Category Archives: Israel-Palestinian conflict

Justice requires action to stop subjugation of Palestinians

Desmond Tutu writes: A quarter-century ago I barnstormed around the United States encouraging Americans, particularly students, to press for divestment from South Africa. Today, regrettably, the time has come for similar action to force an end to Israel’s long-standing occupation of Palestinian territory and refusal to extend equal rights to Palestinian citizens who suffer from some 35 discriminatory laws.

I have reached this conclusion slowly and painfully. I am aware that many of our Jewish brothers and sisters who were so instrumental in the fight against South African apartheid are not yet ready to reckon with the apartheid nature of Israel and its current government. And I am enormously concerned that raising this issue will cause heartache to some in the Jewish community with whom I have worked closely and successfully for decades. But I cannot ignore the Palestinian suffering I have witnessed, nor the voices of those courageous Jews troubled by Israel’s discriminatory course.

Within the past few days, some 1,200 American rabbis signed a letter — timed to coincide with resolutions considered by the United Methodist Church and the Presbyterian Church (USA) — urging Christians not “to selectively divest from certain companies whose products are used by Israel.” They argue that a “one-sided approach” on divestment resolutions, even the selective divestment from companies profiting from the occupation proposed by the Methodists and Presbyterians, “damages the relationship between Jews and Christians that has been nurtured for decades.”

While they are no doubt well-meaning, I believe that the rabbis and other opponents of divestment are sadly misguided. My voice will always be raised in support of Christian-Jewish ties and against the anti-Semitism that all sensible people fear and detest. But this cannot be an excuse for doing nothing and for standing aside as successive Israeli governments colonize the West Bank and advance racist laws. [Continue reading…]

Major U.K. supermarket chain boycotts exports from Israeli West Bank settlements

The Guardian reports: The Co-operative Group has become the first major European supermarket group to end trade with companies that export produce from illegal Israeli settlements.

The UK’s fifth biggest food retailer and its largest mutual business, the Co-op took the step as an extension of its existing policy which had been not to source produce from illegal settlements that have been built on Palestinian territories in the West bank.

Now the retail and insurance giant has taken it one step further by “no longer engaging with any supplier of produce known to be sourcing from the Israeli settlements”.

The decision will hit four companies and contracts worth some £350,000. But the Co-op stresses this is not an Israeli boycott and that its contracts will go to other companies inside Israel that can guarantee they don’t export from illegal settlements.

Welcoming the move, Palestinian human rights campaigners said it was the first time a supermarket anywhere in the west had taken such a position.

The Co-op’s decision will immediately affect four suppliers, Agrexco, Arava Export Growers, Adafresh and Mehadrin, Israel’s largest agricultural export company. Other companies may be affected by the policy.

Hilary Smith, Co-op member and Boycott Israel Network (BIN) agricultural trade campaign co-ordinator, said the Co-op “has taken the lead internationally in this historic decision to hold corporations to account for complicity in Israel’s violations of Palestinian human rights. We strongly urge other retailers to take similar action.”

With strong public support for Palestinians in the UK, this decision by the Co-op is not only good on principal but it may well also prove to be good for business. If in the coming months there is reasonable evidence that this was a smart commercial move, the larger supermarket chains may well follow suit.

Video: U.S. churches consider divesting from Israel

Why BDS doesn’t come with a map

Yousef Munayyer wites: In recent reactions to the BDS movement, writers like Peter Beinart, Daniel Levy and Thomas Friedman have offered criticism. This criticism, however, which views the question of Palestine through the prism of Zionism, is incapable of grappling with a movement that views the same question through a humanist perspective of rights.

In a lengthier article for the Atlantic, Daniel Levy expands on a point Beinart makes in his New York Times op-ed and one that is more or less reflected in Friedman’s column demanding boycott activists carry a map of a two-state solution with them at all times.

“I cannot support or accept the call of the BDS movement,” Levy writes, because “it has nothing to say about Jewish collective, communal or national Jewish interests. And, the refusal to proscribe a political result — to explain the end goal of BDS — is not a minor thing.”

