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The Media’s Settlement / Prisoner Hypocrisy

As we’ve noted earlier, much of the media is obsessed with settlements, intent on portraying them as the main obstacle to peace. There’s a tendency on the other side to take one of the most outrageous examples of Palestinian behavior and dismiss it.

As Professor Jacobson noted last week, Israel, in order to entice the Palestinians to negotiate for a state of their own offered to release 104 prisoners from jail. These aren’t just prisoners. Most, if not all, are remorseless murderers who are treated as heroes by all segments of Palestinian society, including their leaders.

Jonathan Tobin made an apt observation about this phenomenon:

One group of people was happy as murderers went free while others wept. But the gulf here is more than emotional or merely, as the Times seemed to describe it, a difficult process that is part of the price Israel must pay for the chance of peace. In fact, the “emotional gulf” is indicative of a vast cultural divide between these two peoples that explains more about the absence of peace than any lecture about history, borders, or refugees. Simply put, so long as the Palestinians honor murderers, there is no reason to believe they are willing to end the conflict.

Consider the way the New York Times in the article cited by Tobin portrayed the Israeli reaction to the prisoner release:

In Israel, where the returnees are widely viewed as terrorists, the release on Tuesday, like the one in August, has stirred protests and anguish. Many said it was too heavy a price to pay for entering negotiations with no guarantee of a peace accord.

“[W]idely viewed?!?!” This statement is incredible. It’s not only in Israel that they are “viewed as terrorists,” but by definition. Only in the crazy New York Times worldview is the definition of terrorists subjective.

But when dealing with settlements in a subsequent report, the same reporter wrote:

But with each prisoner release — there have been two so far — the Israeli government has tried to appease right-wing members of the coalition by advancing settlement construction plans in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, moves that have deeply embarrassed the Palestinians.

“This is a humiliation process, not a negotiation process,” a Palestinian official said on Thursday.

In this case “deeply embarrassed” is not qualified in any way, but presented as fact.

An article in the Washington Post displayed similar moral gymnastics:

The first 52 of 104 prisoners have been released on schedule. Freeing prisoners is an unpopular gesture in Israel — all of them were convicted of murdering Israelis — no matter that the inmates have served long terms. …

On Wednesday, Hanan Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s executive committee, charged that Israel’s announcement that it would add new housing units to Jewish settlements around Jerusalem and in the West Bank “has proven once again that it is not a partner for peace.”

The housing announcement was widely seen as a political counterweight to the prisoner release.

Note the qualification about “long terms” as if somehow the fact that they had served long sentences absolves them of guilt (in some countries they’d never have been released), but Ashrawi’s quote is provided with no qualification at all.

Missing from any of this reporting is not just the context that Jonathan Tobin described, but a very disturbing declaration by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

Not only has Abbas been celebrating the return of the prisoners as heroes, but he has taken responsibility for sending them.

Palestinian Media Watch recalls that in 2005, Abbas said, “I demand [release of] prisoners because they are human beings, who did what we, we, ordered them to do. We – the [Palestinian] Authority.”

Israel agreed to talk with the PLO when the PLO officially renounced terrorism. In fact it never did. When it became untenable to abide by the illusion that Yasser Arafat had renounced terror, President Bush called for Palestinian leadership who were “not compromised by terror.” This statement of Abbas shows that he too is compromised by terror.

The basic requirements for there to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians was that the Palestinian give up terror and accepts Israel’s right to exist. That has never happened. Instead we see a world that consistently relaxes the standards for the Palestinians and tightens them for Israel. Thus we live in an inverted moral universe where building homes is a bigger obstacle to peace than killing people. And people wonder why the conflict is intractable.

“[N]ot a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities”

To read through recent news reports one could assume that the biggest obstacle to Palestinian Israeli peace are “settlements.”

To cement that impression the New York Times published an article, 1,500 Units to Be Added in Settlement, Israel Says. The caption of a photograph directly beneath the headline reads:

A Palestinian construction worker at a building site on Wednesday in the Ramat Shlomo settlement in East Jerusalem.

