Israeli Settlements Aren’t Worth the Fight

Disagreements over Israeli policy on Jewish settlements have degraded U.S.-Israeli relations. The United States shouldn’t allow that to escalate.

It’s very tempting to say, “It serves the Israelis right!” For 40 years, they’ve been making a negotiated Middle East peace more difficult by their ongoing settlement building in occupied Palestinian areas. Now, finally, an American vice president has called them out for announcing new settlement construction plans in the midst of his official visit to the holy land. The U.S. secretary of state immediately gave the Israeli prime minister a 45-minute dressing down and called the Israeli action “an insult” to the United States. And suddenly it’s there in front of everyone: the first serious relationship crisis between the two allies in 20 years.

The Israeli policy of paving over occupied Palestinian territory was never right, and neither did America ever openly support Israel’s policy of barricading the land with housing units. The United States had but two options: either ignore everything or give Israeli actions tacit approval.

Still, it hasn’t been this frosty and frustrating between Israel and the U.S. since the one occasion when then-Secretary of State James Baker reacted to Israeli settlement building by leaving the phone number of the White House switchboard with the Israelis advising them, “When you’re serious about peace, call us.” It wasn’t coincidence that this happened at a historic turning point, in the year 1990.

During the Cold War years, the United States wanted to contain Soviet influence in the Middle East and undertook a search for Arab allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, that was no longer necessary and the United States again tended increasingly toward its long-time ally Israel. In that light, the current fight over Israeli settlement building may be viewed as a long-overdue rebalancing of American Middle East policy. In that sense, the fight now may be seen as symbolically important: a wake-up call to Israel to avoid letting things get too far out of control. There are many who would gladly do that.

Yet a cool and dispassionate examination of the situation results in the conclusion that this is the wrong argument at the wrong time. It doesn’t bring the two parties any closer to the only worthwhile goal, namely, peace. If the United States wants to be the middleman, it first has to shed any preconditions, not pile more of them on. President Obama originally demanded a complete halt to further settlement building, including within the city of Jerusalem and even any expansion within existing settlements. Not even the Palestinians dared go that far with their demands. Obama had hardly formulated his conditions before the Palestinians tried to outdo them. Unintentionally, Obama had raised the barrier to successfully starting negotiations.

If America wants to spar with its ally Israel, it has to have some benefit. The fight has to have a goal and be part of a strategy that will result in a comprehensive peace. A fight over settlements for the sake of settlements leads to a dead end, and that’s exactly where Obama ended up with his unrealistic demands. Prime Minister Netanyahu stood up to him and little Israel forced gigantic America to its knees.

In order to save face, a complicated compromise was reached: Israel agreed to a 10-month moratorium on settlement building. The information released for public consumption made no mention of a freeze in and around the city of Jerusalem. Netanyahu only privately agreed to include the city in the freeze plans, but apparently someone in Israel took exception to this secret arrangement.

At any rate, the quibbling about settlements first made Obama look foolish, and then Netanyahu as well. Both lost some power because of it. Meanwhile, Obama has become the least popular U.S. president in many years and he has lost credibility in Israel as an effective mediator. At the same time, Obama has been thus far unable to stem the Arab loss of confidence in America caused mainly by his predecessor, Bush.

While Obama’s Cairo speech called for a spirit of new partnership with the Muslim world, little has come of it. It was only a speech and not the beginning of any new policy toward the Arab world, with the result that Obama is now seen as a weak negotiator by both sides. He is now in danger of throwing away the credibility needed in the region to accomplish anything constructive.

After the scolding he got from the Americans, Netanyahu is now faced with a decision. He can either endanger the relationship his nation has with its most important ally or endanger his coalition with Israel’s small, ultra-rightist parties. A decision to accede to America’s wishes could well mark the fall of the Netanyahu administration, something America has no interest in doing. Since Menachem Begin’s 1979 treaty with Egypt, it’s known that Israel’s conservatives favor trading land for peace. And, on the other hand, Israel isn’t likely to find better partners for peace on the Palestinian side than Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad. And their time in office will be over someday as well. It’s time now for progress in negotiations, not for new government crises or artificial barriers to agreement.

That being said, time is not on Israel’s side. The Arab camp has noticed that the strategic situation is in flux: America is wavering; things between Turkey and Israel are not going well; and Israel has been caught up in a global crisis of legitimacy ever since the release of the Goldstone report alleging Israeli war crimes in the recent Gaza campaign. The most serious matter is the fact that an Iranian nuclear bomb is now considered inevitable. Iran’s allies (Hezbollah, Hamas and Syria) are content with this analysis since it means they are under no pressure to make a quick peace. They’re certain they can get a better deal tomorrow than they can today. It’s therefore imperative that the United States and Israel not get bogged down in side skirmishes.

A peace agreement in the Middle East would be the least likely but still best antidote to the Iranian threat. If the threat does not lessen, then the right war at the right time may be fought, namely, if Israel wants to attack Iran against the wishes of the United States. If the United States wants to retain future influence over Israel, it dare not waste that influence now.