Pelosi the Hawk

Reports
by international human rights groups and from within Israel in recent
weeks have revealed the massive scale of war-crimes and other
violations of international humanitarian law, committed by Israeli
forces during their three-week offensive against the Gaza Strip earlier
this year. Despite this, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi has
steadfastly stood by her insistence that the U.S.-backed Israeli
government has no legal or moral responsibility for the tragic
consequence of the war.

This is just one
episode in a long history of efforts by Pelosi to undermine
international humanitarian law, in regards to actions by a country she
has repeatedly referred to as America's most important ally in the
Middle East. It's also part of her overall right-wing agenda in the
Middle East. As the powerful Speaker of the House, Pelosi could very
well undermine efforts by President Barack Obama in the coming years to
moderate U.S. policy toward that volatile region.

Support for the Gaza War

During the height of Israel's devastating offensive on the Gaza Strip in January, Pelosi pushed through a resolution putting the House of Representatives on record calling "on all nations...to lay blame both for the breaking of the calm and for subsequent civilian casualties in Gaza precisely where blame belongs, that is, on Hamas."[emphasis added]

Not only did the
resolution ignore Israel's attacks in Gaza in November and other
violations of the ceasefire that served to "break the calm," it put
forward an extreme reinterpretation of international humanitarian law
apparently designed to absolve any nation that kills large numbers of
civilians, as long as the other side allegedly initiated the conflict.

The resolution
favorably quoted Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, as well as
Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, regarding responsibility for
civilian deaths and for the causes of the conflict, but cites no one
else. Though the Gaza War should be considered "a final and eloquent
testimony to the complete failure of the neoconservative movement in
United States foreign policy," as Juan Cole has written,
Pelosi instead aligned herself and the Democratic congressional
majority with the failed ideology of the outgoing Bush administration.
Indeed, some of the language of Pelosi's resolution was even to the
right of Bush: For example, while the January 8 UN Security Council
resolution - which received the endorsement of Rice and other
administration officials - condemned "all acts of violence and
terror directed against civilians," Pelosi's resolution only condemned
the violence and terror of Hamas. Similarly, her resolution placed
conditions for a ceasefire on the Palestinian side that was even more
stringent than those advocated by the Bush administration and endorsed
eventually by the Israelis.

And, despite International Red Cross reports
of Israeli forces illegally preventing emergency workers from reaching
wounded civilians, killing aid and health workers, and attacking
hospitals and ambulances, Pelosi's resolution went on record praising
Israel for having "facilitated humanitarian aid to Gaza."

Pelosi's
resolution also cited the Israeli invasion as part of Israel's "right
to act in self-defense to protect its citizens against Hamas's
unceasing aggression, as enshrined in the United Nations Charter." In
reality, the UN Charter
explicitly prohibits nations going to war unless they "first of all,
seek a solution by negotiation, enquiry, mediation, conciliation,
arbitration, judicial settlement, resort to regional agencies or
arrangements, or other peaceful means of their own choice." Yet Israel
- with strong bipartisan U.S. support - has refused to even meet with
Hamas. Furthermore, while Article 51 does allow countries the right to
resist an armed attack, it doesn't grant any nation the right to engage
in such massive and disproportionate warfare against densely packed
cities and refugee camps.

Pelosi also
claimed that Hamas bore responsibility for the more than 700 deaths of
Palestinian civilians because of the alleged use of "human shields."
Hamas was certainly guilty of less-severe humanitarian violations, such
as not taking all necessary steps to prevent civilian casualties while
positioning fighters and armaments, but this isn't the same as using
civilians as shields. And, as Human Rights Watch noted,
even the presence of armed personnel and weapons near civilian areas
"does not release Israel from its obligations to take all feasible
precautions to minimize harm to civilians and civilian property during
military operations." Furthermore, the nature of urban warfare,
particularly in a territory as densely populated as the Gaza Strip,
makes the proximity of retreating fighters and their equipment to
civilians unavoidable in many cases. In any case, there have been
scores of well-documented cases of civilian casualties in areas where
there were no Hamas fighters.

The
American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the influential
"pro-Israel" lobby, did not draft Pelosi's resolution, unlike some
similar resolutions in recent years. The wording of the resolution came
primarily out of the offices of Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Reid,
and House Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Howard Berman. This was
a completely Democratic initiative led by Pelosi herself.

