Israel Has No Intention of Granting a Palestinian State

If Hamas Did Not Exist

By JENNIFER LOEWENSTEIN

Let
us get one thing perfectly straight. If the wholesale mutilation and
degradation of the Gaza Strip is going to continue; if Israel’s will is
at one with that of the United States; if the European Union, Russia,
the United Nations and all the international legal agencies and
organizations spread across the globe are going to continue to sit by
like hollow mannequins doing nothing but making repeated “calls” for a
“ceasefire” on “both sides”; if the cowardly, obsequious and supine
Arab States are going to stand by watching their brethren get
slaughtered by the hour while the world’s bullying Superpower eyes them
threateningly from Washington lest they say something a little to their
disliking; then let us at least tell the truth why this hell on earth
is taking place.

The
state terror unleashed from the skies and on the ground against the
Gaza Strip as we speak has nothing to do with Hamas. It has nothing to
do with “Terror”. It has nothing to do with the long-term “security” of
the Jewish State or with Hizbullah or Syria or Iran except insofar as
it is aggravating the conditions that have led up to this crisis today.
It has nothing to do with some conjured-up “war” – a cynical and
overused euphemism that amounts to little more the wholesale
enslavement of any nation that dares claim its sovereign rights; that
dares assert that its resources are its own; that doesn’t want one of
the Empire’s obscene military bases sitting on its cherished land.

This
crisis has nothing to do with freedom, democracy, justice or peace. It
is not about Mahmoud Zahhar or Khalid Mash’al or Ismail Haniyeh. It is
not about Hassan Nasrallah or Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. These are all
circumstantial players who have gained a role in the current tempest
only now that the situation has been allowed for 61 years to develop into the catastrophe that it is today. The
Islamist factor has colored and will continue to color the atmosphere
of the crisis; it has enlisted the current leaders and mobilized wide
sectors of the world’s population. The primary symbols today are
Islamic – the mosques, the Qur’an, the references to the Prophet
Muhammad and to Jihad. But these symbols could disappear and the
impasse would continue.

There
was a time when Fatah and the PFLP held the day; when few Palestinians
wanted anything to do with Islamist policies and politics. Such
politics have nothing to do with primitive rockets being fired over the
border, or smuggling tunnels and black-market weapons; just as Arafat’s
Fatah had little to do with stones and suicide bombings. The
associations are coincidental; the creations of a given political
environment. They are the result of something entirely different than
what the lying politicians and their analysts are telling you. They
have become part of the landscape of human events in the modern Middle
East today; but incidentals wholly as lethal, or as recalcitrant,
deadly, angry or incorrigible could just as soon have been in their
places.

Strip
away the clichés and the vacuous newspeak blaring out across the
servile media and its pathetic corps of voluntary state servants in the
Western world and what you will find is the naked desire for hegemony;
for power over the weak and dominion over the world’s wealth. Worse yet
you will find that the selfishness, the hatred and indifference, the
racism and bigotry, the egotism and hedonism that we try so hard to
cover up with our sophisticated jargon, our refined academic theories
and models actually help to guide our basest and ugliest desires. The
callousness with which we in indulge in them all are endemic to our
very culture; thriving here like flies on a corpse.

Strip
away the current symbols and language of the victims of our selfish and
devastating whims and you will find the simple, impassioned and
unaffected cries of the downtrodden; of the ‘wretched of the earth’
begging you to cease your cold aggression against their children and
their homes; their families and their villages; begging you to leave
them alone to have their fish and their bread, their oranges, their
olives and their thyme; asking you first politely and then with
increasing disbelief why you cannot let them live undisturbed on the
land of their ancestors; unexploited, free of the fear of expulsion; of
ravishment and devastation; free of permits and roadblocks and
checkpoints and crossings; of monstrous concrete walls, guard towers,
concrete bunkers, and barbed wire; of tanks and prisons and torture and
death. Why is life without these policies and instruments of hell
impossible?

