The myth of America as an honest broker in the supposed Palestinian-Israeli peace process has been completely shattered. Not only is the Untied States the financial backer of Israel's brutal oppression of Palestinians, to the tune of $14 to $15 billion per year, the United States no longer recognizes anyone but Israel as a partner to the charade. The absurdity of this position may boggle the mind, but clearly reflects the thinking of George Bush as dictated to him by the Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon.
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| President George W. Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon during a press conference in the Cross Hall of the White House on April 14, 2004. (White House) |
Annette Grossbongardt writing for Der Spiegel and the New York Times draws the curtain back to reveal behind-the-scenes machinations on the summit meeting in support of Israel’s proposed Gaza withdrawal in exchange for expansion of the West Bank settlements, where the international law guaranteeing the Right of Return of Palestinian refugees was majestically waived along with recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. “Sharon also pressured Bush - by threatening to cancel his trip to Washington at the last minute certain that the wording of Bush's guarantee would correspond exactly to what he wanted,” Grossbongardt explained.
The Arab world has reacted to the latest developments by declaring the Bush/Sharon pact a new Balfour Declaration -- a reference to the British promise in 1917 to allow a Jewish homeland in Palestine. According to a Reuters report, “The declaration, written by then British Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, lingers in the memory of Arabs and Muslims as a symbol of colonial powers giving away another people's land.”
The administration’s position could not be clearer, especially in light of American support of Israel’s assassination of Hamas leader Abdel-Aziz al-Rantissi days later, plus the Iraq quagmire orchestrated by pro-Israeli neo-cons associated with the Shock and Awe terror tactics of the Project for a New American Century. The US Middle East policy is of Israel, by Israel and for Israel. (Add $87 billion to $14 billion. That equals over $100 billion in support of Israel in the past year.) Is Israel’s goal to bankrupt America financially, morally, and in our international standing in the world, or are the results a mere by-product of that support?
The Palestinian-Israeli Peace Process has appeared on the surface to have as its end goal peace between Israel and Palestine, and many sincere efforts were wasted on behalf of this end. However, Israel’s hidden agenda has now come to its logical fruition. The “Peace Process” beginning in 1969 with the Rogers Plan, and then with the Kissinger initiatives, from Camp David to Oslo to the Road Map has been used as a de facto control mechanism to the Palestinian resistance movement and their Right of Return guaranteed under international law. Throughout the years of the alleged peace process, Israeli expansion, ethnic cleansing and brutal military incursions into Palestine have continued unabated and provoked the 1st and 2nd Intifadas.
Since the passage of United Nations Resolution 194 (III) of December 11, 1948 Israel has thumped its nose at the guaranteed repatriation or compensation for Palestinian refugees. Now President Bush joins Israel in complete disregard for their tragic plight with the cavalier suggestion that millions of refugees will have to find homes in a new Palestinian state, rather than reclaiming land in what is now Israel. But where are they to go? Currently Palestinians have access to barely 8% of historic Palestine and that figure declines each day Israel annexes additional land for the Apartheid Wall, further expansions of the illegal, quasi-military settlements and Israeli-only roads leading to and from these outposts.
According to UNRWA statistics from 2000 there are 3.7 million Palestinian refugees with 1.6 million in Jordon; 824,622 in Gaza; 583,009 in the West Bank; 383,199 in Syria and 376, 472 in Lebanon. The Palestinian refugee population is the largest in the world. Dispossessed in 1948 by Zionist forces of their land, homes and material property, including personal bank accounts, these assets were subsequently used to create the state of Israel, while Palestinians were forced into tent cities living in humiliated circumstances under squalid conditions. By the 1950s “temporary” housing and infrastructure was provided by the UN, but following the 1967Arab-Israeli war which resulted in the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza thousands more were forced into the camps.
Today the refugee camps in occupied Palestine are continuously under attack by IDF troops with assault rifles, tanks, bulldozers, helicopter gunships and fighter jets, courtesy of US taxpayers. Tent cities are reemerging as homes are bulldozed and sewer and water infrastructure destroyed by repeated Israeli military incursions. Access to food, water, medical attention and schools are frequently blocked by the Israelis. Conditions in the Lebanese camps are said by some to be even worse, barely able to sustain the lives of those living among the rubble of ruins the Lebanese government refuses to allow be rebuilt. But most tragic of all, Palestinian refugees living in camps outside of Palestine have no legal rights whatsoever except one, the Right of Return. To proclaim this right null and void is unconscionable. It is also without legal merit, even if you are the great and mighty president of the United States.
Of course Israel detests the United Nations and UNRWA, which was established in part to clean-up messes Israel leaves behind. Zionist websites complain that the UN persecutes Israel by passing resolution after resolution condemning its activities, resolutions which the Unites States is quick to veto on Israel’s behalf. Language which sets Israel’s teeth on edge includes statements by the United Nations Reaffirming the fundamental principle of the inadmissibility of the acquisition of territory by force.
