Palestinians gave President Mahmoud Abbas a hero's welcome last month after he called for Palestinian statehood at the U.N. But the U.S. has since frozen some assistance, which is hitting Palestinian development projects.
Palestinians Feel Effects Of Frozen U.S. Aid
by Sheera Frenkel
October 7, 2011
Listen to the Story
October 7, 2011
The Obama administration is urging Congress to rescind a decision blocking some aid to the Palestinians.
The congressional decision to put a hold on $200 million of aid money was prompted by the Palestinian Authority's bid for statehood recognition at the United Nations — something both the administration and Congress oppose. The funding cut is already having an impact in the Palestinian territories.
The Palestinian Medical Center, the largest hospital in the West Bank city of Ramallah, is filled with patients. Doctors bolt down the hallways with slips of paper, and nurses frantically send out text messages to physicians in other departments.
There is no intercom or communication system in the hospital. One was supposed to be established later this year. But now, like many other programs at this hospital, the U.S.-funded project has been suddenly halted.
Dr. Niha Sawaheh is the head of the Emergency Department, where she says the system would have been particularly useful.
"Once we get an emergency case, so you just press the button and all the emergency doctors would be with you within second. We were working on that, but it has been stopped now," she says.
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/07/141090967/palestinians-feel-effects-of-frozen-u-s-aid
BACKSTORY
Cat and Mouse Game
Two State Never
James Moore and Wayne Slater in The Architect: Karl Rove and The Master Plan for Absolute Power (2006) write that in order to get George W. Bush elected, Karl Rove’s challenge was to motivate the Christian Right without alienating the Jews, no simple task. But it was critical to the future of the Republican Party and the presidential aspirations of George W. Bush. Rove was engaged in refining and launching the most effective political and religious movement in modern American politics, and if he got it right, Republicans had a chance to run the country for decades.
Bush knew the role Jewish money had played in getting him elected, and as a result of Rove’s minitrations and relationships with Jewish political leaders in the United States, he’d also grown to see Israel’s destiny as inevitably connected to America’s. His Bible, he believed, also told him as much. The attacks of 9/11 seemed to confirm for Bush that he’d chosen the right side in an ancient conflict.
The president was, in fact, so certain of his policies regarding Israel that he was able to joke about a crisis that has never had a sufficient political solution to end the dying of Jews and Palestinian Arabs. During his intital meeting with Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, the president clarified whose side he was on during the first five minutes of their conversation.
Sharon had come to the White House to speak with the new president about Israel’s challenges. As they sat in the Oval Office, Sharon already knew from the campaign that Bush was probably a stronger friend of Israel than any modern-era U.S. president. While they talked, the subject quickly turned to Yasser Arafat. One of the first questions President Bush asked the Israeli prime minister was astonishing.
Ariel Sharon was unquestionably surprised. The leader of the free world, a man whose election had spread discontent across his own country and uncertainty around the globe, was suddenly suggesting a dramatic move that promised a dangerous political outcome.
Bush did not let Sharon complete his thought.
“No, you can’t do that,” the president interjected. “If you do, you make an enemy of the United States, immediately, for the rest of your life. I’m telling you, you can’t do that.”
“No,” Bush continued. “If he needs killing, I’ll do it.”
The wisecracking fraternity boy was now president of the United States of America. His intemperate remarks about the leader of the PLO, however, offered a glimpse of something beyond Bush’s discomforting sense of humor. A president who’d famously bragged that he didn’t read newspapers or deeply study policy had surrounded himself with advisers whose interest in Israel’s sovereignty and safety might have outweighed their concern for the United States.
The president and the vice president took daily briefings, analysis, and advice from senior staffers and think-tank analysts whose perspective had long been influenced by assumptions about Israel’s importance. Many of these administration counselors had been involved in the Project for the New American Century (PNAC), a proposal drafted by neoconservatives who’d been arguing for more than a decade for a U.S. military presence in the Middle East and an invasion of Iraq. The White House sought little input from those articulating the Arab point of view. The vice president’s office acquired even less.
The default position for all of President Bush’s Middle East decisions was always to favor Israel. This was what Karl Rove had planned. He wanted the president to be aggressively pro-Israel to prompt money and votes to flow from American Jewish voters and to show his solidarity with the beliefs of the Christian right. This fit nicely with the broader policies outlined by the PNAC to project America into the Mideast with the unspoken goal of protecting Israel while also promoting democracies in the Arab world. It was a dangerous, provocative approach to shoring up domestic political support for the president.
And it was to lead to a crisis that threatened the very existence of the Bush administration. (59-61)
Voices from the Mideast
An Israeli version of Moore and Slater’s tale is also narrated by Nir Hefez and Gadi Bloom in Ariel Sharon A Life (2006).
The plan Sharon presented to Bush had three stateges: a regional peace conference under the auspices of the American government; a rebuilding period for the Palestiian Authority under strict international supervision of their weapons and security services; and the beginning of negotiations for final status talks. Bush liked the plan, but demanded that the Israelis implement all three stages at once, in order to expedite the process. Sharon felt that the president’s condition rendered the plan unfeasible. It could never pass through the government and was untenable in terms of security. Sheron and Netanyahu were at logerheads over the Palestinian state.
