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<font size=3><a href="http://www.counterpunch.org/" eudora="autourl">
http://www.counterpunch.org/<br><br>
</a></font><font face="Verdana" size=2 color="#990000">January 1 ,
2009<br><br>
</font><h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4><b>Israel Has No
Intention of Granting a Palestinian State <br><br>
<br>
</i></font><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=5 color="#990000">If
Hamas Did Not Exist
</b></font></h1><font face="Times New Roman, Times" size=4>By JENNIFER
LOEWENSTEIN <br><br>
</font><font face="Verdana" size=6 color="#990000">L</font>
<font face="Verdana" size=2>et us get one thing perfectly straight. If
the wholesale mutilation and degradation of the Gaza Strip is going to
continue; if Israel’s will is at one with that of the United States; if
the European Union, Russia, the United Nations and all the international
legal agencies and organizations spread across the globe are going to
continue to sit by like hollow mannequins doing nothing but making
repeated “calls” for a “ceasefire” on “both sides”; if the cowardly,
obsequious and supine Arab States are going to stand by watching their
brethren get slaughtered by the hour while the world’s bullying
Superpower eyes them threateningly from Washington lest they say
something a little to their disliking; then let us at least tell the
truth why this hell on earth is taking place.<br><br>
The state terror unleashed from the skies and on the ground against the
Gaza Strip as we speak has nothing to do with Hamas. It has nothing to do
with “Terror”. It has nothing to do with the long-term “security” of the
Jewish State or with Hizbullah or Syria or Iran except insofar as it is
aggravating the conditions that have led up to this crisis today. It has
nothing to do with some conjured-up “war” – a cynical and overused
euphemism that amounts to little more the wholesale enslavement of any
nation that dares claim its sovereign rights; that dares assert that its
resources are its own; that doesn’t want one of the Empire’s obscene
military bases sitting on its cherished land. <br><br>
This crisis has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, justice or peace.
It is not about Mahmoud Zahhar or Khalid Mash’al or Ismail Haniyeh. It is
not about Hassan Nasrallah or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are all
circumstantial players who have gained a role in the current tempest only
<i>now that the situation has been allowed for 61 years to develop into
the catastrophe that it is today. </i>The Islamist factor has colored and
will continue to color the atmosphere of the crisis; it has enlisted the
current leaders and mobilized wide sectors of the world’s population. The
primary symbols today are Islamic – the mosques, the Qur’an, the
references to the Prophet Muhammad and to Jihad. But these symbols could
disappear and the impasse would continue. <br><br>
There was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the day; when few
Palestinians wanted anything to do with Islamist policies and politics.
Such politics have nothing to do with primitive rockets being fired over
the border, or smuggling tunnels and black-market weapons; just as
Arafat’s Fatah had little to do with stones and suicide bombings. The
associations are coincidental; the creations of a given political
environment. They are the result of something entirely different than
what the lying politicians and their analysts are telling you. They have
become part of the landscape of human events in the modern Middle East
today; but incidentals wholly as lethal, or as recalcitrant, deadly,
angry or incorrigible could just as soon have been in their
places.<br><br>
Strip away the clichés and the vacuous newspeak blaring out across the
servile media and its pathetic corps of voluntary state servants in the
Western world and what you will find is the naked desire for hegemony;
for power over the weak and dominion over the world’s wealth. Worse yet
you will find that the selfishness, the hatred and indifference, the
racism and bigotry, the egotism and hedonism that we try so hard to cover
up with our sophisticated jargon, our refined academic theories and
models actually help to guide our basest and ugliest desires. The
callousness with which we in indulge in them all are endemic to our very
culture; thriving here like flies on a corpse. <br><br>
Strip away the current symbols and language of the victims of our selfish
and devastating whims and you will find the simple, impassioned and
unaffected cries of the downtrodden; of the ‘wretched of the earth’
begging you to cease your cold aggression against their children and
their homes; their families and their villages; begging you to leave them
alone to have their fish and their bread, their oranges, their olives and
their thyme; asking you first politely and then with increasing disbelief
why you cannot let them live undisturbed on the land of their ancestors;
unexploited, free of the fear of expulsion; of ravishment and
devastation; free of permits and roadblocks and checkpoints and
crossings; of monstrous concrete walls, guard towers, concrete bunkers,
and barbed wire; of tanks and prisons and torture and death. Why is life
without these policies and instruments of hell impossible?<br><br>
The answer is because Israel has no intention of allowing a viable,
sovereign Palestinian state on its borders. It had no intention of
allowing it in 1948 when it grabbed 24 per cent more land than what it
was allotted legally, if unfairly, by UN Resolution 181. It had no
intention of allowing it throughout the massacres and ploys of the 1950s.
