The re-election of Donald Trump places the question of US support for Israel’s settlement/annexation policies on the policy agenda. To help illuminate the considerations driving policy in Washington and Jerusalem, I have published below some articles written during the first months of 2020, when Trump and Netanyahu considered and then rejected the option of annexation of West Bank territory.
Washington Blesses Annexation
February 2020
Washington offers a blank check but the decision of how much and when to annex remain in Israel’s hands
The US and Israeli teams working on annexation have just been announced, followed by an initial meeting in the West Bank settlement of Ariel. Their mission: to draw a map of the West Bank reflecting an unprecedented US-Israel agreement on the extent of annexation of territories conquered by Israel in June 1967.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu explained that “the mapping is underway in order to allow for the application of Israeli law on these areas and later American recognition as well.”
Netanyahu certainly welcomes President Trump’s historic readiness to support annexation. But the major constraint to an Israeli decision to annex all or parts of the West Bank is not -- now ... or ever -- the view in Washington, but rather the multi-faceted considerations driving Israeli policy in the West Bank.
The legal and administrative infrastructure for annexation – at least in Israeli eyes -- was established within a week of Israel's conquest in 1967, when the Knesset empowered the government to extend “Israeli law, jurisdiction, and public administration over the entire area of the Land of Israel.” The measure was passed with little debate. Only two members of Knesset –from the communist party –voted against the measure.
Although empowered to annex all its conquests – from Sharm el sheikh to Jebel as-Sheikh – the government limited the extension of sovereignty de jure to Jordanian – now rebranded as “united” Jerusalem -- notably including the Holy Basin and the airport at Kalandia near Ramallah.
Israel has always coveted the land it conquered in June 1967, but not the Palestinians who lived there. The issue of annexation – and the associated challenge of minimizing its impact on the powers of the Jewish majority -- has long been near the top of Israel’s political agenda. In 1977 Moshe Dayan, the Israeli most responsible for Israel’s policies of occupation, won a commitment from the new prime minister Menachem Begin not annex West Bank de jure as a condition for joining his new Likud-led government.
Begin's victory over the Labor Party was an earthquake in Israel’s political history, all the more so because of Dayan’s post-election agreement to serve under Begin’s leadership. Dayan’s partnership with Begin was an unambiguous illustration of the broad Israeli consensus for remaining permanently in the West Bank, no matter how the issue of sovereignty or international recognition were decided.
Building on Begin’s lifelong commitment to Israel’s sovereign control over “Judea and Samaria,” the direction of all subsequent Israeli policies – from the “autonomy” plan mooted at Camp David, to Rabin’s offer of “less than a state” weeks before his assassination, to Trump’s conditional support for an ersatz state – have been based on annexation of approximately half of the West Bank and its Palestinian analogue – the destruction of the territorial foundations for Palestinian sovereignty west of the Jordan River.
The Trump administration’s support for annexation removes a giant obstacle that has constrained if not prevented Israel’s appetite to rule as sovereign de jure over the West Bank territory.
As a consequence of the Knesset action in June 1967, an administrative decision is all that is needed today in order to apply Israeli law – i.e. to annex – to any additional part of the West Bank.
Trump’s views are not the deciding factor as Israel contemplates annexation. Both Jerusalem and the Golan Heights were annexed by acts of the Knesset without US approval or, until the Trump era, Washington’s formal acknowledgement.
Israel has spent decades removing territorial, demographic and international obstacles to annexation. The intention to remain as the sole sovereign power west of the Jordan has provided the essential policy framework for all of its occupation policies. The placement of Jewish settlements and the construction of roads connecting them while “bypassing” Palestinian towns; the 2005 decision to evacuate Gaza; and support for limited Palestinian self-rule outlined in the autonomy, Oslo, Bush and now Trump plans are all part of a grand design intended to consolidate sole Israeli suzerainty west of the Jordan Rover at Palestinian expense, while reducing the demographic “cost” borne by Israel.
