A powerful historical evidence to that is the contrast between periods of geopolitical upheaval (conquests) resulting from imbalances of power, and long periods of stability predicated upon the observance of norms of morality and the civilised and lawful conduct of international relations. On the table at this time lies the unanimous decision by all member-countries of the Arab League to enter into peace treaties and normalisation with Israel once it decides to end its occupation in compliance with the provisions of international law and covenants. The imperatives of such compliance were thoroughly explained by the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in its historic Advisory Opinion on the “Legal Consequences of Building a Wall in the Occupied Territories” and the equally historic adoption of that opinion by the UN General Assembly in its 10th Emergency Session invoking the powerful “United for Peace” action to circumvent an inevitable US veto in the Security Council.
The ICJ had emphatically reminded all UN members (not excluding the US!) that a signatory to international conventions governing lawful conduct in circumstances of war and occupation is not alone responsible for observing the provisions of those conventions; rather every signatory is responsible for the conduct of all the others.
The peace-motivated and law-abiding Arab Peace Initiative has been met with only malignant and disdainful neglect by the Israelis, obsessed as they have been with the short-sighted notion that might makes right. So far, the so-called Arab initiative has been widely acceptable to the mainstream moderates, constituting significant majorities in Palestine as well as in several Arab countries, while at the same time it is looked at as utter blasphemy by fundamentalists whose views of justice for the Palestinians are absolutist in the extreme. The latter are no longer an “extremist fringe”, not even a minority in some Arab countries. Owing to the neoimperialist policies of the neoconservatives and their unqualified support of the Zionist colonial project, the fundamentalists are rapidly expanding in numbers, popularity and influence. Soon enough they will outgrow their minority status and will surely overtake the moderate mainstream, that is if the rules of the game remain dictated by the equally fundamentalist Zionists and colonists (misguidedly called settlers) in the Israeli camp. The latter, unlike their Arab opposites, have never been a negligible minority and, more seriously, their absolutism has provided the very feedstock on which both Arab- and Islamic fundamentalism thrives and expands.
The current Israeli policy towards the occupied territories can be outlined as follows:
Persistence in expanding settlements, expropriating land for the benefit of their colonies and ever expanding “security zones”, and besieging Palestinian villages and towns with security barriers (misguidedly called checkpoints). The infamous “wall”, together with the permanent “checkpoints”, has dissected the Palestinian territories into virtually independent Bantustans, denounced as “the Swiss Cheese State” by no other than George W. Bush himself!
Persistence in degrading the Palestinian Authority into nothing more than a security contractor for Israeli occupation to rein in the population.
Persistence in building the “wall” and other infrastructure that consecrates racist separation between the two peoples.
Persistence in treating the Palestinian economy as a captive market to the Israeli economy and limiting its access to the outside world except through Israel or Israeli-controlled outlets.
All the above, coupled with lethal reprisals and collective punishment directed against the Palestinians, with or without provocation, constitute a deliberate and calculated policy to thinning out the Palestinian demographic weight, which at present matches the weight of the Jewish population in historical Palestine. This policy is in line with the “time-dishonoured” ethnic cleansing that was first unleashed against the Palestinian minority within the demarcations of the Jewish state as generously defined by the UN partition plan in 1948, and continues to be the standard policy of the Zionist project even after Israel has expanded to devour several times the Palestinian land allocated to it by the UN.
After the 1967 war and Israeli conquest of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza, the Jewish state has been relentless in seeking to devour more Palestinian lands and dispossess more Palestinians. The continued expansion of Israeli settlements (read illegal colonies) understandably provokes extreme acts of despair by resistance groups. This in turn is used by the occupation authorities to justify measures designed to make life all over the occupied territories so intolerable that it drives people to immigrate to any country that provides them with a decent livelihood and citizenship.
Unfortunately for Israel, the policy of thinning out Palestinians has met with only marginal success as the Palestinian population growth continued to offset Israeli attempts at “cleansing” them out, with the result that there are as many Palestinians in historic Palestine as there are Jews.
However, the policy of subjecting Palestinians to intolerable living conditions in order to drive them out has a far more serious outcome. Even if the objective of such a policy has proved to be a failure in quantitative terms, there is every reason to believe that it will have other results of the gravest consequences for the society and polity of both the occupied and the occupier. The humiliation, persecution, and closure of avenues of hope for decent livelihoods for the mass of Palestinians will succeed in expelling only those of financial and intellectual means - the well to do and the better educated or their children. This “brain drain” and attrition of the middle class elite, together with economic de-development precipitated by the continued economic stagnation, will have a negative impact on Israel itself as it inevitably ends up facing a population that is increasingly and immeasurably more prone to extremism and violence.
The next US president is asked to responsibly deliberate the lawful outcome of this festering conflict. The paradox is that Israeli intransigence and continued defiance of international law will totally kill the feasibility of a two-state solution that satisfies the right of the Palestinians to national liberation from this last vestige of colonialism in the world and accession to a viable independent state with its capital “in and around East Jerusalem,” (as defined by the International Court of Justice). If the lawful two-state solution is so demolished, then with the maintenance, if not the increase, of the demographic weight of Palestinians in historic Palestine, the political problem of Palestine will cease to be an “international problem” of “foreign occupation vs. national liberation”, but instead revert to its origin as a problem of “internal” racial discrimination against, and persecution of, the mass of indigenous population by the conquering foreign colonists-cum- settlers. This outcome will not only destroy the essentials of the Zionist project but, more seriously, forever deprive even non-Zionist Jews the world over from the possibility of a recognisable cultural homeland.
* Published in JORDAN TIMES on July 22, 2008. The writer, a former deputy prime minister, contributed this article to The Jordan Times.
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