Israelis have at last endorsed the gradual return of a stolen inheritance by Jonathan Freedland [ 29 March 2006 The Guardian ]
“The Likud leader, Binyamin Netanyahu, who had campaigned as the keeper of the Greater Israel flame, said this election would be a referendum on the future of those conquered lands. In which case Israelis gave their verdict with a clear voice: it’s time to let go of most of them.”
International law denies Israel the right to any of the land they’ve occupied since 1967, so if this election was a “vedict” it was delivered in a court that considers itself above those laws. Why Freedland considers the theft of 40% of the West Bank, all of Jerusalem, and denying the Palestinians a border with Jordan as “letting go of most of them” is a riddle for those who read him more regularly than I do to suss out especially as he’s fully aware that it’s a flagrant mischaracterisation of what Olmert has proposed.
Freedland calls the borders “ridiculous” and if implemented would deny the Palestinians a state. He then goes on to say the “left” should support Olmert as “any withdrawal is better than none”. What part of final borders and continuing occupation does he not get? The collective punishment of Gazans, who on Israeli whim were taken to the brink of starvation, is not evidence enough of what would follow any so-called disengagements?
SBS Dateline report Israel’s Borderline Election, 22 March 2006. Lior Chorev is a political advisor to Ehud Olmert.
But, as Lior Chorev makes clear, disengaging the settlers does not mean disengaging the soldiers.
LIOR CHOREV: We’re not just only going to pull out the settlers, but we’ll keep the idea of the Israeli army in those territories. They are not going to be passed to the Palestinian Authority until final agreement, peaceful agreement is reached.
But the impact on settlers will be nothing compared to the impact on the Palestinians. Under Kadima’s strategy, not just East Jerusalem, and the major Jewish settlements west of the wall, would be annexed by Israel. Israel would control the Jordan Valley, encircling the West Bank and depriving the Palestinians of a border with Jordan. The Jordan Valley’s major north-south highway, route 90, has been turned into an Israeli-only road and the Valley has become a no-go zone for most Palestinians.
David Shearer is the head of OCHA, the UN agency coordinating humanitarian relief in the occupied territories.
DAVID SHEARER, HEAD OF OCHA: There are 470-odd roadblocks, checkpoints, obstructions on the road. Now, unless you show that on a map, it’s very difficult to have a kind of mental appreciation of just how bad that is.
Since arriving three years ago, the New Zealander has had his team develop detailed maps, revealing the patterns of Israeli occupation. He says Israel is tightening its control of the Jordan Valley.
DAVID SHEARER: We’ve noticed, in the last year, a dramatic change in the access to the Jordan Valley by Palestinians. Palestinian traffic and transport can not flow through the Jordan Valley, Palestinians who live outside of the Jordan Valley can’t visit for longer than one day, they can’t stay overnight, they can only enter the Jordan Valley if they have a permit. And there has also been restrictions on Palestinians, who are living in the Jordan Valley, to the degree in which they can move around themselves.
I wanted to see the Jordan Valley for myself, so I headed down from Jerusalem, until I reached Route 90. It’s an Israeli-only road, despite the Jordan Valley being part of the occupied West Bank. This bus is carrying Palestinians, entering the West Bank across the river from Jordan. The bus crosses Route 90 but it’s not allowed to stop. No-one can get on or off until it reaches the Palestinian enclave of Jericho.
Once the bus reaches Jericho’s outskirts, I can get on board, where I meet Majed, a Palestinian from Jenin. He’s lived in Jordan for 16 years because the Israelis won’t give his Jordanian-born wife a residency permit.
MAJED: I can reach New York before reaching Jenin, usually. From Amman to New York, I think, it’s around eight hours, but from Amman to Jenin it will take more than this time. It’s 250km, the other is 13,000 or 15,000km. If I want to go to New York, it’s easier.
At Jericho, the passengers disembark. Majed boards one of a fleet of vans and taxis that will take the passengers further into the West Bank.
MAJED: I’m now going because my mother, she is ill. I’m coming to see my mother she is ill. He came to tell me that “your mother is so ill, she wants see you.” I came here. I told you, I left at 7:00 and now it is 11:00 and we are still in Jericho. We need two or three more hours.
Also on the bus is Ayam, now working in the United Arab Emirates. It’s taken him three days to get this far.
AYAM: Actually there’s too much suffering, even now days it’s a bit better than in summer, in summer days some people have to sleep three or four days here in Jericho, also families, small kids, ladies. There is no humanity, nothing. Nobody cares about that, there is no water, no food. Aren’t we human beings? We’re animals, maybe we are from another planet, not from this world.
In this discussion at Kevin Carson’s blog, Stefan asked if there is any validity to the charge of Winston Churchill being a racist. In an article he wrote in ’03, History Forgave Churchill Why Not Blair And Bush?, Mickey Z provided several examples:
In language later appropriated by the Israelis, Winston Churchill had this to say about the Palestinians in 1937: “I do not agree that the dog in a manger has the final right to the manger even though he may have lain there for a very long time. I do not admit that right. I do not admit for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians of America or the black people of Australia. I do not admit that a wrong has been done to these people by the fact that a stronger race, a higher-grade race, a more worldly wise race to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.”
Maybe Freedland is prepared to support Israel’s outrageous plan to militarily impose an illegal precedent for land that is not theirs and finally rid themselves of Palestinians. I’ll pass.
It seems to me that the Arab League would be well within its rights to tax the two countries that stand in defiance of international law and carry out these atrocities then expect the rest of the world to pick-up the pieces. Perhaps if the U.S. and Israel were made to pay additional fees for the energy they consume whilst inflicting horrors upon innocents then the general public would start paying attention. Death and destruction doesn’t seem to be waking them up from their coma.