|
Writers Articles And Opinions |
|
|
|
2 July 2009 By Nicola Nasser In his speech at
Bar Ilan University on June 14, Israeli Prime Minister
Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a new Israeli “peace
plan,” with preconditions that a Palestinian
negotiator must first meet before he would “promptly”
engage in “unconditional” bilateral talks to meet an
international consensus demanding the creation of a
Palestinian state alongside Israel . His preconditions
added to the fourteen conditions the former Israeli
government of comatose Ariel Sharon attached to
Israel’s adoption in grudge of the 2003 Road Map
blueprint for peace with the Palestinian side, on the
basis of which the U.S. administration of President
Barak Obama and his presidential envoy George Mitchell
are now urging an early resumption of “immediate”
Israeli – Palestinian peace talks, which Mitchell on
June 26 hoped “very much to conclude this phase of the
discussions and to be able to move into meaningful and
productive negotiations in the near future."
Sharon’s conditional approval of the Road Map has
condemned the blueprint as a non-starter, led to the
Israeli military reoccupation of the Palestinian
autonomous areas, aborted former U.S. President George
W. Bush’s promise to Palestinians to have their own
state twice in 2005 and 2008, and doomed the twenty –
year peace process since the Madrid conference in 1991
to its current impasse that Obama and Mitchell are
trying to break through. It is a forgone conclusion
that Netanyahu’s preconditions -- Palestinian
recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state,”
“demilitarization” of the prospective Palestinian
less-than-a-sovereign state and preserving Israel ’s
illegitimate “right” to expand its illegal colonial
Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian
territories -- will fare worse than Sharon ’s
conditions.
Netanyahu demanded that the “Palestinian population,”
and not the Palestinian people -- who live “in Judea
and Samaria,” and not in the Israeli – occupied
Palestinian territory, where there is an “Israeli
presence,” and not an Israeli military occupation --
should first agree to a “public, binding and
unequivocal” recognition that Israel is “the nation
state of the Jewish people” worldwide, and not the
nation state of the Israelis. His demand was an
arrogant precondition ridiculed by Gideon Levy in
Haaretz on June 15 as an “excessive demand that
Palestinians recognize the Jewish state by one who has
failed to recognize the Palestinians as a people,”
sarcastically welcomed the next day by Ma'ariv’s chief
political columnist, Ben Caspit, who wrote: “Welcome,
Mr. Prime Minister, to the 20th century. The problem
is that we're already in the 21st.” Moreover, such a
precondition “is almost humiliating and it is unlikely
to be met,” by the Palestinian Authority (PA),
according to Avi Issacharoff, writing in Haaretz on
June 17.
Israeli analyst M.J. Rosenberg wrote on June 19:
Acceptance of Israel as a “Jewish state” is a
non-starter at this point. And Netanyahu knows it. If
that is a precondition for negotiations, there will be
no negotiations. But without any definition of borders
and with Netanyahu committed to expanding settlements
in the West Bank, how can anyone seriously expect
Palestinians to recognize Israel as a “Jewish state?”
Aaron David Miller, a former senior U.S. negotiator in
the Mideast , said Netanyahu’s speech “was less about
pursuing Arab-Israeli peace and much more about
pursuing the U.S.-Israeli relationship.”
PA’s Prime Minister in Ramallah, Salam Fayyad, noted
in a speech at Al-Quds ( Jerusalem ) University on
June 22 that his Israeli counterpart’s speech missed
all reference to the Road Map blueprint as well as to
the thorny issue of expanding settlements and
described the speech as "a new blow to efforts to
salvage the peace process." Head of the Palestine
Liberation Organization (PLO)’s department of
negotiations affairs, Saeb Erakat, condemned
Netanyahu’s speech as a “non-starter.” Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas urged the international
community to isolate him and his government. His
Egyptian counterpart, Hosni Mubarak, a close ally of
Abbas and the U.S. and Israel ’s 30-year unwavering
peace partner, said Netanyahu’s precondition “aborts
the chance for peace,” although he declined to heed
Abbas’ call for the isolation of Netanyahu and
received him and others of his cabinet. Al-Baath, the
mouthpiece of Syria 's ruling party, commented:
“Netanyahu has confirmed that he rejects the Arab
initiative for peace.” In an editorial on June 16, the
Saudi Arabian English daily, “Arab News,” said his
speech was “a challenge to the world community.” Walid
Jumblat, a leading figure of the March 14 bloc, which
recently won the Lebanese elections, lambasted the
speech as dragging the region into a “dangerous stage”
and one that “completely crippled” any possibility to
reach a peace settlement, adding that, “any talk about
Israel as a Jewish state means closing the file on the
(Palestinian right of) return,” on which there is a
consensus among rival Lebanese factions to reject the
resettlement of half a million Palestinian refugees
hosted by Lebanon since 1948.
