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10 October 2010 By
Jonathan Cook
Benjamin Netanyahu,
Israel's prime
minister, has insisted from the launch
of the current peace talks that the Palestinians set
no preconditions, while making his own precondition
the centrepiece of negotiations. Netanyahu has said
talks are futile unless the Palestinians and their
leader,
Mahmoud Abbas, first recognise
Israel as a Jewish state. "I recognised the
Palestinians' right to self-definition, so they must
do the same for the Jewish people," he told American
Jewish leaders recently. Netanyahu, of the rightwing Likud
party, is not the first Israeli leader to make such a
requirement of the Palestinians. His predecessor
Tzipi
Livni, leader of the centrist
opposition, wanted the same recognition.
Ehud
Barak, the
defence minister
and head of the supposedly
left-wing Labor party, also
supports this position. The consensus on this matter,
however, masks a reluctance by Israeli politicians to
clarify what exactly is being expected of the
Palestinians and why recognition is so important. Netanyahu clearly does not simply
want the fact of Israel's existence acknowledged. That
is in no doubt and, anyway, the Israeli state has been
recognised by the Palestinian leadership since the
late 1980s. It is recognition of the state's
Jewishness, not its existence, that matters. Debate on this subject focuses on
Israel's desire to stifle the threat of a right of
return for millions of
Palestinian refugees. Though
doubtless a consideration, that explanation hardly
suffices. It is clear to everyone that the refugees
are one of the main issues to be settled in the
negotiations. In the unlikely circumstances that all
other obstacles to Palestinian statehood were removed,
it can be assumed that the international community
would work to make that particular mountain a
molehill. The demand for recognition is
directed chiefly at another party: the fifth of
Israel's population who are Palestinian – the remnants
of the
Palestinian people
who stayed on their land during the great
dispossession of 1948, the nakba, and eventually
gained Israeli citizenship. They are only nominally
represented at the talks by their state, Israel.
Instead, Netanyahu hopes to use the promise of
statehood to induce Abbas to sacrifice the interests
of Israel's Palestinian citizens. The Palestinian
minority's leaders, who have been lobbying Abbas hard
in the run-up to the talks, understand what
Netanyahu's demand for recognition entails. During the early years of the
Oslo peace process, when a concession on Palestinian
statehood appeared to be drawing nearer, the positions
of Israel's Palestinian and Jewish leaders polarised.
The assumption of Israeli politicians was that
Palestinian citizens would soon either declare loyalty
to a Jewish state – effectively become
Zionists – or be "transferred" to
the coming Palestinian state. Faced with this challenge,
Israel's Palestinian leaders encouraged a civil rights
movement, demanding equality and an end to Jewish
privilege. Their campaign, under the slogan "a state
of all its citizens", implied the end of Israel as a
Jewish state and its transformation into a liberal
democracy. Over the past decade, during the
years of the second intifada, relations between the
two communities deteriorated further, with the
Palestinian minority now routinely accused of being
traitors. Netanyahu's latest demand should,
therefore, be understood as a cynical move to bypass
his own Palestinian constituency and persuade Abbas to
negotiate away the rights of Israel's Palestinian
citizens on his behalf. If the Palestinian president does
recognise Israel as a Jewish state, the campaign by
Israel's Palestinian citizens to reform their country
into a true democracy will be over. Netanyahu will
have Palestinian backing to label the reformers a
fifth column and expel them to the slivers of West
Bank territory he may one day deign to call a
Palestinian state. In the meantime, he will also
have Palestinian permission to institute a loyalty
drive of the kind already being advanced through the
Israeli parliament. Loyalty tests for individual
Palestinian citizens, and the dismantlement of the
Palestinian parties in the parliament unless they sign
up as Zionists, would be the first measures. Rounds of
expulsions could be expected later. If all this sounds familiar, it
is because much the same programme was laid out by
Israel's foreign minister last week during his
controversial speech at the United Nations general
assembly. Avigdor Lieberman's plan for an "exchange of
populations" would initially require border changes to
force hundreds of thousands of Palestinian citizens
into a Palestinian "interim state" in return for the
inclusion of West Bank settlements, some deep in
Palestinian territory, in the
newly expanded Jewish state. There is one flaw in Lieberman's
scheme. Many Palestinian citizens, such as those in
the Galilee, are not near the West Bank and could not
be exchanged through land swaps. His election slogan –
"No loyalty, no citizenship" – tells the rest of a
plan he has revealed to Israelis but not directly to
the international community. Although American Jewish leaders
decried Lieberman's use of the UN platform to reveal a
proposal that officially counters his own government's
policy, Netanyahu baffled observers by remaining
demure. His officials publicly distanced him from the
scheme, but then privately told the
Israeli media that the prime
minister did not think the plan illegitimate and that
he would not "chastise" Lieberman. Netanyahu's silence should not
surprise us. His
foreign minister may be speaking
more bluntly than other Israeli politicians, but he
speaks for them nonetheless. 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
www.jkcook.net.
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