U.S. and Israel pretend to quarrel over settlements

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In the midst of the dispute over Al-Quds (see article on next page), Tel Aviv sparked a diplomatic spat with its sponsors in Washington. The initial cause was the announcement by Israel, made during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit, that it would build 1600 new homes for Jewish settlers in Al-Quds. Mostly ignored by the media was a report by Israel’s Planning Ministry that 50,000 new housing units in eastern Jerusalem neigh­ borhoods were in various stages of planning and ap­ proval.

U.S. officials feigned outrage—not because they op­ pose settlement construction, but because they fear the Zionists aren’t properly acting out the diplomatic charade. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said that the timing of the announcement was “insulting,” and top aide David Axelrod called it an “affront” that “seemed calculated” to undermine the peace talks.

Behind the spat were longstanding Obama admin­ istration fears that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wasn’t giving quisling Palestinian leaders Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad sufficient cover to sign another sell-out accord. Now he was making it too humiliating for them even to say they wanted to come to the negotiating table.

In the midst of this lover’s quarrel, Netanyahu said plans to build homes for settlers in Al-Quds would go ahead. The response of Clinton was to ask him to make a “substantial gesture” towards Palestinians to help restart peace talks. Gesture indeed. The U.S. govern­ ment—itself occupying land in Iraq, Afghanistan, Haiti and elsewhere, and sitting atop an empire built on ethnic cleansing and occupation—has no quarrel with the deeds of the Zionists, only with their timing and rhetoric. It needs the Israeli government as an outpost in the Middle East.

So Washington, while sending stern signals over Ne­ tanyahu’s intransigence, never raised the specter of withholding aid or loan guarantees. This left Netanya­ hu free to tell the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee: “The Jewish people were building Jerusalem 3000 years ago and the Jew­ ish people are building Jerusalem today. Jerusalem is not a settlement. It is our capital.” Building in Jerusa­ lem, he said, is like building in Tel Aviv. And saying his policy was inseparable from that of all previous Israeli governments, he added: “Everyone knows that these neighborhoods will be part of Israel in any peace set­ tlement. Therefore, building them in no way precludes the possibility of a two-state solution.”

Haaretz reported that on returning from Washing­ ton, Netanyahu said he was building in Jerusalem “on Correction: In our March issue, the article “Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Case Stuck in Legal Limbo” used the phrase “convicted police killer Mumia Abu-Jamal.“ The editors should have added the word “wrongly” in brackets to make clear that we believe Mumia is innocent of the murder charges against him and was framed up by the police and legal system.

4 SOCIALIST ACTION APRIL 2010 his own accord and not because coalition partners are pressuring him to do so. … Netanyahu clarified that he has no intention of breaking up his right-wing coali­ tion to form a more moderate centrist alliance, despite continuing pressure from the U.S. … ‘I do not need coalition partners to pressure me into continuing to build in Jerusalem. I, myself, plan to continue build­ ing in Jerusalem as all previous prime ministers did before me.’”

There is speculation that Washington wants to force Netanyahu to break up his far-right coalition and in­ clude Tzipi Livni and her Kadima party—not because her policies are different, but because she knows bet­ ter how to play the game. Livni too is an ardent advo­ cate of settlements in eastern Al-Quds, and during the current diplomatic crisis, said Jonathan Cook in Coun­ terpunch, she emphasized that “by ‘acting stupidly’ in stoking a row with the U.S., Netanyahu had risked ‘weakening’ Israel’s hold on Jerusalem.”

Israel’s latest gambit is to try to end the crisis through a policy of “Don’t ask, don’t tell” about further construction—a policy the U.S. has not yet ruled out. Despite claims by Michael Oren, Israel’s ambassador to the U.S., that the dispute had brought relations to a 35-year low, we can be sure Washington will not cut a dime of the $3 billion in annual aid to Israel. Given the shaky hold on world hegemony that the United States retains due to its adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, it can’t afford too deep a breach with its most impor­ tant ally in the region.

