As Obama Tries to Shift the Debate, Will Democrats Continue to Endorse Israel's Colonization of the West Bank?

By Stephen Zunes, AlterNet. Posted June 6, 2009.

In reality, neither the Fourth Geneva Convention nor the U.N. Security Council resolutions can be superseded by a bilateral agreement, particularly when one of the two parties (in this case, the Palestinians) insist they are still relevant. Indeed, none of the other 14 members of the Security Council accepted the Clinton administration radical reinterpretation of international law in their support for Israel's settlement policies. Furthermore, U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan -- backed by a broad consensus of international legal scholars -- repeatedly insisted that these Security Council resolutions were still valid.

Given the gross asymmetry in power between the Palestinians under occupation and the Israeli occupiers -- whose primary military, economic and diplomatic supporter was also the chief mediator in the negotiations -- it was rather obvious that the U.S.-led peace process would be unable to stop settlement expansion. It appears, then, that the Clinton administration's insistence on sidelining the United Nations was to enable Israel to do just that.

It was during this period that the Israelis began building a massive highway system of 29 roads totaling nearly 300 miles, designed to perpetuate effective Israeli control of most of the West Bank.

These highways -- designed to connect the settlements with each other and with Israel proper -- are creating a series of borders and barriers, in effect isolating Palestinian areas into islands. In addition, since Israel has defined these highways as "security roads," they reach a width of 350 yards (50 yards of road plus 150 yards of "sanitized" margins on each side), the equivalent of 3 1/2 football fields. This has resulted in the destruction of some of the area's richest farmland, including olive groves and vineyards that have been owned and farmed by Palestinian families for generations.

The impact of such a massive road system in an area the size of Delaware is staggering, and has serious political, economic and environmental implications.

As part of what Clinton referred to as "implementation funding" of the 1998 Wye River Agreement, in which Israel agreed to withdraw from an additional 14 percent of the West Bank, the United States offered $1.2 billion in supplementary foreign aid to the Israeli government. Most of the funding was reserved for armaments, but much of the nonmilitary funding was apparently earmarked to build these "bypass roads" and security enhancements for Israeli settlers in the occupied territories.

Such direct subsidies for Israeli settlements placed the United States in violation of Article 7 of U.N. Security Council Resolution 465, which prohibits member states from assisting Israel in its colonization drive. So, not only has the United States allowed Israel to violate U.N. Security Council resolutions in continuing to maintain and expand its illegal settlements, Clinton placed the United States itself in violation of a U.N. Security Council mandate as well.

Once filled with enormous hope with the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993, the Palestinians have since seen more and more of their land confiscated and more and more Jewish-only settlements and highways constructed, all under the cover of a U.S.-sponsored "peace process."

It was frustration over the failure of the peace process to end Israel's colonization drive that contributed to large numbers of Palestinians rejecting the diplomatic approach of Fatah and other moderate nationalists and embracing Hamas. Indeed, prior to this dramatic growth in settlements during the 1990s, Palestinian support for Hamas was less than 15 percent. Now it is close to a majority.

Ironically, the Democrats' criticism during the 2008 election campaign of the Bush administration's handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was that they were not engaged enough, in contrast to the Clinton administration, whose policies were widely praised. It is important, however, to remember that it was the former Democratic administration's policies on Israeli settlements that have largely contributed to the dangerous impasse we see today.

See more stories tagged with: war, israel, peace, foreign policy, palestine, west bank, barack obama, un, gaza

Stephen Zunes is a professor of politics and chairman of Middle Eastern Studies at the University of San Francisco and serves as a senior policy analyst for Foreign Policy in Focus.

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