"Everybody
has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the
settlements because everything we take now will stay ours... Everything
we don't grab will go to them." - Ariel Sharon,
as Israeli Foreign Minister, addressing a meeting of militants from
the extreme right-wing Tsomet Party, Agence France Presse, November
15, 1998.
By now it
should be clear to all Middle East analysts that the main impediment
to peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is Israel and the right-wing
Zionist extremists in Israeli politics. Time and again the Palestinians
have expressed their sincere desire to end the inhuman conditions under
which they are forced to live by the occupying IDF forces, yet every
time that a peaceful settlement seems to be within their grasp, bizarrely,
Hamas or Islamic Jihad decide to fire a few, usually harmless, Qasam
rockets at an illegal Israeli settlement, or unknown "Palestinian
gunmen" will murder
an Israeli settler, inviting the IDF to retaliate with deadly and overwhelmingly
superior force.
How to explain
such repeated, apparently self-defeating acts by the alleged representatives
of the beleaguered Palestinian people? It has been obvious for many
years now that the Palestinians cannot win an armed conflict with
the massively militarily superior Israel and any further attacks against
Israeli forces, population or interests simply provide Israeli politicians
with the justification to increase Israeli control and oppression in
the occupied territories. And Israel's nukes ensure that no other Arab
nation dare interfere. It is equally obvious that the international
community has all but washed its hands of the conflict and is resigned
to allowing it to play out to its final and surely tragic denouement.
In the June
2005 "summit" between Sharon and PA authority Chairman Abbas,
Abbas told the Israelis that he wanted "freedom of movement in and
out of Gaza, air and sea ports re-opened, key Palestinian towns handed
back to their control and the release of Palestinian prisoners."
Such demands are widely understood to be a precursor to the formation
of a Palestinian state, an eventuality that Sharon had built his political
career on ensuring never occurs.
On that
occasion, the Israeli government agreed to Abbas' demands on the proviso
that all Palestinian attacks against Israel must first stop. What is
clear is that the only reason Sharon accepted Abbas' demands is because
he was confident that he could ensure that the Palestinian authority
would never
be able to meet the condition of a cessation of all "terrorist" attacks.
It is clear
that Israeli government oppression of Palestinians has little to do
with "security
concerns" and everything to do with harassing and murdering
Palestinian civilians and leaders in order to prevent them from establishing
themselves as a independent people with a sovereign voice on the world
stage.
Central
to this goal
is the continued portrayal of any Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation
as "terrorism", when in reality, resistance (including armed)
to an occupying power is a fundamental right laid down in the article
four of the third
Geneva Convention.
However,
according
to humanitarian law, in order to lawfully use force in a conflict you
must first be designated a lawful 'combatant'. To be a 'combatant', you
have to belong to an 'armed resistance group' and that group must belong
to a 'party' to the conflict. It is in this fact that we find one of
the
chief reasons why Israel will never willingly allow the creation of a
Palestinian state.
As long
as Palestine
does not have official state status, any Palestinian resistance group
cannot claim to be a party in the conflict and must remain a simple independent
resistance group, or "terrorist" group in modern parlance.
Not only did the developed
world oversee the theft of Palestinian land in order to create the state
of Israel in 1948, but in continuing to refuse to lobby for an independent
Palestinian state, they ensure that any Palestinian resistance to Israeli
aggression is delegitimised in advance.
To the shame
of the international community, in April 2006 it was an Israeli court
that first officially ruled that
the Palestinian Authority fulfilled all of the criteria to be classified
as a state and that Israel had no jurisdiction over Palestinian lands.
Of course, the ruling changed nothing, and any opportunity that it contained
to open international debate on the Israel-Palestine conflict was immediately
crushed by a mainstream media blackout on the story. As I have said so
often in the past, from the ruling Israeli right-wing's point of view,
open and honest discussion, dialogue and debate on the Palestine issue
must be prevented at all costs, because the day that ruling Israeli
politicians engage in fair negotiations with the PA, is the
day that they lose their death grip on Palestine and its people. And
that is the very last thing they are willing to do.
But how
then can the Israeli government be so confident that the Palestinian
dream of a state of their own will remain just that - a dream?
Israel controls
all entrances and exits to and from the Gaza strip and the West Bank,
it is Israel therefore - or more accurately Israel's military and
intelligence apparatus - that decides who and what gets in and out
of the occupied Palestinian territories. Without doubt, the Israeli
army could, with relative ease, accomplish the goal of a cessation
of all "terrorist"
attacks that successive Israeli Prime Ministers have demanded of their
Palestinian counterparts, yet the hard, cold fact of the matter
is that Israel's present position as the dominant force in the Middle
East is dependent on the continued existence of a terrorist threat. That
this has been true for many, many years was made clear by Israeli commentator,
Yoram Bar Porath, in the Israeli News outlet, Yediot Aahronot of 14 July
1972:
"It is the
duty of Israeli leaders to explain to public opinion, clearly and courageously,
a certain number of facts that are forgotten with time. The first of
these is that there is no Zionism, colonialization or Jewish State without
the eviction of the Arabs and the expropriation of their lands."
