Foreign Policy In Focus

Of course it was a coincidence. Of course. Even if it did sound to me like talking points.

A number of pundits and reporters came to the same conclusion at about the same time. To wit (as one of them put it), “the Palestinian leadership has found itself orphaned. Politically divided, its peace talks with Israel collapsed and its foreign support waning, the Palestinian Authority is sidelined, confused and worried that its people may return to violence.”

Those are the words of soon-to-be-ex New York Times Jerusalem bureau chief Ethan Bronner. They appeared March 7 on the paper’s web site in advance of his story – “Mideast Din Drowns out Palestinians” – that showed up above the fold in the print edition the following day.

Coincidently, on March 8, Reuters carried a report by correspondent Noah Browning titled “Amid Iran war of words, Palestinians are forgotten,” which contained this colorful bit of analysis: “A monumental wooden chair erected in Ramallah to symbolize the Palestinians' sought-after United Nations seat collapsed this week after months of wind and rain. Bulldozers quietly took away the shattered remains by night.

“It's (sic) collapse and stealthy removal could well serve as an emblem of Palestinian hopes for statehood.”

Palestinian officials are said to be drafting a statement setting forth guidelines for the resumption of peace talks with Tel Aviv. In Browning’s view, “The Israelis will certainly reject the demands, if they ever arrive, and will face no international pressure to back down, with world attention fixed firmly on the Iranian nuclear row.”

Browning’s obituary for Palestinian hopes for a settlement appeared the day after Bronner’s. The same day, Jonathan Tobin, senior online editor of Commentary magazine, a neo-conservative monthly, wrote:

"For decades, the chattering classes have been working hard to teach us that the central issue of the region was not the Shia-Sunni conflict or the struggle for freedom by Arabs longing to rid themselves of autocratic monarchs or dictators. The belief in the centrality of the Palestinian issue was so strong that every other consideration had to be subordinated to the cause of trying to assuage the anger of the Muslim world at their plight. But in the past year, the main subjects of discussion have been the Arab Spring revolts and the debate over how best to stop the Iranian nuclear threat. The result is that the world is getting on with its business these days without obsessing about the Palestinians. Even President Obama, who had picked an annual fight with Israel, chose this year to abandon his usual attempt to pressure Israel into concessions to the Palestinians."

Tobin’s piece (“Who Marginalized the Palestinians?”) cited Bronner’s, “the “substance” of which was, he wrote, that “The Palestinian answer to their dilemma is much like that of a child who threatens to hold his breath until he turns blue.”

Those words were not in the version of the article he wrote the night before that dealt with the pending unity agreement between the Palestinian Authority and Hamas. It said, “The lack of alarm, or even much worry, about the impact of Hamas on the peace process makes it clear that not only is there no more peace process to worry about, but that the Palestinians have made themselves irrelevant.”

“Where once the international chattering classes doted upon every aspect of Palestinian politics in a way that confirmed the prevalent myth that Israel’s antagonists were truly at the heart of all the problems of the Middle East, it is no longer possible for even their cheerleaders and apologists to pretend this is so. In the 18+ years since the signing of the Oslo Accords,” wrote Tobin. “The Palestinians have talked and bombed their way not only out of peace and the independent state they claimed they wanted but also off the front pages. While supporters of Israel still keep their eyes on the goings-on in Ramallah and Gaza, the rest of the world is gradually moving on.”

All of U.S. President Barack Obama’s initiatives “to push the Israelis to give in on Jerusalem, settlements, and the 1967 borders have been rendered moot by the Palestinian refusal to negotiate” wrote Tobin. “At this point, and with his campaign staff worried about shoring up his popularity in an election year, any further attention paid to the Palestinians is not only bad policy but also a waste of time. Though the Palestinians’ erstwhile European friends have no such worries, even they have figured out there are other more pressing issues.”

