The more things change… (Israel/Palestine edition)

Below is the text of a post I made over 14 years ago on the Israel-Palestine conflict. (1) It’s a sad reminder of how much time has been squandered that could have been used for constructive solutions.

At that time, September 2010, Benjamin Netanyahu was in his second term as Israeli Prime Minister.

Israel's wars/military conflicts in the ten years before 2010 included: the Second Intifada (2002); the withdrawal from Gaza and evacuating the Israeli settlements there (2005);, and, Operation Cast Lead (2008-2009).

Since 2010, they have had Operation Pillar of Defense (Nov.14-21, 2012), Operation Protective Edge (July 8-August 26, 2014), and the Israel-Palestine Crisis of 2021 (May 10-May 21). And, of course, the current Gaza war, the worst of them all.

***************

                                               Poor prospects for Israel-Palestine peace talks

Peace talks are formally under way again between the Israeli government and the Palestinian Authority. Hamas is excluded from the negotiations. Stephen Walt is pessimistic about the prospect of these talks bringing a permanent settlement of the issues, as he explains in Direct talks déjà vu Foreign Policy 08/30/2010:

Here's the basic problem: Unless the new "framework" is very detailed and specific about the core issues -- borders, the status of East Jerusalem, the refugee issue, etc., -- we will once again have a situation where spoilers on both sides have both an incentive and the opportunity to do whatever they can to disrupt the process. And even if it were close to a detailed final-status agreement, a ten-year implementation schedule provides those same spoilers (or malevolent third parties) with all the time they will need to try to derail the deal. I can easily imagine Netanyahu and other hardliners being happy with this arrangement, as they would be able to keep expanding settlements (either openly or covertly) while the talks drag on, which is what has happened ever since Oslo (and under both Likud and Labor governments). Ironically, some members of Hamas might secretly welcome this outcome too, because it would further discredit moderates like Abbas and Fayyad. And there is little reason to think the United States would do a better job of managing the process than it did in 1990s.

The great paradox of the negotiations is that United States is clearly willing and able to put great pressure on both Fatah and Hamas (albeit in different ways), even though that is like squeezing a dry lemon by now. Fatah has already recognized Israel's existence and has surrendered any claims to 78 percent of original Mandate Palestine; all they are bargaining over now is the share they will get of the remaining 22 percent. Moreover, that 22 percent is already dotted with Israeli settlements (containing about 500,000 people), and carved up by settler-only bypass roads, checkpoints, fences, and walls. And even if they were to get an independent state on all of that remaining 22 percent (which isn't likely) they will probably have to agree to some significant constraints on Palestinian sovereignty and they are going to have to compromise in some fashion on the issue of the "right of return." The obvious point is that when you've got next to nothing, you've got very little left to give up, no matter how hard Uncle Sam twists your arm. [my emphasis]

Ali Abuniimah is also pessimistic in Hamas, the I.R.A. and Us New York Times 08/28/2010:

Both the Irish and Middle Eastern conflicts figure prominently in American domestic politics — yet both have played out in very different ways. The United States allowed the Irish-American lobby to help steer policy toward the weaker side: the Irish government in Dublin and Sinn Fein and other nationalist parties in the north. At times, the United States put intense pressure on the British government, leveling the field so that negotiations could result in an agreement with broad support. By contrast, the American government let the Israel lobby shift the balance of United States support toward the stronger of the two parties: Israel.

The near-monopoly once held by pro-Likud hardliners in the Israel lobby in the US is at least loosening up, with the increasing prominence of more realistic groups like J Street, who are also more representative of the outlook of American Jews than AIPAC, still the best-known and most powerful of the pro-Likud lobbies in the US.

J Street's M.J. Rosenberg writes in Brilliant Op-ed in Times On Why Mideast Talks Without Hamas Are A Farce TPM Cafe 08/29/2010, commenting on Abunimah's op-ed: "Bottom line: this week's negotiations are probably going nowhere because (1) Hamas is excluded and (2) the United States is in Netanyahu's pocket."

Notes:

(1) Miller, Bruce (2010): Poor prospects for Israel-Palestine peace talks. Contradicciones (Original) 09/04/2024. <https://oldhickorysweblog.blogspot.com/2010/09/poor-prospects-for-israel-palestine.html> (Accessed: 2024-25-05).

