Roadmap to Apartheid

By Thomas
07/12/03

    Once again a US president has imposed himself into the Palestinian-Israeli “conflict” attempting to become the worldwide hero that ends the bloodshed and solves the conflict.  However once again, but with a different president, the real issues have been ignored amidst Pro-Israeli posturing and defiant “Anti-Terrorist” rhetoric.  Once again another president has blamed the Palestinians and acquitted the Israeli’s.  George W. Bush, the latest addition to the 50 plus years of suffering for the Palestinian people, and his cabinet full of right-wing lunatics and fundamental Christian Zionists have endorsed a new plan for the Middle East called the “Roadmap”.  The fact that this “plan” has Bush’s endorsement is a damning factor in itself as this is the same Bush who recently approved 14 Billion US dollars in aid to the Israelis (Of which 6 or so million will be going directly to the Israeli Occupation Forces to by new weapons to slaughter Palestinians), and the same Bush whose cabinet and government are packet by right-wing Christian Zionists such as Donald Rumsfeld and Daniel Pipes, the later being a rabid racist Anti-Arab who made the statement “The Palestinians are a miserable people...and they deserve to be.”

     The “Roadmap” has several lofty goals among which is the creation of a viable Palestinian state by 2005 and a resolution to the Palestinian refugee crisis, but no method or process for achieving those goals other than once again demanding that the Palestinians cease their legitimate resistance of occupation for a vague promise of a possible future state and human rights.  Why is it that the internationally condemned Israeli occupation of what is left of Palestine is the only conflict in the world where the occupied (The Palestinians) are asked to end resistance to occupation before the occupation ends, for vague promises of an eventual end to that occupation? Did we ask the ANC (African National Congress) to disarm before Apartheid was defeated, did we ask the Afghans to lay down their weapons before the Soviets were expelled from Afghanistan? Of course not.  Yet the Palestinians have been deemed different by the World governments.  This is due to the Israeli intransigent opposition to any peace deal with the Palestinians which would result in a viable Palestinian state and a return of Palestinian refugees.  The Likud Party platform of which current Israeli Prime Minister and war criminal Ariel Sharon is a head of emphatically states “We will not accept an Palestinian state west of the Jordan River” and Israeli has never to this day recognized the Palestinians right to a sovereign viable state with secure borders. (Where as the Palestinians under the PLO, which is an umbrella group for all of the Palestinian resistance groups, recognized Israel’s right to exist with secure borders in 1988, and has adhered to this policy ever since) 

    Even now as Sharon, the man responsible for the Sabra and Shatila massacres in 1982, and the man who told Israeli settlers to “seize the hilltops” in the West Bank during the Oslo Peace process (A time in which the illegal settlements expanded faster than any other time in history, by 72%) talks peace with his right-wing counterpart in the Oval Office the Israeli government is building a massive “Apartheid Wall” which cuts miles into the West Bank from the internationally recognized 1967 borders (Green Line) and is designed to annex the illegal settlement blocks into Israel while purposely cutting off the Palestinian urban centers from each other.  This is the duplicity of the Israeli government; on one hand they talk of peace with their US financers and arms dealers, while on the ground they do everything possible to destroy the conditions for peace, then blame the Palestinians for their continuing resistance.

     The Israelis and their Christian Zionist friends in the US learned two valuable lessons from the failed Oslo peace process.  Firstly they learned that they could placate the International community, and to a large part the Palestinian people by talking peace at high levels while altering facts on the ground to serve their own interests. (That of annexation and ethnic cleansing) In Oslo the Palestinians were told “End your 6 year uprising now, and we will negotiate peace terms with you in the future”.  Yet when the Palestinians ended the first Intifada in 1993 in exchange for future promises of freedom and independence, they were rewarded with 7 years of Israeli styled “Peace”.  The occupation remained, the settlements grew by 72% (When land was supposed to be being given back to Palestinians), and the Israelis made routine demands and warnings that the Palestinians “better not declare independence”.  In 2000 former Army general and close friend of Ariel Sharon, Ehud Barak offered the Palestinians a “final” offer of peace that was reported as “extremely generous” in the world media.  Yet Barak never produced a final map at Camp David, and the proposals he offered amounted to nothing more than a Palestinian Apartheid state, controlled from Tel Aviv.  A large bulk of the settlements would have remained, the Israelis would have controlled dozens of roads intersecting the Palestinian state and connecting the illegal settlements with each other and Israel, the Israeli Occupation Forces would have retained control over the Jordan Valley as a “security area” and would permanently control all of the Palestinian states borders with the outside world (With Jordan from the West Bank, and with Egypt from the Gaza Strip).  As reported in the world media, the most “shocking” aspect of this “generous” offer was Barak’s willingness to let the Palestinians have East Jerusalem as the capital of their future state.  Yet even this offer was duplicitous, with the actual agreement turning over a suburb of East Jerusalem called Al-Quds to the Palestinians for their capital. (See Israel/Palestine by Tanya Reinhardt for full info on Barak’s proposals at Camp David 2000) This offer was and is unacceptable in every regard, but when the Palestinians under the direction of their president and lead negotiator Yassir Arafat rejected this offer of an “Apartheid State” they were successfully blamed by the Israelis for derailing the peace process, and eventuality the Israelis had been pushing for and promoting since its inception in 1993. 

    The second lesson the Israelis and their US Christian Zionist supporters learned from Oslo is that to successfully subjugate the Palestinian people and de-legitimize their internationally recognized right to resistance, and claims to citizenship, human rights, and refugee return, they must successfully find a Palestinian collaborator that will accept the “Apartheid state” and renounce the right of resistance and return. The outbreak of the Al-Aqsa Intifada showed the Israelis that no matter how much of a collaborator Yassir Arafat was (policing the armed resistance groups for the Israelis) he was unwilling and unable to take the final step to sell out his people and their hopes and dreams of independence.  Hence the Israeli’s and US Christian Zionists needed to find a high-level collaborator who would sell out the Palestinians.  Enter Mahmoud Abbas, or Abu Mazen as he is popularly known, the Palestinian millionaire who Sharon described as a “good prospect” for his kind of peace.  For this reason Ariel Sharon and George W. Bush forced the Palestinian people to disregard the democratic election of their president Yassir Arafat and “appoint” Abbas as Prime Minister.  Abbas immediately fulfilled the role of the collaborator signing off on yet another plan making vague future promises, and attempted with little success to unilaterally and without popular support declare an end to this, the second Palestinian uprising. 

    To draw an analogy that best illustrates the perilous position the “Roadmap” puts the long oppressed Palestinian people in, one need only to look back at the American independence movement from British occupation popularly known as the American Revolution.  What is being demanded of the Palestinian people by the “Roadmap” is similar to the British colonial government and their backers in the British parliament demanding that George Washington lay down his weapons and disband the revolutionary army before the declaration of independence in exchange for vague parliamentary promises of a future American state with British settlements connected by British roads and checkpoints.  In addition General Cornwallis’ army would remain in occupation indefinitely and retain control over all of North Carolina as a “security area” as well as control all of the American states international borders.  If you ask any American, and most people around the world if this situation would have been acceptable, they would respond with a resounding “No!”, however this is exactly what the US and Israeli government is asking of the Palestinian people, and the Palestinian people just like the colonial Americans cannot and must not accept this “Roadmap to Apartheid”