In the same haughty, arrogant spirit, Tobin went on to declare, “there is little the world can do” for the Palestinians “unless they decide to recognize the legitimacy of a Jewish state no matter where its borders are drawn. Until they do so — and that seems unlikely for the foreseeable future — they are going to have to reconcile themselves to being marginal players on the world stage rather than the focus of the world’s sympathy.”

The coincidence of this theme of Palestinian defeat and isolation by Bonner, Browning and Tobin, all appearing within a 24-hour period coinciding with the gathering in Washington of the American Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC), Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance there, and his meeting with President Obama is as fascinating as it is troubling. An effort to get that message out was, however, foreseen.

“Peace talks with the Palestinians dominated President Barack Obama's meeting last year with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu but will barely warrant a mention at their White House session Monday or in speeches to a powerful pro-Israeli lobby,” Associated Press reporters Bradley Klapper and Matthew Lee wrote March 3. “Iran is now the issue commanding urgent attention.”

The Palestinians “probably will not get much more than a passing reference by the U.S. and Israeli officials, lawmakers, GOP presidential hopefuls and others” at the AIPAC conference “nor in the Obama –Netanyahu meeting in the Oval Office,” the AP story read. “Shifting focus from the seemingly intractable Mideast conflict has political advantages for both Obama and Netanyahu, even if they also don't see eye to eye on the preferred tactics to prevent Iran from being a nuclear-armed state.”

As the country’s “pro-Israel advocates gather again, the call for peace with the Palestinians has succumbed to fever-pitched talk of military action against Iran,” Klapper and Lee wrote. 

"Putting the peace process on the back burner has not solved any of the underlying tension and mistrust between the Obama administration and Netanyahu government," Haim Malka, a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told AP. "If anything, tension over the Palestinian issue has been eclipsed by bilateral tension over how to address Iran's nuclear program."

“Relegating the peace process to the background is a coup for Netanyahu. His government has brushed aside American criticism of Jewish settlement expansion in lands the Palestinians want for their future state, and has insisted on Palestinian concessions, notably their endorsement of Israel's Jewish character, before any talk of granting Palestinian independence,” concluded Klapper and Lee.

The issue of Palestine and the occupation is not going away – even if Netanyahu and perhaps Obama wish it to. The Palestinian leadership is hardly likely to remain holed up in Ramallah ruing their alleged impotence until next year. Tobin’s notion that they “are going to have to reconcile themselves to being marginal players on the world stage rather than the focus of the world’s sympathy” is a pipe dream.

Gershom Gorenberg wrote on the American Prospect site March 7 that a count of the words devoted to each subject in his AIPAC speech “shows that Netanyahu has succeeded in defining the agenda in U.S.-Israel relations as being all Iran, all the time. Resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, truly the key to Israel's future, has been demoted to less than a distraction.”

“Compare this year's speeches to last year's,” wrote Gorenberg. Addressing AIPAC in 2011, Obama devoted about 200 words of a 3,000-word speech to Iran. The concluding section, nearly half the speech, portrayed the urgent need for an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, ‘based on the 1967 lines with mutually agreed swaps.’ This year, the proportions were reversed: Obama spent less than 200 words defending the very fact that he'd ever engaged in peace efforts. His long crescendo dealt with Iran. Last year, Netanyahu had to declare, ‘Peace between Israelis and Palestinians is a vital interest for us,’ even while putting all blame for the failure to achieve it on the other side. This year he felt free to leave the word ‘Palestinian’ out completely.

“That doesn't mean the issue has disappeared. There's nothing static about the status quo. Two weeks ago, an Israeli planning authority approved nearly 700 new homes in settlements in an area north of Ramallah that Israel would have to give up in any two-state accord. Palestinian frustration with the diplomatic stalemate is growing; the only question is whether it will explode in violent or non-violent protest. Even conservative European leaders such as Germany's Angela Merkel are tired of Netanyahu's policies. Without a two-state agreement, international pressure to declare a single state between the Mediterranean and Jordan will grow—a ‘solution’ almost certain to be disastrous.”

Carl Bloice, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, is a columnist for the Black Commentator. He also serves on its editorial board.