B’Tselem's findings on "apartheid" in Israel

This is a report about the findings published this year by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem in their report, A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid 01/12/2021.

“It Is Apartheid”: Rights Group on How Israel Advances Jewish Supremacy Over Palestinians Democracy Now! 05/20/2021:

Hagel El-Ad, executive director, days in the report, "If it looks like apartheid, is simply because it is apartheid." The interview with Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy is also impressive and informative.

The report argues that although, legally, the areas controlled by Israel include both Israel in its internationally recognized national borders and occupied territories, in practice Israel, in practice Israel is exercising control over the entire area and have created a situation where it is de facto a single state .

More than 14 million people, roughly half of them Jews and the other half Palestinians, live between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea under a single rule. The common perception in public, political, legal and media discourse is that two separate regimes operate side by side in this area, separated by the Green Line. One regime, inside the borders of the sovereign State of Israel, is a permanent democracy with a population of about nine million, all Israeli citizens. The other regime, in the territories Israel took over in 1967, whose final status is supposed to be determined in future negotiations, is a temporary military occupation imposed on some five million Palestinian subjects.

Over time, the distinction between the two regimes has grown divorced from reality. This state of affairs has existed for more than 50 years – twice as long as the State of Israel existed without it. Hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers now reside in permanent settlements east of the Green Line, living as though they were west of it. East Jerusalem has been officially annexed to Israel’s sovereign territory, and the West Bank has been annexed in practice. Most importantly, the distinction obfuscates the fact that the entire area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River is organized under a single principle: advancing and cementing the supremacy of one group – Jews – over another – Palestinians. All this leads to the conclusion that these are not two parallel regimes that simply happen to uphold the same principle. There is one regime governing the entire area and the people living in it, based on a single organizing principle. [my emphasis]

B’Tselem's website carries this notice, which certainly invokes a strong ironic note, given the massive assistance the State of Israel receives from the United States, in particular:

Obviously, not all foreign money is equal. And every government regulates foreign contributions as deems necessary. The list of donors currently posted on their website is dated 11/30/2017.

Biden's Israel policy and the complications Trump created for it

H-Diplo has a helpful new essay on the current status of US relations with Israel and their significance in other areas of US diplomacy: The Trump Presidency, the Question of Palestine, and Biden’s Business as Usual 05/27/2021, by Dirk Moses, editor of the scholarly Journal of Genocide Research, and Victor Kattan, editor of the book Violent Radical Movements in the Arab World (2019). (PDF here.)

Moses and Kattan stress:

... the necessity of recognizing how the conflict between Israel and Palestine has not commanded bipartisan consensus in Washington since the time of the Obama presidency. Nor has the US’s Iran policy, with which it intersects. Concerned about Obama’s Middle East initiatives, Republican politicians and Israel advocacy groups colluded with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to resist Obama’s policies on Iran and Israeli settlements. Thus politicized, different parts of the U.S. political class, with aligned domestic constituencies, identify with different factions of the Israeli political class: for instance, Democrats support centrist anti-Netanyahu forces, while all sides try to co-opt a secular, technocratic Palestinian leadership in Ramallah into their respective visions. [my emphasis]

One of the more disturbing of many disturbing moments in the intransigent Republican opposition to the Obama-Biden Administration was when the Republican majority in Congress invited Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to address Congress without an invitation from President Obama in order to lobby the US Congress against the US President's policy of the moment, particularly the Iranian nuclear arms control agreement. (Krishnadev Calamur, In Speech To Congress, Netanyahu Blasts 'A Very Bad Deal' With Iran NPR 03/03/2015; Chris McGreal, How Netanyahu's speech to Congress has jeopardised US-Israel relations Guardian 02/24/2015)

The Democrats are still enormously weighted down by its bipartisanship obsession, so this didn't produce the kind of sharp criticism of Israel and his Prime Minister from Democrats that one might have expected. But that moment did illustrate a significant turning point in the two parties' respective position on Israel. That mainly means that the Democrats stuck with their distinctly deferential position toward even very dubious actions by Israeli governments while the Republicans became even more receptive to the positions of Netanyahu and other far-right Israeli politicians.

