Editor’s note: This commentary is by Mark Hage, a member of Vermonters for a Just Peace in Palestine/Israel and host of the VTJP television program Salaam Shalom: Report on Palestine/Israel.
[I]n the late ’80s, an elderly gentlemen I met at a national conference on Palestine, asked me on the spot to name all of the Israeli-occupied territories. I confidently rattled off the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, the Syrian Golan Heights and Southern Lebanon.
He smiled and said, “You left one out: the U.S. Congress.”
On Sept. 20, six days after President Obama announced the largest military aid package ($38 billion over 10 years) in U.S. history to Israel, the Jewish state was the recipient of a second gift, this time from 88 U.S. senators.
It came in the form of a letter to President Obama, urging him not to back any international initiatives that would put pressure on Israel to end its occupation of Palestine. It also advised him to deploy U.S. veto power as needed at the United Nations on Israel’s behalf.
Many progressive Democrats, including Elizabeth Warren, Kirsten Gillibrand, Ed Markey, Al Franken, Barbara Boxer and Cory Booker, signed the letter, which had the indelible fingerprints of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) on it.
It is notable that Sens. Bernie Sanders and Patrick Leahy did not sign it.
The senators who did assert illogically that high-pressure diplomacy directed at Israel will make reaching a negotiated agreement between Israelis and Palestinians harder to achieve, if not impossible.
This is an old trope, and patently laughable given that Israel has been systematically confiscating Palestinian land and building fortified Jewish-only settlements on it for decades. This illegal, violent and destructive project is taking place in an ever-shrinking Arab Palestine … yet one day, we are told, against all evidence to the contrary, the few parcels of land that remain in Palestinian hands will somehow blossom into a viable state, without Israel having to face any ultimatums in the process.
What is driving AIPAC at the moment (which means Israel’s prime minister) is the fear that Obama, in the waning months of his presidency, might support, however tepidly and ineffectually, diplomatic proposals on Palestine now being contemplated or in the draft stage, including one from France, which Israel fears will be antagonistic to its colonization agenda.
I call on our congressional delegation to declare their intention to work unceasingly for a cut-off of military aid to Israel, and, further, to demand that the next administration, in concert with like-minded countries, vigorously enforce the rights of the Palestinian people under international law, with the stated aim of ending Israel’s occupation.
There was also irritation over the president’s comments at the opening of the U.N. this year to the effect that Israel can’t occupy Palestine forever. It can’t. But so what that Obama uttered such words, especially after forking over another nearly $40 billion to Israel’s military? Palestinian lives are secondary to his “legacy” of supporting Israel.
It does matter, though, that our two senators, on this occasion, did not fall in line with the Israel lobby. Both concluded, I’d wager, that it was ridiculous to believe that Israel’s occupation or leaders could be exempt from international accountability during any debate on the future of the occupied Palestinian territories.
Moreover, the AIPAC letter was transparently self-serving for its Democratic backers. A flood of money flows to Democratic Party candidates each election season from pro-Israel donors. This is what nobody talks about in polite circles.
There was an unusually frank discussion of this topic last April at a synagogue in Washington, D.C., featuring J.J. Goldberg of the Forward, the leading Jewish media outlet in the United States.
According to Mr. Goldberg, of the top 50 donors to 527s and super PACs, 14 are contributors to the Democratic Party … and only one was not Jewish. Of the 36 Republican big spenders, only eight were Jewish. His comments came in response to a question about funding and pro-Israel politics from Roger Cohen of The New York Times. The source of his data was the Center for Responsive Politics, which researches where big political money comes from and in whose pockets it ends up.
Sens. Sanders and Leahy are not politically beholden to pro-Israel money, to their credit, which opens to them potentially a wider field to operate independently, conscientiously, and boldly on the question of Palestine.
Both men did the right thing in refusing to sign AIPAC’s letter, but they must do more, as does Congressman Peter Welch. They must lead decisively on this issue against AIPAC’s and Israel’s current of obstructionism and deceit.
Not because they have little to fear from AIPAC. But because more than 4 million Palestinians are living under a brutal military occupation that will reach its 50-year mark in June 2017.
Because there is no end in sight to the unlawful expansion of Israeli settlements, which are home exclusively to an estimated 550,000 Israeli Jews.
Because Gaza, in addition to being occupied, has suffered a barbaric siege and multiple military offenses over the past decade. According to the World Bank, the Strip is decimated economically and had the highest unemployment rate in the world in 2014 (43 percent). The U.N. predicted in 2015 that Gaza could be uninhabitable by 2020 unless “herculean efforts” are undertaken.
Because Vermonters, like all Americans, are subsidizing Israel’s occupation, making us complicit in Palestine’s long nightmare.
I call on our congressional delegation to declare their intention to work unceasingly for a cut-off of military aid to Israel, and, further, to demand that the next administration, in concert with like-minded countries, vigorously enforce the rights of the Palestinian people under international law, with the stated aim of ending Israel’s occupation.
