Netanyahu reaffirms commitment to racism and expansionism – thanks to US tax dollars
JMD Morgan
tax dollars
By Saree Makdisi
5 July 2009
Saree Makdisi argues that if Israel is ever to agree to anything for the
Palestinians other than �an amorphous entity lacking a definite
territory, not allowed to control its own borders or airspace, shorn of
any vestige of sovereignty ... and permanently disarmed�, then Americans
must demand an end to their leaders� indulgence of Israel.
To judge by the next day�s headlines, Binyamin Netanyahu�s policy speech
last month was a great success. �Israeli premier backs state for
Palestinians,� declared the New York Times. �Israel endorses two-state
goal,� said the Washington Post. �Netanyahu backs Palestinian state,�
announced the Guardian.
He did no such thing, of course, unless by �state� one understands an
amorphous entity lacking a definite territory, not allowed to control
its own borders or airspace, shorn of any vestige of sovereignty (other
than a flag and perhaps a national anthem), not allowed to enter into
treaties with other states � and permanently disarmed and hence at the
mercy of Israel. It would make about as much sense to call an apple an
orange or a piano a speedboat as to call such a construct a state, and
yet those are the conditions that Netanyahu imposed on the creation of
such an entity for the Palestinians (if they get that far in the first
place).
The strange thing is that Netanyahu�s speech marked both the definitive
end and a symbolic return to the beginning of the two-state solution as
that hapless notion has been peddled since the Oslo Accords of 1993-95.
For what he said the Palestinians might � perhaps � be entitled to is
pretty much what Oslo had said they might be entitled to 15 years ago: a
�self-government authority� not allowed to control its own borders or
airspace, shorn of any vestige of sovereignty, etc. And on top of that
they can also forget about Jerusalem � that is and will forever remain
the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish people.
If it sounds so drearily familiar, that�s because it is: we have come
full circle. First time as tragedy, second time as farce.
Oslo actually never mentioned the apparently magic words �Palestinian
state�, so Netanyahu actually outdid Rabin and Peres in terms of
rhetorical magnanimity. But, rhetoric aside, by bringing the situation
full circle back to what they �offered� Yasser Arafat back in the
mid-1990s, Netanyahu also revealed to those last few Palestinians who
might have believed otherwise that the only kind of Palestinian �state�
any Israeli government has ever countenanced (or will ever countenance)
will look like what was on offer at Oslo. Netanyahu is offering the same
thing all over again because that�s the only Palestinian �state� that
Israel will accept. Take it or leave it.
The Palestinians who still cling to the idea of a Palestinian state to
be achieved through negotiations (from a position of weakness) with
Israel had better absorb this once and for all and move on to other
objectives � and other strategies to succeed.
That�s why the return to the beginning also signals the coming of the
end. For after all the agony of the past 15 years no Palestinians in
their right mind would want to go back to Oslo all over again. Those
agreements led to three things: the permanent institutionalization of
the Israeli occupation of Palestine; the permanent separation of the
occupied territories into shards of land cut off from one another and
the outside world (and hence what Sara Roy calls � and the World Bank
implicitly acknowledges as � the de-development of the Palestinian
economy); and the doubling of the population of Jewish settlers
illegally colonizing the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.
There were just over 100,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank in 1993;
there are around 500,000 there today, including 200,000 or so in
occupied East Jerusalem. According to the UN, their population is
increasing at a rate three times greater than that of Israel itself, and
will double again to about a million within a decade.
This phenomenal expansion is what is referred to as the �natural growth�
of the colonies, which in his speech Netanyahu � brazenly defying
President Barack Obama � said he would protect. A few more years of this
kind of growth and the territory that might once (maybe, long ago) have
been considered as the basis for a Palestinian state will be all but
eaten up by the sprawling colonies.
There�s hardly anything left of that territory anyway. The UN said two
years ago that some 40 per cent of the West Bank is already taken up by
Israeli infrastructure off limits to Palestinians; the 60 per cent that
remains is broken up into an archipelago of islands so cut off and
isolated from each other that a brilliant satirical map has been
circulating on the internet representing the West Bank as a kind of
Pacific island paradise, with dotted lines showing imaginary ferry
routes from Ramallah to Nablus and Bethlehem to Hebron. It would be
funny if it were not so sad. And even in most of that 60 per cent,
Israel retains security control (that�s according to Oslo; today its
army conducts raids wherever it likes � and it does so virtually every day).
What Netanyahu was saying to any Palestinians foolish enough to accept
his terms is that if they want to stick a flag in their archipelago of
little impoverished islands of territory and call it a state, they can
go right ahead.
But for them to get even that far, they must first, he now says,
recognize Israel as a Jewish state. This is a new Israeli demand (it
first came up during the buildup to the doomed Annapolis summit in
November 2007), the latest in a sequence of such demands going back to
the 1970s. First, the Palestinians had to renounce terrorism; then they
had to recognize Israel; then they had to rewrite their national
charter; then they had to tear the charter up; then they had to say �
again, louder � that they recognize Israel�s right to exist; then they
had to end all resistance to four decades of brutal military occupation.
