Canadian Dimension: Western Leaders Betrayed Palestinians 70 Years Ago. There is no sign that’s about to change

Palestine Nakba Day demonstration in Berlin • Photo by Libertinus Israel has been crafting a dishonest counter-narrative ever since the Nakba, one that historians scouring the archives have exploded. On Tuesday, Palestinians will commemorate the anniversary of the Nakba, or catastrophe, their mass expulsion and dispossession 70 years ago as

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Canadian Dimension: Israel’s Bogus Civil War

Photo by Kristoffer Trolle

Nazareth.

Is Israel on the verge of civil war, as a growing number of Israeli commentators suggest, with its Jewish population deeply riven over the future of the occupation?

On one side is a new peace movement, Decision at 50, stuffed with former political and security leaders. Ehud Barak, a previous prime minister who appears to be seeking a political comeback, may yet emerge as its figurehead.

The group has demanded the government hold a referendum next year – the half-centenary of Israel’s occupation, which began in 1967 – on whether it is time to leave the territories. Its own polling shows a narrow majority ready to concede a Palestinian state.

On the other is Benjamin Netanyahu, in power for seven years with the most right-wing government in Israel’s history. On Friday he posted a video on social media criticising those who want to end the occupation.

Observing that a Palestinian state would require removing hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers currently living – illegally – on Palestinian land, Netanyahu concluded: “There’s a phrase for that. It’s called ethnic cleansing.”

Not only did the comparison upend international law, but Netanyahu infuriated the Obama administration by implying that, in seeking to freeze settlement growth, the US had supported such ethnic cleansing. A spokeswoman called the comments “inappropriate and unhelpful” – Washington-speak for deceitful and inflammatory.

But the Israeli prime minister is not the only one hoodwinking his audience.

Whatever its proponents imply, the Decision at 50 referendum is about neither peace nor the Palestinians’ best interests. Its assumption is that yet again the Israeli public should determine unilaterally the Palestinians’ fate.

Although the exact wording is yet to be decided, the referendum’s backers appear concerned solely with the status of the West Bank.

An Israeli consensus believes Gaza has been free of occupation since the settlers were pulled out in 2005, despite the fact that Israel still surrounds most of the coastal strip with soldiers, patrols its air space with drones and denies access to the sea.

The same unyielding, deluded Israeli consensus has declared East Jerusalem, the expected capital of a Palestinian state, as instead part of Israel’s “eternal capital”.

But the problem runs deeper still. When the new campaign proudly cites new figures showing that 58 per cent support “two states for two nations”, it glosses over what most Israelis think such statehood would entail for the Palestinians.

A survey in June found 72 per cent do not believe the Palestinians live under occupation, while 62 per cent told pollsters last year they think Palestinians have no rights to a nation.

When Israelis talk in favour of a Palestinian state, it is chiefly to thwart a far bigger danger – a single state shared with the “enemy”. The Decision at 50 poll shows 87 per cent of Israeli Jews dread a binational conclusion to the conflict. Ami Ayalon, a former head of the Shin Bet intelligence service and a leader of Decision at 50, echoed them, warning of an “approaching disaster”.

So what do Israelis think a Palestinian state should look like? Previous surveys have been clear. It would not include Jerusalem or control its borders. It would be territorially carved up to preserve the “settlement blocs”, which would be annexed to Israel. And most certainly it would be “demilitarised” – without an army or air force.

In other words, Palestinians would lack sovereignty. Such a state exists only in the imagination of the Israeli public. A Palestinian state on these terms would simply be an extension of the Gaza model to the West Bank.

Nonetheless, the idea of a civil war is gaining ground. Tamir Pardo, the recently departed head of Israel’s spy agency Mossad, warned last month that Israel was on the brink of tearing itself apart through “internal divisions”.

He rated this a bigger danger than any of the existential threats posited by Mr Netanyahu, such as Iran’s supposed nuclear bomb.

But the truth is that there is very little ideologically separating most Israeli Jews. All but a tiny minority wish to see the Palestinians continue as a subjugated people. For the great majority, a Palestinian state means nothing more than a makeover of the occupation, penning up the Palestinians in slightly more humane conditions.