The maps detailing the joint US-Israel undemanding for this “deluxe annexation” –the most land with the fewest Palestinians -- have already been prepared and agreed. The membership of the US “negotiating” team under Ambassador David Friedman and his support for Israel’s annexation of Hebron announced at the outset of the talks, set to last only one week, reflect Washington’s unprecedented endorsement of this objective.
Yet the reasons underlying Dayan’s opposition to de jure annexation are still relevant today and they continue to act as the primary restraint on Israel’s appetite for the West Bank.
Israel’s ability to manage this process, and not the views in Washington, no matter how important, remain the most potent obstacle to annexation. Over almost five decades of Israeli rule, Israel has created “facts on the ground” that increasingly enable Israeli leaders to accept the costs of formal annexation.
Trump and Friedman are important cheerleaders, but the complicated decision to annex remains as it always has, in Israel’s hands.
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Annexation is More than a Gift of Words
March 2020
Much attention has been focused of late on Israeli intentions to annex West Bank territory and the green light for such a move given by the Trump administration.
At such a moment it is worth recalling the advice of Israel’s first president, the Zionist luminary Chaim Weizmann. As a diplomat, Weizmann tirelessly argued for a Jewish state in the capitals of Europe, and famously met with Prince Feisal bin Hussein in 1919 to promote the Zionist cause. But despite his considerable achievements, Weizmann understood that without creating facts on the ground, professions of support from distant capitals were of little practical value.
“A state cannot be created by decree,” Weizmann observed almost a century ago, “but by forces of people and in the course of generations. Even if all the governments of the word gave us a country, it would only be a gift of words. But if the Jewish people will go and build Palestine, the State of Israel will become a reality.”
In recent weeks, with the Trump declaration supporting annexation securely in his pocket, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has announced a series of settlement and building plans in Jerusalem and the West Bank that attest to the continuing and decisive importance Weizmann’s timeless instruction.
Hebron
Hebron is the site of the Ibrahimiyya Mosque, (aka Tomb of the Patriarchs), a place of pilgrimage throughout the ages for Muslims and Jews. Right-wing settlers, armed by then deputy prime minster Yigal Allon, first settled in the town in April 1968. Since then Hebron, the market town for the entire West Bank south of Bethlehem, has been under siege by a small but determined group of settlers who claim Hebron as their own.
The massacre of worshippers by a settler in 1994 presented an opportunity for the Rabin government to remove the settlers from the city and more broadly, to give evidence that Israel was intent to evacuate settlements during the Oslo era. But Rabin, only months before his own assassination, demurred. He closed the bustling Palestinian market instead.
Under successive Israeli governments, the town’s economic and transport center has been shuttered and deserted, while the embryonic Jewish settlement in strategic parts of the city has incrementally expanded.
The US Ambassador to Israel David Friedman has said that the application of Israeli sovereignty to the Jewish areas of Hebron poses “no problem."
Late last year, in what PLO leader Saeb Erekat called "the first tangible result of the US decision to legitimize colonization," plans were announced to replace the shuttered market with a new settlement area, long a key demand of settlers in their unceasing campaign to destroy the economic foundations of the Arab community and expand Jewish settlement.
Greater Jerusalem
Israel has labored with great success to establish successive walls of settlement aimed at isolating Jerusalem from its West Bank hinterland – from Bethlehem in the south to Ramallah in the north --and in so doing undermine the prospects for a viable and sovereign Palestinian presence in the city itself.
New and expanding settlements in and around Jerusalem are one territorial anchor of this strategy. Trump’s green light has expedited plans, some of them long postponed, for new and expanded settlement areas, not only in East Jerusalem but also in strategic locations in the environs immediately outside the city.
In the north, plans for a new Israeli suburb of 50,000 at the site of the shuttered Jerusalem airport at Atarot were recently announced. Creation of this new settlement between and among the Palestinian neighborhoods of Kufr Aqab, Qalandia, and Ar-Ram, further imperils the existence of a territorial foundation for Palestinian sovereignty anywhere in the city, while creating a territorial bridge of settlement linking settlements north of Jerusalem with Israel’s coastal plain.