But the Biden-Harris Administration's position on the recent Israeli-Palestinian clashes was part of the bipartisan continuity in US policy:

... the asymmetric exchange of missiles between Hamas in Gaza and Israel in May 2021 has its roots in expansionist Israeli policies in Jerusalem and the West Bank that had been greenlighted by the Trump administration, and which the Biden administration has not rolled back. In not doing so, it is adhering to long-set patterns of US foreign policy.

One of the key policies that was an actual achievement of the Trump-Pence Administration - an extremely problematic one, but an achievement - was the Abraham Accords, the agreement that normalized Israel's relations with the Muslim countries of Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE). (Sean Mathews, Despite Gaza bloodshed, few see Abraham Accords derailing Aljazeera 05/21/2021).

Moses and Kattan how the blundering, blinkered Trump-Pence foreign policy created at least one serious complication a considerable distance from Israel:

Regarding Morocco’s recognition of Israel, this came in exchange for the Trump administration’s recognition of Morocco’s annexation of Western Sahara. This was another attempt to legitimise an illegal act in international law, and again, it remains unclear whether the Biden administration will reverse this decision. Given that the recognition of Western Sahara was tied to the establishment of diplomatic relations between Morocco and Israel, the administration may be less sanguine about reversing it. But the erosion of core rules of international law, such as the non-recognition of territory acquired through the use of force, could embolden other revisionist powers to press their own territorial claims for seizing or retaining control over other “disputed” territories, which may not necessarily serve U.S. interests – for example in Taiwan, the South China Sea, or Ukraine. [my emphasis]

In one sense, of course, international diplomacy runs on hypocrisy. But international law matters, and the US position on one such issue of illegal annexation can affect the positions other nations are willing to take when the US invokes international law in other situations.

They also cite other recognitions of annexations to which the Trump-Pence Administration agreed:

This strategic continuity in the Trump Presidency’s Palestine and Israel policy must be weighed against evidence of discontinuity in key domains. Whether in style (the bullying of Palestinians by closing the Palestinian Liberation Organization’s [PLO] diplomatic mission in Washington, D.C., and cutting funding of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East [UNWRA]), or in substance (consenting to the annexation of the Golan, moving the U.S. Embassy to Jerusalem, and the greenlighting of Israeli settlements, ‘gifts’ given to the Netanyahu government seemingly without any concessions in return), the diplomatic novelty is impossible to ignore. [my emphasis]

Diplomacy often moves slowly. Obviously! But it's hard to see how the long-sought two-state solution can come into being now.

If the two-state solution remains the preferred solution for the “international community,” then the Biden administration’s refusal to rein in Israeli expansionism will surely signal its official demise. ...

Doing nothing is a choice, then, one with increasing domestic and diplomatic costs, but so far the signs are that the administration believes they are lower than expending capital on reigning in Israeli expansionism. Biden must recall the hornets’ nest of opposition that Obama stirred when he pushed for a settlement freeze. ...

Instead, observers who are awake to this reality are imagining a future in which all people who live in Israeli-controlled territory between the Jordan and Mediterranean enjoy equal rights. The question is whether such a vision can be attained in one state with a Palestinian majority that would defeat the very purpose of the Zionist project. Or whether a confederation, or a two-state plan similar to that enshrined in General Assembly 181 (II) of 29 November 1947 that provided for the establishment of two states could be reimagined as the basis for new conversations between Israelis and Palestinians today: an economic union with open borders, minority safeguards, and the protection of private property without discrimination. [my emphasis]

If a durable peace between Israel and the Palestinians were ever seriously the goal of US policy - and at least for some people, it was - it has failed. Not suddenly with the latest spate of violence, but slowly, over decades. The US needs to start make much more practical calculations about its real interests in supporting the plans of Netanyahu's government in the short run.

The US gives large amounts of aid to Israel in various ways. That gives the US a lot of leverage. Repeatedly and continually reassuring Israel's governments that nothing they do will affect the amount of support the US provides will be seen by Israeli governments and by the rest of the world as unqualified support for Israel and its treatment of Palestinians.

Ceasefire in Israel Palestine

As of this writing, a cease-fire is in place in the current round of the Israel-Palestine conflict. Virginia Pietromarchi reports (Jubilation in Gaza as ceasefire takes effect Aljaueera 03/21/2021):

The ceasefire, which was welcomed internationally, was brokered by Egypt in the early hours of Friday after 11 days of relentless bombing of the besieged enclave and thousands of rockets launched into Israel by Hamas, the group ruling the Strip. ...