Tzipi Livni, Israel�s previous foreign minister, even said that the
Palestinians had to learn to purge the word nakba (referring to the
catastrophe of 1948) from their vocabulary if they wanted to have a
state. The one thing that Palestinians have not formally been asked to
do is to say that they are terribly sorry for having dared to resist the
occupation in the first place � and no doubt that demand is on the way
as well.
In return, Israel has had to commit to nothing other than a few vague
and craftily-worded � and endlessly deferrable � promises. And it has
carried out (at its own pace and according to its own terms) a few
tactical redeployments of troops and colonists (from a grand total of 18
per cent of the West Bank, at the very peak of Oslo). Some of those
redeployments have actually, as in Gaza, made the process of dominating
and controlling the Palestinians that much easier (Israel could never
have subjected the people of Gaza to the indiscriminate violence it
rained on them day and night in late 2008 and early 2009 had the Jewish
colonists there remained in place).
The Israelis have always been able to find some Palestinian leader or
other to go along with their endless demands, to jump ignominiously
through one hoop after another, more like a third-rate court jester than
the leader of an unvanquished and defiant people. When one leader
finally said enough was enough (as Arafat did at Camp David), he was
dismissed and another more pliant one (the hopelessly compromised and
unimaginative Mahmoud Abbas) was found to take his place, from among the
dwindling ranks of those candidates the Israelis deemed not worth
assassinating or imprisoning in a campaign of violence going back to the
1970s. (Indeed, it bears repeating that Abbas and his hangers-on
survived to this day only as the result of Israel�s anti-Darwinian
process of unnatural selection of potential Palestinian leaders, in
which the fittest were eliminated and the most inept were allowed to
reproduce).
But this latest demand is too much for any Palestinian leader � even one
as endlessly obsequious as Abbas � to accept.
For to recognize Israel as a Jewish state would be not only to renounce
(which no leader and indeed no individual Palestinian has the authority
to do) the right of return of those Palestinians ethnically cleansed
from their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948. It would also be
to abandon to their fate the remaining million or so Palestinians
(including their descendants) who survived the nakba and have been
living as second class citizens of Israel, and perhaps even to give
Israel license to expel them all and complete the �job� (as Benny Morris
puts it) of 1948.
Israel today is no more Jewish than America is white or Christian. The
big difference, though, is that, whereas America (for the most part)
embraces its own multiculturalism, Israel still desperately wants to be
Jewish. Its absurd demand to be recognized as such (no other state goes
around impetuously demanding that others accept its own sense of its
national character) is an expression of its own profound insecurity: not
its military insecurity � the only serious military threat Israel faces
on its own territory is imaginary � but rather its anxious awareness of
its status as a botched, and hence forever incomplete, settler-colonial
enterprise. Unlike Australia, there were too many aboriginals left
standing when the smoke cleared over the ruins of Palestine in 1948. And
to this day the Palestinians have refused to simply give up, go away or
somehow annul themselves.
That fact � and its attendant anxiety among Zionists � poses a real
problem for the million Palestinians inside Israel, whose fate is far
from settled.
Western liberals consider Avigdor Lieberman to be right wing because he
says openly that he wants the indigenous Palestinians removed from what
he considers to be the Jewish land of Israel (to which he came as a
Russian-speaking Moldovan immigrant). What they fail to acknowledge is
that Tzipi Livni, who ran in the recent Israeli elections as the voice
of peace and moderation � the darling of Western liberals � hinted at
exactly the same dark fate (�Once a Palestinian state is established, I
can come to the Palestinian citizens, whom we call Israeli Arabs, and
say to them �you are citizens with equal rights, but the national
solution for you is elsewhere,�� she said during the electoral campaign
� i.e. you are equal, but not really, and ultimately you must look
elsewhere for a sense of home). And Netanyahu has long espoused a
similar position.
How could he not? This is not rocket science or linear algebra: it is
what it means for a state to insist on having a single cultural identity
irrespective of who happens to actually be living on the territory it
considers its own. It is all too rarely thought of in the same terms,
but the violent insistence on monoculture is just as ugly in Israel as
it is in Iran, Saudi Arabia, among the cadres of the British National
Party, the followers of Jean-Marie le Pen, the hoodlums of Aryan Nation
or the hooded posses of the KKK. The drive to obliterate or expunge
cultural difference from a homeland conceived of as an exclusive space
will always be inherently ugly.
And the fact of the matter is that the expulsion or �transfer� of
Palestinians has been a core feature of Zionism as it has been practised
since 1948. It is inherent in Zionism as a political program � from
right to left � because, if the idea behind Zionism is to establish an
exclusively Jewish state (which it is), the only way for a would-be
Jewish state to have been established on land that began the 20th
century with a population that was overwhelmingly (93 per cent)
non-Jewish was through the removal of the land�s non-Jewish population.
