U.S. Middle East peace efforts: Can rhetoric and policy match?

Commmentary by Omar Baddar, Digital Producer

This week "The Stream" produced a powerful episode on the efforts of peace advocates, particularly former combatants, to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through non-violent activism. Many discussed the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement, or BDS, which aims to pressure Israel into fulfilling its international obligations through a campaign of economic and diplomatic isolation. But the reason peace advocates are resorting to these creative efforts, namely the twenty-year failure of the U.S.-led diplomatic process, merits further discussion.

During his speech at the UN General Assembly last week, President Obama said that the U.S. was committed to “the belief that the Palestinian people have a right to live with security and dignity in their own sovereign state.” His Secretary of State John Kerry has targeted May of 2014 for a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians. A decade earlier, President George W. Bush set a goal of creating a viable Palestinian state by 2009. President Bill Clinton said the conflict could not be resolved without the creation of a “sovereign, viable Palestinian state,” and spent his entire presidency (particularly towards the end of his second term) trying to achieve that. How can this goal remain elusive when the world’s most powerful country is so committed to it? The answer is simple: U.S. rhetoric and positions do not match up with its actual policy.

The US-led “peace process” between Israelis and Palestinians began in the early 1990s, formally with the 1993 signing of the Oslo Accords. Oslo's framework allowed Israel to hold on to all of the territories it was established on in 1948 (comprising 78% of the land). It also mandated that Israel end its occupation of the Palestinian territories (the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem), the remaining 22% of the land which it illegally acquired in 1967, to allow for the creation of a small Palestinian state to live side-by-side with Israel.

Throughout the peace process in the 1990s, instead of ending the occupation of the Palestinian territories, Israel accelerated its expansion of settlements, or colonies, on Palestinian lands, doubling the number of Israeli settlers in the areas. In essence, the peace process failed because Israeli expansionism into the Palestinian territories, in contravention to international law, made the creation of a viable state nearly impossible. The most generous land offer Israel made to the Palestinians at the end of the peace process in 2000 fell short of being adequate, so much so that even Israel’s own Foreign Minister at the time said he would’ve rejected it had he been Palestinian.

Through periods of both peace and violence over the last couple of decades, Israeli settlement expansion in the Palestinian territories continued unabated. Israel’s settler population in the West Bank is now up to 600,000, leading many to wonder whether the extent of Israel’s infrastructural integration of large parts of the Palestinian territories into its state has permanently ended the possibility of a viable, independent Palestinian state emerging. Israeli settlement expansion is not only an impediment to the creation of a viable Palestinian state (and a comprehensive peace agreement, by extension); it is also illegal under international law.

The United States takes a very constructive position on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: It calls for an end to Israel’s occupation of the Palestinian territories, and every single U.S. president over the last three decades has been critical of Israel’s expansion of settlements on Palestinian lands. But if we look beyond rhetoric and positions, and go to actual policy, we see something a little different. Even though President Obama is opposed to settlements, his administration vetoed a recent U.N. resolution opposing settlements. And even though the U.S. opposes the occupation, it still supplies Israel with massive amounts of military aid which allows the occupation to continue. In essence, the U.S. opposes Israeli policies in the Palestinian territories, but provides the military aid and diplomatic cover that enable those very policies to continue. Indeed, no U.S. president since George H. W. Bush has attempted to apply any tangible pressure on Israel to end its settlement expansion.

What accounts for this disconnect between U.S. rhetoric and policy has been the subject of intense and elaborate debate (one that I wrote my Master’s thesis on, and which requires a whole separate article). But the existence of this glaring disconnect should be troubling to all Americans, especially when it perpetuates a conflict that the U.S. considers “vital” to resolve for its interests. In the UN General Assembly speech alluded to earlier, President Obama said the Palestinians were “understandably cynical that real progress will ever be made, and they’re frustrated by their families enduring the daily indignity of occupation.” What he left out was that the cynicism is partially driven by U.S. reluctance to back up its own policy positions with actions.

While non-violent activism on the ground in Israel and Palestine is certainly crucial to bringing an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, peace advocates in the United States have their own work cut out for them. Given the unique leverage the U.S. has over the parties, a campaign to make actual U.S. policy more consistent with U.S. policy positions can go a long way in resolving this decades-old conflict, and ensuring a better future not just for Israelis and Palestinians, but for Americans and, indeed, the entire world.