In his speech at Bar Ilan University on June 14, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a new Israeli “peace plan,” with preconditions that a Palestinian negotiator must first meet before he could engage in “unconditional” bilateral talks to meet an international demand for the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. His preconditions added to the 14 conditions the former Israeli government of comatose Ariel Sharon attached to Israel’s adoption of the 2003 road map blueprint for peace with the Palestinian side.
Sharon’s conditional approval of the road map has rendered the blueprint as a nonstarter and led to the Israeli military re-occupation of the Palestinian autonomous areas.
Netanyahu demanded that Israel be recognized as “the nation state of the Jewish people” worldwide and not the nation state of the Israelis. His demand was an arrogant precondition ridiculed by Gideon Levy in Haaretz on June 15 as an “excessive demand that Palestinians recognize the Jewish state by one who has failed to recognize the Palestinians as a people.” Israeli analyst M.J. Rosenberg wrote on June 19: Acceptance of Israel as a “Jewish state” is a nonstarter at this point. And Netanyahu knows it. If that is a precondition for negotiations, there will be no negotiations. But without any definition of borders and with Netanyahu committed to expanding settlements in the West Bank, how can anyone seriously expect Palestinians to recognize Israel as a “Jewish state?”
Palestinian Authority's Prime Minister Salam Fayyad noted in a speech at Al-Quds University on June 22 that his Israeli counterpart’s speech missed all reference to the road map blueprint as well as to the thorny issue of expanding settlements and described the speech as “a new blow to efforts to salvage the peace process.” Walid Jumblat, a leading figure of the March 14 bloc, which recently won the Lebanese elections, lambasted the speech as dragging the region into a “dangerous stage” and one that “completely crippled” any possibility to reach a peace settlement.
WHEN Netanyahu makes Palestinian recognition of Israel as a “Jewish state” as the cornerstone of his “peace” policy and has Avigdor Lieberman as the foreign minister of his ruling coalition, he officially raises ethnic cleansing to the level of state policy, and may be this is why French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly urged visiting Netanyahu on June 30 to replace his top diplomat and “to get rid of that man.” Recognizing Israel as a “Jewish state” should be rejected not only because it politically forecloses whatever chance remains for the resumption of peace talks but more importantly because strategically such a precondition, if it gains international recognition, would inevitably be used by Israel as a casus belli to officially resume and defend its ethnic cleansing of native Arab Palestinians as an internationally-recognized state policy.
Politically, this would rule out the Palestinian refugees’ “Right of Return” and legitimize Lieberman’s “transfer” dreams (expulsion en masse of Israel's Arab — Palestinian citizens as well as Palestinian natives of East Jerusalem).
Czech Republic Foreign Minister Jan Kohout, visiting Israel on June 28, said in an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post: “First we have to understand what is meant by this (Jewish state demand). So far, I can say that I don’t have a clear picture on that. Resolution 181 (UN Resolution 181, also called the 1947 UN Partition Plan) calls for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. But at the same time it gives equal rights to all of its citizens,” said Kohout, who seemed not interested in noting that the Israel recognized by the UN Resolution 181, which at the time had a population of some (500,000) Jews and (438,000) Arab Palestinians, was very much smaller than the one we know now, which enjoys a de facto, but not yet a de jure, international recognition.
TO ethnically cleanse the Palestinians was the very basis of Israel’s raison-d'être. Speaking of the Arabs of Palestine (Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry), Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organization, said: “Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.” The tragic result was summarized by Israel's minister of defense during the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, in an address to the Technion, Haifa, (Haaretz, April 4, 1969): “Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal Al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.”
It seems clear now that the UN General Assembly Resolution 4686 of 1991, which revoked an earlier one equating Zionism with racism (the 1975 Resolution 3379), was a premature measure.
Kohout, whose country was the former rotating president of the European Union, is not alone in demanding to “understand what is meant” by the “Jewish state” precondition. One could not but recall the Venetian word “ghetto,” once meant for the Jews of Europe. The Israeli leadership seems now in the grips of a “ghetto mentality” racing against the modern times of pluralism and coexistence, when nations are moving toward a globalized 21st-century identity of citizenship by allegiance, regardless of race, creed or gender, and at a time when the French translation of Israeli academic Shlomo Sand’s “The Invention of the Jewish People” is granted this year's French prestigious Aujourd'hui Award for a book which argues that Zionism in modern times “invented” the concept of the “Jewish people” as well as their “imaginary” historical connection to Palestine.
Nicola Nasser is an Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit.
