Re: "Most educated Israelis are made uncomfortable by the idea that Israel is simply a Jewish state; it sounds a little too like an Afrikaner state or a Catholic state. So the "democratic" is added as a kind of public denial that Israel is an ethnic or religious state. The Jewish and democratic idea is crucially important to Israel and Israelis; it is, for example, the central tenet of the 1992 Basic Law on Freedom and Human Dignity, the nearest thing Israel has to a Bill of Rights. This document defines Israel as a Jewish and democratic state and, in contradiction, also excludes equality as one of its principles That's because most Israelis believe that equality applies only to Jews inside Israel, not to the one in five Israeli citizens who are not Jewish but Palestinian." --


metafrc@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Gimme a break.
Biggest RACISTS on the planet.
============================================

Hurtling Towards the Next Intifada

An Interview with Jonathan Cook

by Andrea Bistrich

www.dissidentvoice.org

August 31, 2006





This is an edited version of an interview published in German in the
newspaper Die Junge Welt on July 1, 2006 between Andrea Bistrich and
the British journalist Jonathan Cook, based in Nazareth, Israel, about
his new book Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish State
(Pluto Press, 2006) about Israel's plans for the further
dispossession of the Palestinians. The interview was conducted before
Israel's attack on Lebanon.


Andrea Bistrich: Your book has been released in Britain and is about to
come out in the US. Already it is widely praised by various experts and
academics related to the Middle East. Why does the "Jewish and
democratic State" need to be unmasked?

Jonathan Cook: I chose the word "unmask" because it was the term
Ehud Barak used about Yasser Arafat after the failure of the Camp David
negotiations in June 2000: he said he had unmasked the Palestinian
leader as no partner for peace. But in fact the reverse happened: the
Camp David failure and Israel's subsequent actions during the second
intifada unmasked those like Barak who claimed that Israel was a
partner for peace.

The nature of the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is
irreconcilable as long as Israel sees itself as a "Jewish and
democratic" state. This is the premise of my book. The Jewish and
democratic myth keeps Israelis both from examining the essentially
undemocratic nature of their state -- what social scientists often term
an ethnic state or an ethnocracy -- and from finding a peaceful
solution to their conflict with the Palestinians.

AB: Can you explain the problems of a "Jewish and democratic state"
in more detail?

JC: Most educated Israelis are made uncomfortable by the idea that
Israel is simply a Jewish state; it sounds a little too like an
Afrikaner state or a Catholic state. So the "democratic" is added
as a kind of public denial that Israel is an ethnic or religious state.
The Jewish and democratic idea is crucially important to Israel and
Israelis; it is, for example, the central tenet of the 1992 Basic Law
on Freedom and Human Dignity, the nearest thing Israel has to a Bill of
Rights. This document defines Israel as a Jewish and democratic state
and, in contradiction, also excludes equality as one of its principles.
That's because most Israelis believe that equality applies only to
Jews inside Israel, not to the one in five Israeli citizens who are not
Jewish but Palestinian.


These one million or so Palestinians are the remnants of the
Palestinian majority that once inhabited Palestine. They have been
given citizenship but are treated as a sort of abscess -- or cancer, as
they are often referred to -- in the Israeli body politic. Israel has
not tried to integrate or assimilate them. Why? Because, as non-Jews,
they threaten the Jewishness of the state. So they have to be kept
apart, separate, as pseudo-citizens. Although usually ignored in
discussions about the regional conflict, Israel's relationship to its
Palestinian "citizens" is, I think, revealing about what Israel
wants to be and how it sees itself. For Israelis, "Jewish and
democratic" means democratic for Jews only. The opposite of a Jewish
and democratic state would be a "state of all its citizens" (what
we think of as a liberal democracy), which has been the main campaign
platform of Israel's Arab political parties since the Oslo agreements
were signed in the 1990s. These Arab parties want every Israeli to be
treated as an equal citizen irrespective of ethnicity. Such a platform
is technically illegal in Israel, and parties and candidates can be
banned for promoting it.