Pelosi's siding
with the Bush administration in its defense of violations of
international humanitarian law by U.S. allies was nothing new. When
Bush defended Israel's assaults on Lebanon's civilian infrastructure in
2006 and defied the international community by blocking UN efforts to
impose a ceasefire, Pelosi voted in favor of a resolution
commending him for "fully supporting Israel." This Pelosi-backed
resolution claimed that Israel's actions were legitimate self-defense
under the UN Charter and, despite evidence to the contrary, praised
"Israel's longstanding commitment to minimizing civilian loss and
welcom[ed] Israel's continued efforts to prevent civilian casualties."
Directly contradicting empirical studies by Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and even the U.S. Army War College,
all of which noted the absence of any credible evidence of even a
single civilian fatality resulting from such practices, she went on
recording insisting that the nearly 800 civilian deaths were a result
of Hezbollah using "human shields." Pelosi also echoed Bush's defense
of Israel's 2002 West Bank offensive, which also was directed primarily
at civilian targets. Once again contradicting findings by reputable
human rights groups, she voted in favor of a resolution
sponsored by right-wing Republican leader Tom DeLay claiming the
massive assault was "aimed solely at the terrorist infrastructure."

Pelosi attacked
the International Court of Justice for its landmark 2004 ruling calling
for the enforcement of the Fourth Geneva Convention in Israeli-occupied
territories. She also voted in favor of a resolution
condemning the World Court for its near-unanimous advisory opinion that
Israel's separation barrier shouldn't be built beyond Israel's
internationally recognized border into the occupied West Bank in order
to incorporate illegal settlements into Israel, warning that members of
the international community would "risk a strongly negative impact on
their relationship" with the United States if they dared push for the
implementation of the ruling. (See my article "Attacks Against World Court by Congress Reveal Growing Bipartisan Hostility to International Law.") And Pelosi has even gone as far as defending Israel's use of death squads in the extra-judicial killings of suspected militants.

Pelosi's Middle East Record

Pelosi's
right-wing agenda in the Middle East goes beyond efforts to undermine
international humanitarian law. During the Bush years, she tried to
push congressional Democrats to support the administration's broader
Middle East agenda. "There is no division on policy between us and
President Bush, be it on Israel, Palestine or Syria," she declared.

Nancy Pelosi
doesn't view the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in terms of the many
rights and wrongs of both parties. For her, it's all the fault of the
Palestinians, and the responsibility for the violence and the failure
of the peace process rests on them alone.

Pelosi has long
insisted that the Palestinians' 1993 decision to recognize Israeli
control over 78% of Palestine was not enough. She has even portrayed
former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak's 2000 proposal to create a
Palestinian Bantustan on approximately 18% of Palestine - which would
have effectively divided the territory into four non-contiguous units
with Israel controlling the borders, airspace, and water resources - as
"a generous and historic proposal." She further insisted that
Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat's rejection of that proposal was
indicative of the Palestinians' lack of commitment to peace, ignoring
his subsequent acceptance
of President Bill Clinton's peace plan put forward five months later.
Echoing the Israeli right's claim that the Palestinians' various peace
proposals are all just a ruse and that they simply want to destroy
Israel, Pelosi insists that the conflict is about "the fundamental right of Israel to exist" and that it is "absolute nonsense" to claim it has anything do to with the Israeli occupation.

Subsequently,
Pelosi has sought to undermine the road-map for Israeli-Palestinian
peace. In May 2003, she signed a letter to Bush insisting
that the peace process must be based not on an end to Israeli
occupation and colonization of Palestinian land seized in the 1967 war,
but "above all" on the end of Palestinian violence and the
establishment of a new Palestinian leadership. Though the road-map
called for both Palestinians and their Israeli occupiers to
simultaneously work to fulfill their obligations, she insisted that the
Palestinians alone were responsible for implementing the first stage of
the Road Map and failed to even mention any of Israel's reciprocal
responsibilities, such as ending the sieges and military assaults on
Palestinian population centers and halting construction of additional
illegal settlements.

Speaking about a visit to one of the illegal Israeli settlements in the Gaza Strip in 2004, Pelosi referred
to an infiltration by local Palestinians that had taken place that
morning as part of "the daily reality of Israel: even moments of peace
and beauty are haunted by the specter of violence." By implying that
the Gaza Strip, seized by force by the Israeli army in 1967, was part
of Israel, Pelosi apparently hoped to reinforce efforts by the Israeli
right to resist compliance with a series of UN Security Council
resolutions, and a ruling by the International Court of Justice to
withdraw these settlements in accordance with international law.

