The roadmap and the Right of Return

This article is essentially about the so-called road map, the latest plan for peace between the Israeli army and the Palestinians, including declaration of some sort of Palestinian state. More specifically, it is about the road map and the entire trend of retrogression of which the road map now forms a component part.

This road map charts a path for Israel to annex the West Bank, completely outside international law. It is a path that is intended to retain the support of the United States for the long term (not just the Bush administration), and it is intended as well to liquidate the Palestinians' effective connection to the land without actually expelling them from it.

Among other things, the road map deals in matters that can never be the subject of negotiation, such as the Palestinian right of return, which is both a national, collective right and an individual right. The question of the Palestinian right of return goes to the heart of the issue of the actual nature of the current Zionist state.

The Zionist State of Israel began as a master-race type of democracy with full rights for Jews only, while Arabs generally and Palestinians in particular were on the bottom absolutely stripped of any rights whatsoever. It evolved into a master-race democracy with full rights for white European / North American Jews only, with Palestinians and Arabs still on the bottom and non-white non-European Jews in between with little more than a right to claim citizenship. To accommodate the Palestinian right of return, this state would have to become secular and eliminate discrimination based on ethnic or religious background.

In its short-term intentions, the road map seems like an exercise similar to the Oslo Accords. Under the Oslo Accords, Israel was compelled to recognize a Palestine Authority. Israel even cynically offered a so-called final resolution of outstanding political differences (including a promise of Palestinian independence), to come five years after signing a promise they had no intention of keeping.

In fact, however, the road map goes one last step beyond Oslo. It closes the door on any possibility of genuine independence for any future so-called Palestinian state recognised by Israel. Whatever the entity or its form, this would be a state that would never obtain exclusive control or authority over any of the things that ones own state normally should control (disposition of land, provision of services, collection of revenue, foreign relations, etc.).

In its refernces to the so-called "Tenet work plan", the road-map also incorporates certain proposals of George Tenet, head of the US Central Intelligence Agency, arranging ongoing CIA and Mossad (Israeli intelligence) involvement in Palestinian internal affairs. This is intended to ensure Palestines independence would remain merely a phrase. The promised Palestinian state would have some authority over collectives of Palestinian populations in certain localities in the West Bank, but no authority over territory.

Some Israelis oppose the road map to the extent that it might regulate further settlement activity in the Occupied Territories. In general, however, the road map is designed to extricate the Israeli government from the difficulty in which it landed since Operation Defensive Shield (in March-April 2002). Palestinian fighters in Jenin were not intimidated and learned as well as showed that they were militarily the equal of, and in many respects superior to, the Israeli Defence Forces when they could confront the enemy on terrain of their own choosing. Among Palestinian civilians, there is frequent mass defiance of Israeli Occupation rule, including mass defiance of the curfews. For a number of reasons, the Israeli government on its own cannot implement the road map as presently set out, and needs international, including superpower, backing. At the same time, in the post-Defensive Shield conditions, it has to settle the status of the Occupied Territories once and for all.

The conditions in which Israel has to find and implement a program such as the road map are those of the post-9/11 US-led war on terrorism. These conditions now include invasions and occupations of Arab and Muslim countries. The global context of the Oslo Accords beyond the regional conditions left in the wake of the First Gulf War was the readjustment of the international balance of power in response to the disappearance of the Soviet bloc and of the Soviet Union as a superpower rival to the U.S.

That context today has deteriorated, but it has also simplified measurably: it is Anglo-American-led global retrogression. Israels enthusiastic participation in it has become Zionisms last and best hope for surviving into the future. This is creating major problems for so-called liberal critics of the excesses of Zionist rule within Israel as well as in Canada, the U.S. and elsewhere.

Many elements from these strata have written and spoken in favour of some sort of Palestinians state in general, without ever endorsing the Palestinians right of self-determination in principle. Now, however, they must choose.

The Sharon government has dispatched army personnel to attack and kill solidarity activists like Rachel Corrie (from the U.S.) and Tom Hurndall (from the U.K.) in the West Bank, outraging international public opinion, and followed it up with a notorious waiver that visitors to the West Bank now have to sign at gunpoint before the IDF will let them in, exonerating the army in advance of any responsibility for individuals safety. As the Zionists align themselves ever more closely with the present Anglo-American program in Afghanistan, Iraq etc. -- which is nothing but retrogression -- they rip away the last shred of the veneer of high ideals that its liberal loyal-opposition critics relied upon for cover.

The article below recapitulates major themes in the historical evolution of the Zionist State of Israel in order to argue that such decay in Zionist conscience is a natural outcome of denying the Palestinians right of self-determination. The failure of the Second Intifada to go away has turned some long-time Zionist critics of Zionism like Israeli historian Benny Morris, one of the first to demonstrate from the documentary historical record how the Zionists planned to physically expel the Palestinians and steal their land, into public supporters of the Sharon government, and silenced many others.

