Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy Towards Palestine and Israel Since 1945.

Reviewed by Ian Williams 

"What a long strange road it's been," as the Grateful Dead's Gerry Garcia said. The survivors of the Middle East conflict have reason to be grateful to Donald Neff's book as it meticulously chronicles U.S. diplomacy's long journey through the Middle East - with principles being dropped at regular intervals. By this stage of the journey, the baggage-free position of the administration is that if Israel wants it, it's legal - and it can have it. Neff follows the trail, stopping en route to examine these caches of abandoned principle, many of which he has obligingly included in the copious appendices.

In fairness to American professional diplomacy, the shedding of principles has not gone unchallenged. Neff documents the perennial tension between what U.S. diplomatic professionals and the international community have considered essential principles for resolution of Middle Eastern problems, and the pragmatic pull of pro-Israeli domestic political power in the U.S.

Of course, he is not breaking new ground in claiming that this shift has been overwhelmingly in favor of Israel. However, he provides meticulous documentation of these changes in policy, which is what gives his narrative such shock value. Fatalistically, many of us have come to accept uncritical and unprincipled support for Israel as a fundamental of American policy, so it comes almost as a surprise to be reminded that Washington once did have principles on the issue, and was prepared to push for solutions that in some measure were unpalatable to Israel. Alas, as the title suggests, those pillars of principle are now toppled, and AIPAC, their toppler, is on better ground than Ozymandias in saying "Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair."

Fallen Pillars is a tightly focused study of U.S. diplomacy toward Israel and the Palestinians. Based as it is on official records, it is frontloaded, in that the earlier period is, of course, much better documented with material now in the public domain. Donald Neff has watched and described the process over so many years that one cannot help admire the scholarly detachment with which he writes. His indignation is masterfully restrained and understated -- but it is clearly there.

However in the Washington of the last three decades, purple prose has been unnecessary to rouse inquisitorial fire. The mere statement of the truth is enough to raise indignation on the part of the perpetrator. Almost contemporaneously with the post war beginnings of the Palestinian tragedy, George Orwell's 1984 equipped us with the terms to understand what has happened over the issue. Successive U.S. positions have been dumped down the memory hole of political oblivion, while statements of fact and previous position have become a form of "thought crime," to be punished by political oblivion. Thirty years ago, the Palestinian refugees were at least on the agenda, even if only in the most attenuated form. Now they are in the small print of Oslo, consigned to the "final settlement issues" where Israel is confident that it will get its own way, backed by the U.S.'s partisan neutrality.

The "passionate attachment" that George Ball chronicled in his book, is here seen in development, as an inexorable erosion of principles that undermines U.S. attempts to secure international cooperation from the rest of the world on issues as diverse as nuclear proliferation to the enforcement of sanctions. As Neff says, these efforts do not "enhance America's image as a country whose foreign policy is based on the historic ideals it professes." Economically, he points out, "Israel has been the most expensive ally the United States has ever had," receiving some $65 billion in foreign aid up to 1995. And equaling more than five times the amount spent on the Marshall Aid Plan to Europe.

He is accurately gloomy about the prospects of the Clinton administration which he assesses as the least likely to take any kind of tough posture with Israel. He cites Madeleine Albright's attempt to sweep fifty years of international law under the carpet by rescinding all UN resolutions on issues that dealt with "refugees, settlements, territorial sovereignty and the status of Jerusalem." This is a fitting culmination of a process under which Jimmy Carter's "illegal" Israeli settlements became Reagan's "obstacles to peace"; and have now mutated into Clinton's "complicating factors."

It is easy to dismiss the UN as an irrelevance, but as Neff demonstrates, the Quixotic battle by the U.S. to rewrite international law on behalf of its incubus-like client state is well founded in motive, if not in law. In 1996 when one of the versions of the Helms-Burton bill against Cuba allowed U.S. citizens to sue for expropriated property, one of Helm's aides hastily introduced a clause excluding from its provisions any state that had been created by the United Nations. For the UN-bating Helms, this was doubly ironic. Israel, the only state created by an act of the United Nations against the expressed will of a majority of its indigenous inhabitants, has since tried to deny legitimacy or distort any other decision of that body regarding the region.

Indeed, the UN is one of the pillars that, if it has not yet fallen, is under heavy pressure from Israeli supporters in Congress, who have spent over two decades trying to weaken and delegitimize it in retaliation for its pro-Palestinian position. But, as Neff's book reminds us, most of the those positions were at one time or another supported by the U.S.

The recent vote by the UN Special General Assembly on the Jerusalem settlements are a telling reminder that these fallen pillars are the tombstone for American diplomatic prestige. After an eloquent appeal by U.S. Ambassador Bill Richardson, and some serious ambassadorial arm-twisting around the world, the U.S. and Israel could only coax tiny Micronesia, with an electorate smaller than the U.N.'s workforce, to support them. Fallen Pillars is an indispensable reference book if you want to know why.

Ian Williams is the author of UN for Beginners, and correspondent for Middle East International and Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. He is currently researching a book on the Israel lobby in the United States.