Hussein Ibish
The National / July 20, 2023
The conservative media’s claims that Biden is incorrectly labelling the Palestinian territories as ‘occupied’ are downright cynical.
The partisan schism over US policy towards Israel and the occupation that began in 1967 is solidifying in ways that should alarm both Israelis and Palestinians albeit for different reasons. Republicans are increasingly embracing the annexationism championed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical new cabinet, while US President Joe Biden’s administration is working to restore Washington’s commitment to peace.
Last week, an official editorial in The Wall Street Journal, an authoritative pro-conservative establishment publication, fulminated against the Biden administration’s Middle East policies by relying on two glaring falsehoods.
It condemned Biden’s opposition to proposed Israeli judicial “reforms” that would strip the judiciary of most powers over the government. It insisted that Biden has been treating Israel’s government more harshly than he has the Iranian regime.
The absurdity of this claim is clear. A distinct coolness between Netanyahu and Biden is evident, but US support for Israel remains generous and robust. By contrast, the Biden administration has held firm against unreasonable Iranian demands in nuclear negotiations and maintained remarkably harsh sanctions and significantly ramped up military deterrence against Teheran.
The second glaring falsehood merits particular attention. The editorial claims that, under Biden, “all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is treated as occupied territory”. “This is now a liberal article of faith,” it insists.
These assertions – that it’s somehow incorrect to label the occupied Palestinian territories as “occupied”, and that doing so is a new and especially liberal conceit – invert reality. Shortly after the occupation began in 1967, it was labelled exactly that by the UN Security Council, including the US, and was reconfirmed countless times ever since. This makes Israel’s occupation a legal and diplomatic fact, not anyone’s opinion.
The suggestion is that liberals have adopted a weirdly anti-Israel stance by claiming Israel is an occupying power. Yet the opposite is true, as the editorial’s cynical authors are surely aware. In fact, it is the American right that has abandoned a longstanding bipartisan Washington consensus recognizing the reality of the occupation and endorsing a two-state solution.
In 1980, then-president Ronald Reagan, a conservative hero, strongly supported Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s de facto annexation of occupied East Jerusalem and declaring it null and void. Both presidents Bush, father and son, were also clear on the reality of occupation and the need for two states.
But in the 21st century, radical Christian fundamentalists support for the occupation and annexation steadily spread from the fringe to the mainstream in right-wing discourse.
The Donald Trump administration proved decisive. His Israel policy was run by three religiously conservative, pro-settlement Jewish Americans personally close to him: his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and two of his attorneys, Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman.
Trump endorsed Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights and issued an ambiguous statement recognizing Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem but leaving it unclear whether he was making distinction between West Jerusalem and occupied East Jerusalem.
As US ambassador to Israel, Friedman, the most radical of the group, was unusually empowered. During his tenure, everyone more senior at the State Department studiously avoided Palestine-Israel issues. He was, therefore, usually able to get his way.
He fought hard for the elimination of all references to the occupation or the occupied Palestinian territories in State Department documents, most notably the annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. From their outset, these crucial documents tracked Israel’s abuses and carefully distinguished Israel from the clearly identified “occupied territories”.
During Friedman’s ambassadorship, State Department references to the occupation began to quickly disappear. The area designation in the annual reports was immediately switched from the traditional “Israel and the Occupied Territories” to “Israel, the West Bank and Gaza”. By 2018, all references to the occupation were eliminated. Under Biden, Trump’s area designation unfortunately persists, but the fact of occupation is clearly labelled and shot through the analysis of human rights realities in the occupied territories.
Mr Trump’s 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” proposal, overseen by Kushner, was the key turning point. By encouraging Israel to annex 30 per cent of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley thereby surrounding any potential Palestinian mini-state within a greater Israel, the White House gave its blessing to the Republican right, especially radical fundamentalist Christians, to openly embrace occupation and annexation as legitimate and even desirable.
This otherwise ineffectual document succeeded in its unstated but actual primary mission of stretching the “Overton window” of political discourse on the occupied territories in Washington to include support for annexation. For the Republican right, there was no turning back. Cue editorials pretending that this radical transformation of conservative attitudes that has smashed a longstanding, bipartisan foreign policy consensus is merely the rejection of an outlandish new liberal “article of faith”.
Who else has recognized the reality of occupation? The Israeli military, repeatedly, going before Israeli courts to justify measures such as checkpoints and live-fire zones that are allowed to occupying powers under international law. The Israeli government, too, has frequently cited the occupation when convenient. But whenever it comes to settlements and other civilian projects that grossly transgress international human rights law – because the Palestinians and other occupied peoples have the right not to be colonized – Israel reverts to pretending there is no occupation after all.
What Israel has tried to create is a mobile, ever-shifting landscape where “Israel” legally exists wherever and whenever Israeli settler happens to be hunkering down, with or without permission of Israeli authorities, and everywhere else is an amorphous and undefined occupation, with the status of the land and its people to be determined at some future date. Or not.
Comparing the Biden administration’s Human Rights Reports with such conservative editorials and Republican presidential candidates’ scramble to outdo each other in support for Israel and annexation, it is clear that Mr Trump and his annexationist inner circle succeeded in demolishing the pre-existing bipartisan consensus in favour of peace.
With Netanyahu’s judicial “reforms” set to severely undermine Israel’s “Jewish democratic” bona fides over Biden’s strong objections, and the bitter partisan split developing over the occupation, the decades-old “special relationship” between the two countries seems ready to give way to a less “special”, more normal, status, at least with Democrats. That may dismay Israelis, but alarmingly for Palestinians, most Republicans now appear irreversibly pro-annexation.
Hussein Ibish is a senior resident scholar at the Arab Gulf States Institute and a US affairs columnist for The National