Just east of Jerusalem, on a hilltop visible from the Mount of Olives, a vast new settlement area known as E-1 is now, after many years of delay, scheduled for housing construction. Over the years, a police station and extensive road and services infrastructure have been built, but successive Israeli governments have deferred to international, and particularly, US opposition to the creation of a vast new settlement in this area.
Israel supports development of this area for the very reason that Palestinians and the international community oppose it. It closes the door to a territorial division of Jerusalem’s eastern hinterland while blocking the only remaining land corridor between the northern (Ramallah-Nablus) and southern (Bethlehem-Hebron) West Bank.
Two other links in this chain of settlement – Har Homa and Airplane Hill, -- are now also scheduled for expanded construction in the permissive environment created by Washington. Both settlement areas divide and separate the Bethlehem region from Jerusalem, while fortifying existing territorial links between Israeli settlement areas south and east of the city.
Israel’s byzantine system of land and construction licensing mean that recent declarations notwithstanding, the bulldozers are not necessarily on their way. In some cases ground will not be broken for years, while for others the adverts offering new dwellings for sale have already been published.
After a half century of settlement in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, construction that begins one year more or less is of little consequence.
A day before Israel’s third election in a year, Netanyahu once again promised to make good on his promise to annex West Bank territory.
"That will happen within weeks, two months at the most, I hope," he said.
However, in the West Bank today, whether annexation occurs or not --- such “a gift of words” -- is almost beside the point.
As the saying popularized by the early Zionist settlers goes, “another goat, another dunam...and the country will be ours.”
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Annexation and the US — Making and Unmaking States in the Middle East
July 2020
The Trump administration’s support for Israel’s annexation of Palestinian territory has been widely portrayed as a repudiation of “longstanding” U.S. policy. While this is true on formalistic and declarative levels related to the narrow issues framed by the Arab-Israeli conflict, a broader, historical look at U.S. policy in the region offers a far more nuanced interpretation.
One of the cardinal features of the post-World War II system of international relations was the consensus supporting the sovereign integrity of states. Insofar as this principle related to U.S. policy in the Middle East, Washington supported the constellation of national borders bequeathed by the exhausted Mandate powers, France and Great Britain — including the entirely new State of Israel, established with the blessing of the United Nations.
It is all the more extraordinary that Washington held to this policy, despite the view prevailing among the principal antagonists of the Arab-Israeli conflict — namely Israel, Syria, Jordan, and Egypt — that the Armistice lines were just that: temporary and limited ceasefire lines established as a consequence of Israel’s creation.
The June 1967 war broke the taboo. The Armistice borders were breached. This new territorial tableau forced a rethinking of the sovereign division of the lines in Palestine established after World War II.
Israel was the great champion of this effort, focusing its diplomatic and settlement efforts to cement a claim to Jordanian, Syrian, and Egyptian territory. So too was the PLO, which for the first time in a generation, placed the issue of a sovereign Palestine on the international agenda.
The international community took partial note of this new reality in U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, which called for Israel’s retreat from the conquered territories to “secure and recognized boundaries” presumably different from the temporary ceasefire lines existing on the eve of the war. Palestine however, remained unacknowledged, and half a century later, unrealized.
In the last decades of the twentieth century, the breach in Washington’s commitment to the map of the Middle East opened by the June 1967 war widened. Throughout the heart of the Fertile Crescent, regional developments undermined Washington’s system of alliances. The revolution in Iran highlighted the shortcomings of Washington’s system of regional security.
Iran was not the only pillar of US policy that was imploding. The failure of Arab regimes — notably in Iraq, Syria, and Libya but also Egypt — to win Washington’s confidence soured the U.S. on their role as anchors for American influence and power, and raised explicit questions in Washington about the value of the postwar Arab order as a guarantor of American interests in the region.
In 2005, then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice reflected this assessment when she declared in a Cairo speech, “For 60 years, my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East, and we achieved neither.”
