Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, May - June 2001, page 9

Special Report

 

In His Second Press Conference as President, Bush Sides With Israel, Defends Security Council Veto

 

By Donald Neff

It took President George W. Bush until the end of March finally to spell out his view of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Anyone hoping for a new and innovative policy, however, was severely disappointed. George W., it turns out, is in Israel’s corner. He seems to have no more insight into the conflict than President Bill Clinton had—or, for that matter, the presidents before Clinton, going all the way back to Dwight Eisenhower (1953-61), the only president who has ever seen the region clearly.

In the second news conference of his presidency on March 29, Bush baldly blamed the Palestinians for the violence now in its seventh month throughout the West Bank and Gaza Strip. At the same time he sided with Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, whose lifetime of violence against Palestinians qualifies him as a butcher and racist of historic dimensions. Yet Bush’s words to this modern-day Zealot were merely a mild reminder that, “Israel, for its part, should exercise restraint in its military response. It should take steps to restore normalcy to the lives of the Palestinian people by easing closures and removing checkpoints. Last week, Prime Minister Sharon assured me that his government wants to move in this direction, and I urge Israel to do so.”

Israel’s response several days after Bush and Sharon’s March 20 White House meeting was to kill seven Palestinians in one 24-hour period. To add insult to death and injury, Bush refused to meet with Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Sharon then went too far by sending massive forces to take over a Palestinian enclave in the Gaza Strip on April 17. His troops arrogantly declared they were there for “days, weeks, months.” This flagrant breaking of Sharon’s personal words to Bush brought a stiff rejoinder from Secretary of State Colin Powell. He forthrightly declared Israel’s use of force “excessive and disproportionate,” a dressing down Israel was not used to receiving. Within a day its troops withdrew.

In his press conference remarks, before Israel’s attack in Gaza, Bush made no mention of the deaths Israel has inflicted on Palestinians, which far outnumber those suffered by Israelis and includes victims of an official Israeli policy of assassinating Palestinian leaders. Nor did he mention that Israel was deploying tanks and artillery and assault helicopters, all of them of U.S. manufacture, against a people whose main weapon was stones.

Significantly, Bush did not mention the one issue that lies at the core of the conflict. That is the Palestinians’ struggle to regain their land from Israeli military occupation. In their own eyes, and the eyes of much of the world, Palestinians are freedom fighters, patriots against foreign aggression. Bush seemed unaware that Israel was the aggressor and the Palestinians the victims.

Instead of applauding Palestinians for their courage in trying to wrest back what is rightfully theirs, in a way that early Americans fought to gain their independence, Bush condemned them, saying: “The Palestinian Authority should speak out publicly and forcibly, in a language that the Palestinian people [understand]—to condemn violence and terrorism. It should arrest those who perpetrated the terrorist acts. It should resume security cooperation with Israel.”

For Palestinians struggling against impossible odds, Bush’s remarks were a slap in the face. Bush’s “terrorism” was their last desperate weapon in a rightful cause, no matter how abhorent violence is. As they have repeatedly noted, violence is the only means left that they have to resist Israeli aggession. From the Palestinian view there, this is largely because of America’s total support of Israel. While Israel takes more land, establishes more settlements, isolates and starves the Palestinians and kills them at will in their ancestral territory, the U.S. stands by mutely. It has abandoned all its historic principles and cast its military, monetary and diplomatic might on the side of Israel, ignoring the rights of the Palestinians and thereby giving the Palestinians no diplomatic way to gain their legitimate rights.

Thus Palestinians charge it is absurd for Bush to say, as he did in his press conference, that “this nation will not [try] to force a peace settlement in the Middle East....It requires two willing parties to come to the table to enact a peace treaty that will last. And this administration won’t try to force peace on the parties.”

The American president failed to note that Israel has never offered, and gives no indication of ever doing so, to live up to U.N. resolutions to return most of the land occupied since mid-1967. Bush then added: “what the U.N. tried to do the other day [was] to force a situation in the Middle East to which both parties did not agree. That’s why I vetoed their suggestion.”

In fact, all that the Security Council—which means the majority of the world’s nations—wanted to do was to send observers to monitor the brutal actions of Israel against Palestinians. Israel opposed this entirely humane effort, and therefore Washington did, too, as it usually does in the world body. With that kind of blanket support from America, Israel need never accept any initiative that is to the slightest degree fair to the Palestinians. And it has not. The result is that Bush’s support has allowed Israel to kill the peace process, a state of stasis that allows Israel to continue unhindered its expansionist policies.

Despite Israel’s total reliance on U.S. financial and military aid and its diplomatic umbrella, Bush acts as though America has no means to pressure Israel to halt its actions that so offend the world community. This self-imposed blindness leaves Israel under supernationalist Sharon considerable freedom, all of it of the worst kind. It is free to ignore the oppositon of the world community, free to indulge in the continuing theft of Palestinian land, free to carry on the killing of Palestinians and free, to Bush’s eternal shame, of any effort by the United States to temper its criminal behavior. The one thing it is not free of is the cool eye of Colin Powell. In the end, the secretary of state may be the moderating voice that will save Bush from himself.

Donald Neff is the author of 50 Years of Israel, the Warriors trilogy—all available from the AET Book Club—and Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy towards Palestine and Israel since 1945,.

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