Israel's plan to `disengage' from Gaza, which is part of a scheme to break up Palestinian territory into a series of Bantustans and torpedo the project of Palestinian statehood altogether, must be opposed worldwide - just as apartheid was.
ON June 6, Prime Minister Ariel Sharon finally managed to push through the Israeli Cabinet his plan to pull troops out of all the 21 Jewish settlements in the Gaza Strip and four settlements in the northern West Bank by a majority of 14 to 7. To do this, he had to sack two recalcitrant Ministers and accept a compromise. He still does not have the mandate to evacuate the 7,500 Israeli settlers in Gaza and he can only pull out the troops in phases, delaying the withdrawal by 10 months. Nevertheless, it is a massive victory for the Zionist project of establishing Eretz Israel (Greater Israel) at the expense of the Palestinians.
The Gaza pullout scheme, whatever form it takes, marks a grave new turn in the destiny of the Palestinian people because it is part of a larger game plan. That game plan aims to consolidate the illegal - and far more numerous - Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Jerusalem, with a population of 400,000; to continue to control all approaches to Gaza, including its land borders, ports and air space; to trade its territory with Egypt; to impose further closures and divisions on Palestinian territory; and to present the world with a fait accompli - a moth-eaten, unviable Palestinian state without contiguous territory, and lacking control over its own borders and its economy.
Sharon did not hide his intentions either in March, when he declared that the pullout would be extremely "harsh" on the Palestinians and would "put an end to the dream of a Palestinian state", or on June 6, when he declared his plan a step of "critical importance" for the future of Israel, which "would contribute to its security, its political standing, its economy, and to the demographics of the Jewish people in the land of Israel". Sharon's central objective is to throw overboard the Oslo process and the Road Map, destroy all possibilities of peace, and torpedo the very prospect of an independent Palestinian state.
Regrettably, his plan has received the full backing of the world's sole superpower. President Bush signed on the dotted line on April 14, exceeding some of the right-wing Zionists' wildest expectations. The Bush-Sharon communique of that day has, not wrongly, been called the Second Balfour Declaration. (The original, issued in 1917 by Britain's Imperial government, eventually led to the creation of Israel.)
The Bush-Sharon exchange of letters writes off the Palestinian refugees' right of return - a fundamental right of individuals as well as of communities, fully recognised under international law. This can only have the most unjust of consequences for the Palestinians, a majority of whom live in exile. As if that were not bad enough, the United States also endorsed Sharon's claim that the Palestinians cannot "realistically" expect the evacuation of all the illegal Israeli settlements on their land, which Israel invaded and occupied in 1967.
In effect, this is the first time since 1939, when Hitler invaded and occupied Czechoslovakia, that a major power has endorsed the annexation of another country's or people's land - against long-standing resolutions of the United Nations Security Council (in particular, Resolutions 242 and 338). This undermines a central premise of the post-Second World War global order, which refuses to legitimise the conquest and annexation of land by military force.
The U.S. Congress too has just put its stamp of approval on this unspeakably vile act. The Israeli settlements violate the Fourth Geneva Convention, which bans the transfer of any part of an occupying power's civilian population to territories seized by military force. It also violates U.N. Security Council resolutions 446, 452, 465 and 471.
The gross injustice this heaps upon the Palestinian people and their long struggle for independence - the world's oldest and most sustained national liberation movement - cannot be over-emphasised. And yet, to their shame, the powers comprising the "Quartet" - the U.S., the European Union, Russia and the U.N. - have since put their imprimatur on Sharon's "Revised Disengagement Plan". The plan is egregiously unilateral: it writes off the very possibility of involving any representatives of the Palestinian people in the determination of their fate. Indeed, its first paragraph says: "Israel has come to the conclusion that at present, there is no Palestinian partner with whom it is possible to make progress on a bilateral peace process."
It is hard to think of another "peace process" in the world in which one party, that too the aggrieved party, has been so completely, categorically, excluded from a negotiation of its own destiny. With the "Quartet's" backing, Sharon will now proceed to bury the idea of "land for peace", under which the Palestinians have been willing to establish their state on 97 per cent of the West Bank and Gaza (which together comprise 22 percent of historic Palestine), while having sovereignty over East Jerusalem and the Haram-al-Sharif (Temple Mount) and accepting compensation elsewhere for the remaining 3 percent of their land. Sharon wants to annex and keep 55 percent of the West Bank.
According to Uri Avnery, Israeli writer and activist of the peace group Gush Shalom, Sharon hopes that "the life of the Palestinians in the remaining 45 per cent [of the land] will become so impossible that they will leave the country of their own accord."
Sharon's triumph has significantly altered public opinion in Israel. A recent Haifa University opinion poll says a majority of Israeli Jews want Palestinian citizens of their country to be expelled - 64 per cent want the government to "encourage Israeli Arabs to emigrate", 55 per cent see them as "a threat to national security" 45 per cent support limiting Arab rights to vote or be elected to parliament and 49 per cent say Israeli's treatment of its Arab minority is "too favourable". If this is the Jewish Israeli attitude to Israeli Arabs, their antipathy to Palestinians in the Occupied Territories can only be imagined.
Sharon and his partisan supporters in the military and intelligence services have had some success in convincing many Israelis through sustained propaganda that there is no Palestinian partner with whom Israel can talk peace, and that the Arafat leadership has no desire to rein in "terrorism" - as all resistance to the occupation tends to be branded, regardless of the fact that international law recognises the right of an occupied people to resist tyranny by peaceful means, and indeed to use military means to fight the occupation armed forces.
