“We are witnessing the last vestiges of what has been known
as the Arab-Israeli conflict,”
Jared Kushner crowed in
The Wall Street Journal two months ago.
اضافة اعلان
He was surveying the results of the Abraham Accords, the
ersatz Middle East peace plan he helped negotiate under Donald Trump. At the
heart of his supreme self-assurance, and of the accords themselves, was the
deadly fiction that the Palestinians were so abject and defeated that Israel
could simply ignore their demands.
“One of the reasons the Arab-Israeli conflict persisted for
so long was the myth that it could be solved only after Israel and the
Palestinians resolved their differences,” wrote Kushner. “That was never true.
The Abraham Accords exposed the conflict as nothing more than a real-estate
dispute between Israelis and Palestinians that need not hold up Israel’s
relations with the broader Arab world.”
To circumvent that dispute, the United States set about
bribing other Arab and Muslim countries to normalize relations with Israel. The
United Arab Emirates got an enormous arms deal. Morocco got Trump to support
its annexation of the Western Sahara. Sudan got taken off America’s list of
state sponsors of terrorism.
But the explosion of fighting in Israel and Palestine in
recent days makes clear something that never should have been in doubt: justice
for the Palestinians is a precondition for peace. And one reason there has been
so little justice for the Palestinians is because of the foreign policy of the
United States.
“I don’t think that there’s any way that this occupation and
creeping annexation process could have gotten where it is today if the United
States had said no,” said Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of the liberal Zionist
group J-Street.
One can condemn Hamas and its rockets and still recognize
that this current conflagration began with Israeli overreach born of a sense of
impunity. A major flashpoint was the campaign led by Israeli settlers to evict
Palestinian families from their homes in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of
Sheikh Jarrah. There was also an Israeli (occupation forces) raid on the Al
Aqsa Mosque on the first night of Ramadan, not to prevent violence, but to cut
off its loudspeakers lest prayers drown out a speech by Israel’s president.
Palestinians fear, not without reason, that Israel is trying
to push them out of Jerusalem altogether. That, in turn, has let Hamas position
itself as Jerusalem’s protector. And Israel seems to consider its right to defend
itself from Hamas justification for causing obscene numbers of civilian
casualties. So much horror has been born of the delusion, on both the Israeli
and American right, that when it comes to the Palestinians, the status quo is
sustainable.
To be fair, this is not something that began with Trump:
America has been enabling Israel’s occupation and settlement project for
decades. Tareq Baconi, a Ramallah-based senior analyst for the International
Crisis Group, argued that in some ways the Trump administration was simply more
honest than its predecessors about its disregard for the Palestinians. All the
same, he said, Trump’s foreign policy allowed “the Israeli right-wing to
understand that they can get away with their most extreme policies.”
Before Trump, it was common to say that the occupation would
eventually force Israel to choose between being a Jewish state and a democratic
one. During the Trump years, Israel’s choice became undeniable.
Israel’s 2018 “nation-state law” enshrined “Jewish
settlement as a national value” and undermined the legal equality of Israel’s
Arab citizens. As settlements expanded, a two-state solution turned from a
distant dream into a fantasy.
The death of a two-state framework, Baconi said, has
strengthened a sense of common destiny between Palestinians in the occupied
territories and Arab-Israelis, or, as many refer to themselves, Palestinian
citizens of Israel. “The more that we see Israel-Palestine as a one-state
reality, where Jews have full rights and Palestinians have different tiers of
rights,” the more Palestinians will “understand their struggle as a shared
struggle,” he said.
A unique and harrowing aspect of the violence now shaking
the region has been the intercommunal clashes between Jews and Palestinians
within Israel proper. In Lod, at least four synagogues and a religious school
were burned. “Jewish mobs were seen roaming the streets of Tiberias and Haifa
looking for Arabs to assault,” reported The Times of Israel.
“I’ve lived here for a long time; I’ve never seen it this
bad,” Diana Buttu, a former lawyer for the Palestine Liberation Organization,
told me by phone from Haifa.
All this mayhem is overdetermined; nearly every iniquity in
the region has an impossibly complicated prehistory. But the United States has
underwritten both Palestinian subjugation and the growing power of Jewish
ethnonationalism. It’s not enough for Joe Biden to be a little bit better than
Trump or to try to restart a spectral “peace process.” If Israel can no longer
afford to ignore the demands of the Palestinians, neither can we.
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