Why Israel Says No to Peacekeepers?
“Has Nazism become the sole norm by which Jews judge evil, so that anything that is not its exact duplicate is considered by us morally acceptable? Is that what the Holocaust has done to Jewish moral sensibility?”
– Irena Klepfisz, author of Dreams of an Insomniac
Since the beginning of the current Al-Aqsa Intifada in last September, Palestinians have been demanding an international peacekeeping force be sent to the occupied territories of West Bank and Gaza. During the same time, Israel adamantly rejected any international peacekeeping force. Israel’s permanent Ambassador to the United Nations said that a U.N. force was unacceptable and it “had not been envisaged in earlier peace accords”. Former U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke said the U.S. would oppose any force as long as Israel rejects it. Since then, the Clinton administration and the current Bush administration have helped Israel to defeat Palestinian attempts at the United Nations to win Security Council approval for the idea.
Why does Israel continue to oppose the idea of having an international peacekeeping force in the occupied territories? Why does Israel object to a peacekeeping force that could monitor the cease-fire and help reduce the level of violence in the area?
Israel currently receives about US $3 billion a year in US foreign aid and out of this, about 60% is military hardware like Apache attack helicopters and F-16 fighter planes that are currently being employed by Israel to suppress the current Palestinian uprising. On top of the US $3 billion, Israel has received more than US $66 billion in grants and US $15 billion in loans since 1949. What will be the effects of having monitors on the ground have on this aid? The peacekeepers will witness what the Palestinians have been experiencing for decades – the brutal oppression by a colonial occupying force. They will witness the humiliation suffered by the Palestinians daily. They will see how Palestinian homes are being bulldozed to make room for the “natural growth” of the Jewish settlements, how degradingly the Palestinians are being stopped and questioned on a regular basis by the Israeli army and police, how unarmed Palestinians are being shot and killed in violation of the fourth Geneva Convention, how Palestinian towns, roads, schools and universities are being closed, and most importantly, how the Palestinians are being denied their most basic and fundamental human rights.
The peacekeepers on the ground might do what the major US media have not, that is, they might actually let the world know what is actually happening in the occupied territories. Imagine what an average tax-paying American will do, if he finds out that his government is actually giving billions of dollars every year to a country that has openly defied almost every U.N. resolutions against its treatment of the Palestinians and has abused almost every known human rights law. A person in his right mind will demand his government to stop sending aid immediately, as US law explicitly prohibits aid to countries in gross violations of human rights. In fact, the US government will be forced by its own citizens to enact an economic sanction against Israel, not unlike the one imposed upon South Africa during its apartheid days. Israel can not and will not allow this to happen. Without this military aid, Israel will no longer be able to do what it’s so freely doing now – the continued oppressive occupation of the Palestinian territories and the use of deadly force against civilian populations.
By just the mere presence of the peacekeepers, Israel might not be able to wontedly inflict brutality the way they are so used to doing with impunity. But it remains to be seen whether Colin Powell’s recent backing of the plan to place outside monitors in the occupied territories is a reversal of the past and present US policies. Without the strong backing of the U.S. in sending a peacekeeping force, Israel will continue to say no.