In other words, the overriding concern in Israel has nothing to do with
being democratic and everything to do with being Jewish -- at all
costs. This is backed by polls of Israeli Jews which show an
overwhelming majority reject the idea of Israel being a liberal
democratic state.

All of this is the context for my main argument, which is that the
recent developments in the conflict have been almost entirely driven on
the Israeli side by concerns about demography, about Palestinians
becoming a majority in the region and Israel being compared to an
apartheid state like the old South Africa. The question facing Israel
has been how to ensure the Jewish state remains entirely in the hands
of Jews, and how to distort the reality entailed by this so that Israel
can continue to claim it is both Jewish and democratic.

The disengagement from Gaza last year and now the convergence plan for
the West Bank are about two things: protecting Israel as a "Jewish
and democratic" state in the sense that Palestinians, citizens and
non-citizens alike, will be excluded from any say in its future; and
emasculating the region's Palestinians by locking them up in a series
of ghettoes so that they pose no threat to the Jewish state because
they are powerless to assert their rights as a single national people
and their historical rights to most of their own land. Israel is
hellbent on achieving these two goals because in fact they are
inseparable: the more space in what was once known as Palestine Israel
takes for itself, the weaker the Palestinians will become. In that way,
Israel thinks -- wrongly, I believe -- its future as a Jewish state is
more secure.

AB: What are your major conclusions?

JC: I explain how Israel presented a distorted image of Palestinian
behavior during the intifada, and then used that image to justify
certain policies, in particular the Gaza disengagement and the building
of the West Bank wall. I place -- and to the best of my knowledge no
one has done this before -- Israel's Palestinian citizens at the
center stage of the conflict in terms of understanding what has been
going on during the last six years of the intifada.

When Israel went to Camp David to offer the Palestinians some sort of
state, we know from Barak's advisers that it did not meet the minimal
expectations of the Palestinians: it was a very shrunken state, and it
did not include East Jerusalem, which any Palestinian state needs as
its capital. The breakdown of the talks led directly to the Palestinian
intifada, the outpouring of anger from ordinary Palestinians. Israeli
military intelligence knew a lot about the intifada's causes: that it
was because of Palestinian frustration at being denied a proper state;
it was a popular, grass-roots rebellion; and that Yasser Arafat was
largely caught unawares by its ferocity. We also know now, because of
leaks from the generals in charge of Israel's military intelligence,
that this information was misrepresented to and entirely ignored by the
political leadership in Israel.

The politicians, notably Barak and Ariel Sharon, argued instead that
the intifada was long planned by Arafat and that it was last-ditch
attempt by him to defeat the Jewish state. At the Camp David talks,
they claimed, Arafat insisted on a right of return to Israel for the
millions of Palestinians living in refugee camps outside Israel and
occupied territories so that Israel's Jewish majority would be
decimated. When his demands were rejected, he chose another weapon: an
armed uprising, the intifada.

Both, Barak and Sharon believed Arafat had a second weapon: a Trojan
horse inside Israel that he hoped to use to subvert the Jewish state
from within. The Trojan horse was, of course, the one in five Israeli
citizens who are Palestinian. Arafat, they said, was secretly
conspiring with the Palestinian minority inside Israel to destroy
Israel as a Jewish state.

Israel's leaders also believed, or at least claimed to believe, that
the country's Palestinian citizens had a twin-track for defeating
Israel. First, they could step up their political campaigns for a state
of all its citizens to end the Jewish dominance of the state; in
Israeli eyes that was simply a prelude to engineering a right of return
for the Palestinian refugees. And if they failed in this strategy, they
could try to erode the Jewish majority by marrying Palestinians in the
West Bank and Gaza and thereby winning them citizenship.

As a result we have seen in the last few years two major policy changes
to negate both of these supposed threats:

First, the establishment of the final borders of an expanded Jewish
state through the Gaza disengagement and the building of the West Bank
wall, designed to exclude Palestinian claims inside an enlarged Israel.
If these borders are completed, Israel will be able to dismiss
Palestinian political demands inside Israel, even from its own
citizens, by arguing that Palestinians have their own (ghetto) state
next door in which they can exercise sovereignty.

