Israel-Palestine: Is Peace Possible On Obama’s Watch?
I had asked him what he thought about Zionism’s assertion that a Palestinian mini state could and would pose a threat to Israel’s security and even its very existence. He dismissed it with good humoured contempt as propaganda nonsense. He then asked me what I thought would happen if the government and security forces of a Palestinian state living side by side with an Israel in more or less its pre-1967 borders failed to prevent terror attacks on Israel.
He didn’t wait for me to answer. He said: “We all know what would happen. Israeli tanks would roll over our borders and smash our little state out of existence and then say to the world, ‘You must understand why we had to do this.’” After a pause Arafat added: “Do you really think that having suffered for so long to get a small measure of justice we Palestinians would be stupid enough to allow that to happen?”
I said that I did not think Palestinians were that stupid. (As I write I find myself entertaining the thought that some of Israel’s leaders and their followers hope they are or would be).
It’s interesting to note that a former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, has said on the record that Israeli control of the Jordan Valley is NOT essential for Israel’s security. The argument that it was, Dagan said, is “a manipulative use of security issues for political ends.”
Given that Mossad is the prime source of much of the CIA’s regional intelligence information, I wonder what Kerry made of Dagan’s assessment. Will it, together with Abbas’s explicit rejection of the stationing of Israeli forces in the Jordan Valley, cause him to rethink what his final framework document should say on the subject? Probably not.
Despite Kerry’s proclaimed optimism (has it ever been more than wishful thinking and diplomatic whistling in the dark?), the main reason for believing that Netanyahu has no interest in peace on terms the Palestinians could accept is his insistence on them recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state.” Netanyahu has described this required recognition as “the real key to peace”, “the minimal requirement” and “an essential condition.”
While this Netanyahu demand might seem reasonable or even more than reasonable to uninformed and misinformed Americans (sadly very many if not most Americans) and even some Europeans, it is ludicrous and a non-starter for all Palestinians.
How can Israel be a Jewish state when more than 20 percent of its citizens, about 1.6 million, are Arabs and mainly Muslims? (In the minds of Israeli Jews of the neo-fascist tendency the answer to that question is probably something like, “That won’t be the case when we’ve completed our ethnic cleansing programme.”)
But there’s much more to it. As lawyer John V Whitbeck has stated, Palestinian acceptance of Netanyahu’s demand for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would “constitute explicit Palestinian acquiescence in permanent second-class status for Palestinian citizens of Israel and in the liquidation of the rights of millions of Palestinian refugees, as well as implicit Palestinian acceptance that the ethnic cleansing of Palestine was morally justified, which in turn would require conceding that Palestinians are sub-humans not entitled to fundamental human rights.”
In other words, by recognizing Israel as a Jewish state, the Palestinians would be endorsing Zionism’s version of history (all the propaganda lies upon which it is constructed) and denying their own (essentially the truth).
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