In politics, a "gaffe" is a politically inconvenient truth. The first George Bush committed a gaffe when he said that the idea that cutting taxes would increase government revenue was "voodoo economics." Similarly, it was a gaffe when Barack Obama said that insecure right-wingers "cling" to religion and guns.

Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak gaffed big-time last November. This gaffe is even more colossal than what he said back in 1999 that if he were a stateless young Palestinian, he would "have joined one of the terror organizations."

Barak's November 2011 remark is breathtaking in both its honesty and in its deviation from the Israeli government line (Iran being an existential threat to Israel, Europe and the rest of the world) that has not only been sold to the Israeli people, but also to the United States government -- especially to Congress, where anything from Netanyahu's office is treated as gospel.

Appearing on PBS' Charlie Rose, Barak was asked if he would want nuclear weapons if he were an Iranian government minister. He said he probably would.

BARAK: Probably, probably. I know it's not -- I mean I don't delude myself that they are doing it just because of Israel. They look around, they see the Indians are nuclear, the Chinese are nuclear, Pakistan is nuclear, not to mention the Russians.

Barak did not "delude" himself with the belief that Iran's nuclear weapon program is "just because of Israel." Well, it's always nice to be true to yourself. After the Israeli right went ballistic over Barak's remarks, he qualified them, but in such a half-hearted way that it is clear what he said on PBS is what he believes.

Barak is not the only leading Israeli leader that has spoken the truth.

Meir Dagan, the recently retired Mossad chief, called bombing Iran a "stupid idea." He said: "A military attack will give the Iranians the best excuse to pursue the nuclear race. Khamenei will say 'I was attacked by a country with nuclear capabilities; my nuclear program was peaceful, but I must protect my country.'"

Of course, Barak and Netanyahu and a host of officials in successive Israeli governments for the past 15 years have sold the entire world on the idea that Iran seeks nuclear weapons for the purpose of destroying Israel. Repeatedly, Israeli officials have said that the Iranian government is insane with anti-Semitism, so insane that it would joyfully nuke Israel without any regard for the fact that Israel has 200 land, air and sea-based missiles that could kill millions.

Among the leading advocates for "crippling sanctions" against Iran and for keeping the "bomb Iran" option "on the table" are the right-wing "pro-Israel" organizations led by AIPAC, its congressional cutouts, and, in the blogosphere, Commentary, which is central command headquarters for the "Bomb Iran" movement.

With one honest comment, Barak demonstrated that the hysteria surrounding an Iranian bomb is, in fact, not about an "existential threat" to Israel, but about the fact that: Israelis don't want Iran to have a nuclear weapon because, if it does, Israel will not be free to continue its role as regional hegemon and to do whatever it wants in the Middle East. It will change the balance of power in the region. 

Disregarding the Israelis publically stated reasons for attacking Iran, one needs to ask the question: why the saber-rattling? We believe that part of the answer lies in the unstated circumstantial factors.

In about nine months, the US will hold a presidential election. All the noise about striking Iran could have more to do with American domestic politics than any real or perceived threat to the Israelis.

It is no secret that the right-wing government in Israel in general, and Netanyahu in particular, would prefer a new US president in January 2013. This is not simply because Netanyahu had some tense moments with Obama, but also because in a second term Obama would not face the type of electoral constraints he faces in his first term.

It is no secret that US presidents who have engaged in Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking have been most active in their second terms as Bill Clinton was at Camp David and George W. Bush was in Annapolis. Those that were particularly active in their first terms -- Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush -- were defeated in their re-election bids. Netanyahu does not want an unrestrained Obama demanding that he halt settlement expansion in 2013. Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich is more likely to be more susceptible to the pro-Israel pressures AIPAC is apt to apply.

Netanyahu also knows that if Israel went ahead and attacked Iran on its own before the election, he would put Obama in an extremely compromising position. Obama does not want to get into a war with Iran as it is against American interests. But Obama also knows that should Israel go it alone, he'd be pressured to participate lest he appear weak before the electorate.

