The PA’s support for international agendas shuns the Palestinian right of return

Ramona Wadi

The Palestinian Authority has not ceased to display where its compromised loyalties lie. With each public statement or declaration, it is evident that the PA is working for diplomatic conjectures and, as a result, against Palestinian freedom.

In a meeting in Ramallah with the Dutch representative to the occupied Palestinian territories, Palestinian Prime Minister Mohammad Shtayyeh urged for recognition of a Palestinian state “in order to save the two-state solution from collapse”.

In 2016, the Middle East Quartet had declared the two-state paradigm obsolete. Three years later, international consensus on an obsolete paradigm as the “only solution” shows no signs of abating. The PA has relentlessly promoted this contradiction, even though the only result it has generated so far is the facilitation of Israel’s colonial expansion.

Palestinians have not benefited from the international community’s misrepresentation of their colonised land. The two-state compromise does not decolonise. On the contrary, it allows cohesion for Israel and the international community; the latter hiding behind the veneer of “consensus” to extend its duplicitous role of aiding Israel and pretending to support Palestinian rights. As long as this pretence is not challenged politically, the PA rests assured it can extend its monopoly over Palestinian politics; that is, in the absence of political unity that derives its foundations from Palestinian resistance.

Meanwhile, the two-state hypothesis propaganda has ensured its survival away from the needs of the Palestinian people. It has trampled over Palestinian rights and silenced Palestinian demands, to the point that any diversion, however slight, is considered a threat to the international community’s diplomatic agenda. The tragedy in this spectacle is that the PA has completely aligned itself with protecting international interests. Hence recognition of a Palestinian state is no longer tied to prospects of Palestinian rights, but rather to the international community surviving its own debacle intact.

PA involvement in supporting the two-state compromise means that it is also promoting the illusion of conflict. This misrepresentation and mismanagement of all Zionist violations even prior to the establishment of Israel is what lies at the foundations of international and PA diplomacy.

Israel and Palestine,
Two-States Solution [Wikipedia]

All the Israeli violations which the PA speaks about, notably settlement expansion and Jerusalem have not propelled the international community into action to “save the two-state solution”. From the international community’s perspective, the priority now is to ensure the erasure of Palestinian political rights by continuing to rhetorically resuscitate the two-state hyperbole.

Recognition of a Palestinian state to save the diplomatic agenda is a blatant betrayal of Palestinian rights by the PA. Decades have pointed towards an intensifying dissonance between the international community’s plans and the Palestinian people. To preserve its existence, the PA has abandoned Palestinians; indeed, displaced them from the political process while abusing their existence to continue the farcical differentiation between US and international agendas.

As the absence of any form of a state becomes clearer, it is imperative to return to the earliest indications of Zionist colonisation and the forced displacement of the Palestinian people. The solution for Palestinians lies in the Palestinian right of return – precisely the issue which the US is fighting so hard to eliminate and which the international community diluted from the start through a weak resolution that preserved the Zionist project while shifting blame onto the colonised and dispossessed Palestinian population.

Why USAID Will Never Fund Palestinian Development Projects

TEHRAN (FNA)- It’s a huge mistake to assume that the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) will ever fund all its projects in the occupied West Bank and the besieged Gaza Strip as it doesn't want to help exercise of Palestinian self-determination and sovereignty.

The US administration has already made the decision to cut funding to the Palestinians, and Dave Harden, former USAID Mission Director and Managing Director of the Georgetown Strategy Group, has already confirmed that.

Harden says Washington plans to shut down USAID and that the US administration "demonstrates again a lack of nuance, sophistication, and appreciation for the complexity of the situation.”

Halting USAID projects in the West Bank and Gaza is another example of the end of the two-state solution. And President Donald Trump’s administration has already notified Congress of its decision to cut more than $200 million in bilateral aid to the Palestinians, following a review of the funding for projects in the West Bank and Gaza Strip.

This should surprise no one, as President Trump says he will never endorse the idea of Palestinian “self-determination.” He won’t make genuine efforts to kick-start peace talks either.

He has already abandoned US support for the two-state solution, as giving the Palestinians self-determination would necessarily imply that they can establish an independent state on Palestinian soil. On the other hand, even if he does the impossible and endorses the idea, he will surely switch his stand the moment he feels like it.

Indeed, Trump has a history of self-contradictions and flip-flops. Since his election, Trump has switched his stands on everything from his signature Palestinian aid to the ongoing war on Syria. He has a way to go to before he matches the sheer volume of self-disagreement that he racked up prior to his election – and the Palestinian issue is not an exception:

Initially, Trump took hardline positions on Israel, refusing to condemn the expansion of illegal settlements in Palestinian lands, and then he moved the US Embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem Al-Quds. Relocation of the embassy was controversial because both Israelis and Palestinians claim Jerusalem Al-Quds as their capital.