To some, this silence makes it look as though the Palestinians are more alone than ever and losing allies. Taking the longer view, however, the Palestinians struggle has gone through many stages and has farther still to go; some allies become unwanted baggage when a new context driven by new parameters emerges to displace the previous conditions.

Whether the Palestinians' struggle culminates in either a one-state solution or a two-state solution, Israel continues to demand an absolute right to maintain the Palestinians in a subordinate position. Although technically not connected to the road map, the so-called "fence" -- a 300-km-long barrier that the army is erecting around the West Bank allegedly to deter suicide bombers infiltrating Israel -- is a major weapon of this campaign of subordination. Meanwhile, the U.S. is re-arranging Israel's roles in the Middle East in the wake of its seizure of direct control over Iraqs oil supply.

The U.S. is no less fervent than Israel in opposing actual Palestinian independence independence based on the Palestinians exercising their own right of self-determination. At the same time, the U.S. does not want the Palestinian question to fester, like some unlanced boil, as an ongoing source of regional instability. For this reason, it wants the option of transfer, i.e., physical expulsion of the Palestinians from Israel-proper or the Occupied Territories, off the table. The U.S. needs Israel to operate on its behalf, but not in a state of low-level internal civil war that threatens to drain resources incessantly as well as indefinitely. Israel cannot unilaterally defy this American position without risking the financial and military support from Washington, support without which it cannot last one nanosecond.

Although Israel remains by no means irrelevant to U.S. plans in the region, its position within the American empire is shifting from that of an essential to that of an additional helpmate. With the conversion of some territory within Afghanistan into a U.S. base, and the occupation of Iraq free of direct interference from governments that opposed the Anglo-American invasion, the U.S. can now threaten Iran, which it sees as the next major prize, from land bases, and no longer only from the Gulf. Also, it can offer Saudi Arabia ongoing protection for its oil exports in the world market, independent of OPEC. Hence, more than ever before, Zionism quite desperately needs to keep the Palestinians subordinated. Meanwhile, however, the Palestinians don't need anything of Zionism or Zionists. Their struggle for independence has thus become a major obstacle to the Anglo-American campaign of retrogression on all fronts.

I. Present perspectives

Absolute retrogression is going on before our very eyes. The U.S. and British schemes in Afghanistan, Iraq, Israel-Palestine and elsewhere are all of one piece. The aim is to drag the world backwards for as long as it takes to achieve unchallenged control for their aims. Achieving these aims entails looting everything and anything anywhere, and slaughtering anyone that gets in the way.

How this proceeds has become intimately bound up with how the Zionist State of Israel now proceeds. In the atmosphere of international relations instilled by the United States since 9/11, the Sharon government has shifted from aspiration to action. It is moving stepwise, from occupying to outrightly annexing what US Defence Secretary Rumsfeld openly describes as the so-called Occupied Territories and what his deputy Wolfowitz, an Israeli citizen, more blatantly calls the disputed territories the West Bank & Gaza.

This or that "dissenting" or "moderate" voice from the Bush administration pops up to suggest there is "daylight" between the Sharon and Bush administrations on this point. Far from it: rather, there is a carefully orchestrated dance. The steps are as follows. On the one hand, the Israeli authorities, never mentioning annexation, moot a bevy of nefarious transfer proposals. Just what is supposed to follow or accompany such transfer if not annexation?!? On the other hand, U.S. officials talk of stopping new settlements or occasionally about removing settlements from the Occupied Territories. But why are their top people disputing whether the territories have occupied status? No one dares openly acknowledge the obvious. It is precisely the kind of dispute intended to create a legal excuse, or prima facie basis (albeit tenuous) for justifying any interim Israeli act of annexation.

Has the Bush administration been hoodwinked? Is it being dragged kicking and screaming to accept Sharon's demands? Is it in any way resisting them? All evidence is to the contrary. The entire program - including the mini-scenarios of hesitations and unexpected verbal (and even military) blow-ups, etc inserted as shock or relief - has been planned, or planned for, by what appears to operate as an enlarged plenum of the topmost policy levels in Washington and Tel-Aviv.

The cooperation and collaboration are indeed unprecedented. Various theses have been put forward to account for it. There are claims that American policy is being Israelised. Some say the main problem is the present policy. Others say "movement politics" at this time can have only one practical objective, to mobilise opposition to the present policy -- and therefore on root causes, and especially condemnation of the US imperial, British neo-imperial or Israeli colonial projects as a matter of principle, one should hold one's tongue.

Another line of argument insists on assigning some responsibility for the situation to the Palestinians. This seems to be based not on any truly objective evidence, but just the liberal notion that "it takes two to tango". According to this logic, fair's fair and if serfs have rights, so does the king: the Palestinian victim must share responsibility with the Zionist perpetrator. Recent events, however, have delivered the starkest refutation. During Operation Defensive Shield (March-April 2002) especially in Jenin, the Palestinian institutional order refused to submit to Zionist dictate under fire. As the entire world saw for itself, regardless of the spin applied everywhere throughout the media, the truth was never clearer. This was a defining historical moment. As one contributor to the Dossier on Palestine put it, the world saw "heroes and cowards face to face". Most of the time, the Palestinians act under duress to survive into the next day or the next week or the next month. At such special moments as Jenin, however, the Palestinians excited the admiration of the fighting peoples of the world (and total frenzy among oppressors everywhere) with their steadfast display of absolutely unbreakable resolution.

