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March 26, 2015<br>
<b><small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/26/netanyahus-victory-is-an-even-bigger-victory-for-palestinian-solidarity-movement/">http://www.counterpunch.org/2015/03/26/netanyahus-victory-is-an-even-bigger-victory-for-palestinian-solidarity-movement/</a></small></small></small></b><br>
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<div class="subheadlinestyle">A New Opportunity</div>
<h1 class="article-title">Netanyahu’s Victory is an Even Bigger
Victory for Palestinian Solidarity Movement</h1>
<div class="mainauthorstyle">by AJAMU BARAKA </div>
<div class="main-text">
<p>The cover of respectability that obscured the brutal and
immoral reality of the Israeli colonial project may have been
permanently ripped away by Benjamin Netanyahu’s angry
declaration that if re-elected, there would never be a
Palestinian state and his racist rant on election day against
his own citizens who happen to be Palestinians.</p>
<p>Many people in the U.S. and Western Europe were shocked by
Netanyahu’s comments. However, for those of us who are aware
of the platform of Netanyahu’s Likud Party, the only thing
that was surprising was his candor. The rejection of a viable
Palestinian state has always been Likud’s position, a position
well known in Israel and the basis of Likud’s appeal, but
rarely acknowledged and never discussed in the U.S. corporate
media.</p>
<p>But it is not just the Likud Party – there has never been a
serious commitment to a two-state solution from any of the
mainstream Israeli parties, including the newly-constructed
Zionist Union.</p>
<p>The two-state solution was always an illusion. From the
beginning, it was a right-wing political diversion meant to
confuse and fragment the international community and undermine
the legitimacy of the Palestinian struggle for one,
democratic, secular state for all of the people who live in
the territory. Even after the Palestinian leadership adopted
the two-state position in 1988 that then served as a framework
for the Oslo Accords in 1993, Israeli leaders never seriously
moved to finalize the process.</p>
<p>According to <a
href="http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/ali-abunimah/why-im-relieved-netanyahu-won"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://electronicintifada.net']);">Ali
Abunimah,</a> the co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment and
Sanctions Movement, what distinguishes the Netanyahu victory
from the scenario that would have likely unfolded if the
liberal Zionists from the ZU had won, is that Netanyahu’s win
strips away the opportunities for the so-called ‘international
community’ to “hide its complicity with Israel’s ugly crimes
behind a charade of a “peace process.”</p>
<p>Abunimah’s analysis reflects the position that for most
Palestinians the cultural and psychological assault,
checkpoints, curfews, home demolitions, torture, targeted
killings, assaults from armed settlers who kill with impunity
– the daily reality of life under occupation – would have
continued, no matter what party formation dominated the
Israeli Knesset.</p>
<p>That is precisely why the two-state solution was such a
valuable subterfuge and why liberal Zionists in Israel and the
U.S. were so devastated with the results of the election.</p>
<p>They understood that even though the plight of Palestinians
and a resolution of the conflict was not even a serious topic
in the elections, Netanyahu’s last minute declaration and
racist rant — and the “positive” response it generated among
many Israelis — made the two-state issue and Israeli racism
the embarrassing centerpieces of the election in the minds of
the international community.</p>
<p>Even though Netanyahu’s comments only confirmed what everyone
knew to be the real position of all the major parties in
Israel, liberal Zionists, who have always attempted to have
the best of both worlds — to enjoy the privileges of stolen
land while simultaneously opposing the more crude elements of
the colonial theft — understood that without the political
cover provided by the endless “negotiations” toward a
two-state solution, Israel could potentially face serious
international isolation.</p>
<p><strong>The Congressional Black Caucus and Black
Participation in the BDS movement</strong></p>
<p>Africans in South Africa make-up the most consistently
militant section of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions
movement targeting<br>
<a
href="http://store.counterpunch.org/product/killing-trayvons/"><img
class="alignright"
src="cid:part7.02000008.01040107@freedomarchives.org"
alt="KillingTrayvons1" height="295" width="200"></a>Israel.
This is not surprising, given that Israeli support for the
racist South African regime was only eclipsed by the support
that came from the U.S.</p>
<p>Archbishop Desmond Tutu, one of the moral voices that opposed
apartheid in South Africa, upset the leaders of the Israeli
state when he characterized Israel as an apartheid state. He
has also expressed how deeply impacted he was personally by
witnessing the degradation of Palestinian men, women and
children by Israeli military forces. According to <a
href="http://www.jpost.com/Diplomacy-and-Politics/Desmond-Tutu-Israel-guilty-of-apartheid-in-treatment-of-Palestinians-344874"
onclick="javascript:_gaq.push(['_trackEvent','outbound-article','http://www.jpost.com']);">Bishop
Tutu</a>, the scenes of Palestinian humiliation that he
witnessed in Israel would be “familiar to all black South
Africans who were corralled and harassed and insulted and
assaulted by the security forces of the apartheid government.”</p>
<p>The principled opposition to Israeli apartheid on the part of
South Africans is in sharp contrast to the immoral support the
Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) gives to Israel.</p>
<p>Until now, members of the CBC were able to avoid criticism of
their slavish support for Israel by arguing that they in fact
supported Palestinian liberation by supporting the peaceful
resolution of the conflict in the form of a Palestinian state.</p>
<p>However, with Netanyahu’s rejection of the two-state
solution, coupled with what many African Americans see as
Netanyahu’s “disrespect” for Obama with his speech to
Congress, the CBC and other liberal black formations like the
National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
(NAACP), the National Urban League, as well as some members of
the black clergy, are now beginning to face serious questions
about their support for Israel.</p>
<p>This development, along with the new generation of young
African American activists leading the anti-police violence
struggle who have established solidarity links with
Palestinian activists, are creating the political conditions
to challenge and reverse the influence of the pro-Israel
forces in the black community that emerged over the last two
decades and to also generate black support for the Boycott,
Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, especially among
black students.</p>
<p>Netanyahu and the Israeli voters that voted for him gave the
Palestinian solidarity and BDS movement a strategic opening.
The election may have finally stripped the veil of nationalist
legitimacy from the racialized Ashkenazi Zionist project and
exposed the genocidal violence, greed and generalized moral
rot that is at the core of this project and at the center of
all European invasions and colonialism since 1492.</p>
<p>For 67 years, Palestinian human beings have been displaced,
degraded and dehumanized. Today the Palestinian solidarity
movement has a new opportunity to intensify the efforts to
expose and isolate the Israeli project as the most morally
obscene capitulation to injustice on the part of the
international community since 1945. Let’s thank Netanyahu for
his honesty and take up the challenge we’ve been given.</p>
<p><em><strong>Ajamu Baraka</strong> is a human rights activist,
organizer and geo-political analyst. Baraka is an Associate
Fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS) in
Washington, D.C. and editor and contributing columnist for
the Black Agenda Report. He is a contributor to “<a
href="http://store.counterpunch.org/product/killing-trayvons/">Killing
Trayvons: An Anthology of American Violence</a>”
(Counterpunch Books, 2014). He can be reached at <a
href="mailto:info.abaraka@gmail.com">info.abaraka@gmail.com</a> and <a
href="http://www.AjamuBaraka.com">www.AjamuBaraka.com</a></em></p>
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