The notion of a Palestinian peace process is as obsolete as John Kerry’s hair style. There can be no doubt that the Israeli government is not interested in peace and the world needs to stop acting as if there is some sort of “peace process” going on. The only way things will ever get resolved is if the US and EU lean on Israel HARD. An end to all military aid, sanctions, expulsion of diplomats until Israel withdraws its forces back behind the 1967 borders. Before moving on to the article, check out these quotes, just a few of thousands.
The Partition of Palestine is illegal. It will never be recognized. Jerusalem was and will forever be our capital. Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. For Ever. ~ Menachem Begin, the day after the U.N. vote to partition Palestine."The main difference between Bosnia and Palestine is that ethnic cleansing in the former took place in the form of dramatic massacres and slaughters which caught the world's attention, whereas in Palestine what is taking place is a drop-by-drop tactic in which one or two houses are demolished daily, a few acres are taken here and there every day, a few people are forced to leave" ~ Edward Said"Compassion towards the wicked is really wickedness. It is along these lines that Rabbi Levi opened his speech in honor of Purim: (Talmud, Megillah, 11a): "If you do not uproot the inhabitants of the Land, and allow them to remain ~ they will become thorns in your sides, and will cause trouble for you in the Land in which you dwell." (Bamidbar 33:55) The mitzvah, then of wiping out Amalek [Palestinians], actually stems from the value of compassion and kindness ~ compassion on all those whom Amalek threatens to exterminate. This mitzvah is an ongoing one, and valid even today. Today, too, there are those ~ driven by a deep-seeded anti-Semitism ~ who desperately wish to kill us. These are the people whom the Torah commanded us to obliterate, to leave no memory of them." ~ Rabbi Zalman Baruch Melamed"We'll make a pastrami sandwich of them, ... we'll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in 25 years' time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart." ~ Ariel Sharon
By Juan Cole
July 21, 2013
Secretary of
State John Kerry very tentatively announced Friday that he has hopes
that Israeli and Palestinian negotiations will start back up with a visit of
both sides to Washington in the coming week. Oddly, he made the announcement
alone, not flanked by either Palestinians or Israelis, prompting questions of
whether he really had a breakthrough or firm commitments.
Palestinians had been reluctant to give predatory Israeli policy toward them any legitimacy by negotiating at a time when Israelis were actively pouring more Israeli settlers into the Palestinian West Bank. It is like negotiating with someone about how to share a piece of pie while that person is sneaking a fork into the pie and eating it up. For their part, the Israelis have refused to stop stealing Palestinian land and water as a prerequisite for talks.
For
Palestinians, the point of negotiating with the Israelis is to achieve a
Palestinian state on the territory of the West Bank and Gaza as they existed in
1967. That is also the point of any serious Western negotiator attempting to
achieve peace.
However,
from the point of view of the ruling far-right Likud Party of Israel, the point
of negotiations is to create a fig leaf of a “peace process” while continuing
to appropriate as much Palestinian land as possible, putting more hundreds of
thousands of squatters into the West Bank, while decisively and forever
preventing the establishment of a Palestinian state. In short, for the Likud
Party, the “peace process” with the US and the Palestinians is like the ski mask
worn by a bank robber. It allows you to get away with it.
For this
reason, US Secretary of State John Kerry’s quixotic quest to restart talks is
both a welcome distraction and an unwelcome threat for the Likud. It is
welcome, because without a fictional “peace process,” the massive Israeli theft
of Palestinian land and resources is nakedly exposed to the world. It is a
threat, because there is always a danger that the negotiations may have some
successes, requiring actual Israeli concessions of practical import, which is
definitely not what the Likud wants.
The right wing Israeli project of slowly annexing the West Bank and starving out the Palestinians in Gaza involves a great deal of future-blindness and magical thinking. They seem to imagine that the Palestinians at some point will abruptly vanish into thin air, like an illusionist’s rabbit.
After
decades of carefully hiding from themselves their acts of butchery and ethnic
cleansing against the Palestinians in 1948, and then more decades of denying
that there are any such things as Palestinians, the Israeli Right appears to
have half-convinced itself that there isn’t really a problem with their Drang
nach Osten.
These
attitudes are clear in the Likud responses to the news that Secretary Kerry has
succeeded in reconvening the Israeli and Palestinian sides for talks, as
translated by the USG Open Source Center:
‘Minister Landau: Israel’s Consent To Release Prisoners ~ Mistake: Attila Somfalvi reports at 1647 GMT in Ynetnews:“Tourism Minister Uzi Landau said to Ynet that ‘there is an Israeli interest to enter negotiations; however, the Israeli consent to release prisoners is a mistake. WHOEVER SPEAKS OF THE 1967 BORDERS SPEAKS OF AUSCHWITZ. Whoever pushes for negotiations based on the 1967 boundaries, even with border adjustments, actually speaks of the 1967 borders. We must negotiate with no preconditions and without prisoner release,’ Landau emphasized.”‘
Apparently
far right wing Israelis live in such a cocoon that they can’t understand how
extreme a statement such as ’1967 borders are Auschwitz’ sounds to normal
people.