None of the positions just mentioned are useful when it comes to accounting for the present turn in Israeli-American collaboration. Equally unproductive is the approach suggested during Operation Defensive Shield: that the Zionists never changed, that exceptional external circumstances in certain moments of great chaos during 1948 and 1967 enabled them to advance their colonising project several steps closer to the final goal, and that the post-9/11 atmosphere in international relations and the conditions of the Israeli-American alliance were creating another such moment.(1)

A most remarkable feature has emerged in the Zionist camp since Operation Defensive Shield, about which little if nothing has been said or written up to now. There is a marked degradation manifested in the condition of Zionist conscience itself. This decay, gathering speed and force from years before, has come about not simply as some unfortunate byproduct of Zionist ubris (hubris), but actually and especially in response to Palestinian resistance and rejection.

The Zionist state today is playing a role within the current U.S. imperialist project that was inconceivable in 1948, 1967, 1978 (Camp David) or even 1991-93 (Gulf War to Oslo). This, however, is not just because that project had different preoccupations in those particular moments. It reflects the fact that Israel seems to have lost any purpose other than that of the hired gun of the only (and perhaps the last) superpower on the planet. Meanwhile, the conscience of its Palestinian opponent has, on the contrary, not degraded. It has become sharper, purer and far more focused. The Palestinians' own struggle has transformed the exercise and implementation of the right to self-determination. What seemed for a particularly dark period like barely a distant prospect, discussed in whispers around the out-of-the-way corners of a dozen Arab and a score of other capitals, hundreds and thousands of kilometers from the Palestinian homeland, has become a problem taken up for solution in Palestine itself, using whatever means are at hand or called into service in the circumstances. This is a profound refutation in practice of the widespread pessimism still afoot.

Those claiming Zionism hasn't changed have gone one step further than sowing a free-floating pessimism. They have attaching to it a deadweight anchor, insisting that while Zionism remains more or less intact, the Arab peoples and their governments are "a rotting corpse" and that the Palestinians presumably have been surviving all this time on the good graces or civilised instincts of humanely-intentioned Zionists.

The fact is the disintegration of Zionist conscience has become a major condition and favourable factor at this time for the further development of Palestinian conscience. Zionism needs the Palestinians, and needs them in a subordinate position. Palestinians, however, have no need of Zionism or the Zionists. Reversing this paradigm, however - creating or restoring some kind of Palestinian psychological dependence on the Zionists - has everything to do with the entire flurry of activity currently surrounding the road-map. The road-map's first premise is the shunting-aside of any leadership that the Palestinians themselves approve and support. Its second is liquidation of any possibility to exercise the right of return. This is a desperate bid to retain the Zionist entity intact while major obstacles in the Anglo-Americans' chosen path of unimpeded retrogression are being removed.

II. Legacies of Occupation

The Zionist State of Israel imposed its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza 36 years ago. Since then, the world has watched it unleash a dirty war against the Palestinians. From 1948 to 1967, however, the Israeli government's methods for containing the Palestinians had not fully blossomed into those of an openly colonialist occupying power. Instead, the Zionists were preoccupied with questions of legitimacy. They denied the Palestinians existence as a people. They deliberately and frequently misrepresented as terrorist the reorganisation of the national movement as a national liberation struggle. They concocted one self-serving theory or practice after another each premised on the idea that Palestinians, whether Israeli citizens or resident in the West Bank or Gaza, were second-class, or tenth-class, or no-class but above all in no way the equal to the lowliest Jewish immigrant.

The leaders of the Zionist state up until the late 1970s the Ashkenazi white-European elite at the top of the Labour Party, Histadrut and the rest of the Zionist institutional order were in fact already hopelessly racist. Economically, Israel is part of the world imperialist system. To stave off internal collapse, it resorts on a large scale to importing the cheapest possible sources of labour. For decades, to this end, it relied on Sephardic Jewish immigration from Arab countries. These non-European non-North American Jews were assigned a status only a hair's breadth above that of any Arab.

This condition, plus the increasingly repressive character and requirements of the occupation after June 1967, presented a major electoral opportunity. Unprecedented political space opened for the Likud Party to challenge the dominance of Labour. At the helm, rescued from a deserved obscurity, were a clique of long-discredited terrorists from the former Stern and Irgun gangs the likes of Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir. (For decades previous, they had nestled under the umbrella of Herut and other so-called "right-wing fringe" parties.)