The sense that there is an inherently Jewish land inconveniently
cluttered up with a non-Jewish population that needs to be dealt with
somehow or other drove Zionist planning all through the 1930s (the
�transfer� of the Palestinians was planned more than a decade before the
1948 war). And, as grotesque as ever, it was on full view in Netanyahu�s
speech.
The key moment in the speech came when he said that �the truth is that
in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish homeland, now
lives a large population of Palestinians�. This attitude comes straight
out of the primitive racialism and imaginary civilizational hierarchies
of the 19th century. The Jews are a people with a homeland and hence
they have a right to a state; the Palestinians are not a people at all,
or certainly not one of the same order. They are merely a collection of
vagabonds and trespassers intruding on the Jewish homeland. They have no
rights, let alone a centuries-old competing narrative of home attached
to the same land, a narrative worthy of recognition by Israel.
On the contrary: the Palestinians must accept that Israel is the state
of the Jewish people, and they must do so on the understanding that they
are not entitled to the same rights. �We� are a people, Netanyahu was
saying; �they� are merely a �population�. �We� have a right to a state �
a real state. �They� do not. �They� have to recognize �our� rights; �we�
owe �them� nothing in return, except, possibly, a curt nod of dismissal
from �our� view into the walled-off ghettoes and cantons which we might
(perhaps, if �they� behave well) be persuaded to build for �them� on
�our� land � and �they� had better be grateful even for that.
This racialized sense of inherent entitlement and unique superiority �
fuelled (in just the way that a child is spoiled by over-indulgent
parents) by over 100 billion of our tax dollars, the endless deference
of our elected representatives, the open-ended diplomatic cover provided
on demand by all our presidents after Eisenhower � is what allows
Israelis like Netanyahu (and Lieberman, and Livni, and Olmert, and
Sharon, and Rabin, etc.) to threaten, bellow at and admonish the
Palestinians. It is also what allows Israel to occupy Palestinian land,
demolish Palestinian homes, starve Palestinian children, imprison and
shoot Palestinian youths, tear up Palestinian olive trees, crush
Palestinian aspirations, while believing � really sincerely believing �
that Israel is the real victim of everything that has happened. And,
unbelievable as it is, that idea too (that Israel is the real victim of
Palestinian aggression) was repeatedly expressed in Netanyahu�s speech.
Make no mistake that he really believes it; it�s astonishing to anyone
with even a passing knowledge of the history, but most Israelis, and
most of their supporters in this country, really do believe in this
totally inverted � and perverted � view of history.
Such attitudes, such views, are the inevitable products of endless
indulgence.
No matter what the best way forward is � two states or one � it is
absolutely vital for the American people to call their leaders to
account and to demand that this indulgence must end, for the sake of
everyone involved. And until our politicians learn (or are persuaded) to
do the right thing, it falls on each of us to do what we can to end the
indulgence and to bring pressure to bear on Israel. Heeding the
Palestinian call for boycott, divestment and sanctions is the obvious
place to begin.
Saree Makdisi is a professor of English and comparative literature at
the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of "Palestine
Inside Out: An Everyday Occupation".
last_per...@yahoo.com
> Netanyahu reaffirms commitment to racism and expansionism – thanks to US
> tax dollars
>
> By Saree Makdisi
>
> 5 July 2009
>
> Saree Makdisi argues that if Israel is ever to agree to anything for the
> territory, not allowed to control its own borders or airspace, shorn of
> must demand an end to their leaders’ indulgence of Israel.
That would involve a relinquishment of ZioNazi media control.
Of course, a fine step in the right direction would be for the
dumb masses to tune out, which I think more are doing.
> To judge by the next day’s headlines, Binyamin Netanyahu’s policy speech
> last month was a great success. “Israeli premier backs state for
> Palestinians,” declared the New York Times. “Israel endorses two-state
> goal,” said the Washington Post. “Netanyahu backs Palestinian state,”
> announced the Guardian.
Deceptive reporting by ZioNazi-controlled media. But most Americans
don't really care much about what happens 7,000 miles away, as long
as it doesn't affect their little life sphere; and that includes
whether or
not Iran (or Israel) is blown off the map.
>
> He did no such thing, of course, unless by “state” one understands an
> amorphous entity lacking a definite territory, not allowed to control
> its own borders or airspace, shorn of any vestige of sovereignty (other
> than a flag and perhaps a national anthem), not allowed to enter into
> treaties with other states – and permanently disarmed and hence at the
> mercy of Israel. It would make about as much sense to call an apple an
> orange or a piano a speedboat as to call such a construct a state, and
> yet those are the conditions that Netanyahu imposed on the creation of
> such an entity for the Palestinians (if they get that far in the first
> place).
