Opinion Editorials, December 2011

America's Growing Isolation Due to Its Unconditional Support of Israel

By Alan Hart

Alan Hart views the growing international isolation of the United States due to its unconditional support of Israel, as manifested in the recent condemnation by “all the regional and political groupings on the UN Security Council” of Israeli settlement activities and settler violence.

A longer headline would have added the words because of President Obama’s grovelling for Jewish campaign funding and votes.

On 19 December, in the Jewish Daily Forward, Josh Nathan-Kazis wrote this:

Top-level Jewish fundraisers from President Obama’s 2008 campaign are sticking with the president in 2012.

Despite reports that President Obama faces a loss of Jewish funders due to his Middle East policy, analysis of a list of elite bundlers from his 2008 race shows no defections among the president’s top Jewish supporters in 2012.

That’s not good news for the would-be presidents on the Republican side who are grovelling for Jewish campaign funds and votes.

On the same day, in what the BBC’s Barbara Plett called “a highly unusual move”, all the regional and political groupings on the UN Security Council sharply criticized Israeli settlement activities. They said in their statements that “continued settlement building threatened the chances of a future Palestinian state”. They also expressed dismay at rising settler violence. (“They” were the envoys representing the European Union, the Non-Aligned Movement, the Arab Group and a loose coalition of emerging states known as IBSA, or India, Brazil, South Africa.)

It was UK Ambassador Mark Lyall Grant who read the statement of the EU group.

Israel's continuing announcements to accelerate the construction of settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories, including East Jerusalem (,1000 new housing units tendered for last week), send a devastating message. We believe that Israel's security and the realization of the Palestinians' right to statehood are not opposing goals. On the contrary they are mutually reinforcing objectives. But they will not be achieved while settlement building and settler violence continues.

As Barbara Plett noted, “Despite the unanimity of views, the envoys did not try to draft a single Security Council statement because they knew the US would veto it.” She also noted that the Obama administration’s stance was that “anything to do with Israeli-Palestinian peace talks belongs in a US-led bilateral process, not at the UN”. (In my opinion that’s hypocrisy of the highest order.)

It could be said, and I do say, that such criticism of Israel’s settlement activities is 44 years too late. So what, really, is its significance?

My answer is in three parts.

The first is that it’s a strong indication of America’s growing isolation because of the Obama administration’s unconditional support for Zionism’s monster child.

The second, related, is that it seems to confirm what I have been saying and writing for several months – that behind closed doors almost all of the governments of the world, European governments in particular, are more than fed up with Israel’s contempt for and defiance of international law.

The third is that the governments of most of the member states of the UN have come to terms with the fact that Zionism’s assertion that a Palestinian state on the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, and the Gaza Strip could and would pose a threat to Israel’s existence is propaganda nonsense of the highest order. (This, of course, is only of academic interest because the two-state solution has long been dead if not yet buried.)

When I am thinking about Obama’s grovelling, my memory recalls a comment made to me by Dr. Hajo Meyer, the passionate anti-Zionist Nazi holocaust survivor and author of An Ethical Tradition Betrayed: The End of Judaism.

We had shared a platform in London and over breakfast the following morning I asked him a question. I said: “Hajo, you’re well into your eighties and you are being vilified by Zionism’s verbal hit-men for your efforts to unmask the Zionist monster. Why are you continuing with your truth-telling? Why don’t you sit back in peace and quiet and enjoy what’s left of your life?”

He replied with nine little words. “The first person I see every morning is me,” meaning “I have to live with myself.”

It’s more than reasonable to assume that Obama looks in the mirror from time to time. I wonder if he can live with himself.

Israel’s response as delivered by Karean Peretz, spokeswoman for Israel's UN mission, included this: “The main obstacle to peace, has been, and remains, the Palestinians' claim to the so-called right of return and its refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.”

That, too, is Zionist propaganda nonsense of the highest order.

Israel is not a Jewish state. How could it be when about a quarter of its citizens are Arabs and mainly Muslims? Israel could only be a Jewish state after it had resorted to a final round of ethnic cleansing. Israel is a Zionist state.

Because the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat kept them informed through a secret channel, Israel’s leaders have long known that in the event of a two-state solution, the Palestine Liberation Organization was reluctantly reconciled to the reality of the right of return being confined to the territory of the Palestinian state, which would mean that only about 100,000 refugees would be able to return, with the rest having to accept financial compensation for the loss – the theft – of their land and rights.

As I explain in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, when they decided they had no choice but to be pragmatic, Arafat and his leadership colleagues took a degree of comfort from two hopes. One was that all Palestinian refugees everywhere could and would have a Palestinian passport. The other was that if there was a two-state solution, it could evolve over one or two generations into one state for all – i.e. because in peace and partnership enough Israeli Jews would say something like: “We don’t need two states”. In the event of a one-state solution coming about by mutual consent, it was assumed on the Palestinian side at leadership level that, over time, all Palestinians who wanted to return would be able to return. So, in theory the two-state solution was not necessarily the end-game on the right of return.

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