Five decades of pain

Published June 10, 2017
irfan.husain@gmail.com
irfan.husain@gmail.com

ALMOST exactly 50 years ago, I was a student at Karachi University when news of the outbreak of a war between Israel on one side, and Egypt, Syria and Jordan on the other, reached our (then) distant campus.

Our Palestinian fellow-students were full of excitement, giving the rest of us news of heavy casualties inflicted on the Israeli Defence Forces. According to them, scores of Israeli planes had been shot down, and destroyed enemy tanks littered the Sinai desert.

Alas, it turned out that they had been merely repeating bombastic Arab propaganda, and the real situation was very different: a large part of the Egyptian air fleet had been destroyed by Israeli jets while parked exposed on runways. The famed Arab Legion had been defeated, and the Israelis had captured the West Bank and East Jerusalem from Jordan. Similarly, Syrian forces had been pushed back from the Golan Heights.

Fifty years later, the territories remain under Israeli occupation.

Fifty years later, all these territories remain under Israeli occupation. The Sinai desert was handed back to Egypt after a peace deal, brokered by the US, was signed in 1979. This effectively detached Egypt from the anti-Israel coalition, allowing Tel Aviv to strengthen its grip on its other conquered territories. The Gaza Strip was evacuated by Israel in 2006 as it found the cost of defending settlers there too high. But its embargo on movement and trade has prevented the Palestinians there from living normal lives.

Since then, Palestinians — with virtually no help from their Arab neighbours — have struggled to maintain a sporadic semblance of resistance. But the imbalance of forces is far too great: Israel, bolstered by huge infusions of US military aid, is far stronger than any combination of its foes. And while the world has paid lip service to the ideal of Palestinian statehood, Israel has blocked every attempt to reach a peace deal.

Israel’s intransigence is rooted in its military might, as well as the open-ended support it gets from the United States. There was a time when Israel’s American patron was less one-sided. After the 1956 Suez War when Israel, supported by France and Britain, captured the Sinai, Dwight Eisenhower, the US president, threatened economic sanctions if the IDF was not withdrawn from the territory it had captured.

In 1975, president Ford said he would cut off military aid if Israel refused to vacate the recaptured Sinai. President Carter during the Camp David talks, made it clear he would downgrade ties if Israel did not sign the agreement. In 1991, the senior president Bush threatened to block $10 billion in loan guarantees if prime minister Yitzhak Rabin refused to attend the Madrid talks.

These examples show that when faced with financial pain, Israel does behave. Unfortunately, 1991 was the last time Israel was seriously pressured by the United States. Since then, there has been a lot of hot air from Washington, but no actual pressure. The legendary Israeli general Moshe Dayan once said: “Our American friends give us money, arms and advice. We take the money and the arms, but ignore the advice.” This is as true today as it was in the 1950s.

When Barack Obama made his famous speech in Cairo in 2009 calling for an end to illegal settlements and to occupation, there was genuine optimism that finally, America would put its weight behind an equitable settlement. But as we later saw, Obama was better at making speeches than delivering on promises.

Poor John Kerry, the secretary of state, spent weeks in trying to push both sides to sit down and talk. But the sticking point was the settlements: the Palestinians rightly maintained that it was impossible to negotiate while the land they were talking about was being grabbed by Israel. And while Obama signed an agreement with Israel assuring it of arms worth $30bn over the next ten years, he failed to threaten to halt military assistance. A carrot without the threat of a stick is pretty useless against Israel.

Currently, under Donald Trump, Israel is calling the shots in Washington. Having put up with a hostile Obama for eight years, Netanyahu can sit back and let America defend Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Just as the UN’s top human rights official, Zeid Ra’ad al-Hussein, condemned the occupation, the US has threatened to withdraw from the body he heads.

From Israel’s perspective, the cost of occupation is far less than the cost of withdrawal. The occasional criticism from European states is shrugged off. And apart from formal peace agreements with Egypt and Jordan, it appears to be in de facto ‘alliance’ with Saudi Arabia, Turkey and the Gulf states.

Under these circumstances, there is no military, economic or diplomatic reason for Israel to end its occupation. Short of some unforeseen changes in the Middle East, Israel might still be occupying Palestine 50 years from now.

irfan.husain@gmail.com

Published in Dawn, June 10th, 2017

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