The redrawing of borders was not the principal consequence of growing U.S. antipathy towards regimes in Baghdad, Tripoli, and Damascus that commenced in the latter years of the twentieth century. But in the search for a new regional security paradigm, the revision of sovereign borders and indeed the reconstitution and even creation of new states carved out of the decaying carcasses of Arab dictatorships now out of favor in Washington evolved as its most notable feature.
The standard for policy success in Libya, Iraq, and Syria now in vogue in Washington is to undermine, to impair and indeed to shake the state to its very foundations by contesting the staying power of the ruling regime. From the Clinton administration onwards, Washington has adopted and pursued policies throughout the region that strike at the very existence of the Arab state itself.
Iraq marked Washington’s unambiguous transformation from a status quo power to one supporting its destruction. Not only has Washington supported efforts to remake Arab national borders, but its policies also contest the policy of “one gun one authority” at the heart of the continuing effort of Arab states to establish a monopoly of force within their respective domains.
Washington’s radical turnabout has been embraced with bipartisan enthusiasm as the key to a new strategy in the region. Then-Senator Joe Biden reflected this burst of imperial reimagination, noting in 2006 that Washington should strive “to maintain a united Iraq by decentralizing it, giving each ethno-religious group... room to run its own affairs, while leaving the central government in charge of common interests.”
Biden’s anodyne formulation might suit Washington. But regional players saw Washington’s invasion of Iraq and postwar chaos, like its breezy admonition that Assad “has to go” and the murder of Gaddafi, as a green light to any religious, ethnic, tribal, or rural element disadvantaged by the growing power of the state to challenge it.
In a dramatic turnabout from historical practice, in Iraq and Syria today the U.S. is the godfather of continuing efforts to assist those determined to recalibrate through force of arms the balance of power with the national authority. Others, notably Russia, Turkey and the UAE, are also keen to take better advantage of Washington’s readiness to upend the status quo. No one wants to be absent from the trough when new maps are being drawn.
Washington’s abandonment of the central pillar of the post-war order — respect for the sovereign integrity of Arab states — has reaped the whirlwind. It has fueled both the centrifugal and centripetal processes at the heart of national politics throughout the region.
Even as U.S. policymakers and politicians opened the gates to these bloody and disabling contests by repudiating support for the old order, the leadership to channel this engineered disarray into a coherent regional architecture has been entirely absent. Instead we witness a cornucopia of “forever wars” that serve only to destroy the state-building efforts of the last century, and persistent efforts to undermine the power of Arab central governments over places and peoples already unused to accommodating the power and institutions based in the capital.
In Iraq, U.S. support for Kurdistan has fueled a desire for partition and independence that, no matter the smooth talk from Washington, strikes at the heart of Iraq’s territorial integrity. The rulers of Baghdad, no matter who they are, together with rivals in Istanbul, Damascus and Tehran, remain as determined to defeat this effort as their forebearers.
More recently, the United States, in a demonstration of broad bipartisan agreement, has embraced a strategy towards Syria based upon the creation of zones beyond the sovereign reach of the regime in Damascus. In doing so, the United States has adopted the “divide-and-rule” strategy pursued with disastrous result by the Mandate powers during the interwar era — creating local proxies determined to weaken the power of the central government. In a very real sense, the policies now in favor in Washington mark a total rejection of the state-building paradigm pursued by the international community in the Middle East and elsewhere after World War II.
To be sure, there is no reason to lament the passing of Ba'ath regimes in Baghdad or Damascus. But until now Washington has proven far more adept at destruction of these execrable rulers than the construction of a new, more just order.
Washington has left no doubt about its ability and desire to undermine the foundations of the Arab state system. Yet American power and influence cannot be built merely upon a destruction of the old territorial and political order and the creation of a security wasteland from Libya to Iraq.
Even as Washington has embraced such a destabilizing formula, the region itself has demonstrated the continuing centrality, relevance, and indeed popularity, of the map Washington has tired of. Independence and nationalism continue to inspire hearts and minds throughout the region, as they have done so since the Urabi revolt in Egypt in 1879. Iraq still struggles with reconstituting itself in the aftermath of the American invasion and occupation. Yet another chapter in the long history of Kurdish efforts to rebalance power with Baghdad is being written. Only in Libya has the all but complete destruction of the state been effected. And no one among those advocating Gaddafi’s overthrow is prepared to defend the consequences as a model for American policy.
