American politics

Democracy in America

Israel-Palestine
From one lone-star state to another
Sep 21st 2011, 13:53 by M.S. I EXPECT Rick Perry to say nothing sensible about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, and yesterday he did not disappoint. Mr Perry characterised the Palestinian Authority's move to push for recognition of statehood at the UN as "aggression", and the Obama administration's policies towards the Palestinians as "appeasement". Apparently Mr Perry considers the Palestinian people's efforts to achieve selfdetermination via a vote at the UN to be equivalent to a war of conquest by a totalitarian state. Mr Perry said that "as a Christian", he has "a clear directive to support Israel", suggesting his position is rooted in Biblical prophecy and providing clarification for those Muslims wondering whether Western support for zionism is really related to the Crusades. He said he thinks Israel has the right to build settlements in the occupied West Bank, which would reverse longstanding American policy. He also managed to attack on principle the idea that America should be an evenhanded broker in the peace process: The Obama Policy of moral equivalency, which gives equal standing to the grievances of Israelis and Palestinians, including the orchestrators of terrorism, is a dangerous insult. It's not clear what this is supposed to mean. Obviously the Obama administration doesn't grant equal consideration to the Israeli government and to Hamas, which it doesn't recognise, blacklists as a terrorist organisation, etc. When Mr Perry refers to the "orchestrators of terrorism", then, is he talking about the Palestinian Authority? Nice! The charitable interpretation is that Mr Perry is simply spouting gibberish. But the PLO's representative in Washington didn't take it that way; he called Mr Perry's position that Israeli and Palestinian grievances do not deserve equal standing "racist",

which is a defensible position. His reaction is a useful indicator for how much a prospective Perry administration can expect to achieve diplomatically in the Middle East. The Obama administration, like every other American administration, has been a staunch defender of Israeli interests, showing far more deference to Israel than to the Palestinians. But there is one way in which America has treated the Palestinians and the Israelis similarly. The US is now engaged in a vigorous, desperate last-minute lobbying effort at the UN to get the Palestinians to delay declaring statehood. And in April and early May of 1948, the US did the same thing to Israel. As the Israeli historian Benny Morris explains in "1948: A History of the First Arab-Israeli War", the escalating civil war in Palestine following the UN's November 1947 vote for partition led America to reverse its tentative support for that plan. In April 1948, the Americans got the Security Council to pass a resolution calling for Palestine to be temporarily turned over to a UN trusteeship. The Americans wanted the Jewish settlement in Palestine to delay its declaration of statehood and negotiate a truce with Arab states, in order to fend off an Arab invasion. But the US couldn't get support for that plan in the General Assembly, so it tried to negotiate it multilaterally: From the last week of April, the State Department focused on obtaining a deferment of a Jewish declaration of statehood, arguing that the declaration would precipitate an invasion. The consensus in the US government was that the Arab states would attack the Jewish state and persist in a guerrilla war for as long as it took...Without 'diplomatic and military support' from at least one Great Power, the Jewish state would go under within 'two years', they believed. America didn't convince the UN General Assembly to pass a trusteeship resolution, and it didn't convince David Ben-Gurion to delay declaring statehood. Similarly, the US isn't going to convince the Palestinian Authority to call off its push at the UN, and it won't persuade the UN to vote against recognising the PA as a state. Israel went ahead and declared statehood at 4 pm on May 14, 1948, without specifying its borders, and Harry Truman announced US recognition for the new state 11 minutes later. It was the right and smart thing to do for Israel, and it would be the right and smart thing to do for Palestine. One more thing: I was going to say something in this post, but then decided not to say it because it seemed unfair unless grounded in lots of data. But as Maggie Haberman reports, it turns out Rick Perry said it himself. So here it is: When I was here for the first time some 18 years ago and I was touring the country, the comparison between Masada and the Alamo was not lost on me, he added. I mean, were talking about two groups of people who were willing to give up their lives for freedom and liberty. These are settler narratives. (Photo credit: AFP)