ROADMAP TO NOWHERE

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Roadmap to Nowhere

By Aijaz Zaka Syed -Opinon

18 June 2009

Former US president Jimmy Carter is one of those rare birds who have retained their humanity even after four years in the world’s most powerful job. The architect of the first Arab-Israel peace accord was moved to tears when he visited the ruins of Gaza this week, comparing the condition of the Palestinians to “worse 
than animals.”

Granted, most Americans are not familiar with the Palestinian way of life, I often wonder what the Israelis themselves think of the people living next door in a permanent hell?

Are the Israelis ever moved by the Palestinian suffering, as Carter has been and rest of the world often is? If they are, it is yet to be seen. No matter what happens to the Palestinians and what the rest of the world thinks of their suffering, Israel and its leaders remain as indifferent and as unreasonable as ever.

When Benjamin Netanyahu promised his own roadmap, after President Barack Obama gave him those stony looks in the Oval Office with the world media watching, even the most hardened cynics like me began nursing hopes of peace.

We thought, maybe, Israel, prodded by its faithful ally and biggest backer, finally has had a change of heart. Maybe, we hoped, it’s finally time for the doves of peace to descend on the Holy Land. Perhaps, the time has come for Palestinians to find themselves a home — even if moth eaten — of their own on this big and wide planet.

But Israel is nothing if not consistent. Netanyahu did unveil a ‘roadmap’ in his much-hyped speech but you do not know what to make of it.

Having refused to acknowledge the existence of Palestinians all these years, Netanyahu has finally agreed for ‘peace’ and a Palestinian state, if it can be called one. However, his one hand takes back what the other proffers.

The ‘sovereign and independent’ Palestine envisaged by Israel will have no military or security forces of its own. It is not permitted to possess or import any weapons. It cannot control its own airspace. And, yes, the borders of this Bantustan will be controlled by the able and efficient forces of the great state of Israel. His Imperial Majesty Netanyahu is kind enough though to grant the future Palestinian state the right to have its own flag and currency.

In return, all Israel asks from the Palestinians is the surrender of their rights over their lands and homes in what was once Palestine. They must recognise Israel as the Jewish state and the divine right of Jewish people to the Holy Land. So what if this means the Palestinians can never dream of returning to their homes and lands from which they were driven out or even hope for recompense? In any case, where’s the land and where are the homes that the Palestinians dream of returning to?

It’s all Israel now – greater Israel, from the river to the sea! When will Palestinians grow out of their dreams? How long will they continue to cling to idle hope, year after wasted year, generation after lost generation? After all, it’s been nearly seven decades since the Nakhba? And yes, Jerusalem shall remain the capital of Israel, no matter what the Palestinians claim or Muslims and Christians believe. As for the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and around Jerusalem, they will continue to grow and multiply by the day like all good neighbourhoods should do.

After all, they’ve been growing over the past half-a-century or so. No one has been able to stop them, no matter who is in power in Tel Aviv or Washington. This is why Netanyahu thinks it is not in the “interest of peace and stability” to put a freeze on them now.

Like Israel’s good ol’ friend Bush would argue, they are, after all, ground realities. No one can change them, not even Obama. How dare Barry, hardly four months in the White House, demand a freeze on the settlements when all his predecessors failed to do so! Does he know what he is up against? No one has taken on Israel and survived to tell the tale. No US president has ever managed to push the Israelis in a direction they do not want to go. Israeli politicians have repeatedly played cat-and-mouse not just with the Palestinians and Arabs but also with successive US presidents, forever buying time even as more and more Palestinian land is eaten away by settlements.

No wonder Netanyahu believes he can play the same games with Obama. This is why he came up with that roadmap to nowhere.

While the White House praised the Netanyahu juggernaut as an ‘important step forward,’ it is seen by the Palestinians, Arabs and rest of the world as a huge setback to Obama’s groundbreaking initiative. This is not an important step forward, Mr President, but a clever move to sabotage your peace efforts. This is not a two-state solution but a massacre of the aspirations and hopes of a long persecuted people. In Palestinian leader Mustafa Barghouti’s words, Netanyahu hasn’t endorsed a Palestinian state but a ghetto.

If you call this ‘embracing peace,’ I must be Alexander the Great. For God’s sake, Netanyahu doesn’t even call it a Palestinian state but ‘territory’—whatever that means! As Palestinian spokesperson Saeb Erekat puts it, Netanyahu’s proposal is a ‘slap in the face’ for Obama. So much so even the Israeli commentators are shocked by the in-your-face belligerence of their leader.

A blogger on the Israeli daily, Haaretz, has to say this on Netanyahu’s offer: “It seemed to be ‘no’ to dividing Jerusalem, no to the return of refugees and no to an independent state and no to a real 
settlement freeze.”

