Footnote to my previous post:
To make matters worse - far worse - Israel is more zealously shielded by the US from the political consequences of its settlement policies than it has ever been. And US policy is unlikely to change. The United States will never take on the role of active peacemaker long ascribed to it by an anxious international community. Blanket support for Israel's worst actions and, recently, puerile reiterations of Sharon's insistence that Palestinians 'end terror' have put paid to any hope of useful US intervention; the recent attack on an American target in Gaza suggests that, even for long-credulous Palestinians, belief in Washington's role is finally collapsing. International affirmations of the importance of the US as a broker live on because they still serve US interests in pre-empting European action (and European interest in avoiding action?), while suggesting, for the especially gullible, the possibility of policy change.
None is pending, for reasons that can be found deep in the US political fabric. The problem does not come down to narrow vision, or 'Jewish money' (the standard anti-semitic explanation), or even to America's long-standing military strategy, which assumes Israel to be a bedrock ally - a more even-handed policy would be more likely to enhance the US strategic profile than to erode it. Rather, the force durably proscribing any more constructive policy is the Congress, where one-sided support for Israel is deeply ingrained. This is the result, very largely, of Israeli-lobby leverage and campaign contributions (of various kinds) but major US business interests in Israel have to be borne in mind, as does the well- organised Christian Right, with its bizarre millennialist fixation on a Jewish Israel as portending the Endtimes.
Even more limiting of US foreign policy are the attitudes of individual Congressmen and women. Their public statements indicate that the great majority have internalised right-wing Israeli propaganda. For decades, the Israeli lobby has presented Congress with the narrative of a beleaguered Jewish people trying to build a homeland in a tiny country huddled on the Mediterranean while fending off irrational Islamic/Arab hostility. With members from both parties saturated in these assumptions and hooked by hard financial and electoral clout, the Presidency is greatly constrained in any attempt it might make to lever the Israeli Government towards a loathed and costly policy change - withdrawing or freezing settlements, for instance - even though there are dissenting Israelis who would ardently endorse it. Any move in this direction on the part of any President would be political suicide. The US, then, is not neutral, but neutralised; its foreign policy remains committed to supporting Israel's 'welfare' however the Israeli Government conceives it, which is why it can have no independent impact on settlement policy.
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lrb.co.uk
I'd go even further: I'd say, Any move in this direction on the part of any President would be suicide --literally. |