Let’s unpack this. What is BDS? The BDS movement is a global movement called for by Palestinian civil society that aims to pressure Israel to meet three requirements: 1) self-determination for Palestinians in the occupied territories, 2) a Right of Return for Palestinian refugees and 3) full equality for Palestinian citizens of Israel.

BDS is not a political movement; it is, and I think by design, a rights-based movement. It does not aim to draw borders. This is not because of a philosophy about one state or two, but rather because a person’s location on one side of a border or the other has no bearing on their inalienable human rights.

The question of Palestine has always been one of rights — rights to vote, rights to return to and live on your land, rights to equality among others — and not simply one of identity. Palestinians are not in search of a national-state identity; we know who we are, and we are the people of Yaffa, Haifa, Nablus, Ramallah, Gaza, Jerusalem and the rest of Palestine.

Video: Has time run out for a two-state solution?

Avi Shlaim: Obama must stand up to Netanyahu

By Avi Shlaim, War in Context, March 5, 2012

It is clear what kind of Israeli prime minister President Obama will be receiving at the White House today. Benjamin Netanyahu is a bellicose, right-wing Israeli nationalist, a rejectionist on the subject of Palestinian national rights, and a reactionary who is deeply wedded to the status quo. Nationalism has an in-built tendency to go to extremes and Netanyahu’s brand is no exception. A nation has been defined as ‘a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours’. This definition fits the Likud leader on both counts: he has a selective and self-righteous view of his own country’s history and he is driven by distrust and disdain, if not outright hatred towards the Arabs in general and the Palestinians in particular. This hostility towards Arabs is the central thread that runs through his public utterances, books, and policies as prime minister.

Netanyahu does not believe in peaceful co-existence between equals. He views Israel’s relations with the Arab world as one of permanent conflict, as a never-ending struggle between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. In his 1993 book – A Place among the Nations: Israel and the World – the image he presents of the Arabs is consistently and comprehensively negative. Nor does he admit any possibility of diversity or change. The book does not contain a single positive reference to the Arabs, their history or their culture. Autocracy, violence, and terrorism are said to be the ubiquitous facts in the political life of all the Arab countries. A democratic shift on the Arab side is a precondition to genuine peace with Israel, wrote Netanyahu, in the confident expectation that such a shift is beyond the realm of possibility. The Arab Spring has proved him wrong.

The coalition government headed by Netanyahu is the most aggressively right-wing, diplomatically intransigent, and overtly racist government in Israel’s history. His Foreign minister is Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of the far-right party Yisrael Beiteinu, Israel is Our Home. Lieberman has set his face against any compromise with the Palestinians and he also favours subjecting Israel’s 1.5 million Palestinian citizens to an oath of loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state. Netanyahu’s Defence Minister is Ehud Barak who destroyed and then defected from the Labour Party to form a small break-away faction called Independence. A former chief-of-staff, Barak suffers from a déformation professionelle: he regards diplomacy as the extension of war by other means. Barak is a bitkhonist, a security-ist who wants 100 per cent security for Israel which means zero security for the Palestinians.

The ideological make-up of this coalition government militates against a land-for-peace deal with the Palestinians. It is a government of militant nationalists whose aim is to redraw unilaterally the borders of Greater Israel. The government is democratically elected but by putting nationalism above morality and international legality, and by relying on military power to subjugate another people, it is in danger of drifting towards fascism. And it is already drifting away from the common values that constitute the foundation of the special relationship between the United States and the State of Israel.

On 14 June 2009, Netanyahu gave a speech at Bar-Ilan University in which, under strong American pressure, he grudgingly endorsed a ‘Demilitarized Palestinian State’. This was hailed as a reversal of his government’s opposition to an independent Palestinian state. But the change was more apparent than real. Judged by his deeds rather than rhetoric, Netanyahu remained the relentless rejectionist that he had been throughout his singularly undistinguished political career. The litmus test of commitment to a two-state solution is a freeze of settlement expansion on the West Bank and in East Jerusalem, the capital of the future Palestinian state. Under Netanyahu’s leadership, however, settlement expansion has gone ahead at full tilt, especially in and around Jerusalem.