Israel’s bombardment of Gaza killed 232 Palestinians, including 65 children, and brought widespread devastation to the already impoverished territory. On the Israeli side, 12 people, including two children, were killed.

In other words, 19 times as many deaths among Palestinians as among Israelis, a reflection of the extreme disproportion in military capabilities between the two sides.

Fortunately, the Israel-Palestine flare-up hasn't derailed the nuclear disarmament negotiations in Vienna, which are reportedly proceeding. The Iranian President Hassan Rohani is reporting optimistically on an agreement being close. (Maziar Motamedi, Agreement on restoring Iran’s nuclear deal ‘within reach’ Aljazeera 05/19/2021; Atomstreit: Irans Präsident erwartet rasche Einigung Oberösterreichische Nachrichten 05/20/2021)

Recovering Iraq War advocate Peter Beinart reminds us of one of the bigger long-terms follies in the longterm conflict, Israel's deliberate promotion of Islamic extremists to divide the Palestinians and undercut their negotiating posture (If Israel Eliminated Hamas, Nothing Fundamental Would Change Substack 05/20/2021) :

Today, it’s common to associate Hamas’s militancy with its Islamist ideology. The implication is that if only Islamists were eliminated from the Palestinian political scene, Palestinian politics would grow more moderate and quiescent. But Israeli leaders didn’t always see it that way. Just as US officials once saw Islamists like the Afghan Mujahedeen as less threatening than communists backed by the USSR, Israeli officials once saw Hamas as more pliable than Yasser Arafat’s more secular Fatah. In a recent letter to the editor of The New York Times, former Times’ Jerusalem correspondent David K. Shipler noted that in 1981, Israel’s military governor of Gaza told him that, in Shipler’s words, “he was giving money to the Muslim Brotherhood, the precursor of Hamas, on the instruction of the Israeli authorities. The funding was intended to tilt power away from both Communist and Palestinian nationalist movements in Gaza, which Israel considered more threatening than the fundamentalists.” Oops. [my emphasis]

As Beinart indicates, this was related to the US Cold War approach of encouraging Islamist political groups to offset the poopular of the kind of "Arab socialism" represented by Egypt's Gamal Abdul Nassar. Robert Dreyfuss recounts that effort in his 2005 book, Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundmentalist Islam.

Beinert in that column emphasizes that a substantive peace agreement that doesn't leave Palestinians in unbearable conditions is necessary. But he doesn't talk there about his views on what the road to such an agreement could or should be.

The recent reports by the human rights NGOs B’Tselem (A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid 01/12/2021) and Human Rights Watch (A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution 04/27/2021) show how difficult any "two-state solution" to the problem will be at this point.

Israel-Palestine, a new tranch of US arms sales to Israel, the EU, and Turkey

Patricia Zengerle reports on an arms sale to Israel that the Biden-Harris Administration approved in Biden administration approved $735 million arms sale to Israel Reuters 05/18/2021:

Three congressional aides said Congress was officially notified of the intended commercial sale on May 5, as part of the regular review process before major foreign weapons sales agreements can go ahead. ...

Congress was informed of the planned sale in April, as part of the normal informal review process before of the formal notification on May 5. Under U.S. law, the formal notification opens up a 15-day window for Congress to object to the sale, which is not expected despite the ongoing violence. ...

U.S. law allows Congress to object to weapons sales, but it is unlikely to do so in this case. Because Israel is among a handful of countries whose military deals are approved under an expedited process, the typical window for objecting will close before lawmakers can pass a resolution of disapproval, even if they were inclined to. [my emphasis]

I don't see any way that Israel and other governments will not take the fact that this arms sale is proceeding now as a huge endorsement of Israel's current military actions against Palestinians. According to the Reuters timeline, the approval was given before Benjamin Netanyahu initiated the current round of violent confrontations after the failure of his negotiations to form a new government.

If Austria's government flying an Israeli flag at its mains government building was a clear diplomatic signal of approval for Netanyahu's current actions - former Austria President Heinz Fischer did an editorial describing it as an amateurish diplomatic move (Einseitigkeit auf dem Dach des Kanzleramts? 05/17/2021) - the US proceeding with this trance of arms sales will surely be seen by all sides as complete support for Israel's current actions.

