It was one of those meetings that made you perk up and think that the administration in Washington, after lining up behind Ariel Sharon for so long, refusing to prod him to deliver on his promises, may, just may, be changing its tune and deepening its involvement in the Palestine conflict on a more even-handed keel.
Though not making progress yet, President Bush, signaling a new era of relations with the people of Palestine, welcomed their leader Mahmoud Abbas to the White House last week, with a warm handshake here, a gentle slap on the back there. And let’s not forget the appellation, “a man of courage,” that he conferred on him, or the $50 million in direct aid he promised the Palestinian Authority. (Chump change, to be sure, but hey, it’s the thought that counts, right George?) Washington wants us to believe it means business. The secretary of state, Condi Rice, is slated to visit the region in mid-June, a trip that will be preceded by Elliot Abrams, a top National Security Council aide, and by Assistant Secretary of State William Welch.
Moreover, the role of US Lt. Gen. William E. Ward in the territories, who has been monitoring the Palestinian Authority as it rebuilt its shattered security forces, and who earlier had delivered a positive assessment to the White House — countering Sharon’s repeated claims that the Palestinian leader had “failed to act” — will now expand to include direct mediation between the two sides.
Ward, a no-nonsense military man not given to mincing words, is reported to have berated Israeli officials for harping about Palestinian failures “when they themselves had not met their own commitments.”
Significantly, President Bush, who had sent that infamous 2004 letter to Sharon in which he effectively gave Israel his administration’s go-ahead to keep most of the settlements in the West Bank and to dismiss the Palestinian refugees’ right of return, now appears to have backtracked somewhat, asserting that the issue should be resolved in mutual agreement.
Abbas, a refugee himself who was driven out of his ancestral hometown of Safad in 1948, said in a breakfast meeting with editors the day before he flew back home, that the letter was “perhaps misunderstood by the Israelis since he was reassured about its contents by the president himself”.
Okay, the Palestinian leader is happy about his encounter with George W. Bush; several American officials, including the secretary of state, will visit Palestine soon; the US expands its envoy’s role in the occupied territories; and Palestinians get a hefty check for $50 million to help them rebuild their security infrastructure —the same infrastructure, originally funded for $50 million by the CIA in the 1990s, that was destroyed by the Israelis during the first couple of years of the intifada.
So where do we go from here?
Nowhere that I know of, certainly not in this old geezer’s lifetime.
The Israelis are furiously building away in their largest settlements in the West Bank as they plan to pull 9000 settlers out of Gaza, in a unilateral effort to change not just the demographic but also the political landscape of the Palestine conflict. They are telling the world that Israel has already defined its borders as it expands (the American media love “thickens”) its settlements, especially those near Jerusalem, and completes a route for its separation barrier (the Arab media love “wall of hate”) approved by the Cabinet on Feb. 20.
Meanwhile, the population of the settlements —settlements built on the best land for housing and agriculture —is increasing by about 5.6 percent a year.
“It is the Israeli position,” Sharon said brazenly, standing next to President Bush during a White House visit in April, “that the major Israeli population centers will remain in Israel’s hands under any future final status agreement, with all related consequences.” Israeli population centers? You guessed it, that’s Sharon’s euphemism for settlements.
Yet, time, you see, is not on Israel’s side, not by a long stretch, and Zionist leaders know it.
Palestinians, impoverished and helpless, worry about the present; Israelis, on the other hand, who dictate from a position of unassailable military superiority, worry about the future. They have to worry about how, sooner or later, separation barrier or no separation barrier, settlement expansion or nop settlement expansion, historical imperatives, including the demographic imperative, will catch up with them.
In 1896, Theodore Herzl conned the world by coming up with the pithy phrase, in order to justify the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine, “A land without a people, for a people without a land.”
He and his followers knew, of course, as Benjamin Schwartz, the national editor of The Atlantic wrote recently, “that making an Arab land into a Jewish state required upending demographic reality by implanting a huge foreign population and, in the parlance of the time, ‘transferring’ —voluntarily if possible, forcibly if necessary —large numbers of Palestinian indigenous inhabitants from those areas intended for Jewish statehood.”
Fully 85 years after Zionist immigrants began arriving in large numbers in Palestine, and close to 60 years after the creation of a Jewish state there, the Zionist experiment appears to have a bleak future. So-called “Israeli-Arabs,” that is, Palestinians who were not expelled in the refugee exodus of 1948, now comprise 20 percent of Israel’s population. Demographic projections put the figure at nearly a quarter by 20020 and a third by 2050. In the West Bank and Gaza, likewise, the population is expected to double every generation. And we haven’t even begun to consider an influx of Palestinian exiles from the diaspora who would want to settle in the new Palestine.
A truncated Palestinian state hemmed in on all sides, with scarce water resources, restrictions on its trade, and little control over its border crossings, seaports and airspace, which is what is envisioned for it, will not work. Sooner or later something will give —a binational state by force of reason, or ethnic cleansing by force of arms. Without a doubt, history favors the former.
There was a time when the United States refused to go along with the idea, when it came to Israel, that no nation should be above the law, in this case international law. It obstructed UN resolutions deeming illegal Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem; it ridiculed the Fourth Geneva Convention barring an occupying power from transferring its population to occupied land; and scoffed at condemnations by the international community at the Security Council and elsewhere of Israel’s excesses in the West Bank and Gaza. And now this same United States, the putative “even-handed mediator,” at this late hour, is raising Palestinians’ hopes, with a warm handshake here and a gentle slap on the back there. And, yes, let’s not forget that check for $50 million. So peace lovers of the world unite, you have nothing but your illusions to lose.
As for the Zionist movement, maybe it should have gone for Uganda after all, offered its leadership by Britain in 1903, for it won’t be long before its foray into Palestine, to transform an already inhabited Arab country into an exclusively Jewish state, is proven futile.
