Brainwashed for final ethnic cleansing
He asked me to imagine two things. The first was that a Palestinian mini state was in existence on the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem its capital or, better still, with Jerusalem an undivided, open city and the capital of two states. The second was that rocket and other attacks were launched on Israel from inside the Palestinian state. “How do you think Israel would respond?” he asked me.
I replied: “At a point their tanks would roll over the borders and crush your little state out of existence. Then they’d say to the world something like: ‘We presume you understand why we had to do this and close the Palestine file for ever. We also presume that you will never again ask us to do business with these terrorists.’”
“Exactly!”, Arafat said, almost shouting. Then, after a pause and with controlled passion, he added: “After struggling for so long and sacrificing so much to achieve a small measure of justice, do you really think we Palestinians would be so stupid as to give Israel the pretext to take everything from us and close the Palestine file for ever?”
I replied with just one word. “No.”
A rational Israeli mind would be open to and comforted by the logic of that argument. Unfortunately most Israelis are not rational.
Franks also interviewed Amiad Cohen, the head of security at the West Bank settlement of Eli, 40km outside Jerusalem. As they talked, Cohen gestured to the hills around them and said: “This is our country. We will live here. The question is – Will it be with peace, or will they force us to fight?“
That begs another question which Franks did not ask. What is it that could “force” Israel to fight the Palestinians, by obvious implication from what Cohen said to the finish in an end-game scenario?
Zionism has remained constant in its determination to take for keeping the maximum amount of Arab land (and water) with the minimum number of Arabs on it. Arguably from 1897 and definitely from 1967, Zionism’s strategy has been to break the will of the Palestinians to remain steadfast and continue their struggle for an acceptable amount of justice and force them to accept crumbs from Zionism’s table or, better still from Zionism’s perspective, take leave of their homeland and start a new life elsewhere. I’ve long thought and often said that when Zionism’s leaders conclude that they can’t break the Palestinian will, they’ll create a pretext to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into the neighbouring Arab states and beyond. (The original Sharon plan was to de-stabilize Jordan, get rid of the Hashemite monarchy and say to the Palestinians, “There’s your state, take it.” King Hussein himself told me he had absolutely no doubt that was and would remain a Zionist option, quite possibly its preferred option in an end-game sacenario).
In my analysis global concern from here on should be less about trying to start a real peace process in which Israel’s present and likely future leaders have no interest and more about stopping a final Zionist ethnic cleansing of Palestine.
Program link:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b016w0n7
and
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b016w0n7/The_State_of_Israel/
Footnote:
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