Second, the banning of marriages between Palestinians from the occupied
territories and Israelis, meaning in practice Palestinians with Israeli
citizenship, to prevent a "right of return through the back door",
as Israelis like to call it.

These policies are meant to remove once and for all any demographic
threat the Jewish state faces from the Palestinians.

AB: You use the term "glass wall" in the book. Can you explain what
you mean by this?

JC: I contrast the idea of the "glass wall" with the famous
revisionist Zionist philosophy of the "iron wall". The Revisionists
argued that the Palestinians would never agree to their dispossession
so the Jewish state's leaders must force them to submit with an iron
wall of force -- a sort of "might makes right" philosophy. I argue
that in practice Israel developed a different strategy for dealing with
the Palestinians: what I call the glass wall. Israel separated the two
ethnic populations, Jews and Palestinians, both inside Israel and in
the occupied territories, and for most of its history managed to make
this division invisible to the world. The separation walls existed but
you couldn't see them. This is what I call the glass wall. In the
occupied territories, for example, Jewish settlers lived next to
Palestinian communities in a way that made it possible to believe they
were simply neighbors. But of course in practice the settlers had full
rights under Israeli civil law, both in the occupied territories and
inside Israel while the Palestinians were governed by a much less
benign military law. Movement was unrestricted for Jews but not for
Palestinians. Water resources were provided to the settlers but were
severely rationed to the Palestinians. In this way Israel maintained
the pretence of a benevolent occupation for a couple of decades. Much
the same has happened inside Israel for the country's Palestinian
citizens.

That all began to crumble in the occupied territories in the late 1980s
when the Palestinians refused to have their lives and the
occupation's image managed by Israel. The first intifada forced
Israel to convert the glass walls into concrete and steel walls: first
the Gaza strip was sealed off from Israel and now the same is happening
to the West Bank. That has been very damaging to Israel's image as a
Jewish and democratic state, and the political leadership is now
desperately trying to recover the high ground. The completion of the
West Bank wall, I think, is the key to succeeding. If Israel can create
the appearance of a Palestinian state without the reality of one, then
it is simply erecting again the glass wall as cover for the real
concrete and steel walls around the West Bank and Gaza. It is making a
series of prisons look like a state. That is the real point of
Olmert's convergence plan.

AB: What exactly is behind Olmert's "disengagement" or
"convergence" plan?

[Author's note: Since Israel's failure to defeat Hizbullah in south
Lebanon, Olmert has been forced officially to shelve his convergence
plan. However, the author believes this is merely a postponement of the
completion of the physical separation program begun with the signing of
the Oslo accords. None of the demographic pressures on Israel have
abated. With his reputation battered, Olmert does not currently have
the political support to dismantle even the small number of Jewish
settlements on the wrong of the wall required by the convergence plan.
But pressure will mount for the wall to be completed at some stage in
the future, whether it is because Palestinians begin demanding
political rights inside Israel or because they relaunch their suicide
attacks. Either way, given its view of the conflict and its refusal to
stop being a Jewish state, Israel has no choice but to pursue
separation.]

JC: Let's be clear: Olmert's plan isn't about a disengagement.
The word in Hebrew is hitkansut. The English equivalent is something
like "convergence," "consolidation," "ingathering." There
are important differences from the Gaza disengagement last year, which
is why Olmert has used a different term. This plan is really about
consolidating Israel's Jewish population wherever it has managed to
entrench itself over the four decades of the occupation, including the
majority of some 430,000 settlers who live on Palestinian land in the
West Bank and in East Jerusalem, both of which were occupied by Israel
in 1967. Only a tiny number (maybe 60,000 settlers, maybe far less)
will have to move from their homes, usually those in isolated, remote
settlements. They will be mainly relocated to the large settlement
blocs, the long fingers of which probe deep into the West Bank severing
it into a series of cantons or ghettoes, each physically disconnected
from the next.

