Will Democrats Finally End Their Support For West Bank Settlements? (Part 2)

Editor's note: This is the second installment in a two-part series by Stephen Zunes. Read Part One here.

Recent calls by President Barack Obama for the government of Israel to freeze the expansion of Jewish settlements in the Israeli-occupied West Bank marks a sharp reversal from Democratic Party policy toward the Israeli colonization of Palestinian land.

Indeed, for the past 20 years, Democrats in Washington have largely supported such Israeli expansionism in which Israeli occupation forces confiscate Palestinian land in territories seized in the June 1967 war to build Jewish-only communities that are increasingly interconnected through special highways from which Palestinians are largely banned.

Whether the Obama administration will choose to use its enormous leverage to actually force the right-wing Israeli government to stop the expansion of such illegal settlements, however, remains to be seen. Much may depend on the reaction of the Democratic-controlled Congress.

As outlined in my recent article, it was the Clinton administration and Democrats in Congress who were largely responsible for blocking efforts to freeze Israeli settlements in the early 1990s, when they were only half as large as they are now, and even subsidizing their expansion, policies that contributed directly to the collapse of the peace process in 2000 and the rise of Hamas.

Similarly, during the Bush administration, Democrats in Congress continued their support for Israeli settlements policy. Obama's challenge, then, is not only to fight off Republican opposition to his calls for a settlements freeze, which they refer to as "misguided," but fellow Democrats as well.

Democratic Opposition to Obama

Though there are some indications that some leading Democrats who have supported Israeli settlements policy in the past may be moderating their views, there are others who appear willing to fight any effort by Obama to force Israel to change its expansionist policies.

For example, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., stated, "My concern is that we are applying pressure to the wrong party in this dispute," arguing against pressuring "the only democracy in the Middle East to stop the natural growth of their settlements." She warned Obama, "When Congress gets back into session, the administration is going to hear from many more members than just me."

Despite the provocative nature of these settlements and the precarious security situation they have created for Israeli forces who have to protect this patchwork of illegal outposts amidst a hostile population, Rep. Gary Ackerman, D-N.Y., whom the Democrats have chosen to chair the House Foreign Relations Committee's Subcommittee on the Middle East, insists, "I don't think anybody wants to dictate to an ally what they have to do in their own national-security interests."

Four U.N. Security Council resolutions and a ruling by the International Court of Justice have formally recognized the illegality of Israel's West Bank settlements, citing the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids any country from settling its civilians in territories seized by military force.

Yet Democrats who support Israel's creeping annexation of the territory are insisting that Obama's calls for a settlement freeze is interfering in Israel's internal affairs. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-N.Y., described Obama's actions this way: "There's a line between articulating U.S. policy and seeming to be pressuring a democracy on what are their domestic policies, and the president is tiptoeing right up to that line."

Labeling the illegal colonization of someone else's country as "a domestic policy" is nothing short of endorsement of the right of conquest. Virtually the entire international community recognizes the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as being under belligerent occupation and that what constitutes Israel is the 78 percent of historic Palestine controlled by Israel prior to June 1967.

Israel has never defined where its borders are, however, which has given Israeli leaders and their American supporters an enormous amount of leeway as to what they consider to be "Israel."

According to the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon told Secretary of State Colin Powell during a visit to Washington to discuss the future of the Palestinians and Israeli settlements policy, "We learn a lot from you Americans. We saw how you moved West using this method."

Berkley, Ackerman and Weiner are hardly the only Democrats pressuring Obama to back off. Last month, the majority of Democratic senators signed on to a letter co-sponsored Sens. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., and Arlen Specter, D-Pa., supporting the Israeli right's position that rather than recognize both sides  of international legal obligations to bridge the differences, the U.S. should "work in close concert with Israel."