>
> The strange thing is that Netanyahu’s speech marked both the definitive
> end and a symbolic return to the beginning of the two-state solution as
> that hapless notion has been peddled since the Oslo Accords of 1993-95.
> For what he said the Palestinians might – perhaps – be entitled to is
> pretty much what Oslo had said they might be entitled to 15 years ago: a
> “self-government authority” not allowed to control its own borders or
> airspace, shorn of any vestige of sovereignty, etc. And on top of that
> they can also forget about Jerusalem – that is and will forever remain
> the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish people.
>
> If it sounds so drearily familiar, that’s because it is: we have come
> full circle. First time as tragedy, second time as farce.
>
> Oslo actually never mentioned the apparently magic words “Palestinian
> state”, so Netanyahu actually outdid Rabin and Peres in terms of
> rhetorical magnanimity. But, rhetoric aside, by bringing the situation
> full circle back to what they “offered” Yasser Arafat back in the
> mid-1990s, Netanyahu also revealed to those last few Palestinians who
> might have believed otherwise that the only kind of Palestinian “state”
> any Israeli government has ever countenanced (or will ever countenance)
> will look like what was on offer at Oslo. Netanyahu is offering the same
> thing all over again because that’s the only Palestinian “state” that
> Israel will accept. Take it or leave it.
>
> The Palestinians who still cling to the idea of a Palestinian state to
> be achieved through negotiations (from a position of weakness) with
> Israel had better absorb this once and for all and move on to other
> objectives – and other strategies to succeed.
>
> That’s why the return to the beginning also signals the coming of the
> end. For after all the agony of the past 15 years no Palestinians in
> their right mind would want to go back to Oslo all over again. Those
> agreements led to three things: the permanent institutionalization of
> the Israeli occupation of Palestine; the permanent separation of the
> occupied territories into shards of land cut off from one another and
> the outside world (and hence what Sara Roy calls – and the World Bank
> implicitly acknowledges as – the de-development of the Palestinian
> economy); and the doubling of the population of Jewish settlers
> illegally colonizing the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.
>
> There were just over 100,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank in 1993;
> there are around 500,000 there today, including 200,000 or so in
> occupied East Jerusalem. According to the UN, their population is
> increasing at a rate three times greater than that of Israel itself, and
> will double again to about a million within a decade.
>
> This phenomenal expansion is what is referred to as the “natural growth”
> of the colonies, which in his speech Netanyahu – brazenly defying
> President Barack Obama – said he would protect. A few more years of this
> kind of growth and the territory that might once (maybe, long ago) have
> been considered as the basis for a Palestinian state will be all but
> eaten up by the sprawling colonies.
>
> There’s hardly anything left of that territory anyway. The UN said two
> years ago that some 40 per cent of the West Bank is already taken up by
> Israeli infrastructure off limits to Palestinians; the 60 per cent that
> remains is broken up into an archipelago of islands so cut off and
> isolated from each other that a brilliant satirical map has been
> circulating on the internet representing the West Bank as a kind of
> Pacific island paradise, with dotted lines showing imaginary ferry
> routes from Ramallah to Nablus and Bethlehem to Hebron. It would be
> funny if it were not so sad. And even in most of that 60 per cent,
> Israel retains security control (that’s according to Oslo; today its
> army conducts raids wherever it likes – and it does so virtually every day).
>
> What Netanyahu was saying to any Palestinians foolish enough to accept
> his terms is that if they want to stick a flag in their archipelago of
> little impoverished islands of territory and call it a state, they can
> go right ahead.
>
> But for them to get even that far, they must first, he now says,
> recognize Israel as a Jewish state. This is a new Israeli demand (it
> first came up during the buildup to the doomed Annapolis summit in
> November 2007), the latest in a sequence of such demands going back to
> the 1970s. First, the Palestinians had to renounce terrorism; then they
> had to recognize Israel; then they had to rewrite their national
> charter; then they had to tear the charter up; then they had to say –
> again, louder – that they recognize Israel’s right to exist; then they
> had to end all resistance to four decades of brutal military occupation.
> Tzipi Livni, Israel’s previous foreign minister, even said that the
> Palestinians had to learn to purge the word nakba (referring to the
> catastrophe of 1948) from their vocabulary if they wanted to have a
> state. The one thing that Palestinians have not formally been asked to
> do is to say that they are terribly sorry for having dared to resist the
> occupation in the first place – and no doubt that demand is on the way
> as well.
>
> In return, Israel has had to commit to nothing other than a few vague
> and craftily-worded – and endlessly deferrable – promises. And it has
> carried out (at its own pace and according to its own terms) a few
> tactical redeployments of troops and colonists (from a grand total of 18
> per cent of the West Bank, at the very peak of Oslo). Some of those
> redeployments have actually, as in Gaza, made the process of dominating
> and controlling the Palestinians that much easier (Israel could never
> have subjected the people of Gaza to the indiscriminate violence it
> rained on them day and night in late 2008 and early 2009 had the Jewish
> colonists there remained in place).
