The Palestinians won't achieve statehood, but they will consign
the 'peace process' to history.
By Robert Fisk
After years of mistrust, the Palestinian move at UN indicates how far away a two-state solution is.(EPA)
The
Palestinians won't get a state this week. But they will prove – if they get enough
votes in the General Assembly and if Mahmoud Abbas does not succumb to his
characteristic grovelling in the face of US-Israeli power – that they are
worthy of statehood. And they will establish for the Arabs what Israel likes to
call – when it is enlarging its colonies on stolen land – "facts on the
ground": never again can the United States and Israel snap their fingers
and expect the Arabs to click their heels. The US has lost its purchase on the
Middle East. It's over: the "peace process", the "road
map", the "Oslo agreement"; the whole fandango is history.
Personally,
I think "Palestine" is a fantasy state, impossible to create now that
the Israelis have stolen so much of the Arabs' land for their colonial
projects. Go take a look at the West Bank, if you don't believe me. Israel's
massive Jewish colonies, its pernicious building restrictions on Palestinian
homes of more than one storey and its closure even of sewage systems as
punishment, the "cordons sanitaires" beside the Jordanian frontier,
the Israeli-only settlers' roads have turned the map of the West Bank into the
smashed windscreen of a crashed car. Sometimes, I suspect that the only thing
that prevents the existence of "Greater Israel" is the obstinacy of
those pesky Palestinians.
But
we are now talking of much greater matters. This vote at the UN – General
Assembly or Security Council, in one sense it hardly matters – is going to
divide the West – Americans from Europeans and scores of other nations – and it
is going to divide the Arabs from the Americans. It is going to crack open the
divisions in the European Union; between eastern and western Europeans, between
Germany and France (the former supporting Israel for all the usual historical
reasons, the latter sickened by the suffering of the Palestinians) and, of
course, between Israel and the EU.
A
great anger has been created in the world by decades of Israeli power and
military brutality and colonisation; millions of Europeans, while conscious of
their own historical responsibility for the Jewish Holocaust and well aware of
the violence of Muslim nations, are no longer cowed in their criticism for fear
of being abused as anti-Semites. There is racism in the West – and always will
be, I fear – against Muslims and Africans, as well as Jews. But what are the
Israeli settlements on the West Bank, in which no Arab Muslim Palestinian can
live, but an expression of racism?
Israel
shares in this tragedy, of course. Its insane government has led its people on
this road to perdition, adequately summed up by its sullen fear of democracy in
Tunisia and Egypt – how typical that its principle ally in this nonsense should
be the awful Saudi Arabia – and its cruel refusal to apologise for the killing
of nine Turks in the Gaza flotilla last year and its equal refusal to apologise
to Egypt for the killing of five of its policemen during a Palestinian
incursion into Israel.
So
goodbye to its only regional allies, Turkey and Egypt, in the space of scarcely
12 months. Israel's cabinet is composed both of intelligent, potentially
balanced people such as Ehud Barak, and fools such as Foreign Minister Avigdor
Lieberman, the Ahmadinejad of Israeli politics. Sarcasm aside, Israelis deserve
better than this.
The
State of Israel may have been created unjustly – the Palestinian Diaspora is
proof of this – but it was created legally. And its founders were perfectly
capable of doing a deal with King Abdullah of Jordan after the 1948-49 war to
divide Palestine between Jews and Arabs. But it had been the UN, which met to
decide the fate of Palestine on 29 November 1947, which gave Israel its
legitimacy, the Americans being the first to vote for its creation. Now – by a
supreme irony of history – it is Israel which wishes to prevent the UN from
giving Palestinian Arabs their legitimacy – and it is America which will be the
first to veto such a legitimacy.
Does
Israel have a right to exist? The question is a tired trap, regularly and
stupidly trotted out by Israel's so-called supporters; to me, too, on regular
though increasingly fewer occasions. States – not humans – give other states
the right to exist. For individuals to do so, they have to see a map. For where
exactly, geographically, is Israel? It is the only nation on earth which does
not know and will not declare where its eastern frontier is. Is it the old UN
armistice line, the 1967 border so beloved of Abbas and so hated by Netanyahu,
or the Palestinian West Bank minus settlements, or the whole of the West Bank?
Show
me a map of the United Kingdom which includes England, Wales, Scotland and
Northern Ireland, and it has the right to exist. But show me a map of the UK
which claims to include the 26 counties of independent Ireland in the UK and
shows Dublin to be a British rather than an Irish city, and I will say no, this
nation does not have the right to exist within these expanded frontiers. Which
is why, in the case of Israel, almost every Western embassy, including the US
and British embassies, are in Tel Aviv, not in Jerusalem.
In
the new Middle East, amid the Arab Awakening and the revolt of free peoples for
dignity and freedom, this UN vote – passed in the General Assembly, vetoed by
America if it goes to the Security Council – constitutes a kind of hinge; not
just a page turning, but the failure of empire. So locked into Israel has US
foreign policy become, so fearful of Israel have almost all its Congressmen and
Congresswomen become – to the extent of loving Israel more than America – that
America will this week stand out not as the nation that produced Woodrow Wilson
and his 14 principles of self-determination, not as the country which fought
Nazism and Fascism and Japanese militarism, not as the beacon of freedom which,
we are told, its Founding Fathers represented – but as a curmudgeonly, selfish,
frightened state whose President, after promising a new affection for the
Muslim world, is forced to support an occupying power against a people who only
ask for statehood.
Should
we say "poor old Obama", as I have done in the past? I don't think
so. Big on rhetoric, vain, handing out false love in Istanbul and Cairo within
months of his election, he will this week prove that his re-election is more
important than the future of the Middle East, that his personal ambition to
stay in power must take first place over the sufferings of an occupied people.
In this context alone, it is bizarre that a man of such supposed high principle
should show himself so cowardly. In the new Middle East, in which Arabs are
claiming the very same rights and freedoms that Israel and America say they
champion, this is a profound tragedy.
US
failures to stand up to Israel and to insist on a fair peace in
"Palestine", abetted by the hero of the Iraq war, Blair, are
responsible. Arabs too, for allowing their dictators to last so long and thus
to clog the sand with false frontiers and old dogmas and oil (and let's not
believe that a "new" "Palestine" would be a paradise for
its own people). Israel, too, when it should be welcoming the Palestinian
demand for statehood at the UN with all its obligations of security and peace
and recognition of other UN members. But no. The game is lost. America's
political power in the Middle East will this week be neutered on behalf of
Israel. Quite a sacrifice in the name of liberty...
This commentary was published in The Independent on 20/09/2011
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