at the most obvious ways to deal with the alleged threat and their fate. It is useful, first, to consider a few preliminary questions: Who regards the threat as being of such cosmic significance? And what is the perceived threat?

The Iran “threat” is overwhelmingly a Western obsession; the non-aligned countries—most of the world—have vigorously supported Iran’s right, as a signer of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT), to enrich uranium.
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In Western discourse, it is commonly claimed that the Arabs support the U.S. position regarding Iran, but the reference is to Arab dictators, not the general population. Also standard is reference to “the standoff between the international community and Iran,” to quote from the current scholarly literature. Here the phrase “international community” refers to the United States and whoever happens to go along with it—in this case, a small minority of the international community, but many more if political stands are weighted by power.

What then is the perceived threat? An authoritative answer is given by U.S. intelligence and the Pentagon in their regular reviews of global security. They conclude that Iran is not a military threat. It has low military expenditures even by the standards of the region and limited capacity to deploy force. Its strategic doctrine is defensive, designed to resist attack. The intelligence community reports no evidence that Iran is developing nuclear weapons, but if it is, they conclude, that would be part of Iran’s deterrent strategy.

It is hard to think of a country in the world that needs a deterrent more than Iran. It has been tormented by the West without respite ever since its parliamentary regime was overthrown by a U.S.-British military coup in 1953, first under the harsh and brutal regime of the shah, then under murderous attack by Saddam Hussein with Western support.
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It was largely U.S. intervention that induced Iran to capitulate in its war with Iraq, and shortly after, President George H. W. Bush invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for training in advanced weapons production, an extraordinary threat to Iran.
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