Las Cruces, New Mexico
It’s almost comical to witness Vladimir Putin stumbling around Palestine, attempting to restore Russia’s tarnished image in Israel, an image packed away in a freezer bag after the 1967 “war” and the Soviet Union’s severance of diplomatic ties with the Zionist state. In 1985, the Soviet Union came crawling back, no longer insisting Israel relinquish the lands it had stolen from the Arabs, and advanced no further than establishing an ineffective consular mission. “Now there is a chance for a just Palestinian-Israeli settlement, primarily on the basis of the UN Security Council resolutions and the roadmap the UN Security Council has approved,” declared the former KGB spook. “Much will depend on the readiness of Israeli and Palestinian leaders to meet each other halfway in conformity to the Sharm el Sheikh accords.”
In other words, Putin expects the Palestinians to “conform” to Israel’s plans for additional grand larceny, magnanimously (as the corporate media insists) granting the Palestinians 18.1 per cent of the West Bank. “For the Israelis these were fake negotiations during which the settlements in the West Bank and Gaza grew and the daily life of Palestinians worsened,” notes professor Alain Joxe, director of the Interdisciplinary Centre for Research on Peace and Strategic Studies at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales. As Joxe correctly points out, since the supposed implementation of the Oslo Accords, the population of illegal Israeli colonial settlements on Palestinian land increased from 80,000 to 150,000, nearly doubling. Israel’s plan to reduce the West Bank to a series of isolated Bantustans is on track and it appears Putin agrees with the long-held Zionist plan to get rid of all the Palestinians — or at least make life hellish for those who remain, locked behind Israel’s apartheid wall in their impoverished ghettoes, suffering from rampant unemployment and malnutrition rates on par with sub-Saharan Africa, according to the House of Commons International Development Committee. However, as Joxe explains, crushing Palestinian nationalism completely will be a tough nut to crack. “The Algerian people had been crushed militarily, like the Palestinians. But they were not crushed politically, and de Gaulle decided to make peace.” Ariel Sharon, of course, is no Charles de Gaulle. For Sharon, there is no political solution, only Palestinian compliance.
“Russia will continue to offer aid to the Palestinian Authority to implement reforms and construct a state,” said the Russian busy-body, obviously eager to secure a comfortable place for his ego in the history books. “We support the efforts of President Abbas to reform the security services and fight against terrorism,” in other words, Israel’s unending effort to snuff out Palestinian nationalism, deemed terrorism, as national liberation movements are invariably described by colonialists. Mahmoud Abbas, acting as a kapo for the Israelis, is a key architect of the Oslo Accords selling out the Palestinian people and is co-author of the Beilin-Abu Mazen Understanding (1995), which rescinds the Palestinian refugees’ right of return. Yossi Beilin summarizes: “They [the Palestinians] are willing to accept an agreement which gives up much land, without the dismantling of settlements, with no return to the ’67 border, and with an arrangement in Jerusalem which is less than municipality level.” In other words, Mahmoud Abbas, aka Abu Mazen, long ago sold out the Palestinian people and will continue to do so now that Arafat is dead — likely poisoned, as Dr. Ashraf Al Kurdi, Arafat’s personal physician for over 25 years, related in a recent interview — and Abbas was “elected” president, an “election” held, as Khaled Amayreh noted for the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram late last year, “in the shadow of Israeli tanks.”
Not that it matters. As the independent Palestinian political analyst Omar Barghouti notes, the “elections” determined the leader of the Palestinian Authority, not of the Palestinian people. “Israel and the United States helped create the PA specifically to control the occupied territories,” writes Barghouti for the Colorado Campaign for Middle East Peace, “and eventually to sign some ‘peace’ treaty that would exonerate Israel from its legal and moral obligations to allow the repatriation and compensation of the Palestinian refugees, to comprehensively withdraw its entire colonial apparatus from the West Bank and Gaza — not just by removing its army but also its Jewish colonies, illegal under international law — and to end its system of racial discrimination against its own Palestinian citizens.” In fact, as Barghouti notes, for most Palestinians the PA is irrelevant and they “are increasingly becoming well-organized, politically active and they have developed their own channels of expression.” It is Abu Mazen’s job, as a kapo in the service of Israel and the United States, to make sure this political activism is destroyed, as demanded by Sharon and the Likudites. Abbas is a near perfect candidate for the job precisely because he is “colorless, moderately corrupt, and without any clear ideas of his own, except that he wants to please the white man,” as the lateEdward Said characterized him.
