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A just peace or no peace by Robert Fisk
While journalists continue to perpetuate the Potemkin-like landscape
of the Middle East, the truth is, as long as Israel continues to steal
Palestinian territory, it cannot expect Hamas to recognise it as a
state, writes Robert Fisk
April 3, 2006
By Robert Fisk
We have been conned again. The Israeli elections, we are told, mean
that the dream of "Greater Israel" has finally been abandoned.
West Bank settlements will be closed down, just as the Jewish colonies
were uprooted in Gaza last year. The Zionist claim to all of Biblical
Israel has withered away.
Likud, the nightmare party of Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu,
has been smashed by the Gaullist figure of the dying Ariel Sharon,
whose Kadima Party now embraces Ehud Olmert and that decaying symbol
of the Israeli left, Nobel prizewinner Shimon Peres.
This, at least, is the narrative laid down by so many of our
journalists, "analysts" and "commentators". But it is a lie.
Only in paragraph two - or three or four - of the grovelling news
reports from the Middle East do we read that Olmert's not very
impressive election victory will allow him to "redraw" the "frontiers"
of Israel, a decision described as "controversial" - the usual get-out
clause of newspapers that wish to avoid the truth: that Israel is
about to grab more land and claim it to be part of the state of
Israel.
The wall
Yes, true, the smaller and more vulnerable Jewish colonies illegally
built on Palestinian-owned land may be abandoned - stand by for more
of the grief and tears that we witnessed in Gaza. But the rest - the
great semi-circle of concrete that runs around east Jerusalem, for
example - will not be depopulated.
Let's start with the wall. It will soon run from top to bottom of the
occupied Palestinian West Bank - and it is going to stay.
It is higher in the long sectors where it has been completed
(east of Jerusalem, for example) than the Berlin Wall. Yet journalists
go on calling it a "security barrier" or a "fence" - because the
as-yet-uncompleted sectors of the wall are still coils of barbed wire.
This is part of the dream world that editors and reporters have
constructed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
It exists in the same Potemkin landscape that allows journalists to
call the occupied Palestinian territory "disputed territory" - after
former US secretary of state Colin Powell ordered his diplomats in the
region to use this mendacious phrase - and to call Jewish colonies
illegally built on Arab land "settlements" or, my favourites now,
"Jewish neighbourhoods" or "outposts".
It is the same stage on which Israelis are killed by Palestinians,
which they are, but on which Palestinians die in anonymous "clashes".
(With whom - and killed by whom - exactly?)
And each of these little lies, of course, contains a kernel of truth.
The occupied territories are "disputed" between Israelis and
Palestinians, the first claiming that God gave them the land, the
second producing land deeds to prove that the law entitles them to
their own property.
If illegal colonies such as Maale Adumim are built adjacent to
Jerusalem - itself illegally annexed by Israel - then of course they
are "neighbourhoods". And since the wall - which has gobbled up 10%
more Palestinian land for the Israelis - is to prevent suicide bombers
(and has been fairly successful in doing so), it is a "security
barrier".
I seem to recall that the East Germans called the Berlin Wall - or
"Berlin Fence" as I suppose we would have to call it if built by the
Israelis - a "security barrier".
Forget the illegality of occupation, then, and the illegality of
stealing someone else's home and land, and the illegality of building
a wall that thieves yet more property from the 22% of mandate
Palestine that the Palestinians are supposed to negotiate for.
Let me be frank. If I were an Israeli I, too, would have built a wall
to prevent the suicide executioners of Islamic Jihad and, earlier, of
Hamas.
But I would have built it along the international frontier of Israel -
not used the wall as a cheap method of stealing more land.
Illegal
Indeed, under UN Security Council Resolution 242, which is meant to be
the foundation of any peace, the acquisition of land through war is
stated to be illegal. The wall itself is illegal. The International
Court also ruled it to be illegal. And Israel ignored this ruling. So,
of course, did the US.
But now the burden of all this post-election theft is to be placed
upon Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.
This colourless, helpless man, who presided over the Palestinian
Authority's continuing corruption, is supposed to persuade the new
Hamas government to accept all of Israel's land-grabs, to pick up
where the Oslo process left off (which still left Jerusalem
exclusively in Israeli hands), and to abandon all violence - which
means to surrender whenever Israeli troops raid refugee camps or
cities in the West Bank.
The point is that Hamas members have been as assuredly elected
representatives of the Palestinians as Olmert and his forthcoming
allies in government are representatives of Israelis.
But this does not allow them to make any "controversial" plans to
redraw their "border" with Israel, not even to insist that Israel
withdraws - or redeploys - to its internationally recognised borders.
(I'm talking about the pre-1967 frontier, not the 1948 one.)
They cannot demand fulfilment of UN Resolution 242 because President
George W Bush has already made it clear that the vast Jewish colonies
east of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem itself, will remain in Israeli hands.
Sure, 14 of the 24 Hamas ministers have been in Israeli prisons. But
what are Palestinians supposed to think when they realise that 15
Israeli generals have been elected to the new Knesset, along with six
secret service agents?
Yet even this is not the point. If the Israelis want Hamas to
acknowledge the state of Israel, then Hamas should be expected to
acknowledge the state of Israel that exists within its legal frontiers
- not the illegal borders now being dreamt up by Olmert.
We will have to abandon the idea that Ariel Sharon - an unindicted war
criminal after his involvement in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres
- was really going to give up the major Jewish colonies built
illegally on Arab land or the illegal annexation of Jerusalem.
Certainly, Olmert is not going to do that.
He is going to create wider frontiers for Israel and steal - let's
call a spade a spade - more Arab land in doing so.
The US will go along with this next illegal land-grab. But will the
European Union? Will the UN? Will Russia? Will Tony Blair?
Israelis deserve peace and security as much as Palestinians. But "new"
and expanded "controversial" Israeli frontiers will not bring peace or
security to either. - The Independent
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