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.

GOP Presidential candidate Rick Perry, who has in the past compared Gaza to Mexico and the Alamo to Masada, wants you to know that the Lone Star state and the Star of David state have a lot more in common that just bad relations with their neighbors and certain ethnic groups. "Historian T.R. Fehrenbach once observed that my home state of Texas and Israel share the experience of civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies," the governor of Texas proudly proclaimed in a recent op-ed making the rounds in conservative papers condemning President Obama's Israel policy and the Palestinian Authority's efforts at the UN. 

But, as Max Blumenthal has pointed out, the paraphrasing was too accurate by half. According to Blumenthal, what Fehrenbach actually said in his work Lone Star: A History of Texas and the Texans was this:

The Texan’s attitudes, his inherent chauvinism and the seeds of his belligerence, sprouted from his conscious effort to take and hold his land. It was the reaction of essentially civilized men and women thrown into new and harsh conditions, beset by enemies they despised. The closest 20th-century counterpart is the State of Israel, born in blood in another primordial land.

Perry's Freudian slip?

Perhaps (more likely, it was shoddy speechwriting). But both Perry and Fehrenbach make important points -- Perry in terms of mythologizing history, Fehrenbach in terms of actually reporting history. 

One thing that has always struck me about the points of the argument regarding the disposition of land in the British Mandate of Palestine was how similar the Zionist claim that the Jordan River Valley is an integral part of Israel sounds to arguments made centuries earlier over a different river valley that was once as contested as the Jordan River Valley is today: the Ohio River Valley in the United States.

In the 1760s and 1770s, the Ohio River Valley was a flashpoint that loomed large in foreign and American consciousnesses. Multiple wars were fought over it, military outposts were built throughout its boundaries, people argued that its seizure was tantamount to national survival, and officially sanctioned (by George Washington, no less) ethnic cleansing took place after the American Revolution as settlers and land speculators crossed the Appalachian Mountains into the region.

It all began when the British (doesn’t everything?) fought the French and Indian War, also known as the Seven Years War, largely to check French political ambitions in Europe. The colonies were a secondary combat theater, but the war had the bonus outcome of driving the French from the fertile Ohio River Valley, a prize sought by many colonials, from Virginia plantation owners (including George Washington) to New England merchants and farmers. Britain, however, did not think unregulated settlement was a good idea. The British thus issued the Proclamation of 1763 (without consulting any of the colonial legislatures), which severely restricted the expansion of colonial settlement westward and turned over most of the Ohio River Valley to allied Native Americans. British forts went up to enforce the boundary lines and British soldiers began evicting those American settlers and traders who were there illegally. Americans were furious.

At the heart of the colonists' rage (the rebellion against the Crown wasn't all about taxes, despite what you may hear from conservatives today) was the belief that the Native Americans, weren’t worthy of possessing the land they inhabited. They weren’t natives, they were transients (and savage ones at that). Even though the British did begin to chip away at Indian territories to appease the colonials, it was not enough for them.

Sound familiar? While the Arab invasions of (present-day) Israeli territory in 1948 may indeed have been the catalyst for the expulsion of Palestinians, the aforementioned perceptions about strangeness, inferiority and savagery were the precipitants for the Nakba – and Israel’s ensuing distorted claims that the former inhabitants now have no claims to the land).

The issue of legality is what made the Proclamation of 1763 especially galling: it implicitly recognized that the Native Americans were, well, Native Americans and legally entitled to the land they lived on, something a very vocal number of colonists (including most of the now-deified “Founding Fathers”) absolutely refused to accept. Here is how the mythmaking gets going: You couldn’t “give” these people ownership of the land. "Ownership" was alien to them (actually, it wasn't, but subtleties like that didn't matter). These people weren’t white (i.e., they were inherently inferior). They had no paperwork to denote land ownership (except sometimes they did – but like certain UN Security Council resolutions, the settlers selectively recognized them).

