- We circulate below an assessment of the outlook for Palestine
published on the Jadaliyya website which is associated with the Arab Studies
Journal of Georgetown University.by Rashid Khalidi, professor at Columbia
University whose friendship with Barack Obama became an issue in the 2008
election campaign...
-
- A Good Week For Bibi, A Bad Week For Barack, An Opportunity
For The Palestinians
-
- May 26, 2011
-
- The past week in Washington was an extraordinary one.
It witnessed an American president give two speeches in which he offered
further concessions to Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of a country that
is a client of the United States. Netanyahu challenged the President from
the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue, effectively seeking and receiving
Congress's stamp of approval on his strikingly extreme positions. This
end-run around the US Executive Branch followed an invitation from the
head of the Republican congressional opposition to speak to a joint session
of Congress. This invitation itself was in defiance of American constitutional
principles and the hallowed convention that politics stops at the water's
edge. The world looked on as this foreign leader got at least twenty-six
standing ovations during a hard-line speech that ruled out either the prospect
of a serious negotiation, or of anything approaching a sovereign Palestinian
state. Given the trend of Arab and Palestinian politics lately, negotiations
on American-Israeli terms were in any case unlikely.
-
- After the first of the President's speeches, Netanyahu
insulted him before he even got to Washington, telling reporters on his
plane that Obama did not understand the Middle East. He then disagreed
publicly with his host during their joint remarks after their meeting
looking at the President rather than at the press much of the time as he
hectored the leader of the most powerful country on earth. Finally, in
his speech to Congress, the Israeli leader hit every moss-covered Zionist
propaganda point since the 1897 Basel Congress, and laid out positions
on all the key issues so uncompromising as to make negotiations pointless.
-
- What had Barack Obama done to deserve this treatment?
He had already capitulated to Netanyahu's refusal to stop building settlements
in the occupied territories after two years when this was a central element,
if not the lynchpin, of his Middle East policy. The word "settlement"
did not pass the President's lips during this entire embarrassing week.
Moreover, in his State Department speech before Netanyahu's arrival, Obama
accepted a whole slew of Israeli positions. These included the usual outrageous
and elastic Israeli demands in the name of security; the need for Palestinian
acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state; rejection of the recent inter-Palestinian
reconciliation; and deferral of negotiations over refugees and Jerusalem
the two issues of paramount importance to the Palestinians
into the indefinite future (after twenty years of deferral since Madrid).
-
- Beyond this, the President reiterated his objection to
the "de-legitimization" of Israel. This lexical turn signifies
the Obama administration's adoption of the term, coined by the Israeli
far right and their neo-conservative American lawyer friends. This "de-legitimization"
would take place via the Palestinians bringing the issue of Palestinian
statehood before the UN in September. In his second speech, before the
10,000 people AIPAC had brought to Washington to hear Netanyahu, the President
insisted that a Palestinian state must come into being as a result of negotiations,
not a UN resolution. The President's speech-writers and advisors apparently
failed to recall, or conveniently forgot, that the state of Israel came
into being not as a result of negotiations with the Palestinians, but as
a consequence of a 1947 General Assembly resolution, 181.
-
- However, in the State Department speech, in an attempt
to anticipate Netanyahu's attack on his policies on his own turf, the President
had the temerity to repeat a position taken by every one of his predecessors
since Lyndon Johnson. This was that the United States considers the 1967
lines (with "land swaps") the basis for a settlement, as per
Security Council resolution 242 of November 1967. In Israel and on Capitol
Hill this was considered an occasion for ritual outrage because Obama failed
to mention explicitly George W. Bush's crucial concession to Israel's ceaseless
building of illegal settlements in the occupied territories. This came
in a letter to Ariel Sharon in 2004 in which Bush wrote: "In light
of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli
population centers, it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final
status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice
lines of 1949."
-
- After he had aroused Netanyahu's fury in his State Department
speech, speaking to AIPAC the President's reprised Bush's crucial capitulation
to the Israeli position, albeit in a slightly less fulsome form, referring
simply to "new demographic realities on the ground." Having already
accepted that the Palestinians must recognize Israel as a Jewish state
in the first speech (a demand that originated with Netanyahu, and had never
before been made by Israeli negotiators), in the second Obama implicitly
accepted another new Israeli demand, made explicit in Netanyahu's own speech,
for a permanent Israeli military presence along the Jordan River Valley.
