The Deviants Of Tel Aviv
By Fazal M. Kamal
26 March, 2014
Countercurrents.org
The honesty with which former US President Jimmy Carter answered a question very recently explains a whole lot about the genesis of Tel Aviv’s cavalier attitude especially relating to the Palestinians. When asked why President Obama doesn’t consult with him, as other presidents have done, the former president said:
"That's a hard question for me to answer, you know, with complete candor. I think the problem was that in dealing with the issue of peace between Israel and Egypt, the Carter Center [took] a very strong and public position of equal treatment between the Palestinians and the Israelis. And I think this was a sensitive area in which the president didn't want to be involved."
This fact in addition to the unqualified support Israel receives from very powerful quarters in the United States evidently makes its perennially paranoid leadership indulge in ventures that are not merely outrageous but wreak immense damage on a whole people who have had to live in unacceptable circumstances for decades. In fact, the grim reality is that since al-Nakba occurred, with the complicity of the British politicians and bureaucrats, there has been no cessation of the atrocities that have been inflicted on the Palestinians.
Here’s an instance. A short while back, according to news stories, the U.N. human rights investigator accused Israel of "ethnic cleansing" in pushing Palestinians out of East Jerusalem and underlined the fact that accelerating Israeli settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem is, naturally, dimming all hopes of the Palestinians of establishing a viable state on contiguous territory.
The UN special rapporteur also told a news conference that Israeli policies bore "unacceptable characteristics of colonialism, apartheid and ethnic cleansing…Every increment of enlarging the settlements or every incident of house demolition is a way of worsening the situation confronting the Palestinian people and reducing what prospects they might have as the outcome of supposed peace negotiations."
Making the obvious crimes clearer he explained that more than 11,000 Palestinians had lost their right to live in Jerusalem since 1996 due to Israel imposing residency laws favoring Jews and revoking Palestinian residence permits, and added, "The 11,000 is just the tip of the iceberg because many more are faced with possible challenges to their residency rights."
Despite the incessant malefactions of the Tel Aviv leaders that deprive the people of Palestine of their homes, lives and livelihoods Netanyahu and his cronies remain undeterred mainly because they are getting away with every inhuman and despicable act imaginable. This even though the larger part of the international community is critical of Israeli policies and keeps its distance from its leaders.
It’s public knowledge that Israel’s defense minister has openly questioned the commitment and strength of the US leadership. In a speech Moshe Yaalon had said Israel could not rely on its main ally to take the lead in confronting Iran over its nuclear program and pointed at the Ukraine crisis as an example of Washington showing weakness. Earlier the same minister had described Secretary of State John Kerry's quest for Middle East peace as “messianic and obsessive.”
Even though John Kerry, as well as US Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel, had complained to Netanyahu about his colleague’s bizarre statements, no apology emanated from the blundering leader. Subsequently, the US had also publicly acknowledged “disappointment” with the lack of any regret, but to no avail. And the reasons for this intransigence are clear and have been clear for many years now.
The continuous ruthlessness of the Israeli administration against the Palestinians, its deliberate scorn for United Nations resolutions, its disdain for the opinions of peoples around the world and its contemptuous disregard of the rights of the Palestinian people are there for all the world to see. Yet nothing seems to deter it from going on with its reprehensible policy of apartheid and trampling roughshod over the lives of an entire people who are in practical terms incarcerated by the bullying Israeli leadership.
In a recent report Bill Fletcher Jr. recounted his agony as he traveled through Israel and the occupied territories. He wrote: “It has become almost a cliché to speak of Gaza, the Palestinian territories on the Mediterranean controlled by Hamas and blockaded by Israel, as the largest open-air prison on the planet. Yet I am not sure I will any longer agree with the limits of that characterization. The Palestinians are all in prison.”
He elaborates: “While Gaza may be a maximum security facility, the West Bank is nevertheless a prison. So little is actually controlled by Palestinians despite the formal notion of autonomy. Israeli military incursions can and do happen at any time convenient for the Israeli government and its military occupation. Palestinians are prohibited from using certain roads. The ominous and illegal separation wall, better known as the apartheid wall, spreads like a disease across the land, dividing the Palestinians not as much from the Israelis as from their own land.”
Fletcher, writing in AlterNet, then goes on to detail some of the crimes: “Much as they did within Israel proper, the Israeli authorities have seized lands owned by Palestinians in order to create, in this case, settlements on the West Bank. This land has been seized in the name of security in some instances, and has been seized in other instances because the Palestinians have allegedly abandoned it. In still other cases, land has been seized because Israeli authorities have proclaimed an archeological find located in the territory inhabited by Palestinians, thus justifying land theft and the removal of Palestinians…”
While the United States persists with its efforts to get a peace deal done between the eternally-belligerent Israel and the continuously-humiliated Palestinians, evidence on the ground as well as in international forums confirm that Israel is not much interested in such a prospect. The two primary causes for this are likely to be (1) that it provides its land-hungry leadership to “create realities on the ground” and (2) it is secure in the belief that it has incredible hold on US opinion to carry on with its merry ways---even when they are not welcomed by a US administration.
Consequently, as also given the well-known and well-recorded backdrop of Israeli occupation, it’s unlikely that a US-brokered peace settlement will come to fruition in the foreseeable future. Still the United Nations rapporteur Richard Falk said, "There are other reasons for encouraging the idea that it's still possible to negotiate a settlement based on the two-state model, even though most informed observers regard it as highly implausible given the changes that have taken place during the period of occupation and given the outlook of the Netanyahu government.”
Apparently, for now at the very least, the unfortunate people of Palestine are destined to be subjected to ethnic cleansing and everything else the Israeli leaders are accustomed to doing in the occupied territories against every interest of the oppressed and repressed Palestinians. And Israel is committing all the crimes in full view of the world and yet no one seems capable of slowing it down, to say nothing of making it cease and desist from further recklessness.
Finally a note: It’s often proclaimed that Israel is the only functioning democracy in the region. But surely it must be pretty much obvious by now that an electoral majority isn’t always right---morally, legally or ethically---as has been evidenced numerous times around the world.
The writer has been a media professional, in print and online newspapers as editor and commentator, and in public affairs, for over forty years.
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