The Illusion Of The ‘Palestinian State’
By Ghali Hassan
08 February,
2008
Countercurrents.org
In 1923, the Ukrainian-born
Zionist and founder of Irgun terror network in Palestine, Ze’ev
Jabotinsky wrote that Zionist colonization in the Middle East can
only succeed if it is “protected by an Iron Wall”, designed
to incarcerate and keeps the native Palestinian population out of
their land. Today, more than ever, the Palestinian people are refusing
to surrender and give up their history.
For decades, Western leaders – led by the Americans –, and pro-Israel Western media have promoted the idea of a ‘Palestinian State’ for Palestinians to claim it as their homeland. It has become a euphemism for never-to-be a Palestinian state. What is misleading about this idea of a ‘Palestinian State’ is it provides people in the West – including those who pretend to support the Palestinians – with an illusionary hope, while at the same time it covers Israel’s war crimes and Israel’s illegal annexation and colonization of Palestinian land and water resources.
Publicly, Israel (unconditionally supported by the U.S.) has rejected any peaceful solution that provides for the establishment of a Palestinian state. Indeed, in 1967 the U.S. vetoed a Security Council resolution calling for a two-state settlement on the international border, incorporating all the relevant wording of UN Resolution 242. The Resolution simply demands Israel to withdraw from Arab land it occupied during the 1967 Israeli aggression.
In 1988 when the Palestinian National Council formally accepted the “two-state settlement”, the Israeli government of Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Shamir declared that there can be no ‘additional’ Palestinian state between Jordan and Palestine. In other words, Jordan is to be the new Palestine for the Palestinian people. Israel declaration was immediately supported by the U.S. administration, keeping with U.S. traditions of unconditional support for Israel’s terror at the expense of peace and human lives.
It is important to remember that Israel and the U.S. have always found a pretext to reject peace. The demand has always been that the Palestinians must stop the “violence” (legitimate resistance) as a prerequisite to peace. And because Israelis have a monopoly on the most heinous war crimes – comparable only to Nazis’ war crimes –, they are not required to stop the daily killing of innocent Palestinian women and children. Then came the prerequisite of the “recognition of Israel”, then Israel’s “right to exists”, and now we have a new prerequisite to peace; the recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state”.
Under the cliché of peace, the Israeli army is besieging and murdering Palestinian women and children with impunity while the rest of the (Western) world condoning Israel for “defending” itself. Peace in the Middle East has become an empty rhetoric. Israel and the U.S. use the cliché of peace as a propaganda tool to whiteout the truth and manipulate public opinion into supporting a Zionist-fascist ideology.
The reality, Israel is addicted to violence and domination with a long history of terrorising an entire defenceless Palestinian population. In a recent article in the daily Ha’aretz newspaper, Israeli journalists Gideon Levy, writes: “Bushra Bargis hadn't even left her home. In late April she was studying for a big test, notebooks in hand, pacing around her room in the Jenin refugee camp in the early evening, when a sniper shot her in the forehead from quite far away. Her bloodstained notebooks bore witness to her final moments”. Even unborn Palestinian babies weren't safe from Israel’s terror either. A bullet in the back of a seven-month pregnant Palestinian woman, Maha Qatuni, “struck her foetus in the womb, shattering its head”. With unconditional endorsement in the West, Israeli war crimes remain a taboo in Western media.
Not surprising, Israelis and Jews in general view the unconditional support provided by Western powers as “emanating from God“. In a recent interview, Israel’s current Prime Minister Ehud Olmert admitted that; “It's a coincidence that is almost 'the hand of God' that Bush is president of the United States, that Nicholas Sarkozy is the president of France, that Angela Merkel is the chancellor of Germany, that Gordon Brown is the prime minister of England and that the special envoy to the Middle East is Tony Blair”. (AFP, January 04, 2008). They are the most open pro-Zionism Western leaders.
Even Jabotinsky failed to predict that his Zionist colonial project has no chance of success without the ongoing massive and unconditional political, financial and military support provided by the major Western powers, led by the U.S.
Meanwhile, Palestinians are living under continual suffering and hardship. Those who are the descendants of the 800,000 Palestinians ethnically cleansed from their homes in the 1948’s al-Nakba (the "Catastrophe") remain in refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries. The rest of the Palestinians are confined to the Occupied Territories of Gaza (1.5 million) and the West Bank (3 million) under Israel’s murderous military occupation and siege. More than 1.2 million live as second-class citizens within Israel’s borders.
In flagrant violations of International Laws and civilized norms, Israel refuses to stop its illegal policies of building Jewish colonies on annexed Palestinian land and pushing Palestinians into small ghettos and concentration camps. Israel’s policy of isolating Palestinian communities from each others by the Apartheid Wall, Jewish-only roads and by a policy of military control and collective punishment made the idea of a viable Palestinian state an impossibility. The Palestinians are cut off from their relatives, from their farms, from their children schools, from hospitals and from their work. In the mean time, the Palestinians, terrorised on daily basis by illegal Jewish settlers and a Gestapo-like army, are told to disappear.
Jewish leaders, whether Rabbinic leaders or political leaders, are calling for the removal/transfer (a.k.a. ethnic cleansing) of Palestinians somewhere outside their occupied land. Again, the Western world looks the other way and contemplates Israel’s unending terror against the Palestinians. But, when President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran suggested that European countries should take the Jews back to Europe and allow Palestinians to return to their home land, he is demonised and accused of “anti-Semitism”.
Finally, the outbreak from Gaza where Israel is deliberately perpetuating slow motion genocide – with full complicity of European and U.S. governments – has caught the eyes of some Western media and exposes Israel’s murderous occupation and fascist policies to the outside world. Israel’s medieval siege of the crowded territory caused misery and death to many innocent and defenceless Palestinians.
As people stood in the way of Hitler’s colonial project, so are the Palestinian people. The day will come when Jabotinsky’s “Iron Wall” will fall and with it Palestinians dispossession and victimisation will end, and Palestinian liberation will be achieved.
Ghali Hassan is an independent writer living in Australia.