The "Road Map" for Peace is a Swindle

The Diabolical Cleverness of the Bush/Sharon Scheme

by Michael A. Hoffman II

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"Let the Arabs think he (Sharon) will agree to a (Palestinian) state. He will put enough conditions and obstacles that will prevent the creation of the state forever." --Rabbi David Algaze

During the Clinton era, then Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak made a supposedly magnanimous peace offer to Yasser Arafat at Camp David in July, 2000. The Washington Post, NY Times, Boston Globe, L.A. Times, Chicago Tribune, US News and World Report, USA Today, salon.com and the five major television news networks all hailed the Israeli deal as "offering extraordinary concessions" and "far-reaching concessions," as well as "unprecedented concessions" and "the most far-reaching offer ever." When the Palestinian leader rejected this supposedly benevolent Israeli olive branch of generosity, he thereby "proved" that Palestinians are nothing but a nation of terrorists who hate peace and Jews in that irrational and racist order.

That's the propaganda cover story anyway, and it's had a lengthy shelf life in the American media. In truth, Arafat was offered a chopped up West Bank and Gaza akin to the discontiguous Bantustans of the South African apartheid system. Roughly the same crooked deal is being offered by Bush to Mahmoud Abbas, the new Palestinian Prime Minister: the Israelis will dismantle token settlements on worthless chunks of real estate, but all of the other illegal settlements in Palestine will remain, thus legitimizing the incremental theft of occupied land which has been underway since 1967.

For a harbinger of what Bush and Sharon will propose, take a brief look at Israel's 2000 Camp David deal. This treaty would have divided what is left of the already truncated nation of Palestine into three disconnected ghettos. It would have "annexed strategically important and highly valuable sections of the West Bank" and "make it impossible for the Palestinians to travel or trade freely within their own state" without permission of the Israeli government. This would be an "independent state"?

The most fertile West Bank land would have gone to the Israelis. This Palestinian land also contains the region's most precious water supplies. Palestinians in their "new state" would have been forced to cross into Israeli-controlled territory and onto "bypass roads" each time they traveled or shipped merchandise from one part of their nation to another. It would be like ceding only part of Pennsylvania to American patriots, with the main highway and surrounding land between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh remaining in the hands of the hostile British. Such an "independent state" would in fact be little more than a chimera, creating a pretense for the sake of placating world opinion. In fact, like the Bush Road Map, under the terms of the Clinton/Barak Camp David deal, Palestine would have become a a degraded satrapy of Israel.

Analyst Seth Ackerman observes that, "Had the Palestinians accepted these terms they would have locked in place many of the worst aspects of the very occupation they were trying to bring to an end" and "waiving all further claims against Israel."

Any Palestinian leader who acceded to such a betrayal would have gone down in Arab history as the Judas of the age. Had Arafat agreed he would have become a kind of kapo for the Israelis, administering a glorified prison camp on behalf of Zionist jailers. Barak's Camp David plan was no peace deal, but rather an offer of ceremonial surrender of Palestinian national autonomy to the conquering colonial power similar to the swindle Bush is promoting. For the Barak/Clinton "peace plan," the American media played the game for all it was worth, quoting Judaic religious sources, settlers and Israeli politicians as they mouthed the rhetoric of peace and talked of their love of peace and their desire for peace, blah, blah, blah. The same duplicitous pattern is repeating now.

Palestinians since 2000 have suffered massacres and waves of assassinations. They are "negotiating" under extreme duress with a nuclear power that is backed by the world's only superpower, neither of whom care a farthing for the humanity of Palestinians. The American and Israeli governments seek to give the illusion of a just and humane settlement in order to placate European and Arab allies.

Fresh from killing more than 100 Palestinian civilians thus far in 2003, as well as dozens of assassinations of Palestinian leaders, the murder of American Rachel Corrie, the destruction of Palestinian homes, the razing of Palestinian olive and orange groves, the barricading of cities and the collective punishment of the entire Palestinian nation with shoot-on-sight curfews and destruction of water, sewer and electrical infrastructure, another Zionist "peace plan," now called the "Road Map" is on its farcical course, giving Ariel "the Butcher of Beirut" Sharon the opportunity to posture in the American media as a "peacemaker."

This "Road Map" charade ignores several crucial factors: the Israelis have already carved up the occupied territories with a series of fences, trenches and settlements. The Arab land seized by the large settler enclaves will never be returned by Sharon. Sharon is the crazed settlers' main patron and an architect of their racist movement. 250,000 fanatical fundamentalist Israeli settlers now occupy Palestinian land, up from 125,000 such settlers in 1994. The goal of these bigoted Talmudic fundamentalists, as repeatedly stated in their own religious publications (under the code-word "Amalek") is the extermination of the Palestinians, whom they deride as Amalek.

