Palestijnen boos over steun VS voor uitbreiding nederzettingen
JERUZALEM - Palestijnse leiders hebben de Verenigde Staten ervan beschuldigd de vooruitzichten op vrede te torpederen omdat zij kennelijk bereid zijn de uitbreiding van joodse nederzettingen op Palestijns gebied te gedogen.
De New York Times berichtte zaterdag dat Washington heeft besloten stilzwijgende steun te verlenen aan bouwactiviteiten in de nederzettingen die de Israëlische premier Arie Sharon in stand wil houden.
De Palestijnse premier Ahmed Qureia zei dat hij nog wacht op bevestiging van het bericht, maar geschokt zou zijn als het waar is. "Ik kan niet geloven dat Amerika nu zegt dat het o.k. is om nederzettingen uit te breiden" , zei hij. "Dit zal het vredesproces vernietigen." Nabil Abu Rdeneh, een naaste medewerker van de Palestijnse leider Yasser Arafat, zei dat de zo'n beleidswijziging Israël zou aanmoedigen zijn oorlog tegen het Palestijnse volk voort te zetten en uit te breiden en vroeg Washington om opheldering.
Amerikaanse gedoogsteun voor uitbreiding van nederzettingen zou een definitieve breuk betekenen met de routekaart voor vrede, die alle bouwactiviteiten verbiedt. Tot nu toe hebben de Amerikanen officieel aan de routekaart vastgehouden, hoewel president George Bush in april al zei dat een nieuwe vredesovereenkomst rekening zou moeten houden met "nieuwe feiten", waarmee hij verwees naar de concentratie van nederzettingen die in de loop van de tijd dicht bij de Israëlische grens zijn ontstaan.
Toen Israël vorige week plannen bekendmaakte om in deze nederzettingen duizend nieuwe wooneenheden te bouwen onthielden de VS zich van commentaar, in plaats van Israël zoals gebruikelijk te wijzen op zijn verplichtingen op grond van de routekaart. Zondag bevestigden Amerikaanse functionarissen onder beding van anonimiteit dat de VS hun oppositie tegen uitbreiding hebben opgegeven. Hun oogmerk is, zeiden zij, om Sharon ertoe te brengen illegale nederzettingen te verwijderen en zijn plan voor een Israëlische terugtrekking uit de Gazastrook door te voeren. In september sturen de VS een team naar Israël om richtlijnen voor uitbreiding van de nederzettingen overeen te komen, zeiden de functionarissen. Sharon stuurt zijn adviseur Dov Weisglass naar Washington voor overleg over de gewijzigde plannen.
Geplaatst door Daniël Z
Leg mij eens uit waarom er wel Arabieren in Arabische dorpen/steden in Israel (zoals Umm al Fahm) zouden mogen wonen en geen Joden in Joodse dorpen/steden in de West Bank, zoals Ariel.
het is een beetje lange artikel,
maar, Goed om dat te lezen!
take ur time
Gaarne eerst lezen, en dan kijken of je het woord "anti" hoeft te gebruiken.
Toward a Single State Solution
Zionism, Anti-Semitism and the People of Palestine
By NOEL IGNATIEV
Zionism as a political movement developed in the late 19th century. Its founder, Theodore Herzl, was influenced by two phenomena: the extent of French anti-Semitism revealed by the Dreyfus Trial, and nationalist ideals then popular in Europe. Herzl held that Jews cannot be assimilated by the nations in which they live, and that the only solution to the "Jewish question" was the formation of a "Jewish state" in which all the Jews would come together. The early Zionists contemplated as the site of the future state Argentina or Uganda, among other locales. Herzl favored Palestine, because, although an agnostic, he wanted to make use of the custom, widespread among Jewish mystics, of going on pilgrimages to the "holy land" and establishing religious communities there.
In 1868, there were 13,000 Jews in Palestine, out of an estimated population of 400,000. The majority were religious pilgrims supported by charity from overseas. They encountered no opposition from the Muslims, and their presence led to no clashes with the Arab population, whether Muslim or Christian.
In 1882, Baron Rothschild, combining philanthropy and investment, began to bring Jewish settlers from Eastern Europe to build a plantation system along the model the French used in Algeria. They spoke Yiddish, Arabic, Persian, and Georgian. Significantly, Hebrew was not among the languages spoken. The outcome of Rothschild's experiment was predictable: Jews managed the land, while Arabs worked it. This was not the result the Zionists had in mind; a Jewish society could not be based on Arab labor. Consequently, they began to encourage the immigration of Jews to work in agriculture, industry, and transport.
In 1917 British Foreign Minister Lord Balfour, seeking support for Britain's efforts in World War I, issued his famous declaration expressing sympathy with efforts to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine. The Zionists immediately seized upon this statement, which they interpreted to mean support for a Jewish state. At the time of Balfour's declaration, Jews comprised less than 10% of the population and owned 2.5% of the land of Palestine.
