By Asher Susser

July 30, 2009

Haaretz

The representatives of the settler organizations have recently declared their intention to establish 11 new settlements in the territories, including some, according to media reports, on privately-owned Palestinian land. The operation is being depicted as having been inspired by the 11 tower and stockade communities in the northern Negev that were established just before Yom Kippur in 1946. This is not the first time the settlers have compared their efforts to the settlement activities that provided the foundation for the establishment of the state. There is no basis for such a comparison, which is nothing more than an act of forgery and fraud.

The basic difference between the two undertakings is that the settlement project that preceded Israel’s establishment was intended to create the territorial basis for the future Jewish state. It wasn’t intended to deprive the Arabs of everything that was left or, for that matter, their right to a state of their own alongside the Jewish state.

The 11 settlements in the northern Negev, meanwhile, were meant to ensure the inclusion of the Negev in the Jewish state upon the expected partition of the Land of Israel into a Jewish state and an Arab state.

The current settlement campaign, on the other hand, like the unnecessary construction in East Jerusalem, is not designed to ensure the existence of the state of the Jews, but rather to deprive the Arabs of their state in the West Bank and their capital in Arab Jerusalem. That is precisely the difference between the just Zionism of self-defense and aggressive Zionism, which is totally dismissive of the Arabs and their human rights.

According to the settlers, the Jews have the right “to settle everywhere,” and the Jews of course also have needs created by “natural growth.” In their opinion, do the Arabs also have the right to settle everywhere, or is any construction by Arabs illegal for one reason or another? And don’t the Arabs have “natural growth”?

In the eyes of the settlers, the term “illegal” only applies to Arabs, not to the settlers’ construction, because the source of their inspiration is divine and beyond the democratic context. According to this approach, the law only exists as a tool of the state, as the settlers’ subcontractor, to deprive the Arabs of what little is theirs.

Such an approach of “me and me alone” should outrage every reasonable person, and as a result a large and important part of the Israeli Jewish public believes that this line of thinking is intolerable. And it is not just them. The Obama administration knows that Israel can be attacked over the settlement issue because American Jewry, too, will not come to Israel’s defense on the matter. If that is the situation, why should we complain about the goyim who view the settlements as an act of outrageous injustice?

Through their actions, the settlers not only undermine the legitimacy of settlement in the territories, they also undermine international legitimacy for the very existence of the State of Israel. The grave results are in plain view. Zionism’s just cause and existential interests are grounded in the equality and mutuality of partition.

David Ben-Gurion understood this even during the Arab Revolt more than 70 years ago, as did the international community in its support of partition in 1947. It also reflects the international consensus today.

It is patently apparent that, beyond the issue of basic justice, dividing the land is also in the clear interest of Zionism and anyone who wants to maintain the State of Israel as the state of the Jews. In the arrogance of their position, which tramples on the rights of others, the settlers are compromising the foundations of the justice of the Zionist enterprise, and acting against the State of Israel’s existential interests. By making the Land of Israel the supreme value over and above the State of Israel, they are joining, in a bizarre way, their left-wing post-Zionist “brothers,” who also propose a single state that will succeed the state of the Jews.

The writer teaches Middle East history at Tel Aviv University.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1103989.html

By Henry Siegman

July 21, 2009

Haaretz

The international community may finally be beginning to register the utter futility of decades-long expectations that an Israeli government would agree to a fair and workable peace agreement, one that would end the four-decade subjugation and denial of the Palestinian people’s national and individual rights.

One hopes that is the significance of the proposal by European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana, who suggested that the UN Security Council assume responsibility for establishing a Palestinian state by a certain deadline if the parties have not reached an agreement. The Security Council would then set the borders of Israel and a new Palestinian state, and formulate parameters to resolve the other permanent status issues – Jerusalem, refugees and security.

Of course, this cannot happen without U.S. assent and leadership, which is unlikely if such a proposal is incorrectly seen as punishment for non-performance, rather than understood as the original intent of resolutions 242 and 338, which called for Israel’s return to the 1967 borders.

As I have written previously, the Security Council’s responsibility for resolving the consequences of the Six-Day War if the parties were unable to do so was implicit in the resolutions’ language, which stressed the inadmissibility of acquiring territory through war. Israel’s occupation policy and its vast settlement enterprise have been based on the contrary assumption – if no peace agreement is reached with the Palestinians, the resolutions’ “default” is the indefinite continuation of the occupation of Palestinian lands and people.

