Israel Bold, Defiant
By Richard C. Gross
“With audacity one can undertake anything, but not do everything.”
Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821), Emperor of France, 1804-1814
Chutzpah is a Hebrew word. What could better define it than when Israel announced Friday that it seized another 3.8 square miles of the occupied West Bank just as Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrived in the country for talks of peace with the Palestinians there and in Gaza. That wasn’t a very polite welcome.
The Americans have been bugging the Israelis for decades about continually building and “thickening” Jewish settlements on what were Palestinian lands for centuries, to no avail. Should the Americans bother?
The rude in-your-face Israeli arrogance toward Blinken, a friend and a fellow Jew, no less, marked what Peace Now records as the biggest grab of land in the highly contested hilly and rocky West Bank since the failed 1993 Oslo accords that were intended to secure peace between Israel and the Palestinians. It’s the Israeli do-it-yourself way, criticism be damned.
Peace Now, which tracks government activities and settlements in the occupied territories, was founded by Israeli soldiers in 1978 to achieve peace between the Jewish state and the Palestinians in territories captured from Jordan and Egypt during the 1967 Six-Day War. Egypt had administered Gaza. Israel withdrew from the coastal strip in 2005.
Israel ignores its repeated violation of international law barring Jewish settlement in occupied territories. The law is enshrined in Rome Statute 8 (2) (b) (viii) of 1998 that says “the transfer, directly or indirectly, by an Occupying Power of parts of its own civilian population to the territory it occupies . . .’’ is a war crime. The law by the International Criminal Court (ICC) has 123 signatories. The United States, Israel and Sudan withdrew their signatures in 2002.
Despite the law, it’s been a struggle to get Israel to comply with it because government policy favors settlement of the ancient lands. It’s backed up by its own position on the thorny issue.
Israel argues that Jordan, which ruled over the area from 1950 to 1967, never was the legal sovereign in the territory. Similarly, it argues, “No legal instrument has ever determined that the Palestinians have sovereignty or that the territories belong to them,” according to the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
Thus, it says, the term “occupied Palestinian territories is totally inaccurate and false.” Israel refers to those areas as “disputed territories.”
“While there are those in Israel and the world who seek to undermine our right over the Judea and Samaria area and the country in general, we are promoting settlement through hard work and in a strategic manner all over the country,” hard-right Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich said Friday about his new takeover of Palestinian land.
What do you think?
Judea and Samaria refer to the west bank of the Jordan River. They were the ancient names of the two areas under what the Hebrew Bible refers to as the “United Monarchy,” with Israel and its cities of Shechem (now the Palestinian city of Nablus) and Samaria in the north and Judah in the south, where it harbored the sacred Jewish Temple of Solomon.
Bold Israeli defiance of the wishes of America, Israel’s chief ally and supplier of weapons since 1962, is nothing new. Washington launched efforts to persuade Israel repeatedly to return the seized territories, criticizing Jewish settlement as illegal and “obstacles to peace,” since the United Nations adopted Resolution 242 in November 1967 calling on Israel to withdraw from territories captured in the Six-Day War.
Israel also has established 32 settlements on the windy Syrian Golan Heights, which they annexed in 1981. And heights they are, 9,232 feet above sea level at their highest point. A winding, twisting road with hairpin turns takes you up to the Golan, from which Syria once shelled Israel’s Jordan Valley below.
There are 12 Jewish settlements in Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem, which Oslo viewed as the part of the Holy City where the Palestinians would establish their capital once they had a state. Israel demands that Jerusalem remain united as its capital.
Washington doesn’t snap back publicly at Israelis ignoring what it wants them to do. But I’d bet their closed-door talks must be heated at times because of American frustration, like a parent berating a teenager. That Washington has so much patience instead of seeing its demands fulfilled may be because there are 7.5 million Jews in the United States, 5.8 million of them adults, according to the Pew Research Center. Many of those adults vote.
Israel bristles at being told what to do – wouldn’t you? – and even publicly airs its disagreements with Washington, arguing it’s a “sovereign nation” and thus makes its own decisions.
Israelis are different from Americans, brought up in a sliver of land with their fathers and mothers fighting wars and families dodging terrorism. They live in the Middle East among hostile neighbors wanting destruction of their country, not between two oceans at total peace with Canada and Mexico.
America has been delivering billions of dollars of weapons and other military gear to Israel during the Gaza War, aside from the $3.3 billion annual grant that is used to buy U.S. warplanes and other equipment. Egypt gets the same, both for signing their 1979 peace treaty. Should we still be doing that for a 45-year-old peace?
President Joe Biden has gone easy with Israel in the face of its refusals to accept U.S. advice about how to conduct the Gaza War, like calling for an end to the bombing of civilian areas and his admonitions against invading the southern city of Rafah to eliminate the remaining battalions of Hamas terrorists. Up to 8,000 terrorists are in Rafah, according to New York Times columnist David Brooks.
But tension between America and Israel just got rougher. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu Monday canceled a planned visit to Washington with a top-level delegation to discuss Gaza in retaliation for the U.S. abstention of a U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution because it failed to condition it on the release of Israeli hostages.
The move by Washington, which usually vetoes such resolutions, indicates that Biden is losing his patience with Israeli rejections of U.S. efforts to persuade Israel to cancel a planned invasion of Rafah and Netanyahu’s repeated refusals to seek a two-state peace settlement with the Palestinians.
Biden could stop supplying weapons to Israel to enforce his demands. But this is a very hot election year, the Republicans are all for arming the Israelis to the hilt and the president does have a decades-long soft spot for the Jewish state. What would you do?
Israelis believe they have little choice but to continue the war until Hamas is eliminated as a future threat. The Oct. 7 barbarian massacre of 1,200 Israelis and the seizing of 250 hostages, about 100 of which remain in Hamas’ hands, has burned in like a branding iron.
Israel should continue its war until the last terrorist is found. A lengthy cease-fire sought by America would break the momentum of Israel’s assault. But, as Israelis would put it, go at it “slowly, slowly,” without destroying more above-ground infrastructure. Pursue Hamas’ leaders first.
Richard C. Gross, who covered war and peace in Israel, the American military at the Pentagon, was foreign editor of United Press International and was the opinion page editor of The Baltimore Sun.