Last Friday, as Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas was meeting with President Bush at the White House, trigger-happy Israeli soldiers at a checkpoint in the West Bank shot and killed a 4-year old boy and injured two young girls, one of them seriously, in a burst of gunfire directed at the pickup truck they were riding in. The vehicle was riddled by bullets from a machine gun fired by one of several soldiers atop an armored personnel carrier. An Israeli spokesman told reporters it was all an unfortunate accident, “an operational error.”
Sure, sure, all seventeen of the bullets fired were just that, an accident. Not a hate crime.
The fact of the matter is that Israel’s notions of “eretz Israel” not only demonize Palestinians as a lower species of men to be subjected to the rule of the gun, but they foster the belief that vacating settlements and effecting a meaningful evacuation of the occupied territories is unthinkable.
Let’s get a grip here. There will be no equitable settlement of the Palestine-Israel conflict in our lifetime. The maximum that Israel, under any government, is prepared to concede in the foreseeable future will not meet the minimum that Palestinians will accept.
The conventional wisdom is that the people of Palestine missed a historic opportunity at Camp David when the “dovish” Ehud Barak made them an offer they could not refuse, and, moreover, failed to put forward a counteroffer, a claim that flies in the face of a fundamental truth, that the Palestinian delegation did indeed put forward such an offer, whose main thrust was this: Get out of our homeland, take your miserable settlers with you and leave us the devil alone in that 20 percent remnant of our patrimony left us after 1948. Quite reasonable, no?
They were “offered” rather four non-contiguous islands in the territories with 80 percent of the settlers remaining in large settlement blocks annexed to Israel. Humbug.
The road map today is choking as it gasps for breath and begins to recede from the horizon.
The unavoidable reality is that if the Palestinians are in a bind today, the Israelis are, in the long run, in a worse bind.
Here’s why. By insisting on grabbing for themselves the entire land of historic Palestine from the Jordan Valley to the Mediterranean, they are unwittingly working toward the inevitable and predictable demise of the “Jewish state” as we have known it since 1948, for in coming years, this state will have to face three choices, dictated, very simply, by historical imperatives: Binationlism, apartheid or transfer.
With roughly equal numbers of Arabs and Jews in the Holy Land, enjoying constitutional rights accorded both in equal measure, the end result in time will be the binational state dreaded by Zionist extremists. Should Israel, however, opt to continue its rule over a subjugated people, rule punctuated by repression followed by uprisings followed by more repression, apartheid will become the norm, alienating even further the entire world community from it, much like what South Africa went through at one time. Or Israel could “transfer” — a polite euphemism for expulsion bandied about openly in the Israeli public debate — the Palestinian population by force, an act of such larceny that it will dwarf events in Bosnia and Kosovo, and turn the European community against it. Talk of sanctions then will not be taboo.
Hardcore Zionist expansionists, still living in the 1890s, are not noted for being prescient or insightful. They don’t realize that they have been able for now to get away with their territorial and political shenanigans purely because of the “special relationship” they have had with the US. But special relationships are not a constant in the historical equation, but a variable. Once American support diminishes or ceases, historical imperatives will kick in. And Israel will be on its own.
Meanwhile, forget about Mahmoud Abbas visiting the White House last Friday and Ariel Sharon strutting around Washington last Tuesday. Peace in our time? It ain’t gonna happen, folks.
- Arab News Opinion 31 July 2003