The problem of building a Jewish society among an overwhelming Arab majority came to be known as the "conquest of land and labor." Land, once acquired, had to remain in Jewish hands. The other half of this project, known as Labor Zionism, called for the exclusive use of Jewish labor on the land acquired by the Jews in Palestine. The Labor Zionists maintained this dual exclusionism (or apartheid, as we would now call it) in order to build up purely Jewish institutions.
To achieve the conquest of the land, the Zionists set up an arrangement whereby land was acquired not by individuals, but by a corporation, known as the Jewish National Fund (JNF). The JNF acquired land and leased it only to Jews, who were not allowed to sublet it. Thus land was acquired in the name of "the Jewish people," held for their use, and not subject to market conditions. The idea was for the JNF to gradually acquire as much land as possible as the basis for the expected Jewish state.
Naturally, in order for the land to serve this function, Arab labor had to be excluded. Leases from the JNF specifically prohibited the use of non-Jewish labor on JNF plots. One way to achieve this goal was to lease land only to those Jews who intended to work it themselves. In some cases, when land was bought from Arab absentee landlords, the peasants who resided on and worked the land were expelled. Jewish landholders who refused to exclude Arab labor could lose their leases or be faced with a boycott.
The conquest of labor pertained not only to agriculture but also to industry. The Labor Zionists formed an institution to organize Jewish labor and exclude Arabs: the Histadrut. The Histadrut was (and largely is) an all-Jewish combination trade union and cooperative society providing its members with a number of services. From the beginning it was a means of segregating Arab and Jewish labor and bringing into existence a strictly Jewish economic sector. Even when Arab and Jewish laborers performed precisely the same job, Jewish workers were paid significantly higher salaries. These policies were the death knell for any attempt to organize labor on a non-racial basis. The "laborism" of Labor Zionism killed and continues to kill efforts at building a unified labor movement.
Despite these policies and even with the encouragement of the British government, in the thirty years following the Balfour Declaration, the Zionists were able to increase the Jewish-owned portion of the land of Palestine to only 7%. Moreover, the majority of the world's Jews showed no interest in settling there. In the years between 1920 and 1932, only 118,000 Jews moved to Palestine, less than 1% of world Jewry. Even after the rise of Hitler, Jews in Europe did not choose Israel: out of 2.5 million Jewish victims of Nazism who fled abroad between 1935 and 1943, scarcely 8.5% went to Palestine. 182,000 went to the U.S., 67,000 to Britain, and almost 2 million to the Soviet Union. After the war, the U.S. began to encourage Jewish settlement in Palestine. Aneurin Bevin, postwar British Foreign Minister, publicly blurted out that American policy mainly arose from the fact that "they did not want too many of them in New York." The Pakistani delegate to the UN was to make the same point sarcastically:
Australia, an overpopulated small country with congested areas, says no, no, no; Canada, equally congested and overpopulated, says no; the United States, a great humanitarian country, a small area, with small resources, says no. This is their contribution to the humanitarian principle. But they state, let them go into Palestine, where there are vast areas, a large economy and no trouble; they can easily be taken in there (Weinstock, 226).
The U.S. limitation on the number of Jews allowed into the country coincided with Zionist policy, as enunciated by David Ben-Gurion, first prime minister of Israel: "If I knew that it would be possible to save all the children in Germany by bringing them over to England, and only half of them by transporting them to Eretz Yisrael, then I would opt for the second alternative. For we must weigh not only the life of these children, but also the history of the People of Israel." (Yoav Gelber, "Zionist Policy and the Fate of European Jewry (1932-1945)" Yad Vashem Studies, vol. XII, 199.)
This policy of attaching more importance to the establishment of Israel than to the survival of the Jews led the Zionists to collaborate with Nazism and even be decorated by Hitler's government. The best known case was that of Rudolf Kastner, who negotiated the emigration to Palestine of some of Hungary's most prominent Jews in return for his help in arranging the orderly deportation of the remainder of Hungary's Jews to the camps. For his efforts, Kastner was praised as an "idealist" by no less an authority than Adolf Eichmann. (The best study of Zionist-Nazi relations is Lenni Brenner, Zionism in the Age of the Dictators.)
