US in a tangle


December 17, 2014
Sarah Benton

After the article by Jonathan Cook, there is one from 3 years ago, but still very relevant, on why Palestine and Kosovo are treated differently.

Martin Indyk, vice president and director of the Foreign Policy Program at Brookings interviews Naftali Bennett at the Saban Forum, Brookings, December 6th. Bennett, minister of economy, minister of religious services, Jerusalem and diaspora affairs and chairman, Jewish Home Party won no admirers when he dismissed Indyk as part of the “peace industry” and argued that ‘Israel should annex most of the West Bank’, forcing Palestinian into scattered bantustans. Photo by Peter Halmagyi. He hoped his ‘no more Mr Nice Guy’ would play well at home.

America finds itself in a fix over Israel’s elections

By Jonathan Cook, The National
December 15, 2014

The floodgates have opened across Europe on the issue of Palestinian statehood. On Friday, the Portuguese parliament became the latest European legislature to call on its government to back statehood, joining Sweden, Britain, Ireland, France and Spain.

Similar moves are expected in Denmark, and from the European Parliament. The Swiss government will join the fray this week, inviting states that have signed the Fourth Geneva Convention to an extraordinary meeting to discuss human rights violations in the occupied territories.

But while Europe is finding a voice in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, silence reigns across the Atlantic. The White House appears paralysed, afraid to appear out of sync with world opinion but more afraid still of upsetting Israel and its powerful allies in the US Congress.

Now there is an additional complicating factor. The Israeli public, due to elect a new government in March, increasingly regards the US role as toxic. A poll this month found that 52 per cent viewed Barack Obama’s diplomatic policy as “bad”, and 37 per cent thought he had a negative attitude towards their country.

US secretary of state John Kerry alluded to the White House’s difficulties this month when he addressed the Saban Forum, an annual gathering of US policy elites to discuss Middle East issues. He promised that Washington would not interfere in Israel’s elections.

According to the Israeli media, he was responding to pressure from Tzipi Livni, whose dismissal this month from Benjamin Netanyahu’s government triggered the forthcoming election, and Yitzhak Herzog of the centre-left Labor party.

The pair made a pact in an effort to oust Mr Netanyahu. Their electoral success – improbable at the moment – offers the White House its best hope of an Israeli government that will at least pay lip service to a renewal of peace negotiations. They have warned, however, that any sign of backing from the Obama administration would be the kiss of death at the polls.

US officials would like to see Mr Netanyahu gone, but any visible strategy against him is almost certain to backfire. Washington’s difficulties are only underscored by the Palestinians’ threat to bring a draft resolution before the UN Security Council as soon as this week, demanding Israel’s withdrawal by late 2016 to the 1967 lines.

Given the current climate, the Palestinians are hopeful of winning the backing of European states, especially the three key ones on the Security Council – Britain, France and Germany – and thereby isolating the US. Arab foreign ministers will meet Mr Kerry on Tuesday in an effort to persuade Washington not to exercise its veto. The US, meanwhile, is desperately trying to postpone a vote, fearful that casting its veto might suggest that Mr Netanyahu has the White House in his pocket.


London December 16th: John Kerry meets the foreign ministers of Arab states and, 2nd from left, secretary-general of the Arab League Nabil Al-Araby

But indulging the Israeli right also has risks, bolstering it by default. That danger was driven home during another session of the Saban Forum, addressed by settler leader Naftali Bennett, who is riding high in the polls.

Mr Bennett says clearly what Mr Netanyahu only implies: that most of the West Bank should be annexed, with the Palestinians given demilitarised islands of territory that lack sovereignty. The model, called “autonomy”, is of the Palestinians ruling over a series of local councils.

The Washington audience was further shocked by Mr Bennett’s disrespectful treatment of his interviewer, Martin Indyk, who served as Mr Obama’s representative at the last round of peace talks. He accused Mr Indyk of not living in the real world, dismissively calling him part of the “peace industry”.

Mr Bennett’s goal, according to analysts, was to prove to Israeli voters that he is not afraid to stand up to the Americans.

Given its weakening hand, Washington is looking towards an unlikely saviour. The hawkish foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman used to be its bête noire, but he has been carefully recalibrating his image.

Unlike other candidates, he has been aggressively promoting a “peace plan”. The US has barely bothered examining its contents, which are only a little more generous than Mr Bennett’s annexation option, and involve forcibly stripping hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in Israel of their citizenship.