Jerusalem is the most sensitive issue in this tragic, hundred year-old conflict. By putting Jerusalem at the forefront of his expansionist agenda, Netanyahu knowingly and deliberately blocks progress on any of the other ‘permanent status issues’ such as borders and refugees. Netanyahu is not a peace-maker; he is a land-grabber who rides roughshod over Palestinian rights. It is he who has turned the so-called peace process into an exercise in futility. He is like a man who pretends to negotiate the division of a pizza while continuing to gobble it up.

Barrack Obama reiterates at regular intervals that the bond between America and Israel is ‘unbreakable’. If anyone can break this bond, it is Benjamin Netanyahu. Early on in his presidency, Obama identified a settlement freeze as the essential precondition for progress in the American-sponsored peace process. During his Cairo speech, on 4 June 2009, he made it clear that ‘The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements’. Obama had three confrontations with Netanyahu over the demand for a settlement freeze and he backed down each time. Moreover, Obama has all but turned over to Netanyahu the American veto on UN Security Council. Since 1978 America has used the veto forty-two times to defeat resolutions critical of Israel. The most egregious abuse of this power happened in February 2011 when a resolution condemning Israeli settlement expansion was supported by fourteen members and killed by America. That was a veto of America’s own foreign policy.

How can a jimcrack politician from a small country defy the most powerful man in the world and get away with it? At least part of the answer lies in the enduring power of the Israel lobby. Ever since 1967 the lobby has opposed every international plan for resolving the Palestinian-Israeli dispute that was not to Israel’s liking. But any proposal for a military strike against Israel’s enemies can count on the support of Israel’s friends in Washington, Iraq in 2003 and Iran today being the most obvious examples. In the case of Iran, Netanyahu is the war-monger in chief and he is doing his utmost to drag America into a dangerous confrontation that cannot possibly serve American interests. The region is like a tinder box and one spark could set off a major conflagration.

On 5 March, President Obama is due to receive the Israeli prime minister in the White House. At their first meeting, on 19 May 2009, Obama’s priority was Palestine whereas Netanyahu only wanted to talk about the Iranian threat. Subsequently, Netanyahu succeeded in imposing his agenda on his ally. Today the peace process is in tatters and the war hysteria against Iran is gathering force. The challenge for Obama is to reign in his reckless junior ally and to reorder American priorities in the Middle East. The main threat to regional stability is not Iran but the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. And the main source of hostility towards America throughout the Arab and Muslim lands is Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people and America’s complicity in this oppression. If Obama cannot stand up to Bibi Netanyahu in defence of vital American interests, who will he stand up to? His own credibility as the leader of the free world is on the line.

Avi Shlaim is an Emeritus Professor of International Relations at Oxford University and the author of Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (Verso).

An edited version of this op-ed appears in The Independent today. The complete version is published here with the author’s permission.

UK deputy PM: Israel is vandalizing the peace process

The Daily Telegraph reports: Nick Clegg tilted Britain’s Middle East policy sharply towards the Palestinians on Monday with an attack on Israel’s settlement policies in the West Bank.

The Deputy Prime Minister drew a hostile reaction from Israel by saying the government’s continued construction on internationally recognised Palestinian land was “an act of deliberate vandalism” that undermined the basis of the Middle East peace process.

In some of the most critical language ever used by a senior European politician in government, Mr Clegg accused Israel of making the likelihood of a negotiated settlement to the conflict impossible to deliver.

“It is an act of deliberate vandalism to the basic premise on which negotiations have taken place for years and years and years,” Mr Clegg said.

AFP reports: The number of Israeli settlers living in the West Bank at the end of 2011 rose by 4.3 percent compared with the previous year to 342,414, an Israeli lawmaker said in a statement on Sunday.

Citing official data obtained from the interior ministry, Yaakov Katz of the far-right National Union party said the number of settlers in the West Bank had increased despite a 2010 partial settlement freeze, which he claimed continued to slow Jewish construction in the West Bank in 2011.

Katz said there were now more than 700,000 Israelis living in areas occupied by Israel in 1967, including east Jerusalem and the Golan Heights.

