It has by this time become obvious to most observers of the Middle East peace process that the Israeli government believes Israel cannot afford to give up the West Bank. The opposition Left Wing in Israel and elsewhere believes the contrary: that Israel cannot afford NOT to give up the West Bank. Another century of Middle East strife, wars, and conflict in which the United States will be reluctantly dragged, is inevitable. With Israel already Al Qaeda’s greatest recruitment symbol, Israel has long become a political liability for the United States.
This recent communication from Eugene Bird, President of the Council for the National Interest Foundation, The Scam of the Israeli-Palestinian Peace Process, drew attention to a new article by Henry Siegman, which makes clear that Israel has no intention of providing the Palestinians with a sovereign state on 22% of what is left of original Palestine.
Henry Siegman, who served on the Council on Foreign Relations until 2006 and was head of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994 has written a painful analysis in the recent London Review of Books on how Israel, with partial U.S. connivance, has never intended to give up the West Bank and make a homeland for the Palestinians. The prison-like conditions of life in Gaza are indications of what Palestinians can expect if they don’t succumb to Israeli terms. The scam that Israel is interested in a peace ending the decades-old source of perpetual conflict in the Middle East will only end, he says, when the United States and its allies decide that the border between the two countries can no longer be determined unilaterally but by mutual agreement. He believes that the UN should send in an international force to the occupied territories to “establish the rule of law, assist Palestinians in building their institutions, assure Israel’s security by preventing cross-border violence, and monitor and oversee the implementation of terms for the end to the conflict.”
This is an important and startlingly sober, even bitter article, representing the thoughts of a man who has long studied the situation in Israel/Palestine from the vantage point of a friend of Israel. He concludes that the United States and the EU must bring an end to the scam of the peace process.
Coming at a time when President Bush is promoting yet another peace conference with a very limited agenda, it reflects the increasing disappointment and frustration of Jewish Americans with the “real” Israel and its lack of strategic vision.
The text of The Great Middle East Peace Process Scam was published in the London Review of Books, August 16, 2007.
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n16/print/sieg01_.html
A sample of Siegman’s text gives the gist of what he is saying:
….all previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state, which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank. To be sure, Israel would allow – indeed, it would insist on – the creation of a number of isolated enclaves that Palestinians could call a state, but only in order to prevent the creation of a binational state in which Palestinians would be the majority.
The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is `to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.
Anyone who has been following developments in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict knew at least this much about Israel’s intentions a long time ago. It is a Palestine is Dead formula. But it will not be tolerated by friends and enemies of the United States alike. The United States’ blind support of Israel has endangered it and has contributed to making the United States the target of growing Islamic extremism such as witnessed in Iraq. The American public cannot be kept clueless about this danger forever, or the human rights injustice they have unwittingly become complicit in.
Reprinted by permission of the Council for the National Interest Foundation.
