Current View (original) (raw)
Monday, May 23, 2011
Niven is coming over for a hike shortly.
Saturday I did two short essays. Thefirst was on Newt Gingrich, and the second was prompted by remarks Newt made on the immigration question. They are both intended to inject some reality into the discussions. In particular, there is no simple solution to the immigration question, and pretending that there is does not help the situation; whatever else Newt has done, he has tried to make us aware of that. Read the essays.
Sunday I attempted to inject some realities into the Israeli question. I note that this morning's news has President Obama frantically trying to explain his Thursday Middle East speech in which he seemed to make important concessions for Israel. Obama supporters are trying to throttle back the rash of criticism directed at Prime Minister Netanyahu, who directed a 4 minute on-camera lecture to the President on the realities of the situation. Both the US State Department and the Israeli Foreign Ministry are trying to get the situation back under control and out of the headlines, back to normal diplomacy. At stake for Israel are the enormous subsidies the US gives to Israel, and the smaller but still quite large subsidy the US pays to Egypt. The subsidy to Egypt tends to stabilize the region; it provides money for the Egyptian military, with plenty of room for the customary baksheesh of Middle Eastern countries, giving the Egyptian rulers enough money for internal bribes to allow a relatively open economy -- or did until recently. The new Egyptian government hasn't stabilized things. Tourism is down to near zero levels, wheat prices soar, and Egypt is threatened with total economic collapse.
US Policy and the Middle East
If you haven't read the Sunday exposition on the Middle East, do so before continuing; I'm going to assume you know what's in it.
I concluded last time that there was no longer any possibility of agreed borders between Israel and Palestine. That opportunity was lost when Yasser Arafat rejected the Clinton-brokered Camp David summit accords, and declared the new intafada which was quickly followed by the Ramallah lynching. Since that time the possibility of any mutually agreed border has fallen to zero. Palestine is not going to sell off the settlement areas in Judea and Samaria, nor is Israel going to hand over the -- largely Christian -- ethnic Arab/Palestinian areas of Israel in a swap for parts of Judea and Samaria. Israel might well be pleased to lose a million or so Arabs, but it's not going to happen. Many of them far prefer Israeli citizenship to being turned over to the tender mercies of the rulers of Palestine, at present Hamas; and of course that leaves out the question of defensible borders. If the 1967 borders were indefensible, the hodgepodge resulting from "mutually agreed swaps" of Arab Israel for Jewish Settlements in Judea and Samaria would be far less so. It's hard to imagine what those borders would look like, but it's an exercise in absurdity anyway: it's not going to happen.
Any border between Israel and Palestine is going to be imposed, not "mutually agreed". If Obama does not know know this -- and it's very difficult to believe that he does not -- Secretary Clinton and the Foreign Service certainly do, as does most of Capitol Hill. There is not going to be any mutually agreed border between Palestine and Israel. There is not going to be any contiguous Palestinian state that unites Gaza and the West Bank. (The Camp David Accord proposal included an elevated railway and an elevated freeway between Gaza and Judea.) Israel is not going to give up the settlements, the Golan Heights, or the fortifications in the Jordan River Valley, nor will the IDF give up unmonitored and unrestricted access to the Jordan Valley. Israel does not have the resources to force the settlers to leave the West Bank. The IDF won't do it; the experience in Gaza was too traumatic. Nor could any Israeli government survive an hour after Palestinian police began forcibly removing Jewish settlers from homes around Bethlehem or in Samaria.
This is reality; but assume that somehow it happened and there were "mutually agreed swaps" leading to some kind of border: there remains the question of the refugees who claim a right of return. After the 1948 war, and again after the 1967 war, a number of Arabs fled Israel, in both cases at the encouragement of Arab governments. Most expected to return after the Arab victories. When those victories didn't materialize, they became refugees. How many is controversial, but a half million is a not unreasonable compromise. There are now more than a million who claim refugee status and a right of return to Israel. That includes the surviving original refugees and their lineal descendents including heirs to property to which they have a nearly indisputable title going back to the Turkish government that preceded the British League of Nations Mandate that created Trans-Jordan and Palestine. Some are Christians. I know some of these people. As one put it, "I know that the Germans did terrible things to those people, but I do not know why that gives them the right to my home." The home she describes is in the Jerusalem-Bethlehem corridor, and she grew up in it as a girl. Their family has always been Christian, and they claim descent from the original first generation baptized by the Apostles. Whatever the truth of that claim, they certainly owned that property under the Turks and under the British Mandate government, and it is certainly occupied by European born Jews whose title comes from the Israeli government. No compensation has ever been paid -- not that such compensation would be accepted. "It is not for sale. It has never been for sale."
That story can be multiplied by thousands. How many thousands is not clear. Some of the refugees are descendents of nomads of no fixed address -- much of Palestine in 1948 was undeveloped desert. Some have questionable origins or questionable titles to land in Israel. Discard all those of questionable status and there remain hundreds of thousands of genuine refugees displaced from land in pre-1967 Israel, and who claim a right of return. Add the the others whose status cannot be determined and the number climbs toward a million, perhaps more. While my friends have homes and jobs in Bethlehem (one is a physician married to another Palestinian who is legally resident in Jerusalem although he is not allowed to live there), most of those claiming refugee status live in poverty in refugee camps.
The Arab Israeli wars also produced tens to hundreds of thousands of Jewish refugees, who were forced out of Iraq, Syria, Jordan, Yemen, and other Arab lands. They fled to Israel, where they were absorbed into the Israeli economy and have long since ceased to have any kind of refugee status. That did not happen with the Arab refugees. They were put up in refugee camps and kept there. They were not absorbed into any Arab countries, and most of them remain stateless refugees (although of course many had the gumption to get out of those slums and go elsewhere. Some came to the United States, some legally and some just came in hopes of claiming sanctuary).
The refugee claim to a Right of Return was the official stumbling block to the Arab acceptance of the Camp David Accords which would have restored well over 90% of the land taken in the 1967 war. The refugee claim to a Right of Return will not be given up, and that issue alone will prevent any Arab/Israeli negotiated peace. Borders and the conditions of peace in the Middle East will not be settled by negotiation. They will be imposed, or they will remain in dispute. This is simple reality.
The question for the United States is a simple one: what part should we have in imposing peace in that region? This can only be answered by an analysis of national interests. One of the factors in that determination is the reliability of nations. Who makes and keeps agreements? The Egyptians did, even though Sadat was assassinated for his part in the Egypt/Israeli accord. Mubarak kept the agreement. His government was corrupt -- almost all governments in that region are corrupt, with baksheesh for public officials as a normal procedure -- but it had more economic liberty than many Arab governments. That government is gone, the Egyptian economy is in terrible shape, and the prognosis is uncertain.
US trade with Israel is significant, particularly in science and technology. As to the rest of the Middle East, so far as I know the main reason for the US to be interested in the region at all is the obvious one: energy. Although US oil and gas reserves are high, the development is low.
Niven is here. I'll continue later. But the situation is clear: there is not going to be peace over there except by imposition. Is that in the US interest? Or would we be better off investing in energy developments here?
We are the friends of liberty everywhere. We are the guardians only of our own.
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