This is not a roadmap to peace but a call for another Intifada. This will not put an end to Palestinian suffering but perpetuate it. The question is, what does Obama do now? Does he have the courage to call Israel’s bluff? Is he prepared to beat Bibi at his own game?

His courageous and sincere efforts to end the world’s longest running conflict have awakened hope across the Middle East and beyond. He has not only gone against America’s own hallowed traditions of blind support to Israel, but is also prepared to challenge the powerful vested interests and lobbies in Washington to bring peace to the Holy Land.

If people around the world are, for the first time in decades, optimistic about the Middle East peace today, the credit goes to this extraordinary individual with an equally extraordinary history. Would Obama squander all this euphoria and goodwill because of Israel’s continuing obstinacy? Would he allow Netanyahu to undermine this historic opportunity? As Carter has pointed out, the US is in this together with Israel. It shares the equal responsibility for the Palestinians’ exploitation and the mess in the region.

The US has to choose between peace and justice for both Palestinians and Israelis — and the Middle East — or take Israel’s side and perpetuate the cycle of violence and chaos across the region.

Source Khaleej Times

Aijaz Zaka Syed is Opinion Editor of Khaleej Times and can be reached at aijaz@khaleejtimes.com. Views expressed here are his own

June 18, 2009 Posted by Elias NEWS & POLITICS

NETANYAHU ON A ROAD TO NOWHERE

Netanyahu on a road to nowhere’

Ronnie Kasrils, The Star Opinion, June 18, 2009

Is Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu really offering Palestinians anything to work with? What is heard is the strident voice of a “Dr No”. No freeze on settlement construction. No to Jerusalem as a shared capital. No right of return of the refugees. No end to the siege of Gaza or occupation of the West Bank. No acceptance even of the two-state solution. No sovereign borders or air space in a nebulous territory he can hardly bring himself to name.

What he has announced, Palestinian representatives say, is a series of conditions and qualifications that render a viable, independent and sovereign Palestinian state impossible. This is “no” to peace, “no” to justice, “no” to security for Palestinians and Jewish people.

It is a “no” to Barack Obama – if the US president is in fact serious about brokering a just solution.

Netanyahu’s utterances are reminiscent of apartheid, when the dispossessed majority were warned to stay in their place and offered nothing but Bantustans.

He insists that the Palestinians must accept Israel as the state of the Jewish people. This is integral to the Zionist myth claiming that only the Jews have rights to that land and ignoring the 20 percent Muslims living in Israel – never mind the rights of millions of Palestinians under military occupation or in refugee camps.

To accept the results of such dispossession and apartheid laws would have been tantamount to all South Africans agreeing with banishment to the Bantustans.

It is instructive to refer to a statement of Dr Hendrik Verwoerd’s that “the Jews took Israel from the Arabs after the Arabs had lived there for a thousand years. Israel, like South Africa, is an apartheid state” (Rand Daily Mail, November 23, 1961).

Both apartheid South Africa and Zionist Israel qualify as colonial, settler states created on the basis of the dispossession of the land of an indigenous people. To ignore this is to refuse to recognise the root cause of the conflict and to claim that everything must revolve around the rights of the Jewish people in Israel.

Both Israel and apartheid South Africa implemented a policy based on racial ethnicity; the claim of Jewish people in Israel and whites in South Africa to exclusive citizenship; a monopoly of rights in law regarding the ownership of land, property and business; superior access to education, health, social and cultural amenities, pensions and municipal services; a monopoly of membership of military and security forces; and privileged development along their own racial supremacist lines.

That the Palestinian minority in Israel is allowed to vote hardly redresses the in-justice in all other matters of basic human rights. Palestinians allowed to stand for election to the Knesset do so on condition that they don’t question Israel’s existence as a Jewish state.

Verwoerd would have known of Israel’s dispossession of indigenous Palestinians in 1948 and with it the destruction of their villages, the massacres and the ethnic cleansing in the very month and year his own party came to power in South Africa.

While he did not live to see the division of Palestinian territory after the 1967 Six Day War, and the subsequent enclosure of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, he would have admired the machinations that ghettoised the Palestinians. This was the Verwoerdian grand plan and the reason former US president Jimmy Carter could so readily identify the occupied Palestinian territories as being akin to apartheid.

The Bantustans consisted of 13 percent of South Africa, uncannily comparable to the ever-shrinking pieces of ground Israel consigns to the Palestinians. More than one-third of the occupied territories comprise the illegal settlement blocks and security grid system with their Jewish-only roads. The effect is that the 22 percent of pre-1967 West Bank territory has become a mere 12 percent of historic pre-1948 Palestine. It is this sham with impossible qualifications that Netanyahu proposes for the Palestinians.