Vladimir Putin wants to restore Russia’s faded glory and at the same time help turn Abbas’ PA — systematically targeted and destroyed under Arafat’s rule, since it was not sufficiently obeisant or staffed with Stepford Arabs — into a lean, mean anti-nationalist fighting machine. “We will give the Palestinian leadership technical help and deliveries of (military) equipment and training,” averred Putin from Ramallah. “If we expect President Abbas to fight effectively against terrorism, we cannot expect him to do this with stones.” In short, Putin wants to make sure Abbas and the PA have the correct tools to strangle Palestinian nationalism, as demanded by Sharon and his Jabotinskyite syndicate of avowed Zionists.
Israel, however, apparently wants Abbas to go after fellow Palestinians with stones, as Israeli officials told the Bushcons Elliot Abrams and David Welch to go fish, no way will they assent to allow the PA to get their hands on the “needed materiel” required to “disarm the resistance groups,” as al-Jazeera puts it. As it turns out, even with a CIA “blueprint” designed to align “the structures, tasks, operations and recruitment policies of the Palestinian security services,” as revealed by the Sydney Morning Herald in August of 2002, more than a few Palestinian cops have joined up with Islamic Jihad and other resistance groups. “The Americans see the Palestinians as partners who have to be strengthen to turn into an island of stability,” a senior source in the Israeli “defense” establishment told Roni Shaked of Yediot Ahronot. “According to the American thesis, the better Palestinian intelligence is, the more terrorists they capture and the stabler the peace. This is a naive assumption that ignores the conflict between us and the Palestinians. The Americans relate to this as if it were a conflict between the Israeli-Palestinian side against Hamas.”
In fact, as less reticent Likudites readily and on occasion enthusiastically admit, Israel is at war with all Palestinians, not simply Hamas and Islamic Jihad, and Bush and Putin’s effort to “broker” a peace agreement — i.e., arm and train the PA and unleash it against recalcitrant Palestinian nationalists and thus allow Israel’s land-chomping pacman program to continue unhampered — is ultimately destined for failure, even though it is seriously lopsided in favor of Israel. Sharon and the Likudites will settle for nothing less than total subjugation of the Palestinian people, reducing them to “hewers of wood and drawers of water,” the fate suffered by the Hivites, one of the original tribes of Palestine, as solemnly illustrated in the Judeo-Christian Bible (Josh. 9:21). In fact, the Old Testament of the Bible can be used as a template for deprivations the Palestinians can expect if Israel is ultimately successful in its long-held quest: “And all the people that were left of the Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites, which were not of the children of Israel, their children that were left after them in the land, whom the children of Israel also were not able utterly to destroy, upon those did Solomon levy a tribute of bondservice unto this day.” (I Kings. 9:20-21). It is certainly a “bondservice” Sharon and the Likudites are imposing on the Palestinians.
Vladimir Putin’s little tour of Palestine is an exercise in futility. Sharon and Crew have absolutely no intention of implementing the so-called “roadmap” supposedly meandering in “phases” toward a Palestinian state, as envisioned by Russia, the European Union, and the United States. “We are committed to the implementation of a just peace with our Israeli neighbors and do not want to miss the opportunity which has presented itself,” said Abbas, obsequiously attempting to “please the white man,” as Said avouched the former PLO recruiter is wont to do. Of course, for Sharon and Crew, “just peace” translates into nothing less than imposed domestication, a populace resigned to its role as “hewers of wood and drawers of water” for their racist overlords.
As always, the only viable solution in response to the madness currently wracking the Middle East — and indeed the Israeli-Palestinian crisis is at the heart of that violent madness — is a return to the 4 June 1967 borders, as mandated by United Nations Security Council Resolution 242. No doubt more than a few Palestinians would like to see a return to the 29 November 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine but that will never happen, not so long as the Zionists — many whom consider the Palestinians on par with the biblical Amorites, Hittites, Perizzites, Hivites, and Jebusites — pedal the influence they do, not only in the United States but Putin’s Russia as well.
KURT NIMMO is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/ . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair’s, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.
He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com
