Peace out

"Mr. Netanyahu,tear down this wall!"

The wall must fall! That's actually what Obama has said now I've had a moment to reflect on it. It's positive news for once. But will Obama say it at the wall? Yeah - nah. A Zionist assassination would be more likely if he tried to do that on the Israeli side.

BBC: Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu has rejected comments from US President Obama that a future Palestinian state must be based on the 1967 borders.

In a major speech to the State Department, Mr Obama said "mutually agreed swaps" would help create "a viable Palestine, and a secure Israel".

But Mr Netanyahu said those borders, which existed before the 1967 Middle East war, were "indefensible".

Mr Netanyahu is preparing to meet Mr Obama for talks at the White House.

An estimated 300,000 Israelis live in settlements built in the West Bank, which lies outside those borders. The settlements are illegal under international law, although Israel disputes this.


Bibi is livid:
Complaining about 1967? 1937 would be better wouldn't it? Both sides adhere officially to the same map funnily enough, but on an all or nothing at all basis. But this statement is better than the tacit approval of the militant settlements inside the West Bank and around Jerusalem that previous administrations have had. The thuggish Lieberman character is Foreign Minister and he lives in the West Bank, so this could destabalise Netanyahu's coalition if they acquiesce, and the Jewish Israel lobby in the US will be going ballistic. If any element can make Obama back-track on this it will be them.

One way of seeing this statement of policy is it will return the 12% of the West Bank on the Israeli side of the separation wall. However 1967 is also another way of saying that the American government accepts that the forcible occupation and confiscation by the Jewish State - the Zionist colonial entity - of the Arab lands from the time of the unilateral declaration of independence in 1948 to 1967 is to stand.

It's a great step forward in the so-called 'peace process' - made possible by the popular pressure latent and currently internalised in this Arab revolt and the Fatah-Hamas accord in Cairo - but it does mean a cruel compromise for the Palestinian side if they accept 1967 borders. With that compromise more likely than any other for both sides the question immediately following is the demand the Israeli state applies the same right of return it does for Jews to Arabs who used to live inside Israel's borders. And their families. But then the Jews would be unable to operate their Zionist colonial state because they wouldn't have the numbers in parliament to do it and their religious/ethnic preferences, advantages and systems and instruments of exploitation would be wound back. They would have no more donkeys to serve them.

So because the US and the Europeans back Israel they have pressured the rest of the world - including the subjugated Palestinians - to accept that the Jews should keep their own state and that the Palestinians will be left with whatever pockets the IDF deem convenient. Partition. As if the solution to South Africa's Apartheid regime and race state would have been to partition it so that the white state got the best half of the country. That would not have been acceptable - because that was basically what the white-controlled state had already done and that was the source of the inter-communal friction in the first place. But a race state partition plan every bit as unacceptable as that has been planned for Palestine-Israel since the British.

Just like the Afrikaaner's Apartheid race state, the viability of the Jewish Zionist race state depends on the unity of external recognition and on division and partition internally. If either of those components are broken (and in South Africa's case both: the withdrawal of diplomatic recognition and sanctions combined with the difficulty of maintaining the internal separations and rules of Apartheid made their viability doubtful by the mid 1980s) then the colonial project is at a sunset

Fatah and Hamas angling the Palestinian Authority toward an early official statehood and UN recognition (and all the issues it will bring Israel should they attack as they do so casually at present) is a product of the pan-Arab popular revolt and is an irresistible external pressure.

A quasi-partition (inter-entity boundaries) in a nominally unitary (but highly decentralised and ethnically regionalised and cantonised) state was the heart of the Dayton accords that ended the Bosnian War and it is a peace that has held. Not a perfect peace, compromises based on arbitrary percentages and boundaries had to be made to get it, but it included a right of return and freedom of travel, and it has held. Why can't the same principle of a multi-ethnic state also hold for Palestine-Israel?