Roadmap and PeacemakingIsrael and Palestine
What starts the numerous peacemaking efforts? What brings them to a halt? Are they doomed to fail because the problem is intractable? Or are some peacemaking plans simply unrealistic? With one-sided conditions and expectations?
Thursday, June 21, 2007
orgy of terror and vandlaism ... US and Israel have been heaping wholesome praise on the Fayyad government.
Not for sale | Palestinians won’t accept a Vichy government | By Khalid Amayreh
06/18/07 "ICH" -- -- - Occupied Jerusalem, 17 June 2007 -- -The vast bulk of Palestinians, at home and in the Diaspora, will not accept a quisling government in Ramallah that might be at Israel’s beck and call. This is precisely what the Bush administration and Israel expect the new government, headed by Salam Fayyad, to be.
Of course, it is entirely up to Fayyad and his cabinet to prove the falseness of Israeli bedding and American expectations.
Unfortunately, the new government seems to offer a little promise for a better tomorrow for the thoroughly starved, exhausted and tormented Palestinians.
Indeed, the deafening silence by Abbas and Fayyad, et al, in the face of widespread thuggish behavior by well-known armed hooligans who have been vandalizing and burning down buildings, institutions and businesses throughout the West Bank, is very telling.
True, the government is still a few hours’ old. However, the absence of even a verbal condemnation of the orgy of terror and vandalism against suspected Hamas supporters and their families and businesses doesn’t augur well for the future.
Predictably, the US and Israel have been heaping wholesome praise on the Fayyad government. Moreover, the US and Israel have already signaled their enthusiastic willingness to lift all financial sanctions against the occupied West Bank, apparently to strengthen the Dahlan-Abbas camp against other Palestinians who refuse to be bribed or intimidated into giving in to Israeli insolence and arrogance of power.
The Fayyad Government may be temporarily pleased by the American and Israeli support. However, it should understand that American and Israeli backing is like a poisoned chalice. ...
Not for sale | Palestinians won’t accept a Vichy government | By Khalid Amayreh
06/18/07 "ICH" -- -- - Occupied Jerusalem, 17 June 2007 -- -The vast bulk of Palestinians, at home and in the Diaspora, will not accept a quisling government in Ramallah that might be at Israel’s beck and call. This is precisely what the Bush administration and Israel expect the new government, headed by Salam Fayyad, to be.
Of course, it is entirely up to Fayyad and his cabinet to prove the falseness of Israeli bedding and American expectations.
Unfortunately, the new government seems to offer a little promise for a better tomorrow for the thoroughly starved, exhausted and tormented Palestinians.
Indeed, the deafening silence by Abbas and Fayyad, et al, in the face of widespread thuggish behavior by well-known armed hooligans who have been vandalizing and burning down buildings, institutions and businesses throughout the West Bank, is very telling.
True, the government is still a few hours’ old. However, the absence of even a verbal condemnation of the orgy of terror and vandalism against suspected Hamas supporters and their families and businesses doesn’t augur well for the future.
Predictably, the US and Israel have been heaping wholesome praise on the Fayyad government. Moreover, the US and Israel have already signaled their enthusiastic willingness to lift all financial sanctions against the occupied West Bank, apparently to strengthen the Dahlan-Abbas camp against other Palestinians who refuse to be bribed or intimidated into giving in to Israeli insolence and arrogance of power.
The Fayyad Government may be temporarily pleased by the American and Israeli support. However, it should understand that American and Israeli backing is like a poisoned chalice. ...
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
With a veneer of legality added to the ethnic cleansing, the Jewish consensus will be almost complete...
Defending Israel from democracyThe Shin Bet and the persecution of Azmi Bishara | By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
06/05/07 "ICH" -- -- The second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is sealing the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of prisons. The “demographic time bomb” -- the fear that Palestinians, through higher birth rates, will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land and that Israel’s continuing rule over them risks being compared to apartheid -- has been safely defused through the disengagment from Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants. On the fortieth anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel’s security establishment is quietly satisfied with its successes.
But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it never sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly reinventing itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does not lose legitimacy, even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that cement its supremacist and expansionist agenda.
So, with these achievements under its belt, where next for the Jewish state?
I have been arguing for some time that Israel’s ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians -- including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens -- will be excluded. That was the purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of the wall snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little is left of a potential Palestinian state.
It should therefore be no surprise that we are witnessing the first moves in Israel’s next phase of conquest of the Palestinians. With the 3.7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories caged inside their ghettos, unable to protest their treatment behind fences and walls, the turn has come of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
These citizens, today nearly a fifth of Israel’s population, are the legacy of an oversight by the country’s Jewish leaders during the ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1948 war. Ever since Israel has been pondering what to do with them. There was a brief debate in the state’s first years about whether they should be converted to Judaism and assimilated, or whether they should be marginalised and eventually expelled. The latter view, favoured by the country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The question has been when and how to do the deed.