He said some 300,000 Jews now live in east Jerusalem, along with another 20,000 in the Golan Heights, both beyond the so-called Green Line, the armistice line agreed after the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

The figures given by Katz for overall settlement population and the number of settlers in east Jerusalem far exceed those usually cited by watchdog groups.

Israeli anti-settlement group Peace Now put the number of settlers in east Jerusalem in 2010 at 200,000, with another 18,000 in the Golan Heights, and 311,000 in the West Bank.

Katz said another 60,000 Jewish Israelis were studying at institutions in West Bank settlements in 2011, meaning there are “currently 720,000 Jews residing beyond the Green Line.”

Holocaust scholar Yehuda Bauer talks to Al Jazeera

Middle East peace talks: U.S. takes a backseat

No alternative to a one-state solution

Avraham Burg, former Speaker of the Knessett, argues that it is time for what remains of an Israeli left to abandon the idea of a two-state solution.

Until now, we the seekers of peace, wandered through the world, spreading the hope that there would soon be solutions, while they were busy creating disheartening facts on the ground. With time, our rhetoric was victorious (Netanyahu said “two states” ), but it died. Their acts won the day and are already killing all of us.

So enough of the illusions. There are no longer two states between the Jordan River and the sea. Let the right-wing MKs, the Katzes and the Elkins, travel around the world and show the beauty of their faces without the deceptive layer of makeup we provided.

Meanwhile we must consider how we can enter into the new Israeli discourse. It has intriguing potential. The next diplomatic formula that will replace the “two states for two peoples” will be a civilian formula. All the people between the Jordan and the sea have the same right to equality, justice and freedom. In other words, there is a very reasonable chance that there will be only one state between the Jordan and the sea – neither ours nor theirs but a mutual one. It is likely to be a country with nationalist, racist and religious discrimination and one that is patently not democratic, like the one that exists today. But it could be something entirely different. An entity with a common basis for at least three players: an ideological right that is prepared to examine its feasibility; a left, part of which is starting to free itself of the illusions of “Jewish and democratic”; and a not inconsiderable part of the Palestinian intelligentsia.

The conceptual framework will be agreed upon – a democratic state that belongs to all of its citizens. The practicable substance could be fertile ground for arguments and creativity. This is an opportunity worth taking, despite our grand experience of missing every opportunity and accusing everyone else except ourselves.

Israel: Publishing in a country that has outlawed free speech

In its relentless slide towards outright fascism, Israel has imposed an effective prohibition on political debate around the issue of boycott, divestment and sanctions (BDS). At +972, Dimi Reider describes the effect of the new law by answering the question, What is +972‘s stance on BDS?

The simple answer is that we don’t have one. The website is a collective of authors, each of whom have their own opinions about BDS. Some oppose it, some support it; some, like yours truly, support the D but are not particularly fond of the BS. But unfortunately, our ability to freely discuss this key aspect of the fight against the occupation has been severely and deliberately crippled by recent legislation. We may still carry opinions on BDS; but outright calls for boycott, divestment and sanctions hold far too great a risk for our site – a risk we are not in the financial position to take. Since we are legally responsible for all content appearing on the website, this obligates us to erase outright calls, and only outright calls for BDS from the comment thread as well.

Here is how it works: In May 2011, the Knesset passed the notorious “Boycott Law”. The Boycott Law does not make it a criminal offence or even misdemeanour to call for boycott. Neither any of us, nor any of readers will go to jail for making such a call. But the law does allow anyone who feels they have been materially impaired by that hypothetical call to sue us for damages – without actually proving any damages were suffered. In other words, if a reader was to publish a comment explicitly calling for BDS, tomorrow the website could be slammed with a massive lawsuit by some other reader or a right-wing “lawfare” organisaton. Even if we won the case in the long run, the legal fees would have sunk us very quickly – our budget is minimal, not to say minute, and we have no assets we can liquify and throw into the fight.

Gingrich favors rapid expansion of Israeli settlements in the West Bank — calls Palestinians ‘terrorists’

Having stirred outrage by calling Palestinians an “invented people,” in last night’s GOP presidential debate New Gingrich went even further by saying, “these people are terrorists.”

I guess if he becomes president, at least the United States will have to abandon the pretense that it has any role as a mediator between Israelis and Palestinians.