After many years in power, the right is growing in confidence. It sees no price has been paid, either at home or abroad, for endlessly tightening the screws on the Palestinians.

Israeli moderates have had to confront the painful reality that their country is not quite the enlightened outpost in the Middle East they had imagined. They may raise their voices in protest now but, if the polls are right, most will eventually submit to the right’s realisation of its vision of a Greater Israel.

Those who cannot stomach such an outcome will have to stop equivocating and choose a side. They can leave, as some are already doing, or stay and fight – not for a bogus referendum that solves nothing, but to demand dignity and freedom for the Palestinian people.

Jonathan Cook won the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are “Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East” (Pluto Press) and “Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair” (Zed Books). His website is www.jkcook.net.

This article originally appeared on Counterpunch.org.

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Canadian Dimension: How Israel aims to redefine “ethnic cleansing”

Photo by Harry Pockets

On one level, an incendiary video posted by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu over the weekend looked suspiciously like an own goal.

In it, Netanyahu argues that a Palestinian demand to dismantle Jewish settlements amounts to the “ethnic cleansing” of some 650,000 Jews living in the occupied territories in violation of international law.

“The Palestinian leadership actually demands a Palestinian state with one pre-condition: no Jews,” he says in the short video posted on Facebook last Friday. “There’s a phrase for that: It’s called ethnic cleansing.”

Netanyahu’s aim was not hard to decipher. He wants yet another obstacle in the way of Palestinian efforts to seek international backing for statehood. It comes as pressure mounts separately from France and Russia for the Israeli government to re-engage in peace talks.

Now Netanyahu can argue that when Palestinian leaders call for a state free of armed, Jewish-only colonies breaking up any hope of Palestinian territorial contiguity they should be labelled as ethnic cleansers.

Backed by Trump adviser

Early indications are that Netanyahu’s upending of international law may quickly win backing from the US right – and potentially from the next US administration, if Republican candidate Donald Trump is elected president in November.

On Sunday, the Haaretz daily quoted Trump adviser David Friedman as agreeing with Netanyahu and accusing the Palestinians of planning to make any future state “judenrein” – the term Nazis used to mean “empty of Jews”.

“It is an entirely racist and anti-Semitic position,” Friedman added.

Amal Jamal, a politics professor at Tel Aviv University, told Al Jazeera that Netanyahu’s video should be understood as the flipside of his earlier precondition for peace talks: that the Palestinians recognise Israel as an exclusively Jewish state.

That demand was intended as a trap for the Palestinian leadership, especially given that Israel includes 1.7 million Palestinian citizens who already suffer rampant and institutionalised discrimination.

Population Swap

In Friday’s video, Netanyahu again exploited the existence of this large minority of Palestinians inside Israel to advance his right-wing agenda. He explicitly equated the settlers in the occupied territories with Israel’s Palestinian citizens, saying neither is “an obstacle to peace”.

The implication is that, should the Palestinian leadership insist on the settlers being “ethnically cleansed” from their illegal colonies, Israel would be justified in demanding tit-for-tat. If the settlers have to return to Israel, why not a population swap, with Israel’s Palestinian minority forced into the occupied territories?

Palestinian leaders in Israel understood the danger. Ahmed Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Israeli parliament, wrote at the weekend: “We are not Israeli settlers, Mr Netanyahu … [We] are not foreign immigrants that came to Israel and applied for visas or citizenship … [We] are the indigenous population.”

Jamal said that Netanyahu’s claim would also help him to “set the domestic agenda” against political rivals on the far-right, such as Defence Minister Avigdor Lieberman and Education Minister Naftali Bennett, both of them identified with the settler movement. Lieberman has repeatedly announced plans for land swaps that would redraw Israel’s recognised borders to move some Palestinian communities outside Israel in return for the annexation of the larger settlements.

“Neither Lieberman nor Bennett have gone as far as Netanyahu has now in suggesting that the evacuation of any settlement is ethnic cleansing,” Jamal said. “That will strengthen him with his power base on the right.”

