[Salon] THERE WILL BE NO MIDDLE EAST PEACE WITHOUT A PALESTINIAN STATE - guest post by Allan Brownfeld

THERE WILL BE NO MIDDLE EAST PEACE WITHOUT A PALESTINIAN STATE BY ALLAN C.BROWNFELD ————————————————————————————————————————-—— U.S. foreign policy for many years, under both Republican and Democratic administrations, has supported the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank, which Israel has occupied in violation of international law for more than 50 years. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu addressed a joint session of Congress in July. He did not say a word about the creation of a Palestinian state. In fact, he opposes the very idea of a Palestinian state and members of his Cabinet publicly declare their hope to annex the West Bank and expel its indigenous Palestinian residents. Israel is the largest recipient of U.S. foreign aid in history. There is a clear disconnect between U.S. policy and U.S. support for an Israeli government which totally rejects the creation of a Palestinian state and which has created a system on the West Bank which Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organization, all call “apartheid.” In July, Israel approved the largest seizure of land in the West Bank in over three decades. Israel’s aggressive expansion in the West Bank reflects the settler community’s strong influence on the Netanyahu government, the most right-wing and nationalist in the country’s history. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich, a settler himself, notes the Associated Press, “has turbocharged the policy of expansion, seizing new authorities over settlement development and saying he aims to solidify Israel’s hold on the territory and prevent the creation of a Palestinian state.” Authorities recently approved the appropriation of 12.7 square kilometers (nearly 5 square miles) of land in the Jordan Valley. Data from the group Peace Now indicate that it was the largest single appropriation approved since the 1993 Oslo Accords at the start of the peace process. Settlement monitors said the land grab connects Israeli settlements along a key corridor bordering Jordan, a move they said undermines the prospect of a contiguous Palestinian state. U.N. Spokesperson Stephane Dujarric called it “a step in the wrong direction,” adding that “the direction we want to be heading is to find a negotiated two-state solution.” The newly seized land is in an area of the West Bank where, even before the Israel war with Hamas, settler violence was displacing communities of Palestinians. That violence has surged in recent days. Settlers have carried out more than one thousand attacks on Palestinians in the West Bank, causing deaths and damaging property, according to the U.N. That makes 2024 the peak year for land seizure on the West Bank, according to Peace Now. About 700,000 Israeli settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, reports the U.N.’s human rights office. The Netanyahu government has promoted settlements, which much of the international community condemns as a violation of international law. Settlers are trying to expand those settlements by building a network of smaller outposts, without government approval and eating into Palestinian land. Nadar Weiman was an Israeli Special forces soldier between 2005 and 2008 and served all over the West Bank. Now he is deputy director of Breaking The Silence, an organization of Israeli Army veterans that advocates an end to Israel’s military occupation of the territory. Weiman says settlers are stepping up attacks on Palestinian communities while the world’s attention has been focused on the war in Gaza. Since Oct. 7, 16 Palestinian communities of sheepherders have fled. He says, “Sixteen, that’s a number I never thought I would say.” As of July, the U.N. humanitarian affairs office has recorded 650 attacks by Israeli settlers against Palestinians since Oct. 7. It says settlers have killed at least 9 Palestinians in the territory and Israeli security forces have killed more than 400. In Zanuta, Neiman saw the local school bulldozed by settlers. “why demolish the school?” he asks. “I’ll tell you why. Because you want families to feel they are not safe here. With no school, the kids cannot return. And if you don’t have kids, you don’t have life. It’s not just about stealing livestock. It’s about destroying the sense of being safe.” Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich declares: “Each square meter of land we take from Palestinians will never go back to them. It’s a zero sum game.” B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights group, says tha Israel also restricts Palestinian use of land in the West Bank by declaring areas as military firing zones, nature reserves and archeological sites. Israel uses the zoning to justify its refusal of Palestinians’ building plans for homes linked to water and electricity infrastructure. Editorially, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz (July 21, 2024) declares that, “Israel’s continued denial of the reality of the occupation will be its ruin…The opinion by the International Court of Justice revealed nothing to Israelis that they do not already know…The opinion shatters the lie that the occupation is only temporary and intended only for security purposes. This is the lie Israelis told themselves during decades of occupation while they seized more Palestinian land and built settlements on it.” In the view of Haaretz, the decision by the International Court of Justice “bursts this bubble of lies and views various acts of the Israeli government as annexation of the territory…What difference is there between the far right’s calls of ‘sovereignty now,’ Benjamin Netanyahu’s babble about the impossibility of denying ‘the legal right of Israelis to live in their own communities in our ancestral home.’ Gantz’s nonsense about the ‘judicialization of a political-diplomatic conflict’ and the outrageous moralist preaching of Lapid, who declared the opinion, ‘detached, one-sided and tainted by antisemitism and lacking an understanding of the reality on the ground.’” In the view of Haaretz and more and more Israelis, “Israel’s working assumption that the world will continue to ignore the occupation has been shattered in recent months. If Israel continues to ignore what the world tells it, it may wake up to a reality in which it is boycotted and ostracized like apartheid-era South Africa.” Few now remember that Israel was a close friend of apartheid-era South Africa. In fact, it was South Africa which provided Israel with the uranium it needed to develop nuclear weapons. South Africa was lucky to have leaders like F.W.de Klerk and Nelson Mandela, who brought apartheid to an end and received the Nobel Peace Prize for doing so. Sadly, Israel has leaders who seek to annex the occupied West Bank and remove its indigenous Palestinian population. Ending the Israeli version of apartheid is the opposite of their agenda. The speech Prime Minister Netanyahu gave before the Congress, and for which he was enthusiastically applauded, said nothing whatever about his government’s treatment of Palestinians—-what respected Israeli historians such as Benny Morris and Ilan Pappe have called “ethnic cleansing.” He said nothing about creating a Palestinian state, a bipartisan cornerstone of U.S. policy. One congressional observer, Sen.Peter Welch (D-VT) provided this assessment: “This is the moment for the leader of Israel to lay out a vision for the future. He didn’t. He offered no road map. He hadn’t changed a bit.” Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who chairs a Senate committee on the Middle East, said of Netanyahu, “I think his plan for a while has been to have no workable plan.” For U.S. policymakers to advocate the creation of a Palestinian state but to continue to provide massive U.S. aid to a government which has illegally occupied the West Bank for more than fifty years and openly states that there will never be a Palestinian state, makes no policy sense at all. Finally, the rest of the world is paying attention to the hypocrisy involved in our refusal to advance a policy we know is essential if peace——for both Israelis and Palestinians—-is to be achieved. ## ——————————————————- Allan C. Brownfeld is a nationally syndicated columnist and is editor of ISSUES, the quarterly journal of the American Council for Judaism. (www.acjna.org). --