MARIÂNGELA BERQUÓ enfoca a Geopolítica: Thou Shalt not Oppress

It was no secret, but now it’s official: the Trump administration decided to go around the Palestinians to forge normalisation agreements last year between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain, Robert O’Brien, national security adviser to former President Donald Trump, admitted the Trump administration sought to build “political capital” with Israel first by moving the US embassy to Jerusalem and recognising Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights.

“We couldn’t allow the Palestinians to stand as a roadblock to a broader Middle East peace,” O’Brien said, describing for the first time since leaving office the strategy behind Trump’s diplomatic moves.

“So we went to our friends and partners and allies and we built political capital. And one way we built political capital in Israel was by moving the embassy to Jerusalem, one way we did it was by recognising the Golan Heights, as Israeli territory,” O’Brien said.

Former President Trump forged normalisation agreements called the “Abraham Accords” between Israel, the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain in September 2020. Additional agreements were reached to include Morocco in December and Sudan in January.

Trump had announced in 2017 the US would move its embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and recognise Jerusalem as the capital of Israel. The move was celebrated in Israel but widely condemned elsewhere as detrimental to internationally supported Palestinian interests.

Trump unilaterally recognised Israel sovereignity over the Golan in 2019, contravening international law. Israel had seized the territory from Syria in the Six Day War of 1967.

“These were facts that were never going to change on the ground. Jerusalem was never going to change being the capital of Israel. Israel was never going to give the Golan Heights back to Assad or any other regime in Syria,” O’Brien said.

“We did the same thing. We built political capital with Bahrain, with Morocco with the UAE by letting them know that we would stand with them, by getting out of” the Iran nuclear deal “which was a serious threat to the region”, O’Brien said.

The 2015 United Nations-backed Iran agreement was “providing the Iranian regime with so much money, so many funds, to export their revolutionary ideology,” O’Brien said.

Trump unilaterally withdrew In 2018 from the Iran nuclear agreement which had been negotiated by his predecessor President Barack Obama. Now, President Biden is moving to open negotiations with Iran to revive the agreement.

We then took that capital and used it to bring the parties together and to see if we could bring them to some sort of accord, which we did,” O’Brien said.

O’Brien’s remarks came during a panel discussion hosted by the US Institute for Peace in Washington that included President Joe Biden’s National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan.

Other Arab states are likely to join the Abraham Accords as they see economic benefits and the new relations should allow the US to draw down some its military forces in the region, O’Brien said.

Among the benefits, O’Brien said the accords should allow Israeli entrepreneurs to raise capital from Arab sovereign wealth funds.

“It boxes China out of Israel’s tech sector to some extent, which is something I looked at very carefully,” O’Brien said.

Biden adviser Sullivan said the new administration intends to build on the Abraham Accords. The new president is “thinking about how we make sure that the seeds that have been planted actually grow into the kind of full cooperation” that has been promised, he said.

Separately, Secretary of State Antony Blinken had told the US Senate on January 19 the Biden administration would be taking a close look at the incentives Trump had offered the UAE and Bahrain to enter the accords.

O’Brien said he still hoped for a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians and suggested other Arab states like Saudi Arabia would join in future.

“We weren’t able to get the Palestinians. I wish we had been. But there are a number of carrots and sticks that’ll bring them to the table,” O’Brien said, adding that he thinks European nations will help when they “see the success” of the Abraham Accords.

Daily life under Occupation

Will the European Union help as apartheid state to get away with ethnic cleansing?

“A Regime of Jewish Supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is Apartheid,” was the title of a January 12 report by the Israeli rights group B’Tselem – an Israeli human rights advocacy organization. No matter how one is to interpret B’Tselem’s findings, the report is earth-shattering. The official Israeli response merely confirmed what B’Tselem has stated in no uncertain terms.