In June 2002, Sharon listed three terms Bush worked on a Middle East policy speech. Sharon, directing another anti-terror operation in the West Bank, stayed in close contact with the administration, through official channels and otherwise, “the most sensitive messages” to bus via Arie Granger, who spoke directly with Vice President Dick Cheney, national Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice, and Secretary of State Colin Powell.
Sharon invested a great deal of effort in convincing Bush that Arafat was no different from other terror-mongers. He instructed Shabak director Avi Dichter and Mossad chief Efraim Halevy to produce concrete examples of an Arafat and Saddam Hussein connection, America’s looming enemy. Convinced, Bush gave up faith in Arafat. (285)
On June 24 it became apparent that the direct line in Washington had paid off: Bush announced that the United States would support the Palestinian desire for statehood only after the Palestinians elected a leadership that did not support terror. On the flip side, he demanded that Israel draw its forces back to pre-September 2000 lines and stop all settlement building as outlined in the Mitchell Report; but the call to remove Arafat from the stage was an outright victory for Sharon.
There was however, one line Sharon would rather not have heard. “The Israeli occupation,” the president said, “that began in 1967 will be ended through a settlement negotiated between the parties, based on U.N. Resolutions 242 and 338, with Israeli withdrawal to secure and recognized borders.” The meaning was clear: Israel would have to enter final status negotiations with 1967 borders as a given. (285)
Sharon told Eli Landau that the Arab-Israeli conflict, he said, would not end until the Arabs recognized the Jews’ basic right to live in a sovereign state in their ancestral land. “Show me one other people that has been willing to concede land without losing in war. No one would do that. I managed to work out a plan with the Americans by which an agreement will be reached in states. Why stages? Because each step is permanent. What you have given will never be returned.”
Bloom and Hefez write that according to Sharon, the terms he hammered out with the Americans were an agreement in stages; no negotiations under fire; PA reform; Arafat conceding control of the state security apparatus and state finances; PA security forces acting under American supervision; the tracing of all money donated to the PA to ensure it did not finance terrorism; and the complete cession of anti-Israel incitement in the media and in schools. Only once those reforms had been put in place would Israel proceed with negotiations. (386)
According to the time schedule of the Road Map, by 2003 all terror attacks would stop, a list of reforms would be enacted within the PA, and Israel would freeze all settlement building; by 2004, the Palestinians would hold elections for prime minister, after which America would organize an international peace conference at which the issue of a Palestinian state would be decided; by June 2005, the two sides would hold talks along with other representative Arab states over final status agreements. The two thorniest problems would be solved there: Jerusalem, and the Palestinian refugees’ right of return. (387-8)
Once the Road Map was formally unveiled, Israel had to withdraw to September 28, 2000, lines, freeze all settlement construction, and ease restrictions on the three million Palestinian civilians who suffered from the collective punishment of closure.
As far as Sharon was concerned, the plan was rushed, and terribly dangerous for Israel. The timetable deviated sharply from his plan to proceed incrementally. Sharon, already very familiar with the operating procedure of the Oval Office, couldn’t flat out refuse the president’s plan, certainly not as America readied for war in Iraq. He said that Israel was willing to talk the plan over but that it could not agree to it all exactly as presented. After the war, and elections in America and in Israel, there would be time to toss this plan too in the trash bin of history, on top of all the other well-intentioned peace papers that had been floated down to this region. (388)
BARACK OBAMA & HARRY S. TRUMAN BOUND BY POLITICAL EXPEDIENCY IN ISRAEL PALESTINE STATEHOOD
Obama Administration Talking To Congress
"We are continuing intensive consultations with the Congress on this money because we feel that U.S. support for Palestinians' institution-building is a vital piece of what we're trying to do here. We're trying to prepare the ground for a successful and stable peace," she says.
http://www.npr.org/2011/10/07/141090967/palestinians-feel-effects-of-frozen-u-s-aid
Robert Dallek in The Lost Peace: Leadership in a Time of Horror and Hope, 1945—1953 (2010) writes of how President Truman approved Israel’s statehood out of political expendacy. Dallek posits that post-WWII, Truman did not believe it possible for the United states to shun responsibility for involvement in overseas problems, including the Middle East, where most Americans favored a Palestinian homeland for Hitler’s Jewish victims. Besides, as Truman said later, the Middle East was “one part of the world that has always interested me. The whole history of that area of the world is just about the most complicated and most interesting of any area anywhere, and I have always made very careful study of it,” including the fact that “there has always been trouble there.”
Unlike “a violently opposition Congress whose committees with few exceptions are living in 1890” and, Truman feared, could allow the world to fall into another war, he intended to do his “job,” which “must be done—win, lose or draw,” including keeping the Middle East from provoking a wider conflict. Nevertheless, in summer 1946, he declared, “I have about dome to the conclusion that there is no solution, but we will keep trying.”
