Bush’s upcoming visit to Israel is unlikely to stimulate any relief for the collectively punished, long-suffering Palestinians, despite vague waffle by Olmert on illegal settlement evacuations. Israel has a political half nelson on the US, who are blinkered by pro-Israeli propaganda, who do not realise or do not care that they are co-conspirators in war crimes and heinous human rights abuses. For the uneducated, the Israelis are always the good guys and the Palestinians the bad. Nor do any of the Democrat presidential candidates offer any hope for change. The Israel First Zionist lobby is too strong – to speak of justice for Palestine would be electoral suicide. Why the presidential hopefuls speak of Israel as a democracy is mystifying – perhaps it is a reflection of the lack of real democracy in a country primarily driven and controlled by big money lobbies and corporations.
Jonathan Cook analyses the Barak Oslo offers and makes some chilling conclusions about Olmert’s present political plans toward those hapless people the apartheid State of Israel currently occupies and from whom it blithely and cynically continues to steal land:
In truth, Israel’s need for recognition as a Jewish state is proof that it is not a democratic state, but rather an ethnic state that needs to defend racist privilege through the gerrymandering of borders and population. But in practice Olmert may yet use the recognition test to back Abbas, a weak and unrepresentative Palestinian leader, into the very corner that Arafat avoided.
Before Annapolis, Livni declared: “It must be clear to everyone that the State of Israel is a national homeland for the Jewish people,” adding that Israel’s Palestinian citizens would have to abandon their claim for equality the moment the Palestinian leadership agreed to statehood on Israel’s terms.
Olmert framed the Annapolis negotiations in much the same way. It was about creating two nations, he said: “the State of Israel — the nation of the Jewish people; and the Palestinian state — the nation of the Palestinian people.”
The great fear, Olmert has repeatedly pointed out, is that the Palestinians may wake up one day and realize that, after the disappointments of Oslo and Camp David, Israel will never concede to them viable statehood. The better course, they may decide, is a South African-style struggle for one-person, one-vote in a single democratic state.
Olmert warned of this threat on another recent occasion: “The choice … is between a Jewish state on part of the Land of Israel, and a binational state on all of the Land of Israel.”
Faced with this danger, Olmert, like Sharon and Barak before him, has come to appreciate that Israel urgently needs to persuade Abbas to sign up to the two-state option. Not, of course, for two democratic, or even viable, states, but for a racist Jewish state alongside a Palestinian ghetto-state.
With Bush also wanting a two state solution by the end of his disastrous term of office, the future of Palestinians looks as usual, bleak.