What
You're Missing in Our Subscriber-only CounterPunch Newsletter
The Texas Wars of
Robert Gates:
On Affirmative
Action and Mexican Migrants
What's Robert
Gates's not-so-distant dirty past? Greg Moses turns over the
dirt in College Station, how Gates fought affirmative action
there and how Reagan and Bush's's slippery spook will run the
new Border War.The End of the Libération
Myth! Meet Libération, turncoat tool of neoliberalism.Pierre
Rimbert traces the decline and fall of one of radical journalism's
great hopes --the paper founded by Jean-Paul Sartre. Daniel Wolff describes how Bob Dylan
plays the music of the Apocalypse. Remember, we are funded solely
by the subscribers to the print edition of CounterPunch. Please support this
website by buying a
subscription to our newsletter, which contains fresh material you
won't find anywhere else, or by making a donation towards the
cost of this online edition. Remember contributions are tax-deductible.Click
here to make a donation. If you find our site useful please:Subscribe
Now
The problem facing the Palestinian leadership,
as they strive to bring the millions living in the occupied territories
some small relief from their collective suffering, reduces to
a matter of a few words. Like a naughty child who has only to
say "sorry" to be released from his room, the Hamas
government need only say "We recognise Israel" and
supposedly aid and international goodwill will wash over the
West Bank and Gaza.
That, at least, was the gist
of Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert's recent speech during
a visit to the Negev, when he suggested that his country's hand
was stretched out across the sands towards the starving masses
of Gaza -- if only Hamas would repent. "Recognise us and
we are ready to talk about peace" was the implication.
Certainly the Palestinian people
have been viciously punished for making their democratic choice
early this year to elect a Hamas government that Israel and the
Western powers disapprove of:
* an economic blockade has
been imposed, starving the Palestinian Authority of income to
pay for services and remunerate its large workforce;
* millions of dollars in tax
monies owed to the Palestinians have been illegally withheld
by Israel, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis;
* a physical blockade of Gaza
enforced by Israel has prevented the Palestinians from exporting
their produce, mostly perishable crops, and from importing essentials
like food and medicine;
* Israeli military strikes
have damaged Gaza's vital infrastructure, including the supply
of electricity and water, as well as randomly killing its inhabitants;
* and thousands of families
are being torn apart as Israel uses the pretext of its row with
Hamas to stop renewing the visas of Palestinian foreign passport
holders.
The magic words "We recognise
you" could end all this suffering. So why did their prime
minister, Ismail Haniyeh, vow last week never to utter them.
Is Hamas so filled with hatred and loathing for Israel as a Jewish
state that it cannot make such a simple statement of good intent?
It is easy to forget that,
though conditions have dramatically deteriorated of late, the
Palestinians' problems did not start with the election of Hamas.
Israel's occupation is four decades old, and no Palestinian leader
has ever been able to extract from Israel a promise of real statehood
in all of the occupied territories: not the mukhtars, the largely
compliant local leaders, who for decades were the only representatives
allowed to speak on behalf of the Palestinians after the national
leadership was expelled; not the Palestinian Authority under
the secular leadership of Yasser Arafat, who returned to the
occupied territories in the mid-1990s after the PLO had recognised
Israel; not the leadership of his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, the
"moderate" who first called for an end to the armed
intifada; and now not the leaders of Hamas, even though they
have repeatedly called for a long-term truce (hudna) as the first
step in building confidence.
Similarly, few Palestinians
doubt that Israel will continue to entrench the occupation --
just as it did during the supposed peace- making years of Oslo,
when the number of Jewish settlers doubled in the occupied territories
-- even if Hamas is ousted and a government of national unity,
of technocrats or even of Fatah takes its place.
There is far more at stake
for Israel in winning this little concession from Hamas than
most observers appreciate. A statement saying that Hamas recognised
Israel would do much more than meet Israel's precondition for
talks; it would mean that Hamas had walked into the same trap
that was set earlier for Arafat and Fatah. That trap is designed
to ensure that any peaceful solution to the conflict is impossible.
It achieves this end in two
ways.
First, as has already been
understood, at least by those paying attention, Hamas' recognition
of Israel's "right to exist" would effectively signify
that the Palestinian government was publicly abandoning its own
goal of struggling to create a viable Palestinian state.
That is because Israel refuses
to demarcate its own future borders, leaving it an open question
what it considers to be the extent of "its existence"
it is demanding Hamas recognise. We do know that no one in the
Israeli leadership is talking about a return to Israel's borders
that existed before the 1967 war, or probably anything close
to it.
Without a return to those pre-1967
borders (plus a substantial injection of goodwill from Israel
in ensuring unhindered passage between Gaza and the West Bank)
no possibility exists of a viable Palestinian state ever emerging.
