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18 November 2010 By
Jonathan Cook
Benjamin Netanyahu,
Israel's prime
minister, is in the United States this
week, but few observers expect an immediate or
significant breakthrough in the stalled peace talks
with the Palestinian leadership. In public, Mr Netanyahu maintains
he is committed to the pledge he made last year,
shortly after he formed his right-wing government, to
work towards the creation of a demilitarised
Palestinian state. But so far he has proved either
unwilling or unable to renew even a partial freeze on
Jewish settlement building in the
West Bank
-- a key condition set by
Mahmoud Abbas, the Palestinian
president, for reviving the negotiations. Most of Mr Netanyahu's cabinet,
including
Avigdor Lieberman, his
foreign minister,
barely conceal their opposition to Palestinian
statehood. Instead, Mr Netanyahu has imposed a
precondition of his own: that the Palestinians
recognise Israel as the state of the Jewish people. A leading analyst of Palestinian
politics says the picture is not as bleak for the
Palestinians as it might appear. Asad Ghanem, a professor of
political science at Haifa University, predicts Mr
Netanyahu and his cabinet will eventually come to rue
their obduracy. The intransigence and the
unabashed espousal of "an ideology of Jewish
supremacy" by Mr Netanyahu and his supporters will
lead to the gradual "reunification" of the
Palestinian people,
Dr Ghanem said in an interview. In clinging to a vision of
Greater Israel, Mr Netanyahu and
the right are fuelling a potentially powerful
Palestinian nationalism
that could yet come to crush not only the occupation
but Israel's status as a Jewish state, said Dr Ghanem,
the author of several books on Palestinian
nationalism. Dr Ghanem, who belongs to
Israel's Palestinian minority, a fifth of the
country's population, noted that the original goal of
Israel's founders was to use a sophisticated version
of divide-and-rule to weaken an emerging
Palestinian national
movement that opposed Zionism. The war of 1948 that created
Israel
led to the first and most significant division:
between the minority of Palestinians who remained
inside the new territory of Israel and the refugees
forced outside its borders, who today are numbered in
millions. Since 1967, Israel has fostered
many further splits: between the cities and rural
areas; between the West Bank and Gaza; between
East
Jerusalem and the West Bank;
between the main rival
political movements,
Fatah and Hamas; and between the PA leadership and the
diaspora. Israel's guiding principle has
been to engender discord between Palestinians by
putting the interests of each group into conflict,
said Dr Ghanem. "A feuding Palestinian nation was
never likely to be in a position to run its own
affairs." He is dismissive of plans by Mr
Abbas and his prime minister,
Salam
Fayyad, to try to revive the Oslo
process by bypassing Israel and seeking the
international community's blessing for the
establishment of a Palestinian state next summer. Palestinian leaders who have
pursued statehood, Dr Ghanem added, have done so on
terms dictated by Israel. First the rights of the refugees
to be considered part of the Palestinian nation were
sacrificed, then those of the Palestinians inside
Israel. Next parts of East Jerusalem and all of
Gaza
were excluded. And now finally, he said, even
significant parts of the West Bank were almost certain
to be counted outside a future Palestinian state. "The core of the negotiations for
Abbas is about ending the occupation, but he has
progressively conceded to Israel its very narrow
definition of what constitutes occupied land. The
rights of the refugees and other Palestinians to be
included in the Palestinian nation now exist chiefly
at the level of rhetoric." The Israeli right's insistence on
Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish state
would accelerate the unravelling of Israel's long-term
policy of fragmenting the Palestinian people. "All Palestinians are affected by
such a demand, not just those living inside Israel.
The Palestinian national movement accepted Israel as a
state decades ago but Netanyahu is not satisfied by
that. "He wants to reopen the 1948
file," Dr Ghanem said, referring to the war that
established Israel by expelling and dispossessing 80
per cent of the Palestinian people. "He is provoking
the Palestinian national movement to reassess the
accepted two-state model for ending the conflict." As fewer and fewer Palestinians
cling to the belief that Israel will ever agree to
partition the territory, the physical and ideological
barriers between the Palestinian sub-groups are
starting to crumble, he said. The separate struggles of the
Palestinians -- for civil rights among Israel's
Palestinian minority; for national liberation by those
in the
occupied territories; and for the
right of return among the diaspora -- were being
superseded by "a common fight against the reality of
an ethnic apartheid". Dr Ghanem added that, when
Palestinians came to realise that they would never be
offered more than a "crippled state" by Israel, the
new paradigm would become "one binational, democratic
state for all Palestinians and Jews in historic
Palestine". The different Palestinian
factions would eventually merge their political
platforms. The
civil rights movement
rapidly emerging among Palestinians inside Israel
would then serve to complement the fledgling
anti-apartheid struggle in the occupied territories. Palestinians in Israel and the
occupied territories, as well as the millions of
refugees, said Dr Ghanem, would one day come to thank
Mr Netanyahu for bringing them together. Jonathan Cook is a writer and
journalist based in
Nazareth, Israel. His latest
books are "Israel and the Clash of Civilisations:
Iraq,
Iran and the Plan to Remake the
Middle East"
(Pluto
Press) and "Disappearing
Palestine: Israel's Experiments in Human Despair" (Zed
Books). His website is
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