ISRAEL’S Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu put the final nails into the coffin of the two state solution when he urged, on Monday, that Palestine’s President Abbas recognise Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ and ‘abandon the fantasy’ of the right to return and ‘flooding’ Israel with refugees.
The latest declaration threw a harsh light on the yawning divide between the Palestinians and the US-Israel axis, since it is the US Secretary of State John Kerry that has been supporting the position that Israel is a Jewish state, and has also been pushing the position that Israeli troops should man the borders of the Palestinian state.
Addressing the delegates at the annual policy conference of the AIPAC Jewish lobby in the US, Netanyahu said he was prepared to make an ‘historic peace,’ but not without a Palestinian acceptance of Israel as a ‘Jewish state.’
Netanyahu addressed Abbas personally saying: ‘President Abbas: recognise the Jewish state and in doing so, you would be telling your people. . . to abandon the fantasy of flooding Israel with refugees.’
Netanyahu insists that only when the Palestinians acknowledge Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ will the conflict be finally over.
This the Palestinians cannot agree to, since it would pave the way for new catastrophes and the eviction of many more non-Jews from Israel.
Netanyahu also addressed Israel’s demand to retain a military presence along the Jordan Valley, which runs down the eastern flank of the West Bank, in any future deal, saying he would not even cede security to foreign peacekeepers, instead of Israeli troops.
‘If we reach an agreement with the Palestinians. . . that peace will most certainly come under constant attack’ by groups such as Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Islamist Hamas movement which heads the government in Gaza, and extremists from al-Qaeda.
‘Experience has shown that foreign peace-keeping forces, keep the peace only when there is peace, but when subjected to repeated attacks, those forces eventually go home. . . .The only force that can be relied on to defend the peace. . . is the Israeli army,’ he said.
Top Palestinian official Nabil Sha’th responded that Netanyahu’s demand for recognition of a ‘Jewish state’, and his insistence on keeping Israeli troops deployed in a future Palestinian state were ‘totally rejected’, and was in fact ‘an official announcement of a unilateral end to negotiations,’ which were due to finish on April 29.
Kerry is the author of the plan to put foreign troops on Palestine’s borders while a clause that Palestine accepts that Israel is a Jewish state has been placed into Kerry’s framework proposal.
Palestinians have condemned Kerry’s inclusion of these clauses in the framework as ‘unacceptable.’
Netanyahu also had harsh words for the Palestinian-led international movement to boycott, divest from, and sanction (BDS) Israel over its activities in the occupied territories.
The BDS spokeswoman Rafeef Ziadah brushed off Netanyahu’s words as a ‘desperate attack,’ noting that governments were beginning ‘to take action to hold Israel accountable for its violations of international law.’
President Mahmud Abbas met with an Israeli Member of the Knesset Zahava Gal-On in Ramallah on Wednesday to discuss the crisis in the peace talks and possible repercussions when talks failed.
Abbas told Gal-On, who supports the two state solution that if negotiations fail, ‘we will go into the unknown’.
It is clear that facing this situation Hamas and Fatah must unite to establish a single government in occupied Palestine, and to fully re-launch the struggle for freedom that has been dulled in the recent years of a doomed peace process.
It is also clear that the BDS movement must be launched worldwide for a universal boycott of Israel until it concedes a Palestinian state with no settlements, with East Jerusalem as its capital, and with only Palestinian troops on its borders.
At the same time most Palestinians consider that the armed struggle against the occupiers must be re-launched.
Hezbollah has shown the way in this respect, with its battle that resulted in the Zionist armies fleeing the Lebanon.
It is also a fact that no national liberation movement has ever won its battle by boycotts and diplomatic activity alone.
The end of talks on April 29 is likely to see the beginning of the Third Intifada, as well as a worldwide movement of boycott, to establish a Palestinian state in which Arabs, Jews and Christians will be able to live side by side in peace and prosperity.