John Kerry’s Big Lie and the US’s Opposition to the Two-State Solution

Introduction

On December 23, 2016, the UN Security Council adopted Resolution 2334 condemning Israel’s illegal settlement activities in the West Bank. The last time such a resolution came before the Council for a vote, on February 18, 2011, the US vetoed it. This time, the Obama administration abstained, and on December 28, Secretary of State John Kerry gave a much anticipated speech in which he outlined six principles underlining US policy toward the Israel-Palestine conflict. While Kerry characterized this US policy as being supportive of the two-state solution, properly deciphered, his speech demonstrates how US policy is aimed at blocking that goal.

The administration has come under fire for abstaining from the vote, rather than vetoing the resolution, from apologists for Israel’s crimes against the Palestinians, which includes most members of the US Congress. Former US Ambassador to the UN John Bolton described it as “Obama’s Parting Betrayal of Israel” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, a move “clearly intended to tip the peace process toward the Palestinians.” That is, to try to resolve the conflict by applying international law works against Israel’s interests, since Israel perpetually violates it.

Israeli officials, including Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, had also blasted the Obama administration for not vetoing the resolution, similarly characterizing it is a betrayal. In fact, it is predominantly because of Netanyahu’s own actions that the Obama administration was put in a position where it had no political leverage left to be able to use its veto to protect Israel from accountability for its crimes.

In 2011, for example, the US tried to justify its veto on the grounds that the resolution was “one-sided” since it didn’t also criticize the Palestinians; this time, the drafters includes language condemning terrorism and incitement to violence so the US could no longer employ that argument. That and a conglomeration of other factors forced the US to abstain simply because it was not politically feasible for it to use its veto and still sustain the illusion that its policy is one of opposition to Israel’s settlements.

The biggest factor in that equation is how Netanyahu explicitly rejected the two-state solution in March 2015 to get reelected, and how his government has escalated settlement construction and demolitions of Palestinian homes and other structures in the occupied West Bank. In 2011, in the Obama administration’s calculation, it could veto the resolution and still maintain some measure of credibility for the so-called “peace process”. This time, under the new circumstances, to exercise its veto would fully expose the US as supportive of Israel’s illegal settlement activities and completely undermine what little credibility the “peace process” might have left in the eyes of the world’s governments.

John Kerry therefore had two major goals for his speech: one, to try to maintain the credibility of the so-called “peace process”, which is the process by which Israel and its superpower benefactor have long blocked implementation of the two-state solution; and, two, to try once more to communicate to the Israeli government that its actions were rendering it politically impossible for the US to do so.

Unravelling the Mythology on Israel’s Origin

John Kerry opened his speech by expressing that US policy was premised on the belief that “the two-state solution is the only way to achieve a just and lasting peace between Israelis and Palestinians” and “the only way to ensure Israel’s future as a Jewish and democratic state”.

He further prefaced the six principles by expressing, accurately, how “No American administration has ever done more for Israel’s security than Barack Obama’s”—the word “security” being a standard euphemism relating to the sustainment of Israel’s occupation regime, including an agreement on “an historic $38 billion” in military aid, used by Israel to sustain its oppression of the Palestinians.

The crux of the matter, in the view of the Obama administration, is that Israelis and Palestinians “can choose to live together in one state, or they can separate into two states. But here is a fundamental reality: if the choice is one state, Israel can either be Jewish or democratic—it cannot be both, and it won’t ever really be at peace. Moreover, the Palestinians will never fully realize their vast potential in a homeland of their own with a one-state solution.”

This formulation reveals several key aspects of US policy, once deciphered. First is the significance of the stress placed on maintaining Israel as a “Jewish and democratic” state. To understand this significance, one has to realize how the “Jewish state” actually came into being in the first place: through the ethnic cleansing of 700,000 Arabs from their homes in Palestine. This is a reality Kerry went to lengths to avoid acknowledging during his speech.