As of this report, the civilian deaths were 20-to-1 higher on the Palestinian side (Gaza Flare-up: 212 Gazans Killed in Israeli Strikes, IDF Downs Drone Near Jordan Border Haaretz Wiener Zeitung "Fighting between Israel and Hamas escalated in what has become the heaviest flare-up since the 2014 Gaza War. At least 212 people were killed in the Gaza Strip, and 10 in Israel in the most intensive aerial exchanges in years."

The Biden-Harris Administration is even blocking efforts by the UN Security Council to call on Israel for a cease fire. (Michelle Nichols, U.S. pursues quiet Mideast diplomacy, thwarts U.N. statement Reuters 05/17/2021) Hamas has already called for one.

A lot of the reporting and analysis on the US position has mentioned that the Biden-Harris Administration wants to tilt away from the US focus on the Greater Middle East to the diplomatic-political-military confrontation with China, and so finds the current outburst in Israel-Palestine particularly unwelcome in that regard. Since it's so commonly reported, I assume the White House is promoting that angle on the story. That's also not very encouraging. Because the main message would seem to be, "we don't really care what Netanyahu's government is going with the American aid and arms that the receive."

The EU's foreign ministers are holding a videoconference today to discuss the Israel-Palestine situation. David Hersyenhor and Rym Momtaz give this rundown on current positioning of EU countries (EU divisions over Israel-Palestine leave Brussels powerless as conflict worsens 05/17/2021):

Josep Borrell, the EU’s foreign policy chief, convened the special videoconference of ministers after issuing repeated statements in recent days imploring an end to the rocket fire against Israeli civilians by Hamas, and urging that Israel “act proportionately and avoid civilian casualties.” ...

Among the 27 member countries, Belgium, Ireland, Sweden and Luxembourg are among those most critical of Israel. Countries in Eastern Europe, especially Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, are among those in strongest support of Israel, though in recent days the flag of Israel has flown prominently over the HQ of Germany’s biggest governing party and official buildings in Austria and the Czech Republic in a show of support. Greece and Cyprus have also grown closer to Israel in recent years, partly because of tensions with Turkey.

France typically seeks to stake out more neutral ground, but President Emmanuel Macron’s office has issued statements in recent days that tilted decidedly toward Israel. The Elysée’s statements “firmly condemned rocket launching claimed by Hamas and other terrorist groups targeting the Israeli territory,” but were vaguer when referencing Israeli bombing.

On that, they said Macron had given his condolences to “the many Palestinian civilian losses resulting from military operations and ongoing clashes with Israel.” Macron also reiterated his “unwavering attachment to Israel’s security and its right to defend itself in line with international law,” but failed to reiterate his support for the rights of Palestinians, or recall the status of Jerusalem under international law, in line with France’s historic position. ...

[M]any diplomats, officials and experts said the EU’s best chance for influence in the Middle East was more likely to come from France, which after Brexit is the EU’s only permanent member of the U.N. Security Council. [my emphasis]

We'll see what comes out of EU diplomacy on this. But if France is the best hope in the EU for influencing a move to a cease fire, and the French President is taking a very public position of supporting Israel's disproportionate attacks against the open-air prison it runs in the Gaza Strip, that doesn't give a lot of cause for optimism.

It's worth noting that Turkey's authoritarian President Tayyip Erdoğan in his typically arrogant style is denouncing Israel's actions and tweaking Israel to do more. (Turkey's Erdogan condemns Western powers for inaction against Israel Reuters 05/17/2021)

How serious he is about doing anything to push the EU on this is very questionable. But Turkey is holding around 3.5 million refugees, mostly from Middle East wars who became refugees in no small part because of previous US policies, based on the EU-Turkey agreement that Germany's Angela Merkel negotiated in 2015. Since European politician have been pretty feckless in developing a decent immigration policy that complies with international law since the refugee crisis of 2015-16, though, Turkey can threaten to send large numbers of refugees to Europe. And, as we saw in 2020, such a threat puts EU leaders into a panic. We'll see what develops.

Austria's Chancellor (literally) flies the Israeli flag

Austrian Chancellor Sebastian ("Basti") Kurz is embattled on several fronts: himself facing an investigation for lying to a formal Parliamentary investigation, his Finance Minister is under fire over an embarrassing refusal to release documents the courts had ordered him to provide as part of larger corruption investigations, Basti getting diplomatic criticism and mocking profiles in the German press for his odd posturing within the EU.

