Israel & Palestine V (Post 4)
Post #4 from "The Stalemate Years" (2009-2023): A tangent about a UN resolution veto, and the Israeli Social Justice Protests
FEB 2011: UN RESOLUTION ON SETTLEMENTS
By February of 2011, the Arab Spring had spread from Tunisia to Egypt, and the Obama administration had pretty much stopped fighting Netanyahu on the issue of settlements. It wasn’t completely off their agenda, but they were no longer willing to spend any political capital on it. And in that spirit, the Obama administration vetoed a proposed UN Security Council resolution condemning all settlements built in the occupied territories after 1967, despite the fact that Obama himself had condemned these same settlements on numerous occasions.
In a 2015 talk, Dennis Ross discussed the internal debate within the Obama administration over vetoing this resolution. He noted that some of the cabinet members were worried that if they vetoed this resolution, then the US would become the focus of animosity in Tahrir Square (the epicenter of the Arab Spring protests in Egypt). Dennis Ross pointed out that “no one in Tahrir Square is out there because of Israeli settlements.” The Egyptians were worried about their rights, not Palestinian rights. Ross said the White House should veto the resolution because they had already told the PA not to push this issue in the UN right now and they did it anyway. He also said that “we can do it because no one is going to pay attention to it because they are preoccupied elsewhere.”
Obama went ahead with the veto and when Ross spoke of it he said, “Guess what? No reaction.” Two months later, the issue came up again in another meeting. Ross told the cabinet, “Look, we had this discussion two months ago. All of you who were convinced the sky was gonna fall if we vetoed the resolution, and nothing happened – what is it about the region that you don’t get that led you to think that if we vetoed there’d be this terrible catastrophe? And what do you learn from the fact that there wasn’t? — I didn’t get an answer.”
From a purely cold, calculated realpolitik perspective, I suppose Dennis Ross is correct. My only problem is that Ross is framing this almost solely in terms of the wider Arab world or the Arab regimes (and again, like in his book Doomed To Succeed, he is avoiding the moral/ethical aspects of the issue). I have a problem with that framing because the Arab-Israeli conflict is over – this is the Israeli-Palestinian conflict we’re talking about now. Who cares what some Egyptians or Syrians or Saudis (or their authoritarian leaders) think about the settlements? The Israelis don’t have to live with them – they have to live with the Palestinians. And the Israelis don’t build settlements in Egypt or Syria or Saudi Arabia – they build them in Palestine.
If the real issue for Israel to contend with is Palestinian human rights and not normalization with corrupt, dictatorial Arab regimes (and I personally think that it is), then symbolic actions on settlements do actually matter. I keep hearing that normalizing relations between Israel and the Arab regimes would be a “game-changer,” yet I cannot think of one thing it would actually change on the ground in regards to the violence between Israelis and Palestinians (other than possibly increasing it). I imagine it would have a significant impact on the tensions between Israel and a major power like Iran (and it proxies), but after 10/7 it’s hard not to think that maybe the “smaller” issue was just as important as the “big” one.
All that being said, the problem with the United States supporting a resolution against the settlements is that it might allow the US government to achieve some goodwill with the Palestinians in the short-term, but it’s doubtful it would stop Palestinian violence at all. And the Palestinians would still likely turn against any US administration the minute they didn’t give them 100% of what they wanted immediately and without question. (After all, that’s what Israel always does.) So from the point of view of diplomatic pragmatism, the stance of Dennis Ross made the most sense. Besides, in that same talk he also mentioned another “outrageous” UN proposal (that originated from UNESCO) that would have declared the Wailing Wall to be solely part of the Al-Aqsa Mosque; thereby taking this very holy Jewish site away from the Jews and handing it over to the Muslims. So, it is worth remembering that for every pragmatic UN resolution that the US has vetoed, there is also a needlessly provocative (and often unethical) UN proposal they have vetoed as well.
But there is another thing that stood out for me in that 2015 talk with Dennis Ross – it was how it was the first time that I heard Ross sound genuinely angry. I suppose it was because it was in the wake of the numerous “lone-wolf” attacks following the 2014 war (which I’ll get into later), but Ross was far more forceful and unfiltered about his grievances. He went into detail about his disgust toward the BDS boycott movement (he wondered why you cannot find any similar boycott movements by college activists against the Chinese or Sudanese governments); about how the academic community has “swallowed whole” the Palestinian narrative while completely rejecting the Israeli one; about how there is undoubtedly criticism of Israel that is laced with genuine antisemitism despite all claims to the contrary; about how every time an Israeli is stabbed in the streets, the attacker is treated like a hero by the Palestinian people; and about his complaints of anti-Israel bias in the media – particularly the British outlets like BBC and The Guardian, which he described as the headquarters for the “delegitimization movement.” And look, it’s not that I’ve never heard these complaints before from the supporters of Israel, it was just rare to hear them so forcefully from someone like Dennis Ross. Someone I’d always known to be a more subdued and nuanced voice on this issue.1
An interesting counterpart to that talk was a Rashid Khalidi talk from 2019, where Khalidi essentially argued the opposite side of every one of Ross’s criticisms. Similar to what I was saying about Ross, it was one of the first times that I really saw a different side of Khalidi from the one I had seen previously. Because I had heard numerous talks from Khalidi going all the way back to the 1980s, and I admit there were some that were a bit more “partisan” than others; but this one from 2019 was just a total polemic against the US and Israel that I found so disheartening to listen to. It just felt like I was no longer listening to Rashid Khalidi the academic, but rather Rashid Khalidi the pundit (as if he was trying to be a Palestinian version of Tucker Carlson). Again, I still respect what both men have brought to this debate, but these were two particular talks by them where I felt rather let down.2
Again, I want to note that these talks were outliers to much of what I heard from Dennis Ross and Rashid Khalidi. Although with Khalidi, there seemed to be a steady decline in his work over time. It is his talks from the earlier years where he was his most nuanced and thoughtful; whereas with Ross, he frequently maintained a balanced view even in later appearances. For example, in a talk with Ross from 2021, he declared that right-wing Israeli extremists were an even worse threat to Israel’s security than Hamas. And in another talk that same year, Ross said that if he had it to do over again, “I would have had us be more insistent on the settlements. Because building the settlements made the Palestinians feel powerless. And it created a built-in justification for not doing some of the things they should have been doing on security.” He also admitted that in the past “there were no consequences” from the US government for either side’s transgressions.