However Obama and Mitchell insensitively ignored all
negative Palestinian and Arab reactions, repeatedly
and on record renamed Israel as the “Jewish” State of
Israel, with Obama lightly trying to defuse the
explosiveness of Netanyahu’s demand by stating that it
was “exactly what negotiations are supposed to be
about,” because “this is what both America and Europe
are asking,” according to Italian foreign minister
Franco Frattini.
Angrily describing Netanyahu as a “swindler” who plays
“tricks” with peace – making, Yasser Abed Rabbo,
secretary general of the PLO’s executive committee,
said the Israeli premier wants Palestinians to “become
Zionists.” Mere heartfelt commitment to Zionism will
not be enough, however, Hasan and Ali Abunimah wrote
in The Electronic Intifada on June 17, for the
Palestinians' conversion to have “practical meaning,”
Netanyahu explained, “there must also be a clear
understanding that the Palestinian refugee problem
will be resolved outside Israel 's borders.” In other
words, “Palestinians must agree to help Israel
complete the ethnic cleansing it began in 1947-48, by
abandoning the right of return,” Abunimah brothers
added.
In a statement, five PLO member factions, namely the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the
Palestinian People's Party, the Palestinian National
Liberation Movement and the Palestinian Popular
Struggle Front, said Netanyahu’s speech was
“tantamount to a declaration of war on Palestinians'
national rights.” For the first time since the
Palestinian – Israeli “peace process” was launched
some twenty years ago, the voice of the PLO peace
partners was much louder and harsher in criticizing
Israel than that of their opposition among the non-PLO
factions, like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Netanyahu
seems to have succeeded where four years of Egyptian
efforts have failed to make Palestinians speak in one
voice.
When Netanyahu makes Palestinian recognition of Israel
as a “Jewish state” as the cornerstone of his “peace”
policy and has Avigdor Lieberman, who calls on record
for the transfer of Israeli Arab Palestinians, as the
foreign minister of his ruling coalition, he
officially raises ethnic cleansing to the level of
state policy, and may be this is why French President
Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly urged visiting Netanyahu on
June 30 to replace his top diplomat and “to get rid of
that man,” whom he declined to meet when Lieberman was
recently in Paris, leading Israeli member of Knesset
Afu Aghbaria (Hadash) and ten others of his
parliamentary colleagues to call on world leaders to
declare what they condemn as the “racist” Lieberman a
persona-non-grata. Another Hadash MP, Hanna Swaid,
wrote to Mitchell: "The recognition of Israel as a
Jewish state harms the Arab citizens (25% of the
population), undermines their legal status in the
country and puts them at the heart of the struggle
with no representation in the negotiations.”
Recognizing Israel as a/or the “Jewish state” should
be rejected not only because it politically forecloses
whatever chance remains for the resumption of peace
talks and sets the regional stage for the alternative,
which another peace partner to Israel, Jordan’s King
Abdullah II, has repeatedly warned against because it
“would have adverse and catastrophic consequences on
the whole region,” but more importantly because
strategically such a precondition, if it gains
international recognition, would inevitably be used by
Israel as a casus belli to officially resume -- what
has been so far claimed an unofficial policy by
neutral monitors and officially denied by Israeli
politicians – and defend its ethnic cleansing of
native Arab Palestinians as an internationally
–recognized state policy inside its borders, and in
the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967
outside them, and as an international carte blanche
vindicating what the Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe
documented as its more than sixty-year old “The Ethnic
Cleansing of Palestine.”
Politically this would rule out the Palestinian
refugees’ “Right of Return” and legitimize Lieberman’s
“transfer” dreams (expulsion en masse of Israel’s Arab
- Palestinian citizens as well as Palestinian natives
of East Jerusalem) to be made true as soon as the
political timing render their realization feasible, to
throw “the Arabs into the sea,” according to Aharon
Barak, the former president of the supreme court of
Israel from 1995 to 2006, who was speaking at the
Rabin Center in Tel Aviv on June 25.
