Foreign Policy Magazine: Israel Could Win This Gaza Battle and Lose the War. An all-out effort is again underway to maintain an unsustainable regional status quo. 以色列可能會贏得這場加薩戰役並輸掉戰爭。 為維持不可持續的地區現狀再次全力以赴.
First, this latest tragedy confirms the bankruptcy of U.S. policy toward the long-standing Israeli-Palestinian conflict. This is not the place for a detailed rehearsal of the ways the United States has mishandled this issue (for excellent accounts, see the books by Galen Jackson, Jerome Slater, Sara Roy, Seth Anziska, and Aaron David Miller), but suffice it to say that U.S. leaders from Richard Nixon to Barack Obama had repeated opportunities to shut this conflict down and failed to do so. They had plenty of help from misguided or inept Israeli and Palestinian leaders, of course, not to mention the potent political opposition from the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and other hard-line elements of the Israel lobby, but that’s only a partial excuse. Instead of acting as an evenhanded mediator and exploiting the enormous leverage at their disposal, both Democratic and Republican administrations bowed to pressure from the lobby, acted like “Israel’s lawyer,” pressed Palestinian leaders to make onerous concessions while giving Israel unconditional support, and turned a blind eye to Israel’s decades-long effort to gobble up the lands supposedly reserved for a future Palestinian state.
Even today, the U.S. government continues to shovel money at Israel and defend it in international forums while insisting that it is committed to a “two-state solution.” Given the “one-state reality” that is apparent to most everyone, I’m still surprised that the press corps doesn’t burst out laughing every time some poor State Department spokesperson invokes that obsolete and utterly meaningless pledge. Why should anyone take the U.S. position on this issue seriously when its declared goals are so disconnected from the actual situation on the ground?
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