The specter of an Israeli strike on Iran will have Obama asking Netanyahu what he can do to change Netanyahu's mind and put off the strike to say, at least after November. (Remember Golda Meir’s threat of bombing Cairo with nuclear weapons in October 1973 war?) Netanyahu's government has a great deal to gain from hanging the possibility of a unilateral strike ominously over the head of President Obama before an election.

Israel is hedging its bets for November in the hopes that they will either get a first-term Republican facing domestic constraints that prevent him from pressuring Israel, or a docile Obama, who has already given away the house on Jerusalem and settlements.

Did Netanyahu ask for specific guarantees, similar to the ones George W Bush made, which Obama does not recognize, about Israel's retention of major settlement blocs in any deal with the Palestinians? Did he ask for guarantees about the future of Jerusalem, which he wants to keep in violation of international law, and the Jordan Valley in the West Bank, over which he seeks to maintain a long-term military presence, rendering a would-be Palestinian state dead on arrival?

Ibrahim Kazerooni is finishing a joint Ph.D. program at the Iliff School of Theology and the University of Denver's Korbel School of International Studies in Denver. More of his work can be found at the Imam Ibrahim Kazerooni Blog. Rob Prince is a Lecturer of International Studies at the University of Denver's Korbel School of International Studies and publisher of the Colorado Progressive Jewish News.

In his report on the Oval Office meeting between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu for the New York Times, Mark Landler writes:

Mr. Netanyahu, according to the official, argued that the West should not reopen talks with Iran until it agreed to a verifiable suspension of its uranium enrichment activities — a condition the White House says would doom talks before they began.

In other words, don't hold talks until a goal of the talks has been reached before the talks themselves. In the United States we're familiar with that practice from the Bush administration. It also parallels the Iran Threat Reduction Act of 2011 which prohibited U.S. diplomacy with "any Iranian official who poses a threat to the United States."

In the same vein, in his interview with Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic a few days before, President Obama said (emphasis added):

When you look at what I've done with respect to security for Israel, from joint training and joint exercises that outstrip anything that's been done in the past, to helping finance and construct the Iron Dome program to make sure that Israeli families are less vulnerable to missile strikes, to ensuring that Israel maintains its qualitative military edge, to fighting back against delegitimization of Israel, whether at the [UN] Human Rights Council, or in front of the UN General Assembly, or during the Goldstone Report, or after the flare-up involving the flotilla -- the truth of the matter is that the relationship has functioned very well.

"Deligitimization of Israel"? As what? A legitimate, certified tyranny? President Obama has not only drunk but regurgitated the deligitimization Kool-Aid. The other Rosenberg -- M.J. wrote about the concept in 2010 for the Los Angeles Times.

Suddenly, all the major pro-Israel organizations are anguishing about "delegitimization." Those who criticize Israeli policies are accused of trying to delegitimize Israel, which supposedly means denying Israel's right to exist.

The concept of delegitimization has been used as a weapon against Israel's critics at least as far back as 1975, when then-U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Daniel Patrick Moynihan accused the international body of delegitimizing Israel by passing a "Zionism is racism " resolution. That may have been the last time the term was used accurately.

After all …

Israel achieved its "legitimacy" when the United Nations recognized it 63 years ago. It has one of the strongest economies in the world. Its military is the most powerful in the region. … So why are the pro-Israel organizations talking about it? The answer is simple: They are trying to divert attention from the intensifying world opposition to the occupation of the West Bank and to the blockade of the Gaza Strip, both of which, by almost any standard, are illegitimate. They are trying to divert attention from the ever-expanding settlements, which are not only illegitimate but illegal under international law. They are trying to divert attention from the ever-louder calls for Israel to grant Palestinians equal rights.

In any event, the New York Times reported yesterday (March 6):

The global powers dealing with Iran’s  disputed nuclear program said Tuesday  that they had accepted its offer to resume negotiations broken off in stalemate more than a year ago — a  move that could help relieve increased pressure from Israel to use military  force against Tehran.

