For those of you who believe that a rational, negotiated
solution to the violence in Occupied Palestine is possible, I have news.
It ain't gonna happen.
There is no "peace"
to negotiate, and no amount of wishful thinking, pacifist sloganeering,
earnest protestations or diplomatic niceties can disguise the cruel
absurdity of the "peace process."
David Ben Gurion, Israeli's
first prime minister, laid it out with brutal honesty. "If I were
an Arab leader, I would never sign an agreement with Israel. It is
normal; we have taken their country. It is true God promised it to us,
but how could that interest them? Our God is not theirs. There has
been anti-Semitism, the Nazis, Hitler, Auschwitz, but was that their
fault? They see but one thing: we have come and we have stolen their
country. Why would they accept that?"
Why indeed? Why should the victim of theft negotiate with
the thief? All that does is legitimize the crime by making the victim and
assailant moral equals. Yet, absurdly, this is precisely what the
civilized nations of the world expect the Palestinians to do: Sit down
with the criminal Israel and legitimize a decades-long theft of life, land
and property.
In that light, what did Foreign Minister John Manley's
visit to the region in mid-May really amount to? Officially, the trip was
declared a success--no verbal blunders, no aggrieved parties, no lost
luggage. All in all a much better show than the foot-in-mouth-plagued
performance Prime Minister Jean Chrétien put on last year.
Realistically, though, it was an example of moral
cowardice from a country that prides itself on its principles but has not
the courage to stand behind them.
During
his trip, Manley praised the report of the investigating team led by
former U.S. Senator George Mitchell. "I believe the parties
should use the recommendations contained in this document as a basis
to end the senseless cycle of violence," he said later in a
ministry press release. "The path to ending
such senseless acts lies not through escalation of the violence but
through a negotiated peace settlement."
No amount of casuistry, dissembling or disinformation can
lend credence to the fiction that Israel wants peace. It won't even
define its borders, lest that hamper its creeping expansionism. What¹s
more, Israel has accepted binding UN Security Council Resolution 242,
which mandates that it give back all the Occupied Territories. What's
left to negotiate? Nothing.
Manley
also rightly praised one of the report's key
findings: the cause of the violence is the building and expansion of
(illegal) Jewish settlements on Arab land. At a joint news conference
with Manley, Israeli Foreign Minister Shimon Peres said Israel has no
plans to expand the settlements, but made it clear that the government
did not rule out their natural [sic] expansion. Prime Minister Ariel
Sharon (né Shinerman) has made no such promise.
Did Manley stand up to Peres and declare
Israel the aggressor? No, but he did call upon the Palestinian authority
to stop the violence. "I don't see how an Israeli government could
sustain a unilateral cessation of the hostilities without something
reciprocal... It's simply going to have to happen."
Manley never explains
what the Palestinians have to gain by stopping, At least while the
violence is overt, they can force Israel to demonstrate its cruelty to the
whole world. (During the period of the "peaceful"
Oslo agreement, we should remember that Israel quietly acquired 52 percent
of its hold of the Occupied Territories.)
For an oppressed people,
an honest war is preferable to an ignoble peace, and this politically
inconvenient fact is what drives Israel and its American stooges to stop
the fighting. They¹re trying to return to the advice Theodore Herzl gave
in 1895 regarding the Zionist tactic for physically evicting the Arabs
from Palestine: "[S]pirit the penniless
population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the
process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried away
discreetly and circumspectly."
Peace will only be possible when the world
acts to compel Israel to be accountable to international law. But
countries that are content to wring their hands in impotent indignation
and utter banalities about "peace"
and "negotiations," are abetting Israel's dispossession of
the Palestinians. In short, Canada, by its inaction, is abetting a war
crime.
Mr. Greg Felton is a Canadian editorialist on international politics, especially the Middle East. He can be reached at
gfelton@mediamonitors.org
