Today’s Financial Times has an editorial decrying the "siege" of Gaza and the creeping "annexation of the West Bank" and concludes ominously:
The choice has never been clearer, for Israel and the US: it is either peace or the settlements. It will never be both.
I guess they’re our settlements now.
This is an indictment of the Israel lobby. For why is the US so
implicated in the settlements? The lobby. Hillary is raging against the oil companies, and so is Obama, and no one in our politics can say a word about the settlements! When they are serving to nullify our image in the Arab world.
U.S. Presidents have been "against" the settlements since Nixon and
been able to do nothing about them. Aaron David Miller makes this clear
in his important new book, The Much Too Promised Land.
I have been meanspirited in two niggling posts about this book, I
apologize to Miller; but he shows through the tireless accumulation of
incident that again and again U.S. presidents objected to the
settlements and were warned by their aides about "domestic considerations." I will
offer chapter and verse in a future post, but the most damning thing
Miller demonstrates is this: that the President who did more than
anything for Israeli security, Jimmy Carter with Camp David, did so by deciding he was willing to give up his presidency to try and get peace in the Middle East, and then threw himself at the problem. He used every ounce of political and personal capital he had
over two years, including hectoring his friend Anwar Sadat to basically
sell out the Palestinians on their promised piece of any deal and sign a land-for-peace Sinai deal. And still Carter
could not get the Israelis to move an inch on settlements. Menachem Begin refused to yield at all. And
he could stare down a president because he had the Israel lobby working
for him to sandbag Carter’s efforts. So even Carter, willing to sacrifice his political future, could not scale the illegal and immoral colonization project back one iota.
That was 30 years ago. And today England’s leading financial newspaper warns us about this folly and our candidates can’t say a word. When will American Jews wake up to their role in this disaster
of American foreign policy? I heard a crushing story about Aaron David Miller. He’s from Cleveland and a big Jewish family. He went to a synagogue there recently and spoke from the pulpit and said, The problem’s simple, two peoples fighting for a disputed piece of land, there will have to be a compromise. There was dead silence in the synagogue and the rabbi came up and said, "In Numbers 34, God promised the land of Israel to Moses, from the Dead Sea to the Mediterranean…." Colonize! When will the enlightened portion of American Jewry cry out against this madness?