And, worst of all to American sensibilities, the natives didn’t even farm the land. All that "vacant land" going to waste! That the American continent was a wilderness before European settlement is an assumed historical fact.

And it is just that: assumed.

Americans have long failed to realize that the “wilderness” was actually one of the most intensive examples of arboriculture ever practiced in human history: rather than rely on fields, Native Americans managed the forests for game and crops (and often did practice farming, just not to the extent that the European colonists did). The untamed wilderness myth only got worse as time went on, because people moving west increasingly came upon depopulated landscapes. Just a few years before, these landscapes had been heavily managed by native populations, but they now lay fallow, rendered vacant by disease, warfare and ill tidings of the rapacious white man’s approach. The real (or imagined) vacancy of the land is necessary for any colonial enterprise to succeed: the land has to "belong" to those not even on it yet. Sometimes it helps to force the vacancies along.

Israeli assertions that Zionism has made the "desert bloom" and that the Arabs were incompetent farmers have taken on the same justificatory tone (both moralsitic and scientific) as the untamed wilderness myth in the U.S. The blooming dessert meme also explains why the present water situation in Israel has become a major environmental issue and the Israelis have had to destroy so many Palestinian orchards -- to conserve water, perhaps?

But these orchard demolitions reveal an inherent problem with the wilderness narrative: the land is inhabited. The Founding Fathers, though unhappy with Indian land claims, recognized that the natives did live there (duh, that was the whole problem!) and, obviously, since they lived there in numbers, knew that they were able to feed themselves. The "wilderness" mythology is, in fact, a largely modern invention in both Israel and America.

So how does one end up glossing over this? The simplest solution is for the people at the time to have already gone and created a "wilderness" through scorched earth tactics, as the 1779 Sullivan Expedition to the Ohio demonstrated. Largely forgotten today, it was launched four years into the American War for Independence and was regarded as an extremely important military effort at the time. George Washington himself ordered it, making it comparable to David Ben-Gurion's decision to launch the October 1948 invasion of Galilee.

Like the Galilee operation, the Sullivan Expedition had been given the same objective: secure the territory for future settlement by evicting the native population. Washington, who was known among the Iroquois as "The Devourer of Villages" ordered the expedition to:

Lay waste all the [Indian] settlements around, with instructions to do it in the most effectual manner; that the country may not be merely overrun but destroyed.

After you have very thoroughly completed the destruction of their settlements; if the Indians should shew a disposition for peace, I would have you to encourage it.

Washington wasn't sending an army out just to burn down a few dozen native tents -- he was sending them to burn down dozens of native villages (comparable in size to the average colonial village) until the natives sued for peace.

Regarding that, though, he cautioned his officers over what "peace" in these circumstances meant:

It is likely enough their fears, if they are unable to oppose us, will compel them to offers of peace, or policy may lead them to endeavour to amuse us in this way to gain time and succour for more effectual opposition. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us . . . and in the terror with which the severity of the chastizement they receive will inspire them. Peace without this would be fallacious and temporary.

Ben-Gurion explicitly made an Israeli association (in terms of tactics and moral justification) with this era in American history quite clear during the 1948 War of Independence. His biographer, Michael Bar-Zohar, says that Ben-Gurion told his head officers "the American Declaration of Independence . . . [has] no mention of the territorial limits. We are not obliged to state the limits of our State." 

Galilee was, like Ohio, supposed to remain in the hands of its native inhabitants (that was the UN plan). But, expansionist Israel had other ideas. Washington and his officers had aspirations about Ohio; Ben Guiron pressed his reluctant commanders to drive into Galilee. So, once the natives were cleared by the invaders (in Ohio's case, by the Americans' burning of Indian villages and their food stocks just before the onset of winter; in Galilee's, this was achieved by forced evictions and killings of Arabs that "encouraged" a mass exodus) the now-"empty" land ceased to present a military threat and could be peopled by new settlers.

