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Jonathan Cook is a freelance journalist based in the Palestinian city of
Nazareth in northern Israel. He is a regular contributor to the
English-language Arab media, including Al-Ahram Weekly in Cairo, the
Daily Star in Beirut and the website al-Jazeera.net. His book Blood and
Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State (Pluto Press,
London, 2006) examines Israel's treatment of its Arab citizens during
the second intifada.
The problem facing the Palestinian leadership, as they
strive to bring the millions living in the occupied territories some
small relief from their collective suffering, reduces to a matter of a
few words. Like a naughty child who has only to say "sorry" to be
released from his room, the Hamas government need only say "We recognize
Israel" and supposedly aid and international goodwill will wash over the
West Bank and Gaza.
That, at least, was the gist of Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's
recent speech during a visit to the Negev, when he suggested that his
country's hand was stretched out across the sands towards the starving
masses of Gaza if only Hamas would repent. recognize us and we are ready
to talk about peace was the implication.
Certainly the Palestinian people have been viciously punished for making
their democratic choice in January 2006 and electing a Hamas government
that Israel and the Western powers disapprove of:
an
economic blockade has been imposed, starving the Palestinian Authority
of income to pay for services and remunerate its large workforce;
millions of dollars in tax monies owed to the Palestinians have been
illegally withheld by Israel, exacerbating the humanitarian crisis;
a
physical blockade of Gaza enforced by Israel has prevented the
Palestinians from exporting their produce, mostly perishable crops, and
from importing essentials like food and medicine;
Israeli military strikes have damaged Gaza's vital infrastructure,
including the supply of electricity and water, as well as randomly
killing its inhabitants;
and
thousands of families are being torn apart as Israel uses the pretext of
its row with Hamas to stop renewing the visas of Palestinian foreign
passport holders.
The
magic words We recognize you could end all this suffering. So why did
their prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, vow never to utter them. Is Hamas
so filled with hatred and loathing for Israel as a Jewish state that it
cannot make such a simple statement of good intent?
It
is easy to forget that, though conditions have dramatically deteriorated
of late, the Palestinians' problems did not start with the election of
Hamas. Israel's occupation is four decades old, and no Palestinian
leader has ever been able to extract from Israel a promise of real
statehood in all of the occupied territories: not the mukhtars, the
largely compliant local leaders, who for decades were the only
representatives allowed to speak on behalf of the Palestinians after the
national leadership was expelled; not the Palestinian Authority under
the secular leadership of Yasser Arafat, who returned to the occupied
territories in the mid-1990s after the PLO had recognized Israel; not
the leadership of his successor, Mahmoud Abbas, the moderate who first
called for an end to the armed intifada; and now not the leaders of
Hamas, even though they have repeatedly called for a long-term truce (hudna)
as the first step in building confidence.
Similarly, few Palestinians doubt that Israel will continue to entrench
the occupation just as it did during the supposed peacemaking years of
Oslo, when the number of Jewish settlers doubled in the occupied
territories even if Hamas is ousted.
There is far more at stake for Israel in winning this little concession
from Hamas than most observers appreciate. A statement saying that Hamas
recognized Israel would do much more than meet Israel's precondition for
talks; it would mean that Hamas had walked into the same trap that was
set earlier for Arafat and Fatah. That trap is designed to ensure that
any peaceful solution to the conflict is impossible. It achieves this
end in two ways.
First, as has already been understood, at least by those paying
attention, Hamas' recognition of Israel's right to exist would
effectively signify that the Palestinian government was publicly
abandoning its own goal of struggling to create a viable Palestinian
state.
That
is because Israel refuses to demarcate its own future borders, leaving
it an open question what it considers to be the extent of its existence
it is demanding Hamas recognize. We do know that no one in the Israeli
leadership is talking about a return to Israel's borders that existed
before the 1967 war, or probably anything close to it.
Without a return to those pre-1967 borders (plus a substantial injection
of goodwill from Israel in ensuring unhindered passage between Gaza and
the West Bank) no possibility exists of a viable Palestinian state ever
emerging.
And
no goodwill, of course, will be forthcoming. Every Israeli leader has
refused to recognize the Palestinians, first as a people and now as a
nation. And in the West's typically hypocritical fashion when dealing
with the Palestinians, no one has ever suggested that Israel commit to
such recognition.
In
fact, Israeli governments have glorified in their refusal to extend the
same recognition to the Palestinians that they demand from them.