-
- The first is the demand not for Palestinian recognition
of Israel, which has already taken place, but of Israel as a Jewish state,
rather than as the state of all its citizens. This means that the 1.4 million
Palestinians living inside Israel must remain second-class citizens and
that Palestinians must renounce their conviction that all of Palestine
is their homeland. Netanyahu's demand for control of the Jordan River valley
"and other places of critical strategic and national importance"
in the West Bank means in effect that a Palestinian state will be no more
sovereign and no more of a "state" than a Bantustan, with Israel
controlling its key border and dominating it exactly as it does the occupied
territories today.
-
- There was much else in Netanyahu's speech: all of Eretz
Israel is "the Jewish homeland," including "Judea and Samaria
[where] the Jewish people are not foreign occupiers." However, the
truncated statelet that Israel may eventually deign to grant the Palestinians
in perhaps a fifth of the country is all the Palestinians get as a "homeland."
There is to be no return of refugees to Israel. Jerusalem will never be
divided and will remain the united capital of Israel. It was the speech
of a man who has no intention of negotiating anything with the Palestinians,
and seeks to guarantee that he will not have to, by setting out a position
that would keep even a Palestinian Quisling away from the negotiating table.
-
- While this was not a good week for Barack Obama, and
was a very good one for Binyamin Netanyahu, it also can be a salutary occasion
for Palestinians and Arabs. It should finally cure those still infected
with the diseased notion that they have anything to gain by bending to
the importuning of American diplomacy. It should alleviate any doubt
that there is any reason to avoid seeking entirely new means to achieve
Palestinian national aims. Justice and liberation for the Palestinians,
and peace for the entire region, will not come from following the course
of the last two decades: exclusive reliance on the United States. If this
week in Washington did not make that crystal clear to even the most deluded
Palestinian, presumably nothing will.
-
- So there is no point, if ever there was, in waiting for
Godot to appear in DC. What is to be done is another, harder question.
An optimist would say that the organized, shrewd, massive non-violent methods
that have played a central role in the Arab revolutionary upsurge of the
past six months have provided an object lesson for Palestinians. Hopefully,
this will be a lesson especially to those who have relied on futile, self-defeating
and indiscriminate violence largely directed against civilians. However,
a pessimist would say that the desperate struggle that Arab revolutionaries
are waging in the face of armed reaction in Libya, Yemen, Bahrain and Syria
have dimmed that lesson.
-
- The fact that Israel's leaders have been carefully watching
events unfold in its neighborhood, and specifically these new methods of
mass mobilization, is evident in their vicious reaction to the Nakba Day
marches on May 15. The targeting of unarmed demonstrators with sniper fire
may have been meant to teach a lesson to anyone who would try to march
peacefully on Israel's borders in the future. And that lesson was intentionally
painful. Over fifteen unarmed protestors were murdered and scores wounded.
In addition, what were most likely rounds intended to fragment upon impact
were fired from a couple of dozen meters away (at which distance no trained
soldier could possibly miss) at the backs of several fleeing protestors
near Maroun al-Ras in Lebanon, intentionally causing horrific injuries.
-
- Of course, this may just have been standard IDF operating
procedure. A few days after these reactions to unarmed peaceful protest,
the US Congress offered twenty-six standing ovations to a ringing speech
asserting Israel's absolute right to "self-defense." It is little
wonder that Israel's leaders long ago rightly concluded that with this
kind of endorsement, they can get away with anything, even the intentional
killing of unarmed young people, as they have been doing for so long. Some
authoritarian Arab leaders who order their security forces to shoot unarmed
protestors get similar indulgence from Washington, while others get sanctions
or bombs.
-
- Other means than mass protest, including diplomatic,
popular, informational and other initiatives are possibilities for the
Palestinians in this new Arab era. But a precondition for success in any
strategy is that the Palestinian people take the lead away from the sclerotic,
bankrupt and self-interested leaderships that have stifled them for so
long on both sides of the Fateh-Hamas divide. The thus-far successful popular
demand for the end to petty, self-destructive, partisan inter-Palestinian
divisions, together with the May 15 popular marches, may be long-awaited
indications that Palestinians have in fact started in this direction.
