For Israel, defiance comes at the cost of legitimacy

[ProgressiveMuslim]

By Henry Siegman

Published: February 24 2010 02:00 | Last updated: February 24 2010 02:00

The Middle East peace process and its quest for a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict that got underway nearly 20 years ago with the Oslo accords has undergone two fundamental transformations. It is now on the brink of a third.

The first was the crossing of a threshold by Israel's settlement project in the West Bank; there is no longer any prospect of its removal by this or any future Israeli government, which was the precise goal of the settlements' relentless expansion all along. The previous prime minister, Ehud Olmert, who declared that a peace accord requires Israel to withdraw "from most, if not all" of the occupied territories, "including East Jerusalem," was unable even to remove any of the 20 hilltop outposts Israel had solemnly promised to dismantle.

A two-state solution could therefore come about only if Israel were compelled to withdraw to the pre-1967 border by an outside power whose wishes an Israeli government could not defy - the US. The assumption has always been that at the point where Israel's colonial ambitions collide with critical US national interests, an American president would draw on the massive credit the US has accumulated with Israel to insist it dismantle its illegal settlements, which successive US administrations held to be the main obstacle to a peace accord.

The second transformation resulted from the shattering of that assumption when President Barack Obama - who took a more forceful stand against Israel's settlements than any of his predecessors, and did so at a time when the damage this unending conflict was causing American interests could not have been more obvious - backed off ignominiously in the face of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's rejection of his demand. This left prospects for a two-state accord dead in the water.

The disappearance of the two-state solution is triggering a third transformation, which is turning Israel from a democracy into an apartheid state. The democracy Israel provides for its (mostly) Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. A democracy reserved for privileged citizens while all others are denied individual and national rights and kept behind checkpoints, barbed wire fences and separation walls manned by Israel's military, is not democracy.

At first, the collapse of the assumptions on which hopes for a fair and just resolution of the Israel-Palestine conflict rested triggered much despair. But that despair has begun to turn to anger, and options for resolving the conflict, previously dismissed by the international community as unrealistic, are being looked at anew. That anger is also spawning a new global challenge to Israel's legitimacy.

read on...
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7b9d836e-20e4-11df-b920-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

[aquart]

1. "Legitimacy" for Israel?

That would be the same "legitimacy" that Republicans grant Democrats. Give them everything they want and you still have none.

[Douglas Carpenter]

2. that is an excellent article from the Financial Times of London

Mr Netanyahu's government has hardly been indifferent to the seriousness of this challenge. A study by one of Israel's leading policy institutes warning of this looming global threat to the country's legitimacy was taken up by Israel's cabinet, and described by its members as constituting as grave a danger to the country's existence as the nuclear threat from Iran. Unfortunately - if predictably - the government's response has been to mount a campaign to discredit critics as anti-Semitic enemies of Israel, rather than abandoning the policies that are transforming it into an apartheid state.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/7b9d836e-20e4-11df-b920-00144feab49a.html?nclick_check=1

Reminds me of what Bradley Burston of Haaretz said in a recent article,"Determined to take our fate into its own hands. Israel, at its highest level, has decided that the job of delegitimizing the Jewish state must not be left to foreigners and amateurs. Showing itself desperate to be a pariah state, Israel will now get it done on its own."

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1150799.html

[shergald]

3. Siegman is a no words barred analyst. Who doesn't like him if only for his candor.

Israelis are not listening. Barak just gave a talk at the recent Nerzliya Conference: "it is either peace with the Palestinians or Apartheid." Peace is ill defined, but everyone knows what Apartheid is.

I can't imagine what it will be like as a citizen when the US begins its support of an Apartheid state, Israel. Well, Reagan its seems did support one, South Africa, on our behalf, with some sentiments believing that it was just part of his racist agenda (the Southern strategy, wouldn't you know). In spite of it, South African Apartheid was taken down. And Israeli Apartheid will suffer the same fate.

[oberliner]

4. Isn't he the former head of the AJC?

That group whose involvement in accusing the BBC of anti-semitism you are concerned about?

[azurnoir]

5. Yes he was head of AJC until 1994 I think the BBC

"controversy" was a bit more recent, here is more on Seigman's more recent activity

He is a former Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.<4> Prior to that, he was the Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress (1978-1994). He frequently appeared on Charlie Rose to comment on Israel related topics and contributed to the International Herald Tribune, the Financial Times, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times and other publications
Siegman's opinions

Siegman is a frequent critic of the Israeli policies in the West Bank.<5> Former Israel ambassador to the United States Itamar Rabinovich identified his views as similar to that of Meretz's left wing.<6> Siegman supports the two-state solution and the moral equivalence in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.<7> He advocates engagement with Hamas<8><9> and recently visited Khaled Mashal, Hamas leader exiled in Syria.<10> He says that Yasser Arafat made a "disastrous mistake" in rejecting the peace offer, but claims that "based on my 14 years of dealings with Arafat, I reject the notion that he was bent on Israel's destruction."<11> Siegman is sharply critical of Ariel Sharon, about whom he wrote: "The war Sharon is waging is not aimed at the defeat of Palestinian terrorism but at the defeat of the Palestinian people and their aspirations for national self-determination."<12> He strongly defended former president Jimmy Carter's book Palestine Peace Not Apartheid.<13> He has also sharply criticized the peace efforts by Ehud Olmert and George W. Bush.<14> Siegman has described the process as a “scam” because of a “consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state”.<15> Writing in CounterPunch Magazine, Siegman states:

Their goal remains to prevent a peace process that would require them to halt Israel's expansion of its settlements and its effort to cut off East Jerusalem from its Palestinian hinterland.

—CounterPunch Magazine<16>

Siegman's works and opinions received a widespread recognition in the media. Radio Free Europe calls him "a leading U.S. expert on the Middle East."<17> Jewish daily The Forward credits him for publicizing the "Saudi plan".<18> Journalist David Rieff calls him "the most perceptive American observer-participant in the last two decades of Israeli-Palestine

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Siegman

my gosh he could almost fit the description of anti-semite applied to

uri avnery, avi shlaim, seth freedman, richard goldstone to name some the list grows almost daily that I have seen here on DU