Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

As a strong supporter of the Trump administration's Middle East policy, I believe the president's recent decisions dealing with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are correct--except for one. Everything I've seen about the peace plan that is being designed suggests it will be a sensible, tough-minded, and useful contribution to advancing peace. The decision to cut funding to UNRWA was correct. As I argued here in Pressure Points in January, UNRWA appears dedicated to never-ending Palestinian statelessness and to ensuring that the "refugee" issue never dies. In fact I proposed cutting UNRWA funding when testifying to the House Committee on Foreign Affairs in 2011. The decision to close the PLO office in Washington was correct, and in fact I urged that step here in Pressure Points in 2013. The PLO is not a state with which we have diplomatic relations, and the PLO has a long history of support for terrorism. Today, PLO funds pay terrorists pensions and rewards in accordance with the seriousness of their crimes and the length of their sentences; that is why Congress passed the Taylor Force Act that requires an end to U.S. funding of the PA and PLO unless payments for terror stop. They have not stopped. I proposed closing the PLO office in that same 2011 testimony to Congress and think it is long overdue.  The decision to cut aid levels was correct, given the refusal of the Palestinian Authority to stop its payments to terrorists and its glorification of terror, and given its increasingly authoritarian rule in the West Bank. I testified to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in support of the Taylor Force Act, and aid cuts, in July, 2017. But in that testimony I argued for one exception: Augusta Victoria hospital in East Jerusalem, and the East Jerusalem Hospital Network of which it is a part. As I told the Committee then, "I would make an exception for those hospitals." Defunding them does not harm the PA or PLO, does not punish the Palestinian leadership that is making terrible decisions, does not help Israel, and does potentially harm Palestinians who have no role in Palestinian politics.  I don't actually understand why the administration decided to cut the hospital funding, especially when the Taylor Force Act contains the carve-out. That law states that "the limitation on assistance under subsection (a) shall not apply to...payments made to the East Jerusalem Hospital Network." There is even a cold, political argument for continuing the aid: in the context of wide aid cuts, the continuation of aid to Augusta Victoria would allow the United States government to say "our cuts were inevitable due to misconduct and poor governance by the PA and PLO leadership, but because we care about Palestinians more than their leaders do we decided to continue funding the hospital network." So I believe the decision to cut the funding to the East Jerusalem Hospital Network was a mistake. Mistakes can be rectified, and in this case I hope the administration reconsiders and provides the funds. 

Once upon a time, the Socialist International was an extraordinary organization. Founded in 1951 as a successor to various prior socialist groups, it was staunchly democratic and anti-Communist, and played an important role during the Cold War. Members included such luminaries as Felipe Gonzalez of Spain and Mario Soares of Portugal, and the SI helped them and their socialist parties re-establish their countries as democracies. The SI included people like Willy Brandt and Golda Meir. Those were the good old days. More recently, Germany’s socialist party (the SPD) formed a new organization in 2013 called the Progressive Alliance. Among the SPD’s complaints: the SI now includes too many non-democratic parties. The Progressive Alliance now counts well over a hundred member parties and groups. The latest news about the SI is the resignation from its ranks of Israel’s Labor Party. Why? Because the SI has now joined the BDS movement, calling for boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel. In late June, the SI adopted a “Declaration on the Palestinian Question” that “Calls all governments and civil society organizations to activate Boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS) against the Israeli occupation, all the occupation institutions, and the illegal Israeli settlements including the total embargo on all forms of military trade and cooperation with Israel as long as it continues its policies of occupation and Apartheid against the Palestinian people.” And that’s not all.  The Declaration denounces Israel’s actions on the Israel/Gaza border without one single word of comment, much less condemnation, of Hamas. It “calls on the US administration to reconsider its positions that are favouring Israel,” as if favoring Israel were itself against international law. It “reaffirms its commitment…to bringing a complete end to the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian state that started in 1967.” Now that’s an interesting formulation, because there was no Palestinian state for Israel to occupy in 1967—just territory governed by Jordan and Egypt. The SI has a long history and will continue in existence, doing good work and bad. But it is sad to see what was once a staunch defender of democracy and human rights collapsing into allowing non-democratic parties to affiliate and into using the usual Leftist canards. The SI Declaration said it wanted to encourage “progressive forces” in Israel, and the secretary general of Israel’s Labor Party, Yehiel Bar, responded forcefully: In the declaration, you reiterate your ‘solidarity with the progressive forces in Israel.’ As the international secretary of the Israeli Labor party, as a leader in the party, and on behalf of the Labor Party leadership, the largest progressive party in the Israeli parliament, let me assure you that until the full and formal cancellation of this poor one-sided and miserable declaration, your ‘solidarity’ is not desirable by us. I note that while Israel’s Labor Party is no longer an SI member, guess which party in that region is? Fatah-- Yasser Arafat’s old party, now led by Mahmoud Abbas. Fatah, whose leadership is never democratically chosen and which rules the West Bank without elections, free speech, or freedom of the press. The SI’s actions, in driving Israel’s Labor Party out and embracing the Fatah Party, tell us all we really need to know about its present state. And that is a sad story.