The Zionists knew they had to rid themselves of the Arab majority in order to have a specifically Jewish state. Although 75,000 Jews moved to Israel between 1945 and 1948, Jews still constituted a minority in Palestine. The 1948 war afforded the Zionists an excellent opportunity to rectify this; as a result of the war, more than three-quarters of a million Arabs fled their homes. The case of Deir Yasin, in which Israeli paramilitary forces, under the command of future prime minister Menachem Begin, massacred over 250 civilians, sending a message to Palestinians that they should depart, is the most well known example of how this flight was brought about. In his book, The Revolt, Begin boasted that without Deir Yasin there would have been no Israel, and adds, "The Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting 'Deir Yasin'" (quoted in Menuhin, 120). Recent writings by Israeli revisionist historians have refuted the longtime insistence of Israeli officials that the departures were voluntary. Some of the refugees went to neighboring Arab countries; others became refugees in their own country. Those 750,000 expelled from their homes and their descendants, who together total 2.2 million people, make up the so-called refugee problem. Although the United Nation has repeatedly demanded they be allowed to return, the Israeli government has refused to agree. The war ended with the Zionists in control of 80% of Palestine. In the next year, nearly 400 Arab villages were completely destroyed. This was no accident but the result of deliberate policy, as shown is the following statement by one of the most authoritative officials of the Zionist state:
Among ourselves it must be clear that there is no place in our country for both peoples together The only solution is Eretz Israel, or at least the western half of Eretz Israel, without Arabs, and there is no other way but to transfer the Arabs from here to the neighboring countries, transfer all of them, not one village or tribe should remain
Joseph Weitz, Deputy Chairman of the Board of directors of the Jewish National Fund (JNF) from 1951 to 1973, former Chairman of the Israel Land Authority (Davis, 5).
Moshe Dayan, former Defense Minister, stated in a famous speech before students at the Israeli Institute of Technology in Haifa in 1969:
Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahial arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population (Ha'aretz, April 4, 1969, quoted in Davis, 21).
It is a mistake to draw a moral line between Israel and the Occupied Territories; it is all occupied territory. The 1967 war, as a result of which Israel conquered and occupied East Jerusalem, the West Bank of the Jordan River, and the Sinai Peninsula, was a continuation of the process that began in 1948. It will be drearily familiar to any who know the history of the displacement of the Indians from the lands they occupied in North America. Today it would be called "ethnic cleansing."
The first census of the state of Israel, conducted in 1949, counted a total of 650,000 Jews and 150,000 Arabs. The legal foundation for the racial state was laid down in two laws passed in 1950. The first, the Law of Return, permitted any Jew, anywhere in the world, the right to "return" to Israel. This right did not apply to non-Jews, including the Palestinian Arabs who had recently become refugees. In addition, the Absentee Property Law confiscated the property of Arab "absentees," and turned it over to the Custodian of Absentee Property. Arab refugees within their own country were termed "present absentees" (what a phrase!), and not allowed to return to their property. A number of refugees who attempted to do so were termed "infiltrators," and some were shot in the attempt. Confiscated property accounted for the vast majority of new settlements. These confiscated lands, in accordance with the procedures that were established in the Mandate period by the JNF, have become Israel Lands, with their own administration. This administration, controlling 92.6% of all of the lands in Israel, only leases these lands to Jews.
Unlike many countries, including the United States, the Israeli state does not belong, even in principle, to those who reside within its borders, but is defined as the state of the Jewish people, wherever they may be. That peculiar definition is one reason why the state has to this day failed to produce a written constitution, define its borders, or even declare the existence of an Israeli nationality. Moreover, in this "outpost of democracy," no party that opposes the existence of the Jewish state is permitted to take part in elections. It is as if the United States were to declare itself a Christian state, define "Christian" not by religious belief but by descent, and then pass a "gag law" prohibiting public discussion of the issue.
If one part of the Zionist project is the expulsion of the indigenous population, the other part is expanding the so-called Jewish population. But here arises the problem, which has tormented Israeli legal officials for fifty years, what is a Jew? (For a century-and-a-half U.S. courts faced similar problems determining who is white.) The Zionists set forth two criteria for determining who is a Jew. The first is race, which is a myth generally and is particularly a myth in the case of the Jews. The "Jewish" population of Israel includes people from fifty countries, of different physical types, speaking different languages and practicing different religions (or no religion at all), defined as a single people based on the fiction that they, and only they, are descended from the Biblical Abraham. It is so patently false that only Zionists and Nazis even pretend to take it seriously. In fact, given Jewish intermingling with others for two thousand years, it is likely that the Palestinians-themselves the result of the mixture of the various peoples of Canaan plus later waves of Greeks and Arabs-are more directly descended from the ancient inhabitants of the Holy Land than the Europeans displacing them. The claim that the Jews have a special right to Palestine has no more validity than would an Irish claim of a divine right to establish a Celtic state all across Germany, France, and Spain on the basis that Celtic tribes once lived there. Nevertheless, on the basis of ascribed descent, the Zionist officials assign those they have selected a privileged place within the state. If that is not racism, then the term has no meaning.
het vervolg van zijn zeer interessante en op feit gebaceerde artikel, kan je in bijlage lezen.
als je er interesse in hebt.
Hij maakt ook een goede alternatief bekend,
een Plan voor vrede!