Formalizing
Apartheid Packaged
As Peace Initiative
By Neta Golan &
Mohammed Khatib
18 October, 2007
The
Electronic Intifada
Next
month the US plans to host a regional meeting to discuss peace in the
Middle East, or at least peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
The maneuvering, deal making and negotiating about what will be on the
table has been going on for some time. But the details of the agreement
being discussed have been a well-guarded secret but for the steady flow
of leaks and trial balloons. Deciphering this information combined with
facts on the ground, one can put together a clear outline of Israel's
"next generous offer."
Political maneuvers can be
spun to sound good if the details are kept vague, but when held to scrutiny
it becomes obvious that the upcoming Israeli offer is not so generous.
Like the Oslo Accords and the "disengagement" from Gaza, the
peace process being cooked now is a move to consolidate Israeli control
of all of historic Palestine while taking a large portion of the Palestinian
population off Israel's hands. The devil is in the details that follow.
The agreement on the table
offers Palestinians what Israel's president Shimon Peres calls "the
equivalent of 100 percent of the territory occupied in 1967." According
to Peres, Israel will retain its major West Bank population centers,
also known as settlement blocs, which Peres claims make up only five
percent of the West Bank. In exchange Israel will offer to give the
Palestinians the same amount of territory elsewhere. According to Peres,
Israel will exchange land in Israel populated by Palestinians who hold
Israeli citizenship. This will allow Israel to remove some of its Palestinian
Arab population, whom most Jewish Israelis perceive as "demographic
threat" to the nature of the Jewish state.
When Israeli politicians
like Peres talk about retaining five percent of the West Bank, they
do not include occupied East Jerusalem. Israel illegally and unilaterally
annexed East Jerusalem in 1967-68. Hence, Israeli sources claim there
are 250,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank, completely discounting
the estimated additional 250,000 settlers in occupied East Jerusalem.
Israel's settlement blocs
are being created and built as you read these words. For years Israel
has been creating settlement blocs on strategic land that will carve
the West Bank into disconnected islands, maintain Israeli access to
the West Bank water resources and surround and strangle Arab Jerusalem.
The de facto annexation of this strategic 9.5 percent of the West Bank's
land behind Israel's apartheid wall has already taken place. The "peace"
process will simply make it official.
In March 2006 the newly formed
Kadima party was elected to implement Ariel Sharon's "convergence
plan." According to this plan, the non-strategic settlements outside
of the settlement blocs would be dismantled. The evacuated settlers
would be resettled in the "blocs" behind the wall that would
in turn be annexed by Israel.
On 14 April 2004, President
Bush wrote to then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, "In light of new
realities on the ground, including already existing population centers
it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations
will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949 ..."
This letter was subsequently ratified in both US Houses of Congress.
Israel took this as a green
light from the US to keep whatever areas they can fill with settlers.
Therefore, despite the Road Map requirement that Israel freeze settlement
expansion, Israel accelerated the creation of so-called "existing"
settlement blocs in strategically important areas.
In the same letter to Sharon,
Bush also stated, "It seems clear that an agreed, just, fair and
realistic framework for a solution to the Palestinian refugee issue
as part of any final status agreement will need to be found through
the establishment of a Palestinian state, and the settling of Palestinian
refugees there, rather than in Israel." Consequently, in the offer
to be made by Israel, Palestinian refugees will be allowed the right
to return, not to their homes, but to small, non-contiguous parts of
their original homeland, divided into disconnected territorial units,
with no chance of maintaining a sustainable economy and with no control
over water, power, or other necessary resources. They will be allowed
to return to a cage, with Israel manning every door.
Israeli plans, backed by
these US guarantees, create an unlivable apartheid situation for Palestinians.
But Palestinians are not even likely to receive such a "generous"
apartheid offer in November.
