U.S. Policy on Palestine from Wilson to Clinton.

If you go to the Social Science Index (the computerized version) and call up alternately U.S. and Israel and U.S. and Palestine you will find 132 citations for the former and 38 for the latter (covering the time period February 1983 to January 1995). Now go to PAIS (Public Affairs Information Service). There you will find 697 citations under U.S. and Israel and only 114 for U.S. and Palestine (covering the time period 1972-1994). In both indices many of the citations in the U.S. and Palestine category are either post-Oslo or contain the term "terrorist" in their titles. What we have here is a statistical manifestation of the disproportionate interest shown in the United States for Israel as against Palestine. Indeed, what these numbers suggest is that in the American consciousness, official and unofficial, there is little awareness of Palestine except insofar as it impolitely intrudes upon our religio-cultural and political love affair with Israel.

The series of eleven essays which Michael Suleiman has edited in U.S. Policy on Palestine from Wilson to Clinton are thus timely and important. And they are written in a consistently clear and comprehensive enough fashion to make the work a good candidate for classroom use. Collectively they trace the history of how the U.S. has coped with the unwanted reality of the Palestinians, bringing together a story, heretofore scattered, about the literature or buried under the greater volume of work on U.S.-Israeli relations. As Professor Suleiman's introduction suggests, it is a story of periodic encounters with facts and occurrences which should remind Americans that, as a consequence of the Israel they so ardently support, there is an on-going effort to destroy the living culture and people of Palestine.

The material is brought together in a chronological fashion basically following the flow of presidential administrations. Thus we are given insight into each president's approach to the question of Palestine. For instance, Fred Lawson's essay on the Truman administration demonstrates an excellent use of the documents to reveal a surprising level of concern for the fate of the Palestinians. This was due to their perceived potential to destabilize the Middle East. According to Lawson it was not so much domestic Zionist pressure that motivated Truman's policy formulation on the Palestinians after the creation of Israel, but rather the need for stability. Stability would minimize Soviet influence and assure Middle East oil supplies for post-war Europe.

The need for stability was a corollary of America's growing obsession with the Soviet Union and these essays clearly illustrate how the USSR, Israel and the Palestinians were all eventually perceived through the distorting prism of that ruling passion. Deborah Gerner tells us that the Eisenhower administration had two goals: to keep the Soviets out of the Middle East and to protect oil supplies. However, unlike the Truman administration which took some passing notice of the Palestinians, with Eisenhower there began a process of relegating them to a sort of diplomatic limbo. Garner explains that this was because the Palestinians "had no direct control of oil, nor any significant military or political power that might serve to enhance or thwart Soviet interests" (p. 85).

This perceived powerlessness consigned the Palestinians to the status of refugees. And, as refugees, they were assumed to be just another regional factor. However, because of their vision of the world as a bi-polar one, dominated by the Cold War confrontation between America and her communist nemesis, U.S. policy makers were increasingly disinterested in regional issues. As Zaha Bustami shows in her essay on the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, the lack of appreciation of regional attitudes and forces doomed American plans to settle the "issue of the refugees' (p. 124). Indeed, as Bustami suggests, it was not just the local concerns motivating the Arabs and Palestinians that the policy makers in Washington failed to understand. They also never truly grasped what drove the Israelis to deny the very existence of the Palestinians. For instance, the Johnson administration's naive conception of the Occupied Territories as a "new bargaining chip" (p. 127) shows just how little Washington was aware of the dynamic, religiously motivated, expansionist forces within the Israeli nation.

It is this fundamental lack of interest and understanding of regional factors that is a basic theme running through all these essays. Just as this myopia undercut the policies of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson, Donald Neff's essay eloquently shows how it also frustrated Nixon and Kissinger in their efforts to deal with the Middle East. Ann Lesch clearly demonstrates it misleading Reagan who was completely absorbed in the bi-polar view of the world. Only Jimmy Carter, with his consciousness reshaped by the American civil rights movement, managed to escape the stereotyping Cold War worldview and see the Arab-Israel conflict (and its core Palestinian component) as "predominantly a regional one" (p. 165). However, as Janice Terry explains, Carter could not translate his understanding into a policy meaningful for the Palestinians. Constantly buffeted by Zionist-inspired domestic pressure, he was forced to hedge on whatever pro-Palestinian sentiments he held. As a consequence his hopes for a comprehensive settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict were ultimately replaced by the bi-lateral Camp David agreement - one that most Palestinians found anathema. In the final offerings of the book it becomes apparent that U.S. policy essentially has been captured by the Israeli government and its American adjuncts. While the essays demonstrate that on occasion U.S. presidents could muster harsh words for the Israelis, after the 1950s these were never translated into policies that could bring significant leverage against Israel. Thus, as Cheryl Rubenberg tells us, President Bush might have disliked Yitzhak Shamir, but he nonetheless allowed his administration to adhere slavishly to peace proposals put forth by Shamir's government. All PLO proposals seeking compromise and negotiation were either ignored or rejected.

And so it remains to this day. Despite the demise of the Soviet Union and the Cold War generated bi-polar worldview, the United States has not reoriented its policy to give any consideration to Palestinian national rights. Indeed, as Joe Stork asserts, President Clinton, having "no strong personal views about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict," has been led by "utilitarian considerations" (the fact that "Jewish donors accounted for an estimated 60 percent of his non-institutional campaign funds") to continue to allow U.S. policy to be made by such Israeli auxiliaries as AIPAC (p. 225). Thus, when it comes to the Palestinians there now exists a new bi-polar view of the world - America and Israel at one pole and those potential disrupters of peace at the other. Peace, of course, is to be wholly defined in Israeli terms. Where once Soviet expansionism stood as the great threat so now "radical" aims such as Palestinian national rights stands in its place. Thus U.S. policy makers continue to see the Arab-Israeli conflict though a distorting prism.

In the book's last essay, Ibrahim Abu-Lughod suggests that this inability to relate to the Palestinians is part of a broader American hostility to Third World peoples, especially those who have resorted to "radical movements of national liberation" (p. 241). It seems to me that there is a certain historical logic to this claim. If we study America,s revolution we soon realize that it was not made by the same sort of people or for the same reasons as those now pursued in the Third World. As a consequence the American definition of what constitutes legitimate revolution is so idiosyncratic (basically confined to the attainment of "free market" economies) as to be irrelevant to Third World conditions. In terms of policy, this peculiar outlook has led the U.S. to operate within the modern context as an anti-revolutionary power. In addition there is the fact that the United States, like Israel itself, has its origin as a settler state whose act of occupation and displacement of native peoples has been justified by religious mythology, improvement of the land and the like. In this sense, U.S. policy on Palestine has been consistent with its own historical experience.

In the end one can only say, "Thank you," to Michael Suleiman for putting this story before us in such a clear and concise fashion. However, one also comes away from these essays with a real sense of dismay over the persistent inability of American leaders to grasp the realities of the Middle East. Indeed, one suspects that, caught within the prism of their biases, they have never really tried. Thus US. Policy on Palestine from Wilson to Clinton leads us to the conclusion that it is probably wishful thinking to expect any real change in American-Palestinian relations. Palestinian statehood, when and if it comes, will do so despite American policy. The Palestinians will owe no debt to the United States.