SHAIK: Civil rights road in Palestine 13Mar10 March 13, 2010
by Michael Shaik - The Australian - 13 March 2010
IN January, Israel’s defence minister Ehud Barak announced he was upgrading the status of a college in the settlement of Ariel to that of a fully fledged university. The Ariel University Centre of Samaria thus became Israel’s first settlement university, marking a milestone in Ariel’s growth from a modest settlement 1978 to a thriving university town in the heart of the northern West Bank.
Although Barak’s announcement is consistent with Israel’s policy of developing its settlements to encourage Jewish migration to the West Bank, it seems at odds with concerns he raised last month.
“If, and as long as between the Jordan and the sea, there is only one political entity, named Israel, it will end up being either non-Jewish or non-democratic,” he declared. “If the Palestinians vote in elections,” he added, “it is a binational state, and if they don’t, it is an apartheid state.”
In a desperate attempt to avert this scenario, US Vice-President Joe Biden flew to Israel this week to restart peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians. On the day after his arrival Israel announced plans for 1600 new settlement housing units in East Jerusalem.
The angry recriminations that followed underscored the policy contradictions among all parties to the conflict. The US is committed to a two-state solution but is unable to prevent Israel from destroying the territorial basis of a Palestinian state through settlement expansion.
The Israelis are determined to continue colonising East Jerusalem and the West Bank but have no plan to deal with the consequences of the one-state reality they have created.
The Palestinians are bitterly divided between Fatah, which is seeking a Palestinian state through international peace negotiations, and Hamas, which insists upon the Palestinians’ right of armed resistance.
In his historic Cairo address to the Muslim world Barack Obama seemed to hold out a third way to the Palestinians by calling upon them to learn from the history of the Afro-American civil rights struggle.
The applicability of this model to the Palestinians is debatable, but there are promising signs of such a movement emerging. In the West Bank, Palestinians and religious settlers are holding dialogue meetings, in defiance of the army, in frank acknowledgement they will be neighbours in a post-Zionist future. Last week, Palestinians in East Jerusalem were joined by hundreds of young Israelis in a demonstration against their eviction to make room for Jewish settlers.
The most famous instance of such co-operation is the Palestinian village of Bilin, whose inhabitants have allied themselves with Israeli and international peace activists against the Separation Barrier that Israel is building through their lands.
Last month, after five years of protest, the Israeli army began re-routing the barrier around the village. In December Israel cracked down on the leaders of this movement, including “the Palestinian Gandhi” Abdallah Abu Rahmah, co-ordinator of the Bilin Popular Committee Against the Wall.
The crackdown has been ignored by Obama. To give him his due, the president has avoided the “hands off” approach that characterised the early years of the Bush administration, leaving the conflict to fester as a propaganda resource for America’s enemies.
Obama’s commitment to Middle East peace is certainly sincere. Yet noble intentions are worthless if not grounded in reality. . To continue calling upon Palestinians to “renounce violence,” while offering them nothing more than the empty symbolism of a discredited “peace process” will leave America as an irrelevancy at best and at worst a partner in maintaining an “apartheid state” of Greater Israel.
Michael Shaik is Australians for Palestine’s public advocate
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