Ethnic cleansing as a State policy
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.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.
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.
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.
The writer is a is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit.
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