Time after time Israel is reminded of “the applicability of the Geneva Convention relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War, of 12 August 1949, to the occupied Palestinian and other Arab territories, including Jerusalem. Israel is particularly irked that the United Nations has ruled that Israel's record and actions establish conclusively that it is not a peace-loving Member State and that it has not carried out its obligations under the Charter of the United Nations, Noting further that Israel has refused, in violation of Article 25 of the Charter, to accept and carry out the numerous relevant decisions of the Security Council. (Resolution 273) Under the stewardship of Texan George Bush, the United States now prides itself in emulating Israel with violations of international law and divinely inspired right to preemptive strikes evocative of the lawlessness of the Wild West rather than a civilized society which presumes leadership of the free world.
Writing on behalf of the UK Telegraph, Sean Rayment notes that American military tactics in Iraq are seen as heavy-handed and disproportionate and are condemned by many senior British commanders. One senior Army officer told The Telegraph that America's aggressive methods were causing friction among allied commanders and that there was a growing sense of unease and frustration’ among the British high command, Rayment reports. The officer, who agreed to the interview on the condition of anonymity, said that part of the problem was that American troops viewed Iraqis as untermenschen - the Nazi expression for sub-humans.
Truth, War and Consequences, a PBS Frontline special, shows American soldiers thrown into an urban environment where civilians are often perceived as military threats. One sequence shows protesting Iraqis and a large painted sign, in fractured English that read All Donne. Go home. Poorly trained American soldiers are shown interacting with Iraqis, bullying them and quarreling with them, and then as an act of punishment, riddling their car with bullets and then driving back and forth over their car with a tank and destroying it, while the sound track captures the laughter of American soldiers. Other footage reveals automobiles riddled with gun fire after turning onto a street where American troops were engaged in a raid, killing a man in one car, and a family in another car, and pedestrian walking down the street was also gunned down.
And as Iraqis take to the streets to protest against the brutal US occupation, they also shout protest at becoming another Palestine. Perhaps the ferocity of their resistance is in part fueled by Palestine’s bitter lesson. Iraqi citizens are also well aware of the American-Israeli alliance and are deeply concerned that Israeli companies may be investing in Iraq. Meanwhile the differences between the behavior of American and Israeli troops have become indistinguishable even to Israelis.
Aljazeera.net reports, Some Israeli commentators have highlighted the striking similarity between what the Americans are doing in Falluja, Baquba, and Ramadi on the one hand and what the Israeli occupation army has been doing in Rafah, Khan Yunis and Jenin.
"When I turn to Aljazeera, I need a few minutes to realize that this is Iraq not Palestine," said Uri Avnery, a veteran Israeli journalist and commentator. Reports are surfacing that the Israelis are training US troops in Jenin-style urban warfare.
Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians since 1948 has also been to regard them as "untermenschen" sub-humans and never more so than today. In January 2001 Ha'aretz published an article by Amir Oren, At the Gates of Yassergrad which cites an Israeli officer's statement that the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) studies the 1943 military tactics of the Nazi SS against the Jewish resistance in the Warsaw Ghetto, for application against the Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza.
Even without the Ha'aretz article, casual observation of the incarceration of the 3.5 million men, women and children of Palestine in concentration camp conditions within the confines of the Apartheid wall, electrified razor wire fence, Israeli-only roads, and nearly 900 checkpoints and roadblocks is a tip-off that something is up. When you add in the destruction of a million olive and fruit trees, farmlands, livestock and beehives, enforced starvation (bombing of the UN food warehouse and refusal to allow in food aid) and dehydration (reservoirs, wells and roof top water tanks destroyed by the IDF), curfews that spread into weeks and sometimes a month or more, plus 24/7 IDF assaults on civilians whose defense is the use of rocks, confiscated rifles and homemade bombs, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand why the term Zio-Nazi is common graffiti at certain protest sites.
Perhaps I’m naïve or have misinterpreted Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s intent but I thought the American sacrifice of a half a million dead and nearly 700,000 wounded from World War II was so the world would be safe from Nazism and other brands of fascist oppression. Why am I getting the impression that America is now marching to the tune of an emerging 4th Reich (complete with Patriot Acts I and possibly II) which is somehow bizarrely orchestrated by people who were victimized by the 3rd Reich? But to be fair, many in the Jewish community throughout the world also believe that something is rotten in the state of Israel/America and are joining forces with the Pro-Peace Pro-Palestine Anti-Zionist movement in a desperate attempt to set things right.
About the Author
- Genevieve Cora Fraser is a poet, playwright and journalist as well as an environmental and human rights activist.
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