Rattling the Cage: Quicksand in Yesha

Aug. 6, 2008

Larry Derfner , THE JERUSALEM POST

Ehud Olmert said it about as well as anybody. "We're nearing the point where more and more Palestinians are going to say: 'We're convinced. We agree with [Avigdor] Lieberman. There isn't room for two states between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. All we want is the right to vote.'

"The day that happens," Olmert continued, "we will have lost everything. Even when they commit terrorism, it's hard for us to convince the world that we're right. It'll be that much harder when they're demanding equal voting rights. I dread the thought that the leaders of the struggle against us will be the liberal Jewish organizations that carried the fight against apartheid in South Africa."

That was from an interview with Yediot Aharonot in December 2003. Since then, Ariel Sharon made the good faith effort to avoid Olmert's nightmare scenario by getting us out of Gaza. Then Olmert wanted to go further with his "convergence plan" to withdraw from about 90% of the West Bank. But the Second Lebanon War, the Kassams from Gaza and the rise of Hamas doomed that idea. Instead, the settlements and outposts in the West Bank have only been growing, and there's no end to their growth in sight.

--MORE--

July 24, 2008

Arvind Sivaramakrishnan

The obstacles to a single state founded on justice for all its citizens are formidable. In particular, the Zionist project will have to be stopped.

At first sight, the idea of a single state in Israel-Palestine is barely intelligible; the region is permeated by bitterness and hate, everyday life there involves pervasive fear and violence, and there is calculated interference by foreign lobbies and other states. Even the most conciliatory positions seem to offer some form of two-state solution.

Nevertheless, many are now advocating a single-state solution. Four of the most authoritative proponents of the idea gathered recently for a public debate, the first in a planned series on Israel-Palestine, hosted by two voluntary campus groups at the University of Southampton, namely Amnesty International and the One State Group. With Dr. Oren Ben-Dor in the chair, Professor Ilan Pappe, who has been called Israel’s bravest historian and is the author of The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine, explored the issues in the company of Dr. Ghada Karmi, who — like Prof. Pappe — is at the University of Exeter, Professor Smadar Lavie of Macalester College, Minnesota, and Dr. Nur Masalha of St. Mary’s College in the University of Surrey.

All the arguments were founded on the idea of justice as central to the ending of violence; this, as Dr. Ben-Dor said, would involve redeeming past injustices without perpetrating new ones, and require constitutional and other institutions. The delivery of justice, Dr. Karmi noted, would require conditions in which Palestinians could lead normal lives in their homeland, and could be reunited with their displaced kith and kin.

--MORE--

Palestinians are increasingly rejecting the crumbs of a two-state solution in favour of justice for all in a single state, Palestine, writes Khaled Amayreh in Ramallah

As Israel ostentatiously celebrates the passage of 60 years since its creation in Palestine in 1948, more than nine million Palestinians at home and in exile are commemorating the Nakba, the violent seizure of their ancestral homeland by Zionist Jews and the dispossession, expulsion and dispersion of the bulk of Palestinians to the four corners of the globe.

This year, activities are taking place in many parts of the world where Palestinian refugees and expatriates reside, dreaming of and awaiting a return to their homeland that appears nowhere on the horizon of political reality.

Palestinians, irrespective of their political affiliations, are not only reasserting the legal and moral status of their right to return to the homes and villages from which they were expelled at gunpoint, or otherwise made to flee 60 years ago, but are also emphasising to all who will listen, including their own leaders, that the right of return remains -- and will always be -- the heart, soul and centrepiece of the Palestinian issue.

--MORE-

D.Eyad El Sarraj

link

The Sydney Morning Herald.

Ali Abunimah

May 13, 2008

This month Israel marks the 60th anniversary of its founding. But amid the festivities, including visits by international celebrities and politicians, there is deep unease - Israel has skeletons in its closet and anxieties about an uncertain future which make many Israelis question whether the state will celebrate an 80th birthday.

Official Israel remains in complete denial that the birth it celebrates is inextricably linked with the near destruction of the vibrant Palestinian culture and society that had existed until then. It's not an unfamiliar dilemma for settler states. The United States where I live, like Australia, has found that even the passage of centuries cannot absolve a nation from confronting the crimes committed at its founding.

There are only two real options: to deny history and take comfort in an airbrushed story that paints Israelis as brave, divinely inspired pioneers in a desert devoid of indigenous people and beset by external enemies, or to own up to the consequences and support the enormous redress needed to bring justice and peace.

