Annapolis: Oslo for slow learners
Posted on Wednesday 28 November, 2007
Filed Under International
Israel and the Palestinians – or one faction of the Palestinians, at any rate – have agreed to talks with a view to a peace deal and the creation of a Palestinian state by the end of 2008.
But yesterday’s announcement in Annapolis takes up no further forward than we have for at least 15 years. This is simply Oslo for slow learners.
The outline of a two-state solution to the root of all Middle East evil has long been easily sketchable on the back of a beer mat; Israel withdraws to the 1967 borders and hands over one-third of Jerusalem, and everybody lives happily after. Simple, really.
Except a two-state solution necessarily will not work like that. All it amounts to is the establishment of an aid junkie Bantustan on Israel’s doorstep.
In particular, the Gaza Strip – currently outside Mahmoud Abbas’ control, anyway – will into a giant prison camp, cut off on all sides with no seaport or airport. No one will be able to enter or leave without passing through Israel. Israel will at will be able to cut off the supply of food, raw materials, water, fuel, gas and electricity at will.
This much should be elementary to anybody on the democratic left. Criticism of the state of Israel does not automatically align the critic with the ‘wipe the Zionist entity off the map/until victory! until Jerusalem!’ tendency.
It doesn’t take a crypto-irridentist to observe that the state of Israel’s brutal repression of the Palestinians is contrary to most widely accepted definitions of human rights, to international law, and to the principle of self-determination.
While touting itself as the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel has purposefully excluded hundreds of thousands of Arab victims of ethnic cleansing for more than half a century. These actions weaken its political and moral standing, and by implication, the political and moral standing of its friends and supporters.
For every Israeli killed, Israel kills 3.4 Palestinians, many of them innocent bystanders. The ratio is even higher when it comes to children, where it runs to almost six to one. Pointing this out does not transform a writer into a vicarious Arab nationalist.
Denying the Palestinians their legitimate political rights has not made Israel any more secure. In the final analysis, the killing and marginalization of generations of Palestinian Arabs has work only to prop up the corruption of Fatah and, more recently, generate the backlash that has won mass popular support for the reactionary fundamentalists of Hamas.
The only potential winner from a two-state solution is perhaps a layer of the nascent Palestinian Fatah crony bourgeoisie. In the fourth world refugee camps – some of which I saw on a trip to Jordan – nothing will change. Hamas will be gifted the opportunity to establish an Islamist theocracy governed by sharia, contiguous to Israel itself.
Ultimately, the only stable long-term solution is a democratic secular state, with full religious and political freedoms for all inhabitants, a notion that has respectable grounding in progressive Zionist thought.
As Hannah Arendt argued: ‘The real goal of the Jews in Palestine is the building up of a Jewish homeland. This goal must never be sacrificed to the pseudo-sovereignty of a Jewish state.’ Whatever else Arendt got wrong in political theory, on this much she is completely correct.
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63 Responses to “Annapolis: Oslo for slow learners”
Why does the Israeli government steadfastly insist on being one of the only member states of the United Nations to refuse to subscribe not only to the international convention on nuclear arms proliferation but also to the conventions relating to both chemical and biological weapons of mass destruction? Why does the EU insist on continuing its Association Agreement with Israel which affords that state huge trading advantages within Europe when it is so clearly in breach of the human rights provisions of that agreement?
Any state that so clearly treats international conventions, agreements and institutions with such contempt, should surely be kept at arms’ length by an international community that appears instead to want to appease its every claim and to facilitate its every demand. For God’s sake, of what is the world so frightened – Ehud Olmert, the Labour Friends of Israel or the comatose Ariel Sharon?
Still not deleted the fash comments then Osler?
Fucking hell — Oxford Union Masturbating Society watch out! osler is stealing your thunder!
Richard wrote: ‘Alex you have a basic misunderstanding of antisemitism. It’s not the actions of Israelis , it’s not the action of any Jews that contribute to antisemitic views – It’s antisemites who are responsible for antisemitism.’
Old-fashioned European anti-Semitism was based upon fairy tales: Jews as Christ-killers, child blood-sacrifice, world Jewish conspiracy, that sort of thing. All nonsense, but murderous nonsense, leading to pogroms and culminating in Hitler’s Holocaust.
Although the old myths still exist in a vestigial form these days in Western Europe and the USA (and have taken root in the Arab and Islamic world, where they didn’t exist a century ago), anti-Semitism today is largely a response to material conditions; that is, it is a corrupted and ignorant response to the actions of the Israeli state vis-à-vis the Palestinians.
