With the ‘Deal of the Century’ dead on arrival, the Trump administration itself has widely been blamed as a chief impediment to meaningful negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians. Without doubt, the administration’s record on the issue resembles a wish-list for the Israeli right.

That is precisely the point. The so-called peace plan is designed to be rejected out of hand by the Palestinian leadership upon whom it is being imposed, thus furnishing another example of their supposed intransigence. To this end, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has already responded to the proposal by announcing a vote to annex all Israeli settlements. In this sense, the proposal was merely the latest in a long line of measures taken by the Trump administration over the past three years to pull the rug out from the Palestinians. This began with the Trump administration’s arbitrary reversal of a long-standing U.S. legal opinion that Israeli settlements in the West Bank are illegal, a consensus position under international law. Shortly thereafter, it was revealed that U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Netanyahu had discussed plans for Israeli annexation of roughly 30% of the West Bank, not merely existing settlements. The following week, Naftali Bennett, the Israeli Defense Minister, threw fuel onto the flames and announced plans for new settlements in the Palestinian city of Hebron, thus kicking off the cycle again, and advertising Israel’s intention to amplify the scale of the settlement problem.

The administration has also missed no opportunity to add insult to injury. Its Israel maven and the chief architect of the misbegotten ‘Deal of the Century’, Jared Kushhner, sagely advised the Palestinian leadership that the plan would be easy to accept, if they were not so 'hysterical and stupid' and could simply ‘divorce [themselves] from all of the history.’

Indeed, there is good reason to dwell on the deliberate cruelty and ham-fistedness of foreign policy (and all policy) in the era of Trump. This would be a mistake. It is precisely the temptation to see these events as a historical discontinuity  that must be resisted, lest we fail to understand the fact that in terms of substance, Trump’s approach to Palestine differs little from that of his predecessors in the White House and in Congress. 

To view the United States as a credible mediator or honest broker between the Israelis and Palestinians would be to ignore decades of Executive and Legislative branch policies which have enabled Israel’s occupation, and which ultimately bar any attempt at a resolution. 

These conditions have a long historical precendent mired in the residue of colonialism, orientalism, anti-communism, and — counter-intuitively — anti-Jewish animus. However, these practices accelerated rapidly in the aftermath of 9/11, as Israel falsely linked Palestinian violence to the U.S. ‘war on terror.’ President George W. Bush rewarded Israel’s nominal support of this fatuous undertaking by ignoring Israel’s occupation of Palestine and disregarding this circumstance as the driving force behind the Second Intifada, a popular — and often violent — anti-colonial uprising unfolding at the time. 

Over time, the relationship between the U.S. and Israel has become a cynically transactional relationship which pays dividends for the U.S. and Israeli security establishments and right wing religious establishments, while stifling the Palestinian people and papering over Israel’s worst human rights abuses. And by exerting an inordinate amount of power and influence to shield Israel from international accountability, the United States is complicit in these crimes. Even if the U.S. national security establishment is taken at its word, its unwavering support for Israel undermines its own self-stated long-term interest in preventing further regional escalation, and bolstering  what it vaguely defines as ‘national security’.

This partiality has taken shape through a multi-pronged strategy encompassing financial and political support across the whole of the U.S. government over decades. Foreign aid packages have been weaponized to solidify Israeli control over the Palestinian territories while leaving the beggarded and doddering Palestinian Authority with little choice but to participate in enforcment of the occupation. U.S. veto power in the UN has been employed for decades to block any meaningful attempt at accountability and intervention in the decades-long Israeli-Palestinian crisis. And Congress and the White House consistently enact policies aimed at punishing the Palestinians and robbing them of agency.

Obviously, it is Palestinians who suffer most acutely under this system of deliberate oppression. Palestinians have long called attention to the apartheid nature of the state in which they are forced to live; Israelis, too, have begun to publicly acknoweldge this reality. As prominent Israeli human rights lawyer Michael Sfard wrote in 2018, what we are witnessing is the creation of “a single state containing two peoples, only one of which has citizenship and civil rights.” Regrettably, the U.S. continues to foot much of the bill to prop up this system and perpetuate the unsustainable status quo. 

Indeed, the costs of this system are paid for by working-class Americans, too. Every U.S. taxpayer dollar that supports this system deprives U.S. schools of much-needed funding, while U.S. infrastructure crumbles, and healthcare and higher education costs skyrocket beyond reach of the working class. While Congress faces the persistent need to justify spending in these areas, military spending is a sacred cow — and funding for Israel has long been virtually beyond critique. This must change. 

There is hope. A do no harm approach offers a way out of the vicious circle in which the U.S.’s  lopsided support harms the American working class and remains a persistent barrier to a just peace. This article is the first in a series examining the central role the United States has played in maintaining the fifty-two year occupation of Palestine. Over coming weeks, SPRI will delve into the ways in which the United States tacitly and deliberately supports the systems of occupation and apartheid currently enforced by Israel on the Palestinian people. These modes of support include: bankrolling the Israeli defense budget, aid packages designed to further enmesh the Palestinians in the occupation, blanket political coverage for Israel at the United Nations, and a domestic policy agenda geared toward isolating and enfeebling the Palestinian Authority.

