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Can money really heal the Holy Land?

Published on 27 March 2013, by M. Tomazy.
by Ruth Mickaelson
President Barack Obama’s first state visit to Israel and the West Bank was remarkable in the enormous effort by the administration to make as little verbal impact as possible. Several commentators, such as Daniel Levy writing in Foreign Policy, argued that Obama’s big closing speech at the Jerusalem Convention Centre did not fully address the task at hand by “making one speech and then hoping that the Israeli public will do the rest of the work”.

Obama may have stood on the tarmac at Ben Gurion and said that “peace must come to the Holy Land”, as well as using his Jerusalem speech to highlight the ways in which settlement activity hinders the two-state solution.
But the switch in rhetoric from careful criticism (in his 2009 speech in Cairo) to unequivocal support for Israel played up for the cameras during this visit signals that the president has been backed into a corner when it comes to direct criticism of the Netanyahu government and its policies: a deviation from fawning praise could come back to haunt the Democrats during the next US election. While the US government’s policies have remained unshakeably pro-Israeli throughout the past decades, Israel’s own policy has shifted beneath them, meaning that the geopolitical model the United States declares that it wants to see is increasing impossibility.

The United States has already earmarked $3.1 billion in Foreign Military Financing (FMF) for Israel for 2013. This money will finance the Iron Dome missile defence system as well as the new Arrow III system, leaving the Israeli government economic breathing space to concentrate on other projects, notably settlement building. Despite the success of the Yesh Atid (There is a Future) party in the recent January 2013 election, indicating that large swathes of the Israeli public did not want a hard-right government, the process of coalition building has pulled Yesh Atid rightwards, anchoring the entire coalition in the process.

The result is a government that has declared its policy on settlements to be a continuation of that of the previous Netanyahu coalition, under whose leadership West Bank settlements grew by an estimated 8,730 in the West Bank alone — and over 10,000 in East Jerusalem. The Israeli watchdog Peace Now estimates that during Netanyahu’s last term, 3.4 billion shekels (roughly $1 billion) was spent, in the words of the Israeli Central Bureau of Statistics, on “surplus funding to settlements, funding that would not have been spent if the settlers were living inside Israel proper.”

The US president opened his speech in Ramallah by saying: “I’ve returned to the West Bank because the United States is deeply committed to the creation of an independent and sovereign state of Palestine.” And the US transferred almost $500 million to the Palestinian Authority on the last day of his visit. This money does little to ensure that “peace must come to the Holy Land”. Rather, it will allow the heavily indebted Palestinian Authority (PA) to pay the long overdue civil servants’ wages in Ramallah, to keep West Bank residents from coming out onto the streets in protest. Although the PA does operate in a limited capacity in the Gaza Strip, it seems unlikely that Gaza will feel the effects of this new revenue.

Moreover, Obama’s visit and a lessening of the PA’s financial crisis have done much to drive away any prospect of a unity deal between Hamas and Fatah, which had finally seemed on the horizon following the Israel-Hamas ceasefire of November 2012. In the long term, few may dispute that “peace must come to the Holy Land”, but this cannot happen without Gazan involvement, and that means an entirely new US strategy. That looks far from emerging.

The only development from Obama’s visit that looks like having a lasting impact in the region is the restoration of ties between Israel and Turkey, sweeping to one side Turkish prime minister Erdogan’s earlier comments on Zionism. Private trade between the two nations for the first three months of 2012 was valued at $1 billion, (an increase in the same period from 2011, valued at $770 million). But renewed friendly relations signal a return to the previously booming arms trade between the two countries.

Turkish support for Gaza during the last Israeli attack in November 2012 had been viewed as a landmark, part of a fresh level of regional support for Gaza and the Palestinians as a whole. But the restoration of relations between Israel and Turkey — a sign that the US needs peace between the two nations in light of events in Syria — weakens potential regional pushback against Israel during the next inevitable Gaza war. During the Tuesday session of the Arab League Summit, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu went to great lengths to reassure that Turkey intends to use renewed relations with Israel as “leverage”. Yet the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz quoted a senior Turkish diplomatic source as saying Erdogan is now under pressure from the US not to make a planned visit to the West Bank and Gaza, considering the possibility of a “high profile” Israeli visit to Ankara instead.

The clustering of US influence and focus away from Gaza suggests that the next Intifada looks more likely to originate in the Strip, which is fighting to be heard above the din around settlements and better US-Israel relations. This opens the door to increased Qatari funding of Hamas, as well as financing by private investors from the Gulf and Iran for Gaza’s militant groups, to ensure Gaza is not ignored for long.

Obama may speak of the need for peace, but US policy suggests it will be no more than business as usual.

(Le Monde diplomatique)