By most accounts, the Trump administration's decision to treat Israel's settlement enterprise as a legal endeavor is a retreat by the United States from an almost universally accepted norm of international law. The United States and the current Israeli government are now outliers and isolated. The decision - untethered as it is from any serious strategy to advance Israeli-Palestinian peace - has further compromised, if not killed, Washington's credibility and its role as an honest broker in any conceivable peace deal for the remainder of this presidency.
But that may not be the whole story, or certainly not the most important aspect of the story. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's announcement this past week confirms, through legal acrobatics, the de facto approach of U.S. administrations over the course of four decades to acquiesce to, even enable, the Israeli settlement enterprise; to be silent on the issue of legality or illegality; and to fail to impose a penalty that could limit or discourage Israel's settlement policies. We watched this happen, up close, during our more than 50 combined years of service in U.S. diplomacy under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The United States has known for decades how damaging settlement activity is in the search for peace - Palestinians cannot trade land for it if they don't possess the land - but with one major exception during the George H.W. Bush administration (when Washington refused for a year to extend $10 billion in housing loan guarantees for absorption of Soviet Jews because of Israeli settlement expansion), we have essentially turned a blind eye. At the first Camp David summit, in 1978, President Jimmy Carter tried to extract a commitment from Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin to freeze settlement activity during the negotiations over peace with Egypt, but the terms of that freeze were interpreted differently by both men and never agreed upon. Carter did not insist on a freeze as part of the subsequent negotiations, understanding that the prospect of an Israeli-Egyptian treaty outweighed settlement considerations.
President Ronald Reagan's 1982 "fresh start" peace initiative demanded a settlement freeze even though Reagan had, in 1981, described the settlements as "not illegal," distancing himself from the 1978 State Department determination that settlements contravened international law. Still, the Reagan administration did nothing to push the freeze on Israel's government.
During that decade, Israeli authorities undertook a painstaking effort to conform their settlement expansions with a 1979 Israeli Supreme Court decision (in the Elon Moreh case) that allowed the seizure of private Palestinian land in the occupied territories only for "essential and urgent military needs" - a formulation that kept Israeli policy in line with international law. But Israel's process during the 1980s and later for deciding what constituted "state land" - which then opened that land for settlement - was faulty, based on pro-settlement political priorities. An official Israeli database, disclosed by the Haaretz newspaper in 2009, revealed that extensive construction in more than 30 settlements had occurred on private Palestinian land that Israel had designated as "state land." This information contradicted the Foreign Ministry's own website, which, until then, claimed: "Israel's actions relating to the use and allocation of land under its administration are all taken with strict regard to the rules and norms of international law - Israel does not requisition private land for the establishment of settlements."
Throughout the 1990s, as settlement activity continued and expanded, even after the Madrid Peace Conference and the Oslo accords, Washington confined itself to rhetorical objections. It dropped the rather tepid criticism that settlements were an "obstacle to peace," aiming to placate Israel after the tensions between Bush and Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir over settlements and loan guarantees. The United States similarly failed to act on the findings of the Mitchell report in 2001, which covered the causes of the second Palestinian uprising and recommended that Israel freeze all settlement activity, including the "natural growth" of existing settlements.
In a 2002 Rose Garden speech, President George W. Bush echoed the Mitchell recommendations, saying, "Israeli settlement activity in the occupied territories must stop." But his administration did nothing to curb that activity. The Obama administration, too, called for a freeze but settled for a 10-month moratorium on new housing starts, after which settlement activity resumed. It wasn't until December 2016, on its way out, that the Obama administration abstained on a successful U.N. Security Council resolution that described settlements as a violation of international law, instead of vetoing it.
Perhaps the major reason the United States failed to impose costs on Israel for its settlement activity - at least once serious Arab-Israeli negotiations began in the 1990s - was the compelling view that the only solution to the settlements challenge lay at the bargaining table. That was particularly the case during the tenure of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, who unilaterally committed to stop building new settlements, a vow undercut by the blind eye turned to the creation of more than 100 "outposts" by renegade Israelis in the hills surrounding existing settlements. Domestic U.S. politics played a role, too. Few American presidents were interested in picking a fight with Israel's supporters in both parties. But the underlying concern shared by Democratic and Republican presidents was that fighting with Israel on settlements, untethered from a breakthrough in the peace process, would be self-defeating. The onset of Palestinian terrorist campaigns in the mid-'90s made toughening up U.S. policy against settlements, let alone sanctioning Israel, unimaginable.
Since successive presidents simply ignored settlements and questions about their legality, why didn't Trump? Why flaunt international law and further erode the ability of the United States to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace? Two reasons stand out.
First, the announcement paves the way for U.S. silence if, or when, the Israeli government starts to annex parts of the West Bank or to claim that its jurisdiction and laws extend there. No sooner had Pompeo concluded his remarks than Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahuran to the West Bank to promise just that: immediate annexation moves. Now Trump can justify U.S. acquiescence by saying: We told you already that settlements - and by extension annexation - are not illegal.
Second, Pompeo's announcement appeals to Trump's base, usually the main factor in any policy decision by this administration. A large segment of the evangelical Christian community likes what Pompeo said, as does a large share of the Orthodox Jewish community.
Pompeo's announcement means little for the peace process - the Trump administration's self-described "ultimate deal" - because it wasn't going anywhere anyway. But our inability to act as a credible, honest, effective broker to resolve conflicts is gone, certainly for the rest of Trump's presidency, if not beyond.