Mr Lieberman, however, has usefully created the impression that he is a willing partner to a peace process. He is trying to occupy a middle ground with Israeli voters, demonstrating that he can placate the Americans, while offering a plan so unfair to the Palestinians that there is no danger voters will consider him part of the “peace industry”.

That may fit the electoral mood: a recent poll showed 63 per cent of Israelis favour peace negotiations, but 70 per cent think they are doomed to fail. The Israeli public, like Mr Lieberman, understands that the Palestinians will never agree to the kind of subjugation they are being offered.

The Israeli election’s one certain outcome is that, whoever wins, the next coalition will, actively or passively, allow more of the same: a slow, creeping annexation of what is left of a possible Palestinian state, as the US and Europe bicker.

Jonathan Cook is an independent journalist based in Nazareth


Why Kosovo but not Palestine?

Serbia was historically more aligned with Russia, while Israel serves US foreign policy interests in the Middle East.

By Zoltan Grossman, Al Jazeera
October 06, 2011

In his September 21 speech to the United Nations, President Obama announced that he would veto UN recognition of a Palestinian state, because its independence was not a result of a negotiated settlement with Israel.

He said that “peace depends upon compromise among people who must live together long after our … votes have been tallied … That’s the lesson of Sudan, where a negotiated settlement led to an independent state. And that is and will be the path to a Palestinian state – negotiations between the parties.”

But President Obama neglected to mention a recent prominent example of unilateral independence, the State of Kosovo, which was recognised by the United States three years ago – even though its statehood did not come about through a negotiated settlement with Serbia. If an independent state of Palestine should only be recognised with Israel’s approval, then why did the US recognise the independence of Kosovo in 2008, over the objections of Serbia?

Why recognise Kosovo but not Palestine?

Serbs view Kosovo as the cradle of their national identity, where the Ottoman Empire defeated them in 1389. Kosovo maintained a Serb majority for centuries, but in the late 1800s it became a seat of Albanians’ national awakening, and eventually gained an ethnic Albanian majority. It became part of Serb-dominated Yugoslavia after World War I, and (after the Axis occupation in World War II), the Yugoslav Communist government made Kosovo into a province within the republic of Serbia, recognising the rights of its Kosovar Albanian majority. In 1989, Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic vastly reduced Kosovo’s autonomy, citing threats to the Serb minority, as the opening move in his nationalist crusade for a Greater Serbia.

“So far 83 UN member states (including the US) have recognised Kosovo – 44 fewer than the total member states that have recognised Palestine.”

Like Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat first declared Palestinian sovereignty in 1988, Kosovar Albanian leader Ibrahim Rugova first declared Kosovo independent in 1990. No foreign powers recognised Kosovo at that time, but 127 UN member states have since recognised the State of Palestine.

Civil war erupted between Serbian forces and the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA) in 1998, and more than 2,000 people died in the fighting. KLA fighters targeted ethnic Serb civilians in the province, as well as moderate Kosovar Albanians, and Serbian forces targeted Albanian civilians. In February 1999, President Clinton led NATO in a bombing campaign against Serbia, triggering Milosevic’s plan for the “ethnic cleansing” (or forced removal) of Kosovo’s Albanian majority, which began after the bombs started falling.

When the KLA came to power with backing from NATO troops in June 1999, it in turn ethnically cleansed thousands of Serbs, Roma (Gypsies), Turks and Jews from its territory, based on the accusation that these groups had sided with Serbian forces.

These minority groups had been living in Kosovo for centuries, unlike the Israeli settlers who are mostly recent transplants imported to Palestinian soil. When Serbia had settled some Serb war refugees in Kosovo from other ex-Yugoslav republics during the 1990s, Washington condemned the program as an attempt to shift the demographics of the province. The few Serbs living in Kosovo since 1999 have been subject to periodic pogroms, and a Serb enclave in the north has periodically threatened to rejoin Serbia, generating instability in the new state.

Whereas the prevailing mythology in the United States is that Clinton bombed former Yugoslavia to stop ethnic cleansing, people in the Balkans understand that US forces intervened against Serb ethnic cleansers, but intervened on the side of Croat and Albanian ethnic cleansers. After the fighting was over, NATO rubberstamped the results on the ground of these forced removals, and deemed the silence of the graveyard a “lasting peace”.

