Overview:
For Arab leaders today, the issue of greatest, almost overriding regional concern is the matrix of U.S. policies and positions toward the. Palestinian resistance to the ongoing Israeli military occupation and the U.S. response have greatly impacted U.S. relations with all Arab states and the 34 non-Arab Islamic nations. This issue affects most, if not all, other issues in U.S. relations with Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states.
An increasing number of U.S. diplomats and military leaders in the Middle East admit privately that anti-American sentiment, stemming from the way the U.S. has handled the need to achieve Israeli-Palestinian and Israeli-Syrian peace, is as great as it has been at any time in memory. The root of this disappointment, now into its seventh decade, is perceived U.S. failure on several fronts, among which the greatest, many believe, is Washington’s inability to advance and protect its own interests in the region.
U.S. interests range from strategic, economic, and political matters to those of a commercial, defense, and developmental nature. These interests are inevitably influenced by the degree of local and regional goodwill expressed toward the United States. Maintaining and strengthening U.S. foreign policy objectives in the Middle East in the period ahead will depend in large measure, as it has for decades, on whether the countries in the region are predisposed to cooperate.
The Economic Importance of the GCC States:
Measured by the benchmark of four people per average U.S. family, the source of livelihood for more than a million Americans is directly associated with the states of the GCC alone, through their purchasing of U.S. goods and services. Additionally, of some $1 trillion in GCC capital invested abroad, 60 percent of it is invested in businesses in the United States. In addition, GCC energy exports to the United States fuel countless factories and other workplaces employing millions, cool and heat millions of homes and offices, and propel millions of vehicles.
These examples are but a few among those that underscore what is at stake: the extensive benefits that millions of Americans derive from good U.S. relations with key Arab countries. At issue today among other phenomena is the fact that the United States has long been and continues to be seen to be taking these countries and America’s relations with them for granted. In particular, GCC leaders need to be able to demonstrate to their citizens a capacity to persuade Washington to reconsider the implications of its policies and actions regarding the Palestinians. U.S. Arab allies in the region have concluded, however, that powerful domestic U.S. lobbyists keen to advance Israeli interests and objectives continue to intimidate American elected and appointed officials in such a way that the strategic interests of Israel, rather than the multifaceted strategic, economic, political, and national security interests of the United States, have prevailed at enormous and escalating costs to Israeli, Palestinian, and U.S. interests.
Double Standards:
All the more shocking to GCC citizens is the perceived inability of U.S. officials to (1) see the many parallels between their forbears’ quest for freedom and self-determination and that of the Palestinians’, who struggle daily in their own land to be free of Israeli colonization and military subjugation, and (2) take into full account the elemental human rights and need for justice of the Palestinian people. One need cite only a few examples of alleged arrogance and application of double standards by representatives of the U.S. legislative and executive branches that in the eyes of the GCC and many other Arab and Islamic leaders have harmed U.S.-GCC and overall U.S.-Arab and U.S.-Islamic relations.
The following examples suffice to prove the point. First, take the extraordinary imbalance in resolutions passed in the House and Senate in the fall of 2000 that overwhelmingly blamed the Palestinians and exonerated the Israelis for their respective roles in the Second Intifada’s violence that erupted in September 1999. Second, in what many perceived as a transparent attempt to accommodate Israel, the United States led a campaign to stifle the efforts by Egypt, the GCC states, and most of the world’s 140 developing nations to convene a conference in 1999 to honor the fiftieth anniversary of the Fourth Geneva Convention on the obligations of occupying powers.
Third, in the run-up to the American-led invasion and occupation of Iraq on March 19, 2003, Washington officialdom insisted that the GCC and other countries support its demands that Iraq be held to account and made to comply with the UN Security Council Resolutions resulting from its August 2, 1990 invasion and occupation of Kuwait. On the face of it, GCC leaders throughout this period were of one mind in insisting that Iraq comply fully with the resolutions; however, throughout this period and to this day numerous GCC leaders have also been persistent in calling attention to the fact that the United States has consistently failed to demand that Israel be held similarly accountable for its defiance of the United Nations Security Council’s resolutions that underscore Israel’s obligations to uphold the UN Charter’s dictum regarding the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.
GCC leaders take further umbrage at what they perceive as a continuing tendency of many Members of Congress’ being unable or unwilling to express any remotely comparable empathy or compassion toward the vastly greater suffering that Israel has inflicted upon Palestinian Arab Christians and Muslims. Indeed, to this day few within the GCC region are persuaded that the United States is fully aware of the damage that it has inflicted upon the multifaceted range of its relations with key Arab countries.
