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A New Balfour Declaration
Naseer Aruri Al-Hayat 2004/04/26
The 14 April 2004 exchange of statements and the subsequent joint press conference by President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Sharon created an upheaval in the Palestine question, the likes of which have not been witnessed since the 1917 Balfour Declaration. Bush's scripted statement and his unrehearsed answers to the media released Israel of its legal and moral obligations to the Palestinian people and to international law. Undoubtedly, it will have a major impact on U.S. policy towards the Palestine/ Israel conflict, on international law, on the U.S.-Israeli strategic alliance, and on stability in a volatile region of the world.
What Bush has embraced is a unilateral plan by Sharon that aims to relinquish some control over Gaza, which would ease Israel's security problem involving 7,500 Jewish settlers requiring four times that number of soldiers to protect them. Gaza, which no Israeli faction had shown any inclinations to keep forever, is being exchanged be facto for the West Bank, which Israel regards as a real economic and a strategic prize. Sharon is proposing a partial withdrawal from an unwanted, over-populated, poverty- stricken swath of land, in return for U.S. acquiescence in a long- term interim agreement that would consolidate Israel's control over the West Bank. The deal smacks of the late 1970s dismantlement of the Sinai settlement of Yamit and the withdrawal from Sinai Sharm El-Sheikh, in exchange for peace with Israel that enabled the latter to invade Lebanon and deal a crippling blow to Palestinian nationalism. From Sharon's vantage point, the current deal provided him with strategic gains without having to negotiate with the Palestinians.
Not unlike Britain during the First World War, the U.S. has just pledged, and not merely "viewed with favor", to recognize Israeli sovereignty over the entire area lying between the River Jordan and the Mediterranean Sea. By rendering the 1949 cease- fire lines obsolete, while keeping deliberate silence on the 1967 borders, the U.S. president has, in effect, recognized a permanent Israeli occupation of the remaining 22 percent of what Israel did not conquer in 1948.
This action supplanted mush of America's diplomatic work for thirty-seven years, creating an explicit shift in U.S. policy. Although America's diplomatic monopoly constituted an exercise in futility, it nevertheless contributed to the consolidation of the widely accepted position that the occupation was temporary and that territorial acquisition by force was impermissible under international law. Although the U.S. has paradoxically played the role of mediator, while acting as Israel's chief diplomatic backer, bankroller and arms supplier, it nevertheless refrained from conceding publicly that Israel was under no obligation to withdraw from occupied territory. Now, the window dressing is abandoned; Bush has come out of the closet. The occupation is part of what Bush described as "facts on the ground". No more 242.
It should be noted that since 1948, U.S. policy had twofaced: the declared and the presumed policy. While, it tried, however disingenuously, to approximate international legality on Jerusalem, the refugees, the occupation, the settlements, Washington's real and presumed policy deviated from the international consensus, this becoming the single most important factor enabling Israel to create today's fait accomplish. Now, that pretension has been dropped by George W. Bush, not withstanding his monotonous references to an "independent Palestinian state".
On the refugee question, the U.S. policy had been consistent with the requirements of United Nations resolution 194 of 1948 from its inception until 1993. The resolution recognized the right of return, compensation and restitution. In 1993, Madeleine Albright scrapped all UN resolutions on Palestine as irrelevant, contentious and obsolete". While the policy on refugees remained vague and cautious during the past decade, Bush's statement now restricts the right of return to truncated and isolated Palestinian Bantustans, fenced in between Israeli highways, settlements, and checkpoints. Having emphasized the ethno/religious character of Israel calling it the "Jewish state", a return of Palestinian refugees to their homes, now in Israel, was deemed unacceptable to Bush who invoked the racist demographic imperative. Again, international law, which has been declared irrelevant in Afghanistan, Iraq, Haiti, and elsewhere, was again rendered irrelevant in Palestine.
On the Israeli illegal settlements, bush declared them permanent and thus legal; despite existing U.S. declared policy and the requirements of international law, to which he had previously made a sarcastic reference when answering a question on Iraq: "oh let me call my lawyer". The status of settlements thus descended from "illegal" under carter, to "not illegal" under Reagan, to "an obstacle to peace under the elder Bush, to a "complaining factor in the peace process" under Clinton, to "rooted facts on the ground," thus permanent under Bush II. This is certainly a radical departure from the days of Bush's father who tried to take on the mighty pro-Israel lobby in the spring of 1991 over the status of these settlements James Baker III had simply mentioned the settlements in and around Jerusalem, citing US traditional policy towards Jerusalem, and all hell broke loose. Not only did the younger Bush learn from his father's "sins" but his wholesale embrace of Sharon's plan will challenge voters who will vote against him as voting against Israel's most devoted ally.