Trump now claims he wants to make peace in the long conflict the "ultimate deal." US administrations over the years have been stymied in similar goals. Peace talks have been at an impasse for several years. Both Trump and Netanyahu are eager to show an improved relationship following eight frosty years with the Obama presidency. But experts have also warned that Trump should be careful not to risk provoking Arab states, whom he needs as counterweight to Iran in Iraq and Syria.

The facts tell another story. The US is not an honest broker and has never sought to bring about peace in the Middle East, let alone in Palestine. The US supports Israel’s expansionist policies, including its illegal occupation and other violations of International Humanitarian Law. It supports Israel’s criminal policies financially, militarily, and diplomatically. The US also supports Saudi Arabia’s policies in the ongoing war on Yemen.

The Trump administration might state publically that it is opposed to Israel’s settlement policy and ostensibly “pressure” Tel Aviv to freeze colonization activities; yet it will never cut back financial or military aid to Israel, even if it defies International Law and continues settlement construction. That message is perfectly well understood by Tel Aviv, which continues its attacks on Gaza.

We can still remember vividly how both the US House of Representatives and the Senate passed resolutions openly declaring support for Israel’s war on Gaza, despite a constant stream of reports evidencing Israeli war crimes. On the same token the US reaffirms its “strong support for Israel in its battle with Hamas” - a war crime complicity under International Law.

When Israel waged a war to punish the defenseless civilian population of Gaza last year, its pilots flew US-made F-16 fighter-bombers and Apache helicopter gunships, dropping US-made bombs, including the use of banned munitions in violation of International Law.

US diplomatic support for Israeli crimes includes its use of the veto power in the UN Security Council. When Israel was waging a devastating war against the civilian population and infrastructure of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the US vetoed a cease-fire resolution. As Israel was waging war on Palestinian protesters last year, the US similarly delayed the passage of a resolution calling for an end to the violence.

Through its virtually unconditional support for Israel, the Trump administration had effectively blocked any steps to implement the two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The so-called peace process has for many decades consisted of US and Israeli rejection of Palestinian self-determination and blocking of any viable Palestinian state. This year and the next, Trump will make sure this will continue to be the case under his presidency.

Hence, those that have long been thinking of a two-state solution to the Palestinian issue are apparently needed to get sober to realize that this is not, and has never been, a viable option. The international community should eventually come to realize that Israeli violence, brutality, aggression, crimes and occupation never end through diplomacy and civilized dialogue. Israel and its backers only believe in the barbaric rule of the jungle, so the international community should at least for once look at this problem through a pragmatic view. And it seems that the US policies in support of Israel, specially under Donald Trump, are ironically forcing the genuine advocates of the Palestinians' rights into an age of sobriety.

Why Does the United States Give So Much Money to Israel?

The two countries just signed a new military-aid deal—the biggest pledge of its kind in American history. It have may seemed inevitable, but the record-setting moment is also rife with irony.

EMMA GREEN

U.S. and Israeli officials sign an unprecedented military-spending
deal in Washington, D.C., on September 14.

The United States and Israel have made it official: The two countries signed a new 10-year military-assistance deal on Wednesday, representing the single largest pledge of its kind in American history. The pact, laid out in a Memorandum of Understanding, will be worth $38 billion over the course of a decade, an increase of roughly 27 percent on the money pledged in the last agreement, which was signed in 2007. The diplomatic and military alliance between the two countries is longstanding: Even prior to this week, Israel was, according to the Congressional Research Service, “the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II.” In many ways, Wednesday’s deal seemed predestined.

Yet, it’s also ironic. Barack Obama has a notoriously cold relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—as my colleague Jeffrey Goldberg wrote in The Atlantic’s April cover story, “Obama has long believed that Netanyahu could bring about a two-state solution” to the Israel-Palestine conflict “that would protect Israel’s status as a Jewish-majority democracy, but is too fearful and politically paralyzed to do so.” Nonetheless, Obama will leave office having out-pledged all of his predecessors in military support to the country Netanyahu now runs.

Aid to Israel is among the only static issues of this U.S. election season. While the Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump has made somewhat mixed statements on the Israel-Palestine conflict, he has also made strongly worded promises to strengthen the relationship between the United States and Israel. For her part, the Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, has consistently touted her support for Israel, including during her time as secretary of state.

