|
|
|
  |
| Sunday, 20 February 2005 |
 |
|
 |
Features |  |
| News Business Features Editorial
|
A prison called Palestine by Eric S. Margolis Cynicism springs eternal, in the Middle East. The recent peace summit between Israel's prime minister, Ariel Sharon, and the newly elected Palestinian president. Mahmoud Abbas, produced the usual giddy euphoria from US politicians and media.
Caution, however, is well advised. We have been down the same bumpy road many times before. The Bush administration, incessantly warned by its friends and allies that Palestine's agony is the primary generator of anti-American violence the west calls 'terrorism', now believes it can impose a Mid east peace settlement that is favourable to Israel and the US. The late Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat, always refused to accept any deal that left Israel with 100 per cent of Jerusalem and large swathes of the West Bank. He insisted on a limited right of return to lost homes for at least a token number of Palestinian refugees and the creation of a viable, independent state on the West Bank and Gaza. Worryingly, Abbas has remained mute about these vital questions, preferring to talk about peace and beam at the Americans rather than face the toughest problems. When Israel and the US rejected Arafat's terms, and Israel kept gobbling up the West Bank's best land and water resources, Arafat winked at attacks against Israeli civilians and Jewish settlers by Palestinian militants. He believed, correctly, that Israel would only compromise when forced to by violence. Arafat's convenient death removed a major obstacle to US/Israeli plans. This writer continues to suspect Arafat was murdered by an untraceable nerve or blood toxin originally developed for KGB and then passed on by emigre scientists to Israel's Mossad spy agency. Arafat was being held prisoner by Israel in his Ramallah compound. Poisoning his food or water would have been relatively easy. Arafat's political successors have gone to great lengths to avoid looking into the likely murder of their late leader. Close links Ordinary Palestinians loved Araft in spite of all his faults and failures. So far, they are only tolerating Mahmoud Abbas and his allies, who have uncomfortably close links to the US and Israel. Abbas long urged Palestinians to end violence against Israel. He is right when he says Palestinians cannot oust Israel from the West Bank by armed resistance and must rely on negotiations. Though guerilla attacks may force Israel to withdraw from Gaza's packed slums, Israel's hold on the West Bank and Golan is unshakeable. The Israeli-occupied West Bank won't become a second Lebanon. That's because in Lebanon Hezboullah guerillas who drove the Israelis out had strategic room to move and a supply of modern weapons from Iran. The West Bank and Gaza are totally cut off, surrounded, and under 24-hour Israeli surveillance. Sharon demands Abbas crush Palestinian resistance groups and end political chaos before Israel will stop settlement building or cease its attacks, or release many of the 8,000 Palestinian political prisoners it holds. The new US secretary of state, Condoleeza Rice, chimed in, urging Palestinians to end 'violence,' while only calling on Israel to cease 'operations'. She sounded as if the Palestinians had occupied Israel, and not the other way around. Miss Rice simply ignored the fact that Israel's occupation remains a violation of international law. Israel's use of US weapons against Palestinian civilians violates American domestic law. The West Bank and Gaza are a literally giant, open-air concentration camp seething with despair and violence, ringed by Israeli security forces. Israeli bulldozers have razed much of the infrastructure of Palestinian society: government offices, schools, workshops, olive groves, private homes. While Sharon and Abbas talk about peace, Israel continues to expand settlements and expropriate Arab land. There are now 450,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank, 200,000 of them in the illegally enlarged boundaries of Jerusalem. This is what Sharon means when he talks about a Palestinian 'entity:' three of four separate cantons, or apartheid-style bantustans, isolated from one another by Jewish-only security roads and fortified checkpoints, all surrounded by the notorious and quite illegal 'security wall' that looks like it was plucked up from former East Germany. Expand settlements Jewish settlements, according to Sharon's thinking, may occupy up to 58 per cent of the West Bank. Israeli troops will remain indefinitely along the Jordan Valley and atop the Golan Heights. Palestine's air, land, sea, and telecommunications contacts with the outside world will be entirely controlled by Israel. This is not peace. It's a penitentiary. Palestinian militants may give Abbas a brief chance to make peace. Even so, it's very hard to see how Palestinians will give up armed resistance, however hopeless, in exchange for a what amounts to a garbage dump for unwanted Arabs. The basic reality is this: Israel already has what it wants, the most fertile or militarily important parts of the West Bank and Golan, which it continues to colonise at a furious pace. So it's stalling for time, while trying to drive out as many Palestinians as possible by making their daily lives unbearable.Only two things will motivate Israel to relent: intolerable Palestinian violence, or enormous US pressure. So far, neither seems likely. Nor does a genuine, lasting peace, if Palestinians believe that nothing will change and Abbas is merely the latest US-imposed overseer in the Muslim world. In that case, Palestinian suicide bombers and Israeli death squads will soon resume their deadly cycle of violence. (Courtesy : DAWN Magazine) |
|
| News | Business | Features
| Editorial | Security
| Produced by Lake House |
