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MIDEAST: U.S. Peace Plans Limp Toward Bethlehem

Ellen Massey

WASHINGTON, Jun 5 2007 (IPS) - Four decades ago, as the United States was embroiled in a cold war battle in Southeast Asia, Israel fought its Arab neighbours in a six-day clash that helped shape the modern Middle East.

In the 40 years since, the relationship between the U.S. and Israel has evolved through the end of the Cold War, a string of Arab-Israeli wars and skirmishes, two intifadas and the war on terror, into the intricate connection that exists today.

At the time of the 1967 war, the U.S. was preoccupied with the “Americanisation” of Vietnam. Israel’s struggle for recognition and its conflict with Egypt, Jordan and Syria was little more than a blip on Washington’s radar.

An appeal by Israeli diplomats to the United States for help when Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser closed the Straits of Tiran toward the end of May 1967 was met with U.S. neutrality. When Israel preemptively bombarded Egypt’s Soviet-supplied air force from above on the first day of the war, they used French fighter-bombers. But that was one of the few times that Israel would use weapons made outside of the United States.

Following the six-day war, the United States became Israel’s chief funder and its strategic ally. “Before 1967, the American Jewish community wasn’t really interested in what was happening in Israel,” M.J. Rosenberg, director of policy analysis at the Israel Policy Forum, told IPS.

But with its resounding win and territorial expansion – Israel had acquired the Sinai Peninsula, the Golan Heights, Gaza and the West Bank and East Jerusalem, nearly three times its original land mass – Israel established the inevitability of the Jewish state and the American Jewish population sat up and took notice.

Unlike the subset of the American Jewish population, people in the U.S. were not really tuned in to what was happening in the Middle East. According to a Gallup poll in the first three days of the six-day war, half of U.S. citizens either didn’t take a side in the conflict or didn’t know enough to pick a side.

Yet Washington’s chosen side quickly became evident. U.S. aid to Israel increased exponentially after the war, from 24 million dollars in 1967 to 634 million dollars in 1971. Another hike in aid came after 1973 and the Yom Kippur War when Egypt and Syria launched a surprise attack in an attempt to regain some of the territory lost in 1967.

The 16-day battle showed Israel and the United States that the Jewish state was not invincible. The U.S rushed to resupply the country with arms and cash and in the aftermath of the fighting the two countries agreed to higher levels of weapons stockpiles to guard against future aggressions.

Around this time another important factor was playing into the U.S. role in the region: the Cold War. The Middle East was caught, both geographically and politically, between the power plays of Russia and the United States.

“People got forced onto the sides they were on because of this superpower battle,” said James Zogby, president and cofounder of the Arab American Institute, a political lobby group.

Both sides lost sight of the unique conditions of the different regions where their influence was at work. Complex regional issues were boiled down to who was in which sphere of influence and “Israel was our guy,” Zogby told IPS.

In the U.S., powerful American Jewish lobbies emerged that organised significant voices and significant donors. Their influence made many politicians think twice about pushing too hard for certain outcomes. “The American Jewish community has been very wary of the peace process,” Rosenberg said.

Nevertheless, the U.S. has been a key player in the peace process for the past 30 years. In 1977, newly inaugurated President Jimmy Carter moved to reinvigorate the peace process between Israel and its Arab neighbours. He orchestrated the Camp David Accords, signed by Egyptian President Anwar Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin, which set the stage for the 1979 Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty returning the Sinai Peninsula to Egypt’s control and normalising relations between Egypt and Israel.

The U.S. also committed billions of dollars to both the Egyptian and Israeli governments as a part of the agreements.

Since 1979, Israel has been the single largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid. This year, for the first time, U.S. civilian aid to Israel was zeroed out and the military aid package increased from 1.8 billion dollars to 2.4 billion dollars. The gradual phasing out of non-military grants was part of a programme initiated under Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to establish Israel’s fiscal independence.

In the weeks following the 1967 war, Israel was quick to set up “temporary” military outposts in its newly acquired territory. But it wasn’t long before Israeli civilians began to move into those outposts, and what had once been called a temporary station became the expanding settlements that populate the West Bank and Golan heights today.

There are approximately 180,000 Israelis living in the annexed areas of East Jerusalem and 16,000 settlers live in the Golan Heights. In the West Bank, the settlements that house 250,000 Israelis effectively control approximately 40 percent of the land area in the territory, in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention which prohibits an occupying power from settling its own population in the territory it holds.

Every U.S. administration since Lyndon Johnson’s has officially opposed the Israeli settlements, but in 2004 President George Bush promised then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon that large Israeli population centres in the West Bank would remain in Israel in any future negotiations.

After 20 years of occupation, the first intifada in 1987 introduced Hamas to the equation in the Israel-Palestine conflict. The Palestine Liberation Organisation’s often violent uprising against Israeli rule brought the conflict back into the world’s spotlight but also earned it the designation as a terrorist group by Israel, the United States, Japan and the European Union.

With that label, the United States and Israel gave a key place to Hamas in the politics of the region. “U.S. policy has had a profound impact on the evolution of Palestinian politics,” Jim Fine, a long-time Middle East expert at the Friends Committee on National Legislation, told IPS.

“The failure to bring either Camp David or [the Oslo Accords] to the creation of a Palestinian State has convinced many Palestinians that the Fatah approach won’t work and caused them to turn to Islamists to provide and alternative,” he said.

Despite the efforts of some U.S. presidents to bring a resolution to the enduring Arab-Israeli conflict, those efforts always seem to fall victim to internal politics.

“Domestic pressure has altered the decision of many presidents,” Zogby said, citing a letter signed by nearly 80 senators telling President Clinton to back off in his efforts to pressure then Israeli Prime Benjamin Netanyahu to engage in peace talks.

More recently, the report of the Iraq Study Group at the end of last year cited renewed U.S. engagement in the Israel-Palestine issue as a key step in stabilising the region. The report’s recommendations were quickly dismissed by the Bush administration.

Six months later, as violence continues to grip Iraq, those recommendations have returned to the foreign policy table – all of them, that is, except the recommendation to reengage the peace process, which is explicitly missing from recent legislation introduced in Congress to implement the Iraq Study Group report.

Though the political will to engage both Israel and the Palestinians seems to be lacking in Congress, there is consensus among the American Jewish and American Arab communities about what a peace settlement should look like and that Washington must be involved.

According to a survey released this week by Americans for Peace Now and the Arab American Institute, there is nearly unanimous support for a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in these two U.S. communities and a similar level of agreement that such an accord will help the U.S. achieve its broader strategic interests in the region.

“Now there has to be a political voice that is as big as the numbers,” Zogby told IPS.