And no goodwill, of course,
will be forthcoming. Every Israeli leader has refused to recognise
the Palestinians, first as a people and now as a nation. And
in the West's typically hypocritical fashion when dealing with
the Palestinians, no one has ever suggested that Israel commit
to such recognition.
In fact, Israeli governments
have glorified in their refusal to extend the same recognition
to the Palestinians that they demand from them. Famously Golda
Meir, a Labor prime minister, said that the Palestinians did
not exist, adding in 1971 that Israel's "borders are determined
by where Jews live, not where there is a line on a map."
At the same time she ordered that the Green Line, Israel's border
until the 1967 war, be erased from all official maps.
That legacy hit the headlines
last week when the dovish education minister, Yuli Tamir, caused
a storm by issuing a directive that the Green Line should be
reintroduced in Israeli schoolbooks. There were widespread protests
against her "extreme leftist ideology" from politicians
and rabbis.
According to Israeli educators,
the chances of textbooks showing the Green Line again -- or dropping
references to "Judea and Samaria", the Biblical names
for the West Bank, or including Arab towns on maps of Israel
-- are close to nil. The private publishers who print the textbooks
would refuse to incur the extra costs of reprinting the maps,
said Prof Yoram Bar-Gal, head of geography at Haifa University.
Sensitive to the damage that
the row might do to Israel's international image, and aware that
Tamir's directive is never likely to be implemented, Olmert agreed
in principle to the change. "There is nothing wrong with
marking the Green Line," he said. But, in a statement that
made his agreement entirely hollow, he added: "But there
is an obligation to emphasize that the government's position
and public consensus rule out returning to the 1967 lines."
The second element to the trap
is far less well understood. It explains the strange formulation
of words Israel uses in making its demand of Hamas. Israel does
not ask it simply to "recognise Israel", but to "recognise
Israel's right to exist". The difference is not a just matter
of semantics.
The concept of a state having
any rights is not only strange but alien to international law.
People have rights, not states. And that is precisely the point:
when Israel demands that its "right to exist" be recognised,
the subtext is that we are not speaking of recognition of Israel
as a normal nation state but as the state of a specific people,
the Jews.
In demanding recognition of
its right to exist, Israel is ensuring that the Palestinians
agree to Israel's character being set in stone as an exclusivist
Jewish state, one that privileges the rights of Jews over all
other ethnic, religious and national groups inside the same territory.
The question of what such a state entails is largely glossed
over both by Israel and the West.
For most observers, it means
simply that Israel must refuse to allow the return of the millions
of Palestinians languishing in refugee camps throughout the region,
whose former homes in Israel have now been appropriated for the
benefit of Jews. Were they allowed to come back, Israel's Jewish
majority would be eroded overnight and it could no longer claim
to be a Jewish state, except in the same sense that apartheid
South Africa was a white state.
This conclusion is apparently
accepted by Romano Prodi, Italy's prime minister, after a round
of lobbying in European captials from Israel's telegenic foreign
minister, Tzipi Livni. According to the Jerusalem Post, Prodi
is saying in private that Israel should receive guarantees from
the Palestinians that its Jewish character will never be in doubt.
Israeli officials are cheering
what they believe is the first crack in Europe's support for
international law and the rights of the refugees. "It's
important to get everyone on the same page on this one,"
an official told the Post.
But in truth the consequences
of the Palestinian leadership recognising Israel as a Jewish
state run far deeper than the question of the future of the Palestinian
refugees. In my book Blood and Religion, I set out these harsh
consequences both for the Palestinians in the occupied territories
and for the million or so Palestinians who live inside Israel
as citizens, supposedly with the same rights as Jewish citizens.
My argument is that this need
to maintain Israel's Jewish character at all costs is actually
the engine of its conflict with the Palestinians. No solution
is possible as long as Israel insists on privileging citizenship
for Jews above other groups, and on distorting the region's territorial
and demographic realities to ensure that the numbers continue
to weigh in the Jews' favour.
Although ultimately the return
of the refugees poses the biggest threat to Israel's "existence",
Israel has a far more pressing demographic concern: the refusal
by the Palestinians living in the West Bank to leave the parts
of that territory Israel covets (and which it knows by the Biblical
names of Judea and Samaria).
Within a decade, the Palestinians
in the occupied territories and the million Palestinian citizens
living inside Israel will outnumber Jews, both those living in
Israel and the settlers in the West Bank.
That was one of the chief reasons
for the "disengagement" from Gaza: Israel could claim
that, even though it is still occupying the small piece of land
militarily, it was no longer responsible for the population there.
By withdrawing a few thousand settlers from the Strip, 1.4 million
Gazans were instantly wiped from the demographic score sheet.
