As the human toll of Israeli military action in Gaza mounts, the Obama Administration continues its cynical endorsement of Israel’s “absolute right” of “self-defense.”<\/p>\n
Earlier this week, Flynt appeared on RT\u2019s CrossTalk<\/i> to discuss the Gaza crisis; see here<\/a> or here<\/a> (YouTube). Over the weekend, Hillary went on MSNBC\u2019s Melissa Harris-Parry<\/i> (on both Saturday and Sunday) to discuss the Gaza crisis (see here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>), as well as the West\u2019s mounting tensions with Russia over Ukraine (see here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>) and the extension of the P5+1 nuclear talks with Iran (see here<\/a>). We highlight below some themes discussed.<\/p>\n The Gaza Crisis, International Law, and the Road to a One-State Solution<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n Among various substantive points in the CrossTalk<\/i> episode on which Flynt appeared, the discussion was distinguished by one of the other guests – Martin van Creveld, a well-known Israeli military historian at Hebrew University – yelling at Flynt to \u201cshut up\u201d and then storming off the set, all within the first nine minutes of the program. Flynt\u2019s apparent offense was to challenge Prof. van Creveld\u2019s assertion that Israel is no longer occupying Gaza.<\/p>\n Flynt noted that, while Israel withdrew soldiers and settlers from inside Gaza in 2005, it continues to control – strictly and severely – Gaza\u2019s air, land, and sea access to the world; thus, \u201cunder international law, Israel is still occupying Gaza.\u201d (For analyses on this important point, see – for starters – here<\/a>, here<\/a>, and here<\/a>.) For Prof. van Creveld or anyone else to claim otherwise is, literally, to \u201creinvent international law\u201d – and not in a positive or legitimate way.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n As Hillary explains on Melissa Harris-Parry<\/i>, international law has much broader relevance to the Gaza crisis:<\/p>\n \u201cThere is a legal solution, which [the United States] has repeatedly blocked at the United Nations, and that is to allow the state of Palestine to sign up to, to adhere to the International Criminal Court. Samantha Power, our ambassador there, has said publicly, she has made it her number one priority, every month, to meet with international institutions to block the entry of the state of Palestine to get legal protection. Legal protection would constrain American power, would constrain Israeli power, and that\u2019s why we oppose it\u2026<\/p>\n There is this body of international law that came out of World War II, came out of the persecution of the Jewish people. There is a body of international law that was instituted, that was created with the U.S. hand, with Europeans, so that this would never happen to another people again. Th[e Palestinians] are a protected civilian population under occupation; that\u2019s the law. The United States should get out of the way.\u201d<\/p>\n Politically, too, there is a way forward, as Hillary lays out:<\/p>\n \u201cWe don\u2019t talk about it because we demonize [HAMAS] as a terrorist organization that can\u2019t possibly have a sane idea, but what they have put on the table is a ten-year ceasefire with Israel, in exchange for Israel lifting the siege of the civilian population in Gaza, with an internationally supervised airport and seaport\u2026That is a critically important contribution to conflict resolution.\u201d<\/p>\n However, as Hillary underlines, this runs up against both Israeli and American strategic preferences:<\/p>\n \u201cThe Israelis want to manage occupation, they want to manage a siege. The Palestinians don\u2019t want that. It\u2019s as simple as that. I\u2019ve been to Gaza several times, as a student, as a U.S. official, as a U.S. diplomat. It is, under the best of circumstances, a horrific place to live. No one wants to live there. The vast majority of the population are refugees, without clean water, without health care, without basic necessities. They don\u2019t want a siege. What HAMAS is offering is to change that situation, to change that dynamic.<\/p>\n The problem is that, for the United States and Israel, we would prefer to have the management of conflict, to have the management of an occupation. We don\u2019t really want to see a resolution of this. That\u2019s why the Middle East peace process has always failed – because we don\u2019t really want a two-state solution, we don\u2019t want the constraint of Israeli and American power in the Middle East.\u201d<\/p>\n And that, Flynt argues, puts the parties and the rest of the world on the road toward a one-state solution to the Palestinian conflict:<\/p>\n \u201cIsrael essentially has no strategy for dealing with the Palestinian problem. It is committed to open-ended occupation. We are already at a point where the number of Arabs living under Israeli control exceeds the population of Israeli Jews, which means that what we call the state of Israel is already a minority regime in the areas that it controls. And as long as Israel continues this open-ended occupation of Arab populations, it is going to face resistance, it is going to face violence. HAMAS is not some foreign force imposed on Israel; it is a home-grown resistance movement. Until Israel – and I think this would require, basically, an utter recasting of the Israeli state – until Israel is prepared to stop being an occupying power, this is what it is going to suffer, and it is increasingly going to delegitimate itself in the process\u2026<\/p>\n That is what Israel has brought on itself. The two-state solution is, at this point, in my view, effectively dead, and we are on what is going to turn out, I think, to be a very, very slow, very, very bloody, very painful but ultimately inevitable trajectory toward a one-state solution.\u201d<\/p>\n In this context, it may be worth noting that, this year, July 25 will be Qods Day.<\/p>\n Ukraine and American Policy Toward Russia<\/b><\/span><\/p>\n Hillary linked the current debate over how to deal with Russia to the American political class\u2019s eager embrace of the George W. Bush administration\u2019s \u201cfraudulent case\u201d for invading Iraq just over a decade ago:<\/p>\n \u201cThis is the bipartisan failure of our political class, that we buy into over and over again, based on assumptions of who we deem to be the bad guy\u2026The foreign policy elite in the United States have acted, from day one after the collapse of the Soviet Union, like we defeated Russia, and we\u2019ve acted that way ever since. What Putin represents is a rise to that attitude, that we defeated them. We have basically no response – there is no endgame in trying to bring Putin down, to bring Russia down. We\u2019ve tried that in Iraq, in Libya, in Syria, and it has failed. And now we\u2019re taking it to the doorsteps of one of the world\u2019s historic superpowers, a power with nuclear weapons, a cyber army, dollars, and oil. This is not going to turn out well for us\u2026<\/p>\n This is about Russia\u2019s reemergence to power and its challenge to the United States. It really does need to be dealt with on a Russian-American level, where there is an assurance that we will not encourage, support, or in any way facilitate – for Ukraine or any of these other countries close to Russia – their entrance into NATO. That is the red line for Putin, and if we could do that, that opens the door to conflict resolution. Everything else is noise.\u201d<\/p>\n Flynt Leverett is professor of international affairs at Pennsylvania State University\u2019s School of International Affairs. Hillary Mann Leverett teaches US foreign policy at American University and is CEO of STRATEGA, a political risk consultancy. They are both retired national security professionals, Flynt of the CIA, State Department and National Security Council; Hillary of the State Department, National Security Council and US mission to the United Nations. They are co-authors of <\/em>Going to Tehran: Why the United States Must Come to Terms with the Islamic Republic of Iran<\/a>. Visit their website<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As the human toll of Israeli military action in Gaza mounts, the Obama Administration continues its cynical endorsement of Israel’s “absolute right” of “self-defense.” Earlier this week, Flynt appeared on RT\u2019s CrossTalk to discuss the Gaza crisis; see here or here (YouTube). Over the weekend, Hillary went on MSNBC\u2019s Melissa Harris-Parry (on both Saturday and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":201,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-23903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"meta_box":{"disable_donate_message":"","custom_donate_message":"","subtitle":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/201"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23903"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23903\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23905,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23903\/revisions\/23905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23903"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.antiwar.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=23903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}