The Likud's Power-Logic and Manipulation of US Public Opinion

Handout for Left Forum, NYC, June 4, 2017

by John Davenport

davenport@fordham.edu

The Question: Can an American now legitimately say all of the following?

· I support Israel's founding and continued existence, although not the way that's its land was secured.

· But I absolutely condemn all the settlements built in the West Bank since 1967: it has been illegal since the U.N. Charter (based on the earlier Kellog-Briand pact) for any nation to annex territory, even as a way of punishing the aggressors in an allegedly defensive war (leaving aside the validity of that claim).

· I believe that from its beginning, the Likud party at every major juncture has tried to prevent a final peace settlement with the Palestinians because they knew that such a final settlement would involve giving back occupied lands and increasing the Palestinian population of Israel itself with returnees.

· I also condemn any and all terrorist attacks on Israel, recognizing that indiscriminate attacks on civilians are barbaric, contrary to international law, and to the norms of just war on which the laws are based.

· But the Likud party policies are bad enough to justify some limited form of divestment now, extending at least to businesses run through West Bank settlements and business which aid the occupation.

· I still support a two-state solution, including a permanent Palestinian nation in the West Bank and Gaza, unless (a) Israel offers all Palestinians in these territories full citizenship in Israel; (b) Israel makes the same offer to any Palestinian refugees who wish to return to a combined Israeli-Palestinian state; and (c) the Palestinian authority accepts this offer on behalf of all Palestinians; and (d) the international community creates a fund to help Palestinians within such a system to rebuild, acquire new land within the combined state, and start new businesses, while living free from discrimination.

How the Standard Moderate Position was squeezed out by right-wing Israeli lobbies

As far as I can see, the first four points above summarize the position of most leading U.S. politicians back to Nixon's time, although before the mid-1970s, some contemplated the return of the West Bank to Jordan (an option that I assume is now a dead letter). Such a position is most coherent when

• it recognizes that letting Israel keep any of the West Bank would be to reward the Likud's highly  corrupt (even evil) strategy of trying to create "facts on the ground" and then give back less than half.
• it recognizes that some Palestinian leaders have done terrible things to keep the fight going rather than come to a peace settlement that did not give them absolutely everything they wanted.
• crucially, it emphasizes that one can support Israel's existence without supporting West Bank settlements.

For over 30 years now, since before the Oslo accords, the Likud and other far-right Israeli parties have worked to confuse average Americans, and especially American Jews, with a PR campaign aimed specifically at breaking down this moderate consensus. Their goals in this campaign have been to

(a) To repeat ad nauseam in speeches, editorials, newsletters, mailings to synagogue members etc. phrases that subtly suggest that to "support Israel" requires "supporting the Likud's settlement policy."

-- compare highly offensive Republican party efforts to equate supporting anti-immigrant policies and denying climate change with "supporting America," as if Democrats are by definition unpatriotic.

-- compare Republican efforts to brand even a very modest estate tax as "the death tax."

-- compare Bashir al-Assad's efforts to misconstrue his Sunni opponents in Syria as "all terrorists."

(b) To accuse anyone who makes even small criticisms of the West Bank settlements, or suggests that Israel should give back even a small fraction of the occupied territories, of thereby being "against Israel."

(c) Thus to promote blunt thinking without nuance or distinction among American voters.

(d) To connect with the evangelical side of the Republican party by training them to think that supporting Likud policies is the only way to "support Israel" as a bulwark against rising Islamic threats.

It's been a brilliant PR campaign, one of the most successful corruptions of consciousness in many decades.

Terminology Needed to Explain the Causes of Impasse: points from just war and game theory:

If one reviews mainstream histories, e.g. Charles Smith's widely used textbook, Palestine and the Arab-Israeli Conflict (Bedford/St. Martins, 2010), it becomes clear that so many major agents of change in the process have acted on perverse motives contrary to finding a settlement that is sufficiently just to be sustainable. The most familiar game-theoretic diagnoses have to be expanded to explain the core problems continuing impasse.

