Europe is following Obama – washing its hands of Palestine and why
My headline is a response to recent comments made by German Chancellor Angela Merkel at a joint press conference in Berlin with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the decision of the Cameron government in the UK to make boycotting goods from “Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank” by publicly-funded bodies including local councils and universities a criminal offence.
Much to the delight of Netanyahu who has rejected a French initiative to convene a regional conference to try to get a peace process going, Merkel said, “Now is certainly not the time to make really comprehensive progress.”
She added:
“The European Union, and Germany as a member state, is very concerned about seeing things realistically. (My emphasis added). We know the threat of terrorism that Israel has to endure. We believe, on the other hand, that we have to advance a process of peaceful coexistence, and this, according to our opinion, is ultimately built on a two-state solution.”
In my view Merkel’s words were, to say the least, disingenuous. (My dictionary definition of that term is “not frank or open; merely posing as being frank or open; crafty, devious.”)
If Merkel and all other European leaders and their governments had any interest in acknowledging the reality on the ground in Israel/Palestine they would refrain from describing the attacks by individual Palestinians on Israeli Jews over recent months as terrorism.
To qualify as an act of terrorism an attack has to be motivated/driven by the need and determination to achieve a political goal. In the case of the Palestinians that would be ending Israel’s occupation and securing an acceptable amount of justice.
That has not been the motivation or drive of any of the Palestinians who have attacked and sometimes killed Israeli Jews in recent months. The attacks were and still are motivated/driven by total despair – the abandonment by individuals of all hope for an end to Israel’s on-going and ever-expanding colonization of the occupied West Bank and all it means of terms of the theft of more and more Palestinian land and water and the destruction of more and more Palestinian homes.
In other words, the individual Palestinian attacks on Israeli Jews over recent months are best (most accurately) described as understandable responses to Israel’s brutal repression.
My other reason for describing Merkel’s words as disingenuous is that she knows, as all other European leaders and their governments know, that the two-state solution is dead, killed by Israel’s on-going colonization of the occupied west Bank.
All Western leaders also know that even if they summoned up the will to use the leverage they have to try to cause Israel to agree to bring the concept of a two-state solution back to life as the way to peace, there could never be such a solution to the conflict because no Israeli government is ever going to initiate a Jewish civil war to make the space for a viable Palestinian mini state.
The problem for all European leaders and the American president (Obama at present and whoever succeeds him after the November election) is that they can’t acknowledge that the two-state solution is dead because to do so would leave them with only two options.
One would be to go for a confrontation with Zionism and its monster child and use all of their leverage to try to bring about a one-state solution with equal political, other civil and human rights for all. (Yes, that would mean the de-Zionization of Palestine)
The other would be to say (as Obama has said more than once) that they can’t want peace more than the parties themselves; and that, of course, would be the cover for indicating without saying so that they were washing their hands of Palestine and leaving the fate of its Arabs to be determined by Zionism.
On the subject of the Cameron government’s decision to make boycotting goods from Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank by publicly-funded bodies a criminal offence, I agree with a comment made by Glenn Greenwald in a recent article. Cameron was, he wrote, playing his part in a very co-ordinated and well-financed campaign led by Israel and its supporters to destroy the Boycott, Sanctions and Divestment (BDS) movement. (In Jerusalem on 15 February, at the annual conference of Presidents of Major Jewish Organizations, retired Israeli Brigadier General Yossi Kuperwasser described BDS as “anti-Semitism” and “terrorism.” I imagine he’s deluded enough to regard all and any criticism of Israel’s policies and actions as both).
Hillary Clinton, still it seems the most likely next president of America, has been advancing this Zionist campaign to de-legitimize and outlaw the BDS movement for many months.
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