Israel’s New Government, Old Policies

C oming only four weeks after the European declaration of sanctions against the Palestinian Authority, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s announcement in May of a new Israeli government should raise questions in any Western country interested in a “balanced” approach towards the Middle East. 

It appears that the explicitly racist Yisrael Beiteinu party, which advocates creating an Israel cleansed of Palestinians, will now not be a coalition partner, though Olmert remains open to the idea of their entry into government—as apparently does the Labor Party, which has joined Kadima in the coalition. Nonetheless, Olmert’s government does contain many politicians responsible for the last five years of terror and impoverishment on the West Bank. Consider the denunciation of violence. During the week of April 12, the Israeli Army fired more than 950 artillery tank shells and 46 F16 missiles in this densely populated, supposedly free Gaza strip. Overall 19 Palestinians were killed by the Army, including 3 children, during that week. 

In January Prime Minister Olmert made clear that, “We firmly stand by the historic right of the people of Israel to the entire Land of Israel. Every hill in Samaria and every valley in Judea [the West Bank] is part of our historic homeland.” This is the same, in reverse, as Hamas’s historical claim to the whole of mandate Palestine, which the West believes makes them unsuitable for governing. Moreover Olmert doesn’t stop at theory: “Israel will maintain control over the security zones, the Jewish settlement blocs, and those places which have supreme national importance to the Jewish people, first and foremost a united Jerusalem under Israeli sov ereignty.”  

In other words, in violation of international law, the Oslo Accords, and the Road Map, Olmert has clearly stated that he will incorporate the largest settlement outposts in the West Bank, including Jerusalem, into Israel proper, and re-draw the map to include an Israeli presence on the eastern side of Palestine in the Jordan valley. Any state that results from this exercise will be cut into several sections, with no control over its borders or its international and trade relations or its security—it will have no sovereignty. In no way does this constitute recognition of a Palestinian state. 

The majority of Israel’s political establishment, including the governments of Sharon and Olmert, have spent many years preventing the emergence of a two-state solution through expanding settlements, the Separation Wall, a system of racist settler roads, gateways, and tunnels, which have resulted in two people living separate and unequal lives within the Occupied Territories themselves. Indeed, this was the conclusion of EU diplomats in Jerusalem in a suppressed report leaked before Christmas, as well as a more recent report by UN Human Right Special Rapporteur John Duggard last month. Israeli peace activists such as Jeff Halper from the Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions are quite clear that “the two-state solution is now dead.” 

So Israel violates all three of the conditions set by the “Quartet”(the U.S., EU, UN, and Russia) to the Palestinian Authority—yet you’d have to search long and hard to find Western politicians voicing public condemnation of these policies. Although the Palestinians are not the perpetrators but the victims of countless violations of international law, it is they who are now suffering a sanctions regime perpetrated by Israel, the U.S., and EU—a regime which is sending the Palestinian economy into freefall. It is they who are now targeted by a Western attempt to destabilize their democratically elected government. On February 14, the New York Times reported that senior officials in the U.S. State Department were discussing with Israeli officials the best ways to “destabilize the Palestinian government so that newly elected Hamas officials will fail and elections will be called again.” They discussed Israel withholding tax revenues which it owes to the Palestinian Authority, and which provide the Palestinians with a major source of revenue, and conditions being placed on Hamas to ensure that Western aid stopped flowing.