Now, with less than sixteen
months left in the Bush administration, Ehud Olmert lacks the political
clout to carry out Israel's end of the deal. Israeli Minister of Defense
Ehud Barak recently stated his opposition to what he called "withdrawal
from Israeli principles that have stood for 40 years, merely to gain
favor in the eyes of an American president who is leaving office in
a year." Therefore, at the Olmert's administration's insistence,
the goals of the regional meeting have been watered down to a joint
statement that will outline the basis of the future agreement. Olmert
is demanding that the joint declaration include a reference to Bush's
April 2004 letter to Sharon and to the Road Map.
Israeli foreign minister
Tzipi Livni's stated objective is to declare a "transitional"
Palestinian state with "provisional" borders, an option that
appears in the second phase of the Road Map. When Israel accepted the
Road Map in March 2003 it attached "14 reservations." Israel
considers these reservations as integral parts of the Road Map. Israel's
fifth reservation states: "The provisional state will have provisional
borders and certain aspects of sovereignty, be fully demilitarized ...
be without the authority to undertake defense alliances or military
cooperation, and Israeli control over the entry and exit of all persons
and cargo, as well as of its air space and electromagnetic spectrum."
Such a state would be squeezed between the separation wall, Israel's
"demographic border," and the Jordan Valley, Israel's "security
border" with Jordan. With the Jordan Valley making up approximately
30 percent of the West Bank, under this scenario Israel would likely
retain more than 40 percent of the West Bank. This transitional Palestinian
state would consist of a series of isolated Bantustans, or as Sharon,
who fathered the plan, preferred to refer to them, "cantons."
In the past the Palestinians
have pressed to have this option of the temporary state removed from
the Road Map, since the history of Israel's occupation shows that "temporary
measures" are almost always permanent. However, Palestinian negotiators
now accept the possibility of a temporary state on the condition that
they receive international assurances that the third and final phase
of the Road Map, that includes a permanent settlement, will be implemented
within six months. Israel has no intention of accepting this condition.
It is questionable whether
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas will be able to accept
this offer without a timeframe for a permanent settlement. But perhaps
he is not even meant to accept. For if Abbas refuses another Israeli-American
"generous offer" his rejection could be presented to the world
as more proof that there is no Palestinian "partner for peace."
Israel would then be "justified" in implementing its convergence
plan unilaterally.
Unilateral "convergence"
will make it possible to create a situation in the West Bank similar
to what unilateral "disengagement" has created in the Gaza.
Gaza's residents, 70 percent of whom are refugees from what is now Israel,
are currently isolated, starving and under total Israeli blockade from
land, air and sea.
Olmert, Bush, Blair and their
accomplices in the "Quartet" have vast, sophisticated and
boundlessly resourced PR machinery that, through unlimited access to
an uncritical media, can put a compelling "peace spin" on
an apartheid process. During the November meeting they will assure the
world of their commitment to a Palestinian state (with the appropriate
Abbas/Olmert/Bush photo ops). They will promise to commit millions of
dollars, funding Palestinian "institution building" and humanitarian
aid and arming troops in order to "keep the peace" inside
the Bantustans. Arab states will normalize relations with Israel, strengthening
the "moderates" of the entire region, thus softening the Arab
street as a prerequisite for an American-led strike on Iran.
If we, the peace and justice
community, manage to expose this latest maneuver for what it really
is, Israel could be forced into fair negotiations for the first time.
For this to happen we must
mobilize immediately. It is our job to educate the rest of the world
about what these talks really mean and the truth about what is happening.
The writing is literally on the wall and on the ground. It took many
months if not years to expose the ugly truth behind the first "generous
offer." Let's not make that mistake again.
Neta Golan is an Israeli
peace with justice activist living in Ramallah and a founder of the
Internaitonal Solidarity Movement. Mohammed Khatib is a leading member
of Bil'in's Popular Committee Against the Wall and the secretary of
Bil'in's Village Council. For more information see: http://www.apartheidmasked.org/
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