The narrative then became that the settlers had the virtue of divine providence; they were fighting for their lives; the natives didn’t think of themselves as natives until after they abandoned their land when a fight that they started turned sour for them, etc. Manifest Destiny became accepted fact, rather than historical romanticism and political PR. "The harder you hit them, the longer they stay quiet," goes the old Russian Army axiom. The Palestinians have not forgotten this. Nor have the Israelis (though they have tried to whitewash it and expedite the process of "winning the West [Bank]" through demographic growth). Only a short while after the seminal historical enshrinement of the "frontier in American history" by Frederick Jackson Turner, the clothing of choice for pro-war American jingoes was that of the Western cowboy, incorporating the virgin lands mythology of the frontier with a belligerent self-assertiveness. Today, the clothing of the Israeli jingo is that worn by Israeli settlers -- which may now make up at least 40% of the Israeli military (cowboys in uniform). Theodore Roosevelt, an American "cowboy" in uniform, would in fact probably consider Jewish Voice for Peace to be a group of unpatriotic dilettantes, liken the Palestinians to Apaches, and embrace the Israeli residents of Gush Etzion as kindred spirits. 

Over time, it becomes easier to forget about these actions and to go along with the post-victory narrative that the land was always "empty" and "uncultivated" (even though men like Washington and Ben-Gurion knew that this was not the case because they planned their campaigns on the premise that their forces were going to have to seize and destroy at least a few dozen native settlements in order to claim victory). This forgetting is less prevalent (relatively speaking) in Israel today because 1) it happened only sixty-odd years ago and 2) there are a lot more Palestinians than Native Americans alive today. But in any case, history is fickle, whether it spans half a dozen or two dozen decades. History, written by the victors, always tends to focus more on the eras of expansion that follow the eras of displacement.

Small wonder that both Israel and the U.S. rely on their selective memories to justify their actions and find common ground in their narratives of expansion (not narratives of dispossession, but of provident growth, of democracy and technology triumphing over feudalism). Israel serves a useful purpose from a military standpoint, true, for the U.S. but also serves a useful ideological one as a complement to manufactured American historical narratives.

Selective memory is more or less how consensus is made in any society, particularly a colonialist one. In most Belgian historiography, you’d think that King Leopold II of Belgium was one of the best things to ever happen to the Congolese, or was at least no worse than any other colonizer (rationalization is always a form of justification). Japanese government officials and the media referred to “incidents” in China in the years leading to WWII rather than “battles” (a euphemism sometimes repeated in postwar history textbooks). “History is a series of lies on which we agree,” as Napoleon once said.

And, as we’ve already heard, the Israelis made the desert bloom and the U.S. tamed the virgin wilderness (the Arabs and Indians being footnotes and irritants in the blazing pace of progress set by kibbutz dwellers and homesteaders, respectively).

Two Manifest Destinies (yes, the Jewish National Fund uses that language), two peoples harnessing underutilized resources to better the whole world through economic and democratic beneficence. The expansionist “Age of Jackson” in America can be seen again in Israel – through a line of self-serving historiography extending from the Sullivan Expedition and the Trail of Tears to the Nakba and the Six Days War.

As Adam Hochschild puts it in King Leopold’s Ghost:

And yet the world we live in – its divisions and conflicts, its widening gap between rich and poor, its seemingly inexplicable outbursts of violence – is shaped far less by what we celebrate and mythologize than by the painful events we try to forget.

Paul Mutter is a graduate student at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

(First in a series.)

Although not quite over, September 2011 is one that Israelis are likely not soon to forget. It’s not that their whole world has been shattered, but many of the political threads that have held Israeli regional policy together for decades seem to have simultaneously broken leaving the Israeli "ship of state" floating aimlessly in the Eastern Mediterranean. Worse, it seems to have been hit with a political tsunami for which it – as well as its main supporters in Washington – was ill prepared.