Kosovo’s parliament redeclared independence in 2008, in a move that was boycotted by Kosovo Serb delegates. So far, 83 UN member states (including the US) have recognised Kosovo – 44 fewer than the total members states that have recognised Palestine. Serbia asked the International Court of Justice to rule on the secession, and last year the Court issued an advisory opinion that unilateral declarations of independence are not prohibited under international law.

So what’s the difference?

Serbia has a stronger legal case than Israel to object to unilateral independence, and not only because of the Kosovo’s expulsion of most Serbs. Kosovo was not only recognised as a part of Yugoslavia before the 1990s, not as a Yugoslav republic of its own, but as a province within the republic of Serbia. On the other hand, the West Bank and Gaza (not to mention Israeli-annexed East Jerusalem) have never been recognised as a part of Israel. In addition, after coming to power, KLA fighters blatantly endangered the security of neighbouring states, by seeking to militarily “liberate” ethnic Albanians in western Macedonia and Serbia’s Presevo Valley.

The difference is that Kosovo is under occupation by a foreign military alliance that backs the self-determination of its ethnic Albanian majority. The West Bank and East Jerusalem are under the occupation of a foreign military force that seeks to prevent the self-determination of its majority Palestinian population, and seeks to settle its own population in their place.

Serbia and Israel have remarkably similar messages toward the West. They contend that their military occupations have been justified to prevent a repeat of the genocide directed against them in World War II. (The Palestinians had nothing to do with this genocide, though Croatia and Albania were allied with the Axis Powers.)

“Serbia and Israel present themselves as bulwarks defending Western civilisation against Islamist extremism.”

Serbia and Israel present themselves as bulwarks defending Western civilisation against Islamist extremism, even though both the Palestinian and Kosovar national movements began with secular ethnic-based identities, and include members of Christian minorities. Serbia and Israel have also used ancient religious justifications (such as shrines and archeological sites) for their military presence in lands where they do not have a demographic majority.

The difference is that the Israeli lobby in Washington is far stronger than the Serbian lobby. Milosevic’s massive ethnic cleansings of Kosovar Albanians (as well as Croats and Bosnians) were more recent and televised than Israel’s forced removal of Palestinians from their ancestral lands, in what they term the Nakba (Catastrophe) of 1948.

The KLA has long been implicated in heroin trafficking to raise funds for the cause and cash for personal enrichment. Former KLA commanders, including Prime Minister Hashim Thaci, have even been accused of trafficking in human organs. Kosovo is also a notorious center of sex trafficking in the Balkans, especially as Western troops have been stationed there. Whatever the veracity of any of these particular charges, none of them have prevented US support for Kosovo’s independence.

The difference is that the Palestinian national movement has not been implicated in such international crime syndicates. We can be sure that if any Palestinian leaders were accused of just one of these crimes, the Israeli lobby would trumpet the charge loudly as an argument against a Palestinian state, and the White House would echo the claim.

Palestine and Israel have come down on different sides on Kosovo independence. Senior adviser to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Yasser Abed Rabbo, cited Kosovo’s example for unilateral independence when he said, “Kosovo is not better than us. We are worthy of independence before them and we ask for backing from the United States and European Union.”

Meanwhile, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman categorically refused to recognise Kosovo, claiming that its independence is a “sensitive issue” that should be part of “a really comprehensive and peaceful solution” established through negotiations. So both the Palestinians and Israelis are consistent in their consideration of Kosovo’s example. The party that is not consistent is the United States, which with one hand recognises a new state, and with the other hand blocks another new state.

The difference may be that, since the days of Woodrow Wilson, Washington tends to support the unilateral self-determination of peoples only if they are white Europeans. More to the point, Israel serves US foreign policy interests in the Middle East, but Orthodox Christian Serbia has historically been more aligned with Russia.

The United Nations has not recognised Kosovo because it would set a negative precedent for unilateral secession around the world. Many states in the Arab League and European Union, on the other hand, view Kosovo as a positive precedent for Palestine. Some governments may oppose sovereignty for both Kosovo and Palestine. But the US is virtually alone in its backing for the State of Kosovo, while at the same time hypocritically blocking a State of Palestine.

Americans should start asking President Obama: If Kosovo has a right to exist, why doesn’t Palestine also have a right to exist?

Zoltan Grossman is a professor of Geography and and Native American & World Indigenous Peoples Studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington. He is a civilian Member of the Board of GI Voice, an antiwar veterans group that runs the Coffee Strong resource center for soldiers outside Fort Lewis. He can be reached at grossmaz@evergreen.edu.

A version of this article was first published on Counterpunch.

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