“I have offered to resume talks with Iran on the nuclear issue,” said Catherine Ashton, the European Union’s foreign policy chief,  who represents the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Germany as the contact on the nuclear issue with Iran. “We hope  that Iran will now enter into a sustained  process of constructive dialogue which will deliver real progress.”

Quoted for the article, Trita Parsi, president of the National Iranian American Council and author of A Single Roll of the Dice: Obama's Diplomacy with Iran, said.

"If the two sides fail to establish a process rather than just another meeting, the risk of war will rise significantly.”

In other words, if unsuccessful, talks with Iran could "delegitimize" diplomacy.

From its birth more than 60 years ago, Israel has always presented itself as “an oasis of democracy in a sea of despotism,” an outpost of pluralism surrounded by tyranny. While that equality never fully applied to the country’s Arab citizens, Israel was, for the most part an open society. But today political rights are under siege by right-wing legislators, militant settlers, and a growing religious divide in the Israeli army, all of which threaten to silence internal opposition to the policies of the government of Benjamin Netanyahu. Since that may include a war with Iran—and the probable involvement of the U.S. in such a conflict—the move to stifle dissent should be a major concern for Americans.

The U.S. media has reported on growing tensions between Israeli women and the ultra-orthodox Haredim over the latter’s demand for sexual segregation of schools, public transport, and public life. But while orthodox Jews spitting on eight-year old girls for being “immodestly dressed” has garnered the headlines, the most serious threats to democratic rights have gone largely unreported, including a host of proposed or enacted laws. Some of these include:

*A law that allows Jewish communities to bar Arab families from living among them. Arabs make up about 20 percent of the population.

*A law that makes it illegal to advocate an academic, cultural or economic boycott of Israel, including settler communities.

*A law that would limit the power of the Supreme Court.

*A law that bars any state institutions—including schools and theaters—from commemorating the “Nakba,” or “catastrophe,” the term Palestinians use to describe the loss of their lands in the 1948 war that established Israel.

*A law that prohibits Palestinians from living with their Israeli spouses within Israel proper and denies them citizenship.

*A law that drops Arabic as an official language.

*A law that requires anyone obtaining a driver’s license to swear loyalty to the state.

*A law that would limit the number of petitions non-governmental organizations, including peace and human rights groups, could file before the Supreme Court.

*A law that forces human rights and peace groups to limit the money they can receive from abroad, and forces them to go through burdensome registration requirements.

Tzipi Livni, former foreign secretary and head of the Kadima Party, told the Knesset that Arab states were “trying to become a democracy, while we—with these bills—are headed toward dictatorship.”

Most of these laws are being pushed by Israel’s rightwing Likud and Yisreal Beiteinu parties, but the proposal to drop Arabic comes from the Kadima Party. Ram-rodding many of these laws are Likid’s so-called “fantastic four”: Danny Danon, Yariv Levin, Tzipi Hotovely, and Ofir Akunis.

“We are in the process of reducing freedom of speech and the freedom of association, and we are infringing on the right to equality, especially vis-à-vis the Israeli Arab,” Mordechai Kremnitizer, a professor of law and vice-president of the Israel Democracy Institute told the Financial Times.  “We are also weakening all the elements in society that have the function of criticizing the governments, including the courts. ”

Israeli society is filled with sharp divisions on everything from war with Iran to growing economic inequality. Israel has the highest poverty rate out of the 32-nation Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and ranks twenty-fifth in health care investment. The poverty rate for Israeli Arabs is between 50 and 55 percent.

Starting in the 1980s, Israel began dismantling its social safety net, a trend that Netanyahu sharply accelerated when he served as finance minister in 2003. While slashing money for housing, education, and transport, he cut taxes for the wealthy and corporations.

Most of all, however, Israeli governments poured the nation’s wealth into colonizing the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights, where, according to Shir Hever of the Alternative Information Center based in Jerusalem, Israel has spent about $100 billion. A vast network of bypass roads, security zones, and walled settlements siphoned off money that could have gone for housing, education and transportation in Israel. Special tax rebates and rent subsidies for settlers added to that bill. Some 15 percent of the Israeli housing budget is used to support four percent of its population in the Occupied Territories. Add to that the 20 percent the military budget sucks up, and it seems increasingly clear that the settlement endeavor is no longer sustainable.