>
> The Israelis have always been able to find some Palestinian leader or
> other to go along with their endless demands, to jump ignominiously
> through one hoop after another, more like a third-rate court jester than
> the leader of an unvanquished and defiant people. When one leader
> finally said enough was enough (as Arafat did at Camp David), he was
> dismissed and another more pliant one (the hopelessly compromised and
> unimaginative Mahmoud Abbas) was found to take his place, from among the
> dwindling ranks of those candidates the Israelis deemed not worth
> assassinating or imprisoning in a campaign of violence going back to the
> 1970s. (Indeed, it bears repeating that Abbas and his hangers-on
> survived to this day only as the result of Israel’s anti-Darwinian
> process of unnatural selection of potential Palestinian leaders, in
> which the fittest were eliminated and the most inept were allowed to
> reproduce).
>
> But this latest demand is too much for any Palestinian leader – even one
> as endlessly obsequious as Abbas – to accept.
>
> For to recognize Israel as a Jewish state would be not only to renounce
> (which no leader and indeed no individual Palestinian has the authority
> to do) the right of return of those Palestinians ethnically cleansed
> from their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948. It would also be
> to abandon to their fate the remaining million or so Palestinians
> (including their descendants) who survived the nakba and have been
> living as second class citizens of Israel, and perhaps even to give
> Israel license to expel them all and complete the “job” (as Benny Morris
> puts it) of 1948.
>
> Israel today is no more Jewish than America is white or Christian. The
> big difference, though, is that, whereas America (for the most part)
> embraces its own multiculturalism, Israel still desperately wants to be
> Jewish. Its absurd demand to be recognized as such (no other state goes
> around impetuously demanding that others accept its own sense of its
> national character) is an expression of its own profound insecurity: not
> its military insecurity – the only serious military threat Israel faces
> on its own territory is imaginary – but rather its anxious awareness of
> its status as a botched, and hence forever incomplete, settler-colonial
> enterprise. Unlike Australia, there were too many aboriginals left
> standing when the smoke cleared over the ruins of Palestine in 1948. And
> to this day the Palestinians have refused to simply give up, go away or
> somehow annul themselves.
>
> That fact – and its attendant anxiety among Zionists – poses a real
> problem for the million Palestinians inside Israel, whose fate is far
> from settled.
>
> Western liberals consider Avigdor Lieberman to be right wing because he
> says openly that he wants the indigenous Palestinians removed from what
> he considers to be the Jewish land of Israel (to which he came as a
> Russian-speaking Moldovan immigrant). What they fail to acknowledge is
> that Tzipi Livni, who ran in the recent Israeli elections as the voice
> of peace and moderation – the darling of Western liberals – hinted at
> exactly the same dark fate (“Once a Palestinian state is established, I
> can come to the Palestinian citizens, whom we call Israeli Arabs, and
> say to them ‘you are citizens with equal rights, but the national
> solution for you is elsewhere,’” she said during the electoral campaign
> – i.e. you are equal, but not really, and ultimately you must look
> elsewhere for a sense of home). And Netanyahu has long espoused a
> similar position.
>
> How could he not? This is not rocket science or linear algebra: it is
> what it means for a state to insist on having a single cultural identity
> irrespective of who happens to actually be living on the territory it
> considers its own. It is all too rarely thought of in the same terms,
> but the violent insistence on monoculture is just as ugly in Israel as
> it is in Iran, Saudi Arabia, among the cadres of the British National
> Party, the followers of Jean-Marie le Pen, the hoodlums of Aryan Nation
> or the hooded posses of the KKK. The drive to obliterate or expunge
> cultural difference from a homeland conceived of as an exclusive space
> will always be inherently ugly.
>
> And the fact of the matter is that the expulsion or “transfer” of
> Palestinians has been a core feature of Zionism as it has been practised
> since 1948. It is inherent in Zionism as a political program – from
> right to left – because, if the idea behind Zionism is to establish an
> exclusively Jewish state (which it is), the only way for a would-be
> Jewish state to have been established on land that began the 20th
> century with a population that was overwhelmingly (93 per cent)
> non-Jewish was through the removal of the land’s non-Jewish population.
> The sense that there is an inherently Jewish land inconveniently
> cluttered up with a non-Jewish population that needs to be dealt with
> somehow or other drove Zionist planning all through the 1930s (the
> “transfer” of the Palestinians was planned more than a decade before the
> 1948 war). And, as grotesque as ever, it was on full view in Netanyahu’s
> speech.
