The Extremists in Government signalled long ago that they don't intend Annapolis to succeed, and they've planned massive military assaults to follow.

If you want peace, Israelis will have to take action against their own Extremists, who don't want peace if it includes coexistence with the Palestinians.

Israel's demand to be recognized as Jewish state roils preparations for Annapolis
The Associated PressPublished: November 16, 2007

JERUSALEM: An Israeli demand that Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish state lies at the heart of the latest crisis to upset preparations for an upcoming Mideast peace conference.

In Israel's eyes, the demand seems obvious. Israel has always defined itself as the homeland of the Jewish people.

(In order to hide the fact that it's a state owned and controlled by Zionism, a violent racist Cult, which only seeks its own aggrandizement.)

But the Palestinians think offering that recognition would imply they are dropping one of their key demands in any peace deal — a solution for Palestinian refugees who lost their homes after Israel's 1948 creation and for their millions of descendants.

(That's an interesting way to talk about the people who were Ethnically Cleansed, they simply 'lost their homes' ...)

Israel opposes a return of refugees, for fear they would eventually outnumber the Jewish majority.

(Proving that Israel is, and always has been, an Apartheid state.)

The Palestinians see Israel's insistence that they recognize its Jewish nature now as no less than a last-minute effort to sabotage the conference, which is to take place in Annapolis, Maryland, at the end of the month.

"I know why you want to say it's purely Jewish, so there is no room for any refugees," said Palestinian negotiator Yasser Abed Rabbo. "Why should I do that?"

He said the Palestinians were ready to recognize Israel's right as a state with full sovereignty. "If they want to define their state with any name or title, it's up to them," Abed Rabbo said. Discussion of the refugee issue will be discussed in negotiations and not solved in a unilateral declaration, he said.

Ahead of the summit, a chorus of Israeli leaders have called on the Palestinians to accept the Israeli position, which Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas rejected on Thursday.

"Two states will be established in the historical Palestine, Israel and Palestine," he said. "We are not in a position to define the nature of these two states."

The Israeli Cabinet is expected to debate the issue next week.

Past peace talks have foundered over the refugee issue (aka the Right Of Return), and both sides are mindful of that as they head to Annapolis to formally renew peace negotiations, which broke down in 2001 in a convulsion of violence that simmers to this day.

(See 'Alert', below)

Initially, the plan had been that the two sides would come to the gathering armed with a document laying out the principles of a future accord.

But as the meeting nears, and with gaps still wide, it appears the document will contain few details on how to resolve the decades-old conflict.

(And Olmert has already ruled out any agreement, on the insistence of the Extremists within his cabinet.)

In fact, Israel's Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, who heads Israel's negotiating team, suggested Wednesday that the two sides might not be able to come up with any document at all.

"I hope that we are going to reach a joint statement, yes, but I think that the statement is less important, the most important thing is Annapolis and the day after," she said at a news conference with EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana.

Israel is not a country of broad consensus, but on the refugee issue agreement is almost wall-to-wall. Israelis believe a large-scale influx of Palestinian refugees could spell the end of Israel as a Jewish (Apartheid) state.

Livni, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Defense Minister Ehud Barak have all raised the issue in recent public pronouncements.

One of Olmert's key coalition partners, hawkish Cabinet minister Avigdor Lieberman, told the Haaretz newspaper that Israel should skip the Annapolis summit unless the Palestinians cave in.

"I aim to drag Prime Minister Ehud Olmert into demanding that the Palestinians recognize us as a Jewish state as a prerequisite for the international peace summit planned at Annapolis," the Haaretz newspaper on Thursday quoted Lieberman as saying.

(Remember that Lieberman is the same man who said that Palestinian males should be rounded up and executed.)

Olmert has mentioned the necessity of Palestinian recognition of Israel's Jewish identity, perhaps in a nod to pressure from Lieberman, but has stopped short of making it a condition for the conference.

At a meeting Wednesday, Olmert told Solana the basis for negotiations with the Palestinians after the conference "will be recognition of the state of Israel as the state of the Jewish people," the prime minister's office said.

(But throughout the world, Jews are abandoning their support of Israel and Zionism.)

"The prime minister made it clear that from Israel's point of view, this issue is not subject to either negotiations or discussion," the statement said.

Israel, said Foreign Ministry spokesman Mark Regev, has brought up the issue now because "it is the core of the conflict."

(And because they know that by creating untenable demands, they can pretend that it is the Palestinians, as opposed to themselves, who wish to skuttle the talks.)