When Israel
finally withdrew its illegal settlements from the occupied Gaza Strip
the following year, keeping the territory under a strict siege and
blockade, she praised it as a "courageous," "gut-wrenching" decision
for Israel, as if the Gaza Strip wasn't actually occupied territory but
instead a part of Israel itself, generously given up by the Israeli
government in the interest of peace..

Double Standards

Pelosi has
supported strict economic sanctions and even threats of military force
against Middle Eastern governments targeted by the Bush administration
- such as Iraq under Saddam Hussein, Iran, or Syria - that were slow in
complying with UN Security Council resolutions. Yet she has never
publicly called on Israel to abide by any of the dozens of Security
Council resolutions on international humanitarian law, illegal
annexation of militarily-occupied territory, or nuclear proliferation
with which that government remains in material breech. In Pelosi's
worldview, a country's obligations to comply with the UN Charter and UN
Security Council resolutions depend not on objective international
legal standards but on their relations with the United States.

After supporting
false assertions that Saddam Hussein had somehow reconstituted his
"weapons of mass destruction" in 2002, Pelosi now claims
it's actually Iran - another oil-rich Middle Eastern nation - that
"represents a clear threat to Israel and to America." She has refused
to support calls for a nuclear weapons-free zone for all of Southwest
Asia, which would include nuclear states Israel, Pakistan, and India,
and would link up with already existing nuclear weapons-free zones in
Africa, Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the South Pacific. Instead,
while believing that these U.S. allies need not be pressured to give up
their nukes, she argues that Iran "must be confronted by an
international coalition against proliferation." Indeed, she threatened
Iran for its nuclear program while defending Israel for its development
of a sizable nuclear arsenal.

Pelosi voted in
favor of sanctions against Syria based on its refusal to unilaterally
give up its missiles - even though Israel (along with such other U.S.
allies as Turkey, Israel and Egypt) have even more advanced missile
programs - and its refusal to unilaterally give up their chemical
weapons stockpiles, even though Israel and Egypt have much larger
chemical weapons arsenals.

In short, Pelosi
supports the position advocated by the Bush administration rejecting
law-based universal standards to challenge the threat of weapons
proliferation in the volatile Middle East, insisting the United States
can unilaterally decide which countries can and cannot have certain
weaponry.

Prior to the
division of power between the Fatah-controlled West Bank and the
Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip in 2007, Pelosi supported Bush's policy of
refusing to resume normal relations with the Fatah-led Palestine
Authority, unless the cabinet excluded members of Hamas or any party
that doesn't recognize Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state,
refuses to renounce violence, or fails to endorse previous agreements
in the peace process. By contrast, Pelosi has raised no concerns about
the new Israeli government, led by officials who refuse to recognize
Palestinians' right to statehood, refuse to renounce violence, and fail
to endorse previous agreements. Indeed, despite Israel's new foreign
minister Avigdor Lieberman calling for the ethnic cleansing of
Palestinians from Israel and much of the West Bank, Pelosi has not
uttered a word of concern.

Moreover, Pelosi
has also repeatedly pushed to increase U.S. military aid to Israel,
rejecting calls by Amnesty International and other human rights groups
to condition the arms transfers on an improvement in Israel's human
rights record in the occupied territories and an end to attacks on
civilian population centers.

Undermining International Law

Such double
standards are part of Pelosi's larger effort to undermine international
law and UN authority. She has from the beginning sought to exclude the
United Nations from any role in monitoring or implementing the roadmap
for Middle East peace. According to Pelosi's aforementioned letter
to Bush, allowing the United Nations or the European nations that
cosponsored the roadmap to share responsibility in overseeing
implementation as originally planned "might only lessen the chances of
moving forward" toward peace since "the United States has developed a
level of credibility and trust with all parties in the region which no
other country shares."

In short, Pelosi
was arguing that the Bush administration - despite its contempt for the
UN Charter and basic premises of international law and its support of
Israeli occupation forces - was more reliable than the United Nations
or the European Union in monitoring the peace process.

