Summit's
Goal: Perpetuate
Repression Of Palestinians
By
Barb Olson & Amal Othman
10 December,
2007
The Capital Times(Madison, Wisconsin)
"After
meeting their own low expectations for the Annapolis conference amid
intense skepticism, Bush administration officials crowed with delight,"
said an Associated Press story.
And well
they might. It was more symbolism than substance, but President Bush
looked almost presidential.
But all Palestinian
President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert really
agreed on was to negotiate - Bush called it "hard bargaining."
"Hard
bargaining" with Olmert and Abbas (and Bush too) at record low
levels of support domestically?
"Hard
bargaining" with the overwhelming power of the United States and
Israel on one side and the divided and bloodied Palestinians on the
other?
The United
States is not an honest broker here. Congress just gave Israel another
$30 billion for military aid over the next 10 years. That's on top of
the $3 billion to $5 billion annually it already gets.
Since 2004,
Bush has officially committed the United States to help Israel keep
Palestinian land stolen for Jewish settlements. This policy of using
"facts on the ground" to gobble up Palestinian land, water
and commerce has already sparked two Palestinian uprisings and is destroying
the viability of any independent Palestinian state.
Was this
policy reversed at Annapolis? No. Instead Bush asked Israel to pretty-please
remove a few trailer park "outposts" and to stop expanding
the settlements. (Wink, wink.)
Bush instructed
the Palestinians not to focus on the "borders" of a state.
No wonder - Israel has already set the borders by constructing the annexation
wall deep inside Palestinian territory, leaving the Palestinians imprisoned
in a handful of poverty-stricken ghettos on a fraction of a fraction
of a fraction of their original homeland.
What's next,
a virtual Palestinian state?
Bush told
Palestinians to focus on the "nature" of their state instead.
It should be "democratic." Oh really? The United States and
Israel have starved and bludgeoned the Palestinians for having elected
the wrong people, and then invited Abbas (who overthrew the elected
government) to Annapolis.
Bush hailed
the "transparency and accountability" of the Abbas regime.
These are the same crooks who were thrown out of office for shamelessly
lining their pockets with the meager contents of the Palestinian treasury.
Bush and
Olmert seek a puppet regime that will pick up the garbage and police
the prison-statelets that are all Palestinians can expect from this
"hard bargaining."
This is why
the Abbas-Olmert agreement gives the United States (and thus Israel)
a veto over any results, stating that implementation of the agreement
will be "led by the United States" and "judged by the
United States."
Completely
absent, in spite of pleas from Palestinian human rights groups, was
any mention of international law, which long ago laid down two unavoidable
conditions for peace: the return of all Palestinian (and Syrian) territory
taken by force in 1967, including removal of the colonial settler infrastructure,
and a just solution for the millions of Palestinians driven from their
homeland since 1948.
Bush's U.S.-Israel-Palestine
bargaining process aims to circumvent this painful reality. Behind a
fig leaf of endless negotiations, Israel will push ordinary Palestinians
further into poverty and repression. Many will leave in order to survive.
Those who remain face a grotesque form of apartheid, whose structure
is already in place and whose foundation was laid by the logic of creating
a "Jewish state" in a country populated mainly by others.
Indeed, many Israelis openly hope that even so-called "Israeli
Arabs" - Palestinians who stayed in 1948 and are now 20 percent
of the citizenry - will be forcibly transferred to the new "Palestinian
state."
If you want
to see the reality obscured by the lofty language of
politicians, visit the concentration camp that is Gaza, invisible at
Annapolis. Smell the stench of raw sewage and uncollected garbage. Listen
to the cries of hungry children and watch sick people die from Israel
cutting the electricity or the embargo on medicine or from waiting too
long at the perpetually sealed borders. Watch women screaming over the
bodies of children and husbands torn apart by Israeli bombardment or
vicious fighting among rival gangs of camp inmates.
The original
online transcript of Bush's Annapolis speech referred to the "Iraqi
soil of the West Bank and Gaza." Official versions corrected this
to "rocky soil." But the cruel irony of this Freudian slip
remains. Iraq certainly does resemble Gaza, with the West Bank close
behind. This is not a path to peace.
Barb
Olson and Amal Othman are members of the Madison-Rafah Sister
City Project.
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