Foreign Policy| America Is a Root Cause of Israel and Palestine’s Latest War

The writer considered that the leaders of the United States showed that they lack the wisdom and objectivity to achieve positive results (French)

An article in the American magazine Foreign Policy criticized the United States as a major cause of the war currently taking place between Israel and Palestine. Writer Stephen Walt began his article by saying that at a time when Israelis and Palestinians are mourning their dead and awaiting news of the missing now, the tendency to search for someone to blame is impossible for many to resist.

The Israelis and their supporters want to blame the Islamic Resistance Movement (Hamas) for everything. Those sympathetic to the Palestinian cause see the tragedy as the inevitable result of Israel's decades of occupation and prolonged cruel treatment of Palestinians. Others insist that there is too much blame, and that anyone who sees one side as completely innocent and the other solely responsible has lost any capacity for fair judgment.

The writer Walt believes that it is inevitable that the debate over which of the direct parties is most responsible will obscure other important causes that are not closely related to the long conflict between Zionist Israelis and Palestinian Arabs. However, we should not lose sight of these other factors even during the current crisis, because their effects may continue to reverberate long after the current fighting has stopped.

Walt focused on 5 of the critical events that he believed helped lead to the tragic events of the past two weeks.

Gulf War

He considered the Gulf War in 1991 to be the beginning, in addition to its repercussions represented by the Madrid Peace Conference, when the United States emerged as an undisputed external power in the affairs of the Middle East, and began trying to build a regional system that served its interests.

Although Madrid did not produce tangible results, let alone a final peace agreement, it laid the foundation for a serious attempt to build a peaceful regional order. But it also contained an ominous flaw that sowed the seeds of much trouble in the future.

Iran was not invited to participate in the conference, and responded to its exclusion by organizing a meeting of “rejection” forces and communicating with Palestinian groups - including Hamas and Islamic Jihad - that it had previously ignored. This is what I consider a strategic response on Tehran’s part, not an ideological one, meaning that it sought to prove to the United States and others that it can obstruct their efforts to create a new regional order, if its interests are not taken into account.

The second critical event was the fateful combination of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks and the subsequent US invasion of Iraq in 2003, where the decision to invade was only tangentially related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, despite Baath Party-era Iraq supporting the Palestinian cause in several ways.

The “Abraham” normalization agreement was signed in the White House Government Press Office and circulated to the media for publication

The writer saw that the signing of the “Abraham” normalization agreement in the White House had unfortunate effects (Al Jazeera)

What resulted, unfortunately, was a costly quagmire in Iraq and a significant improvement in Iran's strategic position. This shift in the balance of power in the Gulf alarmed Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, and perceptions of the shared threat from Iran began to reshape regional relations in important ways, including by changing the relations of some Arab countries with Israel.

In hindsight, the third major event at the time was US President Donald Trump's fateful abandonment of the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action on the nuclear issue with Iran and his adoption of a "maximum pressure" policy instead.

Abraham Accords

This foolish decision, according to the writer, had many unfortunate effects, as abandoning the Joint Plan of Action allowed Iran to restart its nuclear program, and the “maximum pressure” campaign led to Iran attacking oil shipments and facilities in the Gulf and Saudi Arabia, which exacerbated the problem.

The fourth development was what was called the “Abraham Accords,” which critics pointed out did relatively little to advance the cause of peace because none of the participating Arab governments were hostile to Israel or capable of harming it. Others warned that regional peace would remain elusive as long as the fate of 7 million Palestinians living under Israeli control remained unresolved.

The fifth factor is not a single event, but rather the constant failure of the United States to successfully end the so-called “peace process.” Washington has monopolized oversight of the peace process since the Oslo Accords, and its various efforts have led nowhere in the end.

The writer commented that, unfortunately for the United States, these five events and their impact on the region provide powerful ammunition for an opportunist stance (as Russian President Vladimir Putin was quick to point out last week).

He concluded his article by saying that there is no security for Israel and no security or justice for the Palestinians. This is what we gain when we let Washington run everything. Whatever their intentions, US leaders have shown us time and again that they lack the wisdom and objectivity to achieve positive results, not even for themselves.