By Jennifer Loewenstein
For
those who haven't noticed, Israel opposes a two-state solution. It has
been doing everything in its power to prevent a Palestinian state from
emerging and will continue to do so as long as it can count on the
complicity of its powerful friends and on abundant popular indifference.
Under
such circumstances, it is incumbent upon ourselves to ask why Hamas has
therefore been ordered - by Israel and its same powerful friends - to
accept "the two-state solution," especially when, unlike Israel, it has
stated clearly and repeatedly that it would accept a Palestinian state
on the lands occupied by Israel in the 1967 war, the West Bank, the
Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. Indeed, all of its key spokespeople have
said this.
Judea and Samaria, which are, or were, the
northern
and southern West Bank, have been subdivided and parceled out over
decades to hundreds of thousands of Jewish settlers for their houses
and orchards and gardens. They have been crisscrossed and circled with
Jewish-only roads that bind the land to Israel. They have been manned
with guards and gunmen and tanks and blue and white Israeli flags that
defend, protect and assure the settlers that they are in fact Israelis
belonging to a single Jewish state.
The settled lands with their
settler families have been mapped and assigned, seized and secured from
the Arabs in the shabby clothes in the rundown villages who live
outside of, or have been forced to leave, the protected colonial zones.
The projected frontiers, the future borders, depend on the
disappearance of these Arabs, which is anxiously anticipated and
actively encouraged. Most of the eastern perimeter of the current state
is a concrete wall erasing from view that "other side," which is
unmentionable in polite company. The eastern perimeter wall will soon
be the western perimeter wall because the acting Israeli prime
minister, Ehud Olmert, has just announced that the rest of the
unincorporated West Bank land will soon be annexed to Israel.
 |
AP Photo/Oded
Balilty
Women
from the Jado family work their land near their house next to a section
of Israel's separation barrier in the outskirts of the West Bank town
of Bethlehem.
|
In
the same breath as he announces this latest unilateral declaration of
confiscated land for a Jewish state, Olmert announces a sanctions
regime against the Palestinians of the occupied territories for
refusing to believe that this land transformation in which one society
is strengthened and expanded and the other is dissolved into a thousand
pieces is actually the two-state solution.
Israel allots to
itself first use of the natural resources, especially water, from the
territory it has appropriated or surrounded. An army of thieves and
wreckers has turned the remainder - the pot-holed roads, the untended
groves, the homes, the schools, the mosques and churches, the
hospitals, universities, shops and remaining civil institutions - into
a series of impassable mazes, a legal no-man's land, where travel
restrictions, permits, coded IDs, passes, random searches, incursions
and arbitrary accusations reduce the inhabitants into suspicious beings
without names, faces, addresses or rights; a collective villain to be
de-educated and de-nationalized and, one day perhaps, deported for the
sake of the Israeli raison d'etre.
For those who haven't
noticed, there is no sign of this process coming to an end. Instead, in
addition to the bizarre demand that Hamas accept the two-state solution
that Israel has categorically rejected and each day renders even more
geographically impossible, another two demands are added to it: Hamas
must recognize Israel, and it must renounce violence. In other words,
it must recognize a state whose policies and whose leaders have worked
tirelessly for decades to deny, undo, renounce, prevent and reject the
existence both of Palestinians and of Palestine - not only in the
present and future but also through erasing the past.
Still, our
media take it upon themselves to show the world a circus mirror
reality, grotesque in its distortions, in which a democratically
elected government-without-a-state and its trampled, largely destitute
people are made out to be holding hostage the hoodlums that are busy
stomping them to death.
While they are being stomped, they must
renounce violence so that the hoodlums won't get hurt. If they defend
themselves they lose. If they complain, they are insincere. If they ask
for something in return, they are untrustworthy. If they ask for a fair
hearing, they are advancing an "agenda." If they hit back randomly,
they are an instrument of terror.
So when the furies of the
thousands of dead, tens of thousands of wounded and detained, and
millions of bound and gagged rise up together in a whirlwind to
protest, they will be pointed to as evidence of innate evil that must
justifiably be contained, justifiably occupied, with justified
indignation and bottomless financial aid.
Hamas' reward for
coming to power just in time to provide all the aspiring Sharons the
most perfect, served-up-on-a-silver-platter pretext for continuing
their well-worn policies with a vengeance has been for the Kadima party
- the party of the future - to announce that it will put the
Palestinians on a starvation diet for presuming to exercise their
rights. Hamas' reward for verifying the smashing success of Israel's
goal to destroy Fatah has been Israel's insistence that it abide by all
the agreements, treaties and accords that Fatah, essentially the
Palestinian Authority, signed but that Israel shredded page by page.
With every new brick laid for the settlements, every new road paved,
every permit denied for work, education, medical care and travel, every
truck left waiting with rotting produce, every tax and customs dollar
stolen from a people interned on their own land, Israel parades its
contempt for human decency and gets standing ovations in the U.S.
Congress and elsewhere.
For those who haven't noticed, Israel
opposes a two-state solution. It also opposes a one-state and a
bi-national state, a federated secular state, and the zillion
interim-state solutions that have been drawn up and debated and argued
over the years. It opposes them because it opposes the presence of
another people on land it has claimed as the exclusive patrimony of the
Jews.
This has to be the starting point for effective
activism
against the racist and hegemonic vision that Israel is implementing and
the U.S. guaranteeing, not faraway discussions on the most ideal
solution. An effective opposition must not retreat into a slumbering or
sidetracked lethal indifference.
Jennifer Loewenstein of
Madison is a visiting research fellow at Oxford University's Refugee
Studies Centre in Oxford, England. She has lived and worked in Gaza
City, Beirut and Jerusalem and has traveled extensively throughout the
Middle East, where she has worked as a free-lance journalist and a
human rights activist. E-mail: amadea311@earthlink.net
Published: March 17, 2006
