{"id":109053,"date":"2014-03-05T18:55:30","date_gmt":"2014-03-05T18:55:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=109053"},"modified":"2014-03-05T18:55:30","modified_gmt":"2014-03-05T18:55:30","slug":"israel-faces-intl-sanctions-permanent-occupation-west-bank","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/latest-news\/israel-faces-intl-sanctions-permanent-occupation-west-bank\/","title":{"rendered":"Israel faces Int\u2019l Sanctions over \u201cPermanent Occupation of West Bank\u201d"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

Juan Cole\u00a0<\/strong>
\nRINF Alternative News<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu\u2019s visit to Washington, D.C., this week was even more of a disaster for him than might have been expected.<\/p>\n

It did not help that the Crimea crisis had broken out, which rather cast a bad light on one country militarily occupying parts of another. Most observers in Europe and even some in the US could see the hypocrisy of the US denouncing Russian troops in Crimea but supporting Israeli troops in Hebron.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu\u2019s government\u00a0has doubled housing starts for Israeli squatters on Palestinian land in the West Bank<\/a>\u00a0in the past year, while pretending to negotiate peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization (there is no such process with the Hamas government in Gaza).<\/p>\n

He came to Washington to blame the Palestinians for his bad faith, and to demand that they recognize Israel as a Jewish state (which is sort of like Obama demanding that Israel recognize the US as a White Christian state). Netanyahu said that this demand (the Jewishness of Israel) is similar to the Palestinian quest for a Palestinian state. But a Palestinian state is envisaged as being pluralistic\u2014 it would not be Islamic but for Muslims, Christians, Druze and (in the view of Saeb Erekat) even possibly any Jews willing to take Palestinian citizenship. The category \u201cPalestinian\u201d is not analogous to what Netanyahu means by \u201cJewish\u201d\u2014 it is far less narrow, less religiously and racially exclusive.<\/p>\n

This demand is just smokescreen for Netanyahu\u2019s obstruction of the peace process. He is demanding that Palestinians recognize the official marginalization of the growing Palestinian-Israeli population of Israel (now 20% of the population and heading toward 30% over the next 15 years) (if Israel is a \u201cJewish\u201d state, then Palestinian-Israelis are what, chopped liver? Will it be all right for Avigdor Lieberman to ethnically cleanse them then?)<\/p>\n

Obama, who has been ambushed repeatedly by Netanyahu during their joint press conferences, this time ambushed Netanyahu instead,\u00a0with an interview with the fanatically pro-Israel former Israeli prison guard at a notorious prison camp for Palestinians, Jeffrey Goldberg.\u00a0<\/a>Obama said,<\/p>\n

\u201cThere comes a point where you can\u2019t manage this anymore, and then you start having to make very difficult choices . . . Do you resign yourself to what amounts to a permanent occupation of the West Bank? Is that the character of Israel as a state for a long period of time? Do you perpetuate, over the course of a decade or two decades, more and more restrictive policies in terms of Palestinian movement? Do you place restrictions on Arab-Israelis in ways that run counter to Israel\u2019s traditions?\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Obama\u2019s phrase \u201cmanage this\u201d the referent is the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, which has been going on since 1967 and has now taken on an illegal character (you\u2019re not allowed in military occupation to flood your population into the occupied territory, nor to systematically confiscate property from the occupied population, nor to target civilians among them for punitive policies).<\/p>\n

By pretending to be involved in a \u2018peace process\u2019 since the early 1990s (a process Netanyahu opposed and which he boasted privately in Hebrew of having destroyed), the Israeli Right has maintained to the world that its policies in the West Bank are somehow temporary (a whole new generation of Palestinians was born and has lived under the boot since 1993).<\/p>\n

\"Map4_WB_Closures_2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Obama is trying to tell Netanyahu that we can see him, and he isn\u2019t invisible any more. He is telling him that the world is deciding that the Israelis intend to keep the Palestinians stateless and to constrain their lives with checkpoints and arbitrary arrest and property theft virtually forever. And this policy is no more acceptable than a revival of plantation slavery for African-Americans in the Old South would be. Stateless people like the Palestinians have many resemblances to slaves\u2014 both lack the right to have rights.<\/p>\n

The members of the European Union, and the Union itself, are trying as hard as they can to signal to Netanyahu that permanent Occupation is not an option and will attract sanctions. Over a third of Israeli trade is with Europe and it deeply depends on EU countries for technology transfers.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu and most Israelis on the Right just cannot see the future. They cannot see what they are doing to the Palestinians (Netanyahu thinks the latter would be satisfied with statelessness and indignity if only their economy improved). They cannot see how unacceptable is their economic siege of the Palestinians in Gaza, illegally targeting non-combatants, and warping children\u2019s lives. They think people who complain about these policies just don\u2019t like Jews, using their grievances about anti-Semitism in old Christian Europe to hide from themselves that they have themselves now become a colonial power, that they are dominant, and that pretending to be downtrodden victims of prejudice under these circumstances is absurd.<\/p>\n

The Zionist Right, living in its fantasy land,\u00a0responds to criticisms of Israeli policy with Nixon-style \u2018enemies lists\u2019 intended to promote aggressive harassment of critics on US campuses.<\/a>\u00a0I\u2019m proud to say that I am among those so targeted. These essentially fascist tactics have helped cow the mainstream US media into pussy-footing around subjects like Netanyahu and the Likud Party\u2019s Iron Wall policies.<\/p>\n

Obama\u2019s words were more candid than those of any sitting president since the 1970s. But even he did not advert to the Gaza siege (in which the US is complicit), and which has caused widespread anemia and some stunting among Palestinian children.<\/p>\n

Goldberg speculated that Obama was issuing a veiled threat when he warned that the US cannot protect Israel from growing sanctions if Netanyahu continues down his present path. I don\u2019t think so. Obama could just have Samantha Powers decline to veto UN Security Council sanctions on Israel any time he liked. He won\u2019t do it, because the Israel lobbies would cause trouble for him with Congress if he did.<\/p>\n

What Obama was more likely saying was that the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement to respond to Israeli colonialism against the Palestinians is unfolding in other venues where the US government doesn\u2019t have a veto. The US cannot force the European Union states to disregard EU law. It cannot forestall lawsuits by Palestinian concerns in Europe against European companies involved in helping occupy them. Moreover, now that Palestine is a non-member observer state at the UN (as a result of a UN general assembly vote that the US could not prevent), it could take Israel to the International Criminal Court over criminal Israel actions in the Occupied territories. Obama was simply observing that as the scales fall from the world\u2019s eyes, Israel will be subject to sanctions, and the US government cannot do anything about it.<\/p>\n

Netanyahu and his right wing political coalition are in denial. They are addicted to occupation. Obama tried to stage an intervention. But addicts are not easy to persuade.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

<\/div>\n
Via\u00a0Juan Cole<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Juan Cole\u00a0 RINF Alternative News Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu\u2019s visit to Washington, D.C., this week was even more of a disaster for him than might have been expected. It did not help that the Crimea crisis had broken out, which rather cast a bad light on one country militarily occupying parts of another. Most observers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":107461,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-109053","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-latest-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109053","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=109053"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/109053\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/107461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=109053"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=109053"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=109053"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}