He recently took the odd step of flying the Israeli flag over the Chancellor's office alongside the Austrian flag as a sign of unilateral support for Benjamin Netanyahu's government in its current actions against Palestinians.

Austria is a member of the European Union and is closely aligned with Western countries generally. But it is officially a neutral country that is not a member of any military alliances, not even NATO.

In this context, the Vienna Standard's Florian Niederndorfer interviewed political scientist Heinz Gärtner about this diplomatic gesture on Basti's part. (Politologe über Israels Flagge auf dem Kanzleramt: "Man entwürdigt die palästinensischen Opfer" 16.05.2021):

STANDARD: Darf ein neutrales Land wie Österreich auf seinem wichtigsten Regierungsgebäude die Flagge eines anderen Landes hissen, das sich im Krieg befindet?

Gärtner: Ich halte das in einer Kriegssituation für völlig unangebracht. Eine Sache ist es, die Raketenangriffe der Hamas zu verurteilen, man kann sich deshalb aber nicht völlig hinter die Politik Israels stellen. Das bedeutet zu negieren, dass der Anlass ja die Evakuierung von arabischen Wohnungen in Ostjerusalem war. Dies hat die Palästinenser beunruhigt, was die Hamas dann ausgenutzt hat. Wenn man als Österreich dann Israels Fahne aufhängt, akzeptiert man auch die Kriegshandlungen Israels. Man würdigt damit zwar zu Recht die israelischen Opfer, entwürdigt aber die palästinensischen Opfer. Indirekt akzeptiert man damit schlussendlich auch den Angriff auf das Medienzentrum in Gaza am Samstag, auch wenn man die Fahne vorher schon aufgezogen hat. 

STANDARD: Should a neutral country like Austria hoist the flag of another country at war on its most important government building?

Gärtner: I think that is totally inappropriate in a war situation. One thing is to condemn Hamas' rocket attacks, but we cannot fully support Israel's policy. This means denying that the cause [that set off the current set of conflicts] was the evacuation of Arab homes in East Jerusalem. This has alarmed the Palestinians, which Hamas then exploited. If you then fly Israel's flag as Austria, you also accept Israel's acts of war. It is right to pay tribute to the Israeli victims, but it degrades the Palestinian victims. Indirectly, this also accepts the attack on the media center in Gaza on Saturday, even if the flag had already been lowered beforehand. [my translation and emphasis]

In Austria and other EU countries, the far-right parties and groups can use an Israel-Palestine flareup to promote both anti-Semitic and Islamophobic narratives by condemning both sides as barbaric and worthy only of contempt and hatred.

That's not the exact game Basti is playing with this. As head of the conservative, Christian Democratic People Party (ÖVP), he acknowledges an Austria responsibility in the heritage of the Holocaust. But he has also played hard for the xenophobic and Islamophobic vote. His favorite political posture is as the Savior of Austria against all types of foreigners: refugees, Muslims, Turks, the EU. And one way that the right uses Islamophobia is to say, look, Muslims hate Jews and we hate Muslims, so we can't be anti-Semitic. When Austrian politicians talk about protecting Austria from "imported" anti-Semitism, that is code for "keep Muslims immigrants out."

Part of the complication of the current conflict for the United States is that it is negotiating with Iran in Vienna to rejoin the Iranian nuclear arms control agreement (JCPOA). Iran has a Presidential election on June 18, and the more reasons Iranians perceive to be hostile to the US, the more problems it could raise for the US keeping the JCPOA alive.

Gärtner notes in his interview that although Austria isn't formally involved in the US-Iran negotiations, hosting the talks in Vienna was a good thing illustrating how Austria can play a wider constructive role as a neutral country. He says that flying the Israeli flag "surely weakened" Vienna's position as the potential host of such negotiations in the future. "It is clear that the Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, who wanted to demonstrate Iran's support for the negotiations in Vienna, cannot go to the Austrian Foreign Ministry when the Israeli flag is flying up," he notes.