-
- MEC Analytical Group
-
- 26 May 2011
-
- Israel and Palestine
-
- Since President Obama's Middle East speech on 19 May
the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has visited Washington. At
a press conference after the two met on 20 May (http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/05/20/remarks-president
-obama-and-prime-minister-netanyahu-israel-after-bilate ) Obama referred
to "some differences between us" on Palestine, and Netanyahu
" publicly lectured " the President as the LA Times put it, notably
insisting that negotiations could not go back to the 1967 borders.
-
- There were two more set-piece occasions, speeches at
the AIPAC conference by the President on 22 May (text at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2011/05/22/
remarks-president-aipac-policy-conference-2011 ), and by the Prime Minister
on 24 May (text at http://www.imra.org.il/story.php3?id=52539 ).
-
- In a positive assessment Jeremy Ben-Ami, President of
J Street, wrote on 25 May:
-
- "With the dust still settling and the instant analysis
flowing, one thing is clear to us: the President of the United States laid
out in succinct and compelling terms some fundamental truths to which we
subscribe:
-
- One, the bond
between the United States and Israel is unbreakable and the US commitment
to Israel's security iron-clad. The relationship between our countries
is so strong because it is rooted in both common values and common interests.
-
- Two, achieving
peace is "more urgent than ever" and the dream that we as Israel's
supporters hold so dear of a secure Israel that is both Jewish and democratic
cannot be fulfilled with permanent occupation.
-
- Three, a lasting
peace will involve two states for two peoples each enjoying self-determination,
mutual recognition and peace and that "the basis for negotiations
has to hold out the prospect of success."
-
- Four, the
best place to start toward an agreement that ends the conflict and all
claims is by agreeing to certain principles. These are: that the borders
between the states will be "based on the 1967 lines with mutually
agreed swaps," security provisions must "be robust enough to
prevent a resurgence of terrorism, to stop the infiltration of weapons,
and to provide effective border security," and a "full and phased
withdrawal of Israeli military forces, a sovereign non-militarized Palestinian
state, with a transition period to be agreed."
-
- He added that "A state of Israel without a state
for the Palestinian people next to it means an Israel that must choose
between being democratic and being the national home of the Jewish people.
This is a choice we must help Israel avoid having to make."
-
- Some Israeli comment was favourable. Nahum Barnea wrote
in the Israeli Yedioth Ahronoth on 25 May:
-
- "In front of a crowded hall, filled with enthusiastic
Members of Congress, Netanyahu was at his best. He spoke to the senior
figures of American politics in their own language. The values were their
values, the phrases were part of their world. ..Netanyahu loves America.
All Israelis love America, but he knows how to express his love better
than anyone. And the Members of Congress love Israel: Particularly Israel
as it comes out of his mouth-so American, so similar to the places from
which they came or the faith upon which they were raised. ..When Golda
Meir saw Begin and Sadat appearing together, she said: 'They may not deserve
a Nobel Prize, but they certainly deserve an Academy Award.' Netanyahu
received his Academy Award yesterday."
-
- Most comment however, particularly in the region, has
been negative. We are for example grateful to Professor Alon Ben Meir for
a comment on 23 May which concludes:
-
- "The President's speech was one of the most pro-Israel
speeches ever delivered by any sitting US president. Netanyahu's reaction
to it was both divisive and counterproductive. It is time for the Israeli
public to rise against such hypocrisy and disdain to demand accountability
from a government that has led the country astray from Day One. Thanks
to Netanyahu's government, no one can say that Israel is better off today
than it was two years ago. It is time to put an end to the illusion that
Israel will be more secure by further territorial entrenchment in the West
Bank."
-
- An editorial in the New York Jewish Daily Forward of
25 May concludes "Most of us hoped that Netanyahu would have given
a courageous, creative speech to move the process forward, safeguarding
Israel's security as he must, but also recognizing the cogent, entirely
reasonable requests from the President of the United States. You are making
us choose, Mr. Prime Minister. Please don't."
