Jafe Arnoldski<\/i><\/p>\n
Amidst that backdrop of a blossoming Arab spring, the US is deeply concerned about the impact it might have on its longstanding Israeli ally, the Palestinians, and interests in the region. Jafe Arnoldski investigates and points out the baffling contradictions in US policy.<\/p>\n
\u201cIsrael wants peace. I want peace.\u201d Those were the words of Israel\u2019s prime minister Benjamin Netenyahu when both he and Obama held a bitter press conference recently at the White House to discuss current US-Israeli-Palestinian relations. Netenyahu went on to say that \u201ca peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle-Eastern reality,\u201d and this very \u201cpeace based on illusions\u201d is what Netenyahu calls the newly proposed peace agreement, a treaty based on Israel restricting its borders to the pre-1967 lines with agreed land swaps. The Israeli prime minister further made it clear that any such attempt at reconciliation was ridiculous and would lead to an extremely vulnerable Israel surrounded on all sides by hostile Arabs.<\/p>\n
Only a day later, at a meeting of the American-Israel Political Affairs Committee, Obama declared the US-Israeli alliance still \u201cironclad\u201d and refused to support any potential recognition of a Palestinian state by the United Nations, saying in advance that the United States would utilize its veto power to put down such a proposal on the Security Council. Since such a recognition might not be the one that meets the interests of US capital, it was crucial for the Obama administration to attempt to broker it\u2019s own deal before the soon to be formed joint Palestinian administration lobbies the UN for statehood this September.<\/p>\n
The Obama administration\u2019s promulgating of both the\u201cpre-1967 treaty\u201d and its vehemently pro-Israeli positions exposed a glaring hypocrisy that is making itself increasingly known. This should come as no shock to many: while the US has armed Israel and continues to provide it with billions in monetary support, it also calls for the \u201cdemographic and geographic disarming\u201d of it as well. A tortuous policy to say the least, one crafted ostensibly to \u201cmoderate\u201d the critical views of the US in the eyes of the Palestinians and those around the world in solidarity with their plight and, at the same time, bolster the Zionist regime in Tel Aviv. A crucial third factor has significantly affected American-Israeli relations: the reverberations emanating from the earthquake that is the raging Middle Eastern and North-African revolutions.<\/p>\n
A product of the revolutionary tremor shaking the Middle East \u2013 which has had important political implications (Hamas and Fatah fusing) in occupied Palestine \u2013 has led to somewhat of a rift between the US and Israel. This has found expression in the question of future Palestinian statehood. Obama and his administration intervened in order to help stabilize the situation in the interests of American imperialism, and his latest pressing for a peace agreement is his desire not to see revolution spread to that part of the world where one of its most oppressed peoples resides, the consequences being too dangerous for the regional order if the Palestinians were to launch a joint insurrection against Israel comparable to what we\u2019ve seen break out in Libya or Syria for instance. Obviating such a development by granting minor concessions to the Palestinians became a necessity.<\/p>\n
The US is, however, stuck in a tangled web of contradictions that include both a seemingly endless back-and-forth mediating between the Israelis and the Palestinians and an appeasement policy needed to secure its geo-political and economic interests via the promotion of its Israeli policeman in the region. But with the continual military and financial support for the expansionist power that is Israel, it cannot but help deepen the oppression of the Palestinians in the process. The US\u2019s \u201cstabilizing\u201d policy is, therefore, in itself facilitating further problems by exacerbating the very contingencies it\u2019s attempting to suppress. Simply put, the peace proposal designed officially to mitigate confrontation between the Israelis and Palestinians is serving to make matters even more contentious.<\/p>\n
Not only are these determinants continuing to destabilize the region, the US\u2019s hypocritical support for a number of the democratic revolutions of North Africa and the Middle East is a slap in the face to the Palestinians and their struggles for liberation that America is working desperately to contain.<\/p>\n
There is no doubt then that America\u2019s so-called campaign for democracy in the Middle East is being exposed more and more for the fraud that it is as the revolts and mass protests continue \u2013 particularly in countries where the US doesn\u2019t necessarily want to see them: Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Yemen, and, now, Palestine.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Jafe Arnoldski Amidst that backdrop of a blossoming Arab spring, the US is deeply concerned about the impact it might have on its longstanding Israeli ally, the Palestinians, and interests in the region. Jafe Arnoldski investigates and points out the baffling contradictions in US policy. \u201cIsrael wants peace. I want peace.\u201d Those were the words […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7724,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[130,1],"tags":[150,104,223,164],"class_list":["post-2984","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-middle-east","category-uncategorized","tag-apartheid","tag-archive","tag-oppression","tag-palestine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7724"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2984"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7151,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2984\/revisions\/7151"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2984"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2984"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fifthinternational.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2984"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}