The
answer is because Israel has no intention of allowing a viable,
sovereign Palestinian state on its borders. It had no intention of
allowing it in 1948 when it grabbed 24 per cent more land than what it
was allotted legally, if unfairly, by UN Resolution 181. It had no
intention of allowing it throughout the massacres and ploys of the
1950s. It had no intention of allowing two states when it conquered the
remaining 22 per cent of historic Palestine in 1967 and reinterpreted
UN Security Council Resolution 248 to its own liking despite the
overwhelming international consensus stating that Israel would receive
full international recognition within secure and recognized borders if
it withdrew from the lands it had only recently occupied.

It
had no intention of acknowledging Palestinian national rights at the
United Nations in 1974, when –alone with the United States—it voted
against a two-state solution. It had no intention of allowing a
comprehensive peace settlement when Egypt stood ready to deliver but
received, and obediently accepted, a separate peace exclusive of the
rights of Palestinians and the remaining peoples of the region. It had
no intention of working toward a just two-state solution in 1978 or
1982 when it invaded, fire-bombed, blasted and bulldozed Beirut so that
it might annex the West Bank without hassle. It had no intention of
granting a Palestinian state in 1987 when the first Intifada spread
across occupied Palestine, into the Diaspora and the into the spirits
of the global dispossessed, or when Israel deliberately aided the newly
formed Hamas movement so that it might undermine the strength of the
more secular-nationalist factions.

Israel
had no intention of granting a Palestinian state at Madrid or at Oslo
where the PLO was superseded by the quivering, quisling Palestinian
Authority, too many of whose cronies grasped at the wealth and prestige
it gave them at the expense of their own kin. As Israel beamed into the
world’s satellites and microphones its desire for peace and a two-state
solution, it more than doubled the number of illegal Jewish settlements
on the ground in the West Bank and around East Jerusalem, annexing them
as it built and continues to build a superstructure of bypass roads and
highways over the remaining, severed cities and villages of earthly
Palestine. It has annexed the Jordan valley, the international border
of Jordan, expelling any ‘locals’ inhabiting that land. It speaks with
a viper’s tongue over the multiple amputee of Palestine whose head
shall soon be severed from its body in the name of justice, peace and
security.

Through
the home demolitions, the assaults on civil society that attempted to
cast Palestinian history and culture into a chasm of oblivion; through
the unspeakable destruction of the refugee camp sieges and
infrastructure bombardments of the second Intifada, through
assassinations and summary executions, past the grandiose farce of
disengagement and up to the nullification of free, fair and democratic
Palestinian elections Israel has made its view known again and again in
the strongest possible language, the language of military might, of
threats, intimidation, harassment, defamation and degradation.

Israel,
with the unconditional and approving support of the United States, has
made it dramatically clear to the entire world over and over and over
again, repeating in action after action that it will accept no viable
Palestinian state next to its borders. What will it take for the rest
of us to hear? What will it take to end the criminal silence of the
‘international community’? What will it take to see past the lies and
indoctrination to what is taking place before us day after day in full
view of the eyes of the world? The more horrific the actions on the
ground, the more insistent are the words of peace. To listen and watch
without hearing or seeing allows the indifference, the ignorance and
complicity to continue and deepens with each grave our collective shame.

The
destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept no
authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately
control. Any individual, leader, faction or movement that fails to
accede to Israel’s demands or that seeks genuine sovereignty and the
equality of all nations in the region; any government or popular
movement that demands the applicability of international humanitarian
law and of the universal declaration of human rights for its own people
will be unacceptable for the Jewish State. Those dreaming of one state
must be forced to ask themselves what Israel would do to a population
of 4 million Palestinians within its borders when it commits on a daily, if not hourly basis, crimes against their collective humanity while they live alongside
its borders? What will suddenly make the raison d’etre, the
self-proclaimed purpose of Israel’s reason for being change if the
Palestinian territories are annexed to it outright?

The
lifeblood of the Palestinian National Movement flows through the
streets of Gaza today. Every drop that falls waters the soil of
vengeance, bitterness and hatred not only in Palestine but across the
Middle East and much of the world. We do have a choice over whether or
not this should continue. Now is the time to make it.

Source:counterpunch