Those of us who repeatedly claimed that Israel is not democratic, governed by an apartheid regime and systematically discriminates against its ethnic and racial minorities, in favor of the country’s Jewish majority, purportedly have nothing to learn from B’Tselem’s declaration. Thus, it may seem that the report, which highlighted racial discrimination in four major areas – land, citizenship, freedom of movement and political participation – merely restated the obvious. In actuality, it went much further.

B’Tselem is a credible Israeli human rights organization. However, like other Israeli rights groups, it rarely went far enough in challenging the Israeli state’s basic definition of itself as a democratic state. Yes, on numerous occasions it rightly accused the Israeli government and military of undemocratic practices, rampant human rights violations and so on. But to demolish the very raison d’etre, the basic premise that gives Israel its legitimacy in the eyes of its Jewish citizens, and many more around the world, is a whole different story.

“B’Tselem rejects the perception of Israel as a democracy (inside the Green Line) that simultaneously upholds a temporary military occupation (beyond it),” the Israeli rights group concluded based on the fact that the “bar for defining the Israeli regime as an apartheid regime has been met after considering the accumulation of policies and laws that Israel devised to entrench its control over Palestinians.”

Let’s be clear on what this actually means. Israel’s leading human rights organization was not arguing that Israel was turning into an apartheid state or that it was acting contrary to the spirit of democracy or that Israel is an undemocratic apartheid regime only within the geographic confines of the occupied Palestinian territories. None of this. According to B’tselem, which has for decades diligently documented numerous facets of Israeli government practices in the realm of politics, military, land-ownership, water distribution, health, education, and much more, Israel is, now, wholly an apartheid, undemocratic regime.

B’Tselem’s assessment is most welcomed, not as a belated admission of a self-evident reality but as an important step that could allow both Israelis and Palestinians to establish a common narrative on their relationship, political position and collective action in order to dismantle this Israeli apartheid.

Relatively, Israeli groups that criticize their own government have historically been allowed much larger margins than Palestinian groups that have done the same thing. However, this is no longer the case.

Palestinian freedom of speech has always been so limited and the mere criticism of the Israeli occupation has led to extreme measures, including beatings, arrests, and even assassinations. In 2002, a government-funded organization, NGO Monitor, was established precisely to monitor and control Palestinian human rights organizations in the occupied territories, including Addameer, al-Mezan Center, al-Haq, PCHR among others. The Israeli army raid on the Ramallah-based offices of the Palestinian human rights group Addameer in September 2019 was one of many such violent examples.

However, Israeli government actions of recent years are pointing to an unmistakable paradigm shift where Israeli civil society organizations are increasingly perceived to be the enemy, targeted in myriad ways, including defamation, financial restrictions and severing of access to the Israeli public.

The latter point was put on full display on January 17, when Israeli Education Minister, Yoav Galant, tweeted that he had instructed his ministry to “prevent the entry of organizations calling Israel ‘an apartheid state’ or demeaning Israeli soldiers, from lecturing at schools”.

Oddly, Galant demonstrated B’Tselem’s point, where the group challenged Israel’s very claim to democracy and freedom of expression, by curtailing Israeli human rights workers, intellectuals and educators’ own right to express dissent and to challenge the government’s political line. Simply stated, Galant’s decision is a functional definition of totalitarianism at work.

B’Tselem did not back down. To the contrary, the group expressed its determination “to keep with its mission of documenting reality,” and making its “findings publicly known to the Israeli public, and worldwide”. It went even further as B’Tselem director Hagai El-Ad met with hundreds of Israeli students on January 18 to discuss the inconsistency between military occupation and the respect for human rights. Following the meeting, El-Ad tweeted “The @btselem lecture did take place this morning. The Israeli government will have to contend with us until the apartheid regime ends.”

The B’Tselem-Galant episode is not an isolated spat, but one out of many such examples, which demonstrate that the Israeli government is turning into a police state against, not only the Palestinian indigenous population, but its own Jewish citizens.

