THE ROVING EYE Sunday, bloody Sunday
By Pepe Escobar
To follow Pepe's articles on the Great Arab Revolt, please click
here.
It was a Sunday, bloody Sunday - with no uplifting U2 anthem to "celebrate" it.
In Palestine, Syria and Lebanon, tens of thousands of Palestinians marched to
the borders with Israel to mark the anniversary of the 1948 Nakba - the
displacement that accompanied the creation of Israel.
The Israeli response, with "maximum restraint": killing 10 people in Lebanon,
eight in Syria, two in Gaza and one in the West
Bank, and injuring over 200. The Anglo-French-American consortium waging war on
Libya because Colonel Muammar Gaddafi allegedly kills his own people was
thunderously mute.
The United Nations urged "restraint" (compare it with the official Israeli
"maximum restraint"). The Israeli daily Ha'aretz, oblivious to the irony, ran a
headline "The Arab Revolution is knocking at Israel's door". Yeah baby, it is,
and that's why you're freaking out.
Always on target
Israel - master practitioner of targeted assassination - can always get away
with killing Arabs wholesale because it fears no UN Security Council
resolution; the US always blocks them. Even if there were any, the US
administration of target executioner-in-chief Barack Obama would not, for
instance, instruct UN ambassador Susan Rice to abstain from a UN condemnation.
That's the kind of abstention that could also help the UN, for instance, to
force Israel into accepting a two-state solution with Palestine.
Forget about the UN Security Council - so eager to send the North Atlantic
Treaty Organization on an attacking rampage on the side of a dodgy bunch of
Libyan "rebels", effectively taking sides on a civil war - even considering
dealing with Israel as it treats Iran, slapping it with economic sanctions
until it starts complying with international law.
Forget about the Obama administration supporting the UN Security Council into
giving Palestine a formal seat as a nation-state at the UN; over 100 nations,
including, recently, Brazil, Argentina and Norway, already recognize the
legitimacy of Palestine. If that would ever happen, the Palestinian nation
could sue the hell of Israel in international courts of law over the systematic
theft of Palestinian territory.
Would Nobel Peace Prize winner Obama lose anything with this move? No. The
powerful Israel Lobby in Washington - led by the American Israel Public Affairs
Committee (AIPAC) - is already campaigning against him in 2012. Anyway, he
won't do it - and on top of it will address the upcoming AIPAC annual meeting
in Washington. If there is a Washington consensus, it's its complicity in the
Israeli regime.
Israel pays for over 100 illegal settlements in the West Bank plus over 100
others that are considered "illegal outposts" even under Israeli law. The US
supports them all via a complex network of Jewish and ultra-right-wing
Christian "charities". Visa, Mastercard and PayPal all enable donations funding
illegal settlements.
And yet this regime is in serious trouble. Prime Minister Benjamin "Bibi"
Netanyahu - for all his bluster - is scared to death. He badly needs the
secular Russians of Yisrael Beitenu ("Israel Our Home") and the fundamentalist
ultra-Orthodox Jews of Shas to remain in power. Former Moldavian bouncer turned
Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of Yisrael Beitenu, eats Bibi
for breakfast and routinely humiliates him (and then Bibi regains his
self-respect by humiliating Obama). All one needs to know is that Lieberman is
the top political dog in Israel.
On top of it, Hebrew University demographer Sergio Della Pergola recently told
the Jerusalem Post that Jews are already under 50% of the population in Israel,
the West Bank and Gaza combined. In an enlightening comparison with
ultra-repressive Bahrain, where a Sunni minority rules over a Shi'ite majority,
a Jewish minority rules over 1.4 million third-class Palestinian citizens of
Israel; 2.5 million occupied Palestinians in the West Bank; and 1.5 million
under siege in that gulag known as Gaza.
Even Human Rights Watch (HRW) has been forced to recognize that "Palestinians
face systematic discrimination merely because of their race, ethnicity, and
national origin, depriving them of electricity, water, schools, and access to
roads, while nearby Jewish settlers enjoy all of these state-provided
benefits".
State-bound is the way to go
Surveying the tragic landscape, Palestinians came to the conclusion there were
only three possibilities on the table; the apartheid continues forever; in the
unlikely possibility of a one-state solution, the apartheid would continue for
a long time until a lot of Israelis, faced with a global boycott, would decide
to emigrate or vote for citizenship for the Palestinians; or Palestine could
force its international recognition as an independent state.
By finally getting their act together and trying to unite Fatah and Hamas,
Palestinians came to the grips with the fact there can possibly be no
meaningful negotiations with a weak, ultra-right wing, fractured Israeli
government essentially controlled by a bunch of squatters (aka "settlers").
Thus the new Palestinian strategy; a relatively unified Palestine going all out
for widespread recognition, during the next UN General Assembly in September,
of a Palestinian state based on the West Bank and Gaza under the 1967 borders.
There's no question they will win the vote.
The next step would have to be a UN Security Council resolution forcing Israel
into serious negotiations - if the US does not block it. If Tel Aviv still said
no, soon the bulk of the world would start applying economic and diplomatic
sanctions to Israel similar to those applied to apartheid South Africa.
Israel lost two wars in less than three years. Whatever didn't kill its enemies
- Hezbollah and Hamas - made them stronger. And then a new
Ankara-Tehran-Damascus axis strolled into the neighborhood. And then "valuable
ally" Hosni Mubarak was booted out of power in Egypt (significantly Israel and
Saudi Arabia, against the will of the Egyptian people, supported the dictator
until, and even beyond, the last minute).