In an interview with a Palestinian newspaper, the president’s son-in-law has revealed himself to be either strikingly naive or deeply cynical.

In the year 2000 the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA) had 2.5 million members. Now it is down to 1.4 million. and the number is still falling. The age profile of members, according to a Pew study, suggests how this happens: 38% of members are 65 or over, while only 8% are under age 29. The denomination is also 88% white, and making no apparent inroads into Black, Asian, or Hispanic communities. But perhaps the members simply lack time to expand, given the time they must dedicate to condemning Israel. The PCUSA’s 223rd General Assembly (GA) has been meeting, and Israel is one issue that continually attracts the attention of these GAs when they assemble every two years. I think it fair to say PCUSA has shown more hostility to Israel over a longer time than any other denomination. For example, at the GA last week a resolution was passed 393-55 demanding that the real estate firm RE/MAX stop doing business in Israeli settlements in the West Bank or in East Jerusalem. Another resolution asked Israel to be in compliance with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (no similar demand of North Korea, Iran, Cuba, China, Russia, Venezuela, etc etc). Another referred to Israel as an apartheid state. A resolution that would have terminated the church’s reference to Israel as a “colonial project” failed. A resolution against legislation (usually at the state level) that opposes BDS (boycotts, divestment, sanctions) passed. Perhaps worst of all, a resolution on the violence along the Israel-Gaza border was rejected as insufficiently critical of Israel—because it also mentioned Hamas. An amended resolution was proposed that removed all mention of Hamas, and it passed 438-34.   The American Jewish Committee (AJC) condemned PCUSA: "The Church remains obsessively critical of Israel in its national utterances. For many years and in myriad ways, the PCUSA has gone beyond legitimate criticism of Israel and embraced demonization of the Jewish state." Obsession and demonization are strong terms, but they seem accurate. I will admit I don’t understand why this happens in the PCUSA, but in many cases a small group of activists can hijack gatherings like this GA. Still, it has been going on year after year, so one has to assume these resolutions reflect the views of the member churches and their own members. Perhaps the only comfort available for those who agree with this criticism is that those churches and their members are fewer in number every year. But the AJC remains positive: it "remains grateful for its Presbyterian friends who have labored hard to change the course and tone of anti-Israel deliberations and have mitigated anti-Israel resolutions and overtures at successive PCUSA GAs." One can only wish them good luck in the apparently uphill struggle they are waging.  

A few days ago (here) I analyzed the recent UN General Assembly vote on Gaza and concluded that the UN's automatic majority against Israel is fraying. Now there is an important piece of new evidence. In his first address to the UN Human Rights Council, British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson said this: I will say that we share the view that a dedicated agenda item focused solely on Israel and the Occupied Palestinian Territories is disproportionate and damaging to the cause of peace and unless things change, we shall move next year to vote against all resolutions introduced under Item 7. Thus the British are now saying they will next year automatically vote against any and every resolution brought under this agenda item, regardless of its content. Britain's move is likely to open the door for others in the EU or the Commonwealth to follow suit, or at least give Israel and the United States a powerful new argument against that agenda item that singles out Israel. There are some good candidates on the Human Rights Council who ought to follow the UK--and, it should be said, Australia, which already takes this position. Among them are Belgium, Germany, Hungary, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, and Switzerland in Europe and Japan outside it. They should be the targets of an American and Israeli campaign for some basic standard of fairness. The alternative will be the withdrawal of the United States from the Human Rights Council. Having criticized the Foreign & Commonwealth Office recently (in this blog post) it is only fair to give credit where it is due. Hat's off to Johnson and the FCO on this one. 