The time now finally appears to be upon us, and the crushing of these more than one million unwanted citizens currently inside the walls of the fortress -- the Achilles’ heel of the Jewish state -- is likely to be just as ruthless as that of the Palestinians under occupation.
In my recent book Blood and Religion, I charted the preparations for this crackdown. Israel has been secretly devising a land swap scheme that would force up to a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens (but hardly any territory) into the Palestinian ghetoes being crafted next door -- in return Israel will annex swaths of the West Bank on which the illegal Jewish settlements sit. The Bedouin in the Negev are being reclassified as trespassers on state land so that they can be treated as guest workers rather than citizens. And lawyers in the Justice Ministry are toiling over a loyalty scheme to deal with the remaining Palestinians: pledge an oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (that is, one in which you are not wanted) or face being stripped of your rights and possibly expelled.
There will be no resistance to these moves from Israel’s Jewish public. Opinion polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israeli Jews support “transfer” of the country’s Palestinian population. With a veneer of legality added to the ethnic cleansing, the Jewish consensus will be almost complete. ...
Defending Israel from democracyThe Shin Bet and the persecution of Azmi Bishara | By Jonathan Cook in Nazareth
06/05/07 "ICH" -- -- The second Palestinian intifada has been crushed. The 700km wall is sealing the occupied population of the West Bank into a series of prisons. The “demographic time bomb” -- the fear that Palestinians, through higher birth rates, will soon outnumber Jews in the Holy Land and that Israel’s continuing rule over them risks being compared to apartheid -- has been safely defused through the disengagment from Gaza and its 1.4 million inhabitants. On the fortieth anniversary of Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, Israel’s security establishment is quietly satisfied with its successes.
But like a shark whose physiology requires that, to stay alive, it never sleeps or stops moving, Israel must remain restless, constantly reinventing itself and its policies to ensure its ethnic project does not lose legitimacy, even as it devours the Palestinian homeland. By keeping a step ahead of the analysts and worldwide opinion, Israel creates facts on the ground that cement its supremacist and expansionist agenda.
So, with these achievements under its belt, where next for the Jewish state?
I have been arguing for some time that Israel’s ultimate goal is to create an ethnic fortress, a Jewish space in expanded borders from which all Palestinians -- including its 1.2 million Palestinian citizens -- will be excluded. That was the purpose of the Gaza disengagement and it is also the point of the wall snaking through the West Bank, effectively annexing to Israel what little is left of a potential Palestinian state.
It should therefore be no surprise that we are witnessing the first moves in Israel’s next phase of conquest of the Palestinians. With the 3.7 million Palestinians in the occupied territories caged inside their ghettos, unable to protest their treatment behind fences and walls, the turn has come of Israel’s Palestinian citizens.
These citizens, today nearly a fifth of Israel’s population, are the legacy of an oversight by the country’s Jewish leaders during the ethnic cleansing campaign of the 1948 war. Ever since Israel has been pondering what to do with them. There was a brief debate in the state’s first years about whether they should be converted to Judaism and assimilated, or whether they should be marginalised and eventually expelled. The latter view, favoured by the country’s first prime minister, David Ben Gurion, dominated. The question has been when and how to do the deed.
The time now finally appears to be upon us, and the crushing of these more than one million unwanted citizens currently inside the walls of the fortress -- the Achilles’ heel of the Jewish state -- is likely to be just as ruthless as that of the Palestinians under occupation.
In my recent book Blood and Religion, I charted the preparations for this crackdown. Israel has been secretly devising a land swap scheme that would force up to a quarter of a million Palestinian citizens (but hardly any territory) into the Palestinian ghetoes being crafted next door -- in return Israel will annex swaths of the West Bank on which the illegal Jewish settlements sit. The Bedouin in the Negev are being reclassified as trespassers on state land so that they can be treated as guest workers rather than citizens. And lawyers in the Justice Ministry are toiling over a loyalty scheme to deal with the remaining Palestinians: pledge an oath to Israel as a Jewish and democratic state (that is, one in which you are not wanted) or face being stripped of your rights and possibly expelled.
There will be no resistance to these moves from Israel’s Jewish public. Opinion polls consistently show that two-thirds of Israeli Jews support “transfer” of the country’s Palestinian population. With a veneer of legality added to the ethnic cleansing, the Jewish consensus will be almost complete. ...
