THERE WILL BE NO MIDDLE EAST PEACE WITHOUT A PALESTINIAN STATE
BY
ALLAN C.BROWNFELD
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U.S.
foreign policy for many years, under both Republican and Democratic
administrations, has supported the creation of a Palestinian state in
the West Bank, which Israel has occupied in violation of international
law for more than 50 years.
Israeli
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress
in July. He did not say a word about the creation of a Palestinian
state. In fact, he opposes the very idea of a Palestinian state and
members of his Cabinet publicly declare their hope to annex the West
Bank and expel its indigenous Palestinian residents.
Israel
is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in history. There is a
clear disconnect between U.S. policy and U.S. support for an Israeli
government which totally rejects the creation of a Palestinian state and
which has created a system on the West Bank which Amnesty
International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights
organization, all call “apartheid.”
In
July, Israel approved the largest seizure of land in the West Bank in
over three decades. Israel’s aggressive expansion in the West Bank
reflects the settler community’s strong influence on the Netanyahu
government, the most right-wing and nationalist in the country’s
history. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself, notes
the Associated Press, “has turbocharged the policy of expansion, seizing
new authorities over settlement development and saying he aims to
solidify Israel’s hold on the territory and prevent the creation of a
Palestinian state.”
Authorities
recently approved the appropriation of 12.7 square kilometers (nearly 5
square miles) of land in the Jordan Valley. Data from the group Peace
Now indicate that it was the largest single appropriation approved since
the 1993 Oslo Accords at the start of the peace process. Settlement
monitors said the land grab connects Israeli settlements along a key
corridor bordering Jordan, a move they said undermines the prospect of a
contiguous Palestinian state.
U.N.
Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric called it “a step in the wrong
direction,” adding that “the direction we want to be heading is to find a
negotiated two-state solution.”
The
newly seized land is in an area of the West Bank where, even before the
Israel war with Hamas, settler violence was displacing communities of
Palestinians. That violence has surged in recent days. Settlers have
carried out more than one thousand attacks on Palestinians in the West
Bank, causing deaths and damaging property, according to the U.N. That
makes 2024 the peak year for land seizure on the West Bank, according to
Peace Now.
About 700,000
Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, reports the
U.N.’s human rights office. The Netanyahu government has promoted
settlements, which much of the international community condemns as a
violation of international law. Settlers are trying to expand those
settlements by building a network of smaller outposts, without
government approval and eating into Palestinian land.
Nadar
Weiman was an Israeli Special forces soldier between 2005 and 2008 and
served all over the West Bank. Now he is deputy director of Breaking
The Silence, an organization of Israeli Army veterans that advocates an
end to Israel’s military occupation of the territory. Weiman says
settlers are stepping up attacks on Palestinian communities while the
world’s attention has been focused on the war in Gaza. Since Oct. 7, 16
Palestinian communities of sheepherders have fled. He says, “Sixteen,
that’s a number I never thought I would say.”
As
of July, the U.N. humanitarian affairs office has recorded 650 attacks
by Israeli settlers against Palestinians since Oct. 7. It says settlers
have killed at least 9 Palestinians in the territory and Israeli
security forces have killed more than 400. In Zanuta, Neiman saw the
local school bulldozed by settlers. “why demolish the school?” he asks.
“I’ll tell you why. Because you want families to feel they are not
safe here. With no school, the kids cannot return. And if you don’t
have kids, you don’t have life. It’s not just about stealing
livestock. It’s about destroying the sense of being safe.”
Israeli
Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declares: “Each square meter of land
we take from Palestinians will never go back to them. It’s a zero sum
game.”
B’Tselem, the
Israeli human rights group, says tha Israel also restricts Palestinian
use of land in the West Bank by declaring areas as military firing
zones, nature reserves and archeological sites. Israel uses the zoning
to justify its refusal of Palestinians’ building plans for homes linked
to water and electricity infrastructure.
Editorially,
the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (July 21, 2024) declares that, “Israel’s
continued denial of the reality of the occupation will be its ruin…The
opinion by the International Court of Justice revealed nothing to
Israelis that they do not already know…The opinion shatters the lie that
the occupation is only temporary and intended only for security
purposes. This is the lie Israelis told themselves during decades of
occupation while they seized more Palestinian land and built settlements
on it.”
In the view of
Haaretz, the decision by the International Court of Justice “bursts this
bubble of lies and views various acts of the Israeli government as
annexation of the territory…What difference is there between the far
right’s calls of ‘sovereignty now,’ Benjamin Netanyahu’s babble about
the impossibility of denying ‘the legal right of Israelis to live in
their own communities in our ancestral home.’ Gantz’s nonsense about
the ‘judicialization of a political-diplomatic conflict’ and the
outrageous moralist preaching of Lapid, who declared the opinion,
‘detached, one-sided and tainted by antisemitism and lacking an
understanding of the reality on the ground.’”
In
the view of Haaretz and more and more Israelis, “Israel’s working
assumption that the world will continue to ignore the occupation has
been shattered in recent months. If Israel continues to ignore what
the world tells it, it may wake up to a reality in which it is boycotted
and ostracized like apartheid-era South Africa.”
Few
now remember that Israel was a close friend of apartheid-era South
Africa. In fact, it was South Africa which provided Israel with the
uranium it needed to develop nuclear weapons. South Africa was lucky to
have leaders like
F.W.de
Klerk and Nelson Mandela, who brought apartheid to an end and received
the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so. Sadly, Israel has leaders who seek
to annex the occupied West Bank and remove its indigenous Palestinian
population. Ending the Israeli version of apartheid is the opposite of
their agenda.
The speech
Prime Minister Netanyahu gave before the Congress, and for which he was
enthusiastically applauded, said nothing whatever about his government’s
treatment of Palestinians—-what respected Israeli historians such as
Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe have called “ethnic cleansing.” He said
nothing about creating a Palestinian state, a bipartisan cornerstone of
U.S. policy. One congressional observer, Sen.Peter Welch (D-VT)
provided this assessment: “This is the moment for the leader of Israel
to lay out a vision for the future. He didn’t. He offered no road
map. He hadn’t changed a bit.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.),
who
chairs a Senate committee on the Middle East, said of Netanyahu, “I
think his plan for a while has been to have no workable plan.”
For
U.S. policymakers to advocate the creation of a Palestinian state but
to continue to provide massive U.S. aid to a government which has
illegally occupied the West Bank for more than fifty years and openly
states that there will never be a Palestinian state, makes no policy
sense at all. Finally, the rest of the world is paying attention to the
hypocrisy involved in our refusal to advance a policy we know is
essential if peace——for both Israelis and Palestinians—-is to be
achieved.
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Allan
C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of
ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. (
www.acjna.org).