Bad Faith in the Holy City

Snapshot

Trading Sanctions for Settlements

Bret Stephens

There is an alternative to the Obama administration's misguided policy, since Israelis care less about holding onto settlements than about stopping Iran's nuclear program.

Snapshot

Trading Sanctions for Settlements

Bret Stephens

There is an alternative to the Obama administration's misguided policy, since Israelis care less about holding onto settlements than about stopping Iran's nuclear program.

Author Interview

Q&A With Daniel Ayalon on Israeli Foreign Policy

Daniel Ayalon

Israeli Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs Daniel Ayalon answers questions about U.S.-Israeli relations and the future of the peace process.

The reason why Hamas and Fatah cannot come up with a negotiating stance is that neither of them has one.

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Bad Faith in the Holy City

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The Israeli government’s announcement in March that it would further expand East Jerusalem settlements was just the latest in a decades-old series of calculated slights to the United States.

Since 1967, virtually every time a U.S. envoy has arrived to discuss the fate of the West Bank or Gaza, the Israeli government of the day has bluntly shown who is really boss, usually with a carefully timed unilateral expansion of Israel’s presence in the occupied territories. Since the 1970s, Israel has illegally settled close to half a million of its citizens in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, not to mention building a barrier mainly inside the West Bank on Arab-owned land that is longer and taller than the Berlin Wall.

Given that for a year the Obama administration has sought a settlement freeze in the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, it is impossible to interpret the latest announcement of settlement expansion in the city as anything but a provocation. (The alternative explanation -- that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu cannot control his own government -- cannot be taken seriously.) As if on cue, an obedient majority in Congress issued a letter demanding that there be no public discussion of U.S.-Israeli differences. This, however, has not ended the controversy.

Although this episode has revealed that some things never change, it has been unusual in the sense that U.S. administrations usually take great care to avoid offending the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (known as AIPAC). Yet, this year, senior officials suggested that unconditional U.S. support for Israel, far from serving U.S. national interests, may in fact jeopardize them. The Israeli paper Yediot Ahronot reported that Vice President Joe Biden said as much to Netanyahu in March; the message was reiterated in a statement by Admiral Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and in the congressional testimony of the head of the United States Central Command, General David Petraeus, who argued that “Arab anger over the Palestinian question limits the strength and depth of U.S. partnerships with governments and peoples [in the region].”

This is nothing new. It has been true at least since the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the first Gulf War, when the last shred of strategic justification for extensive U.S. support for Israel disappeared. After 1991, as the U.S. military presence grew in the Middle East, Washington’s overt bias toward Israel became a growing liability for the United States.

The intense media coverage of the recent diplomatic crisis has largely obscured what is actually happening in East Jerusalem, where the controversy began. As usual, given the media’s obsession with U.S. and Israeli perspectives, there were few, if any, Palestinian voices to point out precisely what each new housing unit, each fresh expulsion of Arabs from their homes, and each new strategic colony in East Jerusalem means for the 200,000 Arabs who live in the city, for the future status of Jerusalem, and for the possibility of a resolution to this conflict.

One telling problem was the media’s widespread use of the Israeli terms “disputed” and “neighborhoods” to describe East Jerusalem's status and the illegal Jewish-only settlements proliferating there. There is nothing disputed about East Jerusalem’s status under international law as understood by every country besides Israel: it is universally considered occupied territory. Similarly, Israeli settlements in the parts of the city that lie across the Green Line are in clear contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which forbids an occupying power from moving its own population into occupied territory.

Jerusalem is the slated location for the capital of an independent Palestinian state, and this is not a matter to be haggled over as far as the Palestinians and Arab and Islamic leaders are concerned. At least 40 generations of leading figures in Palestine’s and the Islamic world’s political, military, religious, and intellectual history -- ranging from generals in Saladin’s armies and Sufi saints to great scholars and distinguished judges -- are buried in the ancient Mamilla cemetery, located in present-day West Jerusalem. Part of this great historic landmark is now being excavated in order to pave way for a “Museum of Tolerance” to be built by the Los Angeles–based Simon Wiesenthal Center, despite the protests of the families of those buried there and of many leading Israeli academics and organizations. Its completion would erase not only part of Jerusalem’s Palestinian and Islamic heritage but also part of the heritage of all mankind that makes this city so important to the entire world.

Today, Jerusalem is the geographic center and communications hub of the West Bank. By walling the city off from its Arab hinterland and building fortresslike settlements in concentric rings around the city -- and, increasingly, within its remaining Arab neighborhoods -- Israel has succeeded in fragmenting and isolating Arab population centers within the city. These settlements also hinder the flow of north-south traffic through the West Bank, leaving Israel as the master of a terrain speckled with tiny Bantustan-esque islands of Palestinians.