Twilight Zone / Cry, the beloved country

By Gideon Levy

PRETORIA, South Africa - It was like being in the movies. Only there would you see an inert photo suddenly come to life. We were standing at the memorial museum in Soweto, next to a photo of a dead boy with other children around him, and our guide Antoinette was telling us about it. Antoinette said that the young girl in the picture was her.

The photo is at the entrance of the museum, built to commemorate the blacks' struggle against apartheid, which began here. Across the way is Nelson Mandela's tiny hut, nearby is the house of Desmond Tutu and down the street is the present home of Winnie Mandela.

The picture was stunningly familiar to us. We were four: MK Ran Cohen (Meretz); Riyad Mansour, the Palestinian ambassador to the United Nations; Diana Buttu, a former legal advisor to the PLO; and myself. We were all making the same associations: Hector is Mohammed al-Dura; the white soldiers shooting at children are us.

The passage of time was evident with Antoinette. The teenager in the picture was now a woman in her late forties. Her brother would have been 44, but a bullet from the rifle of a white policeman deprived him of the chance to witness the miracle of how the cruel racist regime collapsed.

It was another UN conference about peace with the Palestinians, but this time it was being held in a particularly "loaded" location. We were only two Israelis there, but the calling cards I collected were quite varied: Arab and African ambassadors, the previous Egyptian foreign minister, representatives of Muslim countries and diplomats posted in Pretoria. The Syrian ambassador smiled and did not offer his card; the Libyan ambassador did the same. But they listened to us attentively.

The new regime has been good for South Africa; no Palestinian refugee camp looks nearly as attractive as Soweto 2007. But not far away is a shantytown called Alexandra and the sights there are worse than in any Palestinian refugee camp we've seen. This is where South African blacks who haven't been able to pull themselves out of poverty live, together with refugees from neighboring Zimbabwe.

Less than a kilometer separates the impoverished Alexandra from a fancy Johannesburg neighborhood called Sandton. There, behind the electric fences and personal bodyguards, hide the city's wealthy - many of them Jews and a good number former Israelis. On Shabbat we ate cholent. On Friday night we dined with a former Israeli from Nahalal. We drove to Alexandra with a guy who originally hails from Tivon, who has been here for 30 years and owns a huge agricultural enterprise that employs 1,800 black workers earning $2 an hour.

It's impossible not to admire what has occurred in this battered land since the yoke of white tyranny was lifted.

Not in his name

At the conference luncheon, Ronnie Kasrils, South Africa's minister for intelligence services, hurried over to grab a seat next to us. Kasrils, a Jew, had never been to Israel (where he has relatives) until his visit to the territories earlier in the month, when he invited Palestinian Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh to his country. He then made his first, quick trip to Tel Aviv, saw Rabin Square and ate fish in Jaffa. "It was the most pleasant evening I had," he acknowledges.

Tom Segev once wrote that he is "a guy I wouldn't choose to be stuck in an elevator with," but I would be glad to get stuck with Ronnie Kasrils, inside or outside an elevator. He is a Jew in conflict with his people, perhaps also with his identity - a courageous freedom fighter and communist, who joined the oppressed race in its struggle, was exiled from his country for 27 years and is now a minister.

A son of Lithuanian Jews, who had a bar mitzvah and belonged to Jewish youth movements, Kasrils is one of the most fascinating characters to come out of the local Jewish community - which now thoroughly denounces him. He brandishes his Jewishness openly, perhaps defiantly, even when he recently made an official visit to Iran and Syria. He once founded a movement called "Not in My Name," to underscore his disassociation from the injustices committed by Israel in the territories. Ronnie Kasrils hates the Israeli occupation.

When we talked he said the Israeli occupation is worse than apartheid: The whites never shelled the black neighborhoods with tanks and artillery.

Just like the pogroms

If this warm, outgoing 69-year-old has any personal security protection, it is invisible. We sat in a vacant room in a building on the University of Pretoria campus and talked. "You're an Israeli and I'm a South African," he emphasized immediately, as if to negate any common identity. "I'm confident that the circle will be closed one day and people will understand that I'm not anti-Jewish or anti-Israeli ... It really pains me as a Jew that in this country such hostility has developed toward Israel, because of its treatment of the Palestinians ...

"When we saw on television the drama going on in your country, the oppressive pictures of the methods you use toward the Palestinians, the uprooting of trees, the tanks entering Jenin, and the old woman weeping over the demolition of her house and crying 'The Jews, the Jews' - it's just like what my grandmother used to tell me about the pogroms: The Cossacks are coming, the Cossacks are coming. I'm trying to say: It's not the Jews, it's Zionisms that's doing this. So I decided to get up and say something. I found this in the Jewish tradition: to open your mouth, in the name of conscience.

"The man who greeted me when I returned to South Africa after the years of exile was Rabbi Cyril Harris ... He gave me a red skullcap with a dedication: to the freedom fighter. When I started to express criticism of Israel, I thought that the Jews would denounce Ariel Sharon, but then I found out that I was naive. I was stunned to see that the Jewish community here didn't care who was in power in Israel and how extreme the policy was against the Palestinians ... They would blindly support any government. Rabbi Harris became my enemy. He called me a fringe Jew and my response was: We were the only ones who stood up against apartheid and now we're the minority against the injustice.

"When I visited the territories I also passed through Israel and I saw the forests that cover the remnants of the Palestinian villages. As a former forestry minister, this was especially striking to me. I also went into a few settlements. It was insane. Young Americans spat on the flag that was on my car. The occupation reminds me of the darkest days of apartheid, but we never saw tanks and planes firing at a civilian population. It's a monstrousness I'd never seen before. The wall you built, the checkpoints and the roads for Jews only - it turns the stomach, even for someone who grew up under apartheid. It's a hundred times worse.

"We know from our experience that oppression motivates resistance and that the more savage the oppression, the harsher the resistance. At a certain point in time you think that the oppression is working, and that you're controlling the other people, imprisoning its leaders and its activists, but the resistance will triumph in the end.

"We saw the entrance to Qalqilyah, the wall, the people standing hours in line at the checkpoints. It's a beautiful country, I love its landscapes, but I know that it's big enough to contain more people. Israel has developed very impressively, but how much more impressive it would be if you brought about a just solution ... I don't care if it's two states or one - it's up to you, the Israelis and the Palestinians, to decide.

"I had coffee with the commander of the Erez checkpoint. It reminded me of the central prison in Pretoria, a place I've visited many times. And it was so awful to go through this thing in order to get to Gaza. At first I said that I don't want to speak with the man at the checkpoint, but then I decided that was foolish. The Israelis were actually very nice to me.

"What is Zionism to me? When I was 10 years old, it meant security and a national home for the Jews. I waved the Israeli flag at my bar mitzvah and I was very proud of my Judaism. The first book I received for my bar mitzvah was 'The Revolt,' by Menachem Begin. My biggest hero was Asher Ginsberg, Ahad Ha'am ... Later on I started reading not only Herzl, but also [historians] Ilan Pappe, Benny Morris and Tom Segev, and I came to see 1948 in a different light. I understood that it was an ethnic cleansing.

"South Africa changed me and strengthened my South African identity. And then I began to understand that the main problem of Zionism is the exclusivity of the establishment of a national home and the concept of the chosen people. Very soon I started to oppose it. The establishment of a national home for Jews alone seemed to me like a parallel of apartheid. The apartheid leaders also spoke about a chosen people. In 1961, prime minister Hendrik Verwoerd said that Israel is like South Africa. That opened my eyes. For many years we were also aware of the military cooperation between Israel and South Africa - a joint offensive naval force, missile boats, the Cheetah planes and the big secret of the nuclear weapons. Prime minister Johannes Vorster, who had a declared Nazi past, received a hero's welcome from you. This added to my feelings regarding Israel.

"I am very conscious of the Holocaust and of anti-Semitism, but my experience here leads me to one conclusion: that all forms of racism must be fought by means of a common struggle. I have a dream: That you will change your outlook, as happened here, and that change will come. When politicians reach agreements, it's amazing how fast ordinary folks can come to a change in thinking. Change the leadership and the economic conditions and you'll see how easy the change is."

A kind of military coup

By Haaretz Editorial

Does Israel still uphold that proper state of affairs in which the elected government sets policy and civil servants carry it out? According to an article published in Haaretz yesterday ("The spirit of the commander prevails" by Meron Rapoport), it seems that with regard to the army, the answer is negative. While ministers speak about a two-state solution, a kind of military coup is taking place in the West Bank, in which the Israel Defense Forces are turning the area into the state of the settlers. While the Palestinian population is being suffocated, the settlements are flourishing.

It does not make much difference whether the Defense Ministry is headed by a civilian minister, because the army has its own agenda, and its subordination to the government is often simulated. For years, Israel was proud of the democratic miracle of an obedient army that did not accumulate too much power and served the elected government loyally, even though the country was engaged in a continual existential war. During the last war, however, cracks appeared in this faith, when it turned out that the cabinet had been dragged into approving military plans that were never even submitted to it. And even worse things happen every day in the occupied territories. Haggai Alon, an adviser to the defense minister who is responsible for the fabric of life in the West Bank, says that the army disregards the government's diplomatic agenda and essentially serves as the settlers' army. Or at least, that is how it was throughout Dan Halutz's tenure as chief of staff.

One shocking example of this democratic crisis is the army's disregard of court decisions regarding the route of the separation fence. After years of High Court of Justice hearings on every meter of the fence, with the goal of striking a balance between security needs and the needs of Palestinian daily life, it turns out that along Route 317, which links several settlements in the southern Mount Hebron area, the army ignored these decisions and built a mini-fence in addition to the one that was formally approved - and it is located along the original route that the High Court nixed.

Additionally, a section of the fence near the Trans-Samaria Highway, which was supposed to be built near the Green Line, was never completed due to the settlers' objections. The army also stopped conducting security checks on cars with Israeli license plates due to the protests lodged by settlers, who did not want to stop at the checkpoints - even though an explosives-laden car with an Israeli license plate recently entered Israel. The IDF does not report to the government on how many roadblocks there are in the West Bank; thus the government can talk about making life easier for the Palestinians while the army refrains from doing so. Similarly, thanks to assistance from IDF officers, settlers moved into a disputed house in Hebron; downtown Hebron was closed to Palestinians; and 3,000 demonstrators reached the evacuated settlement of Homesh in defiance of the government's decision. Settlements are also expanding in various places because the army has turned a blind eye, and sometimes even with its active assistance.

In light of all this, Amir Peretz's talk about dismantling West Bank settlement outposts, like Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni's promises to reach a new agreement on dividing the land between Israel and Palestine, sounds emptier than ever. It evidently makes no difference which party is in power, as long as the army serves the settlers rather than the state.