>
> The key moment in the speech came when he said that “the truth is that
> in the area of our homeland, in the heart of our Jewish homeland, now
> lives a large population of Palestinians”. This attitude comes straight
> out of the primitive racialism and imaginary civilizational hierarchies
> of the 19th century. The Jews are a people with a homeland and hence
> they have a right to a state; the Palestinians are not a people at all,
> or certainly not one of the same order. They are merely a collection of
> vagabonds and trespassers intruding on the Jewish homeland. They have no
> rights, let alone a centuries-old competing narrative of home attached
> to the same land, a narrative worthy of recognition by Israel.
>
> On the contrary: the Palestinians must accept that Israel is the state
> of the Jewish people, and they must do so on the understanding that they
> are not entitled to the same rights. “We” are a people, Netanyahu was
> saying; “they” are merely a “population”. “We” have a right to a state –
> a real state. “They” do not. “They” have to recognize “our” rights; “we”
> owe “them” nothing in return, except, possibly, a curt nod of dismissal
> from “our” view into the walled-off ghettoes and cantons which we might
> (perhaps, if “they” behave well) be persuaded to build for “them” on
> “our” land – and “they” had better be grateful even for that.
>
> This racialized sense of inherent entitlement and unique superiority –
> fuelled (in just the way that a child is spoiled by over-indulgent
> parents) by over 100 billion of our tax dollars, the endless deference
> of our elected representatives, the open-ended diplomatic cover provided
> on demand by all our presidents after Eisenhower – is what allows
> Israelis like Netanyahu (and Lieberman, and Livni, and Olmert, and
> Sharon, and Rabin, etc.) to threaten, bellow at and admonish the
> Palestinians. It is also what allows Israel to occupy Palestinian land,
> demolish Palestinian homes, starve Palestinian children, imprison and
> shoot Palestinian youths, tear up Palestinian olive trees, crush
> Palestinian aspirations, while believing – really sincerely believing –
> that Israel is the real victim of everything that has happened. And,
> unbelievable as it is, that idea too (that Israel is the real victim of
> Palestinian aggression) was repeatedly expressed in Netanyahu’s speech.
> Make no mistake that he really believes it; it’s astonishing to anyone
> with even a passing knowledge of the history, but most Israelis, and
> most of their supporters in this country, really do believe in this
> totally inverted – and perverted – view of history.
>
> Such attitudes, such views, are the inevitable products of endless
> indulgence.
>
> No matter what the best way forward is – two states or one – it is
Aviroce
By Aviroce
June 14, 2009
Today’s declaration by the Israeli government is a step in the right
direction. But for a Palestinian state to exist side by side to
Israel there are conditions that should be satisfied. These
conditions are the basis of a comprehensive and fruitful peace
between
Palestinians and Israelis. Where these steps would eventually lead
is left to the future generations. Right now, establishment of a
Palestinian state depends upon the following:
Firstly, The Whole West Bank, the Whole East Jerusalem and the Whole
Gaza will constitute the basis of the Palestinian state.
Secondly, The three pieces of real estate will be connected by
easements from the 1948 Israel.
Thirdly, Both states must sign a Mutual Non-Aggression Treaty
guaranteeing the freedom of each for mutual peace and tranquility.
Fourthly, Both states must establish a Uniformization of Criminal Law
to protect each side from discrimination.
Fifthly, The system of Apartheid in Israel should be abolished and
both states should have free democracies with equal opportunities for
all citizens.
Sixthly, All refugees and their descendants have the right to return
to their homes in either state and assume the citizenship of the
state
their homes are in.
Seventhly, All refugees should be compensated by Israel, Jews, United
States of America, Germany, Austria, Poland, Britain, France and all
countries that contributed to the catastrophe the Palestinians
suffered by the establishment of Israel.
Eighthly, All Jewish settlers who are willing to abandon Israeli and
other citizenships just to become Palestinians should be welcome
among
the Palestinian people provided that they will not live where they
lived before and must be relocated within Palestine by the
Palestinian
Relocation Department just like any Palestinian. No Jewish settler
may profit from previous status.
Ninthly, income taxes collected belong to the state of which the
worker is a citizen of and each state would collect the respective
taxes on products sold within their respective territory .
Tenthly, All Arab and Muslim states should recognize the new states
and deal with each according to their respective interests.
What happens in the future between the two states on natural and
peaceful basis is for the peoples in both states to decide on. It is
my firm belief that eventually the two states will combine equally
together by mutual acceptance and majority vote, at least ninety
percent of each people, to combine into one state called the state of
Palestine, a highly developed democratic state with equal
opportunities for all its people.
Aviroce
*** **** ***** *******************
*********
Viva Palestine posted this on Jerusalem:
Misconception About Jerusalem
There is widespread misconception among "Israelis" and Americans that
under
the status que, "Israel" possesses sovereignty over expanded East
Jerusalem.
It does not, it possesses administrative control.
A country can acquire administrative control by force of arms. It can
acquire sovereignty only with the consent of the international
community.
Israel has possessed and exercised administrative control over
expanded East
Jerusalem for more than three decades, to this day, not one of the
world's
other 192 sovereign states has recognized its claim to sovereignty.
