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November
13, 2006
Peace Not Apartheid
Jimmy
Carter's Roadmap
By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN
The historical chapters of Palestine Peace Not Apartheid are rather thin, filled with errors
small and large, as well as tendentious and untenable interpretations.
But few persons will be reading it for the history.
It is what Carter has to say
about the present that will interest the reading public and the
media (assuming the book is not ignored). It can be said with
certainty that Israel's apologists will not be pleased. Although
Carter includes criticisms of the Palestinians to affect balance,
it is clear that he holds Israel principally responsible for
the impasse in the peace process. The most scathing criticisms
of Israel come in Chapter 16 ("The Wall as a Prison").
One hopes that this chapter (and the concluding "Summary")
will be widely disseminated.
Below I reproduce some of Carter's
key statements.
***
Most Arab regimes have accepted
the permanent existence of Israel as an indisputable fact and
are no longer calling for an end to the State of Israel, having
contrived a common statement at an Arab summit in 2002 that offers
peace and normal relations with Israel within its acknowledged
international borders and in compliance with other U.N. Security
Council resolutions. (p. 14)
Since 1924, Shebaa Farms has
been treated as Lebanese territory, but Syria seized the area
in the 1950s and retained control until Israel occupied the Farms--along
with the Golan Heights--in 1967. The inhabitants and properties
were Lebanese, and Lebanon has never accepted Syria's control
of the Farms. Although Syria has claimed the area in the past,
Syrian officials now state that it is part of Lebanon. This
position supports the Arab claim that Israel still occupies Lebanese
territory. (pp. 98-9)
The best offer to the Palestinians
[at Camp David in December 2000]--by Clinton, not Barak--had
been to withdraw 20 percent of the settlers, leaving more than
180,000 in 209 settlements, covering about 10 percent of the
occupied land, including land to be "leased" and portions
of the Jordan River valley and East Jerusalem.
The percentage figure is misleading,
since it usually includes only the actual footprints of the settlements.
There is a zone with a radius of about four hundred meters around
each settlement within which Palestinians cannot enter. In addition,
there are other large areas that would have been taken or earmarked
to be used exclusively by Israel, roadways that connect the settlements
to one another and to Jerusalem, and "life arteries"
that provide the settlers with water, sewage, electricity, and
communications. These range in width from five hundred to four
thousand meters, and Palestinians cannot use or cross many of
these connecting links. This honeycomb of settlements and their
interconnecting conduits effectively divide the West Bank into
at least two noncontiguous areas and multiple fragments, often
uninhabitable or even unreachable, and control of the Jordan
Valley denies Palestinians any direct access eastward into Jordan.
About one hundred military checkpoints completely surround Palestinians
and block routes going into or between Palestinian communities,
combined with an unaccountable number of other roads that are
permanently closed with large concrete cubes or mounds of earth
and rocks.
There was no possibility that
any Palestinian leader could accept such terms and survive, but
official statements from Washington and Jerusalem were successful
in placing the entire onus for the failure on Yasir Arafat. (pp.
151-2)
A new round of talks was held
at Taba in January 2001, during the last few days of the Clinton
presidency, between President Arafat and the Israeli foreign
minister, and it was later claimed that the Palestinians rejected
a "generous offer" put forward by Prime Minister Barak
with Israel keeping only 5 percent of the West Bank. The fact
is that no such offers were ever made. Barak later said, "It
was plain to me that there was no chance of reaching a settlement
at Taba. Therefore I said there would be no negotiations and
there would be no delegation and there would be no official discussions
and no documentation. Nor would Americans be present in the
room. The only thing that took place at Taba were nonbinding
contacts between senior Israelis and senior Palestinians. (p.
152)
In April 2003 a "Roadmap"
for resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was announced
by U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan on behalf of the United
States, the United Nations, Russia, and the European Union (known
as the Quartet).The Palestinians accepted the road map in its
entirety but the Israeli government announced fourteen caveats
and prerequisites, some of which would preclude any final peace
talks. (p. 159)
"Imprisonment wall"
is more descriptive than "security fence." (p. 174)
Gaza has maintained a population
growth rate of 4.7 percent annually, one of the highest in the
world, so more than half its people are less than fifteen years
old. They are being strangled since the Israeli "withdrawal,"
surrounded by a separation barrier that is penetrated only by
Israeli-controlled checkpoints, with just a single opening (for
personnel only) into Egypt's Sinai as their access to the outside
world. There have been no moves by Israel to permit transportation
by sea or by air. Fishermen are not permitted to leave the harbor,
workers are prevented from going to outside jobs, the import
or export of food and other goods is severely restricted and
often cut off completely, and the police, teachers, nurses, and
social workers are deprived of salaries. Per capita income has
decreased 40 percent during the last three years, and the poverty
rate has reached 70 percent. The U.N. Special Rapporteur on
the Right to Food has stated that acute malnutrition in Gaza
is already on the same scale as that seen in the poorer countries
of the Southern Sahara, with more than half of Palestinian families
eating only one meal a day. (p. 176).