1. Ultimatum Game: game theory has come to recognize that cooperation is often blocked, even when it would make both or all main parties better off, because the proposed split of cost and benefits between them is perceived by some as so unjust as to be offensive: it is better to punish those who would take an unfair share by refusing to cooperate. "Divide-the-dollar" or ultimatum games are 'toy models' of this.

    B but it makes the game even harder when it seems like the thief is proposing to split an asset that he stole.

2. Divide and Conquer: of course, even though Israel largely started the 1957 invasion war with Egypt and the 1967 Six-Day War, as early as November 1966, it justified evicting Palestinians and blowing up 125 homes in Samua on the West Bank as retaliation for Fatah raids that were encouraged by the Syrian Baathist regime (Smith, 7th ed., p.273). Thus Jordan's pro-peace king was weakened as Fatah and the PLO ascended; he was further weakened when Israel seized East Jerusalem and the West Bank in 1967 (Smith 285-88). Israel calculated that of the Arab regimes, only Egypt under Nassar and later Sadat was a serious threat that could pressure it to return occupied lands (Smith 325). So it worked to avoid a comprehensive peace plan as advocated by Carter, and succeeded in making a separate peace with Egypt (Smith 350-53).

3. Endless regress of retaliatory claims: ordinarily, distributive equity norms would help divided parties see a fair way to divide the burdens and benefits of proposed cooperation, but resentment from past wrongs makes this much harder: each side presses for rectification of past injustices to get to a fair starting point for bargaining. This has definitely been a major factor on the Palestinian side motivating the PLO to refuse to recognize Israel as a legitimate nation until 1993. But Israel has cynically manipulated this historical issue:

• Starting in 1967, Israel began to justify taking land from Palestinians in East Jerusalem and the West Bank as punishment for past terrorist attacks on Israeli villages or other soft civilians targets (e.g. buses).
• Palestinian groups, who claimed these acts were punishment for past Israeli crimes, then justified later raids and eventually intifada movements and rocket attacks as punishment for Israeli settlements.
• Thus the Likud knew it could keep this cycle going: PM. Begin lied directly to Carter, which he tried to justify with verbal trickery claiming that he had never precisely promised not to build more settlements. When they were built, his party peddled to American supporters the line that this was punishment for continuing Palestinian resistance. Arafat and more radical Palestinians foolishly took the bait every time and launched yet more terrorist attacks, which Israeli governments would use to justify more settlements.
• And so the "who started it" problem became so clouded to most Americans seemed like a bottomless well. Thus a majority of Jewish American voters were slowly persuaded to support keeping some significant amount of the West Bank to punish past Palestinian aggressions (vs the moderate consensus).

My claim is that this was for the most part not a sincere conviction by right-wing Israeli politicians, who knew that annexing land to punish aggression was illegal. It was a deliberate stalling / obfuscation strategy.

4. Moving the Goalpost: another result of this approach was to constantly try to ratchet back American demands from "withdrawal to the pre-1967 borders," to "nearly those borders" (e.g. perhaps taking 5% of the West Bank and some of East Jerusalem), to trading "most of the West Bank for peace," to simply "not building more settlements" (Obama's demand in 2010). So now Likud officials pretend to be enraged at even being asked to "reduce the number of new units" they will build in the next cycle; they construe demands to halt all new settlements as like asking them for the Moon.

• Thus returning even most land under Israeli settlements, let alone all of it, is now so far off the table that we're all supposed to forget that it was the primary demand of American administrations for 50 years.
• This way of continually upping the ante could be compared to mental manipulation of a codependent romantic partner until they feel guilty for asking you to beat them only half as much as you currently do.

5. The 'Buffer Zone' rationalization: after the Six Day war in 1967, Israel resisted the crucial Security Council resolution 242 by constantly saying that it would only retreat to "secure boundaries" (Smith 305).

B This originally meant only keeping some small part of the West Bank, but its meaning has inflated since.

B This is the same as the illegal Soviet justification for taking Eastern European nations in the Cold War.