Israeli Peace always meant avoiding Palestinian Statehood

When Peter Beinart called for one state with equal rights for Palestinians and Jews in Israel and Palestine last month, his essay had enormous impact. Beinart was licensing mainstream discussion of ideas that have been discussed for years on the marginalized left.

So the Jewish Currents essay had the effect of undermining official two-state lip service, which has only served Israeli goals and heightened Palestinian suffering by offering false hope.

Because of its threat to establishment consensus, Beinart’s piece unleashed rage and vituperation from dedicated Zionists. Dershowitz all but called him a Nazi. The ADL said his argument is antisemitic. Dan Shapiro called the argument “utopian nonsense.”

The harshest charge comes from Daniel Gordis, an Israeli author, who likens Beinart to a Holocaust denier, for attacking a “fundament” of Jewish history, that Jews will only be safe if Israel exists.

And the American Jewish community should treat Beinart as a “traitor” and “pariah” and shun him for his writing that essay. And the same goes for Reps. Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib.

Republican Betty McCollum (D-MN) has introduced legislation that condemns the Israeli government’s proposed annexation of the West Bank and blocks any U.S. aid that would potentially be used to fund it.

The Israeli Annexation Non-Recognition Act is endorsed by over 30 progressive organizations and is co-sponsored by six other Democratic House members: Reps. Rashida Tlaib (MI), Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (NY), Ayanna Pressley (MA), Ilhan Omar (MN), Mark Pocan (WI), and Andre Carson (IN).

However, former Florida congressman Robert Wexler, now head of the pro-Israel group the S. Daniel Abraham Center for Middle East Peace, said that Joe Biden had written the Democratic Party platform plank on Israel, which eliminates any reference to occupation (and that some have said is to the right of Israel’s Likud Party).

It is being widely discussed nowadays how the UAE-Israel supposed “peace” deal is a sidelining of Palestinians, a deal meant primarily to curry favor with USA and Israel for security and economic purposes.

The supposed token of “suspending” the planned annexation is dubious and Netanyahu has clearly stated that it in no way means a rolling back of the plan to do so. Palestinians reject it for using them as a mere fig leaf.

But how was it with earlier peace agreements that were supposed to somehow advance the Palestinian cause? Egyptian President Anwar Sadat spoke at the Israeli Knesset in 1977, ahead of the 1978 peace treaty.

I have not come here for a separate agreement between Egypt and Israel. This is not part of the policy of Egypt. The problem is not that of Egypt and Israel.

Any separate peace between Egypt and Israel, or between any Arab confrontation State and Israel, will not bring permanent peace based on justice in the entire region.

Rather, even if peace between all the confrontation States and Israel were achieved, in the absence of a just solution to the Palestinian problem, never will there be that durable and just peace upon which the entire world insists today.

Autonomy” has essentially always been the model that Israel, at best, intended for Palestinians. While the international community would call it a prospective Palestinian “state”, this was never the actual model Israel would permit.

In 1994, Jordan and Israel signed a peace treaty. The treaty annulled any claims that Jordan had to the West Bank, which it had taken over in 1948 and administered until 1967.

The text of the agreement said that “[a]ny treatment of this line shall be without prejudice to the status of the territory.

In the 1994 peace agreement Jordan thus stated that it made no claims for the West Bank, and declared that the border went along the East bank of the Jordan river.

Since this was an agreement between Jordan and Israel, giving up the claim to the West Bank could be interpreted as Jordan implicitly declaring it Israeli territory, but the wording of “without prejudice” suggested that it was open to it being agreed as Palestinian territory by agreements between Israel and the Palestinians.

These were the Oslo years, and the idea from the Israeli standpoint was again that “autonomy” (not a state). Shimon Peres, who was Foreign Minister at the time, was vehemently opposed to a Palestinian state, although making gestures suggesting that he was for it.

As we now know, the Oslo Interim Agreement eventually led nowhere, just to endless occupation. In a secret tape from 2001 (revealed in 2016), Netanyahu bragged to a settler family about how he gave the Oslo accords an “interpretation” that would allow him to stop the “racing to the 1967 lines”. Defined Military zones are now security zones.

That is why every “peace deal” that Israel can accept with anyone, is always about sidelining Palestinian statehood – even with the Palestinians themselves. Every peace deal with another Arab state will include some token in recognition of Palestinian rights, but it will never lead to a fulfillment of those rights.

So in the recent deal with the UAE, this time a “peace” between two states who are not at war and who never contested territory, the supposed token for the Palestinians was that the planned annexation of nearly a third of the West Bank would be postponed?

Mondoweiss / ABC Flash Point WW III News 2020.