Once Israel took the fateful decision to occupy the West Bank and Gaza indefinitely, these elements increasingly assumed leading roles in Zionism inside Israel. The occupation itself came to require a quantum increase of repression of the Palestinians, far beyond the quasi-segregationist methods and treatment in place before the June war. Accordingly, the Begin-Shamir outlook began to appear to be vindicated by events. Pre-1967 Zionism seemed passé, even discredited. Central institutions and leaders of the Zionist movement, both in Israel and internationally, could now begin in earnest to shed any of the last remnants of eighteenth-century beliefs in enlightenment or human progress.

This would also serve later to rescue Ariel Sharon from Israel's political cemetery after staging and being found responsible for the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps of West Beirut.

Initially, this shift from Labour to Likud was presented as mainly an ideological - Left to Right - shift. It was defended either as the necessary step of completing Jabotinsky's iron wall phase of the Zionist mission, or on the apologetic grounds that Israel's conditions and peril could not permit over-indulgence in such "luxuries" as "Western-type democracy for all". Ritually, this defence was followed by the assertion that Israel certainly still wanted human social progress and enlightenment ideals to prevail.

However, this shift originated not in a change of ideas but of actual material conditions -specifically, a transformation in Israel's strategic position following the October 1973 war. Israel had survived this conflict with the Arab neighbourhood only by the skin of its teeth. It used the inconclusive ending (no peace treaty) to take the Occupation off the agenda and replace it with something else. In effect, the same old racist wine about "Arab inferiority" was poured into a new bottle labeled "First let the Arab states sign a peace treaty with us!"

This mantra expressed a fundamental piece of Zionist outlook in which all factions Likud as well as Labour, most of the religious parties and much of the Left including some so-called "communists" could now share.

What happened with Israeli, Zionist and pro-Zionist opinion outside Israel that opposed the Occupation? Now they found themselves in a serious dilemma. They did not want to admit that the Occupation brought into question everything they had previously believed and advocated in defence of Israel's claim to legitimacy as a state. So, they subordinated issues raised by Israel's role as an occupier to issues of what Israel now needed as a state to survive.

Specifically they took up the "secure borders" rhetoric of United Nations Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338, which had been international law since the end of the June 1967 War. These strata fancied themselves Zionism's conscience; now they were ducking the issue of Palestinian rights just as hypocritically as the Zionist institutional leadership.

It is a fact frequently acknowledged that Resolutions 242 and 338 remain a dead letter because of repeated U.S. vetoes of resolutions to implement them. However, far less frequently noted is another fact. These vetoes also ensured that, although the resolutions themselves might be paid rhetorical lip-service, they would play no actual or significant role in the internal struggle among sections of the Zionist ruling clique. In effect, whatever the Israeli army was actually doing in the Occupied Territories could not be used to maneuver for factional advantage, and would remain under wraps so that American support and complicity would also remain concealed.

This was the context in which the Zionist-American "land for peace" fraud was cooked up. It was intended explicitly as an alternative to make the question of Palestine go away, setting out a new basis on which to split the Arab states and patch up outstanding differences within the Israeli-American alliance as well as among the contending Zionist factions. This was what began and ended at Camp David, changing nothing except the lifespan of Anwar Sadat.

Thirty-six years on, UNSCR 242/338 - on which there remains an international consensus - continues to be treated as an annoyance and irrelevance in Washington and Tel-Aviv. Camp David on the other hand is held up as some kind of beacon. The absurd claims continue to be repeated that Israel was positioned to make a separate peace with Egypt either as the fruit of a Zionist policy of strength or because of the courage of some individual Arab head-of-state. The fact is nothing would have taken place without the unstinting support given directly from Washington (and, at that time, indirectly also from Moscow) to Israel's long-term strategic aims and territorial ambitions.

This included the Nixon administration's threat to unleash nuclear weapons against the coalition of Arab states poised on the verge of defeating Israel in the October 1973 War, the Carter administrations policy of propping up the Shah of Iran against the Israel's Arab enemies with multi-billion-dollar arms sales, the schemes of Soviet social-imperialism to aid Egypt in order to help itself to the Suez Canal, etc. So, why the ongoing cover-up, especially now that the other superpower is gone?

Both superpowers - the US and the then-Soviet Union - hijacked 242 & 338 for their common purpose of preventing the Palestinians from achieving self-determination. Israel used the situation to place itself permanently outside and above international law. Instead of having to "face the music" in the Occupied Territories and accept responsibility to implement 242/338, the Zionists cast themselves in the role of hapless victims of superpower contention and collusion. They justified tightening the lid on the Palestinians either as a measure to protect Israel from the unintended consequences of capricious American policies, or as a measure to protect Israel from the deliberate designs of pernicious Soviet ones. This bought time to plan and implement measures for making the occupation permanent.

This occupation became part and parcel of the Zionist conception of Israeli state sovereignty. (It has since become a ticking time-bomb anywhere that unilateral acts of aggression have subsequently given way to indefinitely extended periods of occupation - Indonesia in East Timor, the U.S. in Afghanistan and now Iraq.) Even today, Israel remains only the second government in modern history to have incorporated the functions of an occupying power as a component part of its normal domestic sovereign sphere of authority.(2) Exercising sovereign authority in this manner, the Israelis pick and choose when and whether to abide by the Fourth Geneva Convention and many other key pieces of international law. As the behaviour of the U.S. in Afghanistan in 2001 and in Iraq in 2003 shows, the template has been exported.