"Israel is the national homeland of the Jewish people," Regev said. "That has never been accepted by the Palestinians, and we think any peace agreement has to include that."

(It hasn't been accepted by many Jews, either.)

www.iht.com/articles/ap/2007/11/16/africa/ME-GEN-Israel-Palestinians.php

A "Jewish State": I Can't Define It, But You Have To Recognize It.

November 16, 2007

At one time, everyone knew that peace would break out all over the Middle East if the Palestinians would just recognize Israel. But then the PLO went and spoiled things by recognizing Israel, so there had to be a new excuse for not ending the Occupation. The new demand was that the Palestinians had to recognize Israel's "right to exist". And now, to ward off any danger that peace might raise its ugly head at Annapolis, here's a timely new one: the Palestinians have to recognize that Israel exists; that it has a right to exist; and that it has the right to exist as a "Jewish state".

The implications of Israel's demanding recognition as a state of the Jewish people rather than a state of all its citizens are complex, and I'm going to work on a separate post about that. But one really basic issue came to mind today when I read (via Desertpeace) this Ha'aretz editorial on the subject. To sum up the article: Ha'aretz thinks it's absurd for the Israeli government to demand that the PLO recognize Israel as a "Jewish state", when it is the settlement policies of successive Israeli governments in the Occupied Palestinian Territories that have been, and continue to be, the greatest danger to Israel's Jewishness. But what struck me most when I read the article wasn't the strength or otherwise of Ha'aretz's argument: it was the realisation that Israelis don't seem to have a common understanding of what they mean by a "Jewish state"; yet they insist the Palestinians must recognize nonetheless that Israel is one.

When Olmert and Livni talk about Israel as a "Jewish state", they mean essentially that it is a state that is for Jewish people, even if they don't reside or have citizenship there. It would be very handy for them if they could force the Palestinians to accept this definition, because then they could go into final status talks with some of the more intractable issues - like how to resolve the Right of Return - pre-emptively swept off the table. After all, how can Palestinians have a right to return to their homes in a "Jewish state" when they're not even Jewish, and non-Jews shouldn't expect to be allowed to live in a "Jewish state" in the first place...

Various Israeli commentators have been up in arms this week because the PLO has made it clear it will never give Israel this kind of recognition. The PLO says that Palestinians, like everyone else, give diplomatic recognition to countries, not to demographic balances, religious leanings or political affiliations. In recognizing Iran, for example, they give formal acceptance to Iran's sovereignty, its people and its borders, but not to its religious orientation. If Iran wants to call itself "The Islamic Republic of...", that is purely an internal Iranian affair. It's "Iran" that international diplomacy recognizes, not the Islamic-ness or Republic-ness of its political system. Similarly, if Israel wishes to call itself "The Jewish State of...", that is an internal Israeli affair, which does not need and cannot demand recognition from the PLO or anyone else in the world community.

So what does the PLO recognize in regard to Israel? The PLO recognizes the state of Israel in its 1967 borders - an area which happens to have an overwhelmingly Jewish population - and is offering through its acceptance of the Saudi peace initiative a Right of Return that is implemented in agreement with Israel, i.e. a nominal one that won't change the demographic balance there. So they offer recognition to a state that is de facto Jewish, and recognize the right of that state to peace and security within its recognized borders.

The one thing they won't say is that Israel is formally a "Jewish state", i.e. a state for Jews. Just as a Jewish American might recognize that the USA is a Christian country in terms of its dominant population and cultural traditions, but would never accept that it should be formally designated a "Christian state", because that immediately defines Jews and other non-Christians as lesser citizens. For some outrageous no-doubt Islamofascist Jew-hating reason, the Palestinians similarly refuse to declare that Israel is constitutionally a state where Israelis of Palestinian descent are inferior citizens.

Now, in this Ha'aretz editorial, Ha'aretz also talks about the "Jewish state", and says that the Israeli government is preventing it coming about because of the settlements, which make it impossible to separate the two peoples. So Ha'aretz is talking about a "Jewish State" in terms of an Israel that emerges from a final peace settlement as a country with a large Jewish majority.

But what Ha'aretz calls a Jewish state, i.e. a Jewish-majority state, is not what Olmert and Livni mean by the term, i.e a state that constitutionally favors people of one religion over another. Ha'aretz is saying that Israel will be a Jewish state because it will be a country that is made up overwhelmingly OF Jews - which the PLO could accept. Olmert and Livni say it is a Jewish state because it is a country not OF Jews, but FOR Jews - which Palestinians do not accept.