Haaretz correspondent Amos Harel reported that in the midst of the diplomatic row, “the [Israeli] Defense Ministry and Pentagon were concluding yet another huge deal. Israel will buy three new Hercules-J trans­ port aircraft, built by Lockheed Martin, at a cost of $250 million. The planes will be manufactured accord­ ing to Israeli specifications and include many systems produced by Israeli military suppliers.

“The deal goes to show that a continuing diplomatic crisis between Israel and the U.S. has still to make it­ self felt as far as defense relations are concerned. … Over the past two years defense ties have flourished. The air force now holds extensive exercises with its American counterpart, while this November a large joint missile defense exercise, code-named JuniperCobra, is due to take place in Israel.

“Against a background of high-level tensions be­ tween Obama and Netanyahu, the U.S. defense estab­ lishment has been careful to build an alternative in the form of direct and friendly links with Israeli defense officials.” Israel has also announced plans to replace its aging fleet of F-16 fighter jets with new, U.S.-made F-35 fighters.

The media gave prominent coverage to this theme of supposed conflict between Israeli and U.S. inter­ ests. The most cited example was the testimony to Congress of General David Petraeus, commander of U.S. Central Command (Centcom), which oversees the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus told Senators: “The enduring hostilities between Israel and some of its neighbors present distinct challenges to our ability to advance our interests in Centcom’s Area of Respon­ conflict of interests and argue that peace with the Pal­ estinians would do nothing to assuage hatred of other Arabs and Muslims for the U.S. Given Washington’s many wars and support of repressive dictatorships, there’s truth in this argument. Left unsaid is that nei­ ther Washington nor Tel Aviv can ever achieve real peace with any Arab or Muslim peoples: the inherent­ ly expansionist nature of imperialism mandates a per­ manent state of dominance over, and if need be war against, those resisting rule by Western corporations and the states that protect them.

But Petraeus’s claim that support for Zionism is “against America’s national interests” has been eager­ ly jumped on, not only by right-wingers who couple it with claims that the “Jewish lobby” runs U.S. poli­ tics but even by some liberals, who think this will help put pressure on Israel to agree to a two-state solution. Even some progressive activists have quoted Petraeus out of context, ignoring his main goal: facilitating vic­ tory for the U.S. and for all its allies in all their wars.

There is no question that there are differences of opinion, reflecting real differences in material inter­ ests, between the United States and Israel. That is in­ evitable in a relationship between the world’s biggest imperialist power and a colonial-settler state which, while happily acting as Washington’s guard dog in the region, can survive only by following its own expan­ sionist needs—needs inherent in its nature as a capi­ talist regime.

This contradictory relationship of allies with com­ mon interests arguing when those interests diverge was the case also in disputes between the United States and allies such as the UK or France during the two World Wars and in the Cold War. It has also been the case during the wars against Iraq, as all imperi­ alist powers united to get rid of the Saddam Hussein regime, while squabbling with each other over how many troops to provide, the shape of the occupation government, and the rights of each imperialist coun­ try’s oil companies to newly-privatized oil fields.

In the current world setting, calling for opposition to Zionism by defending the alleged national interests of the United States is a betrayal of the victims of Wash­ ington’s wars, occupations, and support for dictators in Iraq, Afghanistan, Honduras, Haiti, and on and on.

But it’s not just a moral issue: We should be glad that U.S. dominance is threatened by this falling out among thieves: the weaker the U.S. position in Iraq and Afghanistan and the stronger the resistance there, the more maneuvering room the Palestinians have to fight for their own liberation—and vice versa. Just as Che called for “two, three, many Vietnams,” seeing the connection between the liberation struggle there and those in Latin America and elsewhere, we say “two, three, many Palestines!” n • ‘Stop the Occupation of Iraq!’

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The seventh anniversary of the U.S. assault on Iraq has just passed and commentators in the press have been Karim Kadim / AP