The area between the segregation
barrier and the Israeli border has been designated a closed military
region for an indefinite period of time. Israeli directives
state that every Palestinian over the age of twelve living in
the closed area has to obtain a "permanent resident permit"
from the civil administration to enable them to continue to live
in their own homes. They are considered to be aliens, without
the rights of Israeli citizens.
To summarize: whatever territory Israel decides to confiscate
will be on its side of the wall, but Israelis will still retain
control of the Palestinians who will be on the other side of
the barrier, enclosed between it and Israel's forces in the Jordan
River valley. (pp. 192-3)
The wall ravages many places
along its devious route that are important to Christians. In
addition to enclosing Bethlehem in one of its most notable intrusions,
an especially heartbreaking division is on the southern slope
of the Mount of Olives, a favorite place for Jesus and his disciples,
and very near Bethany, where they often visited Mary, Martha,
and their brother, Lazarus. There is a church named for one
of the sisters, Santa Marta Monastery, where Israel's thirty-foot
concrete wall cuts through the property. The house of worship
is now on the Jerusalem side, and its parishioners are separated
from it because they cannot get permits to enter Jerusalem. Its
priest, Father Claudio Ghilardi, says, "For nine hundred
years we have lived here under Turkish, British, Jordanian, and
Israeli governments, and no one has ever stopped people coming
to pray. It is scandalous. This is not about a barrier. It
is a border. Why don't they speak the truth?"
Countering Israeli arguments that the wall is to keep Palestinian
suicide bombers from Israel, Father Claudio adds a comment that
describes the path of the entire barrier: "The Wall is not
separating Palestinians from Jews; rather Palestinians from Palestinians."
Nearby are three convents that will also be cut off from the
people they serve. The 2,000 Palestinian Christians have lost
their place of worship and their spiritual center. (pp. 194-5)
International human rights
organizations estimate that since 1967 more than 630,000 Palestinians
(about 20 percent of the total population) in the occupied territories
have been detained at some time by the Israelis, arousing deep
resentment among the families involved. Although the vast majority
of prisoners are men, there are a large number of women and children
being held. Between the ages of twelve and fourteen, children
can be sentenced for a period of up to six months, and after
the age of fourteen Palestinian children are tried as adults,
a violation of international law. (pp. 196-7)
The unwavering official policy
of the United States since Israel became a state has been that
its borders must coincide with those prevailing from 1949 until
1967 (unless modified by mutually agreeable land swaps), specified
in the unanimously adopted U.N. Resolution 242, which mandates
Israel's withdrawal from occupied territories. This obligation
was reconfirmed by Israel's leaders in agreements negotiated
in 1978 at Camp David and in 1993 at Oslo, for which they received
the Nobel Peace Prize, and both of these commitments were officially
ratified by the Israeli government. Also, as a member of the
International Quartet that includes Russia, the United Nations,
and the European Union, America supports the Roadmap for Peace,
which espouses exactly the same requirements. Palestinian leaders
unequivocally accepted this proposal, but Israel has officially
rejected its key provisions with unacceptable caveats and prerequisites.
.
The overriding problem is that, for more than a quarter century,
the actions of some Israeli leaders have been in direct conflict
with the official policies of the United States, the international
community, and their own negotiated agreements.Israel's continued
control and colonization of Palestinian land have been the primary
obstacles to a comprehensive peace agreement in the Holy Land.
In order to perpetuate the occupation, Israeli forces have deprived
their unwilling subjects of basic human rights. No objective
person could personally observe existing conditions in the West
Bank and dispute these statements. (pp. 207-9)
The United States has used
its U.N. Security Council veto more than forty times to block
resolutions critical of Israel. Some of these vetoes have brought
international discredit on the United States, and there is little
doubt that the lack of a persistent effort to resolve the Palestinian
issue is a major source of anti-American sentiment and terrorist
activity throughout the Middle East and the Islamic world. (pp.
209-10)
The bottom line is this: Peace
will come to Israel and the Middle East only when the Israeli
government is willing to comply with international law, with
the Roadmap for Peace, with official American policy, with the
wishes of a majority of its own citizens--and honors its own
previous commitments--by accepting its legal borders. All Arab
neighbors must pledge to honor Israel's right to live in peace
under these conditions. The United States is squandering international
prestige and goodwill and intensifying global anti-American terrorism
by unofficially condoning or abetting the Israeli confiscation
and colonization of Palestinian territories. (p. 216)
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