Only One Palestine, One Country! Part I

Israel is unquestionably a military Juggernaut patterned after and hugely subsidized and supported by the United States. It seems to have a South African-styled apartheid mindset toward Palestinian Arabs. Israel is not a democracy; sadly, it acts more like a racist theocracy. Israel could neither have come into existence in 1948, without British and then United Nations support, nor have prospered after the Six-Day-War of 1967, without extensive US financial and military assistance. American Jewry has also played a significant and varied roll. Of many pro-Israel lobbies in Washington, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee(AIPAC)is the most powerful. The Israel Project and the Anti-Defamation League(ADL)are two other powerful voices. So commanding are lobbying efforts that few in Congress would dare criticize the occupation of the Palestinian Territories or address the concomitant oppressions. As a symbol of Israeli influence on American politics stands the Holocaust Museum on the National Mall.(I recall the struggle years ago for an indigenous American museum on the same mall.)Regrettably, there is no African-American museum or one dedicated to the consequences of the Colombian Conquest. Stranger still is the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles!(See:Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry.) The claim that the word "holocaust" is exclusively Jewish in reference and must be capitalized is "beyond chutzpah", to coin a Finkelstein title. (Deplorably, there have been many holocausts in human history. What may happen in the Gaza Strip currently is still open to speculation. Let us not forget the Roma, the disabled and disadvantaged, the Gay and the dissident Left in reporting on the Nazi holocaust!) The point is that Israeli public relations perpetuates self-serving fictions: Israel is a democracy and has biblical authority to "repossess" what has been the Palestinian homeland for many centuries. Also, Israel masterly blames the victim! For example: Hamas broke the ceasefire agreement which necessitated an Israeli counter-attack(of massive disproportionality!) It was Israel that violated the agreement, November 4, 2008.(See:Part II)The US public would, no doubt, place Israel after the United States, China and Russia, in terms of ranking international importance. Militarily it ranks fourth. This is an amazing feat for a country with less than six million people. It pays to lobby Congress and conduct perpetual public relations campaigns. By the way, Israel has at least 200 nuclear weapons.(How it acquired the know-how and materiel is a story yet to be told.) A breath-taking fiction initiated in the early years, the Zionists claimed that Palestine(within the Ottoman Empire until WW I)was uninhabited territory awaiting colonization by European Jewry. This enabled Britain to exclude Palestinian Arabs, the indigenous population, from forums on Mandated Palestine. Why complicate matters by including them? The British prevented Palestinians from even establishing a para-state structure as a preliminary step toward statehood. Palestinian Arabs did not constitute a bona -fide political entity, apparently, but European Jews did. Diverting, dividing and distracting Arab interests became the modi operandi. The elevation of the Grand Mufti of Palestine is an example of how these strategies were executed and how they succeeded.(In this vein, consider Yasser Arafat and Mahmoud Abbas.)Much has been said about a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestinian Conflict; but this is another distraction and diversion. Israel has other plans! The two-state idea has been rendered moot by settlement expansions in recent years and by Israel's long-standing secret agenda(but not so secret anymore), expulsion of Palestinian Arabs. The refusal to relinquish confiscated lands acquired during the Six-Day-War is prima facie evidence. After all, occupation in this context represents preludial expulsion! Central to the on going conflict is the illegal Israeli occupation of the Palestinian Territories. Until this basic issue is resolved there will be no lasting peace. The so-called "settlements" are occupying forces intended to drive out the historic inhabitants. Also, the settlements are positioned east and west(laterally)to prevent a "viable" north-south partition. Therefore, the two-state litany is a sham; for, neither Israel nor the Palestinians could ever agree on boundaries--and that's the way Israel wants it to remain. From day one, there has been a demographic problem for the Zionist movement and a Greater Israel: Palestinians, if not excluded in one way or another, will always outnumber European Jews, even with massive international recruitment strategies, including inducements of housing and financial subsidies. The 1948 War and its resultant flight and expulsion, Al-Nakba(The Catastrophe), of 800,000 Palestinians from the United Nations-determined State of Israel was also a means of obtaining a Jewish majority, hence, validating a theocratic polity. An irony of the Six-Day War was that it altered demographics. With the occupation of Palestinian Territories, the non-Jewish population become the majority. How could Israel be a Jewish democracy with such demographics? The easiest solution would have been not to occupy the ill-gotten territory; but, Israel with its agenda of expansion and vision of empire would never voluntarily relinquish what it had taken by military means. One reason Israel vacated settlements in the Gaza Strip was to exclude its l.5 million Palestinians from the population count--cooking the books to establish, at least for a time, a Jewish majority.(Israel still controls the land, but has no responsibility to its inhabitants. Pretty slick, huh?) Since the 1970s the Israeli strategy is to control territory but ignore its Palestinian population. This, too, is foretoken expulsion, in that it is a step toward that objective. In the meantime, Israel has security control over land and Palestinian have civil control, with a Palestinian Authority president as an Israeli proxy. The separation wall is another means to disembody Palestinian lands and prevent partition. It destroys West Bank and East Jerusalem contiguity and serves to dislocate Palestinians from Palestine itself. A partition is not something Palestinian Arabs would agree to voluntarily. Why would they give up what is already theirs?(Especially in what turns out to be a 78-percent-to-22-percent division favoring European Jews!) The Zionists knew land would have to be acquired by skulduggery, military force and eventually, expulsion of the indigenous population! The only way to break the impasse is to establish a single state, one country, comprised of both Arabs and Jews, each with civil, ethnic and religious rights.(See: Ali Abunimah, One Country.)