We'll take whatever the Americans allow

[Classical_Liberal]

We'll take whatever the Americans allow

By Yitzhak Laor



During the decades of the occupation, the dovish camp has learned to summarize its position regarding annexation with the dogma, "The Americans won't allow it." Even the settler right has tended to believe that dogma, and decided to identify it with "fear of the powerful gentile" so familiar from the Diaspora, and such. But that belief has been in stark contradiction to the facts.



Since the 1970 Rogers Plan, no American administration, before or after elections, in a second term or not, has ever intended to halt the Israeli annexation of the last of the land available to the Palestinians to establish their own state. When the U.S. wanted to pressure Israel - for example, in the case of the withdrawal from Sinai in 1975 - it applied a "reassessment" and Israel folded in a flash. If the United States really and truly wanted to prevent Israel from undertaking the long adventure of tragically taking over the territories of the West Bank and Gaza, it could have done so easily. But it never did.

The Americans, according to this baseless theory, opposed the Jerusalem Law - those who legislated the law heard warnings day in and day out about a clash with "our greatest friend in the West"; that's what happened with the Golan annexation, the establishment of the settlements and particularly the invasion of Lebanon. Things reached the level that, at the height of the collapse in Lebanon in 1983, those in the know wondered about the "green light" that Ariel Sharon either got or did not get a year earlier from Alexander Haig, secretary of state in the Reagan administration during the early part of the war. The withdrawal from the Shouf Mountains, delayed despite Israel Defense Forces demands because of American opposition, could have been a launching board for at least an intellectual debate. Nothing like that happened. The fantasy over the equation America equals peace efforts continued to be an inseparable element in the division between "hawks" and "doves." Both sides found their allies in Washington.......

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/417672.html