The - reflexive - Israeli solution in times of trouble is to launch another
war; until recently, it would be simultaneously on Lebanon and on Gaza, as
revealed earlier this year by WikiLeaks cables published by the Norwegian
newspaper Aftenpost (see
here In practice this would be a total war on civilians, as in "Israel
cannot accept any restrictions on warfare in urban areas". All "collateral
damage" would be of course "unintentional". That was a startling case of the
Israeli military announcing in advance its plans to commit a war crime.
So the question the whole world is asking is inevitable; what's wrong with
these people?
Get rid of those Arabs
Whenever they are in geopolitical trouble, Israeli elites cannot but react with
a feeling of being victimized; Mubarak's case is exemplary, as he conveniently
followed Washington's and Tel Aviv's orders and duly obeyed the Camp David
accords, repudiated by the overwhelming majority of Egyptians.
Over the years, this Israeli attitude has engendered widespread paranoia - as
in repeated attempts to unmask a possible, internal, Fifth Column. It was mixed
with virtually total desensitization concerning the daily tragedy in Gaza; the
stealing of West Bank land; and the arrogant swagger increasingly displayed by
radical settlers. Plus equating any criticism of the Israeli government with
advocating the "destruction of Israel".
Yet all this paled in comparison with the growing consensus among Israelis that
it's all right to "transfer" - code word to expel - Israeli Arab citizens to a
possible future collection-of-Bantustans Palestinian state or, better yet,
Jordan and Egypt (after Tahrir Square, forget about the Egyptian gambit).
Already by early 2009, according to the Israeli Association for Civil Rights,
55% of Jewish Israelis said that the state should "encourage Arab emigration";
78% opposed Arab parties in the government; and 56% were sure that "Arabs
cannot attain the Jewish level of cultural development".
Another parallel trend has also been visible over these past two years. Jews
who are fond of Israel but are too critical of the government's agendas are in
fact being "excommunicated". Some of these have been talking to Asia Times
Online.
Dr Oren Ben-Dor, born in Haifa and professor of political philosophy at the
University of Southampton, has analyzed in detail this Israeli pathology of
trying to provoke a permanent state of violence against itself. There's got to
be a huge element of self-satisfaction involved, conditioning such a
self-destructive drive to be hated - as a matter of fact globally - at all
costs.
Ben-Dor found the answer in the "incapacity of Israelis of questioning the
discriminatory foundation of their own state". Only to seriously question the
Israeli apartheid, this famous "right of Israel to exist in security as a
Jewish state" could end the cycle of violence; otherwise the "self-defense
rhetoric" will reveal itself as a "chronicle of a suicide foretold".
There's no evidence the "self-defense rhetoric" is going anywhere else - not
with 2.4% of the Israeli population hijacking what is referred to as the "peace
process" by continuing to build settlements in stolen land. And it's not even
religion that drives them; it's a good deal. The cost of living in settlements
can be infinitely lower than in Israel's big cities.
Netanyahu's master plan is basically to say "No" - a tactic he learned from his
mentor Yitzhak Shamir. Under this framework even the Obama administration had
to admit there's nothing left to Washington except to cajole - and beg. "No"
always translates into a very good deal - for Israel, not for the US.
One of the latest examples: for a minimalistic, one-off 90-day freeze on
illegal settlement expansion in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem),
Israel got 20 F-35 stealth fighter jets worth $3 billion, plus a lot of other
goodies. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had to spend no less than eight
hours cajoling Bibi Netanyahu to accept the bribe. He agreed only to submit it
to his security cabinet. And then he said No.
The Obama administration also knows that Israel's refusal to negotiate with
Palestine is the heart of the matter in Tel Aviv's relentless denunciation of
Iran as an "existential threat". The minute there is a real peace deal between
Israel and Palestine, Iran ceases to be an "existential threat".
No, no, no
As it stands, every additional house built in any West Bank settlement means
only one thing: No. No to peace. No to negotiations. No to Palestinian rights.
Israeli peace activist and author Uri Avnery defines this behavior as "moral
insanity".
As usual, it gets worse. Israel never defined its borders. When it was created,
Zionists dreamed of an Eretz Israel from the Nile to the Euphrates. As the
Euphrates is not in the market, why not settle for the whole, former Palestine
mandate? That's the meaning of the Bibi gambit according to which Palestinians
must recognize Israel as "the Jewish state". The Obama administration has never
complained.
Were this recognition of a Jewish state ever to happen, 1.5 million
Palestinians - already infra-citizens in Israel - will be instantly
denationalized and set to be expelled en masse to the Palestinian Bantustan
configured as the solution to the "demographic problem" as Zionists see it, a
problem created by the fact that the Palestinians simply exist.
So in the Israeli narrative the Israel Defense Forces could have pulverized
Gaza to dust - but it didn't, because it respects human life. Thus destroying
"only" 15% of Gaza's buildings and killing "only" 300 of its children in late
2008, early 2009 could be sold - and accepted - by Israelis as a "humanitarian"
act. As for East Jerusalem, it should be "purified". None of this, of course,
ever arouses the ire of the UN Security Council.
The world knows that Israel has gotten away with killing and torturing tens of
thousands of Palestinians over the past 63 years because of the unconditional
support of Washington. Perhaps the next UN General Assembly in September will
be a game-changer. A new, really representative, really sovereign Egyptian
government will definitely be a game-changer, because - to Tel Aviv's horror -
it will be the absolute opposite of Mubarak.
Yet what is already certain is that as long as the apartheid enshrined at the
very core of Israel is not questioned by Israelis themselves, there is no
evidence the "moral insanity" of the "pathological state" is abating.
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