Editor’s Note:
Those who are reading Viewpoint for the first time may
seem surprised that the central issue in the Middle East
is the Palestinian-Israeli issue. Why? The perception in
the region is that tyranny has been forced on them by
past AND PRESENT empires. The Arab and Muslim people
acknowledge that their governments are all
non-democratic.
This is not a new idea.
The model imposition is literally the way Israel was
imposed upon the region. The world did this for reasons
of oil (but that is for another issue), but the people
know that they were powerless against the forces that
conspired to carve an ethno-national state in their
midst.
Israel’s main ideology is called Zionism. Simply put,
Zionism is an ideology that can embrace right-wing
Likudniks to left-wing socialists. The animating
character that binds the political spectrum is that
citizenship is based upon religious or ethnic
characteristics.
South Africa was based upon this misguided philosophy.
The pre-civil war South was based upon this notion. Nazi
Germany was based upon this same ethno-national right.
Your bloodline in all of these cases determines the
privileges of the state.
Today we have a commentary by Akiva Eldar writes about
Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon’s vision for the
future. There is an increasingly rising tide in the
world that is recognizing Israel’s UNDERLYING ideology
of Zionism as the unsustainable component in Middle East
politics. We heartily concur and hope that the last
vestige of blood and soil nationalism creeps into its
certain demise.
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In the eyes of the beholder- by Akiva Eldar
In winter 2001, shortly before Ariel Sharon defeated
Ehud Barak in elections for prime minister, I had the
opportunity to personally hear Sharon's vision of a
Palestinian state.
Sharon removed a large map of Israel from a corner
cabinet in his modest Likud headquarters office in Tel
Aviv and pointed to the areas he proposed to annex to
Israel. Moving from north to south, the pointer in his
hand went from the Ariel bloc deep in the West Bank to
greater Jerusalem, and from there to the Etzion bloc and
Hebron.
Then the pointer hovered over the Jordan Valley, from
Bet Shean to the Dead Sea. These regions, Sharon
explained, were vital to Israel's security. They could
not be conceded even in return for the best of peace
agreements.
I asked Sharon if he knew any Palestinian who would
accept a state made up of three enclaves bereft of
territorial contiguity.
He replied that that problem had preoccupied Mahmoud
Abbas when he examined the very same map during one of
his visits to Sharon's Sycamore Ranch. "I told him,"
Sharon related, "that there are places where we drive
underneath Palestinian territory, such as the tunnel
road to the Etzion bloc. We can implement the same
arrangement - tunnels or bridges – in other places as
well."
In the course of time, following US President George W.
Bush's presentation of his vision of a Palestinian
state, Sharon, who by then had become prime minister,
termed this idea (which in private conversations he used
to compare to the "Bantustan" model of apartheid South
Africa) "transportation contiguity." Such semantic
exercises serve Sharon in bridging the gap between his
aspiration that Israel hold on to at least half the West
Bank, the international consensus that the Palestinians
deserve an independent state, and Israel's demographic
interests.
After the Oslo Accords Sharon gradually recognized that
terms like "self government" and "autonomy" had become
outmoded as Israeli models for a long-term solution. He
realized that the interim agreement had, in fact, turned
the territories classified as "area A" into autonomous
regions, and that under a final status agreement it
would be necessary to go one step further.
Sharon's decision to pronounce the words "Palestinian
state"
was greeted in Israel and the world with great
excitement; it even helped pave the way for the Labor
Party to join Sharon's first government. So joyful was
the response that the public failed to notice that,
beyond the headlines, it was hard to find in the details
of Sharon's plan any resemblance to the standard
definition of a "state."
Few, for example, bothered to search the globe for a
sovereign state all of whose land links to the outside
world were controlled by another state. (Sharon insists
that even under a final status accord, Israel will
control all border transit points of the Palestinian
"state.")
The proof that nothing has really changed in Sharon's
mind is provided by the course of the separation barrier
and the continuous expansion of the settlements in the
three areas that the prime minister seeks to annex to
Israel. And even a meager Palestinian state would only
be permitted by Sharon to emerge after 15, 20 or even 50
years of interim arrangements.
It is hard to find any bridge that could conceivably
link Sharon's vision of a Palestinian state to that of
Palestinian President Yasser Arafat. The latter's room
for flexibility does not exceed 2-3 percent of West Bank
territory, and even that would be part of a one-on-one
swap in terms of the size and quality of land involved.
The Palestinian approach has not changed since the
Algiers declaration of 1988 that endorsed UN Security
Council resolutions 242 and 338.
Then, the Palestinian National Council gave Arafat a
mandate to make concessions only against the PLO's
original demands for "greater Palestine" and for total
compliance with the right of return for the 1948
refugees. Throughout all the final-status discussions,
from the talks that preceded the Camp David summit in
July 2000 through to the unofficial Geneva accord of
late 2003, not a single Palestinian negotiator was
prepared even to look at a map that did not give the
Palestinian state territorial contiguity and full access
to its capital in East Jerusalem.
The letter of April 14, 2004, that Bush delivered to
Sharon in order to help him gain Likud approval for his
Gaza disengagement plan indicated that Bush's vision of
a Palestinian state is closer to that of Arafat.
Bush rejected Sharon's request to cancel the US
administration's opposition to the expansion of
settlements in the three settlement blocs; he only
accepted recognition of the demographic reality created
in the territories since 1967.
That reality can be translated into a final-status
agreement for the establishment of a Palestinian state
in
94-96 percent of the Occupied Territories, with fair
land swaps. That was the vision of former President Bill
Clinton
- a vision that was thwarted by violence and
shortsightedness.
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Akiva Eldar is a political columnist and editorial
writer for Haaretz. He was previously the paper's
diplomatic and Washington correspondent.
***********************************************************
Other articles on the Middle East worth a look:
US Backs down on War Crimes immunity
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/0624041.shtml
South Korean beheaded
http://www.yellowtimes.org/article.php?sid=1987
Guantanamo Detainee list by country
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/nation/guantanamo_nationalities.html
Bush’s 9-11 Cover Up
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/06/18/911/index.html |