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10/12/2005:

"The canny Sharon's one and three-quarter state solution"

This phase of introspection reflects the broader trend. I spoke yesterday with Eival Gilady, who served as a close adviser to the Israeli prime minister on the Gaza disengagement. His message was clear: the ball is now in the Palestinians' court. Under the internationally endorsed road map, the next step is for the Palestinians to put their own house in order, starting with a crackdown on terrorism.

If that were to happen, then Israel might make a further move. Revealingly, Gilady cites the unilateral disarmament steps taken by Mikhail Gorbachev, which paved the way for a mutually agreed arms pact later. "When you act unilaterally, it doesn't stay unilateral," he says. In other words, Israel moves first on Gaza. Then Abbas stabilises the PA. Then Israel will act again. Not a peace process exactly, but a series of one-sided moves: call it sequential unilateralism.

Under that logic, what would Israel's next act be? In the past few days, the Israeli press has been bubbling with hints from key officials at further unilateral pullouts, this time from the West Bank. The scenario seems to be that Sharon sits tight for now, sees off Bibi, fights, wins an election next year - and then stages a series of mini-disengagements. Dr Gary Sussman, an analyst at Tel Aviv University, says the map for those withdrawals is already laid out. "The fence is the border," he says, confident that Israel would pull back, more or less, to the line traced by the wall, or security barrier, it has built through the West Bank. That would entail dismantling a few isolated settlements - and keeping the large settlement blocs.

Such a move would see Israel out of, perhaps, 50% or 60% of the West Bank. Combined with Gaza that would represent the de facto Palestinian state, promised by the road map and now routinely demanded by George Bush, Tony Blair and everyone else.

The old guard of Palestinian leaders, including Abbas, are said to be deeply depressed at this prospect. For such an entity would leave them no access to Jerusalem and would represent substantially less territory than the Clinton parameters promised in December 2000. It would not be the two-state solution they sought for two decades but, says Sussman, something less: "A one and three-quarter state solution."

What's more, Sharon would make this move and win not just international acceptance but praise. The Gaza withdrawal won plaudits from the UN and EU; even Pakistan broke Muslim ranks to start a diplomatic engagement with Israel last month. If there were to be more pullouts in the West Bank, Sharon would be a hero once more. There would be no pressure on him; it would all be on the Palestinians, who would rapidly be cast as grudging and difficult for not receiving these chunks of the West Bank with gratitude.
guardian.co.uk

A one-state solution
...The question of whether Zionism can be reconciled with democracy has always been at the heart of the debate on the Palestinian problem. But it has dropped off the broader political agenda partly because a majority of Israeli Jews have been resistant to anything that smacks of a challenge to the very premise on which the Zionist enterprise was built, and partly due to the belief (on both sides) that the Palestinian problem is ultimately resolvable via a territorial partition that would separate the mass of Arabs from Jews.

However, a number of recent developments have challenged these assumptions. With an unbridled settlement policy now matched by a "separation wall" that merely consecrates the divide between Palestinians and Israeli settlers within the occupied West Bank, Sharon and his predecessors have all but destroyed the possibility of a viable and sustainable territorial settlement along national lines.

A Basic History of Zionism and its Relation to Judaism
It seems a bitter irony that a movement that initially saw itself as progressive, liberal and secular should find itself in an alliance with, and held to ransom by, the most illiberal reactionary forces. In my view this was inevitable from its inception although the founders, and most of us (including even people like myself, growing up in Palestine in the thirties), did not foresee this and certainly would not have wished it.

Nowadays the deliberate blurring of the distinction between Zionism and Judaism, which includes a rewriting of ancient as well as modern history, is exploited to stifle any criticism of Israel's policies and actions, however extreme and inhuman they may be. This, incidentally, also plays directly into anti-Semitic prejudices by equating Israeli arrogance, brutality and complete denial of basic human rights to non-Jews with general Jewish characteristics.

Zionism has now assumed the all-embracing mantle of righteousness. It claims to represent and to speak for all Jews and has adopted the slogan of "my country right or wrong." The West tolerates Israel's continuous breaches of human rights--violations that it would not tolerate if perpetrated by any other country. Few Western states and not many Jews dare take a stand against Israel, particularly as many of the former still feel a sense of unease and guilt about the holocaust which Zionist Jews inside and outside Israel have exploited in what to me seems an almost obscene manner. In the USA, the Jewish Zionist lobby is still strong enough to keep successive governments on board. Moreover, the USA regards Israel as an important strategic ally in its fight against Middle Eastern "rogue" states which have supplanted the Soviet Union as the great satanic enemy of the free world.