Risky strategy

Nonetheless, this new condition – that Jewish colonies be treated as untouchable – is diplomatically a high-risk strategy.

If, as Netanyahu claims, “societies that demand ethnic cleansing don’t pursue peace”, what does that say about Israel, a state founded on the mass expulsion of Palestinians from their homeland in 1948?

Chemi Shalev, an analyst with the Haaretz daily, noted: “After years that Israel has toiled to prevent the loaded term ‘ethnic cleansing’ from entering the Israeli-Palestinian lexicon, Netanyahu is now pushing it in himself, through the front door.”

As a counter-video hurriedly produced by the Palestinian Authority pointed out, Israel’s founding fathers spoke out repeatedly in favour of ethnic cleansing.

Extending Netanyahu’s logic, another commentator in Haaretz observed that, if Jews had an inviolable right to live on Palestinian land, why should Palestinians expelled in 1948 not have an equivalent right to live in their former homes now inside Israel, in cities like Haifa and Jaffa?

Ongoing expulsions

Netanyahu’s claim not only shines an embarrassing light on Israel’s past crimes. Palestinians are currently being driven off their land to allow for the expansion of Jewish-only settlements, with Israel demolishing Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem and in West Bank communities, in the Hebron Hills and Jordan Valley.

It is doing the same to Palestinian citizens inside Israel. The homes of 1,000 Bedouin residents of Umm al-Hiran in the Negev are about to be demolished so that an exclusively Jewish town – also called Hiran – can be built in their place.

In short, ethnic cleansing – of the kind defined by international law – is very much an ongoing project by Israel.

Then there is the matter of the United States, Israel’s patron. Netanyahu chose to issue his video in English, indicating that it was intended for a foreign as much as a domestic audience.

White House ‘livid’

Publicly, the Obama administration called Netanyahu’s comments “inappropriate and unhelpful”. Behind the scenes the White House was variously reported to be “seething” and “livid”.

That was entirely predictable. In the video, Netanyahu states that “some otherwise enlightened countries even promote this outrage [of ethnic cleansing of Jews]”.

It is hard not to read this as an attack on Washington. US President Barack Obama spent his first term trying unsuccessfully to force Netanyahu to freeze settlement expansion, and has regularly called the settlements an impediment to peace. Last month, US officials were reported to have warned of a “harsh response” if Israel demolished Palestinian homes in the West Bank village of Susiya to make way for settler homes.

So why did Netanyahu choose this provocative course?

The video was certainly not a mistake. It is part of a strategy planned by Netanyahu’s foreign media spokesman, David Keyes. He was appointed in March after coming to prominence for controversial pro-Israel stunts on social media.

Netanyahu has issued eight such videos under Keyes’s direction, many of which have gone viral and are highly popular among his supporters, both in Israel and the US.

Reading US mood

The inspiration for the latest video appears to be Frank Luntz, a high-profile consultant to the Republican party and pro-Israel causes. Famously, he developed a document in 2009 advising Israel’s supporters on how best to make their case. Netanyahu’s ethnic cleansing claim is set out almost word for word at the top of page 62 as the most effective argument with American audiences.

The Trump campaign’s apparent endorsement of the Netanyahu video suggests that the Israeli prime minister may be reading the political climate in the US correctly.

Jamal said that Netanyahu and his advisers intended to severely limit the terms of any future peace process. “Now anyone who demands the evacuation of settlements risks being accused of anti-Semitism,” he said.

Jeff Halper, a founder of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions, agreed that Netanyahu’s goal was to reframe the international community’s assumptions.

“Netanyahu is telling them that there are no more occupied territories and no more settlers,” he told Al Jazeera. “He’s saying, ‘Israel won, and it is time to get used to the reality of a single state’. This is the new normal and he wants the language and thinking of the international community to reflect that.”

Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel is a winner of the Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. His latest books are Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake the Middle East (Pluto Press) and Disappearing Palestine: Israel’s Experiments in Human Despair (Zed Books).

This article originally appeared on Al Jazeera.

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