In a conference call organized by the National Council of Young Israel and broadcast on The Yeshiva World News on Friday, Gingrich took a question from Mort Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America.

Klein is more forthright than some of Gingrich’s other Zionist friends might be — he unequivocally opposes a two-state solution.

Last year he said: “As much as we all want Israel to have peace with the Arabs, Israel can and will survive and thrive without it — as they have since 1948.”

Israel doesn’t need peace — this is the conviction that explains the Israeli intransigence that long ago turned the so-called peace process into a charade.

What those who don’t believe in peace do believe in, is the need for the United States to ensure that Israel maintains its “qualitative military edge” — a commitment that the Obama administration has supported even more strongly than its predecessors.

A nuclear-armed Iran would undermine Israel’s military hegemony in the Middle East and so many of Israel’s supporters are willing to back another war — usually on the pretext that it would prevent a second holocaust — rather than tolerate a significant shift in the regional balance of power.

In spite of the hysterical campaign propaganda that some American politicians are now using, “[f]ew in Netanyahu’s inner circle believe that Iran has any short-term plans to drop a nuclear weapon on Tel Aviv, should it find a means to deliver it,” according to Netanyahu confidant, Jeffery Goldberg.

Klein’s question for Gingrich was on the expansion of settlements, but the strategic perspective they share is that Israel can continue to exist and prosper in a permanent state of war. From that perspective, the two most important features of the relationship between Israel and the United States are that the U.S. continues to maintain a steady flow of military aid and it remains willing to engage in wars that Israel cannot fight alone. It comes down to blood and money.

Note too that a necessary condition that helps ensure that Americans will acquiesce in fulfilling this need is that we must also share the Zionist faith in the sustainability of permanent war.

The unshakable bond that unites Israel and the United States — a bond that in American politics has become an object of cultish devotion — is an absolute faith in war. Perhaps the only thing that will be able to shake that faith will be economic ruin.

Klein: What is your position about the right of Jews to live in Judea and Samaria [the West Bank] and the right of Jews to live in communities there at this present time?

Gingrich: Well, it depends on where exactly you define the boundaries. I do not oppose any development in the [Israeli occupied] areas, because I think that’s part of the negotiating process. To the degree that the Palestinians want to stop the developments they need to reach a deal in which they recognize the right of Israel to exist… As long as they are waging war on Israel, they are in no position to complain about developments. I think the whole peace process has been absurd and has created a psychologically almost impossible position for the average person because once you say there’s a peace process you wonder why the Israelis aren’t being more forthcoming. But if you say, look, we’re still in the middle of a war. They’re still trying to destroy the country — they’re still firing rockets, they still have terrorists coming in — then you all of a sudden understand what the real situation on the ground is, and in that setting, why would the Israelis slow down in maximizing their net bargaining advantage?

In other words, settlement expansion is a bargaining tool and thus the more Israelis there are living in the West Bank, the better Israel’s negotiating position.

As a Palestinian negotiator once said, this is like trying to divide a pizza with someone who is intent on eating the whole pie before it gets divided.

The Washington Post reports on responses to Gingrich’s claim that the Palestinians are an “invented people”:

Michigan Sen. Carl Levin sharply criticized Gingrich’s comments as cynical attempts to curry support with Jewish voters and unhelpful to the peace process.

“The vast majority of American Jews (including this one) and the Israeli Government itself are committed to a two-state solution in which Israelis and Palestinians live side-by-side as neighbors and in peace,” Levin said in a statement. “Gingrich offered no solutions — just a can of gasoline and a match.”

Reuters reports:

[Hanan] Ashrawi, a member of the Palestine Liberation Organisation Executive Committee, said Gingrich’s remarks harked back to days when the Palestinians’ existence as a people was denied by Israelis such as Golda Meir, prime minister from 1969 to 1974.

“It is certainly regressive,” she said. “This is certainly an invitation to further conflict rather than any contribution to peace.”

“This proves that in the hysterical atmosphere of American elections, people lose all touch with reality and make not just irresponsible and dangerous statements, but also very racist comments that betray not just their own ignorance but an unforgivable bias,” she said.