--MORE--

--MORE--

By Saree Makdisi

May 11, 2008

There is no longer a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Forget the endless arguments about who offered what and who spurned whom and whether the Oslo peace process died when Yasser Arafat walked away from the bargaining table or whether it was Ariel Sharon's stroll through the Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem that did it in.

All that matters are the facts on the ground, of which the most important is that -- after four decades of intensive Jewish settlement in the Palestinian territories it occupied during the 1967 war -- Israel has irreversibly cemented its grip on the land on which a Palestinian state might have been created.

Sixty years after Israel was created and Palestine was destroyed, then, we are back to where we started: Two populations inhabiting one piece of land. And if the land cannot be divided, it must be shared. Equally.

--MORE--

By Roger Tucker

09 March, 2008

In response to Dan Lieberman's excellent article of May 3rd, 'The Harsh Reality Of The Middle East Conflict', I would suggest that we might as well face the fact that there is only one "solution" that merits the use of that term. The practical argument for the One State Solution, as he notes, is that there is no viable alternative. It is not a question of whether the one or two state options is "preferable." Anyone truly familiar with the situation knows that Israel, as currently constituted, will not and cannot accept either possibility without committing political suicide. Although they would happily agree to some sort of Palestinian entity consisting of scattered and helpless bantustans, totally dependent on Israel's whims, anything resembling a coherent, sustainable nation state would have to be imposed on them by force. And where would that come from? It's simply not going to happen. A unified, democratic state with equal rights for all would totally subvert the first principle of Zionism, and as long as Zionists are comfortably in charge in Israel that's not going to happen either. Barring either of these two options, we are faced with endless conflict, the continuing ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians, and, as Mr. Lieberman suggests, the likelihood of nuclear war.

Let's back up and look at the root of the problem, because if it can't be solved at this basic level then it can't be solved at all. Anything else would be like applying a bandaid to a malignant tumor. Zionism required that a European ethnocentric colony be established by force in the most conceivably hostile place in the world. That was and continues to be the heart of the matter. The world made a horrible mistake by allowing this to happen - how it was allowed to happen is beyond the scope of this article - and that mistake must be rectified. For all our sakes, including Israelis, the "Jewish State" must be wiped off the map, if I may say so. People recoil at that phrase, due to Zionist conditioning, and think it must involve some unthinkable bloodbath (as if what's going on isn't abhorrent enough). It doesn't mean that at all. It simply means that a genuine, pluralistic democracy must be established there. Anyone who is truly "progressive,' or genuinely conservative, or simply pragmatic for that matter, must see that this is simple common sense and that it conforms with all the established norms of the so-called civilized world (as numerous UN resolutions substantiate, all vetoed by the US).

Mr. Lieberman states that proponents of the two-state solution "sense the one-state solution is unacceptable." Unacceptable to whom? Zionists of course. Unfortunately - and this is the crux of the problem - the Left, both in the West and in Israel, remains in the thrall of the Zionist axiom that the Jewish State has a "right to exist." Is that really true? They state it as an axiom, but what does that mean anyway, the right to exist, as if the State of Israel were a "person," a sentient being that we are morally bound to protect? It is just a political arrangement, created and sustained by force and propaganda, with no more inviolable "right to exist" than the current regimes in Burma or North Korea. The "progressives" who bewail the plight of the Palestinians but defend Israel's right to exist should be ashamed of themselves. They are enablers of a toxic political regime that seriously threatens our world.

--MORE--

By Richard Boudreaux and Ashraf Khalil

Los Angeles Times Staff Writers

May 8, 2008

JERUSALEM — Frustrated by years of on-and-off peace talks with Israel, Palestinians are losing hope for an independent homeland, and some are proposing a radically different cause: a shared state with equal rights for Palestinians and Jews.

A "two-state solution" has been the basis for Israeli-Palestinian negotiations for nearly 15 years and remains the declared aim of both groups' highest elected leaders and the Bush administration. But its advocates are increasingly on the defensive, and not just against militant Islamists and Jewish settlers who have long opposed partitioning the land.

Majorities on both sides dismiss the current U.S.-backed peace talks as futile. And a small but growing number of moderate Palestinians contend that Israel's terms for independence offer less than they could gain in a single democratic state combining Israel, the West Bank and the Gaza Strip.

As a result, the 60th anniversary this month of Israel's birth is a time of insecurity and flux. Conventional wisdom about the long-standing formula for peace is being turned on its head.

--MORE--