Bilateral assistance to Israel 

The principal way the U.S. supports the occupation is by allocating U.S. taxpayer dollars to support Israel’s occupation policies, which fuels a regional arms race and lines the pockets of Israeli weapons manufacturers, all while disregarding Palestinians and financing a system of blatant segregation. In so doing, the U.S. national security establishment further a system that undermines the real security of Palestinians, as well as work-class Americans. 

Israel’s blank check: unlimited dollars, no accountability

Since 1997, the United States government has regularly approved what amounts to a blank check for security aid to Israel. Aid packages amounting to tens of billions of dollars paid out over the course of a decade are used to subsidize and enforce the policies of occupation and apartheid in the Palestinian territories. Notably, this process has won nearly universal congressional support, despite federal restrictions on funding recipients accused of ‘a gross violation of human rights’ where ‘credible information’ is available. In spite of clear and abundant evidence of ongoing rights violations by Israel, the U.S. continues its support to Israel.

Notably, the largest such aid package was gifted by the Obama administration in 2016. The ten-year agreement outlines $33 billion in ‘base’ bi-lateral security assistance to Israel with an additional $500 million allotted annually for missile defense systems (Iron Dome, David’s Sling, Arrow, Arrow II, and Arrow III). Over the course of ten years the memorandum of understanding (MOU) will furnish Israel — one of the wealthiest and most technically advanced nations on earth — with approximately $38 billion in military aid. In total, U.S. aid to Israel will account for approximately 18% of the annual Israeli defense budget. 

Maintaining Israeli ‘superiority’ at all costs

How does the U.S. justify this spending? The answer lies in a little-known military doctrine that promotes what is tantamount to a latter-day cold war-style arms race in the Middle East. The MOU seeks to grant Israel a so-called ‘qualitative military edge’ (QME); in practice, U.S. policy explicitly dictates that Israel’s military should be beefed up on U.S. taxpayer dollars to maintain 'superior' capabilities to those any regional state or non-state actor, or coalition of them.[1] Over the last seven years, Congress has passed four separate laws (Pub.L. 110-429, Pub.L. 112-150, Pub.L. 113-296, Pub.L. 114-92) codifying the United States’ efforts to preserve Israel’s QME.

As such, the U.S. is actively shaping the power balance in the Middle East to reinforce Israeli hegemony, not only vis-a-vis Palestine, but also by fostering the conditions for Israel to adopt aggressive policies toward regional adversaries such as Iran. This has invited unnecessary risks of escalation and violations of sovereignty, as Israel has ratcheted up airstrikes in Syria against Hezbollah, Syrian, and Iranian targets. 

‘Mowing the lawn’

One obscure aspect of the MOU is especially controversial: the authorization for Israel to access munitions from what is known as War Reserves Stock Allies-Israel (WRSA-I). The WRSA-I is essentially an emergency ammo dump maintained by and for the U.S. in the Negev desert. Under the terms of the MOU, Israel can request access to this facility as needed. Notably, the U.S. granted Israel access to tank and artillery munitions from WRSA-I in 2014, when Israel was engaged in a bloody conflict with Hamas which resulted in the death of 1,462 Palestinian civilians. In this instance, U.S. policy and munitions can be directly tied to killing and maiming scores of Palestinians, an occurrence which happens with startling regularity — in Israeli security circles, this policy is crassly known as ‘mowing the lawn’.

Circularity

Finally, the military practices the U.S. promotes and enables in Israel will also find their way to American shores, not only via militarized police trainings conducted in the U.S. by Israel security forces, but also in the deployment of anti-tunnel technologies honed in Israel to tighten its grip on the Palestinian population. Tunnel networks used by Hamas during the 2014 conflict gained considerable notoriety; the MOU now includes funding to counter these networks. This will serve a military purpose in curtailing the flow of materiel and combatants, but it will come at the extreme cost of preventing desperately needed staple consumer goods and food from reaching populations that are besieged by the occupation. The United States is now planning to deploy such a program along the U.S.-Mexico border, marking a clear and direct example of the circularity of U.S. overseas militarism. 

As such, the costs to U.S. taxpayers of continued and unquestioned funding of Israel’s apartheid system are not only monetary, but also material. In the most obvious sense, by supporting and adopting the techniques and technologies honed by the Israeli occupation, the U.S. is complicit in its crimes against Palestinians. More fundamentally, however, Americans also bear the risk that such tactics will be redeployed within our own borders. The longer the status quo is permitted to continue, the longer the American working class, migrants, and hyper-policed communities will pay twice for their tax-dollar support of Israel’s occupation. 

In the next part in this series, we’ll look at the other side of the table and examine the ways in which U.S. support to Palestine functions as a wedge, driving Palestine into greater reliance on Israel and furthering the occupation. 

[1] As defined in the Naval Vessel Transfer Act of 2008, Israel’s QME constitutes 'the ability to counter and defeat any credible conventional military threat from any individual state or possible coalition of states or from non-state actors, while sustaining minimal damages and casualties, through the use of superior military means, possessed in sufficient quantity, including weapons, command, control, communication, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance capabilities that in their technical characteristics are superior in capability to those of such other individual or possible coalition of states or non-state actors.'