The peace process was never intended to give Palestinians a state — true
confessions from Council on Foreign Relations
Steven Cook of
the Council on Foreign Relations has an article at Foreign
Policy saying that the U.S. should phase out aid to Israel and “end the special
relationship” because the peace process has attained its real objective: Israel
is established as a secure country with a standard of living rivaling the UK
and France, and no real military threat.
The piece is
shocking because it strips the mask from the peace process, saying just what
Edward Said, Rashid Khalidi, and Ali Abunimah said decades ago, it was intended
to fail, never producing Palestinian sovereignty.
Cook says the U.S.’s “core interest” in The Middle East was always Israel’s “security,” so the peace process needed to spin
its wheels forever.
U.S. policymakers
have long believed that a two-state solution was the best way to ensure
Israel’s security, and U.S. presidents from Bill Clinton to Barack Obama to
Donald Trump himself has repeatedly pursued that goal. But the most
unacknowledged fact about the two-state impasse—and perhaps the reason
Washington hasn’t summoned the political will to overcome it—is that it has
helped the United States achieve one [of] its core interests in the region:
helping to ensure Israeli security….
The “tragedy” for
Palestinians are that they trusted the U.S. and “misread” core U.S. interests,
Cook explains, but now they have to live forever in Bantustans.
The tragedy in
all this is the permanent dispossession of the Palestinians, who will no doubt
be outraged at Washington’s washing its hands of the conflict, sealing their
fate to live forever under the boot of the IDF or shoved into Bantustans. They
would be justified in their anger. They have also misread core U.S. interests
in the Middle East, which really are not concerned with the Palestinians, who,
against all evidence, trusted the United States.
The next time
anyone talks about Arabs not really meaning what they say or conducting foreign a policy like a soukh, remind them that Even a Council on Foreign Relations
pundit says the U.S. lied to Palestinians for 25 years of false promises.
The obvious question that arises is Why
destroying Palestinian human rights is a core U.S. interest– indeed, why
Zionism is a core U.S. interest — and yes the extent to which this reflects the
power of the Israel lobby in our politics. For a generation, we have had White
House mediators who were labeled “Israel’s lawyer,” or who told
synagogue audiences “We need to be advocates for Israel,” or who went right
from their
postings in the Obama White House to Israel advocacy jobs (both Dan Shapiro
and Tamara Cofman Wittes).
None of these
jokers ever had any real interest in giving Palestinians any sovereignty.
And how much of
the instability of Israel’s neighbors have also served that “core” interest?
Israel is sitting pretty, Cook says, because “Iraq and Syria are in a
shambles.” Lebanon is crumbling.
We should be grateful
to Cook for saying that the point of the peace process was to fail; and that
failure was all for Israel’s interest.
The Israel Policy Forum issued
a similar insight when Netanyahu began threatening to annex the West Bank last year.
To [annex] will
exacerbate partisan divisions on Israel in the United States, ultimately erode
Israel’s security, give an unnecessary and clear victory to the BDS movement,
and upend decades of carefully calibrated policy on Israel.
“[D]ecades of
carefully calibrated policy on Israel” means that Zionists liberal or otherwise
give lip service to a Palestinian state but ultimately have no problem with the
occupation because the status quo is good for Israel– It is a wealthy
democracy-for-Jews– and apartheid for Palestinians is tragic but not worth
losing sleepover.
And when a real effort arises to make
Israel pays a price for its human rights violations, liberal Zionists will jump to label BDS as antisemitic.
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