Eretz Yisrael is not for sale

Eretz Yisrael is not for sale
The Mendacity of Peace Process in the Middle East
March 10 2002

Peace is not the absence of war. It is the presence of justice. There is no peace by making others under stress. There is no justice by doing injustice to others. There is either peace and justice for all or for none. Ursula Frank, the emeritus professor of the University of Toronto


Words alone are not adequate and sufficient enough to describe how the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank are fighting for their independence with the stones, slingshots and the suicide bomb attacks against the indiscriminate daily bombardments of missiles attacks, tank cannon and machinegun fires by the Israeli Occupation Forces.
The battle between Palestinians and Israelis is the world’s last colonial war, no matter what Israeli general-cum-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon brays aloud it as a war against terrorism, as French in 1950s did before they were kicked out of Algeria.

It is a received wisdom in the western society in general and the Jewish culture in particular that in the Oslo Accord of 1993 and following the Camp David negotiations, Jews were such generous to surrender 90 percent of the Disputed Territories and the Palestinians butt head against the Israeli peace initiative with more demands that the Palestinians have lost an opportune chance to have an independent country of their own and Jews have no choice but to engage with Arab terrorists in self-defense mode; that is, Jews are innocent victims of Arab obstinacy in defense of their national security and Palestinians are a bunch of shit-disturbers in excessive demand of spoilt brats.

In such perspective that “the Israelis have made a painful but generous offer 95 percent of the Occupied Territories to Arafat at Camp David and the Palestinians have rejected it outright”, when repeatedly drummed up by the mainstream media in the West, the mendacious and spin-doctor myth has become the overwhelming truth.
In order to straighten out the false and manufactured image of the peace process propagated by the main stream media in the West, one should, first and foremost, clear the two major mendacious and foggy bottoms in the Middle Eastern horizon, one religious myth that God has given the land to the Jews and another media-myth that Israelis are generous and Palestinians are obstinate in the peace process
.
The early Zionists have spread a biblical myth that the Palestine was a vacant and desolate land where the great realtor in the sky had given the Jewish Israelites the land of Judea and Samaria in perpetuity.
In fact, in the years up to 1947 the Palestine was occupied by colonial Britain, where Jews were only about 30 percent of the population of Mandate Palestine and own only six percent of the land in that the rest was occupied by Palestinian Arabs, but the UN partition resolution that year assigned 55 percent of the land to a new Jewish State.

The biblical faith was spread throughout the globe for over two millennium under the auspices of Christian Crusades and the Holy Land that was bestowed by Yahweh to the Jewish Israelites has become the historically accepted and warranted theology by thousands of millions of people.
The Israelis were, from the beginning, in the vantage point on their claim for the land, because millions of people believed in the “historical” saga contained in the Bible—from Abraham’s encounter with God and Moses’ deliverance of twelve Patriarchal Israelites from bondage in Egypt to the land of Judea and Samaria—that legitimizes and endorses the rights of Jewish inheritance to the land.

However, the recent archeological excavation in the biblical sites by the Israeli scholars has sent a shiver down the Israelis collective spines, revealing the evidences that the glorious David and Solomon Empires, the biblical version of Israeli formative history, were a legend nothing more than King Arthur’s and a brilliant fiction nothing less than Shakespeare’s novels.
Since the historicity of the Bible saga was used as a deed as a way of righteous genealogy on the land for the Jews, the challenge by the archeological evidences on the Bible is an anathema for the Israeli dogma “Eretz Yisrael”, the land of Israel and ultimately influence in reshaping and clearing the foggy bottom in the Middle East horizon.

