Last week, President Bush's theorists introduced a revolutionary new principle in the field of logic: the Causal Trifle. Responding to criticism that the Israeli government's annexation of Palestinian land in East Jerusalem threatens to derail negotiations, the Bush administration countered with the logic that seemed to puzzle an exhausted White House press corps.
The Trifle's structure is a proposition of pure stealth: that efforts to resolve a problem - in this case, the Israel-Palestine conflict - are unhindered by the deliberate intensification of the cause of the problem - Israeli colonization of Palestinian land - as long as the appearance of progress toward a solution is occasionally announced - the Annapolis phase of the so-called peace process.
Wouldn't Israeli expansion into Palestine's future capital foreclose peace? Not if you "keep your eye on the ball," State Department spokesman Sean McCormack explained. Rather than focus on such "potential irritants" and "extraneous events," McCormack said, "You need to keep your eye on the strategic objective.
Because if you're able to achieve the strategic objective here, and that means getting to a final status agreement between the Israelis and Palestinians, these kinds of questions aren't even going to arise anymore."
The Trifle is tailor-made for media corporations contemptuous of critical inquiry. When a newsman asked what kind of progress has taken place since the Annapolis negotiations began last year, McCormack quickly evaded it. "You're not going to find us talking about it from any podium here or anywhere else. ... I don't think it serves anybody's purposes to start talking in any detail about it."
This component of the Trifle is crucial: The occasional announcement of progress toward a solution must be unverifiable in order to prevent real scrutiny. One can imagine the consequences to an alcoholic's credibility if he were required to demonstrate progress toward sobriety, despite routine episodes of binge drinking. Even the tenacious Helen Thomas, doyenne of White House correspondents, was averted: "Are you afraid to take a stand on this issue?"
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Thomas confronted Bush's spokesperson, Dana Perino. "They are taking land, Palestinian land, that doesn't belong to them."
Perino wouldn't concede this simple observation. Instead, she diverted Thomas with the red herring that Bush is the first American president to explicitly call for the creation of a Palestinian state.
"Let's see - where is it?" Thomas asked. It's a question observers have been pondering since Israeli officials rejected the generous offer - peace for partial deoccupation - Palestinian negotiators presented them at the beginning of 2001.
An early manifestation of the Trifle surfaced during the last "peace process," when the Israeli government announced in 1997 plans to begin building thousands of housing units to expand an Israeli settlement, Har Homa, into Palestinian land on the border between occupied East Jerusalem and Bethlehem.
Despite the illegality of this annexation of Palestinian land, the U.S. and its European allies approved it, Idith Zertal and Akiva Eldar recount in their masterful history of Israel's settlement regime, "on the assumption that in the final-status negotiations" the Har Homa expansion "would not be an obstacle to peace" - a small Trifle.
Palestinians, conversely, saw the confiscation as a test of U.S.-Israeli sincerity. Despite fiery Palestinian protests, Zertal and Eldar write, "The American government confined itself to lip service." The expansion of Har Homa proceeded with the crucial assistance of U.S. tax dollars, Palestinian leaders withdrew from negotiations and the U.S. vetoed a U.N. resolution condemning Israeli settlement of Palestine.
It was a pattern of deceit that would recur uninterrupted during the "peace process" of the 1990s, so that by the time Israel unilaterally terminated negotiations in 2001, Israeli settlement of Palestine had doubled and the Gaza Strip was well into its transformation "from Bantustan to internment camp to animal pen," in the words of Darryl Li, a perceptive analyst of Middle East affairs at Harvard University.
The Causal Trifle is frequently the foreground of a more important device in the U.S.-Israeli toolbox: the Precondition Veto - the principle that the occupying power cannot withdraw its forces and colonies until its indigenous subjects forego all military resistance.
Former Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon best expressed the veto during Bush's first term, requiring Palestinian authorities to "disarm terror organizations (and) stop incitement" as a precondition to negotiations. The veto, like the Trifle, is designed to consolidate the occupation beneath the facade of a "peace process" forever hostage to the conflict's most extreme elements.
Sharon's legacy lives on in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's vague goal of pursuing the "negotiated part of the basic principles" that might someday unblock Palestinian self-determination, but only if "terror was stopped completely from Gaza," according to Israel's largest daily newspaper, Haaretz.
The Causal Trifle demands us to "keep the focus on the discussions between the Israelis and Palestinians," to use McCormack's words. That is, never mind the U.S.-backed conquest of the remaining fragments of lands that for more than 1,000 years sustained the Palestinian Arabs. If 40 years of blood and dispossession bear a lesson, however, it is that the preoccupation with "discussions" over actions has done justice to neither party.
Matthew Chavez is a political science major with a focus on international relations and a minor in Middle Eastern studies.
