Ron DeSantis, the Republican Governor of Florida, intends to be our next president. He has impressive credentials, a graduate of Yale University, and Harvard Law School. At age 26, he joined the U.S. Navy, and upon promotion to lieutenant served as a legal advisor to Seal Team One, and was deployed to Iraq in 2007. Upon return to the U.S. a year later, the Department of Justice appointed him to serve as a Special Assistant U.S. Attorney. He was discharged from the Navy in 2010.
DeSantis was elected to Congress in 2012 where he became a founding member of the Freedom Caucus, and an ally of President Trump. As a Trump supporter, he was a strong critic of the Robert Mueller investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election.
And
somewhere along that long road, DeSantis decided the national security
interests of Israel compete with those of the United States. In December
2017, before the President Trump decision to recognize Jerusalem
as the capital of Israel, and to move the U.S Embassy to that City,
DeSantis introduced a bill to have Congress declare Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel and to move the United States Embassy there by the
beginning of 2019.
DeSantis
had introduced similar bills previously, in spite of the fact that
since the 1979 Camp David Accords, American presidents had refused to
recognize Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, or move the U.S. Embassy.
The Trump recognition of Jerusalem was a reckless decision. The city was sacred to Jews, Muslims and Christians. UNGA
181, the resolution under whose aegis Israel declared independence,
declared Jerusalem an independent city, corpus separatum, to be
administered by the U.N. Israel had occupied the city in 1967, and
Israel had no legal basis for sovereignty in Jerusalem. It was
considered by the international community as illegally occupied by
Israel, and because of that, no nation had recognized Jerusalem as the
capital of Israel.
In 1980 the Israeli Knesset passed the Basic Law which declared Jerusalem, complete and unified, the capital of Israel. The Basic Law was a violation of UNSC resolutions 476 & 478, and thus a violation of Article 49 of the 4th Geneva Convention. UNSC 478 declared the Knesset Basic Law null and void, and 476 declared any demographic changes in Jerusalem a violation of the Geneva Convention. Breaches of articles of the 4th Convention are prosecutable as war crimes by the International Criminal Court in the Hague.
Trump's decision was rejected by the vast majority of world leaders: the United Nations Security Council held an emergency meeting on December 7, 2017, where 14 of 15 members condemned it, but the motion was overturned by a U.S. veto. The United Kingdom, France, Japan, Italy, and Sweden were among the countries who criticized Trump's decision at the meeting.
The Trump decision alienated 1.9 billion Muslims, and anti-American demonstrations erupted around the world, burning the American flag and images of Trump. U.S. critics of the Trump decision were baffled why Trump made such a decision, because no one could identify any benefit to the U.S., and it virtually destroyed the U. S. leadership role in the Middle East, and brought U.S. prestige, credibility, influence and respect to new levels of disdain in the region. DeSantis has never addressed questions about benefits accrued to the U.S. from his support of the Jerusalem recognition.
But
DeSantis’ apparent confusion about whose national security interests
loyal Americans find most important, struck again in November last year,
when he told an audience at the Republican Jewish Coalition, that the
Israeli occupied West Bank Palestinian territory is not occupied, but is
“disputed.” That was an amazing statement. Surely DeSantis must know
that the U.S. government has considered the West Bank occupied by Israel
since 1967. There is a reason for the U.S. policy decision. The UN
Security Council had declared Israeli-occupied territories to be "the
Arab territories occupied by Israel since 1967, including Jerusalem."
The Security Council made that declaration in 27 UNSC Resolutions. A
conference of the parties to the 4th Geneva Convention, the ICRC , and
the Israeli Supreme Court have also resolved that these territories are
occupied.
The Israeli court said:"Judea and Samaria (West Bank) and the Gaza area are lands seized during warfare, and are not part of Israel.” One would think a graduate of the Harvard Law School would do some research before opposing U.S. policy on an issue of international law in a public forum.
And, unfortunately, DeSantis has also chosen to mimic the repeated claims of Netanyahu addressing joint sessions of the U.S. Congress, saying that “Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.” The claim is false. Lebanon and Tunisia are Parliamentary Democracies, and Jordan and Morocco are Constitutional Monarchies modeled after the twelve Monarchies of Europe. In fact, the international Democracy Index considers Israel a flawed democracy. Israel has more than 50 laws that discriminate against its Palestinian Arab citizens. In fact, the Israeli government is currently advancing legislation to "Judaize" the Galilee, a region in northern Israel with a significant Palestinian population.
In
practice, this arrangement is, principally, a tool for screening out
Palestinian citizens and preventing their residence in these
communities.
We
are facing presidential elections in 2024, and Ron DeSantis will, in
all likelihood, be the Republican candidate. The Middle East has been
the primary U.S. foreign policy issue since 1948, with the exception of
the periods of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the Cuban missile crisis,
and now Ukraine. Over ten thousand Americans have died in the pursuit of
our Middle East objectives. And the future of our national interests in
the region has become nebulous.
If DeSantis should become our next president, Muslims in the Middle East will strive to drive U.S. prestige and influence in the region to new levels of scorn and disrespect, at the expense of our national security interests. The 9/11 attack, mounted because of our support for the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territory, and its population, killed more Americans than the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Our President, and our security services, must do all possible to prevent another such attack: not incite and provoke another one.
Ron Estes served 25 years as an Operations Officer in the CIA Clandestine Service.