Long-Term Interests:
It remains difficult for GCC leaders to accept the United States’ rationale for its seemingly blind-sided and overwhelmingly one-sided support of Israeli policies. Israel’s rising number of critics argue that Israel’s limited assets offer little of enduring geopolitical or strategic value, or for that matter, much else of lasting benefit to broader U.S. foreign policy objectives. GCC decision makers, in short, continue to be amazed by the seeming inability of U.S. leaders to do what is right or even prudent if measured by the benchmark of long-term U.S. and Israeli national interests.
The Need for Greater Humility and Empathy:
GCC and other Arab leaders reason that given the U.S. track record, the situation is hardly lacking in terms of steps the United States could take to improve its image and repair damaged relations with Arab countries, such as restraining congressional and administration officials’ moralizing, application of double standards, and hypocritical posturing. A greater willingness to listen and learn from friends in the region and become an even-handed and effective broker for peace would also be appreciated. The heads of state of all the Arab and Islamic countries have repeatedly expressed their hope that the U.S. position toward the Palestinians would, at a minimum, be just and humane.
Perhaps the Palestinians realize how empty the U.S. rhetoric of “democracy” at times can be. In this context, most Palestinians would arguably agree that a little justice, an abatement of cruelty, an expression of compassion for all who have been wronged would go far. There is little reason to believe that U.S. business with key Arab countries will continue as usual unless there is a fundamental change in the ongoing actions, attitudes, positions, policies, and injustices vis-à-vis the tragedies that Israel continues to visit upon the Palestinian people, including siege, political assassinations, collective punishment, the establishment and administration of Jews-only roads to and from Palestinian lands, “administration detention” — arrests and incarceration without charges, siege, the imprisonment without trial of thousands of Palestinians for exercising their international legal right to use force to resist the illegal expropriation and exploitation of the lands, orchards, citrus groves, olive trees, and water resources forcibly wrested from them by their Israeli occupiers, the building of an impenetrable wall on land previously destined to constitute part of a nationally sovereign, politically independent, and territorially intact Palestinian state living in peace and security side by side with Israel, and the illegal use of U.S. weapons against civilians.
In the face of these transgressions, one would be had-pressed to conclude other than the shortcomings of the Clinton, Bush “43,” and Obama administration’s reactions to the Israeli occupation of Palestinian land and the two Intifadas (December 1987 and September 2000) that have injured America’s relationships with Arab, Islamic, and other important countries whose friendship, trust, and confidence the United States needs most
Key Recommendations:
In the eyes of many GCC and other Arab and Islamic leaders, the United States should at the least make an effort to hold Israel accountable for the following:
(1) its ongoing occupation of Lebanese, Palestinian, and Syrian lands, which has been far longer and equally illegal than Iraq’s 1990-1991 occupation of Kuwait;
(2) its refusal, since 1967, to cease building colonies on expropriated Palestinian and Syrian lands;
(3) its unwillingness to consider truly sharing sovereignty over Jerusalem;
(4) its opposition to even a minimal and incrementally phased repatriation of Palestinian refugees; and
(5) its use of vastly superior, U.S.-supplied armaments to crush the Palestinians’ internationally sanctioned right to resist the occupation.
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Dr. John Duke Anthony is the Founding President and CEO of the National Council on U.S.-Arab Relations. This article originally appeared in issue Number 12 (30 August 2001) of POLICY BRIEF, a publication of the The Palestine Center (then known as the Center for Policy Analysis on Palestine), which is a program of The Jerusalem Fund for Education & Community Development. In June 1999, Moroccan King Muhammad VI, on the occasion of his first official visit to the United States, knighted Dr. Anthony with the Award of Quissam Alouite, Morocco’s highest award for excellence. In 1983 he received the Department of Defense’s Defense Institute for Security Assistance Management’s Distinguished Lecturer Award and, in 1989, he received the Department of State’s Distinguished Visiting Lecturer Award. These two awards were one of three granted by these institutions over a twenty-five year period to honor Americans who have made outstanding contributions to the knowledge and understanding of American diplomatic and defense personal posted to Arabia and the Gulf. In 1988, he was awarded the Stevens Award for Outstanding Contributions to Arab-U.S. Understanding. In 2010, the Greater Washington Chapter of Rotary Club International presented Dr. Anthony its first-ever Local Giants Achievement Award. Dr. Anthony is the only Westerner invited to attend as an observer every Ministerial and Heads of State Summit since the GCC’s establishment in 1981.