On June 13, the United Nations General Assembly voted once again to condemn Israel, this time for its actions against Hamas in Gaza when tens of thousands of Hamas supporters and terrorists stormed the Israeli border. The condemnation is not news, but the voting patterns are worth a look. The final resolution passed 120 (yes) to 8 (no) with 45 abstentions. Who were the eight countries voting no? The United States and Israel, several Pacific island states (Marshall Islands, Nauru, Micronesia, Solomon Islands), Togo—and Australia.  Last year Australia’s government announced that it was through with unfair and unbalanced UN treatment of Israel and would henceforth vote against such resolutions in all parts of the UN system. And so it has. For example, on May 18 of this year, the UN Human Rights Council adopted yet another worthless resolution condemning Israel. The vote was 29 to 2, and the two countries voting no were the United States and Australia. So the first thing to note about the recent General Assembly voting was the Australian vote: a rare show of principle and determination on the international diplomatic scene, and a model for other democracies who all ought to be following Australia’s path. In the General Assembly, the United States introduced an amendment that inserted a condemnation of Hamas in the resolution text. Amazingly enough, the original text did not even mention Hamas once. Algeria moved to quash the American amendment, and remarkably, the United States won that vote 78 to 59 (with 42 abstentions).  That is an amazing event in the UN: 78 countries opposed the Arab position and voted on the US/Israeli side, and only 59 supported the Algerian text.  There was then a vote on whether to adopt the American amendment, and again we won: the amendment passed 62 (yes) to 58 (no), with 42 abstentions. In the UN, that is an astonishing result. Slim margin to be sure, but a win nevertheless. Because UN rules required a two-thirds majority, the amendment was not in the end adopted --but the voting pattern is far better than many past UN votes. And in this skirmish, all 28 EU countries voted with the United States.  That’s the good news. The automatic majority against Israel is indeed fraying at the edges. As U.S. Ambassador Nikki Haley said, “the common practice of turning a blind eye to the UN’s anti-Israel bias is changing. Today, a plurality of 62 countries voted in favor of the US-led effort to address Hamas’s responsibility for the disastrous conditions in Gaza. We had more countries voting on the right side than the wrong side.”  But there was plenty of bad news as well.  The final vote on the (un-amended) resolution condemning Israel was as noted 120 to 8 with 45 abstentions. That’s shameful, as are many individual cases.  India is the greatest disappointment. Relations between Israel and India have been warming and Prime Minister Modi has visited Israel—the first Indian PM to do so. But India abstained on the American amendment and then joined the jackals in the main vote.   In that final vote, the United States and Australia got the support of zero European countries. Many abstained (including Austria, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom) while the resolution actually got an inexcusable yes vote from France, Belgium, Greece (whose own relations with Israel are supposed to be improving), Norway (once a friend of Israel but now increasingly hostile), Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland. Also disappointing was Canada, which abstained on the resolution. Were Stephen Harper still prime minister there is no question that Canada would have voted “no” along with Australia, the United States, and Israel.  Once upon a time but in living memory, the United States had clout in Latin America and Israel had many friends there. Last week’s votes show that those days are gone. The American amendment (which, remember, had 62 yes votes) was supported only by the Bahamas, Barbados, Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Peru. But Antigua, Argentina, Belize, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Guyana, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, St. Lucia, and Trinidad abstained.  Bolivia, Cuba, Dominica, Ecuador, Haiti, Jamaica, Nicaragua, St. Kitts, St. Vincent, Uruguay, Surinam, and Venezuela voted against the United States.  This pattern is bizarre. Hostile governments such as Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador are easy to explain, but the rest are not. Why do Haiti and Jamaica and several of the small island nations vote against us, while Barbados and the Bahamas vote with us? Why did Chile abstain instead of joining Peru and Colombia on our side? Several African votes are also disappointing. Israel’s prime minister Netanyahu recently visited Kenya and Uganda and relations appeared to be very good, yet both abstained on the American amendment and then voted for the final resolution.  The bottom line is positive: Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, commented that “Thanks to the combined efforts with our American friends and our allies from around the world, we proved today that the automatic majority against Israel UN is not destiny and can be changed.” Future progress will require more diplomatic work, by Israel and the United States. Additional votes can be changed, in Latin America, Africa, and perhaps Europe.  Hat’s off, for now, to Amb. Haley, Amb. Danon, and once again to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull and Foreign Minister Julie Bishop of Australia.   

