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Israel and Palestine in a nutshell
 

Jack Dresser, Ph.D.

Any lasting peace cannot ignore the justice with which Gen. Zinni attests that Arabs are "obsessed."  There are two models of justice in all societies: criminal and civil.  Criminal justice can only be imposed through law enforcement, which would require the Israeli leaders to be brought before the international criminal court.  There is no international mechanism to bring this about.  Civil justice cannot be imposed by others but can only be achieved by mediated negotiation between Israel and the Palestinian, refugee and diaspora Arabs of what once was the British mandate in Palestine.

Justice under this model will require that all historical and current issues be brought to the table, including:
    (1) the Jewish terrorism and ethnic cleansing through which Israel was established, producing some 900,000 initial refugees and requiring establishment of an entire new UN agency (UNRWA) for their care at public expense;
    (2) Israel's failure to ever meet the conditions of their 1949 admission to the UN, i.e., internationalization of Jerusalem and allowing return of the refugees;
    (3) Israel's illegal, pre-emptive war (prohibited by the UN Charter) of 1967 and seizure of still-occupied territories, producing a vastly expanded refugee population that now exceeds 4 million;
    (4) Israel's continuous violations of international law and defiance of some 90 UN resolutions condemning their land seizures, continued illegal occupation, settling their own populations on this land, human rights abuses of the Palestinians, two brutal attacks upon Lebanon, and multiple other border violations;
    (5) Israel's imposition of an apartheid system in the Occupied Territories, including compression and isolation of Palestinian villages through authoritarian military control of commerce and communications, a network of Jewish-only roads, and the Great Levantine Wall (my original contribution to the language of this discourse) that has crushed their culture and economy.  This has been an obvious, relentless, remorseless, single-minded pursuit of the original Zionist vision -- openly stated from the British Mandate period to the present -- to expel all Arabs from Palestine, either directly through ethnic cleansing or indirectly through forced emigration by making life unbearable for them.  These practices also violate the Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel that pledged to "ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex" and to be "faithful to the principles of the Charter of the United Nations;"
    (6) The Palestinians' intrinsic right of self-defense under international law against invasion, occupation, land seizure, expulsion, and egregious human rights abuses such as property destruction, arbitrary imprisonment and extrajudicial killings.

Honest negotiation cannot occur with Israel in an overwhelmingly dominant position.  Their best offer is to return some of what they've stolen, offering neither apology, return nor compensation for the rest.  Any 5-year-old would decry that as NOT FAIR!  (Apparently the Israeli leaders all skipped kindergarten with "everything they needed to learn" about human relations.)  Israel will be unmotivated to honestly negotiate until the U.S. terminates its unconditional financial, military and international diplomatic support and Israel faces the condemnation of mankind without our protection (a protection that has earned us the hostility, distrust and contempt ot the Islamic and wider world).

This will not happen until U.S. and other diaspora Jews demand that Israel renounce its racist agenda that is incompatible with their values as citizens of the world's actual democracies, and reshape the AIPAC/JDL et al. agendas accordingly.  This is beginning already with increasing public exposure of Israel's policies and conduct that generate cognitive dissonance between liberal values and loyalty to their putative "ingathering of the exiles" place of imagined ultimate refuge.  Since we provide Israel's chief support and protection, Israel will only mend its ways and negotiate a just solution including appropriate contrition when (otherwise decent and liberal) U.S. Jews demand that the state claiming to represent the Jewish people start earning the right to make that claim in their name.
 
 

Copyright 2007 Jack Dresser, Ph.D.