Moreover, Bush's new manifesto takes the U.S. position back to the pre Clinton era, when Washington abandoned the no- talk policy with the PLO, and began to broker direct negotiations between the Palestinians and Israel. There was no evidence of any Palestinian presence, neither during the past four months of U.S.- Israeli negotiations on the basis of Sharon's so- called disengagement plan, not at the April 14th press conference. In keeping with past practice (Camp David 1978, Oslo 1993). Israel supplied the framework for U.S. adoption, but this time, Israel acted as if the U.S. was its "strategic asset", in the words of Professor Mark Mazower (financial Times, April 14, 04) rather than the other way around. Not only did Sharon sell Bush his 1981 plan keeping 50 percent of the West Bank, relegating the Palestinians to fragmented entities, but he also guaranteed acceptance based on the prevailing strategic realities. With Bush bogged down in an increasingly bloody war that had been urged by Sharon and allies in the first place, he could ill afford to say no to the Israeli leader, who implicitly linked stability in his country to the success of his unilateral plan. Non-compliance by Bush would have been labeled by Sharon as a contributory agent to the ensuing instability in the region, thus assuring a substitutability of roles, wherein Bush becomes the attack dog, i.e. the strategic asset.
Another blatant departure from existing U.S. policy, Oslo's designation of "final status" was summarily dismissed, as Bush proceeded to pre-empt and foreclose on the issues falling under that status. America's frequently used phrase cautioning against "prejudging" a final settlement evaporated like dust, with Bush's instincts fixated on his electoral prospects and his "war on terror." As long as he, himself, did the prejudging, there seemed to be no need for accounting. After all, his previous press conference on Iraq, less than 24 hours earlier was, in effect, a monologue as he faced a fairly tame panel of journalists, who allowed him to use a "master key" approach to most questions.
In conceding final status issues, such as boundaries, refugees, settlements, Jerusalem, Bush seemed either incognizant of or oblivious to what his predecessors had offered on the table of negotiations at Camp David I, Camp David II, Taba, or the Clinton January 2001 speech in New York largely to an American-Jewish audience. The proposals posited then for Israeli territorial acquisitions to accommodate Israel's settlers entailed a swap whereby Israel was under obligation to cede "comparable" land to the Palestine Authority. Bush's generous offer takes no account of such reciprocal arrangements, bestowing upon Israel land, which is neither his nor Sharon's. Nor did Bush utter a sentence about Israel's apartheid wall, which he had previously considered as an obstacle to the "peace process." Perhaps he was satisfied with Sharon's comical assurance that the 400 Kilometer wall was "temporary … and, therefore will not prejudice any final status issues including borders."
Remarkably, Bush's new policy gave the "Roadmap" a short shrift, despite the hollow reference, and despite the huge diplomatic capital invested in it over more than a year during which summit meetings were held with Arab leaders, the EU, Russia and the United Nations. It did not seem to matter to the magisterial Bush that the Roadmap was co-sponsored by the so-called Quartet, which should have been consulted when their enterprise had just been laid to waste at the behest of Sharon and his neo-conservative/Likudist allies in the U.S. Instead, it was effectively set aside after it became known several months ago that Israel had stipulated 14 amendments prior to accepting it as a basis for negotiations. Instead of freezing the Israeli settlements, as required by the Roadmap, Sharon, the father of settlements, receives a U.S. sanction for keeping the settlements and scrapping the Roadmap in a deal that Bush would call "historic and courageous." By contrast, the European Union issued a statement on April 15 saying it "will not recognize any change to the pre-1967 borders than those arrived at by agreement between the parties."
In conclusion, the April 14 charade was the inevitable consequence of a U.S. policy, which permitted Israel over the past decades to create facts on the ground, awaiting propitious regional and international circumstances to be consecrated. The collapse of the Soviet empire, together with Arab disarray and the ascendancy of neo-conservatives, who exploited the events of September 11 were the exact circumstances that Israel has been waiting for to reap the harvest. It found another James Arthur Balfour in George W. Bush.
* Naseer Aruri is Chancellor Professor (Emeritus), University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. His latest book is Dishonest Broker, the U.S. Role in Israel and Palestine, Cambridge, MA, South End Press, 2003.
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