Five years after Israel’s abortive invasion of Lebanon that left 20,000 Lebanese dead and the country’s infrastructure in ruins as a result of massive Israeli bombing, three years after Israel’s unconscionable military assault on Gaza, and one year after Israeli special forces stormed the Mari-Marmara Turkish aid ship to Gaza, killing 9 (8 Turks and one U.S. citizen) Israel finds itself more and more isolated both within the Middle East and in the world as a whole, its image tarnished, its credibility at a low point.

The U.S. Congress can vote for lop-sided pro-Israeli resolutions until it is blue in the face. The fact remains that over the past five years Israel’s international status has plummeted. Almost universally outside of the U.S. and a few of its closest allies, Israel is characterized as a rogue state and threat to peace. The comparisons between Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories is more and more compared to South Africa’s treatment of blacks under the apartheid system. Indeed, Israeli isolation is probably more total today than South Africa’s in the last days of apartheid. Its cynical strategy that the rest of the world can go to hell as long as it has the support of Washington is coming apart at the seams.

Among the recent slew of developments:

• Two strategic regional allies upon which Israel heavily relied to help extinguish anti-Israeli fires now appear far less willing to play their designated role – Turkey and Egypt.
• Turkish-Israeli relations are at an all-time low. The Mari-Marmara incident did not blow over; a significant political and military parting of the ways seems to be occurring as Turkey, essentially spurned in its attempt at European Union membership, turns east.
• Perhaps even more serious, is the decline in Israeli-Egyptian relations. The much touted 1979 Camp David Accord has not collapsed, but Egypt has called for its re-negotiation. Egypt’s unwillingness to support the Israeli sealing of Gaza and the partial re-opening of the Egyptian-Palestinian border crossing has somewhat defused the humanitarian crisis there.
• Egypt’s post-Mubarak posture – pressed by mass opposition in Egypt to the Israeli-Egyptian relationship – has also given momentum to new dialogue and possible cooperation between the main long-feuding Palestinian factions, Hamas and Fatah.
• Regardless of the U.S. vete’s Palestinian UN membership or not, the momentum to support the principle of Palestinian statehood in the United Nations has been a great diplomatic setback for Israel that should not be under-estimated.
• And while Barack Obama – in perhaps his worst performance on the world stage – "stood by" Israel at the United Nations, U.S.-Israeli relations have become strained as the voices within the United States – both within circles of power and on the street – question whether the U.S.-Israeli relationship benefits or undermines the U.S. strategic position in the Middle East.
• As Israel finds itself more and more isolated in the Middle East, it's turning even more so than in the past to what might be called the meshugener Christian fundamentalist fringe (John Hagee, Christians United For Israel) here in the USA that has always supported (politically and financially) settlement building and opposed negotiations with the Palestinians.

The fact of the matter is that the spectacular collapse of Israel’s strategic position is the result of trends that have been brewing for decades and is not simply the result of recently events. What has happened recently is that its near-eternal violation of international law and its contempt for UN resolutions excepting those serving its interests has caught up with Israel. It turns out that there is a limit to how long a country can ignore international law – even the United States or Israel – before the boomerang of the world’s conscience hits in the back of the neck.

A few months after Israeli Foreign Secretary Tzipi Livni suggested that Israel was facing nothing less than a crisis in legitimacy; things continue to fall apart for the Netanyahu government. Put all together, these threads and others tell yet another tale: the utter failure of what was called the Oslo Peace Process and with it, a dramatic failure in U.S. Middle East policy as well. Oslo is dead in the water and has been for a long while. It is only now finally after yet another unsuccessful attempt to raise it from the dead, that both Obama and Netanyahu understand that it is gone, history.

Long lauded as a path to peace, 18 years after its signing, it has turned out to be anything but. Oslo was important in that it provided Israel with a cover of global legitimacy that it has now lost with Washington’s encouragement and connivance from both Democratic and Republican administrations. Israel tried to string the process along for as long as possible. It was a two pronged strategy: talk peace while building settlements (and then a separation wall) that would make a two-state settlement that much more difficult to achieve.