His explanation of the origins of the conflict followed the standard mythology: In 1947, “United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181”—the famous “partition plan” resolution—“finally paved the way to making the State of Israel a reality.” While the Jews accepted this resolution (and the US “recognized Israel seven minutes after its creation”), “the Palestinians and the Arab world did not, and from its birth, Israel had to fight for its life. Palestinians also suffered terribly in the 1948 war, including many who had lived for generations in a land that had long been their home too. And when Israel celebrates its 70th anniversary in 2018, the Palestinians will mark a very different anniversary: 70 years since what they call the Nakba, or catastrophe.”

(Completely disconnected from the origins of Israel, John Kerry later in his speech outlined the US’s six principles, one of them being a “just” solution for the Palestinian refugee problem. He offered no hint of how this refugee problem came into being, apart from his vague earlier acknowledgment of how “Palestinians also suffered terribly in the 1948 war”.)

Unravelling historical reality from mythology, here is what John Kerry was talking about:

In 1947, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution that endorsed a plan to partition Palestine that was premised upon the explicit rejection of the right of Palestinians to self-determination.

This plan had been drawn up by a special committee that had reasoned that the Arabs must not be allowed to exercise self-determination because that would be contrary to the Zionists’ goal of establishing in the place of Palestine a “Jewish state”—a goal that had the support of the US, Great Britain, and other Western governments.

At the time, the Arabs were a two-thirds majority and owned more land than Jews in every single district in Palestine, including Jaffa (which included the main Jewish population center of Tel Aviv). While the Zionist leadership fully exploited feudalistic Ottoman land laws to “legally” expropriate land from the Arab peasants who had long lived on and worked it, the Jewish community by 1948 had managed to acquire only about 7 percent of the land in Palestine. The racist and colonialist partition plan, in support of the Zionist project of expropriating and displacing Arabs from the land, called for the “Jewish state” to be comprised of about 55 percent of the land, leaving the Arabs with only about 44 percent of Palestine for their own state.

The Arabs naturally and reasonably rejected the racist plan, and since the UN had no authority to partition Palestine against the will of a majority of its inhabitants (a point explicitly acknowledged during an Assembly meeting by the US Ambassador to the UN), the only way forward for the Zionists to achieve their dream was to use force.

When Kerry says Israel had to “fight for its life” from birth, he is alluding to the standard mythology that the Arab states launched a genocidal war to wipe Israel off the map simply out of their hatred for the Jews. This refers to how the neighboring Arab states militarily intervened following the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of Israel’s existence on May 14, 1948, by which time Zionist forces had ethnically cleansed 300,000 Arabs from their homes. By the time it was over, 700,000 Arabs had been “cleansed” from the land, and the Zionists had conquered considerable territory well beyond that proposed for the “Jewish state” under the partition plan, amounting to about 78 percent of the former territory of Palestine.

Hence the Palestinians’ description of the events of 1948 as “al Nakba”, or “the Catastrophe”, which refers not, as the standard mythology would have us believe, to the founding of Israel per se, but to the ethnic cleansing by which the “Jewish state” came into being.

By unravelling the mythology, we can decipher John Kerry’s euphemistic language to get at the underlying meaning of US policy.

So what does it mean for Israel to remain “a Jewish and democratic state”? Actually, it’s not only that Israel should remain “Jewish”, but that the Palestinians must recognize its “right to exist” as such—Kerry reiterated the US and Israel’s demand that the Palestinians recognize Israel’s “right to exist”, criticized the Palestinians for questioning “the right of a Jewish state to exist”, and noted that “Recognition of Israel as a Jewish state has been the US position for years”. (Note that it’s not enough that “the PLO formally recognized Israel” more than two decades ago, as Kerry also noted in his speech.) So what does that all mean?

Well, havening unraveled the mythology, we can see that this means that the Palestinians must accept that the Zionists’ unilateral declaration of Israel’s existence and the ethnic cleansing by which it came into being were legitimate.

It follows that the Palestinians must accept as a precondition for any negotiations under the “peace process” that the Palestinian leadership must renounce the internationally recognized right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homeland.