--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The spirit of the commander prevails

Haggai Alon has a bone to pick with the military establishment. He believes the system is calibrated to make the security-fence route more favorable to settlers and to allow them to take over houses in Hebron

By Meron Rapoport

"There is a military policy that is causing the Arab population to leave the center of Hebron. It's a clear plan, it's a fact. Everything would be all right if they would say so openly, if our policy were to create Jewish contiguity in Hebron, and the government were to tell the army to do so: We would go to elections over that. But that is not the policy of the State of Israel. The problem is that under military rule the spirit of the commander is stronger than anything else."

Haggai Alon says these words in the context of his job. In his position as adviser to the defense minister on "fabric of life" issues, Alon visits Hebron with the army, with the Civil Administration, with whoever he has to. As part of his job he sits in on discussions with senior Israel Defense Forces officers, walks around in the area, meets with officers and is supposed to tell them what to do on behalf of his boss, the defense minister.

Here and there he succeeds, he says. The Jordan Valley Highway stopped being a highway for "Israelis only," the work hours at the Karni crossing were doubled, increasing the amount of goods that pass through - but the overall situation is depressing. The experience Alon has accumulated after a year in the job has taught him that the official policy of the Israeli government is one thing, and the actions of the army on the ground are another, sometimes the opposite. In a disturbing way it is reminiscent of the Winograd Committee, which revealed to us how the General Staff held political discussions, whereas the cabinet discussed where to bomb. The cabinet and the army exchanged roles in Lebanon. According to Alon, the same is true of the West Bank.

Alon, 33, has become a thorn in the side of the defense establishment. When, of his own accord, the outgoing CEO of Central Command issued an order forbidding Israelis to give Palestinians rides in their cars, Alon set up a hue and cry and the order was finally rescinded. When he discovered that the IDF was trying to evade honoring a ruling of the High Court of Justice, he sent letters and caused a great deal of embarrassment in the system. When he reveals how army officers are trying to move the fence so it will accord with the map of settlements, he quarrels openly with very senior officers.

Alon, as one may guess, did not grow up in the defense establishment. He is a political person and he doesn't hide it. He was born in Kibbutz Naan, a vestige of what was once called Ahdut Ha'avoda (the left-wing Zionist Labor party). He thinks the Jordan Valley should be left in Israeli hands even in a final status agreement. Definitely not a classical leftist.

For years he has accompanied Amir Peretz, and shortly after Peretz was appointed defense minister, Alon was appointed his political adviser. Since the beginning of the year he has been working in the Defense Ministry as the adviser on "fabric of life" issues. He, a dyed-in-the-wool civilian, replaced Brigadier General (res.) Baruch Spiegel, formerly a senior officer in the Civil Administration.

"Fabric of life" has recently become a burning issue. Last week the World Bank, the United Nations organization considered to be friendliest to Israel, published a harsh report, which claimed that although Israel signed an agreement in 2005 to ease restrictions on movement in the territories, they have only become stricter. The report states that Israel prevents Palestinians access to about half the areas of the West Bank, and it claims that the restrictions on movement were designed to grant priority to the movement of the settlers and to help the expansion of the settlements at the expense of the Palestinian population.

The Benchmarks document recently formulated by the Americans, which presented Israel with a timetable for dismantling roadblocks in the West Bank and for the opening of a safe passage between the West Bank and Gaza, aroused a great deal of anger in Israel. Some IDF officials claimed that the Americans were able to write the document only based on inside information from "factors in the defense establishment." As though OCHA, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, doesn't report regularly on the situation of the roadblocks in the territories, and as though the Americans have no way of knowing what is happening at Hawara checkpoint. Alon does not understand why they are upset by the American demands. The problem is not the demands, he says, but the question: "How did it happen that a year and a half after the disengagement, the Americans feel a need to give us a written document, something they haven't done in a very long time."

A defense source says the origins of this document lie in the fact that the Americans have stopped believing Israel because "they are presented with maps that are an outright lie." Alon says that even though he works in the Defense Ministry and the data are supposed to be accessible to him, he has difficulty knowing the exact number of checkpoints. "The only thing that's clear is that they have doubled since the disengagement."

His job, he says, is to ensure that the official statements made by the Israeli government regarding its policy toward the Palestinians are in fact implemented, and that is not an easy job. He says the IDF is setting a route for the fence that will not enable the establishment of a Palestinian state and is allowing itself to evade High Court orders to change the route. He claims that the army "is carrying out an apartheid policy" that is emptying Hebron of Arabs, setting up roadblocks without anyone knowing where and how many, Judaizing the Jordan Valley and cooperating openly and blatantly with the settlers.

Take for example Highway 317, which links several settlements in the south Hebron Hills. About a year ago, the IDF constructed a concrete barrier along the road, whose location is no coincidence. The barrier prevents Palestinian from reaching their lands on the side of the road. According to the plan approved by Ariel Sharon about three years ago, the separation fence was supposed to run along Highway 317 and in effect to annex the local settlements to Israel, together with hundreds of square kilometers of the southern West Bank between the highway and the Green Line. After it turned out that it would be impossible to defend this route in the courts, it was decided to change the route to coincide with the Green Line.

And now, miraculously, the concrete barrier that was constructed last year is exactly congruent with Sharon's original route. About half a year ago the High Court ordered it dismantled, but the IDF was not impressed. For months it ignored the specific order, until the legal adviser of the Judea and Samaria division announced about a month and a half ago that the IDF has no intention of dismantling the barrier. This was a strange announcement, not only because it ostensibly contradicts a High Court order, but also because, according to Alon, no senior officials in the Defense Minister were informed of the intention not to move the fence: not the defense minister and not even the ministry's director general, who is the official responsible for the fence. The Central Command decided to build the fence in the spirit of Sharon, and that's that. Exactly, says Alon, the way it enthusiastically maintains what he calls the "malicious plan" to link Gush Etzion to Jerusalem, or to annex dozens of kilometers of desert in the area of Ma'aleh Adumim - plans that if carried out will eliminate the possibility of establishing two states for two nations, as written in the government platform.

After discovering a few weeks ago that the IDF does not intend to dismantle the barrier, Alon sent a furious letter to the defense minister, in which he claimed that the army "is doing everything in its power to avoid obeying the High Court ruling." He says that "what is amazing is that army officers say that the route of the fence should have passed there [along Highway 317, M.R.], because that is what Sharon wanted. They're not embarrassed. They say: 'The High Court told us to move the fence, so we moved it, and now we're building a mini-fence [the barrier, M.R.].' As they see it, there was a hitch, the High Court screwed them.

"Another example is the 'hole' in the fence in the area of the Trans-Samaria Highway. The route, which was approved a moment before the formation of the new government, includes 'fingers' around Ariel and Karnei Shomron, but at the moment this section is not being built, because the Americans are opposed to building a fence deep inside the West Bank. So meanwhile there is a gap."

Alon coordinated the work of a team of former senior officials in the Central Command, the Civil Administration and the Shin Bet security services, which has proposed a solution: The fence will be built along the Green Line, and "special security areas" will be built around the large settlements deep inside the area. The proposal will soon be submitted to the defense minister for discussion, but Alon is guessing that the army will prefer to leave the gap in place. "The entire conduct on this issue shows the extent to which the professional establishment has implemented a political policy, in a frightening manner."

Proof of the fact that the gap is a security risk could be seen last Pesach, in his opinion, when a truck bearing a yellow license plate, loaded with explosives, arrived in Tel Aviv and returned to Qalqilyah, without being stopped on the way. How did that happen? "There is no checking of cars with yellow license plates on the Green Line, because the settlers are unwilling to undergo a check," says Alon.

Alon has several current examples of the close relations between the army and the settlers: for example, the ascent to Homesh on Independence Day. The defense minister did not approve plan. Yet thousands of demonstrators celebrated the holiday on the hill near Nablus. "In Homesh there was open, blatant cooperation with the settlers," says Alon. "At first the army gave them permission to ascend. After the permission was revealed, they canceled it, and then, ostensibly by surprise, the settlers 'confused' the army and went up to Homesh with dozens of buses."

Something similar happened in Hebron. Alon has trouble believing that the army did not know of the intention of hundreds of settlers to enter the "beit hameriva" ("house of contention"). He says "when a system is calibrated in advance to allow such things to happen, they happen."

As an example he cites from a letter sent by the legal adviser of the Judea and Samaria division in reply to a request by the Council for Peace and Security to open the center of Hebron to Palestinian movement. "Does anyone think it is possible to protect the residents of the Jewish settlement in the neighborhoods of Jewish settlement when these neighborhoods are isolated from one another, and when they are divided by an area in which a Palestinian lifestyle is being conducted as a matter of routine? How is it possible to prevent an attack caused by friction in the aforesaid neighborhoods when regular Palestinian commercial life is being conducted right on their threshold?"

It may be an excellent reply, but neither Alon nor Minister Peretz nor any of his assistants have informed the Judea and Samaria Division that there is a policy of separation in the center of Hebron. "There is no written order to empty Hebron of Arabs," says Alon, "but that's the greatness of military rule. It can simply refrain from doing: it can refrain from enforcing the law on the settlers and it can refrain from allowing the Palestinians to move around. In the entire story of violations of the law in the territories, the spirit of the commander is the determining factor. It is stronger than any law or procedure."

According to Alon, the sprit of the CEO of Central Command, Yair Naveh, who is about to retire, was clear. He was "a settler in the service of the settlers," he says, and should have been removed because of his statements against King Abdullah of Jordan and because of IDF activity in Ramallah on the day when Prime Minister Ehud Olmert met with Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas in Sharm el-Sheikh. But Naveh, says Alon, at least behaved decently. He did not conceal his opinions, yet he didn't refuse to obey an order the moment he received specific instructions from the political leadership. Other officers, he says, recall their moral difficulty on the issue of the roadblocks only when interviewed upon their discharge.

Alon is trying to see the light at the end of the tunnel. Awareness of the issue of the roadblocks has increased, and in some places, like the Jordan Valley, there has been an easing of restrictions. The program he coordinated to change the route of the fence will soon come up for discussion. New Chief of Staff Gabi Ashkenazi also raises his hopes. "Dan Halutz was a Sharon appointment, and that's how he behaved. Ashkenazi is responsible. He is the hope of the Jewish people for taking politics out of the army. He has already told the political leaders: 'Don't cover political decisions with a pretense of security. Decide, and we'll implement.' The actual policy of the IDF, especially in recent years, is creating profound changes that threaten to make it impossible to leave the West Bank. We cannot allow the executive ranks to get us stuck in an irreversible binational situation."

