For Israel, Palestine doesn’t exist

S P SETH

On the scale of human tragedies, Palestine will rank as one of the highest. Here is the case of a people who have foisted on them a new state of Israel for reasons unknown, except that this was once the home of the Jews in ancient times and that they are returning to claim their lost home. This ancient legend has nothing to do with the Palestinians who have known this region as their home as far back as they can envisage.  But that doesn’t matter because the powers that be of the time decreed through the United Nations that the Jews need a home of their own and that would be Palestine.

Understandably, Palestinians didn’t like it and sought to prevent it. But they lost, as was expected, because Israel was more powerful and had the support of some of the most powerful countries in the world. Since then things have only got worse for them. The new state of Israel sought to obliterate the Palestinian identity by denying its existence. And hoped that their expulsion from their homes in the new state and dispersal in other Arab states will remove any evidence on the ground.

They only partially succeeded by creating the phenomena of Palestinian refugee camps scattered in several Arab countries. The net result, over and above the perpetuation of Palestinian misery, was that their sense of identity even became stronger in refugee camps. And to this day, many of them want to return to their homeland, now Israel, and to their lands they were expelled from. Which is causing additional problems.

In 1967, when Israel launched a pre-emptive strike on Arab countries and went on to occupy more of the Palestinian territory, Palestine’s humiliation and devastation was further compounded. Since then, even though most of the world and the United Nations regard Israel’s occupation illegal, including its powerful friends like the US and European countries, Israel remains undaunted and continues its policy of new Jewish settlements over and above the half-a-million already settled in West Bank and Jerusalem. The remainder of the Palestine now resembles like “Bantustans” of the apartheid era in South Africa.

Indeed, soon after the UN General Assembly overwhelmingly upgraded Palestine’s status recently to a non-member observer state, Israel has granted permission for the building of another 3,000 settlement units in East Jerusalem and other parts of the West Bank. And it includes the area, called E1 that would “completely” cut off East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank. Jodi Rudoren of the New York Times, in a report from Jerusalem, has explained it thus: “Construction in E1, in West Bank territory that Israel captured in the 1967 war, would connect the Jewish settlement of Ma’ale Adumim to Jerusalem, dividing the West Bank in two.” Which will mean that, “The Palestinian cities of Ramallah and Bethlehem would be cut off from the capital, making the contiguous Palestinian state endorsed by the United Nations last week virtually impossible.” And that has raised some concern, even among Israel’s friends, who have criticized the move.

The point is that there is nothing new in Israel’s provocative policy of creeping annexation of what is left of the Palestine. The only thing new is that the US and some of the European countries have publicly criticized Israel for this new provocation, as if they have suddenly discovered that Israel has no interest in a two-state solution of the Palestinian issue. In any case, Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, as usual, doesn’t give a hoot about criticism of the new decision of his government. As he has reportedly said, “We are building and we will continue to build in Jerusalem and in all areas that are on the map of the strategic interests of the State of Israel.” In other words, Israel will continue to press ahead with Greater Israel of the legendry territory of Judea and Samaria that will remain conceptually flexible to include, if necessary, other Arab lands.

Understandably, the Palestinian celebrations over their virtual statehood, conferred by the UN vote, have been overtaken by the Israeli announcement of new settlements. The timing of the announcement, so soon after the UN vote, might seem overtly provocative. But the fact is that over the last twenty years of the Oslo Accord in 1993, that supposedly was to lead to the two-state solution, Israeli settlement activity has continued unabated. And now that there has been some sharp criticism from Israel’s traditional friends in Europe and even here in Australia, the government is making a virtue of it by linking their renewed settlements as a riposte to Palestine’s violation of the Oslo Accord by seeking a vote in the United Nations.

Israel certainly has a way of turning logic and law on its head. Palestine is supposed to wait for Israel until it has been annexed almost entirely with nothing left to negotiate. This is precisely what Israel has been doing and is continuing to do, and when the Palestinians make even some feeble protest to get things back to the starting point, as with the UN resolution, they are pilloried and punished by Israel for not following the Oslo Accord.

Israel maintains that they are willing to talk without any pre-conditions. But how can talks produce any results when Israel holds all the cards by way of occupying much of Palestine, refuses to stop settlement activities, threatens to withhold revenues it collects for Palestine, and do all this without inviting any international action and sanctions? Is it possible to imagine a more unequal relationship as between Israel and the Palestine? And still, Palestine is blamed for all the problems in the Israel-Palestine situation.

And this not likely to change unless Israel is made to realize by the international community that enough is enough and it is time to go back to the pre-1967 borders. Will it be possible? It doesn’t seem likely in the short and medium terms because there is a strong sense, morally and politically, in Israel to recreate the imagined territories of Judea and Samaria by annexing the West Bank and other Palestinian territories.

 According to Peter Beinart in the New York Review of Books, “In his 1993 book, A Place among the Nations, Netanyahu not only rejects the idea of a Palestinian state, he denies that there is such a thing as a Palestinian. In fact, he repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism….” Netanyahu claims, as Beinhart writes, that Israel has already made “gut-wrenching concessions… It has abandoned its claim to Jordan, which by rights should be part of the Jewish state.”

Israel’s Interior Minister, Eli Yishai, is even more ambitious having reportedly said recently that, “We must blow Gaza back  to the Middle Ages, destroying all the infrastructure including roads and water.”

With such mind-set and ambitions, it is difficult to see any peaceful way forward on the Palestinian question.   

Note: This article first appeared in the Daily Times.