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.

A History of Inaction

As part of an annex in the 1978 Camp David Agreement between Israel and Egypt, Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin promised a five-year settlement freeze. When the Israelis resumed construction after only three months, President Jimmy Carter refused to hold Begin to his promise, even though Carter acknowledged that these settlements were illegal and the United States was given the role of guarantor of the peace treaty. This was not the last time the Israeli government would promise to freeze settlements only to break that promise with the knowledge that the Democratic leadership in Washington would let them get away with it.

In 1991, President George H.W. Bush insisted on a settlement freeze as a condition to granting a controversial $10 billion loan guarantee to Israel. In response, leading members of Congress -- including the leading candidates for the 1992 Democratic presidential nomination -- attacked Bush from the right by calling on the president to grant the loan guarantee unconditionally.

These predominantly Democratic critics claimed that the loans were to be used for housing for Jewish immigrants from the former Soviet Union, despite the fact that none of the money in the loan agreement was actually earmarked for such purposes and Israel had thousands of unoccupied housing units then available, even in the city of Beersheva, where most of the recent immigrants were initially being settled.

Indeed, the Israeli government acknowledged that the loans were more of a cushion than anything vital to the economy. Despite this, Democratic leaders like Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, insisted that Bush was "holding Soviet Jews hostage" and challenged the administration's assessment that expanding Israeli settlements was an obstacle to peace.

Under pressure from the Democrats -- who then controlled both houses of Congress -- as well as incipient Democratic presidential nominee Bill Clinton, Bush capitulated and approved the loan guarantee with Israel in July 2002, getting the Israelis to only limit new construction to the "natural growth" of existing settlements. By the following year, however, it became apparent that Israel, with the acquiescence of the new Clinton administration, interpreted this restriction so liberally that the number of new Israeli colonists in the occupied territories grew faster than ever.

Indeed, this infusion of billions of dollars worth of U.S.-backed loans were critical in enabling Israel to embark on the dramatic expansion of Israeli settlements in the coming years.

When the Oslo Accords were signed in September 1993, the Palestinians pressed to address the settlements issue immediately. The Clinton administration, however, insisted that such discussions be delayed. By putting off such a fundamental issue as the settlements as a "final status issue," the United States gave the Israelis the ability to continue to create facts on the ground even as the peace process slowly moved forward.

Clinton knew this would make a final peace agreement all the more difficult, yet at no point did the administration insist that Israel stop the expansion of Jewish settlements and confiscation of land that the Palestinians and others had assumed was destined to be part of a Palestinian state.

It is only because of these settlements that the boundaries for a future Palestinian state envisioned by Clinton and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak in the July 2000 summit at Camp David took its unviable geographic dimensions, which forced Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to reject it. Barak, with the support of Clinton, insisted on holding on to 69 Jewish settlements in the West Bank, where 85 percent of the settlers live.

Furthermore, under Barak's U.S.-backed plan, the West Bank would have been split up by a series of settlement blocs, bypass roads and Israeli roadblocks, in effect dividing the new Palestinian "state" into four noncontiguous cantons, requiring Palestinians and much of the country's domestic commerce to go through Israeli checkpoints to go from one part of their state to another.

In addition, according to this proposal, Israel would also control Palestinian water resources in order to give priority of that scarce resource to the settlements.

There is little question that the failure of Camp David could have been avoided had Bill Clinton used his considerable leverage to halt the settlement expansion at the start of the peace process. Even top Clinton administration officials like Robert Malley have acknowledged that the United States had not been tough enough on Israel for its settlement drive, and this failure to do so was a major factor in the collapse of the peace process.

Despite this, in October of that year, the U.S. House of Representatives, with only 30 dissenting votes, adopted a Democratic-sponsored resolution that claimed that Israel had "expressed its readiness to take wide-ranging and painful steps in order to bring an end to the conflict, but these proposals were rejected by Chairman Arafat."

Pelosi to this day insists that Barak had made "a generous and historic proposal," and Howard Berman, D-Calif., chairman of the House Foreign Relations Committee, claimed during committee hearings that Arafat's rejection of Barak's proposal was indicative of the Palestinians' determination "to destroy Israel." In the view of congressional Democrats, then, if you refuse to accept the large-scale foreign colonization of your country, you are not interested in peace.

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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