But though the loss of Gaza
has posponed for a few years the threat of a Palestinian majority
in the expanded state Israel desires, it has not magicly guaranteed
Israel's continuing existence as a Jewish state. That is because
Israel's Palestinian citizens, though a minority comprising no
more than fifth of Israel's population, can potentially bring
the whole house of cards tumbling down.
For the past decade they have
been demanding that Israel be reformed from a Jewish state, which
systematically discriminates against them and denies their Palestinian
identity, into a "state of all its citizens", a liberal
democracy that would give all citizens, Jews and Palestinians,
equal rights.
Israel has characterised the
demand for a state of all its citizens as subversion and treason,
realising that, were the Jewish state to become a liberal democracy,
Palestinian citizens could justifiably demand: * the right to
marry Palestinians from the occupied territories and from the
Diaspora, winning them Israeli citizenship -- "a right of
return through the backdoor" as officials call it. * the
right to bring Palestinian relatives in exile back to Israel
under a Right of Return programme that would be a pale shadow
of the existing Law of Return that guarantees any Jew anywhere
in the world the automatic right to Israeli citizenship.
To prevent the first threat,
Israel passed a flagrantly racist law in 2003 that makes it all
but impossible for Palestinians with Israeli citizenship to bring
a Palestinian spouse to Israel. For the time being, such couples
have little choice but to seek asylum abroad, if other countries
will give them refuge.
But like the Gaza disengagement,
this piece of legislation is a delaying tactic rather than a
solution to the problem of Israel's "existence". So
behind the scenes Israel has been formulating ideas that taken
together would remove large segments of Israel's Palestinian
population from its borders and strip any remaining "citizens"
of their political rights -- unless they swear loyalty to a "Jewish
and democratic state" and thereby renounce their demand
that Israel reform itself into a liberal democracy.
This is the bottom line for
a Jewish state, just as it was for a white apartheid South Africa:
if we are to survive, then we must be able to do whatever it
takes to keep ourselves in power, even if it means systematically
violating the human rights of all those we rule over and who
do not belong to our group.
Ultimately, the consequences
of Israel being allowed to remain a Jewish state will be felt
by all of us, wherever we live -- and not only because of the
fallout from the continuing and growing anger in the Arab and
Muslim worlds at the double standards applied by the West to
the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Given Israel's view that its
most pressing interest is not peace or regional accommodation
with its neighbours but the need to ensure a Jewish majority
at all costs to protect its "existence", Israel is
likely to act in ways that endanger regional and global stability.
A small taste of that was suggested
in the role played by Israel's supporters in Washington in making
the case for the invasion of Iraq, and this summer in Israel's
assault on Lebanon. But it is most evident in its drumbeat of
war against Iran.
Israel has been leading the
attempts to characterise the Iranian regime as profoundly anti-Semitic,
and its presumed ambitions for nuclear weapons as directed by
the sole goal of wanting to "wipe Israel off the map"
-- a calculatedly mischievious mistranslation of Iranian president
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech.
Most observers have assumed
that Israel is genuinely concerned for its safety from nuclear
attack, however implausible the idea that even the most fanatical
Muslim regime would, unprovoked, launch nuclear missiles against
a small area of land that contains some of Islam's holiest sites,
in Jerusalem.
But in truth there is another
reason why Israel is concerned about a nuclear-armed Iran that
has nothing to do with conventional ideas about safety.
Last month, Ephraim Sneh, one
of Israel's most distinguished generals and now Olmert's deputy
defence minister, revealed that the government's primary concern
was not the threat posed by Ahmadinejad firing nuclear missiles
at Israel but the effect of Iran's possession of such weapons
on Jews who expect Israel to have a monopoly on the nuclear threat.
If Iran got such weapons, "Most
Israelis would prefer not to live here; most Jews would prefer
not to come here with families, and Israelis who can live abroad
will ... I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the Zionist
dream without pushing a button. That's why we must prevent this
regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs."
In other words, the Israeli
government is considering either its own pre-emptive strike on
Iran or encouraging the United States to undertake such an attack
-- despite the terrible consequences for global security -- simply
because a nuclear-armed Iran might make Israel a less attractive
place for Jews to live, lead to increased emigration and tip
the demographic balance in the Palestinians' favour.
Regional and possibly global
war may be triggered simply to ensure that Israel's "existence"
as a state that offers exclusive privileges to Jews continues.
For all our sakes, we must
hope that the Palestinians and their Hamas government continue
refusing to "recognise Israel's right to exist".
CounterPunch
Speakers Bureau Sick of sit-on-the-Fence speakers, tongue-tied and timid?
CounterPunch Editors Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair
are available to speak forcefully on ALL the burning issues,
as are other CounterPunchers seasoned in stump oratory. Call
CounterPunch Speakers Bureau, 1-800-840-3683. Or email beckyg@counterpunch.org.