-
- Akiva Eldar, chief political columnist of Ha'aretz, wrote
on 25 May:
-
- "Netanyahu's peace plan, if that is the right phrase
for the collection of unrealistic terms he presented to Congress on Tuesday,
leads straight to the burial of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process,
an international crisis and a UN declaration of a Palestinian state. In
a bad scenario, these terms suggest that Netanyahu is ignorant of proposals
placed before the Palestinians more than a decade ago. In an even worse
scenario, the "far-reaching compromise" he describes proves that
his relationship with the settlers and his partners on the extreme right
(if not his own ideology ) is more important in Netanyahu's view than the
strategic interests of Israel or the existence of a Jewish democratic state.
..
-
- The key has now moved even deeper into U.S. President
Barack Obama's pocket. Netanyahu the American hero essentially declared
yesterday that he was challenging the American president. Obama will have
to decide, and soon, whether he will pick up the gauntlet and send Netanyahu
a bill for his refusal to accept the principle without which no speech
on Israeli-Palestinian peace has any value: the establishment of a Palestinian
state on the basis of the 1967 borders, with exchanges of territory that
are mutually agreed upon, fair and realistic."
-
- An editorial in the Saudi Arab News of 24 May:
-
- "So here was another US president, apparently the
most powerful man on the planet, standing before AIPAC like a schoolboy
and repeatedly reaffirm America's "ironclad" commitment to the
"security of Israel."...What do the Palestinians do now? They
have no option but go ahead with their plan to seek a formal recognition
and backing of their state by the world community when the UN General Assembly
reconvenes in September. .. Indeed, with the winds of change blowing in
the region and Israel increasingly isolated, there cannot be a better time
to do so. This may be the only way to persuade Israel and its friends in
Washington to play ball. It's time to stand up and be counted."
-
- We circulate below a comment on Netanyahu at AIPAC by
Uri Avnery published by Gush Shalom:
-
- May 28, 2011
-
-
- Bibi And The Yo-Yos
-
- IT WAS all rather disgusting.
-
- There they were, the members of the highest legislative
bodies of the world's only superpower, flying up and down like so many
yo-yos, applauding wildly, every few minutes or seconds, the most outrageous
lies and distortions of Binyamin Netanyahu.
-
- It was worse than the Syrian parliament during a speech
by Bashar Assad, where anyone not applauding could find himself in prison.
Or Stalin's Supreme Soviet, when showing less than sufficient respect could
have meant death.
-
- What the American Senators and Congressmen feared was
a fate worse than death. Anyone remaining seated or not applauding wildly
enough could have been caught on camera and that amounts to political
suicide. It was enough for one single congressman to rise and applaud,
and all the others had to follow suit. Who would dare not to?
-
- The sight of these hundreds of parliamentarians jumping
up and clapping their hands, again and again and again and again, with
the Leader graciously acknowledging with a movement of his hand, was reminiscent
of other regimes. Only this time it was not the local dictator who compelled
this adulation, but a foreign one.
-
- The most depressing part of it was that there was not
a single lawmaker Republican or Democrat who dared to resist.
When I was a 9 year old boy in Germany, I dared to leave my right arm hanging
by my side when all my schoolmates raised theirs in the Nazi salute and
sang Hitler's anthem. Is there no one in Washington DC who has that simple
courage? Is it really Washington IOT Israel Occupied Territory
as the anti-Semites assert?
-
- Many years ago I visited the Senate hall and was introduced
to the leading Senators of the time. I was profoundly shocked. After being
brought up in deep respect for the Senate of the United States, the country
of Jefferson and Lincoln, I was faced with a bunch of pompous asses, many
of them nincompoops who had not the slightest idea what they were talking
about. I was told that it was their assistants who really understood matters.
-
-
-
- SO WHAT did the great man say to this august body?
-
- It was a finely crafted speech, using all the standard
tricks of the trade the dramatic pause, the raised finger, the little
witticisms, the sentences repeated for effect. Not a great orator, by any
means, no Winston Churchill, but good enough for this audience and this
occasion.
-
- But the message could be summed up in one word: No.
-
- After their disastrous debacle in 1967, the leaders of
the Arab world met in Khartoum and adopted the famous Three No's: NO recognition
of Israel, No negotiation with Israel, NO peace with Israel. It was just
what the Israeli leadership wanted. They could go happily about their business
of entrenching the occupation and building settlements.