The IDF Spokesman said in response regarding Homesh that "3,000 Israeli citizens came to Homesh, although it was forbidden to remain in the area without a permit. IDF forces operated according to IDF values in order to ensure the security of the civilians."

Regarding Highway 317 he said that "the Central Command did not try to prevent the implementation of the High Court decision, but examined it and decided on a model for implementation. Due to the reservations of Palestinian residents, the route proposed by the defense establishment is currently being examined."

Throw a pebble at Goliath: don't buy Israeli produce

The 'boycott movement' forces the issue of Israel's disregard of Palestinian human rights into the public arena - where it is too little aired.

Yvonne Roberts
The Guardian: Comment is Free

"The boycott campaign is not really about what happens in the Middle East but about what happens in our unions, on our campuses and in our public discourse. The damage that it does in the UK is that it disables political work in solidarity with those who fight for peace in the Middle East by polarising opinion around an artificial and destructive issue."

So writes David Hirsh on Comment is free, on the vote next Wednesday at a conference held by the University and College Union (UCU), arguing against what he calls "the boycott movement".

So the boycott movement allegedly "disables political work in solidarity with those who fight for peace in the Middle East" does it? Is that the same political work that is so highly effective that the only major change since the 1970s, when I regularly reported from the region, is of a profound deterioration in all aspects of life for ordinary Palestinians?

In contributing his blog, David Hirsh ironically illustrates precisely why the boycott movement has an impact. It clears a space in the public arena which, in the UK and the USA, is normally hopelessly biased in favour of Israel - not least because Zionist supporters of Israel in both countries have money and political clout on a scale the Palestinians cannot hope to match.

While we frequently see and hear about the lives of ordinary Israelis, whether illegally settled on the West Bank or endeavouring to live under harrowing rocket bombardment or simply "being" Israelis - when was the last time the reality of day-to-day life in the refugee camps was regularly portrayed?

Back in the 1970s, long before the war on terror was launched, we tried to do precisely that for the now defunct current affairs series Weekend World. John Birt, its editor, fought furiously to have the film screened, but the battle with his superiors at LWT was lost. The film was shelved, deemed, "propaganda".

Regardless of the rhetoric of some of those advocating a boycott, one hopes that the majority of us are not so naive or so daft as to think that the issue of the Middle East, as Hirsh suggests, splits into a simplistic polarisation of Israel - bad; Palestine - good. Or that excluding Israeli Jewish academics from UK campuses, journals and conferences is anything more than an attack on the right to freedom of speech.

However, a double standard pertains. The Israeli treatment of Palestinians shows a total disregard for human rights. Apartheid doesn't seem to me to be too strong a word - and its consequence, as many have pointed out, is a recruitment drive for Islamic fundamentalists.

In this month's New Internationalist, psychiatrist Samah Jabr, describes his work in Ramallah and Jericho and the "mental health emergency" under way. For a population of 3.8 million, there are 15 psychiatrists and disastrously too few nurses, psychologists and support staff. He points out that 53% of the population is under 17 - especially vulnerable to family deaths, absent fathers and constant warfare.

Add poverty, affecting 67% of the population, unemployment at 40%, 20% of the population are prisoners and ex-prisoners, many suffering the psychiatric after-effects of isolation, and the daily violence does the rest.

Palestinian factionalism and Israel's brutal retaliation, plus its pre-emptive strikes and demolition of homes hits the Palestinian people with a savagery that destroys any semblance of normal living. (The ordinary Palestinians in the Lebanon are again paying the heaviest price.) Of course, ordinary Israelis are affected too - but their community remains robust, well cared-for, with needs met. Psychological trauma, for many Israelis, is at best held at bay and at worst given help. Hundreds of Israeli political prisoners are not rotting in Palestinian jails.

A boycott is neither self-indulgent gesture politics nor an indicator of powerlessness, as Hirsh suggests. It is an international protest against the way in which Israel behaves on a daily basis in an area that will, in all probability, never see peace.

June 9 sees the Global Day of Action on Palestine. Throw a pebble at Goliath - don't spend your pennies on Israeli produce.

Yvonne Roberts has been an award winning journalist, writer and broadcaster in newspapers, radio and television for over 30 years. She writes for the Guardian, Independent on Sunday, Observer, Community Care and the internet magazine, The Frist Post.

It is not only God that will be Blair's judge over Iraq

His cravenly pro-US policy on the Middle East misunderstood Bush's real agenda and resulted in catastrophic failure

Avi Shlaim
Monday May 14, 2007
The Guardian

Tony Blair's opposition to an immediate ceasefire in the Lebanon war last summer precipitated his downfall. Now that he has announced the date of his departure from Downing Street, his entire Middle East record needs to be placed under an uncompromising lens.

Blair came to office with no experience of, and virtually no interest in, foreign affairs, and ended by taking this country to war five times. Blair boasts that his foreign policy was guided by the doctrine of liberal interventionism. But the war in Iraq is the antithesis of liberal intervention. It is an illegal, immoral and unnecessary war, a war undertaken on a false prospectus and without sanction from the UN.

Blair's entire record in the Middle East is one of catastrophic failure. He used to portray Britain as a bridge between the two sides of the Atlantic. By siding with America against Europe on Iraq, however, he helped to destroy the bridge. Preserving the special relationship with America was the be all and end all of Blair's foreign policy. He presumably supported the Bush administration over Iraq in the hope of exercising influence on its policy. Yet there is no evidence that he exercised influence on any significant policy issue. His support for the neoconservative agenda on Iraq was uncritical and unconditional.

Blair failed to understand that America's really special relationship is with Israel, not Britain. Every time that George Bush had to choose between Blair and Ariel Sharon, he chose the latter. Blair's special relationship with Bush was a one-way street: Blair made all the concessions and got nothing tangible in return.

American policy towards the Middle East was doomed to failure from the start, and the end result has been to saddle Britain with a share of the responsibility for this failure. The premise behind American policy was that Iraq was the main issue in Middle East politics and that regime change in Baghdad would weaken the Palestinians and force them to accept a settlement on Israel's terms. The road to Jerusalem, it was argued, went through Baghdad. This premise was wrong. Iraq was a non-issue; it did not pose a threat to any of its neighbours, and certainly not to America or Britain. The real issue was Israel's occupation of the Palestinian territories and America's support for Israel in its savage colonial war against the Palestinian people.

When seeking the approval of the Commons for the war, Blair pledged that after Iraq was disarmed, he and his American friends would seek a solution to the Palestine problem. He has utterly failed to deliver on this promise.

True, Blair was the driving force behind the "road map" that envisaged the emergence of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel by the end of 2005. But Sharon wrecked the road map. In return for the unilateral withdrawal from Gaza, Sharon exacted a written American agreement to Israel's retention of the major settlement blocs on the West Bank. Blair publicly endorsed the nefarious Sharon-Bush pact. This was the most egregious British betrayal of the Palestinians since the Balfour declaration of 1917.

Blair and Bush have also betrayed the Iraqi people. To begin with, there was much brave rhetoric about bringing democracy to Iraq and turning it into a model for the rest of the Arab world. But the rhetoric was empty. The neoconservatives who drove American policy were interested in overthrowing Saddam Hussein and in nothing else.

The allied invasion of Iraq was not an isolated episode but part of the so-called global war on terror. But the overthrow of the Ba'ath regime in Iraq only exacerbated the problem of terrorism. The invasion of Iraq has given a powerful boost to al-Qaida and its confederates by damaging Britain's reputation and radicalising its young Muslims. The London bombs may not have been a direct result of the Iraq war - but they are indisputably a part of the blowback.

What we have in Iraq today is chronic instability, an incipient civil war, endemic violence and anarchy, an upsurge of terrorist activity of every kind, and a national insurgency to which the allies have no answer. The neocons did not bother to plan for postwar reconstruction. Occupation was accompanied by devastation and destruction on a massive scale and a civilian death toll estimated by one source at 655,000.

The allies pride themselves on having brought democracy to the Iraqi people, but they have failed in the primary duty of any government: to provide security for the civilian population. The upshot is that America and its pillion passenger in the "war against terror" are now embroiled in a vicious, protracted and unwinnable conflict.

Blair has the audacity to say that God will be his judge over the Iraq war. This is a curious attitude for a democratic politician to adopt. History will surely pass a harsh judgment on Blair. He has the worst record on the Middle East of any British prime minister in the past century, infinitely worse than that of Anthony Eden, who at least had the decency to accept responsibility for the Suez debacle.

· Avi Shlaim is a professor of international relations at St Antony's College, Oxford, and author of The Iron Wall: Israel and the Arab World.

Imprisoning a whole nation

by John Pilger

22 May 2007

In an article for the New Statesman, John Pilger describes how Gaza in Palestine has come to symbolise the imposition of great power on the powerless, in the Middle East and all over the world, and how a vocabulary of double standard is employed to justify this epic tragedy.

Israel is destroying any notion of a state of Palestine and is being allowed to imprison an entire nation. That is clear from the latest attacks on Gaza, whose suffering has become a metaphor for the tragedy imposed on the peoples of the Middle East and beyond. These attacks, reported on Britain's Channel 4 News, were "targeting key militants of Hamas" and the "Hamas infrastructure". The BBC described a "clash" between the same militants and Israeli F-16 aircraft.

Consider one such clash. The militants' car was blown to pieces by a missile from a fighter-bomber. Who were these militants? In my experience, all the people of Gaza are militant in their resistance to their jailer and tormentor. As for the "Hamas infrastructure", this was the headquarters of the party that won last year's democratic elections in Palestine. To report that would give the wrong impression. It would suggest that the people in the car and all the others over the years, the babies and the elderly who have also "clashed" with fighter-bombers, were victims of a monstrous injustice. It would suggest the truth.

"Some say," said the Channel 4 reporter, that "Hamas has courted this [attack]..." Perhaps he was referring to the rockets fired at Israel from within the prison of Gaza which killed no one. Under international law an occupied people has the right to use arms against the occupier's forces. This right is never reported. The Channel 4 reporter referred to an "endless war", suggesting equivalents. There is no war. There is resistance among the poorest, most vulnerable people on earth to an enduring, illegal occupation imposed by the world's fourth largest military power, whose weapons of mass destruction range from cluster bombs to thermonuclear devices, bankrolled by the superpower. In the past six years alone, wrote the historian Ilan Pappe, "Israeli forces have killed more than 4,000 Palestinians, half of them children".

Consider how this power works. According to documents obtained by United Press International, the Israelis once secretly funded Hamas as "a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO [Palestine Liberation Organisation] by using a competing religious alternative", in the words of a former CIA official.