From the outset, more than skeptical about Oslo’s chances of delivering an Israeli-Palestinian peace based upon political realism and justice, we do not mourn – but welcome – its collapse. It produced nothing but settlements and suffering. A new framework is needed; the time is now.

Ibrahim Kazerooni is completing a joint PhD program at the Iliff School for Theology and the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies in Denver. Rob Prince is a lecturer in International Studies at the University of Denver’s Korbel School of International Studies; for the past seven years he has published a blog, The Colorado Progressive Jewish News.  

Cross-posted from Mondoweiss.

In response to expected clashes between Israeli settlers and Palestinians over the UN vote on Palestinian statehood, the Palestinian Popular Struggle Coordination Committee and the Israel group Anarchists Against The Wall are launching their own patrol efforts around Palestinian villages. Meanwhile, in response to the deaths of two Israelis in a car crash whose cause is now attributed to Palestinian stone throwers, Israeli settlers are demanding that the IDF take action, or they will. The controversial Orthodox Chief Rabbi of the Kiryat Arva settlement, Dov Lior, has told Israeli news outlets that "We have murderous rioters surrounding us, according to the Torah, there is room for collective punishment and the IDF must carry out the punishment against the rioters. There are no innocents in a war."

The anti-price tagging story, first reported by the Christian Science Monitor, outlines the actions of the Palestinian-Israeli groups, who are running car patrols around Palestinian villages and lands to keep an eye out for price-taggers, Israeli settlers who attack Palestinians and IDF property in retaliation for any removal of Israeli settlers from the West Bank. The CSM notes the recalcitrance of the Israeli settlers towards these actions, quoting the mayor of the West Bank settlement of Itmar as saying "This is our home, Israel. It’s in the Bible. It belongs to the Jewish nation."

Israeli settlers are already coordinating their own patrols and protests through their community organizations, while the IDF, Israeli Border Police and Palestinian Authority are nominally working together to prevent outbreaks of violence. At least 5 Israeli settlements have also brought in members of the far-right French JDL to prevent "Arab infiltration."

The CSM also quotes Palestinians involved in the anti-price tagging patrols as being unsupportive of the UN effort and willing to engage in a non-violent campaign to resolve the settlements' question. This course of action has also been suggested by outside commentators, such as Carne Ross of Independent Diplomat.

The story about the Palestinian and Israeli anti-price tag patrols as reported by the pro-Israel, Jewish-American weekly The Algemeiner, though, focuses on charges of how these groups are delegitimizing Israel and enabling the deaths of settlers through their (in)action towards Palestinians throwing rocks at Israeli motorists (two Israelis were reportedly killed in a car crash caused by Palestinian stone throwers on Friday):

Among the settlement leaders who have expressed their concerns is David Ha’ivri, the spokesman for the Samaria Liaison Office, the public relations branch of the Samaria Regional Council.

Ha’ivri alleged that the patrol initiative was “another effort by the extremist left wing and Anarchist activists in Israel to cause friction between Jewish and Arab residents.”

Commentary magazine, referring the stone throwers, asserts that "Arabs" are the main source of all West Bank violence and that the "rare" instances of Israeli retaliation are often done in self-defense.

Israeli settlers have reacted strongly to the deaths. A public funeral for the dead was disrupted by protests that forced the IDF to intervene. A settler leader told Ynet:

The hurling of stones must be stopped. If the IDF can't do it, then we'll do it and we know how. We shall deploy our men along the line. Anyone with a licensed weapon will arrive and we'll equip others with batons and protective gear.

So far, according to Israeli media, protests and counter-protests in the West Bank have remained "relatively" calm, though deaths and injuries among both Israelis and Palestinians have been reported since Friday, when the PA formally presented its statehood bid at the UN in New York.

Paul Mutter is a graduate student at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at NYU and a contributor to Foreign Policy In Focus.

