“Israel wants peace, but it cannot find a partner for peace,” is the mantra endlessly repeated by Israeli leaders over the past sixty-plus years. In fact, the opposite is true: Israel is a highly militarized and expansionist settler state that thrives on war.
The events of the past month have reaffirmed this basic truth, which the corporate media deliberately conceals from the people of the United States. Deceiving the public here is particularly important as Israel is highly dependent on the billions in annual aid and invaluable political protection provided by Washington. Without U.S. aid and protection, Israel would be completely isolated in the world.
In return for this protection, Israel has played a key role in defending U.S. imperialist interests in the Middle East. As a hostile colonial implantation, Israel is in a state of perpetual conflict with the surrounding Arab countries and has severely distorted development in the entire region.
In just the one month since the U.S. election on Nov. 6, Israel has carried out a week-long deadly bombing of Gaza, announced that thousands of new settlement housing units would be built on stolen Palestinian land, and revealed plans for a massive settlement project that would cut the West Bank in two.
Following an overwhelming 138-9 vote by the United Nations General Assembly admitting Palestine as a “non-member observer state,” Israel halted the turnover to the Palestinian Authority of $100 million in taxes collected from West Bank Palestinians.
While both the U.S. and Israeli governments claim to support a “two-state solution,” they bitterly opposed Palestine gaining even the status of a non-member state, arguing nonsensically that, in the words of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice, this would “place further obstacles in the path to peace.”
Israel’s deputy foreign minister, Danny Ayalon, in an interview given while the bombs were still falling on Gaza, painted Israel as a patient peace-seeker, frustrated by alleged Palestinian intransigence:
“We are still waiting at the [negotiating] table. It was unfortunate that almost four years went by almost wasted because the Palestinian Authority under the leadership of Abu Mazen [PA president Mahmoud Abbas] refused direct negotiations.”
Reality is very different from Israeli propaganda.
Why ‘peace negotiations’ fail
The “two-state” plan proposed by the United States is for a Palestinian state in Gaza and broken-up pieces of the West Bank, with Israel retaining control of the borders, airspace, water and mineral rights, and with the elimination of the right of return for Palestinian refugees.
But even such a colonial arrangement is unacceptable to the Israeli leaders. When the PA negotiators agreed to all of these conditions in 2008, Israel’s then foreign minister Tzipi Livni responded: “We do not like this suggestion because it does not meet our demands.” In typically condescending colonialist fashion, she added, “Probably it was not easy for you to think about it, but I really appreciate it.”
What Livni meant by “our demands” is Israel’s unlimited “right” to seize land in the West Bank. Since the Oslo “Peace Process” began in 1993, this has been the Israelis’ consistent approach to negotiations, regardless of whether a Labor or Kadima or Likud party-led government was in office. Negotiators talk peace while Israel creates new “facts on the ground” in the West Bank in the form of hundreds of settlements.
Former Palestine Liberation Organization adviser Michael Tarazy summarized it: “We are negotiating about sharing a pizza and in the meantime Israel is eating it.”
Today, more than 500,000 Israeli settlers live on confiscated Palestinian land in the West Bank, existing in their own apartheid world, protected by the Israeli military.
So much for the myth of the Israelis unable to find “a partner for peace.”
The assault on Gaza
Between Nov. 14 and Nov. 21, at least 162 Palestinians were killed, more than 1,400 wounded, and much of Gaza’s infrastructure and public facilities destroyed by a massive air, sea and land-based bombardment. On the Israeli side, there were six killed and 240 wounded.
On Nov. 19, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton rushed to the Middle East from Southeast Asia with the aim of brokering a truce. Clinton’s emergency trip was a clear sign of the Obama administration’s fears that the continuation of the brutal Israeli assault on Gaza was endangering U.S. imperialist interests in the region. Obama himself played a key role in the negotiations.
From the start of Israel’s latest intense bombing campaign, the White House and Congressional leaders of both parties repeatedly expressed all-out support for the Israeli side, while pointedly ignoring far higher Palestinian casualties.
A moment of supreme absurdity occurred on Nov. 16. That day, the House of Representatives “passed” a resolution expressing “unwavering commitment” to Israel. This House Resolution 813 was introduced at 12:04 p.m. on Nov. 16, and declared adopted “without objection” one minute later at 12:05 p.m.! There was, needless to say, no discussion or debate over the resolution.
Despite its obscenely pro-Israel rhetoric, the Obama administration was clearly fearful that a new Israeli ground invasion of Gaza might provoke rebellions in Egypt, Jordan and other neighboring Arab countries, and possibly lead to a wider war.
Playing a key role in brokering the agreement was Egyptian President Mohammed Morsi. Morsi then took the opportunity to immediately declare a number of measures making himself the virtual dictator of Egypt. Since then, massive protests have engulfed the country. The timing of Morsi’s declaration was not accidental. It came just one day after he played a key role, working closely with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, in brokering the Gaza ceasefire on terms which did not include ending the blockade of Gaza. Washington’s gratitude was reflected in its very muted response to Morsi’s seizure of dictatorial powers.
Despite the death and destruction inflicted by Israel, and the fact that they have no air force, navy, armored units or anti-aircraft defenses, the Palestinian resistance was not defeated. Huge celebrations hailing the resistance took place all over Gaza after the ceasefire was announced.
The terms of the temporary truce reportedly call for a halt to the fighting, an end to Israeli targeted assassinations of Palestinian leaders, and undefined steps to lift the Israeli blockade that has inflicted massive suffering on 1.7 million Palestinians in Gaza.
Lifting the blockade is a critical issue for the people of Gaza. Whether there will be any real movement toward ending the blockade remains in doubt, as does the durability of the truce as a whole.
While Israel withdrew its settlers and bases from Gaza in 2005, it has kept the area surrounded and blockaded ever since. As a result, half of all schoolchildren are malnourished and two-thirds of infants are anemic. Eighty percent of Gaza’s population are refugees—those who were driven out of other parts of Palestine by the Zionist military forces in 1948 and their descendants.
Israel masquerades as ‘victim’
In the 1960s, the Black Panther Party had a saying about racist cops who justified their routine killing and brutalizing of Black people by “masquerading as the victim of an unprovoked attack.” It is a description that perfectly fits Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his predecessors going back to the creation of the Israeli state in 1948.
In the U.S. mainstream media, Israel is invariably depicted as the “victim.” Its brutal and cowardly military assaults are always termed “retaliation,” suggesting that Israel’s actions are “self-defense.” (For more on this history, see “Palestine, Israel and the U.S. Empire,” PSL Publications, 2009)
This familiar pattern was repeated in November 2008. On the day after the 2008 U.S. election, Israel murdered five Palestinian civilians, breaking a ceasefire and setting in motion a chain of events that led to an all-out military assault on Gaza. A vast array of weaponry, including white phosphorous and depleted uranium munitions, was unleashed on a trapped population. More than 1,400 Palestinians were killed, while Israeli forces had 13 killed—a ratio of more than 100 to 1.
Four years later, the fatal shooting of a mentally disabled young man on Nov. 5 and a 12-year-old boy on Nov. 9, both killed by the Israeli army inside Gaza, set off the new round of fighting. Then, on Nov. 14, Israel assassinated a top Hamas leader, Ahmed Al-Jaabari, the very day that he had been presented with a proposal for a long-term ceasefire by a joint Israeli-Egyptian group.
Whether the present ceasefire holds and for how long cannot be known at this point. The only real long-term solution to the crisis is an to end to colonial occupation and real self-determination for the Palestinian people, including the right of all refugees to return to their homeland.