Today, Israel and the US have reversed this ploy and openly back Hamas's rival, Fatah, with bribes of millions of dollars. Israel recently secretly allowed 500 Fatah fighters to cross into Gaza from Egypt, where they had been trained by another American client, the Cairo dictatorship. The Israelis' aim is to undermine the elected Palestinian government and ignite a civil war. They have not quite succeeded. In response, the Palestinians forged a government of national unity, of both Hamas and Fatah. The latest attacks are aimed at destroying this.

With Gaza secured in chaos and the West Bank walled in, the Israeli plan, wrote the Palestinian academic Karma Nabulsi, is "a Hobbesian vision of an anarchic society: truncated, violent, powerless, destroyed, cowed, ruled by disparate militias, gangs, religious ideologues and extremists, broken up into ethnic and religious tribalism and co-opted collaborationists. Look to the Iraq of today..."

On 19 May, the Guardian received this letter from Omar Jabary al-Sarafeh, a Ramallah resident: "Land, water and air are under constant sight of a sophisticated military surveillance system that makes Gaza like The Truman Show," he wrote. "In this film every Gazan actor has a predefined role and the [Israeli] army behaves as a director... The Gaza strip needs to be shown as what it is... an Israeli laboratory backed by the international community where human beings are used as rabbits to test the most dramatic and perverse practices of economic suffocation and starvation."

The remarkable Israeli journalist Gideon Levy has described the starvation sweeping Gaza's more than a million and a quarter inhabitants and the "thousands of wounded, disabled and shell-shocked people unable to receive any treatment... The shadows of human beings roam the ruins... They only know the [Israeli army] will return and they know what this will mean for them: more imprisonment in their homes for weeks, more death and destruction in monstrous proportions".

Whenever I have been in Gaza, I have been consumed by this melancholia, as if I were a trespasser in a secret place of mourning. Skeins of smoke from wood fires hang over the same Mediterranean Sea that free peoples know, but not here. Along beaches that tourists would regard as picturesque trudge the incarcerated of Gaza; lines of sepia figures become silhouettes, marching at the water's edge, through lapping sewage. The water and power are cut off, yet again, when the generators are bombed, yet again. Iconic murals on walls pockmarked by bullets commemorate the dead, such as the family of 18 men, women and children who "clashed" with a 500lb American/Israeli bomb, dropped on their block of flats as they slept. Presumably, they were militants.

More than 40 per cent of the population of Gaza are children under the age of 15. Reporting on a four-year field study in occupied Palestine for the British Medical Journal, Dr Derek Summerfield wrote that "two-thirds of the 621 children killed at checkpoints, in the street, on the way to school, in their homes, died from small arms fire, directed in over half of cases to the head, neck and chest - the sniper's wound". A friend of mine with the United Nations calls them "children of the dust". Their wonderful childishness, their rowdiness and giggles and charm, belie their nightmare.

I met Dr Khalid Dahlan, a psychiatrist who heads one of several children’s community health projects in Gaza. He told me about his latest survey. "The statistic I personally find unbearable," he said, "is that 99.4 per cent of the children we studied suffer trauma. Once you look at the rates of exposure to trauma, you see why: 99.2 per cent of the study group's homes were bombarded; 97.5 per cent were exposed to tear gas; 96.6 per cent witnessed shootings; 95.8 per cent witnessed bombardment and funerals; almost a quarter saw family members injured or killed."

He said children as young as three faced the dichotomy caused by having to cope with these conditions. They dreamt about becoming doctors and nurses, then this was overtaken by an apocalyptic vision of themselves as the next generation of suicide bombers. They experienced this invariably after an attack by the Israelis. For some boys, their heroes were no longer football players, but a confusion of Palestinian "martyrs" and even the enemy, "because Israeli soldiers are the strongest and have Apache gunships".

Shortly before he died, Edward Said bitterly reproached foreign journalists for what he called their destructive role in "stripping the context of Palestinian violence, the response of a desperate and horribly oppressed people, and the terrible suffering from which it arises". Just as the invasion of Iraq was a "war by media", so the same can be said of the grotesquely one-sided "conflict" in Palestine. As the pioneering work of the Glasgow University Media Group shows, television viewers are rarely told that the Palestinians are victims of an illegal military occupation; the term "occupied territories" is seldom explained. Only 9 per cent of young people interviewed in the UK know that the Israelis are the occupying force and the illegal settlers are Jewish; many believe them to be Palestinian. The selective use of language by broadcasters is crucial in maintaining this confusion and ignorance. Words such as "terrorism", "murder" and "savage, cold-blooded killing" describe the deaths of Israelis, almost never Palestinians.

There are honourable exceptions. The kidnapped BBC reporter Alan Johnston is one of them. Yet, amidst the avalanche of coverage of his abduction, no mention is made of the thousands of Palestinians abducted by Israel, many of whom will not see their families for years. There are no appeals for them. In Jerusalem, the Foreign Press Association documents the shooting and intimidation of its members by Israeli soldiers. In one eight-month period, as many journalists, including the CNN bureau chief in Jerusalem, were wounded by the Israelis, some of them seriously. In each case, the FPA complained. In each case, there was no satisfactory reply.

A censorship by omission runs deep in western journalism on Israel, especially in the US. Hamas is dismissed as a "terrorist group sworn to Israel's destruction" and one that "refuses to recognise Israel and wants to fight not talk". This theme suppresses the truth: that Israel is bent on Palestine's destruction. Moreover, Hamas's long-standing proposals for a ten-year ceasefire are ignored, along with a recent, hopeful ideological shift within Hamas itself that amounts to a historic acceptance of the sovereignty of Israel. "The [Hamas] charter is not the Quran," said a senior Hamas official, Mohammed Ghazal. "Historically, we believe all Palestine belongs to Palestinians, but we're talking now about reality, about political solutions... If Israel reached a stage where it was able to talk to Hamas, I don't think there would be a problem of negotiating with the Israelis [for a solution]".

When I last saw Gaza, driving towards the Israeli checkpoint and the razor wire, I was rewarded with a spectacle of Palestinian flags fluttering from inside the walled compounds. Children were responsible for this, I was told. They make flagpoles out of sticks tied together and one or two will climb on to a wall and hold the flag between them, silently. They do it when there are foreigners around and they believe they can tell the world.

Israeli Riddle: Love Jerusalem, Hate Living There

GREG MYRE, The New York Times, May 13, 2007

JERUSALEM — ISRAEL is facing a challenge it never expected when it captured East Jerusalem and reunited the city in the 1967 war: each year, Jerusalem’s population is becoming more Arab and less Jewish.

For four decades, Israel has pushed to build and expand Jewish neighborhoods, while trying to restrict the growth in Arab parts of the city. Yet two trends are unchanged: Jews moving out of Jerusalem have outnumbered those moving in for 27 of the last 29 years. And the Palestinian growth rate has been high.


In a 1967 census taken shortly after the war, the population of Jerusalem was 74 percent Jewish and 26 percent Arab. Today, the city is 66 percent Jewish and 34 percent Arab, with the gap narrowing by about 1 percentage point a year, according to the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.

Jerusalem’s profound religious and historical significance makes its status perhaps the single most explosive issue in the Arab-Israeli conflict. And that status clearly would become even more contentious were the balance of the population to tip toward the Arabs. This is a specter that worries Israelis, even as the 40th anniversary of their victory in the June 1967 war approaches.

“The Jewish people dreamed for centuries of getting back their ancient capital,” said Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the United Nations and author of “The Fight for Jerusalem.” Nineteenth-century immigration to Jerusalem, site of the biblical Jewish temples, gave the city a Jewish majority that has been in place since the 1860s, he said.

For many Palestinians, Jerusalem is an economic hub, containing the third-holiest site in Islam — and the city they yearn to make the capital of a future state. Yet Israeli security measures, imposed after the Palestinian uprising in 2000, have put the city, like the rest of Israel, off limits to the vast majority of Palestinians who live in the West Bank or Gaza Strip.

“People want to go to Jerusalem to pray, but they can’t,” said Rami Nasrallah, an Arab resident who advised the previous Palestinian prime minister, Ahmed Qureia, on Jerusalem affairs. “This makes Jerusalem even more important in their imaginations.”

While Jerusalem’s symbolic importance is paramount to both sides, Israelis and Palestinians differ on the city as a place to live. For Palestinians, it remains a magnet, offering more opportunities than any Palestinian city in the West Bank or the Gaza Strip. But many Israelis see it as poor, rundown and riddled with religious and political tension.

When it comes to job opportunities, affordable housing and a varied cultural life, Jerusalem is much less appealing to secular Israelis than Tel Aviv or other cities.

“Jerusalem just got to be too extreme and we decided it was time to leave,” said Alona Angel, 60, an Israeli who lived more than 30 years in Jerusalem before moving to Tel Aviv two years ago when her husband retired and the last of her children finished high school. “After so many years in Jerusalem, I thought it would be hard to leave, but it wasn’t.”

Ms. Angel said she was increasingly turned off by religious and political intolerance. She recalled being casually but modestly dressed one day when an ultra-Orthodox Jewish woman began yelling at her that she was not properly clothed. “I just felt less and less welcome,” said Ms. Angel, an interior designer.

Last year, Jews leaving Jerusalem outnumbered those moving in by 6,000, in line with figures for the past decade, according to the Jerusalem Institute for Israel Studies.

A poll released last week captured the Israeli ambivalence over Jerusalem. More than 60 percent of Israelis said they would not want to give up Israeli control of the city’s holy sites, even as part of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Yet 78 percent of Israelis said they would not consider living in Jerusalem or would prefer to live elsewhere in Israel.

Israel claims all of Jerusalem as its capital, but only a tiny minority of the Arabs who live there are citizens of Israel. The vast majority have legal residency, a status similar to that of green-card holders in the United States.

Jews and Arabs, by and large, do not mix. “This is still a clear case of two separate cities,” said Shlomo Hasson, a geography professor at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. “There are separate commercial centers, separate transport systems and separate cultures.”

When the Israelis and Palestinians held their last round of full-fledged peace talks in January 2001, the two sides discussed a plan to make Jerusalem’s Jewish neighborhoods part of Israel, and the city’s Arab neighborhoods part of a future Palestinian state — a sharp break from Israel’s insistence that all of Jerusalem remain part of Israel’s “eternal, undivided capital.” But the talks collapsed, and since then Israel has built a West Bank separation barrier that runs largely along the eastern border of Jerusalem. The one substantial exception is in northern Jerusalem, where more than 50,000 Palestinians have been left outside.

Still, the thought of re-dividing the city provokes a strong reaction among some Jews, who recall when Jordan held East Jerusalem and the Old City, from 1948 to 1967, and Jews were not allowed to pray at the Western Wall.