In attempting to ensure
that the "terrorism" so necessary to the state of Israel is
never vanquished, Sharon and his predecessors have gone to great lengths
to infiltrate and co-opt various Palestinian resistance organizations.
Indeed, there is much evidence to support the thesis that, far from being
the victim of terrorism, Israel is in fact one of the prime instigators
of terrorist attacks in the Palestinian territories, attacks that are
conveniently set up to look like the work of Palestinians. For example,
consider the following excerpt from a UPI article from June 2002:
Hamas
history tied to Israel
Richard
Sale
UPI Terrorism Correspondent
6/18/2002
In the wake of a
suicide bomb attack Tuesday on a crowded Jerusalem city bus that killed
19 people and wounded at least 70 more, the Islamic Resistance Movement,
Hamas, took credit for the blast.
Israeli officials
called it the deadliest attack in Jerusalem in six years.
Israeli Prime Minister
Ariel Sharon immediately vowed to fight "Palestinian terror"
and summoned his cabinet to decide on a military response to the organization
that Sharon had once described as "the deadliest terrorist group
that we have ever had to face."
Active in Gaza and
the West Bank, Hamas wants to liberate all of Palestine and establish
a radical Islamic state in place of Israel. It is has gained notoriety
with its assassinations, car bombs and other acts of terrorism.
But Sharon left
something out.
Israel and Hamas
may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several
current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late
1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over
a period of years.
Israel "aided
Hamas directly -- the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance
to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization)," said Tony Cordesman,
Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic Studies.
Israel's support
for Hamas "was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for
a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,"
said a former senior CIA official. [...]
Of course,
here, we are deep into conspiracy theory territory, yet when several
current and former U.S. intelligence officials openly state that Hamas
is basically a tool of Israeli intelligence, are we talking about
a conspiracy theory, or simply the much-ignored SOP (standard operating
procedure) of most of the world's spy agencies? Readers should also
take note of the fact that, over the past few years, it has been Hamas
that has repeatedly scuppered Palestinian aspirations for statehood
by launching attacks on Israeli targets at the most inopportune moments,
thereby providing Sharon with the justification to renege on his hollow
promises to the Palestinian people.
Of course,
Israel has a willing partner in its phony terror-crime in the American
government. Vast sums ($billions) in non-refundable loans are funneled
every year from the pockets of U.S. taxpayers into the coffers of
the
Israeli treasury for the purpose of "fighting terrorism".
Israel, with the implicit support of the U.S. government, has been
allowed to contravene
or ignore dozens of UN resolutions, the Geneva conventions and
Humanitarian and International law because it claims it is "fighting
terrorism".
Indeed, the role of the current U.S. government in facilitating the continued
persecution of the Palestinian people can be clearly seen in its
promotion of the phony "war on terror" and the equally
phony 9/11 attacks that precipitated it, both of which have greatly
benefited the extreme right despots in Tel Aviv and Washington.
Israel then,
in its present configuration, is an illegal state founded on the unlawful
theft of Palestinian land and the blood of the thousands of innocent
Palestinian people that refused, and continue to refuse, to bow down
to the murderous racism of their Israeli taskmasters. Every Israeli
Prime Minister knew and understood this. They also knew that the day
that an Israeli government allows Palestine to be officially recognised
as an independent state, is the day that Israel will no longer have
the right to bulldoze Palestinian homes or arbitrarily execute Palestinian
school children and claim that they are "fighting
terrorism". On that
day, Palestinian resistance to a brutal occupying power will be legitimised
and the actions of successive Israeli governments and the IDF will
be recognised for the war crimes that they are.
For this
very reason, all "peace summits" between Israeli and Palestinian
leaders should be understood as nothing more than a sop
to the spineless international political community and a publicity
stunt designed to con the world into believing that any Israeli government
is genuinely interested in peace. Those in control of the state of
Israel and its evolution have but one plan in mind, and it can be
summed up by the words of recently elected, 80 year-old member of the
Knesset and former top Mossad agent, Rafi Eitan, as quoted by Gad
Becker of the Yediot Ahronot and which appeared in the 14 April 1983
edition of the New York Times:
"We declare
openly that the Arabs have no right to settle on even one centimeter
of Eretz (Greater) Israel... Force is all they do or ever will understand.
We shall use the ultimate force until the Palestinians come crawling
to us on all fours."
The real
question therefore is not whether Israel can find a partner for peace
in Palestinian politicians, but whether there can ever be a just
and peaceful resolution to the Israel-Palestinian conflict while Israeli
politicians continue to insist that they have the right to bomb the
Palestinian people into submission.
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