Wealth disparity—a handful of families control 30 percent of Israel’s GDP—was partly behind last summer’s social explosion that at one point put some 450,000 people into the streets of Haifa, Tel Aviv, and Jerusalem demanding reductions in rent and food prices. But so far, organizers of those massive demonstrations have avoided making the link between growing income inequality and Israel’s policies in the Occupied Territories. Many of these new laws are aimed at organizations that have been trying to do precisely that.

There are other divisions as well. Israelis are split down the middle over whether to attack Iran—43 percent yes, 41 percent no—but 64 percent support the creation of a Middle East nuclear free zone, and 65 percent feel that neither Israel nor Iran should have nuclear weapons. Those are not exactly the home front sentiments that a government wants when it is contemplating going to war.

Besides the avalanche of right-wing legislation coming out of the Knesset, Israel is increasingly at war with itself over the role of religion in daily life, a conflict that is playing out in one of Israel’s core institutions, the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Two years ago, soldiers of the Kfir Brigade, a unit deployed in the West Bank, unveiled banners declaring they would refuse orders to remove settlers. By international law, all settlements in the Occupied Territories are illegal, but Israel claims that only unregistered “outposts” are against the law and subject to removal. The soldiers held signs that read, “We will not expel Jews.” Six of them were arrested and spent 30 days in the stockade.

The soldiers were graduates of army-sponsored “hesder yeshivas” that allow orthodox soldiers to divide their time between active service and Torah study. Settler rabbis rallied around the six and even provided money for some of the soldiers’ families.

Writing in the progressive Jewish weekly, the Forward, Columnist J.J. Goldberg says that a “secret report” in 2008 warned that such “yeshiva graduates comprise 30 percent of the junior officer corps and rising. In a decade they will be the military’s senior commanders. If a peace agreement is not reached in 15 years or so, Israel may no long have an army willing to carry out its side.”

A majority of Israelis support some kind of compromise to achieve a settlement with the Palestinians, but in the most recent set of talks, the Netanyahu government made it clear that Israel will not surrender any settlements, any part of Jerusalem, or the Jordan Valley. In essence, Palestinians would be forced to live in isolated enclaves surrounded by networks of restricted roads and over 120 settlements. The Netanyahu proposal not only violates numerous United Nations resolutions and international law, no Palestinian government that accepted such an offer would survive for long.

But Israelis who protest an offer that is widely seen as little more than a way to kill the possibility of serious negotiations may find themselves treated in much the same way as Israel has dealt with its Arab citizens.

Those who agitate against the current government may find themselves hit with the new libel law that no longer requires plaintiffs to prove they were damaged and increases awards six-fold. Bloggers, who lack institutional support, are particularly fearful of the new law. Organizations critical of the government that try to raise money from sources outside the country could face huge fines.

According to Hagai El-Ad, director of the Association for Civil Rights in Israel, there is growing resistance within Israel to the attempt to silence critics, as well as pressure from abroad, including the American Jewish community. Even a pro-Netanyahu hawk like the Anti-Defamation League’s Abraham Foxman warns “the very democratic character of the state is being eroded.” That resistance has delayed some of the more odious proposals, but the “fantastic four” and their allies are pushing hard to get them on the books.

Why should Americans care? Because if Netanyahu silences his domestic opponents, he will have carte blanche to do as he pleases. And if Tel Aviv attacks Iran, it will be very difficult for the U.S. to keep clear of it. For starters, the IDF will be firing U.S.-made cruise missiles, flying American-made F-15s, and dropping “made in the USA” bunker busters. With the exception of the monarchs from the Gulf states, no one in the Middle East—or most of the world—is going to give Washington a pass on this one.

Does America need another war? If it doesn’t protest the assault on democracy in Israel, it may get one, whether it likes it or not.