Voters, however, have more mixed views on this kind of support. While more than 60 percent of Americans were more sympathetic to Israel than the Palestinians in a 2016 Gallup poll, sympathies differed along partisan lines, with around half of Democrats being more sympathetic to Israelis versus nearly 80 percent of Republicans. In a separate Brookings poll, roughly half of Democrats who responded said Israel has too much influence on the United States government. Boycott, divest, and sanction movements, which call on organizations in the United States and abroad to cut their financial ties with Israel, have long been popular on college campuses, although somewhat marginal; this year, however, they got a boost from the Black Lives Matter movement, which included statements against Israel’s treatment of Palestinians in its recently released policy platform.

In general, young Americans are far less sympathetic toward Israel than their older peers: A 2014 Gallup poll found that only half of those aged 18 to 34 favored Israel in the Israel-Palestine conflict, “compared with 58 percent of 35- to 54-year-olds and 74 percent of those 55 and older.” Bernie Sanders, who was extremely popular among young people during the Democratic primary season, controversially criticized Israel, winning “applause and cheers” from the audience at one debate for saying, “If we pursue justice and peace, we are going to have to say that Netanyahu is not right all of the time.”

All of this creates an odd backdrop for a historic military-spending deal. No matter how bad the relationship between the two countries’ top leaders, no matter who gets elected to the White House, no matter how loudly some voters voice their opposition or how charged the underlying ideological debate: The United States has pragmatic reasons to keep providing large sums of money for Israel’s military.

There are straightforward explanations for why this particular deal got done. Politically, the spending package was partly a response to the nuclear deal that the United States and other world powers finalized with Iran in July of last year, and which Obama hailed as cutting off Iran’s pathway to nuclear weapons for more than a decade. Netanyahu was harshly critical of that agreement, which he called a “historic mistake” that would ease sanctions on Iran while leaving it with the ability to one day get the bomb. “Even with the deal in place, and taking the nuclear-weapon capability of Iran off the table at least for the next 10 to 15 years, there are still considerable destabilizing activities that Iranians are pursuing in the region that are not consistent with U.S. or Israeli interests or objectives,” said Melissa Dalton, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. The new money is an attempt to pacify Israeli concerns about continued threats from Iran, she added.

The money is also an attempt to satisfy congressional Republicans. The Obama administration reportedly asked Netanyahu to get Lindsey Graham, the head of the Senate foreign-affairs appropriations committee, to agree to the deal. After it was signed, though, Graham released a statement indicating that Congress would not necessarily adhere to the pre-determined funding levels. “I find it odd the [Memorandum] only allocates $500 million for missile defense starting in 2018,” he wrote, especially “given provocative Iranian behavior [and] improved Iranian missile technology.” While this may be the U.S.’s biggest-ever military-aid deal, the GOP has pushed for even greater spending.

Defenders of the deal would say it’s necessary. Dalton described the uptick in spending as a natural extension of the long-standing relationship between the United States and Israel, “as well as close ties between those countries and their peoples.” She described the “fraught neighborhood” surrounding Israel: war-torn Syria to the northeast, Hezbollah-influenced Lebanon to the north, and an Islamist insurgency in Egypt’s Sinai to the south, all of which help explain the historically high promise of $5 billion in missile funding over the next 10 years. As National Security Advisor Susan Rice said at the signing ceremony for the deal, “This MOU is not just good for Israel, it’s good for the United States. Our security is linked. When allies and partners like Israel are more secure, the United States is more secure.”

The deal also directs more money back toward the United States. It eliminates a provision in the previous aid agreement that allowed Israel to spend 26 percent of its Foreign Military Financing on weaponry and other resources produced within Israel, rather than in the United States—a provision intended to help Israel build its own defense industry. Now that Israel’s defense industry has developed, Dalton said, that money will go toward purchases benefitting the defense industry in the United States.

While the United States’s new Memorandum of Understanding with Israel is historic in its own right, it’s most remarkable in its apparent inevitability: It is a foreign-policy move seemingly immune to the electoral politics around it. “At the end of the day, we’re electing people to make judgments based on the information and the advice that the receive,” Dalton said. “One of the inputs to that process, certainly, is popular opinion. But I don’t think it should be the sole determinant of foreign policy.” In its own way, that’s a good explanation of why America’s aid to Israel is so big: Military spending does not go up or down in direct relationship to votes or even the news cycle. In this case, it was a record set as if it were on an unstoppable trend line.

EMMA GREEN is a staff writer at ​The Atlantic, where she covers politics, policy, and religion.