Comments(6)
The Jews of the twentieth century only knew one law: The law of the jungle. Israel became the Jewish people's last stand in the very shadow of genocide. The Arab side, and specifically the Palestinians, were the aggressors. The idea that Jews should not be allowed to live on what for three thousand years has been called Judea is the absurdity of our libelous age. If the Judean settlements are illegal, then all of American territory is also illegal. What rule of international law justifies the taking of three continents by European armies and missionaries? There is none, and that's the whole point. What's even more ironic is that the justification given for such an unparalleled land grab and occupation of original native populations was the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. REMEMBER: Christianity was the European justification, not any international law. But Jesus was born in Judea and Judea has been central to all of Jewish history. While at the same time the word Palestine was a Roman construction and never once mentioned in the Koran. In fact, Sura 5 of the Moslem Holy Book specifically states that "Children of Moses" are the rightful owners of the specific land in question. Moreover, the Jewish claim is so much stronger than the Anglo, Spanish or American because the Jews insist that their land is native to them and not the Arabs and the Palestinians. Before 1967, there were no Israeli settlements on the Judean territory because Jordan occupied these territories through invasion. Before 1948, Jews were murdered if they attempted to live in this territory, even though they had the legal right to do so based on the League of Nations Mandate. When was sovereignty given to the so-called Palestinian Arabs? When was the Jordanian invasion and occupation legalized? The best claim for this land under international law remains the Jewish one based on League of Nations' San Remo Conference. But international law is irrelevant because most international diplomats of stature understand that such a law is nothing more than a fiction. Diplomacy works when warring parties become tired of war, period. The Palestinians have yet to tire of war, especially war by other means, i.e. diplomacy and the fiction of international law! But the Jewish people know that the State of Israel is their very last hope. In the very shadow of the Holocaust how could it be any other way. Jewish history will be made by Israelis and not diaspora Jews living on stolen land in North America.
Settlements, or rather civilian Jewish residency communities as towns, villages or kibbutzim, are not an obstacle to peace but a bridge to peace. Jews lived in those territories until ethnically cleansed by th Arabs of Palestine during 1920-1947 and then Jordan and Egypt 1947-1948. Even that moratorium forced by Obama didn't impress Abbas. Int'l law as decided by the League of Nations specifically guaranteed Jews "close settlement" on the land so all this argumentation by the authors is...illegitimate, to use a certain term preferred by former US adminsitrations' officials who attempt, as aboe, to argue otherwise or to suggest that if Jews only yielded on their rights all will be well. Until Arabs accept Jewish national identity anywhere in what they presume is their territory rather than the Jewish national home, there is no chance for peace.
How are settlements a 'bridge to peace'? The Palestinians will never forgive you for stealing their land and putting them into what basically amount to ghettos, destroying their crops, killing their children and just generally treating themin an inhumane way. Settlements are denying Palestinians a right to live a humane life. The roads connecting your settlements fragment Palestinian territories and make it impossible for them to have viable economy. How can a people that went through the holocaust be so cruel to other human beings? Dont you have any shame?
Right. Arafat kissers are honest brokers. And credible too. And I, as a Jew living in the first Jewish city of Israel, Hebron, I am an obstacle to peace. Because I want to pray at Maarat HaMachpela, the 2nd holiest site in the world, where Avraham and Sarah, Isaac and Rebecca, and Jacob and Leah are buried, a site off-limits to Jews for 700 years, because we were Jews. And I like to visit and pray at the tomb of Jesse, King David's father. And because 2 weeks ago we, in Hebron hosted 45,000 people, to read with us in the weekly Torah portion how Abraham bought those caves almost 4,000 years ago. Because of this me and my community are issues, problems, settlers, extremists, who prevent peace. Sorry guys, but you've got it wrong. I'm on the right side, I know who I am and where I came from. The two of you live in denial of your true identity. Maybe you remember what happened to others, like you, who denied their Judaism. Harvard, Yale, and Princeton aren't going to help you. Know who you are, and live who you are. Because rejection is nothing less than betrayal and, in the end, suicide.
David, you should learn some empathy. Yes, you are an obstacle to peace, because that desire of you to live near your holy sites disregards the fact that that area holds many sacred sites for other religions top, and that much of the land you are now living on was privately owned land by Palestinians that you stole. You Israelis always go on and on about your supposed "rights", based on some ancient religious text, but you deny those same rights to Palestinians, who also have a long history on that land and whose religious texts also refer to sacred sites in that area. You cannot barge into a land 2000 years after your supposed ancestors left it and claim it for yourself, disregarding the people who were living there and their legitimate rights to the land of their forefathers (DIRECT forefathers, as in fathers and grandfathers, not some imagined ancestors that lived 2000 years ago). Those kinds of ideas are what make you a religious extremist, violator of international law and obstacle to peace.
The comments by some Israelis here are oozing with hatred for their palestinian neighbours. Israel has become a sick country based on ideas of Jewish supremacy and religious extremism, perpetuated by large-scale human rights abuses. The commenters below dont even seem to realize how disgusting their remarks are. Israel is an apartheid state that is increasingly out of touch with the rest of the world. Mainstream political parties in Israel espouse ideas that would get a party banned in any Western democratic country. Israëli politicians, even government ministers, make dehumanizing remakrs about Palestinians that would land them in jail for hate crimes in any Western democracy. Your country is rotten, the Israëli people have become rotten themselves through years of government-sanctioned atrocities and apartheid policies. Daily human rights abuses by israel are the order of the day for palestinians and yet no one in Israel is even talking about it.
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