The last week of the year suddenly became momentous for US-Israeli relations. The public dispute between the two countries following the US Security Council abstention that allowed a resolution to pass banning the building of more illegal Jewish settlements has been truly extraordinary. The big question is whether the abstention was too little, too late. Since the Obama administration is leaving and the incoming president will apparently take a much softer approach with Israel, it might be thought that the timing of the vote rendered the whole exercise futile.
The outgoing administration could have tried to tie its successors’ hands with the resolution or take a proverbial shot at an Israeli government that doomed previous peace talks with its settlements policy. Or it could have been simply meant to sum up where the Obama administration stands on the Middle East.
The fact is the Obama administration will join a long line of administrations that have failed to solve the Palestinian-Israeli issue. On Wednesday, Secretary of State John Kerry, speaking for President Obama, laid out the reasons why. The central portion of Kerry’s speech was a harsh attack on the settlement enterprise and why it undermines the prospects for a two-state solution. Kerry used the settlements issue to directly question the intentions and commitment of the Israeli government, particularly Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu who has bragged that his government is more committed to the settlements than any Israeli government in history. Netanyahu is unwilling to make any big, hard decision to advance or preserve a two-state solution.
When Kerry described Netanyahu’s government as “the most right-wing in Israeli history,” the top US diplomat was making an accurate assessment of a dangerous shift in Israel’s domestic politics. Jewish settlers are relentlessly pushing Israel deeper and deeper into the West Bank. The growth of Jewish settlements on occupied land is in fact burying all prospects of a negotiated settlement and a two-state solution. Peace negotiations were deliberately sabotaged by the creation of thousands of new settlement units, many of them in the heart of the areas that would constitute the Palestinian side of the land deal.
This, not the false charge of hostility to Israel or US collusion with others, is why the Obama administration abstained on Resolution 2334, which challenged the legal validity of all the settlements. The US has warned Netanyahu for eight years that his policy would have a price, but those objections were systematically ignored. He preferred to pacify the settler lobby instead of making a plan of action, to the point at which settlers have all but succeeded in taking effective control of what’s left of the territory on which a peace deal could be made.
Netanyahu has publicly committed himself to a two-state solution to the decades-old conflict. In practice, though, he has overseen a massive expansion of Israel’s web of West Bank settlements that has occupied so much territory that it would be almost impossible to cobble together a contiguous Palestinian state.
Kerry did not offer any original solutions nor did he say anything not known before. His view was that the unrequited appetite of Israel’s deep settler state is a big part of the problem. His deep belief that the two-state solution is dying and that US, Israeli and Palestinian interests will suffer if it’s not somehow rescued was obvious. His was a sincere sense of urgency about the possibility of a two-state solution being lost at a moment when the international community has spoken in one voice against this land grab. He set out principles which will form the basis for any future negotiations between the parties, reaffirming the international consensus around what a final resolution of this conflict could and should look like, and why it’s not the Obama’s administration’s fault that it hasn’t taken that shape.