-
- Now Netanyahu is having his Khartoum. NO return to the
1967 borders. NO Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem. NO to even a symbolic
return of some refugees. NO military withdrawal from the Jordan River -
meaning that the future Palestinian state would be completely surrounded
by the Israeli armed forces. NO negotiation with a Palestinian government
"supported" by Hamas, even if there are no Hamas members in the
government itself. And so on NO. NO. NO.
-
- The aim is clearly to make sure that no Palestinian leader
could even dream of entering negotiations, even in the unlikely event that
he were ready to meet yet another condition: to recognize Israel as "the
nation-state of the Jewish people" which includes the dozens
of Jewish Senators and Congressmen who were the first to jump up and down,
up and down, like so many marionettes.
-
- Netanyahu, along with his associates and political bedfellows,
is determined to prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state by all
and any means. That did not start with the present government it
is an aim deeply embedded in Zionist ideology and practice. The founders
of the movement set the course, David Ben-Gurion acted to implement it
in 1948, in collusion with King Abdallah of Jordan. Netanyahu is just adding
his bit.
-
- "No Palestinian state" means: no peace, not
now, not ever. Everything else is, as the Americans say, baloney. All the
pious phrases about happiness for our children, prosperity for the Palestinians,
peace with the entire Arab world, a bright future for all, are just that
pure baloney. At least some in the audience must have noticed that,
even with all that jumping.
-
-
-
- NETANYAHU SPAT in Obama's eye. The Republicans in the
audience must have enjoyed that. Perhaps some Democrats too.
-
- It can be assumed that Obama did not. So what will he
do now?
-
- There is a Jewish joke about a hungry pauper who entered
an inn and demanded food. Otherwise, he threatened, he would do what his
father did. The frightened innkeeper fed him, and in the end asked timidly:
"But what did your father do?" Swallowing the last morsel, the
man answered: "He went to sleep hungry."
-
- There is a good chance that Obama will do the same. He
will pretend that the spittle on his cheek is rainwater. His promise to
prevent a UN General Assembly recognition of the State of Palestine deprived
him of his main leverage over Netanyahu.
-
- Somebody in Washington seems to be floating the idea
of Obama coming to Jerusalem and addressing the Knesset. It would be direct
retaliation Obama talking with the Israeli public over the head of
the Prime Minister, as Netanyahu has just addressed the American public
over the head of the President.
-
- It would be an exciting event. As a former Member of
the Knesset, I would be invited. But I would not advise it. I proposed
it a year ago. Today I would not.
-
- The obvious precedent is Anwar Sadat's historic speech
in the Knesset. But there is really no comparison. Egypt and Israel were
still officially at war. Going to the capital of the enemy was without
precedent, the more so only four years after a bloody battle. It was an
act that shook Israel, eliminating in one stroke a whole set of mental
patterns and opening the mind for new ones. Not one of us will ever forget
the moment when the door of the airplane swung open and there he was, handsome
and serene, the leader of the enemy.
-
- Later, when I interviewed Sadat at his home, I told him:
"I live on the main street of Tel Aviv. When you came out of that
plane, I looked out of the window. Nothing moved in the street, except
one cat and it was probably looking for a television set."
-
- A visit by Obama will be quite different. He will, of
course, be received politely without the obsessive jumping and clapping
though probably heckled by Knesset Members of the extreme Right.
But that will be all.
-
- Sadat's visit was a deed in itself. Not so a visit by
Obama. He will not shake Israeli public opinion, unless he comes with a
concrete plan of action a detailed peace plan, with a detailed timetable,
backed by a clear determination to see it through, whatever the political
cost.
-
- Another nice speech, however beautifully phrased, just
will not do. After this week's deluge of speeches, we have had enough.
Speeches can be important if they accompany actions, but they are no substitute
for action. Churchill's speeches helped to shape history but only
because they reflected historic deeds. Without the Battle of Britain, without
Normandy, without El Alamein, those speeches would have sounded ridiculous.
-
- Now, with all the roads blocked, there remains only one
path remains open: the recognition of the State of Palestine by the United
Nations coupled with nonviolent mass action by the Palestinian people against
the occupation. The Israeli peace forces will also play their part, because
the fate of Israel depends on peace as much as the fate of Palestine.
-
- Sure, the US will try to obstruct, and Congress will
jump up and down, But the Israeli-Palestinian spring is on its way.
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