Some say it was bad timing or that one half of the Israeli government didn’t know what the other half was doing. In effect, however, the American government had its bluff called by a regime that has no intention of agreeing a deal with the Palestinians. Not now. Not ever.
Waiting until US vice-president Joe Biden was actually in Israel on a mission to restart stalled peace talks before announcing provocatively that 1,600 new homes would be built in East Jerusalem, was a calculated insult to the country’s main benefactor. America gives Israel more than $3 billion a year as well as the latest, cutting-edge military hardware.
Did Biden or President Obama respond by suspending aid? No way. With mid-term elections coming up and Obama’s popularity in free fall, the White House put the Israel lobby first and instead accepted humiliation at the hands of the Netanyahu government.
Palestinian leaders who had hoped that Obama’s election would bring change were equally humiliated. What now? Will the Palestinian Authority under the discredited Mahmoud Abbas unilaterally declare a independent state now that the prospects of negotiations with the Israelis are dim to non-existent?
Will the PA support the new Intifada or popular uprising that is beginning throughout the West Bank as ordinary people march on a weekly basis against the Jewish settlements and the wall that Israel has built to enforce its policy of apartheid? The protests are in fact so far receiving more help from Israeli activists than Palestinian officials.
For example, almost 130 supporters of Anarchists Against the Wall have been arrested inside the West Bank on joint protests with Palestinians. AATW say: “We believe that it is possible to do more than demonstrate inside Israel or participate in humanitarian relief actions. Israeli apartheid and occupation isn't going to end by itself - it will end when it becomes ungovernable and unmanageable. It is time to physically oppose the bulldozers, the army and the occupation.”
Other Israeli groups, notably Woman Against the Occupation and for Human Rights
and the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions also oppose Israeli policies. But they are lone voices in a country where official Zionist propaganda paints Palestinians as natural enemies of Jews and treats those living in Israeli as second-class citizens in a distinct form of apartheid.
A two-state settlement is more and more a practical impossibility, even if the Israelis were ever prepared to negotiate. Nearly 300,000 settlers live in the West Bank, in addition to 180,000 Israelis residing in Jewish neighbourhoods built in east Jerusalem. The West Bank is criss-crossed by Israeli roads and checkpoints. The settlers would rather die than leave.
Gaza, home to another 1.5 million Palestinians, is under siege, its population living in horrific conditions as a result of sanctions imposed by the European Union and enforced by the Israeli and Egyptian authorities. Of course, it has no geographic connection to the West Bank. A single state for Jews and Palestinians is therefore a more progressive and even practical solution. It would have to be established on a secular basis to succeed and the collapse of “peace talks” gives added impetus to the policy.
Meanwhile, there is something practical we can all do. The global boycott, disinvestment and sanctions movement has called a second day of action on March 30 in the campaign against Israeli occupation of Palestinian land. The success of the first BDS action sent the Israeli government into a spin. That’s a good enough reason to back this year’s.
Paul Feldman
Communications editor
For revolutionary solutions to create a sustainable, not-for-profit economy in place of global capital alongside a real democracy based on People’s Assemblies. Visit our web site at www.aworldtowin.net
Showing posts with label West Bank settlements. Show all posts
Showing posts with label West Bank settlements. Show all posts
Friday, March 12, 2010
Monday, June 15, 2009
Netanyahu endorses a ghetto
Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday became the sixth Israeli prime minister to utter the words “Palestinian state” – and yet the Palestinians are no nearer their goal after his speech. The conditions set out by the right-wing Israeli leader are so draconian that they effectively rule out self-determination for the Palestinians as the outcome of any negotiations before they have even started.
Netanyahu simply ignored pressure from President Obama, who had called for an immediate end to settlement building on the West Bank, making no mention of these. He shut down options about the future status of Jerusalem and blocked any prospects of a return to the area by five million exiled Palestinians by insisting on recognition of Israel as an exclusively “Jewish state”.
And to top it all, Netanyahu insisted that any future Palestinian state would have to be “demilitarised” – having no control over its borders or air space. No wonder Palestinian MP Mustafa Barghouti said Netanyahu had “endorsed a ghetto" and a “a state that would be subject to Israeli control”.
