Another
Brick In The Wall
By
Robert Fisk
06 April, 2006
The Independent
We
have been conned again. The Israeli elections, we are told, mean that
the dream of "Greater Israel" has finally been abandoned.
West Bank settlements will
be closed down, just as the Jewish colonies were uprooted in Gaza last
year. The Zionist claim to all of Biblical Israel has withered away.
Likud, the nightmare party
of Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu, has been smashed by the Gaullist
figure of the dying Ariel Sharon, whose Kadima Party now embraces Ehud
Olmert and that decaying symbol of the Israeli left, Nobel prizewinner
Shimon Peres.
This, at least, is the narrative
laid down by so many of our journalists, "analysts" and "commentators".
But it is a lie.
Only in paragraph two - or
three or four - of the groveling news reports from the Middle East do
we read that Olmert's not very impressive election victory will allow
him to "redraw" the "frontiers" of Israel, a decision
described as "controversial" - the usual get-out clause of
newspapers that wish to avoid the truth: that Israel is about to grab
more land and claim it to be part of the state of Israel.
Yes, true, the smaller and
more vulnerable Jewish colonies illegally built on Palestinian-owned
land may be abandoned - stand by for more of the grief and tears that
we witnessed in Gaza. But the rest - the great semi-circle of concrete
that runs around east Jerusalem, for example - will not be depopulated.
Let's start with the wall.
It will soon run from top to bottom of the occupied Palestinian West
Bank - and it is going to stay.
It is higher in the long
sectors where it has been completed (east of Jerusalem, for example)
than the Berlin Wall. Yet journalists go on calling it a "security
barrier" or a "fence" - because the as-yet-uncompleted
sectors of the wall are still coils of barbed wire.
This is part of the dream
world that editors and reporters have constructed for the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict.
It exists in the same Potemkin
landscape that allows journalists to call the occupied Palestinian territory
"disputed territory" - after former US secretary of state
Colin Powell ordered his diplomats in the region to use this mendacious
phrase - and to call Jewish colonies illegally built on Arab land "settlements"
or, my favorites now, "Jewish neighborhoods" or "outposts".
It is the same stage on which
Israelis are killed by Palestinians, which they are, but on which Palestinians
die in anonymous "clashes". (With whom - and killed by whom
- exactly?)
And each of these little
lies, of course, contains a kernel of truth. The occupied territories
are "disputed" between Israelis and Palestinians, the first
claiming that God gave them the land, the second producing land deeds
to prove that the law entitles them to their own property.
If illegal colonies such
as Maale Adumim are built adjacent to Jerusalem - itself illegally annexed
by Israel - then of course they are "neighborhoods". And since
the wall - which has gobbled up 10% more Palestinian land for the Israelis
- is to prevent suicide bombers (and has been fairly successful in doing
so), it is a "security barrier".
I seem to recall that the
East Germans called the Berlin Wall - or "Berlin Fence" as
I suppose we would have to call it if built by the Israelis - a "security
barrier".
Forget the illegality of
occupation, then, and the illegality of stealing someone else's home
and land, and the illegality of building a wall that thieves yet more
property from the 22% of mandate Palestine that the Palestinians are
supposed to negotiate for.
Let me be frank. If I were
an Israeli I, too, would have built a wall to prevent the suicide executioners
of Islamic Jihad and, earlier, of Hamas.
But I would have built it
along the international frontier of Israel - not used the wall as a
cheap method of stealing more land.
Indeed, under UN Security
Council Resolution 242, which is meant to be the foundation of any peace,
the acquisition of land through war is stated to be illegal. The wall
itself is illegal. The International Court also ruled it to be illegal.
And Israel ignored this ruling. So, of course, did the US.
But now the burden of all
this post-election theft is to be placed upon Palestinian President
Mahmoud Abbas.
This colourless, helpless
man, who presided over the Palestinian Authority's continuing corruption,
is supposed to persuade the new Hamas government to accept all of Israel's
land-grabs, to pick up where the Oslo process left off (which still
left Jerusalem exclusively in Israeli hands), and to abandon all violence
- which means to surrender whenever Israeli troops raid refugee camps
or cities in the West Bank.
The point is that Hamas members
have been as assuredly elected representatives of the Palestinians as
Olmert and his forthcoming allies in government are representatives
of Israelis.
But this does not allow them
to make any "controversial" plans to redraw their "border"
with Israel, not even to insist that Israel withdraws - or redeploys
- to its internationally recognized borders. (I'm talking about the
pre-1967 frontier, not the 1948 one.)
They cannot demand fulfillment
of UN Resolution 242 because President George W Bush has already made
it clear that the vast Jewish colonies east of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem
itself, will remain in Israeli hands.
Sure, 14 of the 24 Hamas
ministers have been in Israeli prisons. But what are Palestinians supposed
to think when they realize that 15 Israeli generals have been elected
to the new Knesset, along with six secret service agents?
Yet even this is not the
point. If the Israelis want Hamas to acknowledge the state of Israel,
then Hamas should be expected to acknowledge the state of Israel that
exists within its legal frontiers - not the illegal borders now being
dreamt up by Olmert.
We will have to abandon the
idea that Ariel Sharon - an unindicted war criminal after his involvement
in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres - was really going to give up
the major Jewish colonies built illegally on Arab land or the illegal
annexation of Jerusalem.
Certainly, Olmert is not
going to do that.
He is going to create wider
frontiers for Israel and steal - let's call a spade a spade - more Arab
land in doing so.
The US will go along with
this next illegal land-grab. But will the European Union? Will the UN?
Will Russia? Will Tony Blair?
Israelis deserve peace and
security as much as Palestinians. But "new" and expanded "controversial"
Israeli frontiers will not bring peace or security to either.
© The Independent