Apartheid-style Fight for Democracy Looms

Despite seeing the one-state train coming down the track,
it is unlikely that Olmert will accept a just two-state solution.
He is more likely to try to impose a bantustan on Abbas.

By James Bowen

Samuel Johnson, who once said that "a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience", would have had something pithy to say about anybody expecting justice for the Palestinians from the Annapolis process. Too many past initiatives have been derailed by the intransigence of Israeli governments whose tactic has long been to delay justice in order to deny justice.

This started as long ago as May 1949 when, in order to join the United Nations, Israel promised to honour Resolution 194 which demanded that the Palestinian refugees be allowed to return home. They are still waiting.

Olmert's commitment to reach a final-status agreement in 2008 should be seen in the same light as Rabin's 1993 commitment to do the same within five years. By early 1995, the Israeli general turned peace activist, Matti Peled, had recognised that Rabin did not intend to allow an independent Palestinian state and said so in an article headlined "Rabin does not want peace". Unfortunately for Rabin, his assassin was not so perceptive.

The Palestinians were more trusting than Peled, finally venting their frustration in September 2000, after seven years of a "peace process" in which Israeli governments of every political stripe had destroyed any possibility of a viable Palestinian state, by stealing more land and vastly increasing the number of settlers. The process has continued ever since, despite the Gaza "withdrawal" - there is huge ongoing settlement expansion in the West Bank.

Annapolis overshadowed an important anniversary. Sixty years ago last week, President Truman forced the "international community" to ignore the wishes of the overwhelming majority of the people in Palestine. On November 22nd, 1947, the UN rejected the partition of Palestine. A second vote, four days later, also rejected partition, so Truman asked that the final vote be delayed for three days, until after Thanksgiving. Truman had entered the White House only on Roosevelt's death in 1945 and needed American Zionist support to win the 1948 election. Over the next few days, he bullied five of the weaker UN members into changing their vote. That is how partition was passed on November 29th, 1947.

The UN vote was only a "recommendation" and had no force in international law. However, the Zionists knew this distinction could be hidden when they implemented their plan to ethnically cleanse the Arabs who were the overwhelming majority of the population.

Indeed, on November 29th this year, the historian Tom Segev wrote in Ha'aretz, an Israeli newspaper, that 'The partition resolution can therefore be seen as the mother of all the ensuing diplomatic fictions, from Security Council Resolution 242 to the "road map"'. Annapolis, claiming to be based on the road map, is merely the latest fiction, in which a weak Palestinian leader is scripted to illegitimately sign away his people's rights under international law. We should remember three facts: Mahmoud Abbas leads a party which lost the January 2006 elections for the Palestinian Authority; Israel prevents most Palestinians, the almost six million refugees in the diaspora, from voting in PA elections; international law specifies that the refugees should be allowed to return home. In the Annapolis charade, a delegation which has no mandate from the refugees is expected to sign away this right.

As Peled recognized in 1995, Israel does not want a Palestinian state.

The Zionists have always wanted all of Palestine, but without the Palestinians. Now they have the land, the long-term plan is to make life so miserable for the remaining Palestinians that they will emigrate. Until then, Israel wants the "surplus"

incarcerated in open-air prisons, in Gaza and a few isolated parts of the West Bank. If it amuses the "international community", Israel will call these prisons a Palestinian state, but it will be under continuous siege, just as Gaza is today. That is the best Palestinians can expect from the Annapolis fiction.

Indeed, cannier Israelis are anxious to create this fictitious state.

They are worried about what, with unabashed racism, they call the "demographic timebomb". Ignoring the refugees in the diaspora, the number of Palestinians under Israeli rule is about to exceed the number of Jews. Indeed, US State Department figures suggest it has already happened.

This is what prompted Olmert to tell Ha'aretz last Wednesday, November 28th, that "If the day comes when the two-state solution collapses, and we face a South African-style struggle for equal voting rights [ also for the Palestinians in the territories], then, as soon as that happens, the State of Israel is finished". Israel needs to appear to offload as many of these potential Palestinian voters as it can, quickly.

Olmert is surely aware that a group of Palestinian and Israeli intellectuals issued a declaration last week in which they called for "a single state . . . that does not privilege the rights of one ethnic or religious group over another".

Despite seeing the one-state train coming down the track, it is unlikely that Olmert will accept a just two-state solution. He is more likely to try to impose a bantustan on Abbas. If he does, the South African-style struggle will not be long behind.

-James Bowen is chairman of the Ireland- Palestine Solidarity Campaign, www.ipsc.ie

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