Really?
Letting the Palestinians have a decent life is comparable to gassing innocent
Jews? Trivializing Auschwitz like this is the real crime, and ratcheting up the
rhetoric so that any concession to political reality is equated to genocide, is
an offense against common sense.
And, you
will never ever hear mainstream American news programs report or quote Landau’s
absurd and deeply offensive pronouncement.
Israeli settlements in
the Palestinian West Bank
Then there’s
this:
‘Likud’s MK Regev: PM Should Clarify Truth on Renewed Talks: Moran Azulay reports at 1504 GMT in Ynetnews:“Knesset Member Miri Regev addressed the issue of renewed talks with the Palestinians, and said: ‘In light of the various statements regarding an agreement about the 1967 borders, as well as agreements on releasing Palestinian prisoners, the prime minister should clarify the truth,’ Regev said, adding: ‘I expect to hear what the Palestinian leadership is doing for a peace agreement, because in my opinion they have no real intention of reaching one.’ According to her, US Secretary of State John Kerry’s ‘cleverness’ will increase the dangers to Israel’s security.” ‘
In other
words, Regev doesn’t want the negotiations. She wants the West Bank. She sees
giving up the West Bank and the establishment of a Palestinian state as
unacceptable “dangers” to Israel. She implicitly believes that only by
strangling the Palestinians can Israelis breathe free. Thus, she dismisses
Kerry’s skilful diplomacy as mere ‘cleverness’ and condemns it as unsafe at any
speed.
Deputy
Defense Minister Danny Danon blasted his boss, Netanyahu, for the concession of
freeing Palestinian prisoners, telling the Jerusalem Post
‘We must
learn from our past mistakes and not free terrorists with blood on their hands,
neither as a gesture nor as a reward.” He insisted that Israelis must not again
commit the ‘injustice of the disengagement (in Gaza) by returning to the 1967 borders.’
Danon, the Likud Convention chair, said that the Netanyahu government ‘must not
uproot thousands of Jews from their homes.’
Danon, in
other words, rejects any concessions to the Palestinians. He wishes Israeli
troops and squatters were back inside Gaza, instead of the Israeli military
only surrounding it and preventing its Palestinians from exporting most of what
they make. He rejects the establishment of a Palestinian state or a return to
1967 borders, which would require that Israeli squatters on Palestinian land
(which they stole outright) return to Tel Aviv and Haifa. He sees all
Palestinians that dared resist Occupation and Apartheid as mere ‘terrorists’
and thinks they all, even the children among them, should stay in Israeli
prisons forever. It should be remembered that many Palestinians in Israeli
prisons are guilty of much less than Nelson Mandela was when he was in South
African prisons.
In his
response, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who has openly boasted of
derailing the 1993 Oslo Peace Process, said:
“With the resumption of the diplomatic process, we are faced with two main goals: Preventing the creation of a bi-national state between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River that would endanger the future of the Jewish state, and preventing the establishment of an additional Iranian-sponsored terrorist state on Israel’s borders, which would endanger us no less.”
In other
words, Netanyahu believes that no Palestinian state can be allowed to come into
existence, because it would inevitably be an Iranian-sponsored satellite and
would conduct violence against Israel.
Netanyahu,
on the other hand, understands that with no negotiations and no political
settlement of any sort, Israel will likely become responsible in the eyes of
the world for the stateless Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza, and will be
forced to give them Israeli citizenship. People in the 21st century can’t be
allowed to be without citizenship in a state, since that is what
gives people the right to have rights. If Israel won’t allow
the Palestinians to have a state (and it won’t), then it will be pressured to
make them citizens of Israel.
So if
Netanyahu absolutely rejects allowing a Palestinian state to be erected, and
absolutely rejects giving the Palestinians citizenship in Israel, what is left?
Apartheid is what is left, which is what Netanyahu wants. He wants Israeli
control over the West Bank’s land, water and air, but wants to keep the
Palestinian population there stateless. He hopes that Palestinians can be
persuaded to accept Apartheid if only they are given a better standard of
living, that, in essence, they can be bribed to accept their status as
stateless inmates of an Israeli police state on the West Bank.
So for
Netanyahu, the negotiations are not in good faith. They are window dressing.
They give him a reply to the European Union, which accuses him of crimes against
international law in the West Bank.
Just wait,
he can say, there may be irregularities now, but who knows what things will
look like at the end of the peace negotiations, which we are actively pursuing.
It is the old dodge of the Israeli right wing.
Those
negotiations are aimed at browbeating the Palestinians into accepting their
statelessness forever, in return for empty Israeli pledges not to completely
expropriate them and further pledges to allow them a standard of living similar
to that of Jordanians.
I am only ass-u-and-me-ing the Auschwitz reference is supposed to imply the contrived fear of obliteration of God's chosen ones if they have to retreat to before the 1967 borders.
ReplyDeleteOne look at those maps 1948 to today tells a different story. Who is being obliterated?
As for the "Drang nach Osten", a lot could be said about that one.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Top9aNsvwMU