Famously Golda Meir, a Labor prime minister, said that the Palestinians
did not exist, adding in 1971 that Israel's borders are determined by
where Jews live, not where there is a line on a map. At the same time
she ordered that the Green Line, Israel's border until the 1967 war, be
erased from all official maps. That legacy hit the headlines again when
the dovish education minister, Yuli Tamir, caused a storm by issuing a
directive that the Green Line should be reintroduced in Israeli
schoolbooks. There were widespread protests against her extreme leftist
ideology from politicians and rabbis.
According to Israeli educators, the chances of textbooks showing the
Green Line again or dropping references to Judea and Samaria, the
Biblical names for the West Bank, or including Arab towns on maps of
Israel are close to nil. The private publishers who print the textbooks
would refuse to incur the extra costs of reprinting the maps, said Prof
Yoram Bar-Gal, head of geography at Haifa University.
Sensitive to the damage that the row might do to Israel's international
image, and aware that Tamir's directive is never likely to be
implemented, Olmert agreed in principle to the change. There is nothing
wrong with marking the Green Line, he said. But, in a statement that
made his agreement entirely hollow, he added: But there is an obligation
to emphasize that the government's position and public consensus rule
out returning to the 1967 lines.
The
second element to the trap is far less well understood. It explains the
strange formulation of words Israel uses in making its demand of Hamas.
Israel does not ask it simply to recognize Israel, but to recognize
Israel's right to exist. The difference is not a just matter of
semantics.
The
concept of a state having any rights is not only strange but alien to
international law. People have rights, not states. And that is precisely
the point: when Israel demands that its right to exist be recognized,
the subtext is that we are not speaking of recognition of Israel as a
normal nation state but as the state of a specific people, the Jews.
In
demanding recognition of its right to exist, Israel is ensuring that the
Palestinians agree to Israel's character being set in stone as an
exclusivist Jewish state, one that privileges the rights of Jews over
all other ethnic, religious and national groups inside the same
territory. The question of what such a state entails is largely glossed
over both by Israel and the West.
For
most observers, it means simply that Israel must refuse to allow the
return of the millions of Palestinians languishing in refugee camps
throughout the region, whose former homes in Israel have now been
appropriated for the benefit of Jews. Were they allowed to come back,
Israel's Jewish majority would be eroded overnight and it could no
longer claim to be a Jewish state, except in the same sense that
apartheid South Africa was a white state.
This
conclusion is apparently accepted by Romano Prodi, Italy's prime
minister, after a round of lobbying in European capitals from Israel's
telegenic foreign minister, Tzipi Livni. According to the Jerusalem
Post, Prodi is saying in private that Israel should receive
guarantees from the Palestinians that its Jewish character will never be
in doubt.
Israeli officials are cheering what they believe is the first crack in
Europe's support for international law and the rights of the refugees.
It's important to get everyone on the same page on this one, an official
told the Jerusalem Post.
But
in truth the consequences of the Palestinian leadership recognizing
Israel as a Jewish state run far deeper than the question of the future
of the Palestinian refugees. In my book
Blood and Religion, I set out these harsh consequences both for
the Palestinians in the occupied territories and for the million or so
Palestinians who live inside Israel as citizens, supposedly with the
same rights as Jewish citizens.
My
argument is that this need to maintain Israel's Jewish character at all
costs is actually the engine of its conflict with the Palestinians. No
solution is possible as long as Israel insists on privileging
citizenship for Jews above other groups, and on distorting the region's
territorial and demographic realities to ensure that the numbers
continue to weigh in the Jews' favor.
Although ultimately the return of the refugees poses the biggest threat
to Israel's existence, Israel has a far more pressing demographic
concern: the refusal by the Palestinians living in the West Bank to
leave the parts of that territory Israel covets (and which it knows by
the Biblical names of Judea and Samaria). Within a decade, the
Palestinians in the occupied territories and the million Palestinian
citizens living inside Israel will outnumber Jews, both those living in
Israel and the settlers in the West Bank.
That
was one of the chief reasons for the disengagement from Gaza: Israel
could claim that, even though it is still occupying the small piece of
land militarily, it was no longer responsible for the population there.
By withdrawing a few thousand settlers from the Strip, 1.4 million
Gazans were instantly wiped from the demographic score sheet.