Fawzi Barhoum, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, said the Gingrich remarks “were grave comments that represented an incitement for ethnic cleansing against the Palestinians.”

Half of Israeli Jews say peace with Palestinians will never happen

Here are some of the findings from the Brookings Saban Center 2011 Public Opinion Poll of Jewish and Arab Citizens of Israel:

49% of Israeli Jews say that peace with the Palestinians will never happen, while 42% say it will happen but will take more than five years.
43% support a comprehensive peace based on the 1967 borders, while 31% oppose withdrawing from territories occupied in 1967 even if all Arab states accept and recognize Israel. 24% choose nether option.
A robust majority of Israeli Jews, 71% support a formulation of Israel that accommodates its non-Jewish citizens by defining the state as “the homeland of the Jewish people and of all its citizens.”
Two thirds of Israeli Jews say that Israel should do more to promote a comprehensive peace based on the 1967 borders with agreed modifications and a peaceful Palestinian state.
52% of Jewish Israelis believe that Arab citizens of Israel have legal equality but institutional and societal discrimination, while 33% say there is full equality between Arab and Jewish citizens.
57% of Arab/Palestinian Israelis describe their current status in Israel as one of legal equality but of institutional and societal discrimination, 36% describe it as akin to apartheid, and 3% say there is full equality.

Iran

90% of Israelis believe that Iran will eventually develop nuclear weapons.
Israeli Jews are equally divided on attacking Iranian nuclear facilities, with 43% supporting and 41% opposing an attack. However, 68% of Arab citizens of Israel, who constitute nearly 20% of the population, oppose such an attack, while only 4% support it (see below). Overall, more Israelis oppose than support an attack.
Given a choice of two options, one where both Israel and Iran have nuclear weapons and one where neither has them, 65% of Israeli Jews support the latter while only 19% support the former.

To Mideast peacemakers: You are all George Costanza!

Larry Derfner writes: Jason Alexander (“George Costanza” in Seinfeld) is a good liberal, he cares about Israel and wants to see peace, he wants to see Palestinians have their freedom and Israelis their security. He and an American group called “One Voice” were just in Israel and the West Bank again, talking to Shimon Peres and Salam Fayyad, to Israeli and Palestinian notables of all sorts. On Thursday Alexander wrote an op-ed in Yediot Aharonot titled, “Yes, you can,” which was almost mathematically even-handed. He mentioned the 8,000 rockets that battered Sderot, he mentioned the wall and the settlements that strangle Kalkilya. “Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] can guarantee the support of the Palestinians in the West Bank for an agreement with Israel and force Hamas to respect it. And I believe Netanyahu can guarantee the support of the Israelis.” The problem is “violence on the part of the extremists,” and the solution is negotiations and compromise.

Alexander writes that he’s been talking peace with Israelis and Palestinians for 20 years, which means he probably has a good deal of knowledge about the conflict, and also some perspective. So I’m convinced that privately, he’s not even-handed; privately he knows that Netanyahu and the Israeli government are the rejectionists in this deal, while Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are the conciliatory ones. He can compare Netanyahu and Lieberman to Rabin and Peres, just like he can compare Abbas to Arafat, which must lead him to the conclusion that Israel has been moving away from peace while the Palestinians have been moving toward it. He knows what Palestinian violence was like in the past and what it’s like now. He knows the settler movement at least used to have a fight on its hands, and that it doesn’t anymore. There’s no way an intelligent, knowledgeable, liberal person, which I assume Alexander to be, can really believe that Israel’s leadership and the West Bank’s leadership are equally to blame for this long coma in the peace process.

So why does Alexander write this “yes, you can” crap? Either he’s lying to himself, or he’s afraid – afraid to blame Israel and not the Palestinians, afraid to be called a self-hating Jew, an Arab-lover, afraid of being written off as biased against Israel. So he plays patty-cake – he doesn’t play the “blame game,” he’s “constructive,” he doesn’t take sides, he deals out the same advice to Israelis and Palestinians, and thinks he goes home a peacemaker.

But I imagine Abbas reading his op-ed and saying, “Thanks for nothing, shmuck,” and I imagine Netanyahu reading it and saying, “That’s my boy, George.”

