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January 9, 2006
How can Ariel Sharon and Israel can be described as the main proponent of peace in the Middle East, given Israel's ongoing removal of the Palestinians from what will soon be a greater Israel, its occupation of the Palestinian territories in the West Bank and Gaza, and Israeli aggression against the Palestinian population in West Bank and Gaza for nearly thirty-eight years? Robert Fisk's judgement.
The peace move is the answer in the Australian media. As Lenin's Tomb states it:
Ariel Sharon has had a stroke, and suddenly the Israeli-Palestine conflict is supposed to be set go aflame again... Sharon had a plan for peace, and now it could all be in ruins, wrecked by a tiny clot of blood, and woe betide the Palestinians, woe betide Israel.
The peace plan--ie., the withdrawal from Gaza--- is described by Dov Weisglass, Sharon's chief political strategist and advisor, as follows:
The disengagement is actually formaldehyde. It supplies the amount of formaldehyde...The political process is the establishment of a Palestinian state with all the security risks that entails. The political process is the evacuation of settlements, it's the return of refugees, it's the partition of Jerusalem. And all that has now been frozen....And when you freeze that process you prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state and you prevent a discussion about the refugees, the borders and Jerusalem. Effectively, this whole package that is called the Palestinian state, with all that it entails, has been removed from our agenda indefinitely. And all this with authority and permission. All with a presidential blessing and the ratification of both houses of Congress. What more could have been anticipated? What more could have been given to the settlers?
This is not a policy to facilitate the establishment of a genuinely independent Palestinian state or Israel's withdrawal to the 1967 borders.
The U.S government provides the ideological, military, and diplomatic cover for Israel's occupation and its steady stream of human rights violations in the occupied territories. The Israeli government's illegal occupation and oppression of the Palestinians in West Bank and Gaza has continued because Israel is militarily and diplomatically supported by its superpower patron, the United States. The strategy is to exempt Israel from the basic requirements of international law and to shield Israel from the condemnation and sanctions its behaviour deserves.
Power politics determines the rules and the discourses through which to apprehend reality. We in Australia view the Palestinian Israeli conflict through a US lens. That discourse, at its crudest, is totalitrarian: it is one that says the Jews are victims not perpetrators; Israel is vulnerable; the Arab world's resistance and anger toward Israel can only be blamed on an inexplicable anti-Semitism; and anyone who disagrees with us is an anti-Semite. So speaks the pro-Israel lobby.
The reality is that the conflict is a straightforward one arising from resistance to occupation : one marked by the disposession of an indigenous people (the uprooting of the Palestinians in 1948 1948), an occupation by military conquest, and exercising control over the Palestinians in the occupied territories through the use of torture, political liquidations, unlawful and deliberate killings, arbitrary detentions (by the tens of thousands), house demolitions, use of civilians as human shields, attacks on ambulances, and what Amnesty calls "reckless shooting, shelling and aerial bombardment of residential areas". Zionist colonisation is the basis for the criticism of Israeli policy; a criticism based on making distinctions between Judaism and Zionism, Jews and Israel, and politics and ethnicity.
Evan Jones has a great post on this over at Alert and Alarmed consisting of extracts from Uri Davis Apartheid Israel (2003)
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