Rouge States Embrace: The Bush - Sharon Conference

Occupied Arab Jerusalem

Bush’s embrace of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon’s
unilateral plan to annex six major West Bank settlement
blocs and reject the internationally-recognized
Palestinian right of return as a quid pro quo for
Sharon’s pull-out from most Gaza settlements represents
a major defeat for Palestinian human rights and
international law, and a huge consolidation of the
U.S.- Israeli alliance. While U.S. policy has, since
1967, tacitly accepted Israel’s illegal settlements and
done nothing to even encourage the end of the
occupation, Bush’s position represents a sharp break
with longstanding precedent of supporting a negotiated
settlement and even more sharply with Bush’s own
(however disingenuous) claim to support a two-state
solution. In his rejection of the right of return and
his acceptance of the permanence of Israeli occupation,
Bush banished the possibility of achieving a serious
and comprehensive solution to the Palestinian-Israeli
conflict. The "new status quo" of U.S.-recognized
permanent Israeli occupation, no right of return and no
viable Palestinian state will set the terms for the
next indefinite period, with the possibility of any
change dependent on a future Israeli determination that
it has found a newly "acceptable" Palestinian
negotiating partner.

The U.S. position returns Middle East diplomacy to its
pre-1991 position, when Palestinians were excluded from
all negotiations. Israeli-U.S. negotiations become the
substitute for Israeli-Palestinian talks, with the U.S.
free to concede Palestinian land and rights. As one PLO
legal advisor told the New York Times, "imagine if
Palestinians said, ’O.K., we give California to
Canada.’ Americans should stop wondering why they have
so little credibility in the Middle East."

The official U.S. acceptance of the Israeli occupation
of huge swathes of Palestinian territory, and the Bush
administration’s willingness to cede internationally-
recognized Palestinian rights represents a new version
of the 1917 Balfour Declaration in which Britain, the
colonial power, guaranteed settlers of the early
Zionist movement a "national Jewish homeland" in
Palestine disregarding the rights of the indigenous
population.

While calling for Israel to make the Apartheid Wall a
"security border" and not a "political border", Bush
made clear he has no intention to hold Israel
accountable for the Wall’s violations of international
law. The finding of the Wall’s illegality by the UN
General Assembly, and the likely decision of the
International Court of Justice regarding the
consequences of that illegality, were ignored.

The U.S. endorsement reaffirms the U.S. willingness to
violate international law, ignore the United Nations
Charter and undermine UN resolutions (including the
often-cited resolution 242 which unequivocally
prohibits "the acquisition of territory by force") to
provide diplomatic and political protection for Israel.
It even violates the terms of the U.S.-imposed but
internationally endorsed "roadmap," which stipulates
that Israel must freeze all settlement activity in its
first phase. Sharon stated explicitly that the six
major settlement blocs should continue to grow and be
strengthened.

In the short and medium term, Bush’s move will likely
lead to a spike in his political support in the
election campaign. However, recognition of the long-
term dangers inherent in such an explicit embrace of
the most one- sided acceptance of settlements and
denial of Palestinian rights ever endorsed by a U.S.
president, may bring about a later drop in electoral
support.

The U.S. action demonstrates the increasing isolation
of the Bush administration. Government officials and
commentators from around the world have been unified in
condemning Bush’s statements. UN Secretary General Kofi
Annan criticized the U.S. endorsement of Israel’s
unilateral plan, stating that "final status issues
should be determined in negotiations between the
parties based on relevant Security Council
resolutions." It is unlikely that even chief Bush-
backer Tony Blair of Britain will endorse his partner’s
action in meetings scheduled for today.

Sharon’s "Gaza withdrawal" plan is predicated on an end
to Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. Sharon made clear
that he views its results as part of a "long-term
interim solution", in which Israeli occupation will be
retooled to remain in place virtually forever, without
ever reaching "final status" negotiations. That
reflects the vast power disparity between occupied and
occupier; for Israel, an end to Palestinian resistance
(enforced, or willing, or fenced off) is all that is
required to make the current situation perfectly
acceptable for the long-term. For Palestinians, an end
to violence would leave them still stateless, living in
isolated and truncated bantustans, cut off from each
other and surrounded by Israeli walls, troops and
territory.