That is a central reason that the demographic trends stir fear among Israelis, since it would be difficult to reconcile the fact of an Arab majority in the city with its status as Israel’s eternal capital. Overall, the city now has 475,000 Jews and 245,000 Arabs as of 2005, the latest year for which figures are available.

Jerusalem’s Jewish population is still growing despite the out-migration, but only by a little over 1 percent a year — not enough to match the annual 3 percent increase among Arabs. The small Jewish increase is a result of an extraordinarily high birth rate among the ultra-Orthodox, who make up about a quarter of the city’s population; on average, each of these woman has more than seven children.

Yet as the ratio of ultra-Orthodox Jews increases, so does the outflow of secular Jews.

With the Arab and ultra-Orthodox communities expanding, the city’s tax base has weakened, straining municipal services and contributing to the outflow of the middle class. Meanwhile, many Palestinian neighborhoods are becoming badly overcrowded.

While it is virtually impossible for Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza to move to Jerusalem if they were not born there, natural population growth and restrictions on building in Arab parts of the city mean large families often share very small apartments.

An estimated 18,000 apartments and homes, or a third of all the Arab residences in East Jerusalem, were built illegally because permits are so hard to obtain, Mr. Nasrallah said, adding that Israel has not approved the development of a new Palestinian neighborhood in East Jerusalem since 1967.

“Israel sees Jerusalem as a demographic problem,” he said, “and sees the solution as getting rid of Palestinians.”

In contrast, Israel has established many Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and more than 200,000 Jews now live in the eastern part of the city.

But in the long term, if the demographers are right, it will not be enough.

Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

NYTimes: Red Cross Report Says Israel Disregards Humanitarian Law

May 15, 2007

By STEVEN ERLANGER
JERUSALEM, May 14 — The International Committee of the Red Cross, in a confidential report about East Jerusalem and its surrounding areas, accuses Israel of a “general disregard” for “its obligations under international humanitarian law — and the law of occupation in particular.”

The committee, which does not accept Israel’s annexation of East Jerusalem, says Israel is using its rights as an occupying power under international law “in order to further its own interests or those of its own population to the detriment of the population of the occupied territory.”

With the construction of the separation barrier, the establishment of an outer ring of Jewish settlements beyond the expanded municipal boundaries and the creation of a dense road network linking the different Israeli neighborhoods and settlements in and outside Jerusalem, the report says, Israel is “reshaping the development of the Jerusalem metropolitan area” with “far-reaching humanitarian consequences.” Those include the increasing isolation of Palestinians living in Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and the increasing difficulty for some Palestinians to easily reach Jerusalem’s schools and hospitals.

The Red Cross committee, which is recognized as a guardian of humanitarian law under the Geneva Conventions of 1949, does not publish its reports but provides them in confidence to the parties involved and to a small number of countries. This report was provided to The New York Times by someone outside the organization who wanted the report’s conclusions publicized. The leak came just days before Israel’s celebration of Jerusalem Day this Wednesday, observing the 40th anniversary of the unification of the city.

The committee is better known for its role in visiting prisoners all over the world to try to ensure humanitarian conditions. It has been involved for decades with the Israeli-Palestinian situation as part of its role in upholding the Geneva Conventions, which cover the responsibilities of occupying countries. But its reports rarely surface.

The report considers all land that Israel conquered in the 1967 war to be occupied territory. It was the result of nine months of work by the committee and was delivered in late February “to Israel and to a small number of foreign governments we believe would be in the best position to help support our efforts for the implementation of humanitarian law,” said Bernard Barrett, a spokesman for the committee in Jerusalem.

Israeli officials said that they respected the committee and that they had cooperated with it gladly on issues ranging from the release of captured Israeli soldiers to asking its officials to give briefings on international law to Israeli diplomats and commanders serving in the occupied West Bank.

They confirmed having received the report, but disagreed with its premises and conclusions.

“We reject the premise of the report, that East Jerusalem is occupied territory,” said Mark Regev, spokesman for the Israeli Foreign Ministry. “It is not. Israel annexed Jerusalem in 1967 and offered full citizenship at the time to all of Jerusalem’s residents. These are facts that cannot be ignored.”

Israel, he said, “is committed to a diverse and pluralistic Jerusalem, to improving the conditions of all the city’s inhabitants and to protecting their interests as part of our sovereign responsibility.” He added, “If any population in Jerusalem is thriving and growing, it is the Arab population.”

He also noted that Israel made great efforts to ensure health care for Palestinians, pointing to 81,000 entry permits in 2006 for Palestinians needing care inside Israel.

Conditions have worsened for Palestinians in East Jerusalem, which has long had inferior services.

Security restrictions and the barrier that runs around and through parts of East Jerusalem were Israel’s response to suicide bombings after 2000, but they made it much more difficult for Palestinians to move into and out of Jerusalem.

It is virtually impossible for Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza to move to Jerusalem if they were not born in the city; even visiting requires a permit that can be hard to get. Natural population growth and building restrictions in Arab parts of the city means that large families often share very small apartments.

Palestinians argue that the building restrictions are meant to suppress the growth of the their community; the Israelis counter that zoning restrictions are imposed throughout the city.

The Red Cross report notes that the separation barrier “was undertaken with an undeniable security aim,” but adds, “The route of the West Bank barrier is also following a demographic logic, enclosing the settlement blocs around the city while excluding built-up Palestinian areas (thus creating isolated Palestinian enclaves).”

Mustafa Barghouti, spokesman for the Palestinian unity government, welcomed the report, calling it consistent with the rulings of the International Court of Justice, which said in a nonbinding opinion in 2004 that Israel’s security barrier was illegal where it crossed the 1967 lines into occupied territory. “Israel violates international law with impunity, and couldn’t continue this blunt violation for 40 years if it did not feel impunity toward the international community,” Mr. Barghouti said.

Top Bush Adviser Says Rice's Push For Mideast Peace Is 'Just Process'

Nathan Guttman
The Forward | Fri. May 11, 2007

Washington - As Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice presses Israelis and Palestinians to meet a new set of policy benchmarks, the White House is reassuring Jewish groups and conservatives that the president has no plans to pressure Jerusalem.

Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams told a group of Jewish communal leaders last week that the president would ensure that the process does not lead to Israel being pushed into an agreement with which it is uncomfortable.

Also last week, at a regular gathering of Jewish Republicans, sources said, Abrams described President Bush as an "emergency brake" who would prevent Israel from being pressed into a deal; during the breakfast gathering, the White House official also said that a lot of what is done during Rice's frequent trips to the region is "just process" — steps needed in order to keep the Europeans and moderate Arab countries "on the team" and to make sure they feel that the United States is promoting peace in the Middle East.

According to one of the participants in the meeting of Jewish Republicans, Abrams said that he does not believe that the United States can make much progress on the Israeli-Palestinian front. The United States could only see success, Abrams added, on limited issues relating to freedom of movement for Palestinians in the territories and efforts to strengthen the presidential guard of Palestinian Authority leader Mahmoud Abbas.

Abrams offered his skeptical view of the prospects for progress as the State Department was launching its latest effort to push the process forward. In general, according to Washington insiders, Rice and her Middle East team are pushing an increasingly aggressive agenda on the Israeli-Palestinian front, while the White House policy team, led by Abrams, is pulling back, viewing any major breakthrough as unlikely.

[In response to the initial version of this article, an NSC spokesperson issued a statement on behalf of Abrams stating that the White House supported Rice's efforts. "Advancing toward peace between Israelis and Palestinians and toward the President's vision of two states living side by side in peace and security is not only Secretary Rice's goal, it is a key goal of the President's," the NSC statement said. "It is inaccurate to suggest that the White House and State Department are at odds on this issue, for the entire Administration — including Mr Abrams — is committed to pursuing it and the rest of the President's agenda. Moreover, Mr. Abrams' reference an 'emergency brake' was in reply to a question about whether European and Arab pressure could put Israel in a corner, and was intended to make clear that this would not happen because ultimately the United States provides an emergency brake. It had nothing to do with efforts by the United States to push the process forward, under Secretary Rice's direction."]

Last week, American diplomats presented the Israelis and Palestinians with a document specifying benchmarks that both sides are required to fulfill in the upcoming months.

Most demands of Israel have to do with issues of mobility and access — lifting roadblocks, allowing truck convoys from Gaza to the West Bank and opening the Karni crossing, Gaza's main import and export entrance point. The Palestinians, according to the document, are required to deploy forces in order to stop the firing of rockets at Israeli towns and to curb violence within the territories.

The presentation of the benchmarks is seen as a major move by the United States and as another sign of Rice's determination to push the stalled peace process forward.

The Palestinian reaction to the document was mixed, with Hamas turning it down and Fatah seeing the paper as a possible platform for negotiations. Jerusalem, according to Israeli sources, is still studying the proposal and will provide its formal answer to American diplomats on the ground. Israeli sources stressed, however, that they view the program as positive, mainly since it includes a demand that the Palestinian Authority confront the rocket-launching issue.

Rice's dramatic attempt to make both sides live up to their commitments, however, now appears undermined by political developments on the ground.

The State Department announced Monday that Rice is postponing her planned visit to the region, due to the political uncertainty in Israel. "There's obviously a lot of politics in Israel that they're working through at this point," said State Department spokesman Sean McCormack.

Rice, however, made clear that she intends to keep on working with Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on promoting the peace process. "We're going to continue to work toward the two-state solution because one thing that we know is that the Israeli people overwhelmingly want to get to a place where they have a neighbor who can contribute to their security," Rice said in an interview to the Al-Arabiya TV network.

The benchmarks carry even more urgency in light of a new report released this week by the World Bank. The report stresses the economic difficulties faced by the Palestinians because of a lack of free movement and access, issues that Rice has frequently raised in Israel and that are addressed in the benchmarks she established.

The World Bank report described in great detail the restrictions Israel imposed on the Palestinians regarding use of roads, access to land and freedom of movement. These restrictions are a result of building the separation barrier, forbidding Palestinians from entering roads used by Jewish settlers and closing areas adjacent to settlements.

"As long as large areas of the West Bank remain inaccessible for economic purposes… and unpredictable movement remains the norm for the vast majority of Palestinians, sustainable economic recovery will remain elusive," the report concluded.

Rice's renewed drive to promote an Israeli-Palestinian settlement is seen in Washington not only as a desire to calm America's allies in Europe and the Middle East but also as part of the new thinking within the State Department, which views the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as an obstacle that deters Arab countries from joining the United States in its attempts to stabilize Iraq.

This view was recently reinforced by Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska, who in a conversation with nationally syndicated columnist Robert Novak accused Abrams of preventing the administration from having a "coherent Middle East policy" which would engage Iran and Syria in an attempt to stabilize Iraq. "I do know that there are a number of Israelis who would like to engage Syria," Hagel told Novak. "They have said that Elliott Abrams keeps pushing them back."

