Content area
Full Text
As the United States continues efforts to consolidate its hold on Iraq in the latest phase of empire building, the enduring Arab-Israeli issue is quietly slipping into obscurity once again. Israel has long been an important aspect of U.S. militarization of the entire Middle East. In order to help it achieve hegemony commensurate with its economic goals, the United States used Israel as a client state to act as a buffer against Soviet encroachment and a brake on Arab nationalism during the Cold War.
With the sudden end of the previous rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, and U.S. emergence as the world's sole superpower, Israel was uniquely advantaged as the key U.S. ally in the Middle East. The opening of new markets in Europe, especially in former Eastern-bloc countries as well as in many nonaligned states, gave a tremendous boost to the Israeli economy and its project of export-led growth. This new era of U.S. global hegemony benefited Israel in its efforts to end the pariah status it had endured since the 1967 War. Thus a new epoch had emerged in Arab-Israeli relations that was first presaged by Arafat's unprecedented recognition of Israel and United Nations Security Council (UNSC) Resolution 242 in 1988 and was later consolidated by the U.S. victory in 1991 in its war against Iraq. This U.S. victory forced the Palestinians to enter into the Oslo Peace negotiations from a dramatically weakened position (Ehrlich 2002, 55-56).
Yet Israel's continued oppression of the Palestinians is now a growing liability for America. The brutal suppression of Palestinian aspirations threatens to derail President Bush's "Road Map" to peace. It becomes increasingly clear that this road map is merely a cover for the finalization of an apartheid system using cheap Palestinian labor from the Occupied Territories to bolster the Israeli economy at the expense of the colonized Palestinian economy. An essential component of this project of colonization, involving the creation of politically and economically subjugated Bantustans in the West Bank, is the establishment and expansion of Jewish settlements as the linchpin of Israeli domination of the area. These settlements frustrate Palestinian self-determination and obstruct the future of Palestinian-Israeli relations. Yet even as the settlements remain the key obstacle to peace, they are...