If this reading were correct, the Security Council resolutions would have served as an irresistible invitation to Israel – and to all other occupiers – to avoid peace talks in order to preserve the status quo, which of course is exactly what Israel has been doing, in clear violation of Resolution 242’s declaration that territory cannot be acquired by war.

Israel’s contention has long been that since no Palestinian state existed before the 1967 war, there is no recognized border to withdraw to, because the pre-1967 border was merely an armistice line. Moreover, since Resolution 242 calls for a “just and lasting peace” that will allow “every state in the area [to] live in security,” Israel holds that it must be allowed to change the armistice line, either bilaterally or unilaterally, to make it secure before it ends the occupation.

These are specious arguments for many reasons, but principally because UN General Assembly Partition Resolution 181 of 1947, which established the Jewish state’s international legitimacy, also recognized the remaining Palestinian territory outside the Jewish state’s borders as – at the very least – the equally legitimate patrimony of Palestine’s Arab population, on which they were entitled to establish their own state, and it precisely mapped the borders of that territory. Resolution 181’s affirmation of the right of Palestine’s Arab population to national self-determination was based on normative law and the democratic principle that grants statehood to the majority population. (At the time, Arabs constituted two-thirds of the population in Palestine.) This right does not evaporate because of delays in implementation.

I have argued in my writings over the years that the international community has failed to reject Israel’s notion that the occupation and the creation of “facts on the ground” can go on indefinitely, so long as there is no agreement acceptable to Israel. This failure has defeated all previous peace initiatives and peace envoys. Current efforts will meet the same fate if this fundamental issue is not finally addressed. The U.S. and the international community must finally act on the resolutions’ plain logic that the default is a return to the status quo ante, the pre-1967 border – without territorial and other changes that negotiations and a peace agreement might have produced.

What is required, as proposed by Solana, is a Security Council resolution affirming that changes to the pre-1967 situation can be made only by agreement between the parties, and that unilateral measures will not receive international recognition; the default of Resolution 242 is a return of Israel’s occupying forces to the pre-1967 border; and that if the parties do not reach an agreement within a defined period, the default setting of the 1967 and 1973 resolutions will be invoked by the Security Council. The Security Council will then adopt its own terms for an end to the conflict, and will arrange for an international force to enter the occupied territories to help establish the rule of law, assist Palestinians in building their institutions, assure Israel’s security by preventing cross-border violence, and oversee the implementation of its terms for an end to the conflict.

President Obama has indicated he intends to present Israel and the Palestinian Authority with a framework for a permanent status agreement. His aim of Middle East peace before the two-state solution disappears would be best served if such a framework were to become the basis of a Security Council resolution establishing a Palestinian state.

The writer is the director of the U.S./Middle East Project, and a former national director of the American Jewish Congress. He also serves as a visiting associate professor at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1101703.html

Jonathan Cook

July 9, 2009

The National

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, has been much criticised in Israel, as well as abroad, for failing to present his own diplomatic initiative on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process to forestall US intervention.

Mr Netanyahu may have huffed and puffed before giving voice to the phrase “two states for two peoples” at Sunday’s cabinet meeting, but the contours of just such a Palestinian state – or states – have been emerging undisturbed for some time.

In fact, Mr Netanyahu appears every bit as committed as his predecessors to creating the facts of an Israeli-imposed two-state solution, one he and others in Israel’s leadership doubtless hope will eventually be adopted by the White House as the “pragmatic” – if far from ideal – option.

While Israel has been buying yet more time with Washington in bickering over a paltry settlement freeze, it has been forging ahead with the process of creating two Palestinian territories, the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, that, despite supposedly emerging from occupation, are in reality sinking ever deeper into chronic dependency on Israeli goodwill.

This is creating a culture of absolute Israeli control and absolute Palestinian dependency, enforced by proxy Palestinian rulers acting as mini-dictatorships.

For a growing number of Palestinians, the conditions of bare subsistence and even survival are Israeli gifts that few can afford to spurn through political activity, let alone civil disobedience or armed resistance. The Palestinian will to organise and resist as their land is seized for settlements is being inexorably sapped.

It is little mentioned but Israel all but abandoned completing its massive separation wall in the West Bank some time ago. There are significant gaps waiting to be filled, but, with things having grown so quiet and the cost of each kilometre of wall so high, the sense of political and military urgency has evaporated.