If there is an official “East Jerusalem,” I am unaware of it, but perhaps the paper meant “east Jerusalem.” However if you read down a few paragraphs you learn:

The 1,500 new apartments are to be added to Ramat Shlomo, a largely religious neighborhood of 20,000 on the city’s northern edge. They were originally announced during a 2010 visit to Jerusalem by Vice President Joseph R. Biden, causing a diplomatic crisis that dampened Israel’s relationship with the White House and Europe for months.

So actually, Ramat Shlomo isn’t in the city’s east but in its north (or northeast) and it’s not a settlement but a neighborhood.

And while the announcement led to a major diplomatic blowup, it was of the administration’s making. The Vice-President, Secretary of State and President could have remained silent. Everyone expects sections of Jerusalem, even those illegally occupied by Jordan from 1948 to 1967 to be part of Israel in any final agreement with the Palestinians.

The announcement had occurred during an Israeli ban on settlement building outside of Jerusalem. That settlement ban brought about no serious negotiations. (The PA returned to the table only a few weeks before the end of the freeze and, when the freeze expired, walked away.) If settlement freezes were so important to the Palestinians, why didn’t they negotiate then?

So “settlements” provide a convenient excuse for a Palestinian refusal to negotiate or concede anything to Israel. But should they?

At the beginning of the Obama administration, Glenn Kessler of the Washington Post wrote Old Legal Opinion Raises New Questions. The opinion in question was whether, according to the United States, Israeli communities outside of the 1949 armistice lines were illegal. This is how Kessler set things up.

Thirty years ago, the State Department legal adviser issued an opinion in response to an inquiry from Congress: The establishment of Israeli settlements in occupied Palestinian territories “is inconsistent with international law.”

The opinion cited Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which states that an occupying power “shall not deport or transfer parts of its own civilian population into the territory it occupies.” Israel has insisted that the Geneva Convention does not apply to settlers and broadly contests assertions of the settlements’ illegality.

Despite the passage of time, the legal opinion, issued during the Carter administration, has never been revoked or revised. President Ronald Reagan said he disagreed with it — he called the settlements “not illegal” — but his State Department did not seek to issue a new opinion.

What Kessler doesn’t say is that the opinion was a departure. Not a single administration ever adopted it as a matter of policy. But that didn’t stop him from implying that the ruling of a single Carter administration official should have the force of law (because it was never contradicted) or could well become the policy of the Obama administration. In fact, unless you’re a reporter for the New York Times, the Obama administration never accepted the ruling.

The Carter-era ruling departed from established legal framework of viewing “settlements.” Instead of basing the legality of settlements on the language of 242, which implicitly understood that Israel would not withdraw from all territories captured in 1967, it was based on a dubious reading of the Fourth Geneva Protocol. Morris Abram, one of the drafters of the protocol said that it “was not designed to cover situations like Israeli settlements in the occupied territories.”

Resolution 242 stated that Israel should withdraw “… from territories occupied in the recent conflict.” Not specifically “all territories,” but “territories,” generally.

The reason 242 did not require an Israeli withdrawal from all territories, was articulated by President Johnson in the wake of the Six Day War:

There are some who have urged, as a single, simple solution, an immediate return to the situation as it was on June 4. As our distinguished and able Ambassador, Mr. Arthur Goldberg, has already said, this is not a prescription for peace but for renewed hostilities.

Eugene Rostow cited this speech in explaining why Resolution 242 did not require Israel to withdraw from all territories captured in 1967. The Johnson speech, which is cited by Rostow as the basis for 242, called first for “the recognized right of national life,” as necessary for peace, even before justice for the refugees or territorial integrity.

The precedent for Israel retaining at least some portions of Judea and Samaria goes back even further than the Carter era legal ruling. But those Palestinian state cheerleaders, in what Barry Rubin terms the “MUG complex,” conveniently ignore Johnson’s statement or the wording of 242. They just focus on Palestinian claims as if they are the only ones that are justified.

Johnson did not see any contradiction between Israel retaining some of the territories it captured and there still being “justice for the refugees.”

By accepting the Palestinian narrative as the primary grievance that needs to be addressed (rather than recognition of Israel’s right to exist or security) those critics of Israel aren’t just reversing American policy, they are also making the chances for peace more remote. As long as Palestinians know that their grievance is accepted in full and that failure of talks will be blamed on “settlements” they have no reason to compromise or to make a deal.

