Peace and Justice Post

Joel Brinkley | San Francisco Chronicle, Sunday, June 14, 2009

It’s a familiar story: An exceeding popular president with a strong electoral mandate decides soon after taking office that, to advance Middle East peace efforts, he must push Israel to freeze construction of Jewish settlements in the West Bank.

“The most significant action Israel could take to demonstrate good faith,” the president says, “would be a settlement freeze.”

As soon as he voices the idea, Israel’s prime minister publicly refuses. Within weeks, reporters discover that settlers are putting up even more new West Bank homes, in defiance of the president’s request. The White House expresses irritation, and the matter passes.

The episode just described took place in 1983, early in the Reagan administration. But look at the early years of almost any administration over the past 30 years, and you’ll discover a similar effort and similar disappointing results. President Jimmy Carter was an outspoken critic of settlements. Shortly after leaving office, he declared: “Settlements are illegal and an obstacle to peace.” At that time, 23,000 Israeli Jews lived in West Bank settlements.

Now it’s President Obama’s turn. “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements,” Obama told an appreciative audience in Cairo this month. “The construction violates previous agreements.”

Well, Mr. President, I wish you luck. You’ll need it.

Why can’t the president of the United States, who authorizes an annual gift to Israel of at least $3 billion, persuade any Israeli government left, right or centrist to stop building settlements? The settlements violate international law, and Israel has agreed, more than once, to freeze settlement growth. The European Union, the United Nations and many other individual states have all inveighed against settlements. No other nation anywhere in the world endorses Israel’s settlement policy. In fact, the majority of Israelis disapprove of continued settlement expansion. And so it has always been.

After Reagan left office, President George H.W. Bush made settlement expansion his signature issue with Israel. At that time, tens of thousands of Soviet Jews were emigrating to Israel, and Jerusalem asked Washington for a $10 billion housing loan.

Bush said repeatedly that Israel would not get the money until it froze settlements. But the prime minister then, Yitzhak Shamir, didn’t even seem troubled.

“Settlement in every part of the country continues and will continue,” Shamir said with his characteristic nonchalant shrug. “They try to link the two things, but no one said aid will end. I don’t think it will happen.”

And he was right. Bush finally relented, late in the 1992 election campaign, when the president feared he could lose the election because he had so angered American Jews and their political allies. And, of course, he did lose.

Shortly after President Bill Clinton took office, in 1993, he cut the loan guarantee by almost 25 percent because Israel was once again refusing to stop new settlement construction. By then, 10 years after Reagan’s effort, 112,000 Israeli Jews lived in the West Bank. After the Oslo Peace Accords in 1993, Israel more or less stopped building new settlements but aggressively expanded existing ones.

President George W. Bush, chastened by his father’s loss to Clinton in 1992, chose not to make much of the settlement issue. The White House called the settlements “unhelpful,” and its “road map” for peace called for a settlement freeze. But when Bush took office 177,000 Israeli Jews lived in the West Bank. When he left, the number approached 300,000.

This month, Obama said “part of being a good friend is being honest” with Israel. Well, I would argue that Carter was honest. So were Reagan, Bush and Clinton. On the settlement issue, it did no good.

A week or so ago, TV news recorded Israeli security officers tearing down an illegal settlement outpost in the West Bank. That tape got a lot of air play. No one was there with a camera that same evening, NPR reported, when settlers came back and put up even more buildings.

Perhaps Obama will be able to do what none of his predecessors has. Maybe he can persuade Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to freeze settlements and to make peace with the Palestinians. Maybe, though I doubt it. The political costs of following through are too high, and the Israelis know that.

Obama does at least seem to be aware of the risks. Asked this month what the president might do if Israel ignored his request, a White House official pointedly noted that holding back loan guarantees “is not under discussion.”

Joel Brinkley is a professor of journalism at Stanford University and a former foreign policy correspondent for the New York Times. To comment to him, e-mail brinkley@foreign-matters.com. Contact us at forum@sfchronicle.com.