Indeed, the decision by the Israeli Ministry of Education is rooted in a previous law that dates back to July 2018, which was dubbed the “Breaking the Silence law”. Breaking the Silence is an Israeli civil society organization of army veterans who became vocal in their criticism of the Israeli occupation, and who have taken it upon themselves to educate the Israeli public on the immorality and illegality of Israel’s military practices in occupied Palestine. To silence the soldiers, former Israeli Education Minister Naftali Bennett ordered schools to bar these conscientious objectors from gaining access and directly speaking to students.

The latest government’s decision, taken by Galant, has merely widened the definition, thus expanding the restrictions imposed on Israelis who refuse to toe the government’s line.

For years, a persisting argument within the Palestine-Israel discourse contended that, while Israel is not a perfect democracy, it is, nonetheless, a ‘democracy for Jews’. Though true democracies must be founded on equality and inclusiveness, the latter maxim gave some credibility to the argument that Israel can still strike the balance between being nominally democratic while remaining exclusively Jewish.

That shaky argument is now falling apart. Even in the eyes of many Israeli Jews, the Israeli government no longer possesses any democratic ideals. Indeed, as B’Tselem has succinctly worded it, Israel is a regime of Jewish supremacy “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea.”

Daily life under Occupation

That said, the world is exhaling following the end of the vicious incompetence and corruption of Donald Trump’s presidency. Journalists and political commentators applauded the inaugural address delivered by President Joe Biden, and expressed varying levels of hope about what is called a “return to normalcy” in US public policy. Meanwhile, we wonder whether the Biden administration will finally end US complicity in and support to the Israeli apartheid regime.

As I said above, B’Tselem disputes the popular narrative about Israel being a democracy. Instead, I repeat, the position paper makes the following assertion: “One organising [sic.] principle lies at the base of a wide array of Israeli policies: advancing and perpetuating the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians.”

The B’Tselem position paper does not stand alone. In June 2020, Yesh Din, yet another Israeli human rights organization, issued a legal opinion that concluded that the Israeli regime is committing the crime of apartheid in the West Bank against Palestinians. Although the Yesh Din legal opinion (which cites international law as its controlling authority) limits its apartheid indictment to the West Bank, the B’Tselem position paper makes the more sweeping indictment that Israel exists as one apartheid regime “from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea,” an area that includes the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip.

We agree that Israel is an apartheid regime. One of us (Raouf Halaby) is a Palestinian-American who was born in Jerusalem; in 1959 his family was forced from their home by Jewish persecution. One of us (Lauri Umansky) is ancestrally Jewish. One of us (Wendell Griffen), who is ancestrally African American, was born during (and vividly recalls what life was like during) the last years of Jim Crow segregation in the United States. One of us (Allan Boesak) is a native of South Africa who was a leading opponent to the apartheid regime of South Africa.

We each, and separately, have first-hand knowledge about the political, social, and legal oppression perpetrated by the Israeli regime against Palestinians. That first-hand knowledge is the foundation for our agreement with the B’tselem position paper. Contrary to the popular narrative mouthed by US politicians and media pundits, Israel is an apartheid regime, not a democracy. The Yesh Din legal opinion provides a clear explanation for this conclusion based on universally accepted principles of international law.

The Israeli apartheid regime is subsidized, politically and economically, by US tax dollars, US corporations, and by US-based charitable organizations. A 2015 article reported that the US government has provided $139 billion in direct assistance to Israel since 1949. The article also mentions how US taxpayers receive favorable tax deductions by making charitable donations to organizations that fund illegal Israeli settler activities in the West Bank.

For generations, people in the United States have turned a blind eye to the ongoing crimes against humanity practiced by the state of Israel against non-Jews generally and against Palestinians, especially. Israel’s racial disdain of Ethiopian Jews and other African nationals has been duly noted. And Israeli and non-Israeli Jews who dare criticize Israel’s racist policies are labeled as self-hating Jews. Now that the Biden-Harris administration has entered office, we should open our eyes to the apartheid that former US President Jimmy Carter documented in his book titled Palestine Peace Not Apartheid (Simon & Schuster, 2006). In that book, President Carter, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts to negotiate peace between Israel and Egypt, detailed Israeli violations of key United Nations resolutions, official US policy, and an international “road map” for peace by subsidizing illegal Israeli settlements on Arab lands and by militarized enforcement of political, social, and economic oppression of the Palestinians.

