Sullivan: Pull money out, force the bargaining table

Many moons ago, meaning late 2010, talks broke down between Israel and the Palestinian National… Many moons ago, meaning late 2010, talks broke down between Israel and the Palestinian National Authority over the former’s refusal to continue its freeze on its settlements in the West Bank.

Now statistics have appeared showing that Israeli settlements grew fourfold in 2010. In concrete numbers, that means Israel built 6,794 Jewish-only housing units on Palestinian land, according to the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics. The bureau is the statistical arm of the Palestinian National Authority, providing data measuring Palestinian economic indictors like industrial production and price levels, but people likeSam Mellits of Panthers for Israel dispute the research methods of this organization, charging that it might have an intrinsic bias in reporting.

The freeze on settlement building is a reasonable request. The settlements are in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, which aims to protect civilians living in a war zone,  and were specifically called out as illegal in 2004 by the International Court of Justice in The Hague.

More than this, the settlements are a land grab — an attempt by Israel to install partisans in a land they know is hotly contested so as to increase the veracity of the claim that Israel at its largest is a birthright for Israeli Jews. The British, who caused the whole damn thing in the first place, used a similar tactic in the early 1600s, transplanting Scotch-Irish and British Protestants to Northern Ireland. And as we saw, the transplantation resulted in a bloody, drawn-out conflict known as the Irish Confederate Wars.

Sarah Moawad of Students for Justice in Palestine noted that settlements can be used as a type of group punishment. According to Moawad and several news sources, after the cold-blooded murders of five Israeli settlement dwellers, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu held a special meeting on settlements to allow 500 more units to be built in response. All West Bank Palestinians are being punished for the crimes of a few.

Now that I’ve significantly alienated at least half of my readers, I’ll say this — the Palestinian Authority is just as stubborn, intransigent and wrong as the Israeli government.

It continues to wage a guerrilla campaign against both the Israeli military and civilians, it refuses to make any commitment to peace talks without unconditional terms, and Fatah and Hamas, the two largest factions of Palestinians, continue to fight among themselves.

In fact, the further my research spiraled down the Middle East rabbit hole, the more hopeless I began to feel. The problems that block a path to peace can feel insurmountable. Each party in this situation is obsessed with its own victimization, while in truth they are both aggressors using past injustices to legitimize the injustices they both currently perpetrate. Both sides are bullies. Both sides are wrong.

So what can the United States government do to stop these two groups from beating each other into a pulp and destabilizing an entire region? Well, giving up on a demand for a moratorium on settlements certainly won’t help.

But the U.S. does have a strong bargaining chip in the matter. We give $2.3 billion in military aid to Israel and $400 million in aid to the Palestinian Authority each year. What we must do for as long as these two parties refuse to compromise or talk at all is withdraw all of our financial support. These groups rely on American aid to wage war on each other, and the removal of it — all of it, for both sides — will drive them to the bargaining table faster than any reasoned argument.

What they do when they get to the bargaining table is another question. Both sides have, at one point or another, approved of a two-state solution, but invariably they’ve backpedaled. So unfortunately, we must make obstinacy a thoroughly unpleasant option for both parties.

In either case, why should the American taxpayer be funding both sides of a bloody conflict? Why should we be giving billions of dollars in military aid to the most militarily advanced country in the Middle East or lend millions to an organization that regularly supports terrorist attacks on civilians?

American involvement in this conflict is twisted and cancerous. We must strip it away and begin again.

Such a plan will not be widely supported by Jewish-Americans or Palestinians. It makes sense — they have ties to a side in the fight and do not want to see their side injured in any way.

But here in the U.S. we have a wonderfully rational system in which those who have emotional ties to an issue are not given a larger vote than anyone else. For the same reason that those who lost family in the Sept. 11 attacks should not be allowed to force the government’s hand on the location of an Islamic Community Center in New York City, those who favor compromise only from the other side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict should be ignored while the quest for peace continues.

Everyone wants peace in the Middle East, but demanding unilateral concessions from one side or the other is not a quest for peace — it is a quest for victory. And when both sides act in such a despicable manner, neither deserves victory. Just peace.

Write Brendan at b.james.sullivan@gmail.com.