The Trump administration claims to support Israel’s annexation of West Bank territory as a fulfillment of the long-sought effort to establish secure and recognized boundaries for the Jewish state. Israel welcomes the long-sought U.S. recognition of Israel’s policy of creating “facts on the ground.”
But not all facts are created equal. Palestine, now sequestered in Gaza, is to suffer the consequences of the new border west of the Jordan River endorsed by Washington. As such Washington’s actions offer a seductive opportunity to powers — great and small -- that hope to profit from the free for all it has helped to unleash throughout the region.
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Bibi The Magician
August 2020
The key to a magician’s success is diversion. He draws the audience’s attention to one event in order to complete another.
Trump and Bibi Netanyahu have just pulled off a magic trick of the first order.
The extravagantly named “Abraham Accord” commands the attention of the world -- while distracting attention from Washington and Jerusalem’s complete failure to accomplish their principal foreign policy objective of the last four years – Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.
To be fair, the declaration of normalization between UAE and Israel is no mean feat. But to be fair, the Abraham Accord was hardly the point of US-Israeli diplomacy of the last four years.
When MBS summoned Mahmoud Abbas to Riyadh in November 2017 it was not to inform him that Washington was determined to promote mutual recognition between Jerusalem and Abu Dhabi. Rather the point of that meeting was to inform Abbas that Washington was in bed with Netanyahu on the future of Jerusalem and the West Bank.
Trump’s “Deal of the Century” gave voice to this understanding -- the center of which was a US greenlight to Israel’s annexation of the West Bank.
With a twenty-first century Balfour declaration on US recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital already in his pocket, Netanyahu, from the earliest days of the Trump presidency, placed US support for Israel’s unilateral annexation of the West Bank at the top of the US-Israel agenda.
For almost half a century Israel has worked to create facts on the ground throughout the West Bank that diplomacy would have no choice but to accommodate. Relations with what Ehud Barak derisively called the “Galabiyas” of the Gulf were useful to be sure but accommodating Arab interests in order to secure their recognition was never an Israeli priority.
In Trump Bibi thought he had found a soulmate. Without the US imprimatur, annexation as a unilateral Israeli move has always been a nonstarter. Washington’s blessing of Israel’s permanent return to Judea and Samaria would propel Bibi into the political and historical stratosphere. It was for Israel a tantalizing prospect – to bury forever the failed diplomatic model of the last 5 decades. As Netanyahu noted, with Trump, the issue at the center of Israel-Palestinian diplomacy was no longer how much land Israel would surrender to a putative Palestinian state, but rather how much of the West Bank Israel would take for itself.
When the moment of truth arrived sometime in early 2020 however Trump cooled on his support for annexation. To anyone familiar with the disfunction and absence of policy discipline at the heart of the Trump White House, Washington’s rejection of its own plan at the moment of truth should not have been surprising. Netanyahu, like all others who have invested in Trump’s commitment to a policy, was caught short by the policy reversal on annexation. Tantalizingly close to realizing the crowning achievement of a lifetime, Netanyahu by his misplaced confidence in the American president, has forever closed the door to Washington’s support for a unilateral Israeli annexation of the West Bank heartland.
Notwithstanding the debacle that is the Deal of the Century, the historical moment for a diplomatic resolution of the conflict based upon the creation of a state of Palestine west of the Jordan capable of exercising sovereignty west of the Jordan river has passed. So too has Trump’s option of a unilateral Israeli annexation of the West Bank supported by the United States.
Either of these options could be resurrected. Nothing in international affairs is forever after all. Yet a responsible assessment suggests that neither option will be realized.
In its place, Israel has pulled the policy equivalent of a rabbit out of the hat. And the audience, without realizing the distraction and enjoying the spectacle, cheers.