If there is to be peace between Israel and the Palestinians there needs to be a realization that “settlements” are not the obstacle to peace but that the removal of all of them might very well be a “prescription … for renewed hostilities.”

(Some of Johnson’s speech is seen below, starting at 13:57)

When Wishful Thinking Becomes Foreign Policy

Last week as we noted, the New York Times ran a devastating article about President Obama’s Syria policy. The Times reported, among other things, that the President was disinterested in planning discussions about Syria.

Two other articles reported that America’s Middle East allies generally and the Saudis specifically were upset by the administration’s Middle East policy.

I guess that the New York Times had enough serious reporting about the shortcomings of the Obama administration’s Middle East policy, because over the weekend, it published Rice Offers a More Modest Strategy for Mideast by its foremost White House cheerleader, Mark Landler. (Landler contributed to the Syria report, but was not one of the bylined reporters.)

Each Saturday morning in July and August, Susan E. Rice, President Obama’s new national security adviser, gathered half a dozen aides in her corner office in the White House to plot America’s future in the Middle East. The policy review, a kind of midcourse correction, has set the United States on a new heading in the world’s most turbulent region.

At the United Nations last month, Mr. Obama laid out the priorities he has adopted as a result of the review. The United States, he declared, would focus on negotiating a nuclear deal with Iran, brokering peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians and mitigating the strife in Syria. Everything else would take a back seat.

The article goes on to point out that even Egypt was no longer a priority. In a jab at President Obama’s predecessor we learn:

Not only does the new approach have little in common with the “freedom agenda” of George W. Bush, but it is also a scaling back of the more expansive American role that Mr. Obama himself articulated two years ago, before the Arab Spring mutated into sectarian violence, extremism and brutal repression.

The blueprint drawn up on those summer weekends at the White House is a model of pragmatism — eschewing the use of force, except to respond to acts of aggression against the United States or its allies, disruption of oil supplies, terrorist networks or weapons of mass destruction. Tellingly, it does not designate the spread of democracy as a core interest.

One of the problems with this description of President Obama’s evolution is that his own policies helped fuel the “sectarian violence” in Syria by doing nothing to help the rebels when it might have helped. His complete withdrawal from Iraq enabled the “extremism” of al Qaeda to once again flourish in the Middle East. His embrace of the Muslim Brotherhood helped bring about the “brutal repression” that eventual led Egypt to a second revolution. Of course, if Obama is doing it, it’s pragmatic.

Then there are warning signs.

Mr. Gordon took part in the Saturday sessions, along with two of Ms. Rice’s deputies, Antony J. Blinken and Benjamin J. Rhodes; the national security adviser to the vice president, Jake Sullivan; the president’s counterterrorism adviser, Lisa Monaco; a senior economic official, Caroline Atkinson; and a handful of others.

It was a tight group that included no one outside the White House, a stark contrast to Mr. Obama’s Afghanistan review in 2009, which involved dozens of officials from the Pentagon, the State Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency. Ms. Rice said she briefed Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel over weekly lunches.

In other words, President Obama is only getting advice from those who think like him. But I think that this points up to another problem. Dr. Rice isn’t necessarily pursuing her own policy, she is doing exactly what the President wants. President Obama wants to be less involved in foreign policy and she is obliging him. The point of this article is to pretend that there was great considering put into this new approach. But there wasn’t. President Obama was always uncomfortable with foreign entanglements. Now he has the personnel to implement that strategy without question.

(The Times has now followed up this reporting with an editorial, Allies in Revolt, which dismisses concerns that Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Israel have with administration policy and asserting that President Obama should ignore them because his “first responsibility is to America’s national interest.” In particular the editorial disses PM Netanyahu saying that he is “doing his best to torpedo any nuclear deal with Iran.” Anyone who is paying attention to Netanyahu knows that he is doing his best to torpedo any deal that doesn’t set Iran’s nuclear program back at least a few years. Apparently to these foreign policy ignoramuses, even coming to a bad deal with Iran, is in America’s national interest.)

If the New York Times is celebrating President Obama’s new isolationism, this approach is not at all popular at the Washington Post.