I’ve written many times about the British royal family’s remarkable record of refusing to make an official visit to Israel while making scores of visits to Arab capitals. That will change in a matter of days when Prince William visits Jordan, Israel, and the “Occupied Palestinian Territories.”  It has long been assumed that the royals themselves were not refusing to visit, but were (as is constitutionally required in the U.K.) following the advice of Her Majesty’s Government—in this case the Foreign Office. While we do not know what led to the current change of policy that permits a royal visit, it may well be the warming relations between Israel and some of its Arab neighbors. It simply cannot be argued these days that a royal visit to Israel will harm Britain in any way. But leave it to the Foreign Office to try to stir ill will over the visit. Here is what the Jewish Chronicle in London reports: The  Duke of Cambridge will arrive in the evening on June 25, after visiting Jordan. His first engagement, on the morning of June 26, will see him visit Yad Vashem – Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. Accompanied by Chief Rabbi Ephraim Mirvis, the prince will receive a short tour of the museum and meet with a survivor of the Holocaust and the Kindertransport. He will also lay a wreath in Yad Vashem’s Hall of Remembrance. After that, the prince will meet Mr Netanyahu and Mr Rivlin at their respective residences....planned stops include the Mount of Olives, where the prince’s great grandmother, Princess Alice of Battenberg, is buried. The itinerary says this will take place as part of the prince’s trip to the “Occupied Palestinian territories.” It gets worse.  The Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth reported that  When asked to comment by Yedioth Ahronoth on the decision to place the prince’s visit to the Old City of Jerusalem under the rubric of his visit to the Palestinian Authority, a British Foreign Office spokesperson said: “East Jerusalem is not Israeli territory.” As former holders of the Palestinian Mandate, the British above all others should know that the Old City of Jerusalem was never “Palestinian territory.” It was Jordanian territory until 1967, and has never been under Palestinian sovereignty for one single day. The British might have said the Prince was visiting “Jerusalem” without saying more. To call a visit to the Old City instead a visit to “Occupied Palestinian territory” is deeply and probably intentionally offensive—and plain wrong. It is in fact one thing to say that the UK does not regard East Jerusalem as settled Israeli territory and that its fate will be decided in peace negotiations, and quite another to call it “Occupied Palestinian territory.” This episode has made me agree entirely with David Friedman, the U.S. ambassador to Israel, that the United States should stop using the term “occupied territory” to describe any part of Jerusalem or the West Bank. Call it “disputed territory,” which it certainly is, or just say “East Jerusalem and the West Bank, which Palestinians claim as part of an eventual Palestinian state.” Legally, it is hard to see how land that was once Ottoman, then governed by Britain under a League of Nations mandate, then Jordanian, can be “Occupied Palestinian territory” anyway. The visit by Prince William has been damaged by the Foreign Office, but it is still a step forward after 70 years of refusals to make an official visit at all. One hopes that during the Prince’s visit to Israel, someone—perhaps the Chief Rabbi—will tell him what was the fate of East Jerusalem before Israel conquered it in 1967: no access at all for Jews, no protection for Jewish holy sites, vast destruction of Jewish holy and historical locations. The Prince will visit the Mount of Olives. Perhaps he might be told what occurred during the Jordanian period, as described by the Jewish Virtual Library:  All but one of the thirty five synagogues within the Old City were destroyed; those not completely devastated had been used as hen houses and stables filled with dung-heaps, garbage and carcasses. The revered Jewish graveyard on the Mount of Olives was in complete disarray with tens of thousands of tombstones broken into pieces to be used as building materials and large areas of the cemetery leveled to provide a short-cut to a new hotel. Hundreds of Torah scrolls and thousands of holy books had been plundered and burned to ashes. Somehow I doubt the Foreign Office will apprise the Prince of that bit of background about “Occupied Palestinian territory.”