For more of Conn Hallinan's essays visit Dispatches From the Edge. Meanwhile, his novels about the ancient Romans can be found at The Middle Empire Series.

Cross-posted from IPS Special Project Right Web's Militarist Monitor.

Last week, blogger and Inter Press Service correspondent Mitchell Plitnick reported that an otherwise little-noted Republican National Committee (RNC) meeting in New Orleans produced a potential foreign-policy firebomb: a unanimously adopted resolution apparently disavowing the party’s commitment to a two-state solution for Israel-Palestine and endorsing the Israeli annexation of the Palestinian territories.

The relevant text reads: “BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED, that … Israel is neither an attacking force nor an occupier of the lands of others; and that peace can be afforded the region only through a united Israel governed under one law for all people.”

The curious trope that Israel is “neither an attacking force nor an occupier” harkens to an annexationist, right-wing audience that sees the West Bank in particular—or “Judea and Samaria”—as an integral part of Greater Israel, meaning the Israeli soldiers there in abundance are not properly foreigners but locals (the occupation itself notwithstanding). Proponents of this worldview often further suggest that the Palestinians themselves are “occupiers,” as implied by GOP presidential candidate Newt Gingrich when he called Palestinians an “invented people” who had missed their “chance to go many other places.” Although Palestinian lands are considered occupied territories under international law, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu received a standing ovation from the U.S. Congress when he declared, “in Judea and Samaria, the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers.”

The allusion to “one law for all people” is quite clear about the number of states the GOP would favor in the region, but it leaves unresolved questions about the final status of Palestinians. Would they be fully absorbed and assimilated into a democratic Israel, or would they live on as second-class citizens, a potential Arab majority in an officially Jewish state? Might they be expelled from the region altogether?

Plitnick himself speculated that the RNC activists “do not understand the implications of their resolution and that it would mean either the end of Israel as a Jewish state or would necessitate the mass expulsion of Palestinians from the West Bank.” Indeed, an RNC spokesman played down the report, noting that the official platform, which currently calls for “two democratic states living in peace and security,” can only be formally amended at the presidential nominating convention. But the unanimous one-state resolution speaks volumes about the attitudes of the GOP base toward Israel-Palestine.

One wonders why the party would seek to downplay this shift away from the two-state formula, which is already apparent in deed if not word. In addition to the party’s grassroots, its presidential candidates (at least the ones who aren’t Ron Paul) have been utterly unshy about advocating a pro-settlement policy in the West Bank that would render a viable two-state solution completely unworkable. 

In addition to his other impolitic remarks, for example, Gingrich has expressed his support for “development in the [occupied] areas” as a way for the Israelis to “[maximize] their net bargaining advantage”—acknowledging but not condemning the fact that the expansion of illegal Israeli settlements in Palestinian territories makes good-faith negotiation about the division of land impossible. Mitt Romney has criticized President Barack Obama for supposedly going “to the United Nations to criticize Israel for building settlements” in the West Bank, despite the fact that the Obama administration actually spent considerable diplomatic capital to veto a UN resolution condemning the settlements in defiance of its own stated policy. Most curiously, Rick Santorum has claimed—and repeatedly refused to clarify—that “all the people who live in the West Bank are Israelis, they’re not Palestinians.”

Perhaps the GOP’s reluctance to embrace its own one-state bent is purely tactical. If the party can continue to claim support for a stagnant “peace process” geared toward the eventual creation of a Palestinian state—all the while supporting the settlement program that has fatally hamstringed recent negotiations—it can continue to place the onus on Palestinians to recognize Israel’s “right to exist” as “a Jewish state,” and even to end their supposed “war on Israel,” as though these were the crucial stumbling blocks. Nominally clinging to the two-state formula enables Republicans to shirk tougher questions about the fate of Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza that would inevitably arise should the party fully back a one-state solution.

Of course, if even the right-wing Israeli government is unwilling to own its positions on these matters, one could hardly expect better of today’s Republican Party.