As I found during a recent visit to Israel/Palestine, public discourse in Israel usually blanks out, or only dimly recognises, the tyrannical nature of the occupation. A new triumphalism is in evidence today, which gloats over the "Second Balfour Declaration" and recent setbacks to the Palestinian resistance, especially after the assassinations of prominent Hamas leaders Shaikh Ahmed Yaseen and Abdel Aziz Rantissi.
Some right-wing supporters of Zionism, both in Israel and abroad, have already declared that the Second Intifada - which began after Sharon's provocative march on the Haram-al-Sharif in September 2000 - is "dead"; Israel has emerged victorious. This judgment may be premature, although there is a significant decline (70 per cent or more) in armed attacks on Israeli targets - to the point that Israel is planning to discharge 20,000 security guards. But it is undeniable that the Palestinian struggle has suffered big setbacks.
As far as the Palestinian people are concerned, Israel's disengagement from Gaza is only the disengagement of Gaza from the West Bank - "which means", says Israeli journalist Amira Hass, "disconnecting the Palestinians in Gaza from their brethren. In other words, driving another stake into the two-state solution, if by Palestinian state the intention was for a viable state and not a collection of disconnected enclaves". Disengagement is viewed as "another, successful attempt by Israel to evade responsibility for the occupied territory".
This perception is sharply at odds with the Palestinian Authority's positive response to the pullout plan. It welcomed the withdrawal although that will create disorder and disarray and make it vulnerable to pressure from Egypt and Jordan, especially Egypt, which is accepting the role of a security buffer between Israel and Gaza. Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Ahmad Qurei said: "We welcome any Israeli withdrawal from any part of the Palestinian territories, as long as it is in the course of implementing the Road Map, and as long as it will be a full and comprehensive one... " (But it is patently clear that Sharon's plan has nothing to do with the Road Map.) Palestinian Authority Minister Saeb Erekat went even further: "If approving this fragmented plan took the Israeli government this long, I wonder how much time it will take to implement it."
This highlights the deepening confusion and crisis within the Palestinian Authority leadership, which is unable to detach itself from illusions about the now-dead Road Map and from extreme dependence upon the U.S. as a mediator.
Politically conscious Palestinians are acutely aware that the Gaza pullout is intimately linked to other components of Israel's recent strategy - of enforcing a system of closures (through more than 750 checkpoints, roadblocks, and gates that prevent the movement of people); instituting work and residence permits, like South Africa's notorious "Pass Laws", which restrict liberties; gerrymandering of urban boundaries (to alter their composition in favour of Israeli Jews); and house demolitions (some 15,000 dwellings have been destroyed).
Perhaps the most monstrous manifestation of this strategy is the "Separation Barrier" or "Apartheid Wall" - a 700-km-long wall-cum-electric fence-cum-barbed wire-barrier, which will be 30-150 metres wide in places, and five times longer and three times higher than the Berlin Wall.
Sharon is proceeding to create some 300 disjointed enclaves in the West Bank. These Bantustans or cantons will negate any possibility of a territorially integrated, contiguous, viable Palestinian state. This poses a unique and immediate danger, one that the world's great powers refuse to recognise adequately, leave alone act upon.
Already, Israel has imposed untold misery and injustice upon the Palestinian people. It has grabbed their land - as much as 24 percent of the area of the West Bank and Gaza and 89 per cent of East Jerusalem - for settlements, highways, military installations, nature reserves, and so on. It has appropriated 80 per cent of their water resources. It has followed a conscious policy of impoverishing them and destroying their economy (which has shrunk by one-half in three years). Today, unemployment runs at 67 per cent in Gaza and 50 per cent in the West Bank. The poverty ratio in the occupied territories has worsened gravely - from 20 to 75 per cent (85 per cent-plus in Gaza). Half of all Palestinians living under occupation need external food assistance.
THE sheer magnitude of this expropriation and humiliation makes, say, India's terrible experience of colonialism look like a picnic. Indeed, the Palestinian situation is virtually indistinguishable from apartheid, with its systematic ethnic-identity-based ruthless discrimination, as well as its violation of people's rights to live, move, travel, work, associate, nurture families, build integrated communities, or secure themselves.
Sharon's plan will further aggravate this situation. It will rationalise and sanctify vicious forms of colonial injustice and tyranny and produce a grotesque monstrosity. A historic evil like Israel's occupation (and its plans for further annexation) cannot be successfully combated on a national scale alone. Just as apartheid could not have been defeated without an international struggle, the Zionist project can only be countered by a global movement.
Historically, India played a positive role in solidarity with the Palestinian national movement. For the past decade, and especially under the National Democratic Alliance government, however, it has pursued a strategic "triadic" partnership with Israel and the U.S. This is a thoroughly egregious project. The United Progressive Alliance government rightly promised to correct course. But it has diluted its commitment to it over the past month.
Thus, the Common Minimum Programme made no mention of Israel and reiterated "India's decades-old commitment to the cause of the Palestinian people for a homeland." But the President's address made an explicitly positive reference to Israel: "Our relations with Israel, which have developed on the basis of mutually beneficial cooperation, are important, but this in no way dilutes our principled support for the legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people." Prime Minister Manmohan Singh's address to the nation was silent on the whole issue.
Since then, Israel has made overtures to India - through Ariel Sharon's phone call to Manmohan Singh, and the signing of a defence deal for space cameras. New Delhi also entertained a visit by the American Jewish Committee, the world's oldest - and most powerful - Zionist lobby.
The time has come to demonstrate pro-Palestinian solidarity in practice - concretely. India should invite a number of Palestinian leaders, both from the Palestinian Authority and outside it, as well as Israeli peace groups. It could usefully host an international conference on a just solution to the Palestinian problem. The world will remember India with gratitude and pride if New Delhi's policy is guided not by expediency, but by moral clarity and worthy purpose.