Realism and pragmatism needed on Israel-Palestine, but American policymakers find those very difficult

The current outbreak of violence in Israel-Palestine, clearly initiated by Benjamin Netanyahu's far-right government, currently facing the dilemma of being unable to form a new government after elections, is obviously developing quickly at the moment. The Israeli attack on worshippers at the Al-Aqsa Mosque was a very dramatic, highly symbolic act of violence and contempt for not only Palestinians but Muslims generally. (Oliver Holmes and Peter Beaumont, Oliver Holmes in Jerusalem and Peter Beaumont Guardian 05/10/2021; Frank Andrews, Al-Aqsa under attack: How Israel turned holy site into a battleground Middle East Eye 05/12/2021)

Juan Cole has a suggestion for how we should describe it at this point: "a performance of Israeli dominance and Palestinian defiance." (Gaza and Israel’s Kidnapper’s Dilemma: Keeping a Million Children Brutalized in its dark Basement Informed Comment 05/15/2021)

He calls attention to the dramatic disparity of power between the two sides:

Israel’s staccato bombardment campaigns against Gaza (2008-9, 2014, 2021) are not a war. Israel has an army, Gaza does not. Israel has a sophisticated Air Force with 581 aircraft, including fighter jets and helicopter gunships. The Palestinians in Gaza don’t have a conventional army or navy or air force, don’t have tanks or aircraft or artillery. Most of their rockets are high school science experiments (they have a handful of longer range rockets). The Izzuddin Qassam Brigades have a few tens of thousands of poorly armed and trained volunteer militiamen. If they tried to mount a conventional assault on Israel they would all be killed in an afternoon. The Asian Spa killer in Atlanta killed more people than Hamas has since the beginning of the current hostilities.

Pragmatic realism on the Israel-Palestine conflict has been desperately hard to find in American politics. It's not that no one has been trying. Two books that appeared during the Cheney-Bush Administration, when conflict with Muslim countries and groups took center stage in American politics represent two significant exceptions. One was The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy (2007) by the über-Realist scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt. This combined a realist analysis of general US policy toward Israel with a fact-based discussion of groups lobbying for US support for Israeli policies, a subject that has been used in dishonest ways by anti-Semitic propagandists. Having two of the most important American foreign policy intellectuals lay out this analysis was an important step in demystifying the whole topic.

Jimmy Carter's 2006 book Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid is the other. The idea that Israel was in real danger of making a two-state solution a practical impossibility, and that they would be left with an apartheid state, with a Jewish majority and a Palestinian minority deprived of equal civil rights and many denied basic human rights, forcibly held in desperate conditions.

American policy didn't change for the better. Cheney and Bush saw Israel's rightwing governments as allies in the War on Terror against Muslims, and made no serious attempt to forward the Israel-Palestine peace process. The Obama Administration was so stridently anti-Muslim. But the Obama-Biden Administration was generally willing to give Netanyahu's government free rein, as well, and also did little to advance the peace process. And the Trump-Pence Administration was completely deferential, even recognizing Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, a major issue in an attempt to end the Israeli occupation in a way that would bring actual peace.

There's certainly no guarantee that the Biden-Harris Administration will do better, though the public should demand they do. But there are signs that there might be important shifts in American understandings of the conflict. The two-state solution seems less feasible than ever. And it's at least no longer as shocking as it was in 2006 to talk matter-of-factly about the possibility and reality of "apartheid" in Israel. And there's at least some hope that a more realistic discussions among politicians and at least some of the establishment press about American pragmatic foreign policy interests, human rights, and international law in regard to Israel than we've had for a long time.

But it's not as though there isn't plenty of solid information and analysis on the subject available for those who are motivated to look.

Zaha Hassan and Daniel Levy provide a good example with Biden's Old Playbook Won't End Israeli-Palestinian Violence Foreign Policy 05/13/2021:

They also have a good analysis of why the latest developments in Israel-Palestine is a problem for the foreign-policy branding that the Biden-Harris Administration is attempting. As they note, "the United States is indisputably the most consequential external actor in this arena." And however cynically pragmatic professed US concerns about human rights problems in other countries so often are, the "soft power" of the US in matters of democratic governance and human rights really is A Thing. And the (so far thankfully tentative) new-cold-war posture toward China has relevant implications on Mideast issues: "The 'America is back' message has been all about a law-abiding, norm-promoting, rights-respecting nation leading a resurgence of democracies. ... It's not hard to imagine the refrain in Beijing: 'You say Uyghurs, we say Palestinians.'"