President Bush is playing a heartless, cynical game. He must mollify Tony Blair and Vladimir Putin if he wishes to have any allies anywhere, and the Israelis are willing to play along, posing as peacemakers while their war crimes and atrocities are neatly forgotten in the euphoria centered on the new "kinder, gentler" Sharon. By this stratagem the Israelis reap a public relations windfall.

The American Zionists and the Israelis know full well that Palestinian resistance (i.e. "violence") will continue, no matter what the new Palestinian Prime Minister Abbas promises Sharon. Abbas' inability to halt the armed Palestinian resistance to Israeli Occupation will be cited as "evidence of the treachery and bad faith of the Palestinians," when in fact Abbas is a but a figurehead with no power to command enraged bands of Palestinian resistance fighters who have watched helplessly as their grandmothers, wives and children have all been blown away by Israeli helicopter gunships, tanks and infantry.

It should not be forgotten that the Israelis have a virtual license to murder any Palestinian, with the exception of the new Prime Minister and the Prime Minister emeritus (Arafat). Any other Palestinian may be killed at will. This horrible fact is a daily reality in the occupied territories and the record of these Israeli murders is fresh in the minds of the men and women of Palestine. It is folly to expect the Palestinian resistance to be pacified or gulled by the spectre of the latest round of American diplomacy.

The Israelis slaughtered much of the Palestinian police force in March and April of 2002. Any new Palestinian police department assembled under the "Road Map," would be a turncoat mercenary force working ultimately for Sharon and hated by the Palestinian people who will view such cops as an auxiliary of the Israeli army, doing Israeli dirty work.

The "Road Map" ignores these realities because it has been deliberately concocted to disappoint the absurb expectations that have been artificially raised on its behalf. The hidden truth is that the Bush Road Map is pre-ordained to fail. This Zionist stratagem will be incomprehensible to the non-chess players reading this, but the fact is, expectations are being inflated and the "Road Map" destined to fail so that the subsequent failure can be be blamed on the Palestinians and their "intransigent terrorist mentality." Having thus gained a new moral mandate for more war, occupation and transfer, Bush and Sharon will say, "We did all we could for peace," prior to returning to the business of mass murder and state terror.

The US government and media have no patience with the Palestinians. They believe they are fated to be slaves and now, with the Road Map, the Palestinians have the "golden opportunity" to choose what sort of chattel they will become. They have the choice of being shot by the hundreds year after year in what is, in effect, a slow-motion holocaust, or they can live as contented darkies on an American-brokered Israeli plantation.

The American media's take on the Palestinians is that they are a perennial pain in the neck who should accept any crumb "God's Chosen People" deign to toss them on the road to overcoming them by a combination of violence and diplomatic chicanery. That's the authentic "road" Mr. Bush's "map" is pointing toward. When this slavish "Road Map" explodes in the smoke and fire of Palestinian resistance, we will be back to square one, with an even more jaundiced opinion of the Palestinians by Americans outraged at their "rejection of the generous peace offer."

Sharon's secret strategy behind the "peace" offensive, was revealed last winter by a prominent orthodox rabbi:

"Why is Sharon doing this? Why is he so vehemently and vociferously supporting the creation of a 'Palestinian' state?...Sharon is fighting a war on the diplomatic field. As a general he knows that the most important quality in war is guile...he has apparently concluded that the best way to fight this battle is by cunning. Let the Arabs think he will agree to a state. He will put enough conditions and obstacles that will prevent the creation of the state forever. Let the European Union and the (U.S.) State Department get off his back as he now tells them that he subscribes to their theories. Why not? It does not make an iota of difference in the real world. Sharon is counting on the Arabs' stupidity and internecine hatred to prevent the rise of another Arab state. In the meantime, Israel is killing the terrorists, destroying their infrastructure and putting a big dent on the Arabs' public image. He has no intention of letting the tragedy of an Arab state in the Land of Israel happen..." --Rabbi David Algaze, "The Jewish Press" (Brooklyn, NY); Jan. 10, 2003, p. 59.

The diabolically clever Bush/Sharon Road Map serves to enhance the public relations image of the Israeli state, and blacken the image of its victims, as the low intensity genocide against the Palestinians and the theft of their land continues apace. This is the big picture which the infantalized American people do not grasp, and which the American media will not publish or broadcast. The stage is thus set for ever more shedding of the blood of innocents in the God-forsaken sandbox the world calls the Holy Land.