After the recent Annapolis ‘peace’ conference between the Israelis and the Palestinians, a group in Israel showed citizens of the country what they really thought of the negotiations in the US:
Over 10,000 posters warning of a power outage were plastered over residential doors and public locations in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv and Haifa by Left-wing activists in protest of the Government’s decision to cut-back the power supply to the Gaza Strip. Dozens of activists participated in the overnight operation which was organised by ‘The Front for the Liberation of Gaza,’ a coalition of anarchist organisations who oppose the Government’s decision to cut power supplies to Gaza. According to the poster, the power outage is scheduled for next week. ‘The power outage is a step we must take since there are army headquarters in your city which are responsible for war crimes in the West Bank and Gaza,’ the poster read. ‘For humanitarian reasons, the cuts will not be absolute, and we will allow you to use some power for hospitals, the water and sewage systems or residential homes,’ the poster read. It is believed that the activists do not plan to perform any real power cut in Israel, but rather aim to raise public awareness of civilian life in Gaza.
It was a fitting response to the media’s embrace of renewed peace talks between Israel’s weakened Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Annapolis was yet another example of the impression of a ‘peace process’ while the dispossession of the Palestinian population, and the ever-growing occupation of West Bank territory, continues unabated.
Many Jews believe that mouthing empty platitudes against the settlements is enough, while remaining silent when colonisation continues apace. Just days after the end of the one-day photo opportunity, Israel announced it was building yet more illegal homes in East Jerusalem. Must we continue to suffer the Jewish State’s insistence that it’s serious about reaching an agreement with the Palestinians? One leading US neo-conservative simply preferred to call the Bush Administration’s Annapolis conference the epitome of appeasement. ‘Ms [Condoleezza] Rice’s conclave,’ wrote Frank Gaffney, a former Reagan-era official, ‘is shaping up to be a gang-rape of a nation on a scale not seen since Munich in 1938.’
Olmert made an intriguing statement recently that fooled some gullible observers into believing he accurately understood what was at stake. He warned that the ‘State of Israel is finished’ if a Palestinian State was not established and feared that the alternative was a South-Africa-style struggle. Many hardline Zionists were upset with his comments, chastising him for appropriating the kind of symbolism frequently used by critics of Israel. In fact, Olmert was simply trying to charm a world that now understands that present-day Palestine is already remarkably reminiscent of apartheid South Africa.
The law of the jungle operates in the occupied territories — Peace Now announced last week that only 3 per cent of demolition orders in the West Bank over the past 10 years have been carried out — with leading Zionist commentators in Israel continuing to refer to the land in the West Bank as Judea and Samaria, descriptions that include all of the land further colonised every day.
Despite the rhetoric wafting from the Zionist camp that most West Bank settlements would be abandoned in a peace deal, a recent poll found that the vast majority of these settlers would not leave voluntarily if offered cash incentives. After decades of supporting these fundamentalists, Israel has created for itself a situation — if they are ever forced to evacuate the settlements — that is likely to end in a civil war between secularists and religionists. Young settlers continue to flout the rarely enforced laws.
But perhaps the most interesting development of the Annapolis conference, little discussed in the mainstream, was the reaction of US Jewish groups to even the idea of negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians. Remarkably, a major donor of the country’s leading Zionist lobby, AIPAC, chastised the group for supporting a letter in the Congress that would have increased aid for the Palestinians. This is what being pro-Israel truly means for many in the Zionist community.
The leading US Jewish newspaper, Forward, targeted the Zionist groups for remaining silent during Annapolis. Although the publication, on the Zionist Left, seemed to believe that the conference was a positive step forward, its chastising was startling and significant:
When the story is told, though, no one will have more explaining to do than the organised American Jewish community. For 40 years, the major Jewish organisations have taken on as their most important task the defense of Israel in the American public square. They’ve placed a taboo on questioning Israel’s actions publicly, and those who do raise questions have been taken to task, publicly humiliated, hounded from jobs and community positions. Israel, we’ve been told over and over, has the right to decide its own security needs. Roadblocks throughout the West Bank? Not our business. Inadequate safeguards for enemy civilians? We can’t judge, but Israel knows what it’s doing.
The newspaper rightly challenged Zionist commitment to peace in the Middle East and wondered if they in fact preferred war and constant conflict with the Palestinians. With the power of the Zionist lobby now challenged in the wake of the recent best-selling book by two American academics, many in the Jewish community are starting to wonder whether Zionist spokespeople really care about Israel’s future or simply future fund-raising prospects.
Typically, the Australian Jewish News issued a predictably bland editorial after Annapolis,once again ignoring the elephant in the room, the ever-expanding occupation in the West Bank, while local Zionist mouthpiece AIJAC managed little better, arguing that Israel was truly sincere in its push for peace. Surely the mainstream media that continue to publish AIJAC’s facsimile of Israeli Government talking points should ask whether the organisation — proven disastrously wrong over the Iraq War and Iran’s non-existent nuclear weapons — truly understand anything about the Middle East.
The recent release of the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) that found Iran was not currently pursuing nuclear weapons has forced worldwide Zionist organisations on the back-foot to defend their policy of bomb first, ask question later. An Israeli poll taken in the days after the report suggested that a majority were opposed to unilateral military strikes against the Islamic Republic (though Israeli society itself is becoming more racist by the year, according to a new study, with only half the Jewish population believing that Jews and Arabs should have equal rights).
But the focus should remain on Zionist groups that have spent the last years issuing apocalyptic warnings against Tehran (when, in reality, their real concern is a regional threat to Israel’s nuclear hegemony). Once again, Forward articulates what few others have:
As sticky as Israel’s situation is right now, that of its American Jewish advocates is doubly so. Though they hate to hear it, the big Jewish agencies are in the hot seat. Their judgment is doubted, their loyalty under a microscope, their credibility paper-thin even within their own community. Now is not the time to go to war against the world’s opinions.