Unity or Annihilation – The Real Choice For The Palestinians (Again)
Some months after the PNC’s critical debate and vote on his policy of politics and compromise, I had the first of many meetings with Arafat. “I kept a record of the time I devoted to those conversations,” he told me. “It was a total of 550 hours over the five-year period.” As he came to the end of the story of his struggle to sell compromise, he extracted a notebook from his hip pocket. “It’s all here,” he said with triumph. “Let me tell you the figures… 296 votes FOR the mini-state formula, only FOUR against. Imagine that! We have turned our people around. No more this silly talk of driving the Jews into the sea. Now we are prepared to live alongside them in a little state of of our own. It is a miracle.”
Arafat himself was the miracle worker. No other Palestinian leader could have done it. With his policy of politics and compromise now endorsed by the PNC, the highest decision-making authority on the Palestinian side, Arafat was at the height of his powers. He could have deliver
ed the compromise necessary from his side for peace on terms which any rational government and people in Israel would have accepted with relief. The problem was that Arafat did not have a partner for peace on the Israeli side. The most successful terrorist leader of modern times, Menachem Begin, was in power in the Zionist state; and he was stuffing the occupied West Bank with settlers to make it impossible for any future Israeli government to withdraw for peace. And that was a manifestation of an underlying truth – that Zionism was not and is not interested in peace on any terms the vast majority of Palestinians, other Arabs and Muslms everywhere could accept. (The essence of Zionism’s philosophy of doom was once put into words by its one-eyed warlord, General Moshe Dayan. “It’s them or us”, he said).
Let us now fast-forward to the present day.
Zionism’s own end-game strategy for a solution to the Palestineproblem now leaves nothing to the imagination. Israel‘s leaders still believe that by means of brute force and reducing the Palestinians to abject poverty, they can destroy Hamas and 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 theproduct of minds which are deluded close to the point of clinical madness. Some say that nuclear-armed Israel is on its way to becoming a fascist state. I think the more appropriate terminology is lunatic asylum.
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 they can’t destroy Palestinian nationalism with bombs and bullets and brutal repressive measures of all kinds?
My guess is that they, the Zionists, will go for a final round of ethnic cleansing- to drive the Palestinians off the West Bank and into Jordan and beyond. That, I fear, could very well be Zionism’s final solution to the Palestineproblem.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.
That’s what I mean by “Annihilation” as in the headline over this article.
I know that my Gentile fear on this account is shared by some eminent Jewish critics of Zionism and, for example, I’ll name two of those I am privileged to have as dear friends and allies in common cause, it being to tell in the truth of history.
Professor Ilan Pappeis Israel’s leading “new” or “revisionist” (honest) historian. His latest book is The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine. Ilan has described Israel’s policies for oppressing and suppressing the Palestinians as “genocide in slow motion.” In conversation with me, and on public platforms he has shared with me, he has also stated that it’s by no means impossible that what I describe as a Zionist holocaust could happen.
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