When former deputy foreign affairs minister Aziz Pahad and I visited Yasser Arafat in his demolished headquarters in Ramallah in 2004, he pointed around him and said “See: this is nothing but a Bantustan.” No, we responded, pointing out that no Bantustan had been fenced in, let alone bombed by warplanes and pulverised by tanks. Pretoria pumped in funds, constructed impressive administration buildings, even allowed for Bantustan armies and airlines to impress the world that it was serious about “separate development”.

What encouraged apartheid’s rulers was the way the Western powers permitted Israel to use its military with impunity to expand its territory and hold back the tide of Arab nationalism. After the Six Day War, Verwoerd’s successor, John Vorster, notoriously said: “The Israelis have beaten the Arabs before lunchtime. We will eat the African states for breakfast.”

But it was not only the racial doctrine of Israel that excited apartheid’s leaders, it was the use of the biblical narrative as the ideological rationale to justify its vision.

The Voortrekkers had used Bible and gun, as colonisers had elsewhere, to carve out their exclusive bastion in South Afri-ca’s hinterland. Like the biblical Israelites, they claimed to be “God’s chosen people”, with a mission to tame and civilise the wilderness, disregarding the productivity of people who had tilled the soil, built the world’s earliest towns and traded for millennia. Racist history taught that the white man arrived in South Africa as the “Bantu tribes” were wandering across the Limpopo – and that they were pioneer settlers in a land devoid of people.

Such a colonial mentality had echoes in Palestine, which Zionists claimed was “a land without people” waiting to be settled by “a people without a land”.

It is on this basis that Zionists such as Netanyahu, and the illegitimate settlers in the West Bank – those his speech was designed to encourage – make their claims for an exclusive Jewish state.

In its conduct and methods of repression, Israel came to resemble apartheid South Africa at its zenith – even surpassing its brutality, house demolitions, removal of communities, targeted assassinations, massacres, imprisonment and torture of its opponents and the aggression against neighbouring states.

We South Africans can identify the pathological cause, fuelling the hate, of Israel’s political-military elite, giving rise to more extreme racist postures. Neither is it difficult for anyone acquainted with colonial history to understand how deliberately cultivated racism inculcates a justification for atrocities against defenceless civilians, as recently witnessed in the brutality unleashed on the population in Gaza.

South Africans visiting the occupied territories can’t but agree with Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu’s observation that things happen in Israel that never happened in apartheid South Africa. (The Guardian, May 28.) It is also instructive to recall the words of an Israeli cabinet minister, Aharon Cizling, in 1948, after the savagery of the Deir Yassin massacre of 240 villagers: “Now we too have behaved like Nazis and my whole being is shaken.” (Tom Segev – The First Israelis.)

Veteran British MP Gerald Kaufman, a long-time friend of Israel, remarked that an Israeli Defence Force spokeswoman had talked like a Nazi when she coldly dismissed the deaths of defenceless civilians in Gaza. He is not alone in fearing the rise of fascists like Avigdor Lieberman to powerful positions in Israel; the threat of the expulsion of the 1948 Palestinians; the enactment of laws threatening imprisonment for anyone denying that Israel is a Jewish state; a bill prohibiting anyone from advocating a bi-national state and another seeking to imprison for three years anyone mourning the 1948 nakba. These have been described by Israeli peace activist Uri Avnery as “a factory of racist laws with a distinct fascist odour”.

Dare we believe that an America led by Obama will make a difference? Some have raised the hope that the stalled “Road Map” might spring back to life and with it the chimera of a two-state solution. That is not likely with Netanyahu’s latest stance.

Obama calls only for a freeze in settlement construction – and precious little else. Can 12 percent or a few percent more in horse-trading and all the preconditions for negotiations set by Netanyahu provide for a viable Palestinian state? Acceptance by the Palestinians is as likely as it would have been for black South Africans to accept the Bantustans.

The words of Nelson Mandela in 1997 are salutary: “The UN took a strong stand against apartheid and over the years an international consensus was built which helped to bring an end to this iniquitous system. But we know too well that our freedom is incomplete without the freedom of the Palestinians.”

One would hope Obama would share such a view. Just as a united, national movement of a determined people, reinforced by international solidarity actions invoking boycott, divestment and sanctions won freedom for all South Afri-cans, so too can this be the case for Jewish people and Arabs in the Holy Land.

Whether a unitary state or a two-state solution ultimately results, those two peoples will have to find a way to peacefully co-exist. That must, however, be on the basis of justice, fairness and equity – not the racist diktat of the likes of Netanyahu.

Kasrils is a former government minister.

SOURCE : Jews for Justice for Palestinians

June 18, 2009 Posted by Elias