2011: THE ISRAELI SOCIAL JUSTICE PROTESTS
As the Arab Spring was heating up in early 2011, Netanyahu was disturbed by Obama’s desire to be “on the right side of history” by pushing for President Hosni Mubarak to step down in Egypt in response to massive protests by the Egyptian people in Tahrir Square. It was a pretty heartless and hypocritical stance on Netanyahu’s part, but I cannot deny that Netanyahu’s predictions of what the Arab Spring would lead to seemed a bit more prescient than Obama’s (or mine) ended up being.
In May of 2011, there was yet another diplomatic moment that put on display the tensions between Obama and Netanyahu. After Obama had called for Israel to return to its pre-1967 borders in a speech, he and Netanyahu had a state visit where Netanyahu (in front of all the cameras) told Obama, “It’s not gonna happen. Everyone knows it’s not gonna happen. And I think it’s time to tell the Palestinians forthrightly it’s not gonna happen.”3 And this would not be the last time that Netanyahu would take on Obama and his policies openly and publicly.4
The Arab Spring protests seemed to inspire other nations to engage in protests of their own, such as the Occupy Wall Street protests in America. In the Summer of 2011, a viral post about the rising cost of cottage cheese pushed hundreds of thousands of Israelis to take to the streets “over the lack of affordable housing, but grew to encompass calls for tax reform and the creation of a welfare state, among other demands.” There were also calls for broad notions of “social justice” and complaints about the rising cost of living in general. According to The New York Times, the protests were “largely driven by the middle class [and] have been carnival-like and nonviolent.”
I found both this NPR piece and this NPR piece to be interesting on-the-ground accounts of those protests. The first one featured an interview that tied into how Israel’s early generations and their “Founding Fathers” had their roots in socialism.
NPR: Bezalel Aloni came to the protest with his children and grandchildren. Aloni, who describes himself as well into his 60s, said he was appalled at the lack of housing assistance provided to younger generations. “When we were a young couple, we could easily afford an apartment. The state helped pay for most of it for us,” Aloni says. “But quickly, this country has changed.” The newly born Jewish state had socialist ideals, says Aloni, and that included subsidized housing for young people and new immigrants.
The latter piece also noted how the protests attracted a wide cross-section of people, where even some of the West Bank settlers wanted to join other groups (including leftists) as part of this movement. This bears some resemblance to what I was hearing about Occupy Wall Street at this time, where there were countless pieces that noted the common ground between Occupy Wall Street and the Tea Party despite other notable differences (often cultural).5 In Israel too, you saw strange bedfellows forming on these types of bread-and-butter issues – including occasions where Arabs and Jews protested together – even though such common ground would ultimately give way to other issues (often cultural).
Previous Posts In This Chapter: Post 1, Post 2, Post 3
In his 2007 memoir, Palestinian activist Sari Nusseibeh had said of Dennis Ross: “Despite his obvious support for Israel, he was a man oozing with eager goodwill for Palestinians.”
I should note that most of what is written in this paragraph I have left as it was originally worded (which was circa 2021). I did this so that my thoughts from that time could remain objective – because I feel it is important to acknowledge that I am no longer objective about Rashid Khalidi in the wake of the 10/7 attacks. His response to the atrocities on October 7th was (and continues to be) pretty disgusting in my opinion. But regardless of how I feel about him now, I do not want to start pretending as if his work had no impact on me. I think his more recent arguments should be universally ignored, but his earlier writings and lectures were incredibly helpful in my understanding of this history and they should still be studied and taken seriously.
Netanyahu also made another noteworthy comment when he said, “We’ve been around for almost 4,000 years, and experienced suffering like no other people.” Again, illustrating the ancient (and even biblical) framing Israelis like to put on their claims over the land – and how they tend to use a very, very long view of history to determine who exactly the “victims” are.
You can watch a segment on this particular incident (and on the response to the Arab Spring) in the Frontline documentary Netanyahu at War. That segment will start automatically at 1:17:28 when you click that link, and it ends at the 1:27:40 mark.
Those links were made circa 2021 and were based on the searches that popped up in Google at that time. If the results have changed at all since then I apologize – but at the time I put those searches in Google, the results organically brought up a number of pieces from 2011-2012 which discussed the numerous similarities between the two movements (similarities which are rarely talked about today).