Israeli governmental and parliamentary officials of
Netanyahu’s ruling coalition criticized Barak's
support for “a state for all its citizens.” It would
be very instructive here to recall the first Prime
Minister of Israel and forefather of ethnic cleansing
David Ben-Gurion’s reaction to the news that the world
renowned physicist Albert Einstein declined the offer
of the Israeli presidency in 1952: “Tell me what to do
if he says yes! If he accepts, we are in trouble,” he
said, because Einstein “would distinguish between
Jewish homeland and state, and argued for a
bi-national state where Jews and Arabs shared a common
land, not a strictly defined “Jewish state,” according
to Fred Jerome, who in June published his new book,
“Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas
about the Middle East” (St. Martin’s Press).
More instructive than Einstein’s arguments and
Ben-Gurion’s reaction was the U.S. President Harry S.
Truman’s proclamation, just 11 minutes after the
state's unilateral declaration, that, “The United
States recognizes the provisional government
(proclaimed by Jews “in Palestine”) as the de facto
authority of the new State of Israel,” and NOT as “the
new Jewish State” as proposed by the American Jewish
leaders, crossing out the proposed words and replacing
them in his own handwriting with “the new state of
Israel.” Obviously, Netanyahu’s precondition “was
devised because Netanyahu understands that
Palestinians will never accept it because it negates
their standing in a land they have inhabited from time
immemorial.” ( Rosenberg on June 14)
Czech Republic Foreign Minister Jan Kohout, visiting
Israel on June 28, said in an exclusive interview with
The Jerusalem Post: “First we have to understand what
is meant by this [Jewish state demand]. So far, I can
say that I don't have a clear picture on that.”
“Resolution 181 (UN Resolution 181, also called the
1947 UN Partition Plan) calls for recognition of
Israel as a Jewish state. But at the same time it
gives equal rights to all of its citizens,” said
Kohout, who seemed not interested in recent history to
note that the Israel recognized by the UN Resolution
181, which at the time had a population of some
(500,000) Jews and (438,000) Arab Palestinians, is
very much smaller than the one we know now, which
enjoys a de facto, but not yet a de jure,
international recognition, thanks to Israel’s "War of
Independence" using Plan D to “cleanse” Palestine,
according to Pappe and to five major territorial
expansionist wars, dubbed “preventive” or
“pre-emptive” wars by Israeli strategists, who
launched them to secure their ethnic cleansing
exploits, claiming with their former premier, Golda
Meir, that there was “no Palestinian people” to
cleanse.
To ethnically cleanse the Palestinians was the very
basis of Israel ’s raison-d’être. Speaking of the
Arabs of Palestine (Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895
entry), Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist
Organization, said: “Spirit the penniless population
across the frontier by denying it employment... Both
the process of expropriation and the removal of the
poor must be carried out discreetly and
circumspectly.” The tragic result was summarized by
Israel ’s minister of defense during the 1967 war,
Moshe Dayan, in an address to the Technion, Haifa , (Haaretz,
April 4, 1969): “Jewish villages were built in the
place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names
of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because
geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books
not exist, the Arab villages are not there either.
Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in
the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of
Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal
al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this
country that did not have a former Arab population.”
It seems clear now that the UN General Assembly
Resolution 4686 of 1991, which revoked an earlier one
equating Zionism with racism (the 1975 Resolution
3379), was a premature measure.
Kohout, whose country was the former rotating
president of the European Union, is not a rare species
in demanding to “understand what is meant” by the
“Jewish state” precondition. One could not but recall
the Venetian word “ghetto,” once meant for the Jews of
Europe. The Israeli leadership seems now in the grips
of a “ghetto mentality” racing against the modern
times of pluralism and coexistence, when nations are
moving towards a globalized 21st-century identity of
citizenship by allegiance, regardless of race, creed
or gender, and at a time when the French translation
of Israeli academic Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of
the Jewish People” is granted this year’s French
prestigious Aujourd’hui Award for a book which argues
that Zionism in modern times “invented” the concept of
the “Jewish people” as well as their “imaginary”
historical connection to Palestine.
*Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based
in Bir Zeit of the Israeli – occupied Palestinian
territories.
EsinIslam.Com
|
Save
Add Comments To This Story