The columnist also said Hagel quoted foreign ministers, ambassadors and former Americans officials as saying they believe Abrams "is making policy in the Middle East."

Israel, according to sources close to decision-makers in Jerusalem, also sees Abrams as the leading policy figure in the administration on Middle East issues, a status that has led Olmert to keep an open channel of communications with Bush's senior adviser.

According to the sources, Abrams is also a leading voice in trying to convince American Jews to be more supportive of the war in Iraq.

At the same time, Abrams is said to hold a relatively moderate view when it comes to dealing with Iran's nuclear threat. In a recent White House meeting with leaders of a major Jewish group, Abrams outlined what he described as the disadvantages of taking military action against Iran. Participants quoted Abrams as saying that accepting a nuclear Iran or launching a military attack against the Islamic country would both be "terrible options," and that international diplomatic and economic pressure is the only way to solve the problem.

Israeli officials also recalled the tough stand Abrams took against Israel's plans to build in the E1 corridor near Jerusalem, an area seen as vital for the territorial contiguity of any future Palestinian state.

"I never sensed that he is committed to a 'greater Israel' idea," said an official in a Jewish organization who regularly meets with Abrams. "He is simply very skeptical when it comes to the Palestinians."

Like the Israelis, officials at Jewish organizations see Abrams as the main contact point in the administration when it comes to Middle East affairs. "He knows all the Washington representatives of the Jewish groups and has good relations with them," said one Jewish organizational official.

Another Jewish official, who described Abrams as a "pretty approachable guy," said that it is regular practice for the administration to "send the [National Security Council] when they want to be nice to the Jewish community and send the State Department when they want to please the world."

Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, said that Abrams' availability to Jewish representatives depends on their views of the administration. "Once we [the ZOA] started criticizing Bush's policy in the Middle East, he stopped taking my calls," Klein said. "Before he joined this administration, he agreed with me about Oslo and about Arafat."

Fri. May 11, 2007

World Bank: Sustainable Palestinian economic recovery impossible under West Bank restriction system

JERUSALEM, May 9 2007 – As part of its ongoing analytical work on Palestinian trade facilitation and economic revival, the World Bank released its latest report today, entitled Movement and Access Restrictions in the West Bank: Uncertainty and Inefficiency in the Palestinian Economy.

While acknowledging Israel's legitimate security concerns, the report examines the wider context and implications of the current access situation in the West Bank. It notes that although physical impediments are the visible manifestations of closure, the means of curtailing Palestinian movement and access are far more complex and are based on a set of administrative practices and permit policies. The resulting system, while enhancing Israeli security, is also aimed at protecting and enhancing the free movement of settlers and the physical and economic expansion of the settlements at the expense of the Palestinian population. In particular, the routing of the separation barrier, the system of restricted West Bank roads, the control of the Palestinian population registry and restrictive zoning and land use rules and practices are aimed primarily at serving the settler population.

Drawing on extensive work undertaken by UN OCHA and others, the Bank report notes that the restriction system has fragmented the West Bank into 10 economically isolated cantons, severed Palestinian economic, social and physical links to Jerusalem and denied Palestinians access to some 50% of West Bank land for economic purposes.

According to David Craig, World Bank Country Director for the West Bank and Gaza, this has devastated the Palestinian economy. "The restriction system has caused a rise in transaction costs, making Palestinian goods increasingly uncompetitive. Even more importantly, the system has created such a high level of uncertainty and inefficiency that the normal conduct of business in the West Bank has become exceedingly difficult and investment has been stymied," he said.

"Palestinian economic revival is predicated on an integrated economic entity with freedom of movement between the West bank and Gaza and within the West Bank, unfettered Palestinian access to West Bank land for economic purposes, and reliable access to world markets," Craig added. "The restriction system has significantly undermined these conditions. Restoring sustainable Palestinian economic growth is dependent on its dismantling."

Official English Summary of Winograd

Press Release

1. On September 17th 2006 The Government of Israel decided, under section 8A of The Government Act 2001, to appoint a governmental commission of examination “To look into the preparation and conduct of the political and the security levels concerning all the dimensions of the Northern Campaign which started on July 12th 2006”. Today we have submitted to the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defence the classified interim report, and we are now presenting the inclassified report to the public.

2. The Commission was appointed due to a strong sense of a crisis and deep disappointment with the consequences of the campaign and the way it was conducted. We regarded accepted this difficult task both as a duty and a privilege. It is our belief that the larger the event and the deeper the feeling of crisis – the greater the opportunity to change and improve matters which are essential for the security and the flourishing of state and society in Israel. We believe Israeli society has great strength and resilience, with a robust sense of the justice of its being and of its achievements. These, too, were expressed during the war in Lebanon and after it. At the same time, we must not underrated deep failures among us.

3. This conception of our role affected the way we operated. No-one underestimates the need to study what happened in the past, including the imposition of personal responsibility. The past is the key for learning lessons for the future. Nonetheless, learning these lessons and actually implementing them are the most implication of the conclusions of the Commission.

4. This emphasis on learning lessons does not only follow from our conception of the role of a public Commission. It also follows from our belief that one Israeli society greatest sources of strength is its being a free, open and creative. Together with great achievements, the challenges facing it are existential. To cope with them, Israel must be a learning society – a society which examines its achievements and, in particular, its failures, in order to improve its ability to face the future.

5. Initially we hoped that the appointment of the Commission will serve as an incentive to accelerate learning processes in the relevant systems, while we are working, so that we could devote our time to study all of the materials in depth, and present the public with a comprehensive picture. However, learning processes have been limited. In some ways an opposite, and worrying, process emerged – a process of ‘waiting’ for the Commission’s Report before energetic and determined action is taken to redress failures which have been revealed.

6. Therefore we decided to publish initially an Interim Report, focusing on the decisions related to starting the war. We do this in the hope that the relevant bodies will act urgently to change and correct all that it implies. We would like to reiterate and emphasize that we hope that this Partial Report, which concentrates on the functioning of the highest political and military echelons in their decision to move into the war will not divert attention from the overall troubling complete picture revealed by the war as a whole.

7. The interim report includes a numer of chapters dealing with the following subjects:

a. The Commissions’ conception of its role, and its attitude to recommendations in general and to recommendations dealing with specific persons in particular. (chapter 2): We see as the main task of a public commission of inquiry (or investigation) to determine findings and conclusions, and present them- with its recommendations – before the public and decision makers so that they can take action. A public commission should not – in most cases – replace the usual political decision-making processes and determine who should serve as a minister or senior military commander. Accordingly, we include personal conclusions in the interim report, without personal recommendations. However, we will reconsider this matter towards our Final Report in view of the depiction of the war as a whole.

b. The way we balanced our desire to engage in a speedy and efficient investigation with the rights of those who may be negatively affected to ‘natural justice’ (chapter 3): The special stipulations of the Commissions of Inquiry Act in this regard do not apply to a governmental commission of Examination, but we regard ourselves, naturally, as working under the general principles of natural justice. The commission notified those who may be affected by its investigation, in detailed letters of invitation, of the ways in which they may be negatively affected, and enabled them to respond to allegations against them, without sending “notices of warning” and holding a quasi-judicial hearing before reaching out conclusions. We believe that in this way we provided all who may be negatively affected by our report with a full opportunity to answer all allegations against them.

c. The processes and developments in the period between the withdrawal of the IDF from Lebanon until July 11, 2006 which contributed to the background of the Lebanon War (Chapter 4): These processes created much of the factual background against which the decision-makers had to operate on July 12th, and they are thus essential to both the understanding and the evaluation of the events of the war. Understanding them is also essential for drawing lessons from the events, whose significance is often broader than that of the war itself.

8. The core of the interim report is a detailed examination of the decisions of senior political and military decision-makers concerning the decision to go to war at the wake of the abduction of the two soldiers on the morning of July 12th. We start with the decision of the government on the fateful evening of the 12th to authorize a sharp military response, and end with the speech of the Prime Minister in the Knesset on July 17th, when he officially presented the campaign and its goals. These decisions were critical and constitutive, and therefore deserve separate investigation. We should note that these decisions enjoyed broad support within the government, the Knesset and the public throughout this period.

9. Despite this broad support, we determine that there are very serious failings in these decisions and the way they were made. We impose the primary responsibility for these failures on the Prime Minister, the minister of defence and the (outgoing) Chief of Staff. All three made a decisive personal contribution to these decisions and the way in which they were made. Howwever,, there are many others who share responsibility for the mistakes we found in these decisions and for their background conditions.

10. The main failures in the decisions made and the decision-making processes can be summed up as follows:

a. The decision to respond with an immediate, intensive military strike was not based on a detailed, comprehensive and authorized military plan, based on carefull study of the complex characteristics of the Lebanon arena . A meticulous examination of these characteristics would have revealed the following: the ability to achieve military gains having significant political-international weight was limited; an Israeli military strike would inevitably lead to missiles fired at the Israeli civilian north; there was not other effective military response to such missile attacks than an extensive and prolonged ground operation to capture the areas from which the missiles were fired – which would have a high “cost” and which did not enjoy broad support. These difficulties were not explicitly raised with the political leaders before the decision to strike was taken.

b. Consequently, in making the decision to go to war, the government did not consider the whole range of options, including that of continuing the policy of ‘containment’, or combining political and diplomatic moves with military strikes below the ‘escalation level’, or military preparations without immediage military action -- so as to maintain for Israel the full range of responses to the abduction. This failure reflects weakness in strategic thinking, which derives the response to the event from a more comprehensive and encompassing picture.

c. The support in the cabinet for this move was gained in part through ambiguity in the presentation of goals and modes of operation, so that ministers with different or even contradictory attitudes could support it. The ministers voted for a vague decision, without understanding and knowing its nature and implications. They authorized to commence a military campaign without considering how to exit it.

d. Some of the declared goals of the war were not clear and could not be achieved, and in part were not achieveable by the authorized modes of military action.

e. The IDF did not exhibit creativity in proposing alternative action possibilities, did not alert the political decision-makers to the discrepancy between its own scenarios and the authorized modes of action, and did not demand – as was necessary under its own plans – early mobilization of the reserves so they could be equipped and trained in case a ground operation would be required.

f. Even after these facts became known to the political leaders, they failed to adapt the military way of operation and its goals to the reality on the ground. On the contrary, declared goals were too ambitious, and it was publicly states that fighting will continue till they are achieved. But the authorized military operations did not enable their achievement.

11. The primary responsibility for these serious failings rests with the Prime Minister, the minister of defense and the (outgoing) Chief of Staff. We single out these three because it is likely that had any of them acted better – the decisions in the relevant period and the ways they were made, as well as the outcome of the war, would have been significantly better.