Such a response to Israeli actions is wrong, and must be condemned by socialists. It is not on the left where such sentiments are found; rather (in my experience), it is amongst politically naive people who are disgusted by such Israeli actions, but who do not understand the relationship between Zionism, the state of Israel and the Jewish people.
However, things are not helped by the way in which Zionists and the pro-Israel lobby associate Jews as a whole with Zionism and the state of Israel. This plays into the hands of the professional anti-Semites: the far right and extreme Islamicists, who make exactly the same association between the Jews and Zionism and Israel. Hence, one can see how politically naive people fall into this trap.
Yes, anti-Semites are responsible for anti-Semitism; but the state of Israel and Zionists and Israel lobbyists are making things easier for them to spread their poison.
It falls upon people who understand the relationship between the Jewish people, Zionism and the state of Israel — and upon socialists in particular, as the foremost opponents of racism — to ensure that people’s criticism of the actions of the state of Israel against the Palestinians does not become corrupted into hostility towards Jews as a whole, and that it remains free of the stench of anti-Semitism.
Dr. Paul wrote:
anti-Semitism today is largely a response to material conditions;
you could say that about many things that it’s hardly a satisfactory explanation for the complex phenomena we know as antisemitism
that would hardly explain away Soviet antisemitism, would it?
that would hardly explain away the Eastern European states purges of “cosmopolitans”**, would it??
reducing everything down to the material conditions is an oversimplification, and would not provide a satisfactory explanation when looking at the rise of racial attacks on Jews in the last 3-4 years
Antisemitism is a multifaceted phenomena, which evolves over time bringing in new elements, on one end of the scale it is merely a foul racial hatred and yet at the other it is a full-fledged ideology, which seeks to explain away the world’s complex interactions by means of Jewish conspiracies and suchlike.
So we shouldn’t try to reduce everything down to the material or the economic, it may play part in explaining some manifestations, but by no means can it explain all instances, nor can it answer the question: why does antisemitism persists in so many different societies in different forms?
you wrote:
and upon socialists in particular, as the foremost opponents of racism
some are, some ain’t
as Mike Rosen puts it:
http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=10384
“That’s to say, it’s said by some that racism towards peoples from countries oppressed and exploited by the West is the main racism we’re fighting, but a racism directed towards peoples seen as heavily implicated in the West’s oppression matters less.”
Translation: racism directed towards Jews is often seen as a lesser concern
by and large, the problem is that parts of the British Left are in a degree of denial and ambivalence about the variations of (non right wing wing) antisemitism and so when it pops up (as with Jock McTrouser’s filth) they don’t know how to spot it
[** cosmopolitans, another nasty euphemism for Jew]
Dr Paul correctly writes that ‘things are not helped by the way in which Zionists and the pro-Israel lobby associate Jews as a whole with Zionism and the state of Israel’.
The real issue is that the British electorate is increasingly concerned about undue Israeli influence on our parliamentary democracy – not Jewish influence – of which there is none. It is not the Chief Rabbi who has the ear of the Prime Minister, (both current and previous), but the Israeli ambassador.
Very true, as this article shows:
http://comment.independent.co.uk/commentators/yasmin_alibhai_brown/article3218062.ece
Maybe mod and sue will accuse her of being an anti semite too.
I was just wondering when Jock McTrousers, Vaird or Paddy Garcia are going start quoting from the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, as “fact”
So you claiming that Yasmin Alaibhai Brown is an anti semite and put her writings in the same category as the Protocols of the Elders of Zion?
kill garcia.
Stamp the dirt down.
Filth.
Do away with. Put in a skip with rats.
Why not stick to the point rather than issuing death threats? Twat.
Joke: Paddy Garcia talks about not issuing death threats, I thought that’s what his friends in the Palestinian independence moverment and the Islamic world did all the time. (Sharp intake of breath from assembled masses reading this!!!!’My God, it’s an Islamophobic Harry Placer!!!’ they scream.). Why is it so difficult for people, supposedly conscious socialists to recognise reactionary filth when it presents itself? r mental illness. How more explicit does the pond scum have to be for you lot to wake up that Jock McTrousers is either a wind-up merchant or a very naughty boy? I’m very disappointed in you, Dave. By their friends, ye shall know them.
Specific criticism of, or answers, to ANYTHING I ACTUALLY SAID, very welcome.
Well said, Jock.