More vividly, UN General Assembly Resolution 53/37 adopted in
December
1998
by a vote of 149 to 1 - with USA abstaining- declared that the
General
Assembly... determines that the decision of Israel to impose its laws
jurisdiction and administration on the Holy City of Jerusalem is
illegal and
therefore null and void and has no validity whatsoever.
The facts are that Jerusalem is still divided, and that 200,000
Palestinians
live there, and NOBODY simply in no position to compromise on East
Jerusalem as well as the settlements as well as the right of return,
all for
nothing more than a pat on the back and a phony state that couldn't
fool
even as ardent a claimant for the illusion as Bush and his team.
http://groups.google.com/group/Imperialism_Zionism/browse_thread/thread/e799946726e32489
***************************************************************************************************************************************
On Jul 5, 7:54 pm, JMD Morgan <JohnM...@email.non> wrote:
> Netanyahu reaffirms commitment to racism and expansionism – thanks to US
> tax dollars
>
> By Saree Makdisi
>
> 5 July 2009
>
> Saree Makdisi argues that if Israel is ever to agree to anything for the
> Palestinians other than “an amorphous entity lacking a definite
> territory, not allowed to control its own borders or airspace, shorn of
> any vestige of sovereignty ... and permanently disarmed”, then Americans
> must demand an end to their leaders’ indulgence of Israel.
>
> To judge by the next day’s headlines, Binyamin Netanyahu’s policy speech
> last month was a great success. “Israeli premier backs state for
> Palestinians,” declared the New York Times. “Israel endorses two-state
> goal,” said the Washington Post. “Netanyahu backs Palestinian state,”
> announced the Guardian.
>
> He did no such thing, of course, unless by “state” one understands an
> amorphous entity lacking a definite territory, not allowed to control
> its own borders or airspace, shorn of any vestige of sovereignty (other
> than a flag and perhaps a national anthem), not allowed to enter into
> treaties with other states – and permanently disarmed and hence at the
> mercy of Israel. It would make about as much sense to call an apple an
> orange or a piano a speedboat as to call such a construct a state, and
> yet those are the conditions that Netanyahu imposed on the creation of
> such an entity for the Palestinians (if they get that far in the first
> place).
>
> The strange thing is that Netanyahu’s speech marked both the definitive
> end and a symbolic return to the beginning of the two-state solution as
> that hapless notion has been peddled since the Oslo Accords of 1993-95.
> For what he said the Palestinians might – perhaps – be entitled to is
> pretty much what Oslo had said they might be entitled to 15 years ago: a
> “self-government authority” not allowed to control its own borders or
> airspace, shorn of any vestige of sovereignty, etc. And on top of that
> they can also forget about Jerusalem – that is and will forever remain
> the eternal and undivided capital of the Jewish people.
>
> If it sounds so drearily familiar, that’s because it is: we have come
> full circle. First time as tragedy, second time as farce.
>
> Oslo actually never mentioned the apparently magic words “Palestinian
> state”, so Netanyahu actually outdid Rabin and Peres in terms of
> rhetorical magnanimity. But, rhetoric aside, by bringing the situation
> full circle back to what they “offered” Yasser Arafat back in the
> mid-1990s, Netanyahu also revealed to those last few Palestinians who
> might have believed otherwise that the only kind of Palestinian “state”
> any Israeli government has ever countenanced (or will ever countenance)
> will look like what was on offer at Oslo. Netanyahu is offering the same
> thing all over again because that’s the only Palestinian “state” that
> Israel will accept. Take it or leave it.
>
> The Palestinians who still cling to the idea of a Palestinian state to
> be achieved through negotiations (from a position of weakness) with
> Israel had better absorb this once and for all and move on to other
> objectives – and other strategies to succeed.
>
> That’s why the return to the beginning also signals the coming of the
> end. For after all the agony of the past 15 years no Palestinians in
> their right mind would want to go back to Oslo all over again. Those
> agreements led to three things: the permanent institutionalization of
> the Israeli occupation of Palestine; the permanent separation of the
> occupied territories into shards of land cut off from one another and
> the outside world (and hence what Sara Roy calls – and the World Bank
> implicitly acknowledges as – the de-development of the Palestinian
> economy); and the doubling of the population of Jewish settlers
> illegally colonizing the occupied territories, including East Jerusalem.
>
> There were just over 100,000 Jewish colonists in the West Bank in 1993;
> there are around 500,000 there today, including 200,000 or so in
> occupied East Jerusalem. According to the UN, their population is
> increasing at a rate three times greater than that of Israel itself, and
> will double again to about a million within a decade.
>
> This phenomenal expansion is what is referred to as the “natural growth”
> of the colonies, which in his speech Netanyahu – brazenly defying
> President Barack Obama – said he would protect. A few more years of this
> kind of growth and the territory that might once (maybe, long ago) have
> been considered as the basis for a Palestinian state will be all but
> eaten up by the sprawling colonies.
