By Angie Todd:
IN his carefully prepared speech to a Muslim audience at the University of Cairo, Egypt on June 4, Barack Obama, the current U.S. president, correctly recognized that central to peace in the Middle East is the solution to what he described as the situation between Israelis, Palestinians and the Arab world.
He first made it clear that "America's strong bonds with Israel are well known. This bond is unbreakable…" he affirmed, before going on to state, "It is also undeniable that the Palestinian people, Muslims and Christians, have suffered in pursuit of a homeland..." – as if they never had one that was taken from them – "for more than 60 years they have endured the pain of dislocation…"
The choice of the word ‘dislocation’ is likewise a tremendous euphemism for the initial assaults on Palestinians living in land that remained theirs after the initial division of the Palestinian state in 1948, resulting in up to 950,000 refugees; the Israeli war of expansion in 1967, which produced a further approximate total of 300,000 exiles forced to flee to Jordan, Syria and the Lebanon, among other neighboring countries; and a steady aggressive expansion ever since, plus the ferocious military containment of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.
In Cairo, the U.S. president’s only clear demand of his Israeli allies referred to Israeli territorial expansion: "The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements. This construction violates previous agreements and undermines efforts to achieve peace. It is time for these settlements to stop."
Obama’s Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had also issued clear ‘orders’ on that subject to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when he visited the United States shortly before the June 4 address to Muslims in Egypt.
However, back in Israel, the recently elected Israeli premier’s response was not promising. After referring to "understandings" over such encroachments agreed with the Bush administration, in a major speech on June 14 he came out with a new version of expansionism within the West Bank, re-labeling it "natural growth, as opposed to "freezing family life." Washington’s initial response to that was one of "cautious optimism."
And ongoing Israeli expansions/expropriations within Jerusalem and the West Bank are moving strongly ahead, via strategies illustrated in a recent Al Jazeera Television series. The following excerpts are taken from its online site:
"Israel has approved the construction of 50 new homes in a West Bank settlement and announced plans to expropriate more Palestinian land.
"The Israeli Defense Ministry presented plans to the Supreme Court to relocate settlers from an illegal outpost in the West Bank to a settlement north of Jerusalem.
"And there are plans for another 1,400 housing units at the site, Israel's anti-settlement group Peace Now told the court. But Gabriela Shalev, Israel's UN ambassador, said on June 29 that the Obama administration had assured Israel that it would continue defending it at the UN.
"We were told explicitly [by the Americans] that there are no consultations and no discussions at all within the administration in this direction," Shalev told Israel's Channel Ten television.
"Some 500,000 Israelis live among 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, land Israel captured in the 1967 Middle East war.
"This would be the largest area of land ever confiscated by Israel in one go since 1967" stated Hatem Abdel-Qader, Palestinian minister."
"The Palestinian village of Silwan clings to a steep hillside facing the southern walls of Jerusalem's Old City.
"In the valley below, Al Bustan neighbourhood stretches out in the shadow of Haram al-Sharif.
"The Israeli authorities in Jerusalem have plans for the network of narrow alleyways and walled compounds that make up Al Bustan. They say the area has been ear-marked for parks and open spaces – and most of the homes here were built without permits.
"A total of 88 buildings have received demolition orders from the Israeli-controlled Jerusalem municipality. If the municipality proceeds with its demolition plans, 1,500 people will become homeless.
"…another person who risks losing his home is the local imam, Sheikh Mousa Mahmoud Odeh. He believes there is a systematic plan to remove Palestinians from areas close to the Old City and redevelop the area for Jewish residents and the tourism industry. And he accuses the municipality of working hand-in-hand with right-wing Jewish settler groups.
"I see a black future," said Sheikh Mousa. "The Jews are trying to displace all the Palestinians – from Silwan and from Jerusalem itself – so they can build a so-called 'holy basin'… "They consider all places overlooking Al-Aqsa mosque to be part of that holy basin. I think that we have lost Jerusalem."
"As the Palestinians are being squeezed out, the settlers are creeping in.
"There are now about 70 Jewish families living in the Silwan area. They either buy homes from Palestinians or simply grab them under Israel's Absentee Property Law."
The article concludes by stating: "The Fourth Geneva Convention forbids an occupying power from destroying the property of people living in the territory it controls."
"Adalah, a legal centre for Arab rights in Israel, claims that the possibility of Palestinians returning to the homes they left in what is now Israel is slowly being eroded away by the sale of an increasing number of their properties to private individuals.
"In most cases, the original owners are either in exile or unable to afford the prices offered by tender on the Israel land administration website.
"Based on its law, Israel is allowed, as a state, to use this property. However it is not allowed to sell it to private hands," Hassan Jabareen, the managing director of Adalah, said.
"But at least 282 homes have been sold in the past two-and-a-half years." he told Al Jazeera.
"Israel calls them "absentee properties" – houses and land belonging to nearly 700,000 Palestinians who left or were expelled when Israel was created in 1948.
"The Palestinians have always argued that the refugees should be allowed to go back, even to lands that are now part of Israel.
"Some of the refugees scattered across the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria and beyond even keep the deeds and the keys for their old properties in the hope they will one day return."
In the last week of August, Netanyahu visited London and Germany prior to an Israeli delegation meeting with George Mitchell, the U.S. peace envoy. His tour prompted contradictory press coverage, from tensions between Washington and Israel in the settlements context, to major advances on the same issue, with "a harder line on Iran in exchange for a "partial freezing." (London). In Germany, Merkel told him that, for her country, "halting the construction of settlements is… a condition for re-launching the peace process."
However, the Israeli government appeared to be anything but deterred and Netanyahu himself made no reference to the matter in press conferences in those two countries.
After the Obama meeting in New York on September 22 with President Ahmoud Abbas of Palestine and a smug Netanyahu, Mitchell told reporters: "We are not identifying any issue as a precondition or as an impediment for negotiations," thus officially announcing the U.S. capitulation.
All that remained were Obama’s insubstantial statements in his speech to the UN General Assembly.
Given that the United States is the central agent of any renewal of the peace process, none of the Israeli actions within Jerusalem reported in the Al Jazeera series are counter to the U.S. president’s thinking on an Israeli-Palestine peace process, despite the settlements issue. According to the electronicintifada.net website, Obama is insisting that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel and it must remain undivided" – despite the fact that East Jerusalem remains the designated capital of a future Palestinian state, in line with the Oslo Accords and the Road Map peace process.
In relation to Palestinian refugees, the U.S. president’s appraisal is that "the right of return is something that is not an option in a literal sense (Ibid)." Yet another euphemism, as what other ‘sense’ is there apart from a virtual one, or its elimination?
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