But
though the loss of Gaza has postponed for a few years the threat of a
Palestinian majority in the expanded state Israel desires, it has not
magically guaranteed Israel's continuing existence as a Jewish state.
That is because Israel's Palestinian citizens, though a minority
comprising no more than a fifth of Israel's population, can potentially
bring the whole house of cards tumbling down.
For
the past decade they have been demanding that Israel be reformed from a
Jewish state, which systematically discriminates against them and denies
their Palestinian identity, into a state of all its citizens, a liberal
democracy that would give all citizens, Jews and Palestinians, equal
rights.
Israel
has characterized the demand for a state of all its citizens as
subversion and treason, realizing that, were the Jewish state to become
a liberal democracy, Palestinian citizens could justifiably demand:
the
right to marry Palestinians from the occupied territories and from the
Diaspora, winning them Israeli citizenship a right of return through the
backdoor as officials call it.
the
right to bring Palestinian relatives in exile back to Israel under a
Right of Return program that would be a pale shadow of the existing Law
of Return that guarantees any Jew anywhere in the world the automatic
right to Israeli citizenship.
To
prevent the first threat, Israel passed a flagrantly racist law in 2003
that makes it all but impossible for Palestinians with Israeli
citizenship to bring a Palestinian spouse to Israel. For the time being,
such couples have little choice but to seek asylum abroad, if other
countries will give them refuge.
But
like the Gaza disengagement, this piece of legislation is a delaying
tactic rather than a solution to the problem of Israel's existence. So
behind the scenes Israel has been formulating ideas that taken together
would remove large segments of Israel's Palestinian population from its
borders and strip any remaining citizens of their political rights
unless they swear loyalty to a Jewish and democratic state and thereby
renounce their demand that Israel reform itself into a liberal
democracy.
This is the bottom line for a Jewish state, just as it was for a white
apartheid South Africa: if we are to survive, then we must be able to do
whatever it takes to keep ourselves in power, even if it means
systematically violating the human rights of all those we rule over and
who do not belong to our group. Ultimately, the consequences of Israel
being allowed to remain a Jewish state will be felt by all of us,
wherever we live and not only because of the fallout from the continuing
and growing anger in the Arab and Muslim worlds at the double standards
applied by the West to the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.
Given Israel's view that its most pressing interest is not peace or
regional accommodation with its neighbors but the need to ensure a
Jewish majority at all costs to protect its existence, Israel is likely
to act in ways that endanger regional and global stability.
A
small taste of that was suggested in the role played by Israel's
supporters in Washington in making the case for the invasion of Iraq,
and this summer in Israel's assault on Lebanon. But it is most evident
in its drumbeat of war against Iran. Israel has been leading the
attempts to characterize the Iranian regime as profoundly anti-Semitic,
and its presumed ambitions for nuclear weapons as directed by the sole
goal of wanting to wipe Israel off the map a calculatedly mischievous
mistranslation of Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's speech.
Most observers have assumed that Israel is genuinely concerned for its
safety from nuclear attack, however implausible the idea that even the
most fanatical Muslim regime would, unprovoked, launch nuclear missiles
against a small area of land that contains some of Islam's holiest
sites, in Jerusalem. But in truth there is another reason why Israel is
concerned about a nuclear-armed Iran that has nothing to do with
conventional ideas about safety. Last month, Ephraim Sneh, one of
Israel's most distinguished generals and now Olmert's deputy defense
minister, revealed that the government's primary concern was not the
threat posed by Ahmadinejad firing nuclear missiles at Israel but the
effect of Iran's possession of such weapons on Jews who expect Israel to
have a monopoly on the nuclear threat.
If
Iran got such weapons, Most Israelis would prefer not to live here; most
Jews would prefer not to come here with families, and Israelis who can
live abroad will ... I am afraid Ahmadinejad will be able to kill the
Zionist dream without pushing a button. That's why we must prevent this
regime from obtaining nuclear capability at all costs. In other words,
the Israeli government is considering either its own preemptive strike
on Iran or encouraging the United States to undertake such an attack
despite the terrible consequences for global security simply because a
nuclear-armed Iran might make Israel a less attractive place for Jews to
live, lead to increased emigration and tip the demographic balance in
the Palestinians' favor.
Regional and possibly global war may be triggered simply to ensure that
Israel's existence as a state that offers exclusive privileges to Jews
continues. For all our sakes, we must hope that the Palestinians and
their Hamas government continue refusing to recognize Israel's right to
exist.
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