Israel: will Kerry’s admonition make a difference?

S P SETH

It is rare for an American politician to express his frustration with Israel publicly over Palestine. But it can be frustrating and annoying dealing with Israel when it simply wants the United States to simply do its bidding. The US Secretary of State, John Kerry, recently found himself in that situation when spending a lot of time and energy engaged in shuttle diplomacy to promote a two-state solution to the Palestine-Israel issue, but then finding that Israel wasn’t really interested in it. And he let go his frustration during a television interview with Palestinian and Israeli reporters when he said that, “Does Israel want a third intifada? The alternative to getting back to the talks is the potential of chaos.”

Highlighting the contradiction between Israel’s continued settlement policy in the occupied West Bank and commitment to a peace agreement, Kerry reportedly said, “If you say you are working for peace and you want peace and a Palestine that is a whole Palestine that belongs to the people who live there, how can you say we’re planning to build [even more settlements] in the place that will eventually be Palestine?” He went on to caution Israelis against growing complacent when he said, “Well, I’ve got news for you. Today’s status quo [that favours Israel] will not be tomorrow’s or next year’s,” as Israel will find itself increasingly isolated.

Nobody could have better spelt out the Israeli hypocrisy on peace. Which doesn’t mean that the United States is wavering in its support for Israel. In some ways, Prime Minister Netanyahu has a more powerful constituency in the US Congress and among people that matter in the US than even the US president. Therefore, while John Kerry’s candor is welcome in defining the situation, it doesn’t make the task of a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine any easier.

The more important question though is: does Israel want a peace settlement based on a two-state solution? On the face of it, it doesn’t. And that is clear from the fact that it keeps building more and more houses in the occupied West Bank and Jerusalem. This is in utter disregard of international law when a state (Israel, in this case) continues its territorial expansion in gross violation of the UN resolutions and gets away with it. Interestingly, even some seemingly empathetic (to the Palestinians) Israeli analysts simply believe that Israel really has no option but to keep gobbling up rest of the Palestine for Israel’s security.

For instance, writing in the New Yorker, Ari Shavit, a columnist for Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, reconstructs the massacre in 1948 of about two hundred and fifty Palestinians in the Lydda valley in thirty minutes, and the deportation by evening the same day of 35,000 of the town’s Palestinian residents  (fearing a bigger massacre), at the direction of the then prime minister Ben-Gurion. Conceding that, “Lydda is the black box of Zionism”, Ari Shavit, however, is of the view: “The truth is that Zionism could not bear the Arab city of Lydda. From the very beginning, there was a substantial contradiction between Zionism and Lydda… [because  a Palestinian Lydda] could not exist at its centre. ” Subsequent to the massacre, and expulsion of Palestinians from Lydda in 1948, that logic of Israel’s security has been applied and is being applied to other massacres and expulsion of Palestinians from elsewhere in their homeland.

 Shavit  opines: “…the conquest of Lydda and the expulsion of Lydda’s population were no accident. Those events were a crucial phase of the Zionist revolution, and they laid the foundation for the Jewish state.” And he adds, “Lydda is an integral and essential part of the story [of Israel]. And, when I try to be honest about it, I see that the choice is stark: either reject Zionism because of Lydda or accept Zionism along with Lydda.”  Extrapolating it to the direct and creeping annexation of more and more of what is left of Palestine would seem to be the extension of the same logic. Which is that Palestine must be obliterated to make Israel secure. In other words, the story of the massacre at Lydda and expulsion of its people in 1948, and many more Lydda-like stories since, leads Shavit to forecast that, “the chances to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the foreseeable future are hard to envision.”  

It is important to understand that Shavit’s logic is woven into the story of the rise of Zionism to reclaim the old Jewish homeland, as Jews believe, of Judea and Samaria. Hence, all this talk of a two-state solution is a smokescreen for the real goal of annexing all of the West Bank by pushing out the Palestinians. Not surprisingly, Netanyahu’s response to Kerry’s criticism reportedly was a resounding assertion that, “No amount of pressure will make me or the government of Israel compromise on the basic security and national interests of the State of Israel.” And that demands the building of more and more Israeli settlements in West Bank and Jerusalem to encircle the Palestinians and make their life so miserable that, over time, they might feel lucky, like the thirty-five thousand people of Lydda, that they simply managed to escape with their lives intact.

The sad thing is that it is the Jews--- persecuted in Europe, exterminated by Hitler in Germany and, otherwise shunned and shunted around by their strongest supporters today when seeking asylum from Nazi Germany--- that are the perpetrators of such inhumanity on the Palestinians, who are simply seeking to stay in their homeland against all the violence and indignities heaped on them. Indeed, some of Israel’s top leaders of the past and present have even sought to deny the existence of the Palestine and its people.

As Peter Beinart wrote in the New York Review of Books in 2010, citing Netanyahu’s 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 [Neitnyahu} repeatedly equates the Palestinian bid for statehood with Nazism.” In his view, Israel has already made territorial concessions by abandoning its claim to Jordan, which by rights (of mythical past) should be part of the Jewish state.

In a recent article in the same journal called, The American Jewish Cocoon, he highlights the total indifference of the American Jewish establishment to the plight of the Palestinians, sometimes even calling them “animals”. It is uncannily similar to what the Nazis portrayed the Jews and much more. Beinart concludes his article with this poignant sentence: “By seeing Palestinians--truly seeing them [in Palestine]—we glimpse a faded, yellowing photograph of ourselves. We are reminded of the days when we were a stateless people, living at the mercy of others. And by recognizing the way statelessness threatens Palestinian dignity, we ensure that statehood doesn’t rob us of our own.”

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au