On the face of it, statehood is an odd request to reject. But, writes Gershom Gorenberg at the Daily Beast: "The official argument is that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has turned to the United Nations because he wants to evade making peace with Israe.l As Israeli Education Minister Gideon Sa'ar phrased it at a recent political rally … 'The Palestinians have been serial rejectionists of peace—ever since the U.N. decision of 1947.'"

It's tough to understand how the process of becoming a state could sabotage the peace process. Intuitively the opposite should be true: becoming a state suggests a readiness to assume the responsibility of global citizenship. Nevertheless, in a speech yesterday (September 20) before the UN Security Council, President Obama spelled out the unconventional wisdom on why Palestine should be denied statehood. Instead, he said

… the international community should continue to push Israelis and Palestinians toward talks on the four intractable "final status" issues that have vexed peace negotiations since 1979: the borders of a Palestinian state, security for Israel, the status of Palestinian refugees who left or were forced to leave their homes in Israel, and the fate of Jerusalem, which both sides claim for their capital.

Turns out Abbas is willing to comprise and delay statehood until more talks are held. The Guardian reports:

International efforts to forestall a showdown in the UN security council over the declaration of a Palestinian state are solidifying around a plan for the Palestinian leader, Mahmoud Abbas, to submit a request for recognition but for a vote on the issue to be put on hold while a new round of peace talks is launched.

In the interim, Washington couldn't wait to show Israel how alarmed it was by Palestine's pursuit of statehood. James Traub at Foreign Policy:

With barely a week to go before the Palestinian Authority (PA) seeks a vote on statehood at the United Nations, members of U.S. Congress have begun to stage a lively competition for the most elaborately punitive legislative response. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, has prepared a bill that would withhold funds "from any UN agency or program that upgrades the status of the PLO/Palestinian observer mission," … Rep. Steve Israel, a New York Democrat, did her one better with a measure that would eliminate bilateral military assistance for any country that voted for statehood … But Rep. Joe Walsh, a right-wing Republican from Illinois, took the cake with a resolution endorsing Israel's right to annex the West Bank should the PA go ahead with the vote.

At New York Magazine, John Heilemann chronicles Washington's groveling during Prime Minister Netanyahu's visit in May of this year. 

The next day, Netanyahu delivered his on-camera lecture to Obama. … But Netanyahu knew he could get away with it—so staunch and absolute is the bipartisan support he commands in the U.S. Garishly illuminating the point, on the night before his speech to Congress, the prime minister attended the annual AIPAC policy conference in Washington, where he was the headline speaker at the event’s gala banquet. Before he took the stage, three announcers, amid flashing spotlights and in the style of the introductions at an NBA All-Star game, read the names of every prominent person in the room, including 67 senators, 286 House members, and dozens of administration and Israeli officials, foreign dignitaries, and student leaders. … thunderous waves of applause … poured over Netanyahu.

The next day came his speech to Congress, in which he spelled out demands that were maximal by any measure: recognition by the Palestinians of Israel as a Jewish state as a precondition for negotiations, a refusal to talk if Hamas is part of the Palestinian side, an undivided Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, and absolutely no right of return for Palestinian refugees.

More on Netanyahu's speech by Gideon Levy at Haaretz.

It was an address with no destination, filled with lies on top of lies and illusions heaped on illusions. … The fact that the Congress rose to its feet multiple times to applaud him says more about the ignorance of its members than the quality of their guest's speech.

Back to Heilemann:

Taken as a whole, his whirlwind Washington visit provided a strong dose of clarity. … So much pandering, so little time!

Here's an idea: when Netanyahu completes his term as prime minister, he should move back to the United States, where he lived for six years as a youth, graduating from an American high school. Cabinet members are free from birth requirements like the president of the United States. To make it that much easier for Capitol Hill to pay deference to Netanyahu and Israel, create a Department of Israeli Affairs, and appoint Netanyahu, like a Supreme Court justice, as its head for life.