Also, there is much talk of "consolidating" the Jordan Valley, the
long flank of the West Bank that is the border with Jordan. Even though
it's sparsely populated with Jews, this huge stretch of land was
annexed de facto by Israel many years ago: the main road connecting the
Galilee in northern Israel to Jerusalem, and open only to Israelis,
runs much of the length of the Valley; Palestinians who don't live in
the Jordan Valley need special, almost-impossible-to-obtain permits to
enter the area, even if they have family living there. So the Jordan
Valley is a sort of closed military zone as far as Palestinians are
concerned. If Israel keeps the Jordan Valley under its convergence
plan, which seems almost certain, then we are talking about some 40 per
cent or so in total of the West Bank being out of bounds to most
Palestinians. (And remember even if the Palestinians got all of the
West Bank and Gaza, they would have only 22 per cent of their historic
homeland.) So let's first dispel the myth that Israel is suggesting
that it will disengage from the West Bank.

The point of the convergence is for Israel to add a veneer of
legitimacy to the annexation of the main Jewish colonies in the West
Bank, and to imprison the Palestinians in the space left behind, in the
hope that eventually they will grow so desperate they will leave. It is
about the theft of some Palestinian land now, and all the Palestinian
land later.

AB: So you don't think the occupation is about to end?

JC: Israel and the international community may claim that the
occupation is coming to an end, but let's look at the facts. If
Israel controls the eastern flank of the West Bank, the long border
with Jordan, and has a series of long territorial fingers of settlement
blocs behind a fence-cum-wall dissecting the West Bank in at least
three strategic points on its western flank, how exactly has the
occupation ended? Who will control the borders and movement between the
West Bank and Gaza and between the West Bank cantons? Israel, which
will doubtless continue the checkpoints and pass systems it evolved in
the 1990s. Who will control the scarce water resources? Israel, because
its settlements blocs have been positioned to sit over the main
aquifers. Who will deliver services, such as electricity and water?
Israel, which can use the supplying and withholding of these services
as forms of collective punishment. Who will control the airspace,
including flights in and out of the West Bank? Israel again. And the
radio frequencies. And of course there is no possibility that the
Palestinians will be allowed their own army. So what we are talking
about here is a reinvention of the occupation. It's a bit like a
prison that through technological advances dispenses with the need for
guards. Cameras control the doors of the cells, and machines deliver
the food. Would we say that such an institution is no longer a prison?
Well, the same goes for the occupation, I think.

AB: Israeli peace activists such as Jeff Halper from the Israeli
Committee Against House Demolitions are quite clear that "the
two-state solution is now dead." Would you call this estimation too
pessimistic?

JC: Not at all, they are right. It died years ago, only the
international community didn't notice or was too afraid to point it
out. I think there are clear reasons why Israel fears a two-state
solution. Remember Barak and Sharon were both profoundly opposed to the
Oslo agreements because they saw them as creating a proto-Palestinian
state in the West Bank and Gaza under the government of Yasser Arafat
and the Palestinian Authority. They feared that with a fledgling
Palestinian state emerging on Israel's doorstep, the Palestinian
leadership could assert its rights not only inside the Palestinian
state but also inside Israel, through the subversive activities of
Israel's Palestinian citizens.

Of course, I think they were entirely wrong in that reading of
Palestinian intentions. The reason Israel's Palestinian citizens were
demanding "a state of all its citizens" was that they wanted civic
equality, they wanted an end to discrimination.

AB: There have been numerous proposals and agreements attempting to
address this conflict -- Geneva conferences, the Mitchell Plan, Camp
David Accords, Oslo Accords, Camp David Summit -- but they all have
failed. What are the reasons for these constant failures?

JC: The reason for the continuing failures is the false assumption that
Israel is acting in good faith in the peace negotiations. But as I've
pointed out, it isn't. It doesn't want a real Palestinian state and
any agreement that sets that as a precondition will either be rejected
by Israel or manipulated, as the Road Map has been, so that in practice
the deal is worthless.

AB: What role and responsibility do you see for the international
community and the UN to end this conflict and to deal with Western
hypocrisy?