“Eretz Yisrael” has no clear definition of border, spanning from Egypt through Palestine to Turkey and Iran, and most of Israeli politicians, generals and Talmudic rabbis are pledged to believe in it in their political and religious dogma, as Americans pledge to their allegiance to the flag.
For Jews, land is the be-all and end-all for their survival, and the ownership of land in Israel is under the strict jurisdiction of the Israel Land Authority which applies as a fundamental criterion of land use, religion and nationality: only registered Jews can own or rent the land or open a business.
The Jews-only principle on land is the sacrosanct and unviolable national dogma that no Jewish people, politician, general, scholar, rabbi, or Joe-blow, can imagine to compromise from the very beginning of every peace process…there were only an illusion and image of “peace in return for land”; it is like asking Americans to give up their flag in return for peace.

When one is able to clear the first foggy bottom of the religious myth that Eretz Yisrael is not for sale for any circumstance, then it is not difficult to understand the second media-myth, in which then-PMs, Yitzhak Rabin in the Oslo Accord and Ehud Barak at Camp David, were such generous readily giving the land back for peace, is a sheer mendacious and concocted product of the mainstream media overwhelmingly flooded with a cabal of Jewish journalists.
It was true that the world opinion widely accepted the Oslo Accord in 1993 a historical agreement between Israel and Palestinian Authority (PA), by bestowing three participants, Rabin, Peres, and Arafat, a joint Nobel Peace Prize.

For the Palestinians, the Oslo Accord was a sellout by Arafat, giving up 78 percent of their land and accepting the imagined formula “land for peace” in return for the withdrawal of Israel from the occupied territories.
For the Israelis, the Accord was another serendipitous reward mediated by the Uncle Sam without mentioning or discussing about the right of Palestinian refugees to return their homeland and Israelis were happy to confirm that they do not need to withdraw up to the 1967 Greenline that US Resolution 242 calls for.

According to two diplomats, one American and one Israeli, who involved intensively in the Camp David negotiations in the summer of 2000, Ehud Barak offered only a verbal proposal, nothing of written form that keeps main Jewish Settlements and Jews-only bypass roads in the Occupied Territories, leaving hundreds of the Palestinian villages the corralled islands by the Israeli Military checkpoints and fortified Settlements. (The Settlement would be more appropriate to be termed the Colony and the Settler the colon as in French in colonial era.)

The Barak proposal was a non sequitur that denies the contiguous territorial integrity to the Palestinians who are daily subjected to the Israeli Military control and Settlers’ harassment.
Under the Barak formula, peace for land, the Palestinian State would be no more than an Apartheid system of Bantustans where Israelis control every Palestinian movement whether they go to school, to work, to hospital, to mosque, or to see a relative in other village that may take five-hour detour instead of 30-minite direct walk due to the fenced bypass roads of Jews-only highway.
No country in the world would claim the sovereignty if any nation is subjected to the Barak proposal, and if Arafat would have accepted Barak’s, he would be an Israeli satrap, doing dirty jobs for his colonial boss.

The dogma of Eretz Yisrael is directly connected with the survival of the Israeli population in terms of water resources…if Israel were ever to accept the 1967 Greenline borders with Arabs, Israel would give up a major source for fresh water from the Sea of Galilee (Lake Tiberias) and have to pay at least for one-third of the 500 billion gallons of water its Jewish population uses annually.
Currently, Israel gets 30 percent of its water from the Golan Heights that was captured in 1967 war from Syria, and Israel would not allow Syria to access on the shore of the Sea of Galilee.
Another third of Israeli demand for water comes from aquifers in the occupied West Bank and Gaza where Israeli controls and manages 80 percent of the wells.
Would Israelis ever give back the land to the Arab neighbors that abuts rivers, lakes or surround aquifers for recognition or normalization?


Are Israelis ever willing to give the land back for peace and withdraw up to the 1967 Greenline in return for normalization with Arabs as the old Saudi Plan suggested recently and widely welcomed by the mainstream media?
If one examines carefully on the two major foggy bottoms above-mentioned, it would be wise to surmise that the Israelis prefer to sit out at the negotiating table for another five years while building more settlements, more bypass roads and more military checkpoints with an unlimited flow of the US taxpayers money until the Palestinians reach up to the breaking point to surrender to any offer by them.