The Zionists claim legitimacy for Israel to exist as a state of, and for, all Jews anywhere in the world, ahead of all others including any of the indigenous population currently or formerly residing there. This was unprecedented in 1948. It remains so to date. Israel is the only so-called *nation*-state to come into existence as the state of a collective (the "Jewish people") that long, long, long before had lost, and by 1896 - when the modern Zionist movement was founded - no longer possessed any distinctive material connection whatsoever with, any portion of the Palestinian territory that it proposed to place under its authority.(3)

Proceeding with such an arrangement posed a profound threat to Enlightenment values concerning human social progress. Everything, however, was done not to confront the simple and disturbing truth of what was going on. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, the British Mandate authorities in Palestine flip-flopped between regulating, banning and ignoring Jewish immigration. By the mid-1940s, the Americans were underwriting and assisting Zionist terror gangs managing this human trafficking as a weapons-smuggling infrastructure. It was blindingly obvious that the Zionists intended to overcome the absurdity of acquiring a nation-state for something that was not a nation by peopling the territory *after the fact* with those declared to be descendants of those in whose name the state was being created.

On these matters, the UN Partition Resolution of November 1947 was, fatefully, silent. Instead, on the one hand reflecting a prevailing anti-Arab racism and anti-Islamic prejudice the Palestinians right to self-determination was ignored or dismissed. On the other hand, the guilt over, and horror of, the Nazi Holocaust against European Jews during the Second World War seemed either to answer or suspend the usual skepticism, or drown out the warning-bells such a proposition was bound to trigger.

Subsequent developments greatly compounded the consequences of the initial moral-political failure. Exploiting the contradictions of the developing Cold War, the Zionists tried to fool domestic and international public opinion that Israel with its "cooperative" kibbutzim (organised in permanent armed confrontation with surrounding Palestinian villages) it was somehow actually oriented towards the socialist countries. Meanwhile, Zionist foreign policy remained solidly pro-US behind an anti-British veneer. This opened the way for the Zionists to deploy military means without significant resistance, enabling them to use the Partition Resolution as a stepping-stone to annex much of the Galilee - explicitly *excluded* from partition - as "spoils of war"! Until 1967, the Zionists' ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians during the 1948 War and subsequent refusal to uphold the right of return for Palestinians displaced by the conflict isolated the State of Israel in wide sections of world public opinion. To this day, Israel remains in breach of obligations which it had accepted on joining the UN General Assembly in 1948-49 -- specifically, the commitment to permit those who had been turned into refugees by the 1948 War to return to their homes now inside the State of Israel. Indeed, Israel remains technically liable to be expelled from the General Assembly. Courtesy of the Security Council and U.S. imperialism, however, Zionist Israel remains both a member of the General Assembly and at the same time a rogue state without parallel.

Many who knew better shunted aside another unpleasant truth from the 1948-1967 period. Israel could only carry on its chosen course as a prop and agency of foreign imperial and colonial powers. First it was the cats paw for Britain and France: the response of the worlds peoples and governments to the Suez debacle put an end to that phase.

But the outcome also vindicated the patience of the US State Department. The US now seized the day and put Israel firmly in the pocket of the American Empire. (Following WW2, the US had been expanding this empire behind an endless propaganda about the need to contain communism; it is this same empire that is being expanded and reorganised today as people are mobilised to rant, rave and cringe impotently in fear about the need to wage the war on terrorism.)

Surrounding Israel's birth, there was everything Western but nothing especially democratic. Its subsequent development unfolded as a 'herrenvolk'-type democracy a master-race democracy for Jews only in theory and for white European Jews only in practice. Democratic conscience was strangled in Israel from the outset. Beginning well before June 1967, the Zionists substituted this 'herrenvolk' model adapted both consciously and unconsciously from the practices evolved during the apartheid regime in South Africa maintained by the National Party as their own racist subtype. The outcome of the Six-Day War, however, entailed erecting a permanent Occupation of the West Bank and Gaza as a terror regime of suppression and control over the resident Palestinian population. It was specifically in this context that Zionist propaganda launched the myth of Israel as "the only democracy in the Middle East".

The main target of this propaganda was neither the Palestinians, nor the Arab world, nor even the international Zionist fundraising network. The main target was the stratum of liberal opinion, especially Jewish liberal opinion in the United States and Canada, that wanted to believe that Israel still represented something progressive and enlightened, even if it was resorting to short-term policies that seemed at variance with the professed ideal. This stratum provided a crucial buffer tending to exonerate, or suspend critical judgment or condemnation of, the Israeli government.