In some respects, Israeli apartheid is even worse than South African apartheid. Yet, oppressed South Africans, after decades of struggle, and especially after first the Sharpeville massacre, and then the slaughter of the children in 1976, found allies in the international community. They joined together in a nonviolent, targeted, and highly effective boycott, divestment and sanctions campaign without which the struggle against that system would never have been successful. How many more massacres of Palestinians must it take for the West, and the US in particular to rediscover that spark of moral indignation and political integrity regarding Palestine that made them choose the side of the oppressed in South Africa?

It is high time people who believe that apartheid and racism are illegal call on the United States to stop subsidizing apartheid and racism under the guise of supporting Israel. It is time for us to quit pretending that Israel is a US partner for democracy. It is time for an all-out challenge to the anti-BDS (boycott, divestment, sanctions) laws and resolutions that have been introduced in thirty-two U.S. states. It is time, once and for all, to call out the ruse, whether enshrined in law or propaganda, that criticism of the apartheid Israeli regime is tantamount to anti-Semitism: as B’Tselem and Yesh Din make clear, anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism cannot and must not be falsely equated. It is high time for the US, if it is to be a creditable force for “democracy,” to recognize Israel for what it is: an apartheid regime that depends on US financial and political support to maintain the oppressions it inflicts on Palestinians.

It’s utopic, but many call on the Biden-Harris administration to end U.S. support for the Israeli regime’s apartheid policies and practices.

What is less utopic is to urge other persons who believe in justice and the rule of law to join the rising chorus of voices in Israel, such as B’Tselem and Yesh Din, and around the world, who are making the same demands.

PALESTINA

It has been a year since President Donald Trump and his pal, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, unveiled their “Deal of the Century” to a crowd of supporters and financial backers.

Their plan envisioned Israel, with an undivided Jerusalem as its capital, being sovereign over historical Palestine and commanding total control over the wide network of Jewish settlements in the Palestinian territories.

The proposed Peace Plan was a sham, devised by Trump’s lieutenants to appease Israel and please his conservative evangelical base.

The “deal” was not a deal at all, since it was not negotiated with the concerned party, the Palestinians.

Utterly shortsighted, it also violated international law, broke with long-standing US policy and principles, and torpedoed whatever was left of Washington’s suitability as a mediator.

But it was all in line with Trump’s record of supporting Israel’s military occupation and legitimising its illegal settlements while offending the Palestinians and delegitimising their struggle for freedom.

In 2017, the Trump administration recognised Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. It moved the US embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem and also closed the representative office of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) in Washington, DC the following year.

It also froze all assistance to UNRWA, the UN agency tasked with supporting millions of Palestinians living as refugees and quit the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) under the pretext of bias against Israel on account of its policies in occupied Palestine.

Alas, Congress kept mostly silent. And so did much of the world, including the Arab world. Even though many vehemently rejected Trump’s dealing and wheeling over Palestine, they could or would do little or nothing to stop him, for fear of retaliation.

Long before a vengeful Trump administration began to take down names of those who would not back its policies in Congress, like a bully, it “took down names” of countries which did not back its Israel policies at the UN.

The Trump administration went on to cynically exploit the ambition or vulnerability of the governments of the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco to nudge them to normalise relations with colonial Israel despite its continued assault on the Palestinians and against the will of their peoples.

The reversal of the long-held conventional wisdom that a Palestinian state is a prerequisite for Arab normalisation exposed the utter weakness of the Arab regimes and rendered any peace process superfluous.

Why would Israel negotiate with the Palestinians if it could dictate its terms to them; why compromise when belligerence is rewarded with more concessions?