Here is what PM Ariel Sharon succinctly boasted to the world a week ago and it is important to remind everyone that he was elected and mandated by Israelis to do what he is intended to do as follows:
According to the Israeli newspaper, Haaretz, PM Sharon told in a press conference: “It won’t be possible to reach an agreement with them before the Palestinians are hit hard. Now they have to be hit. If they aren’t badly beaten, there won’t be any negotiations. Only after they are beaten will we be able to conduct talks. I want an agreement, but first they have to be beaten so they get the thought out of their minds that they can impose an agreement on Israel that Israel does not want…they must be beaten; the Palestinian Authority, its forces, and the terrorists. It they aren’t beaten there won’t be any political horizon.
Arafat is the father and patron of terror, and we have to cause Palestinians heavy casualties and then they will know they can’t keep using terror and win political achievements.
We can overcome all the obstacles if we know how to remain steadfast.”

In other word, the settlement issue could be settled “over our dead body” for all Zionist politicians, a majority of them were former generals and colonels in the Israeli Army, who hold the brigadier- general mentality in dealing with their counterpart at the peace talks: Prime Ministers (Sharon, Barak, Rabin) and Cabinet Ministers (Defense, Culture and Science, Transportation) were ex-generals and ex-PM and future-PM-in-waiting (Benjamin Natanyahu) was a retired colonel.
It is axiomatic at least that the Israelis have been electing, year after year, these ex-generals and colonels as their leaders who call their neighbors animals like cockroaches, beasts walking on two legs, crocodiles, etc. and want to break their bones in order to keep peace in the region.

In a clear message to the world a few days ago, the Jewish State of Israel publicly declared that they would be ready for another peace process after they accomplish to beat the Palestinians hell out of their mind with deadly forces: see you later after we beat you to pulp.
And in a joyful response Uncle Sam decided to send their envoy General Anthony Zinni in the region for another round of the peace process, and the General is a good friend of PM Sharon, calling the barrel-chested PM with a warm term, a papa di tutti cuppa (Papa-Bear), while calling Arafat an unreformed liar comparing him to a Mafia boss akin to New York Mafioso Carlo Gambino.
What kind of peace would be fetched in a meeting among the butcher of Sabra and Shatila, Ariel Sharon, the Mafia boss in Kaffiyeh, Yasir Arafat, and ex-Marine General mediator, Tony Zinni who did not give a shit about the innocent civilian casualties during his brief sortie in Somalia?

In the meantime, the old Saudi plan of normalization with Israel in return for 1967 Greenline border was enthusiastically welcomed in the mainstream media as if the day of the Messiah has arrived and Sharon is ready to meet Saudi Prince for details on the plan.
Here goes again!
There appears to be another round of the mendacious peace process in the Middle East horizon…the Smart Alec Sharon would not miss once in a lifetime chance of shaking hand with Arab caliph (normalization and recognition) without delivering a obligation (withdrawal from the Occupied Territories).

As in the colonial war where there would be no justice for the oppressed and therefore no peace for the oppressor, peace would not be achieved in the Middle East prior to bring justice for all, including Palestinians who have been caged for half a century in the biggest prisons in the world.
PM Sharon could sit out at the negotiating table for years, keep talking and bombing without giving up a square foot in the Occupied Territories until the Palestinians buckle to their knees, as far as the US taxpayers are willing to foot the bill of over $5 billion per annum. (Since 1949, Uncle Sam has given Israel a total of $84 billion, and this means that the US Government has given more federal aid to the average Israeli citizen in a given year than it has given to the average American citizen.)
As usual, PM Sharon puts Shimon Peres in a limelight starring him a little Dutch boy of the legend who sticks his finger in the dike, pretending that he is serious in talks with Arabs, and voila!
The mainstream media in the West sing along: Hallelujah, another series of the mendacious peace process commences with fanfare.