With the emergence of the First Intifada (1987-93), for the first time there emerged as a serious material force among Palestinians - a new generation coming of age in the West Bank and Gaza - the idea of resistance as the general daily way of life. Before this, there were many calls to resist. Such calls had been the torch or banner of a number of political parties and movements. Most of these had been either penetrated, isolated or marginalised by the Israeli state. The Zionists responded to the Intifada, however, at two levels. On the home front, they effectively merged and coordinated the counterinsurgency campaign of civilian police, regular as well as reserve military, and all the intelligence agencies. On the diplomatic front, seizing the space opened by the Gulf War (1991), they engaged the backing of their superpower sponsor, the United States, to initiate at the international level the so-called peace process, leading to the Oslo Agreements and establishment and recognition of the Palestine Authority.

The Israeli government's "peace process" diplomacy had two main aims. The first was actually to prop up and render permanent this counter-insurgency regime at home. The second was to acquire a licence from the international community, in the form of the so-called "high contracting parties" to Oslo, to rig up and impose fascism without limits as a normal feature of everyday life. The effective content of the new Israeli approach amounted to this: under the guise of treating peace and security questions in the Occupied Territories and Israel-proper on the same basis, new settlers or settlements in the Occupied Territories were to be furnished access to the same level of services and standards as in Israel-proper.

This would proceed regardless of how or where this might conflict with or have impact on any outstanding claims or established standards in existing surrounding Palestinian communities. The Israelis then picked the precise moment to concede the Palestinians a limited autonomy, to appear like some magnanimous gesture, all the while knowing others would subsidise the Palestine Authority and Israel alone would levy and collect taxes and retain control over all decisions relating to provision of services. The mixed ABC system of exclusively-controlled and jointly-patrolled zones meanwhile gave Israel the means to exterminate autonomy by degrees.

Everything the Zionists do is a maneuver, each maneuver looks like an isolated and exceptional response to exceptional circumstances but there is also always a strategic aim. The Zionist aim in the peace process was to disintegrate the social cohesion of the Palestinians as a people. The road map, with its plan to replace all notions of a Palestinian nation or territory with municipal units whose democratically-elected officials are first vetted by the CIA, and Mossad-approved, has the same aim.(4)

As the checkpoints system has clearly proved, the Israelis are determined to make life impossibly burdensome for the Palestinians. They hope the eventual elimination even of this extremely controlled autonomy will encounter minimal resistance when the decisive, critical moment arrives. The underlying logic of the Zionist policy - and at the same time its Achilles heel - is that if the Palestinians are demeaned as animals long enough, they will become little better than animals themselves and can then be despatched without significant resistance or protest.

Adolf Hitler dismissed liberal defenders of the Rights of Man as historical amnesiacs in the face of such genocidal acts as the Ottoman assault on Armenian Christian communities during WW1 with the rhetorical question: Who remembers the Armenians? In fact, however, when it came to putting in place the processes required first to condition a people not to resist actively the fate assigned them by the self-appointed master race before actually implementing the final solution, even the Nazis - before the Zionists, probably the most blatant negators of Enlightenment principles in modern times - seem to have acted with far greater circumspection.

The peace process created pretexts for escalating Israeli state terror without limit. The checkpoints system has effectively deputised any Zionist or Jewish Israeli elements to take the law in their own hands in the name of defending against Palestinian terror. On recognizing this reality, many have become fatalistic, even nihilistic. They throw up their hands in despair, as though such things were final, damning evidence that there is no essential truth or central meaning to be gleaned.

Amid the apparent chaos currently besetting daily life throughout Israel-Palestine, is such pessimism justified? These conditions express something else of profound and powerful importance: the entity lacking any meaningful social cohesion, national principle, or democratic ideal is not the Palestinians and their truncated, bombed out, beleaguered and bankrupt Authority. On the contrary: it is Zionist Israel fifth greatest military power on earth.

After all the negotiating, scheming and compromising, why and how could the Intifada re-erupt in the way that it did in September 2000? With the collapse of the entire fraud of Ehud Barak's "generous offer", what the Israeli government needed more than anything else was an atmosphere of permanent insecurity and imminent terrorism. Sharon's notorious provocation at the Dome of the Rock unfolded accordingly.

The Zionists responded to the Palestinians ensuing "days of rage": in the gunsights of their police and the IDF, they now placed the 18 per cent Arab population of Israel-proper alongside 100 per cent of the indigenous Palestinian population of the Occupied Territories already under permanent attack. Here was the barbarous reality that the Zionists, aided by the Fox & Skye Networks of Rupert Murdoch, the BBC and CNN, have done everything to misrepresent as a question of "homicide bombers". There are even phony debates about whether the Palestinians are targeting "innocent civilians" (meaning Israelis outside the West Bank and Gaza) or "fanatics" (meaning Jewish settlers inside the West Bank and Gaza).

Since the start of the Oslo process to date, the Israeli authorities repeatedly presented their actions as purely defensive security measures. Those who today seriously still believe the Israeli authorities have only been responding to suicide, or homicide, bombings are either lying to themselves and others, or are failing to pay attention. Such a view utterly fails to take into account the extremely long history of the Israeli authorities in creating pretexts for repression, in expanding the application of repressive measures as something normal, in making the courts system more reactionary without resorting to special executive orders or additional or amended legislation, in justifying extra-judicial executions, etc.

