February 24, 2006
For Those Who Haven't Noticed
Watching the Dissolution of Palestine
http://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein02242006.html
By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN
Oxford, England.
For those who haven't noticed, Israel opposes a two-state solution. It
has been doing everything in its power to prevent a Palestinian state
from emerging and will continue to do so as long as it can count on
the complicity of its powerful friends and on abundant popular
indifference. Under such circumstances, it is incumbent upon ourselves
to ask why Hamas has therefore been ordered - by Israel and its same
powerful friends --to accept "the two-state solution" especially when,
unlike Israel, it has stated clearly and repeatedly that it would
accept a Palestinian state on the lands occupied by Israel in the 1967
war, the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Indeed, all of
its key spokespeople have said this:Zahar, Haniye, Meshal, and Yassin
and Rantisi before they were murdered.
Judea and Samaria which are, or were, the northern and southern West
Bank, have been subdivided and parceled out over decades to hundreds
of thousands of Jewish settlers for their houses and orchards and
gardens. They have been crisscrossed and circled with Jewish-only
roads that bind the land, the houses and orchards and gardens, to
Israel. They have been manned with guards and gunmen and tanks and
blue and white Israeli flags that defend, protect and assure the
settlers, their houses and orchards and gardens, that they are in fact
Israelis belonging to a single Jewish state.
The settled lands with their settler families, their houses and
gardens, shops and schools, clubs and cafes and pools, have been
mapped and assigned, seized and secured from the Arabs in the shabby
clothes in the rundown! villages who live outside of, or have been
forced to leave, the protected colonial zones. The projected
frontiers, the future borders, depend on the disappearance of these
Arabs, which is anxiously anticipated and actively encouraged. Most of
the eastern perimeter of the current state is a concrete wall erasing
from view that Other Side, which is unmentionable in polite company.
The eastern perimeter wall will soon be the western perimeter wall
because the acting Israeli Prime Minister, Ehud Olmert, has just
announced that the rest of the unincorporated West Bank land will soon
be annexed to Israel: The Jordan Valley, the West Bank's border with
the state of Jordan, now to be Israel's eastern border with the state
of Jordan, will also be secured by the wall and off-limits to
"non-Israelis," meaning Palestinians, who will then be fully encircled
in their stagnant reservations unable to access the outside world.
In the same breath as! he announces this latest unilateral declaration
of confiscated lan d for a Jewish State, Olmert announces a sanctions
regime against the Palestinians of the occupied territories for
refusing to believe that this land transformation in which one society
is strengthened and expanded and the other is dissolved into a
thousand pieces is actually the two-state solution.
Israel allots to itself first use of the natural resources, especially
water, from the territory it has appropriated or surrounded. An army
of thieves and wreckers has turned the remainder-- the pot-holed
roads, the untended groves, the homes, the schools, the mosques and
churches, the hospitals, universities, shops and remaining civil
institutions -- into a series of impassable mazes, a legal
no-man's-land, where travel restrictions, permits, coded IDs, passes,
random searches, incursions and arbitrary accusations reduce the
inhabitants into suspicious beings without names, faces, addresses or
rights; a collective villain to be de-educat! ed and de-nationalized
and, one day perhaps, deported for the sake of the Israeli raison
d'etre. It is becoming as difficult for travelers from abroad to visit
the occupied territories as it is for the rightful inhabitants to move
freely among them. It is therefore more difficult for outsiders to
corroborate that the dangers they are warned against come directly
from Israel, not the hapless people they have besieged. The daily
threat to life and property is growing not abating.
For those who haven't noticed, there is no sign of this process coming
to an end. Instead, in addition to the bizarre demand that Hamas
accept the two-state solution that Israel has categorically rejected
and each day renders even more geographically impossible, another two
demands are added to it: Hamas must recognize Israel and it must
renounce violence. In other words, it must recognize a state whose
policies and whose leaders have worked tirelessly for decades to deny,
undo, renounce, prevent and reject the existence both of Palestinians
and of Palestine --not only in the present and future but also through
erasing the past. Still, our media take it upon themselves to show the
world a circus-mirror reality, grotesque in its distortions, in which
a democratically elected government-without-a-state and its trampled,
largely destitute people are made out to be holding hostage the
hoodlums that are busy stomping them to death.
While they are being stomped, shot, beaten, demolished, assassinated,
intimidated, robbed, despoiled, starved, uprooted, dispossessed,
harassed, insulted and killed with bullets, missiles, armored
bulldozers, tanks, helicopter gun-ships, cluster-bombs, fleshettes,
fighter-bombers, semi-automatic submachine guns, sonic booms, tear
gas, electrified fences, blockades, closures and walls, they must
renounce violence so that the hoodlums won't get hurt. If they defend
themselves they lose. If they complain, they are insincere; if they
ask for something in return, they are untrustworthy; If they ask for a
fair hearing, they are advancing an "agenda;" If they hit back
randomly, they are an instrument of terro! r. So when the furies of
the thousands of dead, tens of thousands of wounded and detained, and
millions of bound and gagged rise up together in a whirlwind to
protest, they will be pointed to as evidence of innate evil that must
justifiably be contained, justifiably occupied, with justified
indignation and bottomless financial aid.
Hamas' reward for coming to power just in time to provide all the
aspiring Sharons the most perfect, served-up-on-a-silver-platter
pretext for continuing their well-worn policies with a vengeance, has
been for the Kadima party -- the party of the future-- to announce
that it will put the Palestinians on a starvation diet for presuming
to exercise their rights. Hamas' reward for verifying the smashing
success of Israel's goal to destroy Fatah has been Israel's insistence
that it abide by all the agreements, treaties and accords that Fatah,
essentially the PA, signed but which Israel shredded page by p! age.
With every new brick laid for the settlements, every new road pav ed
to Ariel, Maale Adumim, Illit, Gush Etzion and beyond, with every
permit denied for work, education, medical care and travel, every
truck left waiting with rotting produce at Sufa and Karni, every tax
and customs dollar stolen from a people interned on their own land,
Israel parades its contempt for human decency and gets standing
ovations in the US Congress and elsewhere.
When Osama Bin Laden opines that it is legitimate for al-Qaida to
murder Americans because, as citizens in a democratic country, they
are responsible for their government, "civilized" society erupts,
appropriately, in indignation. When Dov Weisglass and his smug,
sadistic associates advocate appalling varieties of collective
punishment against Palestinians for having had the audacity to
democratically replace the failed Fatah with Hamas, "civilized"
society nods its head in sanctimonious approval.
For those who haven't noticed, Israel opposes a two-state solu! tion.
It also opposes a one-state and a bi-national state, a federated
secular state, and the zillion interim-state solutions that have been
drawn up and debated and argued over the years. It opposes them
because it opposes the presence of another people on land it has
claimed as the exclusive patrimony of the Jews. This has to be the
starting point for effective activism against the racist and hegemonic
vision that Israel is implementing and the US guaranteeing, not
faraway discussions on the most ideal solution. An effective
opposition must not retreat into a slumbering or sidetracked lethal
indifference.
Jennifer Loewenstein is a Visiting Research Fellow at Oxford
University's Refugee Studies Centre. She has lived and worked in Gaza
City, Beirut and Jerusalem and has traveled extensively throughout the
Middle East, where she has worked as a free-lance journalist and a
human rights activist.
http://www.counterpunch.org/loewenstein02242006.html
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Just some favorite sites:
http://www.antiwar.com/
http://www.ussliberty.org/
http://www.lewrockwell.com/ips/lobe-arch.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAoe26MaTew&search=fox%20news
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