VIVA PALESTINE

What does the US get from the financial and military backing of Israel?  In the other case it abundantly clear that the native Palestinians have been dealt ongoing injustice and dispossession.

Jason Koutsoukis reports in The Sydney Morning Herald, Benjamin Nethanyahu as saying that Israel was prepared to make generous concessions for peace, but if the Palestinians declared a separate state, following the Israeli example, Israel threatens to take unilateral action by pulling the plug on previous agreements.

According to the report by AFP, in The Raw Story, the US Government is singing from the same song sheet as the Israeli Government:

The United States voiced opposition Monday to unilateral Palestinian moves to seek recognition for an independent state, saying negotiations with Israel were the best way forward.

A State Department spokesman reiterated US commitment to a future Palestinian state but poured cold water on an initiative to ask the United Nations Security Council to recognize a state unilaterally.

“We support the creation of a Palestinian state that is contiguous…. We are convinced that has to be achieved through negotiations between two parties,” said spokesman Ian Kelly.

Chris Hedges put the counter view. Firstly he observes the historical situation:

The collapse of the Palestinian Authority, the result of Israel’s 42-year refusal to implement a two-state solution, leaves the Palestinians no option but to unilaterally declare an independent state. Israel acted unilaterally when it announced independence in 1948. It is the Palestinians’ turn. It worked in Kosovo. It worked in Georgia. And it will work in Palestine. There are 192 member states in the United Nations and as many as 150 would recognize the state of Palestine, creating a diplomatic nightmare for Israel and its lonely ally the United States. Israel will face worldwide censure if it attempts to crush the independent state by force and very likely be subjected to the kind of divestment campaigns and boycotts that brought down the apartheid government of South Africa.

It is astonishing that the people that suffered the Holocaust have in their turn engaged in systematic cruelty toward another set of people. Chris Hedges notes:

The Israelis have orchestrated acute misery and poverty in the Palestinian territories over the past two decades in an effort to subdue and ethnically cleanse the captive population. They have reduced Palestinians, many of whom now live on less than $2 a day, to a subsistence level. They have created squalid, lawless and impoverished ghettos in the West Bank and Gaza. Israeli soldiers, who ring these ghettos, have the ability to instantly shut off food, medicine and goods to perpetuate the misery. Israel, when the Palestinians grow restive, drops 1,000-pound iron fragmentation bombs and artillery shells-as they did a year ago in Gaza-on the concrete hovels that pack neighborhoods. The Israeli objective is to turn the Palestinian territories into a hell on earth. This policy has, however, swollen the ranks of radical Islamists in the occupied territories and throughout the Middle East.

Nobody has to look very far to see an important contributing factor to asymmetrical conflict and more generally to the cause of terrorism. In this case the fundamental issue is the failure of national states due to perceived advantage and use of threat power and violence to acknowledge justice and to institutionalize injustice through the existing state system, including the UN Security Council.

In the meantime, while the international players did nothing but talk, a new truck convoy is planned to set out for Gaza on 5 December .

ELSEWHERE:

The  EU has decided not to support a Palestinian State.

Ray McGovern supports the conclusion reached here in the context of the proposed trials in the US of those suspected of been associated with the attacks on 11 September, over eight years ago.

BBC reports continuing settlement building in East Jerusalem.