The fact is that even before Netanyahu’s Zionist vision of a Greater Israel to the exclusion of all other people in the area, a two-state “solution” like the one favoured by the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is simply unworkable and ought to be abandoned. You don’t have to look hard to see why.
Nearly 500,000 Israeli Jews live in settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem – 280,000 in the West Bank and a further 190,000 in East Jerusalem. There are a further 102 unauthorised outposts in the West Bank which are not officially recognised by Israel but which the authorities turn a blind eye to. Over 40% of the West Bank is taken up with Israeli infrastructure.
The settlements are illegal under international law, but Israeli governments don’t give a damn about this. The United Nations and the United States have declined to act for more than 40 years, giving the Israelis confidence to go on with their carving up of Palestinian territory. In addition to the settlements, there is the geographical fact that the West Bank and Gaza are not contiguous areas, making it extremely difficult to conceive of them as part of a viable Palestinian state. In any case, Gaza is surrounded and under siege, entirely cut off from the West Bank.
So if two states can’t and won’t work, what about having just one? As Israel’s rulers have no intention of allowing Palestinians to form a viable state, their bluff should be called. As writer and noted academic Joel Kovel has argued, it is urgent to “envision Israel beyond Zionism”. The Zionists fear a movement for a one-state solution beyond anything Hamas can throw at it. Former prime minister Yehud Olmert once admitted: “We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All we want now is the right to vote’. The day they get it we will lose everything.”
Israeli Jews have more to gain than to lose from a one secular state solution. Today they live in a militarised, divided society which is far from the co-operative paradise promised by the early Zionist founders. A new generation of leaders on both sides is needed to take this project forward. They have to find ways of making a principled appeal to Israeli Jews, including the settlers, to Israel’s Palestinian citizens and to the Palestinian masses to come together to establish a peaceful future for the region.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
Netanyahu simply ignored pressure from President Obama, who had called for an immediate end to settlement building on the West Bank, making no mention of these. He shut down options about the future status of Jerusalem and blocked any prospects of a return to the area by five million exiled Palestinians by insisting on recognition of Israel as an exclusively “Jewish state”.
And to top it all, Netanyahu insisted that any future Palestinian state would have to be “demilitarised” – having no control over its borders or air space. No wonder Palestinian MP Mustafa Barghouti said Netanyahu had “endorsed a ghetto" and a “a state that would be subject to Israeli control”.
The fact is that even before Netanyahu’s Zionist vision of a Greater Israel to the exclusion of all other people in the area, a two-state “solution” like the one favoured by the Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is simply unworkable and ought to be abandoned. You don’t have to look hard to see why.
Nearly 500,000 Israeli Jews live in settlements built since Israel's 1967 occupation of the West Bank and Arab East Jerusalem – 280,000 in the West Bank and a further 190,000 in East Jerusalem. There are a further 102 unauthorised outposts in the West Bank which are not officially recognised by Israel but which the authorities turn a blind eye to. Over 40% of the West Bank is taken up with Israeli infrastructure.
The settlements are illegal under international law, but Israeli governments don’t give a damn about this. The United Nations and the United States have declined to act for more than 40 years, giving the Israelis confidence to go on with their carving up of Palestinian territory. In addition to the settlements, there is the geographical fact that the West Bank and Gaza are not contiguous areas, making it extremely difficult to conceive of them as part of a viable Palestinian state. In any case, Gaza is surrounded and under siege, entirely cut off from the West Bank.
So if two states can’t and won’t work, what about having just one? As Israel’s rulers have no intention of allowing Palestinians to form a viable state, their bluff should be called. As writer and noted academic Joel Kovel has argued, it is urgent to “envision Israel beyond Zionism”. The Zionists fear a movement for a one-state solution beyond anything Hamas can throw at it. Former prime minister Yehud Olmert once admitted: “We are approaching the point where more and more Palestinians will say: ‘There is no place for two states between the Jordan and the sea. All we want now is the right to vote’. The day they get it we will lose everything.”
Israeli Jews have more to gain than to lose from a one secular state solution. Today they live in a militarised, divided society which is far from the co-operative paradise promised by the early Zionist founders. A new generation of leaders on both sides is needed to take this project forward. They have to find ways of making a principled appeal to Israeli Jews, including the settlers, to Israel’s Palestinian citizens and to the Palestinian masses to come together to establish a peaceful future for the region.
Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor
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