The American Presidents and the Palestine Issue

Since the Palestine issue was being debated in the corridors of the United Nations in 1947, before the establishment of “Israel” and even before the publication of the partition resolution, we have watched a pattern continually recur in the relations between the Arab regimes and the successive presidents at the helm of the White House. In summary, this pattern is that every time a new American president enters the White House, the Arab regimes fix all their hopes on the idea that he will reduce the excessive, blind U.S. bias toward “Israel” and adopt a more balanced position between the Arabs and the Zionist movement. Presumably, that would lead to a just resolution of the Palestine issue, given the weight that the U.S. carries in international politics on the one hand and its standing with the Zionist movement “Israel” and ability to influence and exert pressure on it on the other. For the last seven decades, we have seen the same pattern repeat itself in its entirety: Every time the Arabs fix more of their hopes on the new American president, his term ends — after four years for a single term or eight years for a double term — with more of blind U.S. bias toward Zionism and “Israel.”

The pattern started with President Harry Truman, who was believed to be against Zionism. Some even went so far as to describe him as anti-Semitic. When he stood for the U.S. presidential election, a delegation from the Zionist lobby came to him and told him that if he did not adopt a position supporting the resolution to partition Palestine, the Jewish-American vote would pour, in its entirety, in favor of his rival, John Dewey.

The result, as historical documents tell us, is that the U.S. was not content, at the time, to merely support Resolution 181, which decreed the partition of Palestine and permitted the Zionist movement a state therein. Rather, it stood at the head of the international force pressuring — through coercion, threats and incentives — the states that were hesitant about the resolution and those that opposed it.

Since that date, the U.S. administration has practically turned a blind eye to the distinction between the Palestinian territory that was occupied through the barrel of a gun and the territory that the partition resolution specified [for the Jewish state] and has considered this difference to be an excellent reward for the Zionist occupation. The Americans don’t just turn a blind eye; they encourage and applaud it and, since the 1950s, have allowed Europe — France and Britain — to supply it with nuclear weapons.*

Before we come to the most recent period — the last two decades — we should mention the famous attempt that President Gamal Abdel Nasser made in the 1960s with the new American president at the time, John Kennedy. Nasser dispatched his famous letter to Kennedy, in which he attempted to remind him of the fundamental facts of the Palestine issue. It is in this letter that Nasser’s famous expression appeared: The Palestinian issue began because “he who does not own [the land] has made a promise to him who does not deserve it.”

But disappointment with the U.S. position at the time, especially after John Kennedy was assassinated and after the 1967 war, caused Nasser to adopt his historical position:

“What was taken by force can’t be retaken without force.”

By that, he meant all of the occupied Arab lands, not just the Sinai Peninsula. After that turn, every president that has come into the White House has surpassed his predecessors with the intensity of his support for “Israel,” its occupation, all its acts of aggression and its violation of all the international [U.N.] resolutions connected to the Palestine issue.

Up to today, there have been no deviations in the pattern — not even small ones — except for former President George H. W. Bush, who executed a decree stopping the allocation of U.S. assistance to “Israel” because it had violated his request to stop building settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. However, he quickly paid the price of this position, which broke the pattern. He was brought down from power when he stood for his second presidential term, even though he was a hero of a victorious U.S. war against Saddam Hussein’s occupation of Kuwait.

Since that event, the manner in which new American presidents deal with “Israel” has returned to its known historical trajectory: Every time a new president — Republican or Democrat — tries to break through the deadlock in the Palestine issue, Zionist pressure and Arab weakness thwarts him, and history records another victory for the Zionist movement over the master of the White House in Washington.

Given this result, the remarkable thing is that the U.S. continues to cave in to Zionist pressure by persevering in a peace process with obstinate, if not impossible, Israeli stipulations. But in the end, that is a natural continuation of the pattern in U.S.-Israeli relations. But the thing that causes amazement and puzzlement and warrants disapproval is the position taken by both the [High] Follow-Up Committee for the Arab [Masses in Israel] and the presidency of the Palestinian Authority. They are continuing the peace process via the same failed, incapable means: relying on the possibility of a development in the U.S. position.

The biggest question remains: What do the Arabs have left, given their adherence to alternatives that still all depend on the U.S. position?

*Translator’s note: The author’s exact meaning in this paragraph is unclear.