I am reading Robert Fisk’s monster The Great War for Civilisation, a history of the Middle East in the past half century. He has lived in Beirut for over three decades and is the Middle East correspondent for The Independent.

It is unfortunate that no newspaper carries his reports and columns which are full of so much more knowledge than anything written by other reporters in the Middle East. The man was the first Western journalist to interview Osama bin Laden, which he’s done a few times, speaks fluent Arabic (something that a shocking few Western journalists can do), and has spent the past decades reporting from the overthrow of the Shah, to Desert Storm to the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

The title is in reference to World War I, which Fisk’s father fought in as a British soldier, and played a huge part in his upbringing. His father used to take him around the battlefields in England and France and Germany when Fisk was a child. In his adulthood he has spent his days reporting from Northern Ireland, the Balkans, and the Middle East. All the trouble in these regions derives heavily from his father’s war and the Balfour Declaration (the support of a Jewish state in Palestine) and the treaty of Versailles, which divided up and created the all three of the regions where Fisk has worked, and especially the Middle East.

In light of VP Biden’s visit to Israel and the “untimely” announcement of another settlement, I find Fisk’s words about Benjamin Netanyahu particularly interesting. Here, Clinton was trying to salvage what was left with his “peace” deal (the Wye agreement) part of the utter failure of Oslo in the late 90s.

At an autumn 1998 private dinner party in the White House with junior members of the Jordanian royal family, President Clinton unburdened himself of a few thoughts on Benjamin Netanyahu [who was Prime Minister then too]… “I am the most pro-Israeli president since Truman,” he announced to his guests. “But the problem with Bibi [Netanyahu] is that he cannot recognize the humanity of the Palestinians.” Stripped of its false humility—Clinton was surely more pro-Israel than ruman—the president had put his finger on Netanyahu’s most damaging flaw: his failure to regard the Palestinians as fellow humans, his conviction that they are no more than a subject people. This characteristic comes across equally clearly in his book A Place Among the Nations, which might have been written by a colonial governor. Clinton got it right. He understood the psychological defect that lay at the heart not just of Netanyahu’s policies but of the whole Netanyahu government. (436).

Of course, coverage of the announcement and subsequent reaction from the Obama administration has barely reached infantile levels. Hillary Clinton tries to talk tough to the press while giving a speech to AIPAC reassuring Israel that our security interests are one in the same. Netanyahu was in Washington this week where he was expected to apologize (for the untimely announcement of the settlements, not for the fact that the settlements are illegal and in violation of UN Resolutions 194, 242, 338 among others as well as the 4^th Geneva Conventions which calls any colonization in an occupied territory an illegal act and a war crime.) He was apparently going to use the opportunity to pressure Obama for bunker-busting missiles, which Israel lacks, in order to attack Iran. Bush was said to have denied all Israeli pressure for these missiles. While Obama is calling for tougher sanctions on Iran (after all, it worked so well for Iraq, where the UN estimated that it lead to the deaths of upward of 500,000 people. Remember Madelaine Albright talking about the tough decision between the sanctions and the dead kids, and how it was worth it?), we can only hope they don’t make such a reckless move by giving Israel the exact tools for a strike on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Hillary Clinton was upset that Israel wasn’t cooperating with the U.S. There was not even a reference to the Palestinians, instead Clinton made the Obama administration out to be the victim. God forbid they talk about the way Israel treats the Palestinians.

Fisk rights about settlements: “I have sought in vain to discover the origin of our journalistic use of the word ‘settlements.’ By its nature, the expression is almost comforting. It has a permanence about it, a notion of legality. Every human wants to ‘settle,’ to have a home. The far more disturbing—and far more accurate—word for Israel’s land-grabbing in the West Bank and Gaza since 1967 is colonizing. Settlers are colonists. Almost all the Israelis in the West Bank are living on someone else’s land. They may say that God gave them the land, but those Palestinians who legally owned that land—who had property deeds to prove it, since the British Mandate, since the Ottoman empire—are not allowed to appeal to God” (425).

The peace agreement formed at Wye was just like the rest: a slickly-worded seizure of more Palestinian land. “The Wye agreement even dropped the “land for peace” logo. It was now biled as the “Land for Security” agreement, “peace” being a least temporarily unobtainable. Peace menas respect, mutual trust, cooperation. Security means no violence—but it also means prison, hatred and, as we already knew torture” And the Israeli withdrawal? The “3 per cent of the Palestinian land from which Israel would now withdraw was to become—perhaps the most farcical of Oslo’s many manifestations—a “nature reserve” upon which Palestinians could not build homes” (437).

Anyway this is nothing new, from Begin-Sadat, to Arafat-Sharon, but it is interesting to keep in mind the infinite failures of the so-called “peace” agreements and the lack of leverage the U.S. has over its no. one ally in the world. At one point, Jimmy Carter even tried to claim that there was only so much pressure he could put on “a sovereign nation.” Tell that to the endless U.S. client states throughout the past two centuries.

If I go too much further, they´ll start calling me an anti-semite and all that. Funny how they call all the Arab regimes anti-Semitic. After all, as Fisk points out, they are semites too.

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