Jackson Diehl of the Washington Post dismisses the President’s new approach with Foreign Policy based on Fantasy:

In his zeal to extract his administration from what he sees as a regional quagmire, Obama, like the old freeze movement, has adopted a narrow and high-altitude approach to a complex and sprawling set of conflicts. Rising above the carnage in Syria — or “somebody else’s civil war,” as he called it in his recent speech at the United Nations — he has adopted a priority of destroying the country’s chemical weapons arsenal. He seeks to put stronger safeguards on Iran’s nuclear program while sidestepping its larger effort to use terrorism and proxy wars to become a regional hegemon.

From a certain Washington point of view, Obama’s aims look worthy and, better yet, plausibly achievable — unlike, say, establishing democracy in Iraq. The problem with the approach is that it assumes that the Syrian civil war and other conflicts across the region pose no serious threat to what Obama calls “core U.S. interests,” and that they can be safely relegated to the nebulous realm of U.N. diplomacy and Geneva conferences, where Secretary of State John Kerry lives.

Let’s suppose for the moment that al-Qaeda’s new base in eastern Syria, Hezbollah’s deployment of tens of thousands of missiles in Lebanon and the crumbling of the U.S.-fostered Iraqi political system pose no particular threat to America. That still leaves U.S. allies in the region — Israel, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Turkey — marooned in a scary new world where their vital interests are no longer under U.S. protection.

Diehl’s op-ed is such a direct rebuke to the New York Times article I wonder if he was aware that the Times article was about to be published.

In other words the more “modest” approach can’t simply be achieved by wishing it.

A subsequent Washington Post editorial, (one that Diehl clearly contributed to) faults Mr. Kerry’s empty words on Syria:

So what does the Obama administration propose to do to stop this barbarism? The simple answer is: nothing, other than issue strongly worded statements. The remedy proposed by Mr. Kerry is that Syria’s allies, Russia and Iran, pressure it to behave. “A regime that gassed its own people and systematically denies them food and medicine will bow only to our pressure, not our hopes,” Mr. Kerry correctly points out. So: “Assad’s allies who have influence over his calculations must demand that he and his backers adhere to international standards.”

Mr. Kerry is certainly right about the severity of Syria’s humanitarian crisis. According to Valerie Amos, the United Nations’ humanitarian chief, some 2.5 million people are beyond the reach of aid, including 290,000 trapped in areas besieged by government forces. There are credible reports of children dying of starvation in the suburbs of Damascus, The Post’s Loveday Morris reported Sunday. Diseases are spreading, including scarlet fever.

Yet to suppose that Russia or Iran would insist that the Syrian army meet “international standards” requires some very wishful thinking. It was Russia, after all, that prevented the U.N. Security Council from adopting a binding resolution ordering the regime to allow humanitarian access this month — a fact that Mr. Assad’s henchmen have cited as they have denied visas to relief workers and held up convoys at borders and checkpoints. Russian President Vladimir Putin himself inflicted a similar humanitarian catastrophe on part of his country, Chechnya, a decade ago, using similar tactics. As for Iran, its military commanders and proxy militia Hezbollah are directing or conducting the same sieges that Mr. Kerry wants lifted.

What the New York Times hailed as “modest” and “pragmatic,” the Washington Post exposes as “wishful thinking.”

Reading about the chemical weapons inspections in Syria or nuclear negotiations with Iran you see this.

The reporting on the inspections in Syria is muddled. What really are the deadlines for the regime. All chemical weapons sites were to be visited by October 27 and all weapon production capabilities are supposed to be destroyed by November 1. However inspectors can’t get to two facilities due to fighting in the area. I think it can be assumed that the equipment at those facilities will not be destroyed by the deadline, yet Syria is in no danger of suffering any consequences.

Towards the end of the Susan Rice article, Landler reports:

Some priorities were clear. The election of Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran presents the West with perhaps its last good chance to curb its nuclear program. Mr. Rouhani has a mandate to ease sanctions on Iran and has signaled an eagerness to negotiate.

Note what it doesn’t say. It doesn’t say that Rouhani has a mandate to slow, stop or roll back Iran’s nuclear program. But I think this reflect the administration’s thinking (and the New York Times’s thinking) that a deal has a value in itself even if it doesn’t accomplish anything. Leverage is useless if you aren’t willing to use it.

The Obama administration’s foreign policy has descended into wishful thinking instead of any strategic thinking. The New York Times is there cheering it on.