12. Let us start with the Prime Minister.

a. The Prime Minister bears supreme and comprehensive responsibility for the decisions of ‘his’ government and the operations of the army. His responsibility for the failures in the initial decisions concerning the war stem from both his position and from his behavior, as he initiated and led the decisions which were taken.

b. The Prime Minister made up his mind hastily, despite the fact that no detailed military plan was submitted to him and without asking for one. Also, his decision was made without close study of the complex features of the Lebanon front and of the military, political and diplomatic options available to Israel. He made his decision without systematic consultation with others, especially outside the the IDF, despite not having experience in external-political and military affairs. In addition, he did not adequately consider political and professional reservations presented to him before the fateful decisions of July 12th.

c. The Prime Minister is responsible for the fact that the goals of the campaign were not set out clearly and carefully, and that there was no serious discussion of the relationships between these goals and the authorized modes of military action. He nade a personal contribution to the fact that the declared goals were over-ambitious and not feasible.

d. The Prime Minister did not adapt his plans once it became clear that the assumptions and expectations of Israel’s actions were not realistic and were not materializing.

e. All of these add up to a serious failure in exercising judgment, responsibility and prudence.

13. The Minister of Defence is the minister responsible for overseeing the IDF, and he is a senior member in the group of leaders in charge of political-military affairs.

a. The Minister of Defence did not have knowledge or experience in military, political or governmental matters. He also did not have good knowledge of the basic principles of using military force to achieve political goals.

b. Despite these serious gaps, he made his decisions during this period without systemic consultations with experienced political and professional experts, including outside the security establishment. In addition, he did not give adequate weight to reservations expressed in the meetings he attended.

c. The Minister of Defence did not act within a strategic conception of the systems he oversaw. He did not ask for the IDF’s operational plans and did not examine them; he did not check the preparedness and fitness of IDF; and did not examine the fit between the goals set and the modes of action presented and authorized for achieving them. His influence on the decisions made was mainly pointillist and operational. He did not put on the table – and did not demand presentation – of serious strategic options for discussion with the Prime Minister and the IDF.

d. The Minister of Defence did not develop an independent assessment of the implications of the complexity of the front for Israel’s proper response, the goals of the campaign, and the relations between military and diplomatic moves within it. His lack of experience and knowledge prevented him from challenging in a competent way both the IDF, over which he was in charge, and the Prime Minister.

e. In all these ways, the Minister of Defence failed in fulfilling his functions. Therefore, his serving as Minister of Defence during the war impaired Israel’s ability to respond well to its challenges.

14. The Chief of Staff (COS) is the supreme commander of the IDF, and the main source of information concerning the army, its plans, abilities and recommendations presented to the political echelon. Furthermore, the COS’s personal involvement with decision making within the army and in coordination with the political echelon were dominant.

a. The army and the COS were not prepared for the event of the abduction despite recurring alerts. When the abduction happened, he responded impulsively. He did not alert the political leaders to the complexity of the situation, and did not present information, assessments and plans that were available in the IDF at various levels of planning and approval and which would have enabled a better response to the challenges.

b. Among other things, the COS did not alert the political echelon to the serious shortcomings in the preparedness and the fitness of the armed forces for an extensive ground operation, if that became necessary. In addition, he did not clarify that the military assessments and analyses of the arena were that a military strike against Hezbollah will with a high probability make such a move necessary.

c. The COS’s responsibility is aggravated by the fact that he knew well that both the Prime Minister and the Minister of Defense lacked adequate knowledge and experience in these matters, and by the fact that he had led them to believe that the IDF was ready and prepared and had operational plans fitting the situation.

d. The COS did not provide adequate responses to serious reservation about his recommendations raised by ministers and others during the first days of the campaign, and he did not present to the political leaders the internal debates within the IDF concerning the fit between the stated goals and the authorized modes of actions.

e. In all these the Chief of Staff failed in his duties as commander in chief of the army and as a critical part of the political-military leadership, and exhibited flaws in professionalism, responsibility and judgment.

15. Concomitantly we determine that the failures listed here, and in the outcomes of the war, had many other partners.

a. The complexity of the Lebanon scene is basically outside Israel’s control.

b. The ability of Hezbollah to sit ‘on the border’, its ability to dictate the moment of escalation, and the growth of its military abilities and missile arsenal increased significantly as a result of Israel’s unilateral withdrawal in May 2000 (which was not followed, as had been hoped, by The Lebanese Army deploying on the border with Israel.

c. The shortcomings in the preparedness and the training of the army, its operational doctrine, and various flaws in its organizational culture and structure, were all the responsibility of the military commanders and political leaders in charge years before the present Prime Minister, Minister of Defense and Chief of Staff took office.

d. On the political-security strategic level, the lack of preparedness was also caused by the failure to update and fully articulate Israel’s security strategy doctrine, in the fullest sense of that term, so that it could not serve as a basis for coping comprehensively will all the challenges facing Israel. Responsibility for this lack of an updates national security strategy lies with Israel’s governments over the years. This omission made it difficult to devise an immediate proper response to the abduction, because it led to stressing an immediate and sharp military strike. If the response had been derived from a more comprehensive security strategy, it would have been easier to take into account Israel’s overall balance of strengths and vulnerabilities, including the preparedness of the civil population.

e. Another factor which largely contributed to the failures is the weakness of the high staff work available to the political leadership. This weakness existed under all previous Prime Ministers and this continuing failure is the responsibility of these PMs and their cabinets. The current political leadership did not act in a way that could compensate for this lack, and did not rely sufficiently on other bodies within and outside the security system that could have helped it.

f. Israel’s government in its plenum failed in its political function of taking full responsibility for its decisions. It did not explore and seek adequate response for various reservations that were raised, and authorized an immediate military strike that was not thought-through and suffered from over-reliance on the judgment of the primary decision-makers.

g. Members of the IDF’s general staff who were familiar with the assessments and intelligence concerning the Lebanon front, and the serious deficiencies in preparedness and training, did not insist that these should be considered within the army, and did not alert the political leaders concerning the flaws in the decisions and the way they were made.

16. As a result of our investigation, we make a number of structural and institutional recommendations, which require urgent attention:

a. The improvement of the quality of discussions and decision making within the government through strengthening and deepening staff work; strict enforcement of the prohibition of leaks; improving the knowledge base of all members of the government on core issues of Israel’s challenges, and orderly procdures for presentation of issues for discussion and resolution.

b. Full incorporation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in security decisions with political and diplomatic aspects.

c. Substantial improvement in the functioning of the National Security Council, the establishment of a national assessment team, and creating a center for crises management in the Prime Minister’s Office.

17. We regard it is of great importance to make findings, reach conclusions and present recommendations on the other critical issues which emerged in this war. We will cover them in the final report, which we strive to conclude soon. These subjects include, among others, the direction of the war was led and its management by the political echelon; the conduct of the military campaign by the army; the civil-military relationship in the war; taking care of Israel’s civilian population under missile attack; the diplomatic negotiations by the Prime Minister’s office and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; censorship, the media and secrecy; the effectiveness of Israel’s media campaign; and the discussion of various social and political processes which are essential for a comprehensive analysis of the events of the war and their significance.

18. Let us add a few final comments: It took the government till March 2007 to name the events of the summer of 2006 ‘The Second Lebanon War’. After 25 years without a war, Israel experienced a war of a different kind. The war thus brought back to center stage some critical questions that parts of Israeli society preferred to avoid.

19. The IDF was not ready for this war. Among the many reasons for this we can mention a few: Some of the political and military elites in Israel have reached the conclusion that Israel is beyond the era of wars. It had enough military might and superiority to deter others from declaring war against her; these would also be sufficient to send a painful reminder to anyone who seemed to be undeterred; since Israel did not intend to initiate a war, the conclusion was that the main challenge facing the land forces would be low intensity asymmetrical conflicts.

20. Given these assumptions, the IDF did not need to be prepared for ‘real’ war. There was also no urgent need to update in a systematic and sophisticated way Israel’s overall security strategy and to consider how to mobilize and combine all its resources and sources of strength – political, economic, social, military, spiritual. cultural and scientific – to address the totality of the challenges it faces.

21. We believe that – beyond the important need to examine the failures of conducting the war and the preparation for it, beyond the need to identify the weaknesses (and strengths) in the decisions made in the war – these are the main questions raised by the Second Lebanon war. These are questions that go far beyond the mandate of this or that commission of inquiry; they are the questions that stand at the center of our existence here as a Jewish and democratic state. It would be a grave mistake to concentrate only on the flaws revealed in the war and not to address these basic issues.

We hope that our findings and conclusions in the interim report and in the final report will not only impel taking care of the serious governmental flaws and failures we examine and expose, but will also lead towards a renewed process in which Israeli society, and its political and spiritual leaders will take up and explore Israel’s long-term aspirations and the ways to advance them.

THE LIVNI-RICE PLAN: TOWARDS A JUST PEACE OR APARTHEID?

by Jeff Halper

For years I have been one of the doomsayers, arguing that the two-state solution is dead and that apartheid has become the only realistic political outcome of the Israel-Palestine conflict– at least until a full-blown anti-apartheid struggle arises that fundamentally changes the equation. I based my assessment on several seemingly incontrovertible realities. Over the past 40 years, Israel has laid a thick and irreversible Matrix of Control over the Occupied Territories, including some 300 settlements, which effectively eliminates the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. No Israeli politician could conceivably be elected on the basis of withdrawing from the Occupied Territories to a point where a real Palestinian state could actually emerge, and even if s/he was, the prospect of cobbling together a coalition government with the requisite will and clout to carry out such a plan is highly unlikely, if at all. And given the unconditional bi-partisan support Israel enjoys in both houses of Congress and successive Adminstrations, reinforced by the Christian Right, the influential Jewish community and military lobbyists and a lack of will on the part of the international community to pressure Israel into making meaningful concessions, a genuine two-state solution seems virtually out of the question – even though it is the preferred option espoused by the international community in the moribund “Road Map” initiative.

Now if it is true that the two-state solution is gone, the next logical alternative would be the one-state solution, particularly since Israel conceives of the entire country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan River as one country – the Land of Israel – and has de facto made it one country through its settlements and highways. Seeing that Israel has been the only effective government throughout the land these past 40 years, why not go all the way and declare it a democratic state of all its inhabitants? (After all, Israel claims to be the only democracy in the Middle East.) The answer is clear: a democratic state in the Land of Israel is unacceptable (to Israel) because such a state, with a Palestinian majority, could not be “Jewish.”

