[ 16/07/2011 - 04:10 PM ] By Khalid Amayreh in occupied Jerusalem
According to recent reports from Washington, the Obama administration is proposing a trade-off to reach a breakthrough in the stalled Palestinian-Israeli talks.
The new formula, which the U.S. tried (but failed) to sell to other members of the Quartet, proposes a Palestinian recognition of the "Jewishness" of Israel in exchange for an American endorsement of a Palestinian "state" on unspecific parts of the West Bank in addition to a few scattered neighborhoods of occupied East Jerusalem.
The United States has already approached some Arab states, asking them to endorse the American ideas and pressure the weak Palestinian Authority (PA) leadership to do likewise.
Unfortunately, the notoriously obsequious PA is yet to utter a clarion and unequivocal "NO" in response to increasingly daring Israeli and American efforts to force the Palestinian leadership to commit a historic adultery with Palestinian honor, legitimate rights and future, since recognizing the "Jewishness" of Israel would be a historic obscenity exceeding any other obscenity.
Some shallow-minded Palestinian officials seem unable to grasp the actual and potential gravity of the issue at hand. These people must be asked to shut up, or get lost, as they have no right whatsoever to sacrifice the rights of future Palestinian generations to freedom, dignity, and equality.
Russia has had the decency to reject the obscene American demand. This fact should at least silence and embarrass some of the defeatist elements within the PA who go by the adage "feed me today, kill me tomorrow."
In addition to that, a compromising attitude by the likes of Mahmoud Abbas and Yasser Abed Rabbo would really force our friends and allies into a very difficult position. Some of them would argue rather bitterly "we can't be more Catholic than the Pope, we can't be more Palestinian than the Palestinians themselves."
There are those whose tongues function much more swiftly than their brains do, who argue that the issue is merely symbolic and that Israel is already a Jewish state.
Well, things are not that simple and Israeli leaders such as the arch-racist prime minister Benyamin Netanyahu and his terrorist cohorts know exactly what they really have in mind when they speak of a Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state.
Netanyahu knows, but doesn't say so, that a Jewish state means institutionalized Jewish racism, sanctioned by the law of the land and recognized as legitimate and legal by no other than Israel's victims.
In other words, upon receiving a Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, Israel would not only legally decapitate the paramount right of return for millions of Palestinian refugees, but would also adopt all sorts of draconian and manifestly fascist measures against the sizeable Palestinian community in Israel.
Such measures would range from brazen religious and cultural discrimination to brash ethnic cleansing, and Israel would do all of this perfectly legally because Israel is recognized as an exclusively Jewish state. In other words, the right of Israel to maintain itself as a predominantly Jewish overrides Israel's non-Jewish citizens' right to equality, dignity and basic human rights and civil liberties.
In fact, Israel has already embarked on measures that could be viewed as ominous harbingers for a full-fledged fascism. For example, Israel has unearthed ancient Muslim cemeteries in Jerusalem, ordered mosques to tone down the timeless call for prayers and imposed stringent restrictions on Muslim and Christian access to religious shrines in East Jerusalem.
Moreover, with the Israeli justice system slowly but definitely transformed into a legal body of Talmud-based anti-Gentile system that is reminiscent of history's darkest ages, and with the Israeli Jewish society moving decidedly toward Jewish religious fanaticism and national jingoism, one can only imagine the kind of treatment non-Jews, especially Palestinians, would receive in Israel several years from now.
A few months ago, I spoke with a liberal Jewish intellectual who told me that Israel wouldn’t necessarily take dramatic measures to drive Arabs away from Israel.
"Israel would make their daily life unbearable through the promulgation of clearly discriminatory laws and other ostensibly "legal" measures." In a sort of defensive reflex, I reminded him that Israel claimed to be a democratic state. "You know this is for propaganda and for international public opinion consumption, it is not for real."
Israel has already started introducing racist laws in an effort to enforce "the Jewish identity" of the state, just as Nazi Germany started enforcing the German identity in the early and mid 1930s.!
For example, the Israeli parliament, the Knesset, has proposed a new law which would make it mandatory for all Israeli (Arab and Jewish) kindergartens to sing the Jewish national anthem at least once a week.
This means that the nearly two million Arabs living in Israel would be forced to glorify the symbol of their Nakba. It would be akin to the Third Reich forcing Jewish kids to sing the Nazi anthem.
In any case, forcing the children, grandchildren and great grandchildren of the tens of thousands of Palestinians, who were murdered, savaged, and violently ethnically cleansed by genocidal Zionist terrorists when Israel was created in 1948, to sing hatikva, would be a small detail once Arabs and other non-Jews were forced to pledge loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state.
Finally, recognizing Israel as it is would be a huge betrayal for the Palestinian people, their legitimate rights, aspirations, struggle, suffering and grievances. But recognizing Israel as a Jewish state would be a real crime against humanity, since saying "yes" to the Jewishness of Israel means and implies consent to Jewish racism, fascism and even Nazism. It is nothing
River to Sea
Uprooted Palestinian
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