Aaron David Miller and Daniel Kurtzer write about the current situation in Battle between Israel and Hamas is an unwelcome surprise for Biden CNN 05/12/2021: "It is doubtful whether the current crisis in Jerusalem -- which has now grown into a larger battle between Israel and Hamas -- will impel the Biden administration to launch a full-throated effort to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But, at a minimum, it should compel the administration to do everything it can to defuse this dimension of the crisis."

Trying to understand the current Israel-Palestine confrontation

I'm not bold enough to make big predictions about the situation in Israel or the international politics of it. It does seem to me that the current crisis could very well be a turning point at which the publics in the US and Europe will start to see the "two-state solution" that has been a stable feature of official policy for decades is no longer viable.

I've seen a few helpful in-depth discussions the last few days on the topic. The Majority Report segment linked below talks about how the Democratic Party's position on Israel is very likely to evolve from the current posture of largely uncritcal public support of Israeli government actions to one that takes a more realistic and policy and one that takes a broader regard for international law and human rights issues.

The Republican Party is in such a bizarre state of fanaticism that it's hard to predict which way they will go. Their white evangelical base has largely adopted an explicitly theological position of backing basically anything a rightwing government in Israel does. And Israeli politics has evolved in a way that there is hardly a left presence in Israeli politics capable of forming a government in the currently foreseeable future.

It's important to recognize that the Christian fundamentalist view of Israel promoted by groups like John Hagee's Citizens United For Israel (CUFI) group is based on very modern, very imaginative, and distinctly anti-Semitic reading of the Christian Bible. This view is broadly called Christian Zionism. See, for instance: Joshua Shanes, John Hagee Is a Muslim-hating, Antisemitic, Annexationist Extremist. He’s No Friend of Israel Haaretz 06/22/2020: "Hagee’s editorial cannot be understood outside of his long-pursued apocalyptic and deeply antisemitic worldview."

It's also the case that some rightwing groups in the US and Europe still hold traditional anti-Semitic views and attitudes without bothering with the superficial philo-Semitic act that Christian Zionists put on. There was the notorious, murderous Charlottesville "United the Right" march in 2017, in which neonazis carrying tiki torches chanted "Jews Will Not Replace Us." Then there is the current posture that some far-right parties in Europe use to incorporate their Islamophobic emphasis in which they argue essentially, Muslims hate Jews and we hate Muslims so that makes us totally not anti-Semitic.

There is always the complication that criticism of Israel can stand in for hostility to Jews. And Israel international politics does make pragmatic use of the memory of the Holocaust to discredit criticism of Israeli policies today.

Nobody should assume that the politics of Israel and the Palestinians is always simple and straightforward.

Israel's Colonialist Project in Sheikh Jarrah & Palestinian Rights w/ Noura Erakat The Majority Report with Sam Seder 05/11/2021 (the discussion on Israel is in the first half of the video):

What the U.S. Can Do to Put Pressure on Israel & Stop Bloodshed The Mehdi Hasan Show 05/12/2021

This interview with Norman Finkelstein by Katie Halper is particularly interesting for the discussion of recent reports by the Israeli human rights organization B’Tselem (A regime of Jewish supremacy from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea: This is apartheid 01/12/2021) and Human Rights Watch (A Threshold Crossed: Israeli Authorities and the Crimes of Apartheid and Persecution 04/27/2021) which provide blunt assessments of Israel's current occupation policy. Finkelstein argues that both of these are particularly notable because of their established credibility. Norman Finkelstein on Israel & What's happening Here 05/11/2021)

Cale Brooks interviews the historian Leena Dallasheh of Humboldt State University Humboldt State University in Sheikh Jarrah Evictions and Palestinian Rights w/ Leena Dallasheh Jacobin 05/11/2021. It includes a discussion of the state of the political left in Israel.:

Aljazeera is also providing coverage of the current situtation, A third Palestinian uprising? Inside Story 05/11/2021:

Alice Bach, Inside the Christians United for Israel Summit in Washington, D.C., 20–22 July 2010 Journal of Palestinian Studies 40:1 (Autumn 2010)

Sarah Lazare, The Terrifying Alliance Between End Times Christian Zionists and Donald Trump In These Times 10/05/2020

Marwan Bishara, Jerusalem, the unfolding tragedy Aljazeera 05/11/2021