Suicide bombers, had they the determination, could still slip into Israel. But increasingly Palestinians view such attacks as futile, if not counterproductive: Israel simply wins greater international sympathy and has the pretext to turn the screw yet tighter on Palestinian life.

None of this has been lost on Israel’s leaders of either the so-called Left or Right.

Rather than being an aberration in response to rocket attacks, the blockade of Gaza has become Israel’s template for Palestinian statehood. The West Bank is rapidly undergoing its own version of disengagement and besiegement, with similar predictable results.

Gaza’s blockade – and the savage battering it took in December and January – has suggested even to Mr Netanyahu that the Israeli version of the carrot-and-stick approach works.

The stick – a devastated Gaza unable to rise from the rubble because aid and basic goods are kept out – has transformed most of the population into a nation dependent on handouts, borrowing where possible to buy necessities smuggled through the tunnels, and concentrating on the lonely art of survival.

As the normally restrained International Committee of the Red Cross reported last month: “Most of the very poor have exhausted their coping mechanisms. Many have no savings left. They have sold private belongings such as jewellery and furniture and started to sell productive assets including farm animals, land, fishing boats or cars used as taxis.”

The carrot – if it can be called that – is directed towards Gaza’s leaders, Hamas, rather than its ordinary inhabitants. The message is simple: keep the rocket fire in check and we won’t attack again. We will allow you to rule over the remnants of Gaza.

In the West Bank, the carrot for the leadership is even more tantalisingly visible. The Palestinian Authority under Mahmoud Abbas is colluding in the creation of a series of mini-fiefdoms based on the main cities.

Trained by the US military, Palestinian security forces with light weapons are taking back control of Jenin, Nablus, Jericho, Qalqilya, Ramallah and so on, while the PA is encouraged by promises of economic charity to prop up its legitimacy.

The leader of a Palestinian non-governmental organisation in Ramallah confided at the weekend that what is being created are “City Leagues” – a mocking reference to the Palestinian regional militias known as the Village Leagues armed by Israel in the early 1980s to stamp out Palestinian nationalism by threatening and attacking local political activists. Those were a dismal failure; this time Palestinians are less sure Israel will not succeed.

Palestinian prisons are starting to fill not only with those suspected of belonging to Hamas but those who dissent from Fatah rule. The ground is being carefully tended by Israel to create a brutal client state.

The stick, as in Gaza, is directed at the ordinary population. The news headlines are of the easing of movement restrictions at the checkpoints. That may be true at a few places deep in the West Bank. But at the big checkpoints that separate Israel from what is left of the West Bank, such as the one at Qalandiya between Ramallah and Jerusalem, the monitoring of Palestinian movement is becoming fearsomely sophisticated.

These checkpoints are now more like small airport terminals, with limited numbers of “trusted” Palestinians entitled to pass through. To escape the poverty of the West Bank each day to reach manual work inside Israel, they must have a magnetic ID card storing biometric data and a special permit. Cards are denied by Israel not only to those with a record of political activity but also to those who have distant relatives deemed to be politically engaged.

The same NGO leader concluded, again with bitter irony: “Our leaders are declaring victory: the victory of defeat.”

Should Mr Abbas and his PA functionaries sign up to this Israeli vision of statehood, the defeat for the Palestinians will be greater still.

By Henry Siegman

July 3, 3009

Al-Hayat

President Barack Obama’s decision to choose a demand for a total Israeli settlement freeze – as called for in the 2003 Roadmap for Middle East peace – as the entry point for his changed approach to peacemaking between Israel and the Palestinians has been criticized not only by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his cabinet, and not only by hopeless neocons in the U.S. like Elliot Abrams, but also by officials who served in the Bush administration, such as Aaron Miller, who were critical of the Bush administration’s tolerance of the settlements.

These critics argue that it is simply impossible for an Israeli government to freeze construction in the settlements except in the context of an overall peace agreement. This strategic goal, they say, rather than the secondary issue of the settlements, should be the focus of the Obama administration’s diplomacy.

The argument has a surface appeal, but could not be more wrongheaded, for a number of reasons.

What differentiates Obama’s approach from that of previous administrations is his understanding that allowing Israeli governments to redefine the vocabulary of the peace process so as to mean the opposite of their own words’ plain meaning is to doom what hope there is for an end to this conflict.