It had no intention of allowing two states when it conquered the
remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine in 1967 and reinterpreted UN
Security Council Resolution 248 to its own liking despite the
overwhelming international consensus stating that Israel would receive
full international recognition within secure and recognized borders if it
withdrew from the lands it had only recently occupied. <br><br>
It had no intention of acknowledging Palestinian national rights at the
United Nations in 1974, when –alone with the United Statesit voted
against a two-state solution. It had no intention of allowing a
comprehensive peace settlement when Egypt stood ready to deliver but
received, and obediently accepted, a separate peace exclusive of the
rights of Palestinians and the remaining peoples of the region. It had no
intention of working toward a just two-state solution in 1978 or 1982
when it invaded, fire-bombed, blasted and bulldozed Beirut so that it
might annex the West Bank without hassle. It had no intention of granting
a Palestinian state in 1987 when the first Intifada spread across
occupied Palestine, into the Diaspora and the into the spirits of the
global dispossessed, or when Israel deliberately aided the newly formed
Hamas movement so that it might undermine the strength of the more
secular-nationalist factions.<br><br>
Israel had no intention of granting a Palestinian state at Madrid or at
Oslo where the PLO was superseded by the quivering, quisling Palestinian
Authority, too many of whose cronies grasped at the wealth and prestige
it gave them at the expense of their own kin. As Israel beamed into the
world’s satellites and microphones its desire for peace and a two-state
solution, it more than doubled the number of illegal Jewish settlements
on the ground in the West Bank and around East Jerusalem, annexing them
as it built and continues to build a superstructure of bypass roads and
highways over the remaining, severed cities and villages of earthly
Palestine. It has annexed the Jordan valley, the international border of
Jordan, expelling any ‘locals’ inhabiting that land. It speaks with a
viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head shall
soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and security.
<br><br>
Through the home demolitions, the assaults on civil society that
attempted to cast Palestinian history and culture into a chasm of
oblivion; through the unspeakable destruction of the refugee camp sieges
and infrastructure bombardments of the second Intifada, through
assassinations and summary executions, past the grandiose farce of
disengagement and up to the nullification of free, fair and democratic
Palestinian elections Israel has made its view known again and again in
the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of
threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation. <br><br>
Israel, with the unconditional and approving support of the United
States, has made it dramatically clear to the entire world over and over
and over again, repeating in action after action that it will accept no
viable Palestinian state next to its borders. What will it take for the
rest of us to hear? What will it take to end the criminal silence of the
‘international community’? What will it take to see past the lies and
indoctrination to what is taking place before us day after day in full
view of the eyes of the world? The more horrific the actions on the
ground, the more insistent are the words of peace. To listen and watch
without hearing or seeing allows the indifference, the ignorance and
complicity to continue and deepens with each grave our collective
shame.<br><br>
The destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept
no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately
control. Any individual, leader, faction or movement that fails to accede
to Israel’s demands or that seeks genuine sovereignty and the equality of
all nations in the region; any government or popular movement that
demands the applicability of international humanitarian law and of the
universal declaration of human rights for its own people will be
unacceptable for the Jewish State. Those dreaming of one state must be
forced to ask themselves what Israel would do to a population of 4
million Palestinians <i>within</i> its borders when it commits on a
daily, if not hourly basis, crimes against their collective humanity
while they live <i>alongside</i> its borders? What will suddenly make the
raison d’etre, the self-proclaimed purpose of Israel’s reason for being
change if the Palestinian territories are annexed to it
outright?<br><br>
The lifeblood of the Palestinian National Movement flows through the
streets of Gaza today. Every drop that falls waters the soil of
vengeance, bitterness and hatred not only in Palestine but across the
Middle East and much of the world. We do have a choice over whether or
not this should continue. Now is the time to make it.<br><br>
<b>Jennifer Loewenstein</b> is the Associate Director of the Middle East
Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She can be
reached at
<a href="mailto:amadea311@earthlink.net">amadea311@earthlink.net</a><br>
<br>
<br><br>
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