Nowhere to Go But Up
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN
Can
anything be more dismal than prospects for any decent resolution of the
Israel/Palestine issue? Seemingly not. The hopes of January, 2009, at
the dawn of Obama’s presidency, are dead. Washington has now given up
all efforts to restart the direct Israeli-Palestinian talks and has
wearily begun a new round of mediated talks instead.
Across the past two months Obama inscribed one
solid achievement in history’s ledger, where all said the feat would be
impossible. He actually raised the bar for Presidential acts of craven
ass-kissing towards Israel. In mid-November he was offering the Israelis
$3 billion to pretend for 90 days that they'd stopped settlement
construction. The Israelis would be paid $33 million per day for every
day they agree to back the lie he is suggesting.
There has been no limit to the servility of
Washington to Tel Aviv. On July 8 the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz
revealed that the Obama Administration was planning to start
transferring nuclear fuel to Israel in order to build up Tel Aviv’s
nuclear stockpile. In other words, amid an unrelenting campaign against
Iran -- the Wikileaks files reveal it to be the US’ prime diplomatic
obsession – for enriching uranium and planning to make a nuclear bomb,
Washington is flouting the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) by
aiding Israel’s nuclear weapons program.
Israel refuses to sign the NPT—indeed, to this day
won’t concede it has nuclear weapons at all—thus making it ineligible to
buy uranium on the world market. US intelligence agencies commonly
reckon Israel has anywhere from 100 to 200 nuclear missiles. Article I
of the NPT explicitly forbids supplying nuclear material to a
non-signatory country, which in the case of Israel makes the U.S. in
violation of the NPT.
While the Obama administration totters from one
concession to the next, last Wednesday Israeli settlers announced they
are building new housing at a religious school on the Mount of Olives in
east Jerusalem -- the part of the city claimed by the Palestinians.
It’s long been obvious to all but the most fervent
apologists for Israel that all Israeli governments have never
entertained the slightest intention of yielding control of
Palestine/Israel from the Mediterranean to the Jordan River, and that
this unyielding posture renders impossible any just and workable
solution based on Palestinian claims to self-determination.
As the respected Israeli activist Jeff Halper, head
of the Jerusalem-based Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions puts
it in our last CounterPunch newsletter, # 20, , “we are at a dead-end
of a dead process. Israel will never end its occupation voluntarily; the
permanent warehousing of the Palestinians is what it has in mind. The
international community will not exert enough pressure on Israel to
realize even a two-state solution, which leaves Israel on 78 per cent of
historic Palestine, with no right of return for refugees; given the
veto power over any political process enjoyed by the American Congress,
locked into an unshakable bipartisan “pro-Israel” position, the
international community cannot exert that required pressure.”
Yet Halper says that against all the odds “I’m
optimistic that 2011 will witness a game-changing ‘break’ that will
create a new set of circumstances in which a just peace is possible.”
The jolt can take one of two forms, the first is already being
discussed: a unilateral declaration by the Palestinian Authority of a
state based on the 1949 armistice lines (the 1967 “Green Line”), which
then applies for membership in the U.N. This would force the hand of the
international community. A new, or reaffirmed Palestinian declaration
of independence within those boundaries would be a unilateral act but
rather one done in agreement with the member states of the U.N., who
have accepted the 1949/1967 borders as the basis of a solution. It
conforms as well to Bush’s “Road Map”peace initiative led by the U.S.A.
itself.
But alas, the Palestinian Authority has leaders
incapable of any such bold initiative. Indeed, on December 15
Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said such a move would not bring
a state closer.
But a second scenario envisages that the
Palestinian Authority will soon either resign or collapse, throwing the
occupation back on the lap of Israel. As Halper describes it,
“The end or fall of the PA would create an
intolerable and unsustainable situation. Israel would be forced to
retake by force all the Occupied Territories, and, not willing to allow
Hamas to step into the vacuum, would have to do so violently, perhaps
even invading Gaza again and assuming permanent control. Having to
support four million impoverished Palestinians with no economic
infrastructure whatsoever would be an impossible burden (and, hopefully,
the donor community would not enable the re-occupation by stepping in
to prevent a humanitarian crisis, as it does today). Such a move on the
part of Israel would also inflame the Muslim world and generate massive
protests worldwide, again forcing the hand of the international
community.”
In other words, Israel’s obduracy will finally
unlock the impasse. This seems a long shot? Indeed it is – but what
alternatives are there? 2010 has been the year when the phrase “peace
process” have been definitively exposed as the fraud it always was.
There’s nowhere to go but up.
http://www.counterpunch.org/
[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
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