This is a painful week to be a leader of the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas--and a much worse week to be living under its rule. Israel left Gaza in 2005, and in 2007 Hamas seized control by overwhelming the (much larger) Fatah forces. Eleven years of Hamas rule have brought nothing but violence and repression to the Palestinians who live there. Hamas might have decided to improve the economy and offer Palestinians tired of Fatah’s corruption and inefficiency an decent alternative. Instead it has focused only on attacking Israel and maintaining its fantasy of “return” and the destruction of the Jewish state.  Constant rocket fire from Gaza—thousands of attacks—into Israel led to “Operation Protective Edge” in 2014. In that nearly two-month conflict over two thousand Palestinians died, ten thousand were wounded, and thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed. From this Hamas may have learned that escalation of its attacks on Israel will lead only to misery. But it had several tricks to try. The first was unpredictable, occasional, and damaging rocket fire. Hamas could make life miserable and even unlivable for Israelis anywhere near the Gaza border or in larger areas of southern Israel. This the Israelis defeated with the high-tech layered defenses against rockets and missiles that they developed.  Then Hamas tried tunnels. Tunnels to Egypt brought consumer goods and fuel (which Hamas taxed) and of course weaponry; tunnels into Israel brought opportunities to kidnap or kill Israelis and lay waste to Israeli communities. But the Egyptians started closing the tunnels and moving citizens back away from the border. And Israel is again employing high-tech means of discovering the tunnels, which it then bombs, and blocking new construction. Now Hamas has tried pushing masses of Gazans to the border fences, mixing its own armed men among them carrying grenades, guns, and other weapons. The goal was obviously to overrun the border, get into Israel, and (we know from testimony in the past few days) kill and destroy as much as possible. And now this tactic has failed as well. Israel defended its border: no one got through and all the loss was on the Palestinian side. Injuries to those trying to break through the border overwhelmed Gaza’s medical facilities, there were perhaps 60 deaths, and Hamas pulled back. On “Nakba Day” itself, Tuesday May 15, there was relative quiet. In the West Bank, there was little solidarity shown to Hamas: a couple of hundred demonstrators here and there, totaling under two thousand. There were no major demonstrations in Arab capitals.  So every one of Hamas’s tactics has failed, and has produced only more misery in Gaza. Now what? The answer is at one level obvious: Hamas should stop throwing the people of Gaza into combat and stop attacking Israel. It should concentrate on economic recovery for Gaza, negotiating for more open borders that permit imports of needed goods and export of people and products. Israel and Egypt should agree to such arrangements, so long as Hamas stops trying to import more weapons to prepare for future rounds of combat with Israel. Hamas should break its ties with Iran. It should permit the Palestinian Authority to resume its presence in Gaza. Both Israel and Egypt would in fact accept such a deal. Misery in Gaza is not in Israel’s interest. The problem is that Hamas has thus far shown no interest in such a transformation from Islamist terrorist group into responsible government of Gaza. This should be no surprise. Yasser Arafat could never make that transformation either, from terrorist into head of government. His rejection of Israel’s offer at Camp David was in part a rejection of changing himself from a “resistance” leader in military uniform into an administrator responsible for schools, hospitals, roads. And Arafat was secular; Hamas is Islamist. Its Covenant is a bizarre anti-Semitic document filled not only with Koranic references and calls to expel the Jews from the Middle East, but also explanations that the French Revolution, First World War,  and the League of Nations, as well as the Freemasons and Rotary and Lions clubs, were the product of the Jews.  No one rises to leadership in Hamas because he thinks the unemployment rate in Gaza must be reduced or the water supply improved. Asking the Hamas leadership to abandon the battle against the Jews is asking them to abandon their raison d’etre and their life’s work. I suppose it is possible that a tactical retreat can be negotiated by the Egyptians, and they appear to have done something of that sort this week—agreeing to open the Rafah crossing between Gaza and Egypt and getting Israel to open the Kerem Shalom crossing where trucks go through into Gaza) in exchange for an end to the mass border assaults. But how long can that last? Hamas is an Islamist terrorist group dedicated to the eliminating Israel, and will never agree to transform itself into a “normal” government.  This leaves Israel and Egypt, and anyone else who is serious about avoiding more violence, with few good options. How can Israel and Egypt pursue a policy of improving economic conditions in Gaza—more electricity, water, sewage treatment, jobs, opportunities to leave the Gaza Strip to study or get medical treatment—without strengthening Hamas’s ability to move terrorists in and out and acquire more weapons or their components? We are familiar with the story of cement: permitted to be imported to build houses, but instead diverted by Hamas into construction of those tunnels.  It is worth trying again to reduce misery in Gaza, even if success will be partial or minimal. Efforts at humanitarian relief at least show Gazans and moralists in Europe (so quick to jump to facile criticism of Israel, as we saw this week) that the true author of Gaza’s plight is Hamas, which sees Gazans as cannon fodder rather than citizens for whom it is responsible. There is no visible “solution” to the problem of Gaza, because it is today a small Islamist emirate governed by a terrorist organization. For Israel, violence can at best be reduced or delayed, but not avoided entirely, when the goal of the group ruling Gaza is precisely violence designed to destroy you. Is that really true? Here are a few choice lines from the Hamas Covenant:  "Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it" (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).  Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah's victory is realised. Initiatives, and so-called peaceful solutions and international conferences, are in contradiction to the principles of the Islamic Resistance Movement.  Jihad becomes the individual duty of every Moslem. In face of the Jews' usurpation of Palestine, it is compulsory that the banner of Jihad be raised.  Israel, Judaism and Jews challenge Islam and the Moslem people. "May the cowards never sleep."  These beliefs are the background to this week’s violence. While Hamas rules Gaza, full solutions to Gaza’s problems must be sought but it seems very unlikely that they will be found.