Which leads us back, then, to apartheid, a system in which one population separates itself from another and then proceeds to dominate it permanently and structurally. Since the dominant group seeks control of the entire country but wants to get the unwanted population off its hands, it rules them indirectly, by means of a bantustan, a kind of prison-state. This is precisely what Olmert laid out to a joint session of Congress last May when he presented his “convergence plan” (to 18 standing ovations). And this is precisely what Condoleezza Rice, together with Israel’s Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, have been working on during Rice’s monthly visits to the region.

The plan embodies the worst nightmare of the Palestinians. Phase II of the Road Map presents the "option" of an independent Palestinian state with provisional borders, "as a way station to a permanent status settlement." Livni is publicly pushing for Phase II to replace Phase I, raising Palestinian fears of being frozen indefinitely in limbo between occupation and a “provisional” state with no borders, no sovereignty, no viable economy, surrounded, fragmented and controlled by Israel and its ever-expanding settlements.

For their part, Livni and Rice are proceeding very quietly, in stark contrast to the bluster of their male bosses. They have even refrained from giving a name to their plan, which Livni calls simply and innocuously “Israel’s peace initiative for a two-state solution.” Ari Shavit, a leading journalist in the Israeli daily Ha’aretz, asks: “Does Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni have a clear diplomatic plan that she is trying to promote? Livni implies that she does, but refuses to explain. She speaks of the two-state vision. She talks about the need to divide the country politically….However, she does not explain what the plan really is.”

The plan is simple but far below the public radar. (The New York Times recently took Rice to task for “humiliating” herself by going to Israel frequently with no apparent plan). In order to seemingly conform to the Road Map initiative ostensibly led by the US, Livni talks of the two-state solution arrived at through negotiations. But the Road Map requires Israel to freeze its settlement building, something Israel steadfastly refuses to do. How can this be reconciled? How can Israel pursue a two-state solution while at the same time expanding its settlements and infrastructure in the very territories in which a Palestinian state would emerge?

The answer lies in a little noticed but fundamental change in US policy, announced by President Bush in April, 2004, and ratified almost unanimously by both houses of Congress. “In light of new realities on the ground, including already existing major Israeli populations centers [which is what the Bush Administration calls Israel’s massive settlement blocs],” he stated, “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949.” In one fell (but immensely significant) swoop, Bush fatally undercut the very basis of international diplomacy towards the Israel-Palestine conflict, including his own Road Map: the withdrawal of Israel to the 1967(1949) borders to make space for a genuine Palestinian state. Israel thus claims that settlement building within these settlement blocs does not violate the Road Map, since that territory has been unilaterally recognized by the US as belonging permanently to Israel. In this way between 15-25% of the West Bank has been removed from negotiations and annexed de facto to Israel, while the “occupied territories” have been redefined as only that area outside the settlement blocs – and that to be negotiated and “compromised.”

What Israel expects of the Palestinians, then, is a type of occupation-by-consent made possible by “negotiations” in which a priori the Palestinians lose up to 85% of their historic homeland. Now this is patently unacceptable to the Palestinians. Israel’s initial attitude was: Who cares? The Palestinians have always been irrelevant, including in the Oslo “peace process.” In his congressional address, Olmert was explicit in Israel’s intention to impose a Pax Israeliana unilaterally if need be: “We cannot wait for the Palestinians forever. Our deepest wish is to build a better future for our region, hand-in-hand with a Palestinian partner. But if not, we will move forward -- but not alone. We could never have implemented the disengagement plan without your [America’s] firm support. The disengagement could never have happened without the commitments set out by President Bush in his letter of April 14th, 2004, endorsed by both houses of Congress in unprecedented majorities.”

But here Olmert hit a snag. The Road Map – to which lip service must be paid – clearly calls for a negotiated end to the Occupation and the conflict. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict, says the text, must be resolved “through a negotiated settlement leading to a final and comprehensive settlement.” Both Bush and Blair grabbed Olmert and told him that the “convergence plan” could not be imposed unilaterally. He would have to “pretend” (and I know that word was used by the British government) to negotiate with Abbas for a year. That is what lies behind the occasional meetings Olmert has had with Abbas, which Olmert has publicly limited to strictly “practical issues.” The Boston Globe reported on April 15, 2007, “Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas launched a U.S.-initiated series of meetings on Sunday, bypassing some of the most contentious issues of the Middle East conflict….‘We will not discuss the core issues of the conflict – the issue of (Palestinian) refugees, Jerusalem and borders,’ Olmert said in broadcast remarks at the weekly cabinet meeting.”

And here is where Tzipi Livni’s idea of substituting Phase II for Phase I comes in. After the year is over (in May 2007) and it is clear that the Palestinians have not been “forthcoming,” Israel will be allowed to declare the route of the Separation Barrier its “provisional” border, thus annexing about 10% of the West Bank. That may not sound like much, but it incorporates into Israel the major settlement blocs (plus a half-million Israeli settlers) while carving the West Bank into a number of small, disconnected, impoverished “cantons.” It removes from the Palestinians their richest agricultural land and all their water. It also creates a “greater” Israeli Jerusalem over the entire central portion of the West Bank, thereby cutting the economic, cultural, religious and historic heart out of any Palestinian state. It then sandwiches the Palestinians between the Barrier/border and yet another “security” border, the Jordan Valley, giving Israel two eastern borders. This prevents movement of people and goods into both Israel and Jordan, but also internally, between the various cantons. Israel also retains control of Palestinian airspace, the electro-magnetic sphere and even the right of a Palestinian state to conduct its own foreign policy.

In that way the Palestinians get their state, albeit with “provisional borders,” Israel expands onto 82-85% of the country while still conforming to the Road Map and apartheid – in the guise of a “two-state solution” – becomes political reality. And that’s where we stay forever.

But here I hit a snag. Make your case as persuasive as you might, neither Israelis nor Palestinians nor governments are willing to give up on the two-state solution, seeing nowhere to go from there. So I have to cut it some slack. Tzipi Livni herself, one of the few truly thinking government officials we Israelis have, has uttered some hopeful phrases lately, going further in tone and content than anyone in the Labor Party. “On the one hand, I want to anchor my interests on the security issue, demilitarization and the refugee problem,” she said recently, “and on the other I want to create a genuine alternative for the Palestinians that includes a solution to their national problem.”

She has even criticized male approaches to the conflict over the years. “Did you see male hormones raging around you?” she was asked in a Ha’aretz interview (December 29, 2006). "Sometimes there are guy issues," she answered candidly. “Was there a guy problem in the conduct of the [Lebanon] war?” pressed the interviewer. "Not only in the war,” she responded. “In all kinds of discussions, I hear arguments between generals and admirals and such and I say guys, stop it. There's something of that here….During those days [of the war], the thinking was too militaristic….At the beginning of the war, some people thought that the diplomatic role was to provide the army with time. That's understandable: In the past we always achieved, we conquered, we released, we won, and then the world came and took away from us. The victory was military and the failure political. But this time it was the opposite."
Livni, like most Israelis, cannot abandon the two-state plan. The alternatives – one state or apartheid – are clearly unacceptable. The existence of a Jewish state depends on that of a Palestinian one. Yet that has not constrained Israeli settlement expansion, which continues apace even as I write. Livni appears to believe, with most Israelis, that there is a thin magic overlap between the minimum the Palestinians can accept and the minimum Israel can concede – especially if emphasis is given to the Palestinian state and territory rather than to genuine sovereignty and economic viability. I doubt this, particularly in light of the fact that more than 60% of the Palestinians in the Occupied Territories are under the age of 18 and need a truly viable future.

Failing the carrot, Israelis – and here I’m not really sure where Livni stands – turn to the stick, to military pressures, economic sanctions and daily hardship that, they believe, can compel the Palestinians to accept a truncated, semi-sovereign, non-viable mini-state. All that is needed is continued pressure on the part of Israel, combined with some “sweetening of the pudding” designed to make apartheid palatable to the international community. Giving the Palestinians 90% of the Occupied Territories, for example. Though all the resources, sovereignty and developmental potential are found in the 10% Israel would keep, simply offering them such a “generous offer” would place irresistible pressures on them to accept. Who, after all, really cares about “viability?”

I think the two-state solution is gone and apartheid is at the door. I do not see any way that “finessing” will liberate enough qualitative land for a viable Palestinian state to emerge. But if we are stuck with it for the meantime, I would then contend that three absolutely indispensable criteria have to be met to give any two-state solution at least a shot at success: (1) the Palestinians must obtain Gaza, 85-90% of the West Bank in a coherent form (including its water resources) and an extra-territorial land connection between them; (2) they must have unsupervised borders with Arab States (the Jordan Valley and the Rafah crossing in Gaza), plus unrestricted sea- and airports; and (3) a shared Jerusalem must be an integral part of a Palestinian state with free and unrestricted access.

I fear that the Livni-Rice plan falls far short of this. I don’t doubt Livni’s sincerity (something unusual for me to say about any politician, let alone one from Likud-Kadima), but I fear she, like almost all Israelis who seek peace, minimize what the Palestinians can accept beyond what they are capable of. And when they don’t accept, they are, of course, to blame. Thus Livni herself has said tellingly: “Abbas is not a partner for a final-status agreement, but he could be a partner for other arrangements, on the basis of the road map's phased process.”

Can Livni pull it off? It all depends on her sincerity, her ability to maneuver an extremely right-wing Olmert government onto a path of true peace or, failing that, to get elected Prime Minister on her own and then establish a government that could take the momentous decisions a true and just peace with the Palestinians would require. A pretty tall order, but keep Tzipi Livni, not a name most people recognize today, in mind.

In the meantime, the no-name, no-publicity, Livni-Rice non-plan proceeds on its course, concealed by seemingly larger events such as the Arab League initiative. But wait! What about the Arab League/Saudi initiative? Doesn’t that call for a two-state solution and a return of refugees? It does, of course, but few in the Arab world take it seriously. People there understand that justice for Palestinians means far less to the Arab governments than relations with the US and, yes, Israel, especially given the common Iranian threat. So the Arab League initiative is intended more to placate the Arab Street than as an actual political position that will adversely affect the Livni-Rice plan.

We in the peace camp must closely monitor the doings of Livni and Rice. There is nothing really secret; everything reported above has been said or reported upon in the Israeli press. It is simply a matter of connecting the dots, of picking up the hints and half-statements. We must develop the ability to comprehend the significance of bland non-news statements such as “Abbas is not a partner for a final-status agreement but…” if we, unlike the New York Times, want to “get it.” As it is, the Livni-Rice initiative is significant in exactly the reverse proportion to how it is perceived as newsworthy.



(Jeff Halper is the Coordinator of the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions (ICAHD) and a candidate, with the Palestinian peace activist Ghassan Andoni, for the 2006 Nobel Peace Prize. He can be reached at ).