The plan’s terms were negotiated by Sharon’s minions
for many months not with Palestinian interlocutors,
however, but with the Bush administration. So it was
clear even before the joint Bush-Sharon press
conference that U.S. backing was certain. All that was
left to be announced was how much U.S. support would be
explicit, and how much couched in coded language.

Bush’s actual language was far more explicit than most
analysts anticipated. Calling Sharon’s plan "courageous
and historic," Bush went on to embrace a new status
quo, making permanent the Israeli occupation of
Palestinian land. In Bush’s words, the "new realities"
on the West Bank made it "unrealistic to expect the
outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and
complete return to the unrealistic 1949 armistice
line." The reference to 1949 was a deliberate effort to
deflect attention away from the Israeli occupation of
1967, and instead remind listeners (especially pro-
Israeli voters in the U.S.) of the alleged
"vulnerability" of Israel in the pre-1967 period, often
used to justify the 1967 occupations

On the right of return, in a sharp departure from
earlier officially vague U.S. positions (however
disingenuous), Bush officially welcomed Israel’s
longstanding rejectionism. He stated that the
Palestinian refugee problem should be solved by "the
establishment of a Palestinian state and settling of
Palestinian refugees there, not in the state of
Israel." He also referred several times to the "Jewish
character of Israel", code for acceptance of the
Israeli concerns regarding the racist-termed
"demographic bomb". He thus dismissed longstanding
international law (the Geneva Conventions, which
guarantee all war-time refugees the right to return to
their home regardless of the particular reasons they
fled or were forced to flee), and specific United
Nations resolutions (including 194, which since 1949
specifically guarantees Palestinian refugees the right
to return to their homes and to compensation for their
losses).

Response among Palestinians was swift. Palestinian
officials across the political spectrum had
preemptively condemned Sharon’s plan even before its
embrace by George Bush. The continuing refusal of U.S.
officials to negotiate seriously with the Palestinians,
the isolation and sidelining of Palestinian President
Yasser Arafat, the willingness of the U.S. to give away
Palestinian land and Palestinian rights as if they were
their own, culminated in the absence of even a token
Palestinian presence at the Bush-Sharon press
conference. The result is an extraordinary escalation
in the sense of Palestinian political humiliation, with
their recognized leaders, however compromised, utterly
excluded from the decision-making determining their
future. That political humiliation, and international
isolation, now match the on-going humiliation on the
ground facing Palestinians living under Israeli
military occupation. The result is almost certain to
lead to an upsurge in violent resistance.

Regional and international response, particularly among
Arab and Muslim countries, was immediate. Condemnation
from Arab and Muslim governments, and deep unease was
widespread among U.S. allies. It remains unclear
whether the European Union will officially condemn the
U.S. position; along with the United Nations and
Russia, the EU’s ostensible role in the so-called
"Quartet" supporting the "road map" has been completely
sidelined by the new Bush position. It also remains
uncertain whether the UN General Assembly, anticipating
a certain U.S. veto in the Security Council, will take
on the challenge of crafting a serious condemnation of
the U.S. endorsement of Sharon’s illegality.

Sharon had been floating his "withdrawal from Gaza"
proposal for some months, facing significant opposition
from his right-wing Likud bloc, and particularly from
the settler movement which has historically been his
primary political base. Being able to claim U.S.
backing for the illegal annexation of major West Bank
settlement blocs (which together hold over 100,000
Israeli settlers) as well as U.S. acceptance of the
longstanding Israeli rejection of the Palestinian right
of return gives Sharon crucial political cover. The
Gaza settler population, while economically valuable
for Israel (not surprising given that the settlers
control 40% of the land and a commensurate proportion
of the water of the Gaza Strip) is tiny, only 7,000
Israeli settlers. Living among 1 ½ million
Palestinians, the majority of them impoverished
refugees in squalid camps, the settlements remain
costly in military terms, requiring deployment of
significant numbers of Israeli troops to back the armed
settlers. The effect of the Sharon plan’s U.S.
endorsement will likely be wider backing from Sharon’s
right (with the exception of the most ideologically-
driven of the settler movement) as well as acceptance
from the mainstream Labor Party, who will likely focus
on Sharon’s "historic withdrawal" from Gaza and paint
it as a first step towards a two-state solution,
ignoring the far more significant U.S. embrace of
annexation and rejection of the right of return. Right-
wing and settler opposition to Sharon’s plan will
likely be narrowly- based and short-lived.

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