100 Years of US Policy on Palestine

This Sept. 21 marks 102 years since Congress passed the Lodge-Fish Resolution supporting the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In doing so, Congress endorsed British imperialism’s Balfour Declaration creating a “national home” for the Jewish people. The resolution, passed in the House and the Senate and subsequently signed by President Warren G. Harding, defined the country’s official policy on Palestine.

Just as the establishment of the Zionist occupying regime on Palestinian land was a game of Western imperialism, the regime’s survival to this day has been possible only with its support. In this sense, the Zionist occupying state is the illegitimate child of British imperialism. With the Balfour Declaration of 1917, British imperialism declared that it occupied Palestine not for its own sake but rather to provide a path to statehood for international Zionism.

Since the United States, another child of British imperialism, took the Western imperial helm following World War II, its administration has assumed the role of protector of “Israel,” the illegitimate occupying state founded through alliances of the Zionist terror organizations that emerged from among the Jewish immigrants settled in Palestinian territory by international Zionism under the auspices of the British. The continued existence of the illegitimate occupying regime to this day has been made possible through the help and support of the United States. Without the support of British imperialism, Zionist terror organizations would not have been able to achieve statehood, and without support from the U.S., the established terror state wouldn’t have been able to survive.

The Sept. 21, 1922 congressional resolution is the product of an occupier mentality. The resolution endorsed the formation of a homeland for Jewish people in Palestine. However, Palestinian land was not vacant at the time. In fact, the region was one of the most densely populated areas in the world. It hosted a considerable population because it contained productive agricultural land (with the exception of the Negev Desert), possessed a coastline on both Red Sea and Mediterranean shores, and served as a link between Africa and Asia. Thus, transplanting the world’s Jewish population to the area would require forcibly displacing people already living there. The pursuit of such an objective reflects a completely militant, colonialist and crude occupier worldview.

The U.S. continued to provide the Zionist occupying regime with political, diplomatic, economic and military support after it was established, and made all sorts of sacrifices to ensure its survival. It made full use of its leverage within the United Nations and various other international organizations to conceal the regime’s extremism, massacres and assaults, and to help it avoid international scrutiny.

America has made significant diplomatic moves to legitimize the occupying regime, exerting its power and influence globally, and particularly in the Arab world.

It was the U.S. that pushed King Hussein of Jordan to organize an operation known as “Black September” in 1970 to expel all Palestine Liberation Organization militias from Jordan. It was the U.S. that convinced Egypt, the first Arab country to recognize the occupying regime, to face up to the reactions of the Arab world and sign the Camp David Accords. And it was again the U.S. that manipulated the higher-ups of the PLO into direct negotiations with the occupying regime to free it from the grip of the First Intifada in late 1987, leading to the Madrid Conference.

It is well-known that equipment, missiles, and bombs sent by the U.S. are being used in the occupying regime’s genocidal war, which has continued for over a year, and that the U.S. is providing financial backing to ensure that the economic crisis resulting from this war doesn’t shake the regime too harshly.