Rami G. Khouri

The bizarre role of the United States government in current events in Israel and Palestine has reached such a peak this week that someone in the realm of the absurd should create a prize for this and award the inaugural one to Secretary of State John Kerry. Washington’s quest for a cease-fire in Gaza, while wholeheartedly supporting and arming Israel’s onslaught against Palestinian civilians, reflects the frightening extent of bankrupt Arab diplomacy and exercise of sovereign power as much as it reflects the true nature of the American government’s siding with Israel.

 

Here is the situation as it played out this week: The American president and secretary of state repeatedly supported Israel’s right to defend itself; the U.S. Senate voted 100-0 to support Israel’s actions and ask for a dissolution of the Palestinian national-unity government; Kerry flew to Cairo to help negotiate a cease-fire while stating that he viewed Israeli actions in Gaza as legitimate and appropriate, and said that a cease-fire was not enough but that the “underlying issues” also needed to be addressed. 

The massive contradiction between the wholehearted official American support for Israeli savagery in Gaza on the one hand, and the American attempt to mediate a cease-fire on the other, is rationally incomprehensible and untenable. However, it is also a reality we must live with, for some reason that ordinary Arabs and men and women of logic and goodwill around the world cannot understand. That is because American behavior is beyond comprehension. It comes from the realm of the absurd.

 

Two fundamental problems in the American position mirror the much wider and older problem of how colonized Palestinians and their diplomatically neutered Arab cousins have for decades been unable to counter the brutal use of American and Israeli military power used indiscriminately against mostly helpless civilians in places such as Gaza and Iraq. The first is that the two principal institutions of power and foreign policy in the U.S. – the presidency and Congress – have proven again and again that they support Israel’s right-wing military excesses absolutely, without exception.

 

We should not be surprised. American leaders and presidential candidates repeatedly affirm that, “there is no daylight between the U.S. and Israel.” We are seeing this in action this week. 

The second problem is that Kerry’s desire now to start addressing the “underlying issues” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is impossible to take seriously. Kerry personally just spent a year of intense diplomacy trying to forge an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement, and he failed. If he was not addressing some of the underlying issues then, what was he doing? And if he was addressing them, then he and his team must be incompetent or dishonest as mediators. 

The United States government has been virtually the only mediator between Israelis and Palestinians for the past two decades, and the record, too, has been one of failure. The reasons for these serial failures will become clearer with time, as historians do their work and elucidate what happened. My sense is that a central reason for the failure has been and continues to be the inability of the U.S. government to function as a truly impartial mediator or facilitator, given its intense bias towards the Israeli position.

 

So there is zero credibility in Kerry’s remarks now that all parties must start discussing the underlying issues in the conflict. This is more problematic because it now seems more obvious than ever that one of the underlying issues here is the long history of intense pro-Israeli bias in the U.S. government, which has helped right-wing Zionists perpetuate their colonial policies against Palestine. So perhaps the best thing for Kerry to do is mediate between his own Congress and president, on the one hand, and the Israeli government, on the other, to seek a modicum of sovereignty and autonomy for Washington in designing its policies toward the Israel- Palestine conflict. 

None of this is new, but the shocking manner in which the absolute Zionist chokehold on American lawmakers has reasserted itself this month during the Gaza assault forces us once again to ponder the reasons for this and what can be done about it. Hamas and Hezbollah have offered one option, which is armed resistance. Most Arab leaders have opted for acquiescence in the face of the Zionist-American furies we see raining bombs on penned-in Palestinian civilians.

 

There must be a better way, and individuals and institutions across the Arab world and abroad must urgently start exploring the options available, including resorting to the international rule of law. Our criticisms of the U.S. and Israel are also criticisms of our own inadequacies, and we are the ones who must take that sad reality in hand and do something about it.