Is Peace (in Israel-Palestine) Possible?
Some Israeli commentators downplay the prospect of a civil war on the grounds that if ever there was a real push for real peace, many Jewish settlers would let their deluded minds be guided by their pockets, and would move out of the illegal settlements – agree to be relocated – in return for very generous compensation. I think perhaps half of them might, but the rest, cheered on by their Christian fundamentalist allies, praising the lord and passing the ammunition, would fight…. I remain more or less convinced that what Peres said to me would be the case. So I am strongly inclined to the view that no Israeli government will risk provoking a Jewish civil war to end the occupation of all of the West Bank, in order to satisfy the demand and need of the Palestinians for an acceptable minimum amount of justice.
There isn’t time this evening for me to tell another true story from Volume Two of my book. It’s a blood chilling account of what Ezer Weizman told me in private when he was Israel’s Minister of Defence in Begin’s government. It’s about an oath that was signed in blood by senior military men. In the event of any Israeli government deciding to withdraw from all of the West Bank, the oath committed them to make common cause with the settlers and fight that government “to the death”. (This story can be found in Chapter 35 which is titled The Blood Oath).
In passing I’ll add there is no mystery about Hamas’s real position. If tomorrow Israel said and meant that it was ready to negotiate a full and final peace on the basis of a genuine two-state solution, Hamas’s leaders would say, “Let’s do the business”. And they would say that and mean it because they are not stupid. They know they would have no choice because a genuine two-state solution is still what the vast majority of Palestinians are prepared to settle for. (But for how much longer is a good question).
In passing I’ll also say that the issue of the Palestinian right of return is NOT the obstacle to peace Zionism asserts it to be. In good faith negotiations for a full and final peace based on a genuine two-state solution, Israel would discover that Palestinian pragmatism could and would be applied even to the right of return…. As Arafat and his senior leadership colleagues told me many years ago (and as I have quoted them as saying in Volume Two of my book), the right of return would have to be confined to the Palestinian mini-state; which would mean that probably not more than 100,000 Palestinians would be able to exercise their right to return. The rest would have to settle for financial compensation.
In reality the Palestinian right of return would be a perfectly manageable issue if Zionism was interested in good faith negotiations for a genuine two-state solution. The truth is that it’s not. And that’s also the opinion of Gideon Levy, the conscience of Israeli journalism. The headline over his article in Ha-aretzlast Sunday was ISRAEL DOESN’T WANT PEACE.
In my analysis Zionism’s own end-game strategy for a solution to the Palestine problem now leaves nothing to the imagination.
Zionism’s leaders still believe that by means of brute force and reducing the Palestinians to abject poverty, they can break the will of the Palestinians to continue the struggle for their rights…. The assumption being that, at a point, and out of total despair, the Palestinians will be prepared to accept crumbs from Zionism’s table in the shape of two or three bantustans, or, better still, will abandon their homeland and seek a new life in other countries.
In my view the conviction that Zionism will one day succeed in breaking the Palestinian will to continue the struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice is the product of minds which are deluded to the point of clinical madness.
The question that’s almost too awful to think about is something like this: What will the Zionists do when it becomes apparent EVEN TO THEM that the Palestinians will not give up their struggle for an acceptable minimum of justice?
My guess is that they, the Zionists, will create a pretext to go for a final round of ethnic cleansing – to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into Jordan and beyond. That, I fear, will be Zionism’s FINAL SOLUTION to the Palestine problem…… If that happens, the West Bank will be turned red with blood, mostly Palestinian blood. And honest reporters will describe it as a Zionist holocaust.
But that does NOT have to be the end of the story of Palestine. There still could be a new beginning.
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