Israeli Settlements

The Obama administration recently ruffled a lot of feathers by failing to veto a UN resolution in the Security Council that condemns Israel’s growing number of settlements in Eastern Jerusalem and the West Bank. A lot of people are questioning why the Obama Administration would do such a thing now, when we have a new administration coming into office in just a few weeks that is showing signs of being the most pro-Israeli administration in history. That’s a fairly good question as it turns out; Why now?

The answer is probably a combination of several different factors. First off, there is a lot of pressure of US allies to solve this issue as it is not a static problem. It’s worth taking a look at the nations on the UN council that voted for the resolution. These countries did not abstain and allow the resolution to pass they voted for it and adamantly and completely support it. Britain, China, Russia, France, Egypt, Japan, Uruguay, Spain, Ukraine, and New Zealand all voted for the measure. In other words, three of our most powerful allies voted for the resolution. I don’t think anyone would suggest that Britain, France, China, and Russia are all conspiring to punish Israel for ideological reasons as the last two are pretty much ideological opposites of the first two. In other words, almost all of the rest of the civilized world believes that continuing to build settlements in areas that no one including Israel believes they own is a thoroughly bad idea.

The fact is that Israel has built settlements for some 600,000 Israeli settlers in these two areas WHILE they were under constant condemnation of the rest of the civilized world to stop doing so. There have been well over 100,000 Israelis installed in settlements where the rightful owners were forcefully displaced since the Obama Administration came into office. Israel has so far been found to be in direct violation of UN Security Council Resolutions over this same issue no less than 28 times. Israel does not own East Jerusalem nor the West Bank. They are legally lands under direct UN control at the moment but everyone agrees and has agreed that they are not Israeli property since the very beginning of Israel’s existence.

Israel controls the West Bank and East Jerusalem and is illegally dispossessing the legal owners of property, demolishing the existing homes in both locations forcefully and then building settlements for Israeli citizens. They have been doing this for a very long time. Meanwhile, the legal owners of the land in the West Bank are denied citizenship in Israel, voting rights, freedom to conduct business, and freedom to move about.

The resolution also strongly condemns acts of terror against innocent civilians and inflammatory rhetoric on both sides as it aims towards building a consensus for a permanent solution to the continuing problems in East Jerusalem and the occupied West Bank.

Meanwhile, president elect Donald Trump is attempting to work on policy decisions before he is installed in office by directly calling other UN members and urging them to drop this resolution before it was brought forth. Trump has appointed David Friedman, a bankruptcy lawyer and open advocate of Israel, as his new ambassador to Israel. Trump has also promised to move the US Embassy to Jerusalem in Israel which is a blatant violation of existing UN doctrine that the US helped put in place when Israel was recognized as an independent nation. The fact that Jerusalem does not belong to Israel is one that is unquestioned in international law nor anywhere else except perhaps in the narrow little brains of Donald Trump and David Friedman. Friedman has also publicly supported increased Israeli settlements in both areas mentioned in the UN resolution just passed. He is widely known to be considerably more hawkish and further to right than even the most right wing leaders in Israel itself. It remains to be seen just how foolish Trump and Friedman statements will become in the future but judging from what they have said so far he may very well touch off a war in Israel and the middle-east if he keeps going down the present path over what is completely settled international law according to every other nation in the world.

To get back to the question of why now I suppose there are a lot of possible answers. However, the most important one in my opinion and one that we should be demanding an answer to is why we didn’t do this long before now. I would suggest that instead of a weak kneed abstention from voting for this resolution, why have we not demanded that Israel stop building these settlements long ago? Everyone else in the world understands that this land does not belong to Israel, that they have no legal right to it, and that they are forcefully bulldozing the houses and businesses of the people it does belong to so that they can install Israeli citizens in their place. This is not a new thing. It has been going on for many, many years under the singular protection of the US Government whose veto power on the Security Council has protected Israel for many years.

Why has the US government itself not demanded that Israel cease and desist this activity? We have given the Israeli government over 130 Billion dollars in aid since 1949. We have averaged giving them 3.6 Billion dollars a year since 2001; WHILE they have continuously carried out this illegal and contemptible policy. WHY?