By ELLEN CANTAROW
No one doubts that Avigdor Lieberman is a thug. His ultimata (“Those who think that through concessions they will gain respect and peace are wrong,” etc, New York Times Thursday, April 2, 2009) were designed to shock. On this site Neve Gordon’s revelations of Lieberman’s many corruptions, his beating of a 12-year-old child, his exhortation to bomb Gaza as the US bombed Hiroshima, supply further ugly evidence against the man, and fuel the flash-fires burning through the Internet in the wake of his appointment as Israel’s foreign minister.So he should be denounced by all means, but it is certain that the problems attaching to his name are not going away. On the contrary -- particularly given President Obama’s repudiation of Lieberman during the President’s speech in Ankara, Turkey, and his avowed loyalty to a ‘two-state solution’ – these problems will appear in a different form, specifically in regard to the nature of the “two states” under the guidance of Obama, Netanyahu & Co.
If the Lieberman appointment wasn’t specifically designed to have him play bad cop to everyone else’s good cop, it’s certainly turning out that way. A recent J Street petition urges me and thousands of on-line others to denounce Lieberman as a threat to “our community’s values,” and also to endorse J Street’s offer of “our best wishes and congratulations . . . pledging to help Benjamin Netanyahu's government where possible, and push when necessary, to achieve the goal of real peace and security for Israel, the Palestinians, and the whole Middle East.”
This is truly a dangerous path. Three years ago, Lieberman proposed annexing to the northern West Bank parts of the Galilee with large Arab populations. At the heart of this region is Wadi Ara, described in a US media account a few years ago as “a seasonal riverbed adjacent to the West Bank.” With a majority Arab population, Wadi Ara has been Israel’s ever since Ben-Gurion wrenched an agreement from Jordan’s King Abdullah that he cede the land as part of the post-war armistice agreement.
The area’s story goes back farther. During a 2005 US trip, Shimon Peres suggested to American listeners that US “disengagement funds” (your tax dollars at work after the famed Gaza “pull-out”) should be employed to “develop” Wadi Ara – that is, to resettle the “dispossessed” Gaza settlers there. This echoed Irving Howe’s suggestion in The New York Times Book Review (May, 16,1982), that more Jews be sent to the “under-populated Galilee” – “under-populated,” that is, in the sense that New York was “under-populated” by whites until the gentrification projects of the housing “boom years.”
Lieberman set the Peres idea on its head with his “land-swap” notion but both proposals have in common their preoccupation with the “the demographic issue.” On this, just about all of Israel – and much of so called “liberal Jewish” America - is united, extreme-right through left, the devil being only in the details how to resolve it for good.
Lieberman’s suggestion was deemed “illegal” by Israeli scholars, but it has found sympathetic supporters ever since. As it stands now, it could easily trot forward as a “two-state solution” under US-Israeli aegis. 1 This is what is ignored in the hysteria about Lieberman’s actual appointment: “transfer,” long an Israeli option, may actually take place in the near future. (Lieberman’s has been called “soft transfer”)
In the Washington Post February, 2006, Henry Kissinger enthusiastically endorsed the idea without mentioning Lieberman by name: “The most logical outcome would be to trade Israeli settlement blocs around Jerusalem . . . for some equivalent territories in present-day Israel with significant Arab populations. The rejection of such an approach . . . which would contribute greatly to stability and to demographic balance reflects a determination to keep incendiary issues permanently open.”
Incendiary issues” no doubt include Wadi Ara Arabs’ bitter resistance to the “land swap” notion. “Stability” and “demographic balance” are code for the purity of the Jewish state, once it’s been relieved of its “demographic problem,” and once potentially fractious Arabs have come under the boot of the Palestinian Authority, the US-Israel regional puppet.
Around the same time Kissinger wrote his commentary, Israel National News reported that Knesset member Otniel Schneller of Kadima, “considered to be one of the people closest and most loyal to Prime Minister Ehud Olmert,” had proposed something similar to Lieberman’s “swap” idea. Schneller’s plan was “more gradual.” The annexed, former Israeli Arab citizens would still be of the Jewish state. Their land, however, would belong to the Palestinian Authority and they wouldn’t be allowed to resettle anywhere else in Israel. 2
A more recent recruit to this bandwagon is Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who has said a “Palestinian state” could “be the national answer to the Palestinians” in the territories and those “who live in different refugee camps or in Israel.”
One assumes that this plan will keep popping up and that (the incendiary Lieberman kept tidily in the wings while his shoot-from-the-mouth behavior distracts the attention of “the left”) that it could well come to fruition. The New York Times’ Ethan Bronner reported February 12 that “the left” likes Lieberman’s “willingness to create two states, one Jewish, one Palestinian, which would involve yielding areas that are now part of Israel.” Note Bronner’s use of “willingness” and “yielding,” suggesting his own tacit endorsement of Israel’s magnanimity. (Bronner, of course, quoted no Arab voices from Wadi Ara, nor did he mention that what Israel would yield is land inhabited by untermenschen. At best the vast majority of Israelis consider the Arabs to be people who need “help” -- as in the suggestion 32 years ago by Irving Howe’s disciple, Michael Walzer, that the indigenous people are “marginal to the nation.” His solution was “helping people to leave who have to leave.” 3
Again, there’s no need to ask the people of Wadi Ara and such “Arab” areas how they feel because, after all, the land isn’t theirs to begin with. The Jewish National Fund controls more than 90 percent of Israel’s land and the JNF must use charitable funds in ways that “directly or indirectly [benefit] . . . persons of Jewish religion, race or origin.” The JNF is “recognized by the Government of Israel and the World Zionist Organization as the exclusive instrument for the development of Israel’s lands.” Such development is open, forever, only to Jews. 4
And so, amidst much celebration (hand-shakes on the White House lawn, etc.) the new “two-state” solution could well be realized in the not-so-distant future. A Palestinian ghetto would exist alongside a Jewish state, which would of course include the settlements. “The demographic problem” bedeviling Zionists ever since two rabbis returned in the 19th century with the report that the bride was “beautiful but married to another man,” would vanish. Now and then, on a distant hilltop, a lone goatherd might appear, nostalgically suggesting “simpler” and more “traditional” times. Palestinian embroidery would be sold at appointed places, to adorn the persons and furniture of pure Jews commuting back and forth to a now purely Jewish Jerusalem and Tel Aviv from, say, purely Jewish Maale Adumim. American readers wearing exquisite Navajo turquoise jewelry – this writer among them – will recognize these images.
0 Have Your Say!:
Post a Comment