Groundhog Day in Palestine/Israel

Michael Hudson writes: For an unforgettable “Groundhog Day” experience, there is nothing better than a trip to Palestine and Israel. We’ve experienced multiple revolutions over the past six decades in information technologies, social mores and political upheavals.

The Soviet empire collapsed, democracy advanced around the globe, Asia began to rise and the West began to decline. It is all quite disorienting. But one thing remains constant: The Arab-Israeli conflict. It just grinds on and on.

For those of us who have been studying it professionally, there is something oddly reassuring about that. For most others not directly involved, it has just become boring. Too bad, because, like a smoldering peat fire, the Palestine problem helps keep the entire Middle East on the boil.

Here are some verbal snapshots from a recent visit to Palestine and Israel.

Getting out of Fortress Israel into the promised land of Palestine is not nearly as difficult as getting back in. Ramallah has become a boom town, far different from the sleepy metropolis it used to be.

“There’s lots of money here,” my taxi driver observed, “but not so much anywhere else in the West Bank.” A lot of that money comes from Western donors to support that sickly enterprise known as the Palestinian Authority. Other money is coming in from the Gulf. Land prices are out of sight.

The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, darling of Washington and the World Bank, is building small city that would aspire to be Dubai or Singapore. But Ramallah, like the other main towns of the West Bank, is hemmed in by Israeli checkpoints. And for a Palestinian to get from Ramallah to Bethlehem requires a two-hour (or more, depending on delays at checkpoints) journey down into the Jordan valley and back up again, which could be done via Jerusalem in a half-hour were there no Israeli obstacles.

Arab Jerusalem (the east side including the Old City) is languishing economically and socially because it is now effectively cut off from its natural hinterland – Bethlehem and Hebron to the south, Ramallah, Nablus and Jenin to the north.

If you want to contemplate the possibilities of the two-state solution, there is no better place to do so than on a drive between Ramallah and Nablus. Where is this other state going to be, anyway? I got a ride with a friend who has been making the trip regularly for some years. She said the pace of settlement construction has dramatically increased under Netanyahu’s regime.

At every crossroads there are signs and roads to new Israeli settlements, and on virtually every hilltop there is a new “outpost”. Settlers continue to seize the agricultural lands belonging to Palestinian villages. By any conception of a genuine state, with territorial contiguity, these settlements would have to go. But is there any Israeli government, hawkish or dovish, that could make that happen?

Fact checkin’ Israeli apartheid

OWS, welcome to the War on Terror

Ayesha Kazmi writes: Supporters of Occupy who are pushing the Palestine issue are not doing so because they want to highjack the Occupy agenda. Rather, it is because those who are pushing Palestine are doing so because they’re connecting the issues.

Palestine should not be the focal point of Occupy. However, when you talk about the crimes of the American 1%, then talk about all of their crimes. It is correct to point out that Palestine is not the soul external issue to Occupy – but it is the most glaring.

If Occupy wants to talk about the bad behaviours of billionaire Americans, one need not look much further than Sheldon Adelson from Boston, Massachusetts. Currently, Adelson is 8th wealthiest American and 16th wealthiest person in the world and has a reported net worth of approximately $21.5 billion through various casino enterprises and is perhaps best known for his less than palatable business practices and various controversies.

Never heard of him? Try dropping his name in Israel and one might have better luck. Adelson is one of Birthright Israel’s largest donors contributing $25 million annually. Adelson is also one of the major figures responsible for the attack on the Islamic Society of Boston Cultural Centre attempting, unsuccessfully, to shut down the building of the mosque.

This connection is just the tip of the iceberg.

It is worth knowing that the heavy “less-lethal” artillery raining down on Occupy protesters in parts of the United States carry the very same labels as the ones that rain down on Palestinians in the West Bank. The corporations who are selling these “less-lethal” products are certainly making a “killing” in profits these days.

The 1% have haven’t merely secured their wealth domestically over the past 10 years, there has been an entire global campaign functioning simultaneously. Simply put, our fiscal insecurities have resulted from the deaths of people all over the globe.