Alan Hart

Who was it? Justice Minister and chief negotiator (with the Palestinians) Tzipi Livni. What did she say?

On 9 May she said on Army Radio that Israeli settlements were to blame for the failure of peace talks. “The settlers want to prevent us from living a normal life and do not accept the authority of the law… Settlers are preventing us from reaching a resolution… Settlement construction makes it impossible to defend Israel around the world.”

At the start of his effort to get a peace process going more than nine months ago, U.S. Secretary of State Kerry wanted a settlement freeze. He believed it would demonstrate his seriousness to all concerned and especially the Palestinians. But Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu said he could not deliver a settlement freeze because his government would fall if he tried to go down that road.

I imagine that frightened Kerry because he knows that if Netanyahu’s government was brought down it would most likely be replaced by one that could be described, objectively, as neo-fascist. (Strange though it may seem, those to the extreme right of Netanyahu in his coalition government, those of the neo-fascist tendency, sometimes give him the appearance of being a moderate!)

So Kerry and President Obama surrendered to Netanyahu just as he had surrendered to the settlers and their mouthpieces in government.

But there’s more to the blame game than that.

The real blame has to be laid at the feet of the American-dominated UN Security Council for its failure to put Israel on notice in the text of Resolution 242 that it would not be permitted to settle (colonize) any of the Arab territory it grabbed in the 1967 war. All those who drafted 242 knew it was a war of Israeli aggression not self-defence; and after “Emphasising the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by war”, the text should have indicated that if Israel settled the newly occupied territories in defiance of international law it would be sanctioned.

As I explain in my book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews, the passing of Resolution 242 on 22 November 1967 was the moment the Security Council said goodbye to its integrity.

My detailed explanation includes what was said to me by a very, very senior and globally respected UN official. “Zionism has corrupted everything it touched, including this organization in its infancy“. I knew, really knew, that he was reflecting the deeply held but private conviction of all the top international civil servants who were responsible for trying to make the world body work in accordance with the ideals and principles enshrined in its Charter and international law.

Though it is contentious to say so in public, the corruption charge is supported by the facts. In 1947 the Zionists and their allies in the U.S. Congress subverted the General Assembly of the UN to get a rigged and bare minimum majority for the partition plan, which was subsequently vitiated. And in 1967 the Security Council was effectively subverted by the Johnson administration’s Zionist-driven refusal to label Israel the aggressor and hold it accountable to international law and its obligations as a member of the UN.

In the light of the above, and given that Obama lacks the political will to take on Netanyahu and confront the Zionist lobby and its stooges (traitor agents) in Congress, Kerry never had a chance of succeeding. Why did he bother? Only he knows the answer.

The question the mainstream media refuses or can’t be bothered to ask and cause to be answered is this. Is it likely that any Israeli prime minister will ever be prepared to confront the settlers of the occupied West Bank?

Those familiar with my book and on-line articles will be aware that my answer is “No”, but why I believe that to be the case bears repeating in tight summary.

Way back in early 1980 when I was acting as the linkman in a secret, exploratory dialogue between PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat and Shimon Peres who was then the leader of Israel’s main opposition Labour Party and hoping to replace Menachem Begin as prime minister, Peres told me feared it was already “too late” for peace on terms the Palestinians could accept. I asked him why.

He replied: “Begin knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s stuffing the West Bank with settlements to create the conditions for a Jewish civil war. He knows that no Israeli prime minister is going down in history as the one who gave the order to the Jewish army to shoot large numbers of Jews… I’m not).

When Peres spoke those words to me there were 70,000 illegal settlers on the occupied West Bank. Today there are in excess of 520,000 with that number rising on an almost daily basis. If it was too late in 1980, how much more too late is it today?!

A few weeks after that conversation with Peres I had a private meeting with Ezer Weizman, then the defence minister in Begin’s first term coalition government. He was half an hour late for our appointment at the defence ministry in Tel Aviv and when he arrived he looked exhausted and very troubled. He told me he was late because he had been checking something out. He described the something as follows.

“This lunch time Sharon convened a secret meeting of some of our top generals and other security people. They signed a blood oath which commits them to fight to the death to prevent any government of Israel withdrawing from the West Bank.”

As I write I have on my desk a copy of Uri Avnery’s latest article. It is headlined THE PROSPECT OF A FASCIST COUP IN ISRAEL.

The first part of the article tells of what happened after an Israeli soldier in Hebron was filmed by a hidden Palestinian camera abusing and threatening Palestinians. The footage was broadcast on Israeli television along with a report that the offending soldier had been punished. Tens of thousands of Israeli soldiers then took to the social media to defend him.

Avnery then gets to his main point with the observation that for the first time in the history of Israel, and perhaps the world, the internet is providing the basis for rebellion. (He described the social media defence of the offending Israeli soldier in Hebron as “the first mass rebellion in the annals of the Israeli army.”) He went on:

“With the army rank and file composed of teenagers who are indoctrinated from the age of three in the spirit of Jewish victimhood and superiority, such a rebellion, if it occurs, is bound to be right-wing, perhaps even fascist… Now, in less than 24 hours, hundreds of thousands of soldiers can openly defy the army command… It (the social media) puts an end to the sacred assumption that the army obeys the civilian elected authority. It also puts an end to the assumption that a military coup can only be carried out by a junta of senior officers, the “colonels”. Now simple soldiers, incited by some rabble-rousers, can do it.”

Israel is not short of rabble-rousers and I assume that Avnery would not have written the article if he did not believe the prospect of a fascist coup was a real one.

But coup or no coup Israel in my view is on its way to becoming a state ruled by neo-fascists.

In theory that’s good news because such a state would make it impossible for Zionism to go on selling its propaganda lies as truth, and that in turn would significantly improve the prospect of Israel being called and held to account for its crimes.

I think Tzipi Livni understands that.

Footnote

I have just viewed a most remarkable Al Jazeera documentary, The Lost Cities of Palestine. It should be required viewing by all citizens everywhere, especially in the U.S., who have been conditioned to believe the mother and father of all of Zionism’s propaganda lies – that Palestine was “a land without people for a people without land.”