All these things have failed, and yet all these things carry on. Why? Because in their mass defiance most recently, of curfews the Palestinian residents of Israel-proper and the Occupied Territories continue to remind the Zionists that the Palestinians are not going away. Their withstanding Operation Defensive Shield has thereby rendered the entire Zionist project more vulnerable than ever.

Meanwhile, as a result of developments in American policy since 9/11, this resistible Zionist force has become positioned to team up with a highly movable object. Israel has embroiled itself far more intimately and directly than ever before with the forces working to bring about retrogression on the world scale those who have been raping Afghanistan and Iraq. Operation Defensive Shield, planned years before, unfolded only after Sharon secured unconditional U.S. support. For years the Zionists sought to ignore and bypass any indigenously-supported Palestinian entity, but not until the U.S.-led coalition completed the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq and become an occupying power in the region in its own right has Israel become ready to proceed with the road map. Only under such conditions does it dare ignore Palestinian-supported entities and risk the fallout and resistance that will come when it props up its own replacements with impunity. Sharon's visits to the Oval Office, arrogantly boosted as proof of Israel's especially privileged relationship with the Bush administration - are actually about ensuring Israel's survival within the existing framework of roles it has been undertaking for decades as premiere guardian of long-term U.S. imperial interests in the Middle East.

American vetoes long shielded Israel from any of the consequences of its racist and militarist hostility to the Arab world, accustoming it to operate with absolute impunity and immunity. Under present conditions, however, this has afforded Israel no meaningful grip on its future security as a Zionist entity. There is widespread frenzy throughout the Zionist camp, over everything from having to recognise even an Israeli-controlled collection of disjoint cantons as a Palestinian state, to having to tolerate the European Unions maintenance or cultivation of its own links among the Palestinians (independently of Tel-Aviv or Washington). One Zionist regime follows another, promising the final solution their predecessor failed to deliver, while all manner of wild threats issue forth from Israeli civil society about the dire consequences that will follow if achievement of the Zionist aim continues to be obstructed.(5) In the fevered imagination of Zionist propaganda, the end of the regime of Saddam Hussein was going to make the Palestinians roll over, curl up and die. In reality, the Palestinians' resolve inspired the peoples of Iraq to unite against unfolding the Anglo-American occupation.

And so, once again, the problem is that - "against all logic", as the Zionists say - the Palestinians continue to resist. Israel and the Western media monopolies amplify their propaganda that it's nothing but the last terrorist gasps of a lost cause. History has its own cunning in moments like this, however. The truth is transparent, irresistible and can no longer be concealed or made to disappear. The resistance of all those confronting the Zionist onslaught, and of all those striving for a durable and lasting peace against the global wave of reaction unleashed by the Bush-Blair axis, continues to mount. This furnishes two extremely important points to remember and rely upon as guides to further action: firstly, that this worldwide retrogression is actually Zionisms best and last hope, while secondly, the resistance itself is widening the space in which the retrogression itself can and must be stopped.

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End Notes

1. Zionist aims never changed and included Palestinian expulsion from the outset. However, the same cannot be said about the morale of those committing their own lives, as well as the State of Israel, to achieving these aims. It is timely to reiterate the distinction in this, the year of the 60th anniversary of the Soviet defeat of the Nazis at Stalingrad. The Battle of Stalingrad, which is frequently cited as a touchstone in the thinking of various sections of the Palestinian leadership, marked the point in WW2 after which no one outside Nazi Germany could any longer doubt that the Third Reich could not win the war that its leadership had instigated. It also marked a turning point in the ranks of the Nazis themselves. Entire units and layers of the military leadership their aims unchanged nevertheless secretly set in motion plans to surrender at the first propitious moment in defiance of the sacred oath they had been compelled to swear personally to their Fuehrer, Adolf Hitler.

2. An astonishing fact: the first such regime was the so-called General Government of occupied Poland. Imposed in September 1939, it was overthrown and dismantled by the Soviet Red Army and the Polish resistance in 1944. In the last two years of its operation, in order to ensure maximum efficiency in processing Holocaust victims at and through the death camps the most extensively-developed of which, at Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor and Majdanek, happened to lie within its territorial jurisdiction the Nazis administered the General Government as a component part of the Third Reich.

3. In the sense of a people continuously occupying a particular territory, world Jewry and its ancestors had long since either ceased to have any meaningful connection with Palestine for most of the preceding 2,000 years, or had for millennia originated and remained either in other parts of what became the Arab world, or other parts of the ancient world India and China far from Arab lands in general or the Middle East in particular, or arose independently in such regions as the Caucasus almost five centuries after the collapse of the Roman Empire and the ancient world.

4. The current hysteria surrounding the internal disagreements of Sharons cabinet regarding the road-map obscures the fundamental reality: the Zionists will never voluntarily cease colonising the Occupied Territories and whatever Palestinian state they recognise will have no authority to remove any existing settlement.

