Just after the November 2007 Annapolis conference on Israeli-Palestinian peace, Ehud Olmert issued a statement that took most people by surprise:
As quoted by the London Guardian,
Israel risks apartheid-like struggle if two-state solution fails, Olmert says.
another headline noted,
Jewish state is finished without deal, warns PM
Writing from Jerusalem for the British Guardian on November 30, 2007, Rory McCarthy wrote,
Israel’s prime minister issued a rare warning yesterday that his nation risked being compared to apartheid-era South Africa if it failed to agree on an independent state for the Palestinians. In an interview with the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, Ehud Olmert said Israel was “finished” if it forced the Palestinians into a struggle for equal rights.
If the two-state solution collapsed, he said, Israel would “face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights, and as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished”. Israel’s supporters abroad would quickly turn against such a state, he said.
On New Year’s Day, Olmert went even further in discussing the division of Jerusalem. As reported in the Jerusalem Post,
Olmert says Israel must internalize divided J’lem
Israel needs to internalize that even its supportive friends on the international stage conceive of the country’s future on the basis of the 1967 borders and with Jerusalem divided, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert has declared to The Jerusalem Post.
At the same time, he made clear that he did not envisage a permanent accord along the ’67 lines, describing Ma’aleh Adumim (a settlement city) as an “indivisible” part of Jerusalem and Israel. In an interview at the start of a year that he hopes will yield a permanent Israeli-Palestinian peace accord, the prime minister said many rival Israeli political parties remain “detached from the reality” that requires Israel to compromise “on parts of Eretz Yisrael” in order to maintain its Jewish, democratic nature. Israel “will have to deal with a reality of one state for two peoples,” he said, this “could bring about the end of the existence of Israel as a Jewish state. That is a danger one cannot deny; it exists, and is even realistic.”
(snip)
At the same time, the prime minister expressed considerable empathy for Palestinian concerns over settlement growth. If the only construction work undertaken since the road map was accepted had been at Ma’aleh Adumim and Har Homa, he said, “then I imagine the Palestinians, though they might not have been happy about it, would not have responded in the way that they respond when every year, all the settlements – in all the territories – continue to grow. There is a certain contradiction in this between what we’re actually seeing and what we ourselves promised. We always complain about the [breached] promises of the other side. Obligations are not only to be demanded of others, but they must also be honored by ourselves.”
(snip)
While all the final-status issues were now on the table as part of the Annapolis process, Olmert stressed that he would never accept a Palestinian “right of return” to Israel. He said he was convinced, too, that Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas “has made the choice in his heart” between clinging to the “myth of the ‘right of return'” and the opportunity to establish a Palestinian state where all Palestinians, refugees included, would live.
Is this the last gasps of a lame duck or is Olmert serious?
Although Olmert continues to espouse Apartheid notions indirectly by denying the “right of return” to Palestinians whose families were ethnically cleansed in 1948 and are now living in numerous UN refugee camps throughout the Middle East including the Palestinian territories after the 1967 occupation, these openings are probably the first to provide a Zionist rationale for a two state solution: the only condition under which a Jewish state could exist.
Possibly the only clue that Olmert is being honest in his proposals was the fact that his wife, Aliza, accompanied him to Annapolis. Aliza Olmert is a peace activist associated with Woman in Black and Peace Now, and has often protested her husband’s earlier policies. The Olmert family is otherwise a soap opera of contradictions, which, in addition to Aliza, has produced a daughter, Danna Olmert, who is a member of Machshom Watch, an Israeli leftist organization that monitors and often acts against Israeli checkpoints in the West Bank, and who is also a fervent street activist against her father’s policies, and two sons who are Refusniks, who have declined to serve in the Israeli military.
So has Olmert become a peace activist, or is he just making the pronouncements of an unpopular lame duck? Food for thought.