So the peace process was pronounced dead. Yet again! After all, it had also been pronounced dead after Clinton’s 2000 Camp David summit failed to save it; after George W Bush’s Roadmap failed to revive it, and after the Obama Administration all but gave up on it.

Alas, with each obituary, violence broke out in frustration as Israel unleashed military campaigns including two major offensives against Gaza. Whether it acted in vengeance, or to “mow the lawn”, ie cut the Palestinians to size, Israeli aggression led to mayhem and the death of thousands.

And yet, there is no giving up on the spectacle; no letting go of the diplomatic charade which, in fact, killed the two-state solution, by allowing Israel to deepen its military and civilian entrenchment in the prospective Palestinian state.

The peace process is dead; long live the peace process.

For it is now Biden’s turn to revive the peace procession.

His administration has promised to redress some of the defects of the Trump approach by improving relations with the PLO, reopening the US consulate in East Jerusalem, and restoring financial assistance to the Palestinian Authority (PA) so that it could put the show back on the road.

The move is commendable and is sure to be welcomed everywhere, except perhaps in Israel, where the Netanyahu-led government continues to embrace all that is Trump and oppose all that Biden stands for.

That is why it is high time for the US president to shun this corrupt Israeli prime minister, who has been indicted on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust. And who, like Trump, has undermined the electoral process purely for personal gain and glory.

Netanyahu had basically taken Trump’s side during the elections, and kept his joint photo with Trump on his official Twitter account, well after his mob attacked the Capitol.

Biden surely remembers how Netanyahu, rudely and against all protocol, incited Congress against the Obama administration on the Iran nuclear question

The president must also respond to Netanyahu’s most recent provocation of announcing new settlement expansion on the eve of his inauguration, by speaking out against the illegal Israeli settlements, as he did in the past.

Lest he forgot how Netanyahu humiliated him personally as he visited Jerusalem in 2010 to restart the peace process, by announcing dramatic new plans for illegal settlement expansion in East Jerusalem.

If, as to be expected, words do not work, the US must act to censor Netanyahu or his potential replacement after the March elections.

If he truly wants to restore US diplomatic credibility, Biden must be ready to leverage US financial and military assistance to Israel, which amounts to more than half of the US’s entire foreign military financing.

It is outrageous that Biden appears to think such a step would be “outrageous” when it is the only practical way to induce Israel to end its occupation and save it from its worst demons.

The use of such leverage does not undermine an alliance; it helps save it before it is too late. And it does not only apply to US-Israel relations. Biden must use Washington’s leverage with Saudi Arabia to end its war in Yemen, and use its leverage with Egypt to end the wide human rights abuses there, etc.

Likewise, if Biden refuses to use Washington’s leverage, Israel will continue to deepen its occupation and move further to the right, making any solution of any kind impossible without greater violence.

The Biden administration needs to drop the pretence that $40bn of US military support for Israel safeguards its security and moderates its position when the record shows it only safeguards its occupation and hardens its posture.

Pursuing the same damn policies again and again for more than half a century and expecting different results is indeed madness.

Truth be told, the Middle East region is in such turmoil, there may not be a geopolitical justification or strategic interest why Biden should invest big political capital on Palestine.

But there is a moral imperative that could no longer be muddled or ignored. One that is widely embraced by the Democratic Party and greater segments of the American Jewish communities.

Washington’s unconditional support for Israel has come with a heavy price for Palestine in terms of countless human rights violations, war crimes and crimes against humanity, in the form of an apartheid system, which expanded under Republicans and Democrats alike.

If the show must go on, it needs to take a different, more confident approach based on fairness and common sense; one that, for a starter, recognises the need for equal rights among the equal number of Jews and Palestinians now living between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

If he is truly serious about the peace rather than the process, Biden should make it clear to Israelis and Palestinians ahead of their upcoming elections, that the US will stand with those who stand for freedom and justice for all, not the few.