5. On January 20, 2003, while the Franco-American standoff over Iraqi weapons inspections was still behind closed doors at the U.N. Security Council, independent journalist Ferry Biedermann interviewed Dutch-Israeli military historian and Hebrew University professor Martin van Creveld about the future of Israel-Palestine, from which the following has been extracted. An interview transcript is posted at the following German indymedia site: http://www.de.indymedia.org/2003/01/39170.shtml

Arguing Israel has been driven in desperate times to consider desperate measures, van Creveld openly raises the prospect of Israel unleashing its nuclear arsenal on civilian populations in member-states of the EU:

Van Creveld: If the dispute lasts much longer, the Israeli government will lose control of its people. For people will say: "If government can't protect us, what on earth can they do for us? If the government can't guarantee that we'll be alive tomorrow, what good are they? Well defend ourselves."

Biedermann: So Israel is beaten in advance?

Van Creveld: On that I'll quote Henry Kissinger: "In campaigns like this the antiterror forces lose, because they dont win, and the rebels win by not losing." That certainly applies here. I regard a total Israeli defeat as unavoidable. That will mean the collapse of the Israeli state and society. We'll destroy ourselves.

Biedermann: Is there any point to the recent Israeli military offensive?

Van Creveld: This offensive is totally useless; it's only further enraging the Palestinians. Perhaps there will be a short-lived calm, but in the end there will even more suicide attackers.

Biedermann: Is there any hope?

Van Creveld: If I were Arafat, I wouldn't stop either. I'd only cease in exchange for a very far-reaching political accord. And it seems as if we have a government [under Sharon-tr.] that won't make Arafat such an offer. If elections were held today, the Left would be thoroughly beaten.

Biedermann: Some maintain that it is Israel's foreign enemies that keep the country unified.

Van Creveld: That's right. I only wish that there were foreign enemies, but that isnt the case. We've fought our external enemies for so many years. Each time there was a war, we took a mighty hammer to our foes, and after being defeated a few times, they left us alone. The problem with the Palestinian revolt is that it doesn't come from without, but rather from within. Therefore we can't avail ourselves of the hammer.

Biedermann: Is the solution, then, to keep the Palestinians outside the borders?

Van Creveld: Exactly, and right now there's nearly unanimous agreement on that. We ought to build a wall so high, that not even a bird can fly over it. The only problem is: where to put the border? Since we can't decide whether the territories conquered in 1967 should be included, for the time being we improvise a little. We're building a series of little walls, which are much more difficult to defend. From a military standpoint this is very stupid. Every supermarket has gradually acquired its own living wall of security guards. Half the Israeli population is guarding the other half-unbelievable. Aside from the fantastic waste, it's almost totally useless.

Biedermann: Does that mean that the Palestinians stay within the borders?

Van Creveld: No, it means that they all get deported. The people who strive for this are waiting only for the right man and the right time. Two years ago only 7 or 8 percent of Israelis were of the opinion that this would be the best solution, two months ago it was 33 percent and now, according to a Gallup poll, the figure is 44 percent.

Biedermann: Will that ever be possible?

Van Creveld: Sure, since desperate times give rise to desperate measures. Today there's a fifty-fifty split on where the border should run. Two years ago 90 percent wanted the wall built along the old border. That has completely changed now, and if things continue, if the terror doesn't stop, in another two years perhaps 90 percent will want to build the wall along the Jordan. The Palestinians talk of "summutt", meaning hang tough, cling to the ground and the soil. I have enormous respect for the Palestinians. They fight heroically. But if we in fact want to strike across the Jordan, we would need only a few brigades. If the Syrians or the Egyptians were to try to stop us, we'd wipe them out. Ariel Sharon is leader. He never improvises: he always has a plan.

Biedermann: A plan to deport the Palestinians?

Van Creveld: I think it's quite possible that he wants to do that. He wants to escalate the conflict. He knows that nothing else we do will succeed.

Biedermann: Do you think that the world will allow that kind of ethnic cleansing?

Van Creveld: That depends on who does it and how quickly it happens. We possess several hundred atomic warheads and rockets and can launch them at targets in all directions, perhaps even at Rome. Most European capitals are targets for our air force.

Biedermann: Wouldn't Israel then become a rogue state?

Van Creveld: Let me quote General Moshe Dayan: "Israel must be like a mad dog, too dangerous to bother." I consider it all hopeless at this point. We shall have to try to prevent things from coming to that, if at all possible. Our armed forces, however, are not the thirtieth strongest in the world, but rather the second or third. We have the capability to take the world down with us. And I can assure you that that will happen, before Israel goes under.

Biedermann: This isn't your own position, is it?

Van Creveld: Of course not. You asked me what might happen and I've laid it out. The only question is whether it is already too late for the other solution, which I support, and whether Israeli public opinion can still be convinced. I think it's too late. With each passing day the expulsion of the Palestinians grows more probable. The alternative would be the total annihilation and disintegration of Israel. What do you expect from us?