>
> There’s hardly anything left of that territory anyway. The UN said two
> years ago that some 40 per cent of the West Bank is already taken up by
> Israeli infrastructure off limits to Palestinians; the 60 per cent that
> remains is broken up into an archipelago of islands so cut off and
> isolated from each other that a brilliant satirical map has been
> circulating on the internet representing the West Bank as a kind of
> Pacific island paradise, with dotted lines showing imaginary ferry
> routes from Ramallah to Nablus and Bethlehem to Hebron. It would be
> funny if it were not so sad. And even in most of that 60 per cent,
> Israel retains security control (that’s according to Oslo; today its
> army conducts raids wherever it likes – and it does so virtually every day).
>
> What Netanyahu was saying to any Palestinians foolish enough to accept
> his terms is that if they want to stick a flag in their archipelago of
> little impoverished islands of territory and call it a state, they can
> go right ahead.
>
> But for them to get even that far, they must first, he now says,
> recognize Israel as a Jewish state. This is a new Israeli demand (it
> first came up during the buildup to the doomed Annapolis summit in
> November 2007), the latest in a sequence of such demands going back to
> the 1970s. First, the Palestinians had to renounce terrorism; then they
> had to recognize Israel; then they had to rewrite their national
> charter; then they had to tear the charter up; then they had to say –
> again, louder – that they recognize Israel’s right to exist; then they
> had to end all resistance to four decades of brutal military occupation.
> Tzipi Livni, Israel’s previous foreign minister, even said that the
> Palestinians had to learn to purge the word nakba (referring to the
> catastrophe of 1948) from their vocabulary if they wanted to have a
> state. The one thing that Palestinians have not formally been asked to
> do is to say that they are terribly sorry for having dared to resist the
> occupation in the first place – and no doubt that demand is on the way
> as well.
>
> In return, Israel has had to commit to nothing other than a few vague
> and craftily-worded – and endlessly deferrable – promises. And it has
> carried out (at its own pace and according to its own terms) a few
> tactical redeployments of troops and colonists (from a grand total of 18
> per cent of the West Bank, at the very peak of Oslo). Some of those
> redeployments have actually, as in Gaza, made the process of dominating
> and controlling the Palestinians that much easier (Israel could never
> have subjected the people of Gaza to the indiscriminate violence it
> rained on them day and night in late 2008 and early 2009 had the Jewish
> colonists there remained in place).
>
> The Israelis have always been able to find some Palestinian leader or
> other to go along with their endless demands, to jump ignominiously
> through one hoop after another, more like a third-rate court jester than
> the leader of an unvanquished and defiant people. When one leader
> finally said enough was enough (as Arafat did at Camp David), he was
> dismissed and another more pliant one (the hopelessly compromised and
> unimaginative Mahmoud Abbas) was found to take his place, from among the
> dwindling ranks of those candidates the Israelis deemed not worth
> assassinating or imprisoning in a campaign of violence going back to the
> 1970s. (Indeed, it bears repeating that Abbas and his hangers-on
> survived to this day only as the result of Israel’s anti-Darwinian
> process of unnatural selection of potential Palestinian leaders, in
> which the fittest were eliminated and the most inept were allowed to
> reproduce).
>
> But this latest demand is too much for any Palestinian leader – even one
> as endlessly obsequious as Abbas – to accept.
>
> For to recognize Israel as a Jewish state would be not only to renounce
> (which no leader and indeed no individual Palestinian has the authority
> to do) the right of return of those Palestinians ethnically cleansed
> from their homes during the creation of Israel in 1948. It would also be
> to abandon to their fate the remaining million or so Palestinians
> (including their descendants) who survived the nakba and have been
> living as second class citizens of Israel, and perhaps even to give
> Israel license to expel them all and complete the “job” (as Benny Morris
> puts it) of 1948.
>
> Israel today is no more Jewish than America is white or Christian. The
> big difference, though, is that, whereas America (for the most part)
> embraces its own multiculturalism, Israel still desperately wants to be
> Jewish. Its absurd demand to be recognized as such (no other state goes
> around impetuously demanding that others accept its own sense of its
> national character) is an expression of its own profound insecurity: not
> its military insecurity – the only serious military threat Israel faces
> on its own territory is imaginary – but rather its anxious awareness of
> its status as a botched, and hence forever incomplete, settler-colonial
> enterprise. Unlike Australia, there were too many aboriginals left
> standing when the smoke cleared over the ruins of Palestine in 1948. And
> to this day the Palestinians have refused to simply give up, go away or
> somehow annul themselves.
>
> That fact – and its attendant anxiety among Zionists – poses a real
> problem for the million Palestinians inside Israel, whose fate is far
> from settled.
>
> Western liberals ...
>
> read more »