JC: Absolute responsibility. Israel has no will to end this conflict
and the Palestinians have no power to end it. So a solution must be
imposed from outside. The problem is that the US, the world's sole
superpower, is in charge of determining the outcome of the conflict,
not the UN or the Quartet, as the Israelis understand only too well.
Washington portrays itself as an honest broker when in truth it is
exactly the opposite. It is fully committed to supporting Israel, wrong
or right. So for the time being any international solution appears to
mean an Israeli solution. That is why unilateralism is now the name of
the game.

One can ponder the reasons for Washington's blind loyalty to Israel.
It may be that the Israel lobby is phenomenally powerful and wealthy,
and American politicians are afraid of it; or it may be that Israel is
a very useful ally in the region to the US. That is another debate. But
the upshot is that Washington has so far refused to put any real
pressure on Israel to reach a fair accommodation with the Palestinians.

AB: Ultimately, you conclude, there will be a third, "far deadlier
intifada." Could you specify the reasons that led you to this
prognosis?

JC: Vladimir Jabotinsky, the early leader of revisionist Zionism,
coined the phrase the "iron wall", meaning the use of unremitting
force against a Palestinian population that he believed would never
submit to their national dispossession and enslavement. Well he was
right about the Palestinians refusing to submit willingly, I think, but
a little optimistic that simple force would be enough to subdue them
for good. You can't steal from a people, then lock them up in prisons
if they demand their possessions back, and expect them to keep quiet
for ever. Israel can seal the Palestinians into a series of ghettos but
that will not contain them indefinitely. Sooner or later they will find
a way to fight back, even from behind their walls. My guess is that the
next intifada will be called the Qassam intifada after the homemade
rockets Palestinians fire out the Gaza Strip to try to hit Israeli
communities. We are going to see more of that kind of resistance.

Also, my view is that in the longer term the convergence plan will
envision sealing Israel's Palestinian citizens into their own
ghettoes, some severed from the new borders of the Jewish state and
others corralled into areas where they will become effectively guest
workers. So Israel is creating common cause among the region's
Palestinians, whether those in the occupied territories or those
currently inside Israel. That raises the stakes on both sides
considerably.

AB: What are the prerequisites for both sides in this conflict in order
to achieve a genuine and durable peace?

JC: To be honest, nothing less than the eradication of Zionism as
Israel's national ideology. In the current circumstances, you can no
more have a Zionist state committed to peace-making with the
Palestinians than you could an apartheid South Africa ready to make
peace with its native black population. Maybe Zionism at an earlier
stage in its development was capable of it, but the Jewish state we
have today is incapable of making a deal with the Palestinians unless
it renounces Zionism or is forced to do so.

Andrea Bistrich is a writer based in Germany.

Jonathan Cook, a British journalist living in Nazareth, is the author
of Blood and Religion: The Unmasking of the Jewish and Democratic State
(Pluto Press, 2006). Visit his website at: www.jkcook.net.
Other Articles by Jonathan Cook
* After Lebanon, Israel is Looking for More Wars
* Lebanese Deaths and Israeli War Crimes Kept off the Balance ***
* How I Found Myself with the Islamic Fascists
* Hypocrisy and the Clamor Against Hizbullah
* UN Resolution
* Israel, Not Hizbullah, is Putting Civilians in Danger on Both Sides
of the Border
* Why Do They Hate Us? Listen to Qana (Again)
* The Lies Israel Tells Itself (and We Tell on Its Behalf)
* Five Myths that Sanction Israel's War Crimes
* Beirut Evacuations
* Notes from Northern Israel: In the Line of Media Fire
* Israel's Latest Bureaucratic Obscenity
* Jewish Tribalism Comes Clean
* "Escalation", "Retaliation" and BBC Double Standards in Gaza
* The Truth Lies Buried in Gaza Sands
* How Israel's Jewish Terrorist Became a Victim
* How Olmert Conned Washington Over Convergence
* Boycotting Israeli Academia
* Israel's Marriage Ban Closes the Gates to Palestinians
* Israel's Road to "Convergence" Began with Rabin
* The Long Path Back to Umm al-Zinat for Palestine's Refugees
* The Real Meaning of Deporting Hamas Members of Parliament
* The Israeli Consensus Shows its True Colors
* Britain's Duplicity and the Siege of Jericho Jail

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