It seems absurd that Israelis will have hysterical fits when the PLO says it doesn't recognize Israel as a "Jewish state", when Israelis themselves don't agree in first place what exactly they mean by a "Jewish state".

Israelis need to decide what it is they mean by a "Jewish state", before they accuse the Palestinians of being unreasonable in rejecting it. Right now, I suspect that some of them are happy to conflate the two different understandings of what a "Jewish state" is; perhaps so that when the PLO rejects Olmert's demand for a "state for Jews", they can pretend the PLO is rejecting too the idea of Israel as a "state of Jews". I suppose if you understand that the price of a universally-recognized Jewish-majority state in the 1967 borders is finally getting out of the Occupied Territories, and you really don't want to do that, it's a lot easier to derail peace talks by whipping up fears of being driven into the sea than to simply acknowledge you're not willing to pay the price. It's a bit like having the President of Iran say that the Occupation regime over Jerusalem will disappear from the pages of time, and then pretending that he really said he would "wipe Israel off the map"; because it's always easier to invoke the Hitler bogeyman than to answer Ahmadinejad's questions about why exactly Muslim-majority Palestine should be dismantled to make way for a sectarian Zionist state....

Maybe Israelis could take a short break from insisting on what the Palestinians must give them, and make up their minds what exactly it is they want. Then perhaps if they could actually listen to what they're being offered, they might even be pleasantly surprised to find it's something they could live with after all.

www.uruknet.info/?p=m38304&hd=&size=1&l=e

ALERT: Annapolis a Charade: Olmert Plotting Massive Aggression

In Germany, according to historian Richard Evans, in 1931-1932, if enough Germans of conscience had begun to say No -- history would have had an entirely diferent outcome.

If we go any further down this road the tears will be those of conservatives as well as progressives. They will be (Israeli) tears.

The time for weeping has to stop; the time for confronting must begin.

Adapted from "American Tears"
www.huffingtonpost.com/naomi-wolf/american-tears_b_68141.html

The timing is interesting, given the upcoming "Annapolis Conference", which serves to be about PR alone, as Olmert has already ruled out any Negotiations or Compromise in the name of peace.

If you follow the events surrounding Israel's "Disengagement" from Gaza, you will quickly understand that this was the plan all along. While Israel was making a public spectacle of "forcing Jews to leave their homes", it was quietly surrounding the Strip with artillery emplacements, in an operation ominously named "First Rain".

Under this operation, Gaza basically became a "Free-Fire Zone", and several artillery and gunship strikes killed a high number of civilians. Finally, when one of these batteries fired upon and murdered a Palestinian family - picnicking on a beach that had been Segregated "Jews Only" only weeks before, Hamas finally decided to call an end to its unilateral, two-year cease-fire.

(In essence, they took Israel's bait. After all, you can't excuse your Aggression and label it "defense" if you're not being intermittently attacked. Never mind the hypocrisy underlying the entire media's framing of that whole debate ...)

When the Palestinians responded by electing Hamas to power (yes, elected), Israeli Extremists and their Ideological, bought foreign co-conspirators imposed unilateral sanctions on Gaza, a bit of Collective Punishment which increased the hardship of those stuck in the world's largest Concentration Camp.

When they felt Gaza had been substantially weakened, the US and Israel undertook a Coup attempt, using corrupt elements within the Fatah Party, provoking a violent response by Hamas, which expelled the group. Most of the world's media ignored the events leading to this "crisis", and instead only repeated the Propaganda emanating from the US and Israel, which used this to further increase sanctions against Gaza.

Most recently, Israel stepped up its Collective Punishment, except that human rights groups and legal advisors to the Government halted some of its approved measures, because they run contrary to International Humanitarian Law.

This was sold as another "response to rocket attacks" (again highlighting the hypocrisy of the debate's Framing - are the Palestinians allowed to defend themselves from strikes which actually KILL people ... ?), even though high-ranking officials said that this was NOT, in fact, a response to these attacks, but a way to "distance Israel from Gaza's infrastructure".

The real reason for this whole episode, of course, has been to "soften up" the Gaza Strip for a long-planned military attack, a way to undermine the resolve, and hopefully rid this territory of Palestinians altogether.
Olmert signalled long ago that he would not entertain any serious discussions at this summit, essentially selling out the Israeli public's desire for peace.

 http://winnipeg.indymedia.org/item.php?8076S


Mazuz OKs cuts to Gaza's electricity
www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1195127517226&pagename=JPost/JPArtic