Sadly, he was all too right. In the fall of 1946, against State Department advice that continuing openly to support Jewish aspirations for a homeland would undermine U.S. national interest in the Middle East, the president endorsed a plan to partition Palestine into Arab and Jewish states. He refused to be swayed by the risk o a threat to oil supplies from doing what he said was “right.”
But the moral argument hid his conviction that no aspirant for the White House in 1948, which he already was, could afford to loose New York’s electoral votes. Moreover, his likely opponent would be Tom Dewey, the state’s governor, and a Dewey presidency would produce U.S. backing for partition and make his opposition irrelevant. Since he believed he would lose the White House if he opposed partition and that a new administration would not only use his opposition against him in a campaign but also would support partition beginning in 1949, he saw both moral and political reasons to act as he did. A UN resolution in November 1947 supporting partition, and a British announcement that they would leave Palestine after it occurred in May 1948, left responsibility for keeping the peace to the UN.
BBC WORLD NEWS
US & Canada / 22 September 2011 … aid to any country supporting the Palestinian bid for UN membership, sponsored by a Democrat. Such moves have been seen before, but the strength…
Robert Dallek posits that the partition and British withdrawal on schedule left the United Nation and Washington struggling to head off bloodshed. But neither had the wherewithal or the will to enforce a proposal for a trusteeship that aimed to delay partition and provide a temporary solution. In fact, neither the UN nor the Truman administration had the power to halt the movement toward a two-state solution and the fighting that it provoked. Neither could come up with a better alternative.
Jews in Palestine and the United States rejected trusteeship as delaying the inevitable establishment of a Jewish state, while Arabs refused to agree to Israeli independence. Because the existence of Israel seemed to be a foregone conclusion, Truman saw no reason to delay recognition and lose the political and moral advantages it gave him.
The decision to recognize Israel did not endear Washington to the Arabs, but it did not result in an immediate Soviet gain among them. As anticipated, Arab economic ties to the West were too strong to give Moscow an immediate advantage in the Middle East. In time however, East-West competition for influence in the region would become a critical part of the Cold War. (177-8)
For Truman, who accepted the political necessity of overtly supporting the new Jewish state, there was nothing untoward about doing so: not only would it help him politically, but he believed it was the right and realistic policy. He fully accepted the moral claims for a Jewish homeland in Palestine, and Clark Clifford convinced him that Israel would come into existence with or without America’s immediate backing.
When he won election in November, Truman believed that he had both made a smart political decision on Israel and acted in concert with larger moral and historical forces. Israel’s successful resistance to the Arab League armies in 1948 vindicated Clifford’s prediction that an Israeli state would come into being regardless of initial outside reactions. When the chief rabbi of Israel told Truman during a visit to the White House, “God put you in your mother’s womb so you would be the instrument to bring the rebirth of Israel after two thousand years,” Truman started to cry. Such are the fictions by which men sometimes take comfort from their actions.
Neither the rabbi nor the president reflected on the potential for continuing violence created by the irreconcilable differences between Israelis and Palestinians over land and survival in the Holy Land. (270)
ISRAEL ~ A CULTURE OF VICTIMHOOD & THE MYTH OF AMERICAN DEFORMATION
Avraham Burg in The Holocaust Is Over; We Must Rise From Its Ashes (2008) writes that in the state of Israel Zionism has bread a cult of denial. He writes that we have not yet been cured of this disease of denial. Indeed schools teach of the days of darkness and fear, but these are lessons about life outside life. This is reminiscent of the current denial of Diaspora Jews. Who among us really knows about the Jews outside Israel, who are the majority of our people? What do we Israelis know of the lives, dreams and fears of American Jews? What did we learn of the North African Jews who emigrated to France, or the Latin American Jews? Not a clue, and worse—we simply do not care. “They should either come and live here,” the late President Ezer Weizman once told me [Burg] angrily, “or they should go to hell.” This was the thinking when he grew up in the British Mandate Palestine-Land of Israel, thus they were ignored during the Shoah [Jewish Holocaust], and this is still the sentiment today. If they are well, they do not interest us at all; if their condition worsens, it only justifies our choices.
This is catastrophic Zionism at its worst: what is bad for the Jews is better for Zionism. In this sense, I am not just a post-Zionist, but an anti, anti-catastrophist Zionist. I believe wholeheartedly that if we do not establish modern Israeli identity on foundations of optimism, faith in humans and full trust in the family of nations, we have no chance of existing and surviving in the long run—not as a society in a state, nor as a state in the world, and not as a nation in the future.
The era of fearful Judaism and paranoid Zionism is over. The time for integration in a free, positive world has come. The faith of the Jewish people in the world and in humanity must be rehabilitated. (99-100)
Latest news, analysis and background on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-15163640
Middle East / 4 October 2011
US and Palestinian officials have criticised a freeze the US Congress has placed on $200m (£130m) US aid to the Palestinian Authority. US Defence…
WHEN THE SHOE WAS ON THE OTHER FOOT
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