Thus, Obama understands that Netanyahu’s insistence that any settlement freeze must allow construction to accommodate “natural growth” is a calculated deception intended to cover up construction in the settlements far beyond “natural growth” in order to permanently preclude the possibility of a viable and territorially contiguous Palestinian state. He knows this because that has been the pattern until now under previous Likud, Kadima and even Labour-led governments.

Consider the odd decision of Netanyahu to accede to Obama’s demand that he accept a Palestinian state, a concession far more important and “strategic” than what Obama’s critics consider to be the secondary issue of settlements. Why would Netanyahu, who bitterly and successfully fought off Ariel Sharon’s efforts to prevent the Likud’s formal rejection of Palestinian statehood, now attack Mahmoud Abbas for delaying a resumption of peace talks to achieve a Palestinian state? And consider the strange political phenomenon of the dog who didn’t bark – i.e. the failure of the settlers and Netanyahu’s extreme nationalist coalition partners to attack him for that decision. It was greeted by them with virtual indifference.

The answer is no great mystery to most Israelis, even if most members of the U.S. Congress don’t seem to get it. Israelis know that rejoining a peace process that has gotten exactly nowhere for the past 15 years poses no threat to the status quo. Indeed, it is the charade of peace talks that has provided the cover Israeli governments needed to be able to pose as pursuers of a peace agreement as they continued the enlargement of the settlement enterprise to a point that would prevent a Palestinian state from ever arising.

It is also not true, as Obama’s critics maintain, that Israeli governments cannot stand up to those who oppose a freeze on construction in settlements that does not accommodate natural growth. It is an absurd claim. As Amnon Rubinstein, a former minister in several Israeli governments, pointed out, Israeli governments regularly enforce “draconian laws” governing illegal construction within Israel’s borders. If an Israeli citizen living in Tel Aviv or Haifa whose family experienced “natural growth” were to demand exemption from those laws, he would be advised – not very politely – to look for more appropriate accommodations in some other part of town, or in another town. There is no reason why Israelis living in the occupied territories cannot be told the same thing.

But perhaps the most compelling reason the Obama administration decided to begin its push for a breakthrough in the stalemated peace talks with the issue of Israel’s illegal settlement activity was its belief that it could retain the support of the Congress in a confrontation with Netanyahu’s government over this issue, and disprove the conventional wisdom in Washington that the Israel lobby cannot be defeated even when it seeks to defend the clearly indefensible. Having established that precedent, the Obama administration believes it will be in a far stronger position to press its case with Netanyahu and his government on the permanent status issues, including borders and the sharing of Jerusalem.

But as indicated in a document on this subject presented to President Obama last November by a bipartisan group of former senior government officials whose members were described in the New York Times as “mandarins” of the foreign policy community, ending the enlargement of settlements and getting the parties to negotiations will not produce anything more than previous negotiations produced – unless the Obama administration, with the support of the international community, presents the parties with a clear framework for the negotiations, based on UN resolutions, international law, and previous agreements to which Israel and the Palestinian Authority have signed on.

The Obama administration’s determination to move ahead quickly with its own proposals for a framework for an Israel-Palestine permanent status agreement is also the only effective response to a stonewalling by Netanyahu’s government of Obama’s demand for a settlement freeze. Rather than engaging Israel in a deliberately protracted debate over this issue, and risking compromises that will inevitably be seen everywhere as Obama having caved in to Netanyahu and sanctioned continued settlement expansion, moving quickly away from the table at which the freeze is debated to the table at which the U.S. will present its parameters for a final status agreement should help refocus Israelis and Palestinians on the real issues and away from their contretemps designed to avoid the “painful compromises” they have long claimed they are ready to make for peace.

A Netanyahu government that defies Obama’s attempt, supported by the entire international community, to hold back further settler depredations on Palestinian land and salvage a two-state solution to the conflict can only weaken Israel’s position at the table where the permanent status issues will be determined. Israel’s citizens might well want to have a different government at that table. However, absent an American framework for permanent status negotiations and determined U.S. leadership for its implementation, the outcome of the battle over the settlement issue will not matter.

President Obama surely knows this, and that is reason to hope he will continue to persevere along the path he has so skillfully set out.

Henry Siegman, president of the U.S./Middle East Project in New York, is a visiting research professor at the Sir Joseph Hotung Middle East Program, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London.