Pelosi has also supported legislation that attacks the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA). For example, Pelosi faults
UNRWA for making "no effort to permanently resettle Palestinian
refugees," even though this would go well beyond its mandate and be
against the wishes of the majority of refugees, who insist upon
returning to their homeland in accordance with the Universal
Declaration of Human Rights. She joined far-right UN critics in raising
dubious allegations
that "UNRWA facilities have been used for terrorist training and bases
for terrorist operations," and that the UNRWA educational system of
using textbooks and educational materials "promote anti-Semitism,
denial of the existence and the right to exist of the state of Israel,
and exacerbate stereotypes and tensions between the Palestinians and
Israelis."

Right-Wing not Pro-Israel

Nancy Pelosi
isn't, as some of her critics would have it, too "pro-Israel;" rather,
she is simply too right-wing. Her positions on U.S. policy toward
Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and a number of other nations in
that region put her closer to the right-wing Christian Coalition than
the moderate National Council of Churches, closer to the
neoconservative Project for a New American Century than to the liberal
Peace Action, and closer to right-wing Zionist groups like AIPAC than
liberal Zionist groups like Americans for Peace Now or Brit Tzedek
v'Shalom.

The 2006 Lebanon
War, which Israel launched after months of pressure by the Bush
administration to attack its northern neighbor, ended up as a disaster
for Israel, as outlined by the Israeli government's 2007 Winograd
Report. During the fighting, as thousands of Israeli peace activists
took the streets of Tel Aviv chanting "We will not kill or die for
Bush," Pelosi was back in Washington essentially saying, "Oh, yes you
should!"

Where Pelosi's
allegiance lies in the Israeli political spectrum is not only
illustrated by her opposition to the Israeli peace movement, but in her
outspoken support of former prime minister and war criminal Ariel
Sharon. She repeatedly praised the right-wing Israeli leader for his
"remarkable leadership," endorsing Sharon's construction of a
separation barrier deep inside the West Bank as well as his
"disengagement plan," which would eventually annex most of Israel's
illegal settlements in the occupied territory into Israel.

And she has been
quite intolerant of Democrats who dissent from her hawkish views,
heavily pressuring House Democrats to support various resolutions
supporting Bush's Middle East policy and seeking to damage the
campaigns of insurgent Democrats who challenge her right-wing views.
For example, Pelosi attacked Howard Dean, early in his campaign for the
2004 Democratic presidential nomination, for suggesting the United
States should be more "even-handed" towards the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict. She has even condemned former President Jimmy Carter for
opposing Israeli occupation policies in the West Bank. No Democratic
leader has ever criticized either a former president or the
front-running presidential candidate of his or her own party on any
issue as harshly as Pelosi criticized Dean and Carter on Israel and
Palestine.

Pelosi's views
don't reflect her role as a major Democratic fundraiser. Her antipathy
toward Palestinians goes back long before she came into leadership. As
a junior congresswoman in 1988, without links to wealthy national
contributors, she was an outspoken opponent of Palestine's right to
exist, helping lead an effort to defeat a ballot proposition in San
Francisco supporting the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside
a secure Israel.

Pelosi's
right-wing Israel policy is less a matter of AIPAC's power and more
about the inability of the progressive community in San Francisco and
Democrats elsewhere to force her to do otherwise. She changed her
position in support of the U.S. occupation and counterinsurgency war in
Iraq only because her constituents and Democrats nationwide demanded
it, fearing the political consequences of doing otherwise. She isn't
likely to change her position on these other important Middle East
policy issues unless we do the same.

Unfortunately,
few Democrats are even aware of how far to the right Pelosi is when it
comes to the Middle East. Not only has the mainstream media failed to
call attention to her Middle East agenda, but progressive publications
have failed do so as well. In These Times praised Pelosi for her "solid record" on human rights issues, while Ms. Magazine
lauded her for having a "voting record strong on...human rights," failing
to even mention her defense of Israeli war crimes against Palestinian
and Lebanese civilians.

Obama was initially able to withstand attacks by right-wing Republicans over the Chas Freeman appointment and tentative plans to participate in the UN Anti-Racism Conference,
but he capitulated once prominent Democrats began pressuring him as
well. Unless, then, rank-and-file Democrats are willing to challenge
Pelosi on the Middle East, there is little hope that Congressional
Democrats will allow the Obama administration to take human rights or
international law seriously - not just in terms of Israel and its
neighbors - but anywhere else.