Eviscerating Obama's outreach to Muslims, Israel's premier offers occupation under another name as the basis of a final peace with the Palestinians, writes Saleh Al-Naami Satisfaction was plainly written on the faces of the teaching staff at Bar Ilon University as they listened to the speech of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, who chose their university as the site for delivering his response to US President Barack Obama's Cairo University address. Yet their satisfaction was not only related to the premier's choice of location. They were also pleased with the content. Bar Ilon University is considered one of Israel's fiercest extreme right strongholds, and its graduates include Yugal Amir, who assassinated prime minister Yitzhak Rabin in late 1995, and Baruch Goldstein, who killed 29 Palestinians in prayer one dawn in February 1994. Netanyahu's speech met the expectations of it, granting credibility to Israeli media claims that he had reached a prior agreement over every word in it with the extreme right leaders in his government. This is what led the leaders of the Jewish Home Party, which represents radical settlers in the West Bank, to refer to Netanyahu's speech as "courageous". As expected, the speech was merely a verbal offering to the US administration with the goal of avoiding obligations related to a political settlement of the Arab-Israeli conflict by dictating a long list of impeding conditions for the Palestinians to meet while also creating a mirage. Indeed, the speech was void of anything that would guarantee that a political settlement is reached. This led Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO) Negotiations Department Director Saeb Erekat, one of the Palestinian officials most intent on negotiations with Israel, to say that "Netanyahu could wait 1,000 years and he'd never find a Palestinian he could reach a settlement with on the basis of his speech." By the end of his speech, Netanyahu had asked the Palestinians seven times to recognise Israel as the national homeland of the Jewish people. This demand that extreme right leaders in Israel are so passionate about means that Palestinians and Arabs would recognise Israel's right to do as it sees fit in order to guarantee the presence of a Jewish demographic majority, including getting rid of the "1948 Palestinians" who form more than 20 per cent of Israel's population. Although Netanyahu rejected the placement of prior conditions on peace talks, he also placed several stipulations that would shape the outcome of any negotiations to reach a peace settlement, including the following. - The stipulation that the Palestinians resolve the issue of refugees outside the borders of Palestine, meaning that everything related to this issue is beyond the scope of negotiation. Netanyahu treats the refugee issue as a humanitarian issue that Israel has no relation to and that requires the international community to solve it. This despite the fact that the refugees fled as a result of Israeli army massacres during the 1948 war. - There will be no scope for negotiating over Jerusalem. According to Netanyahu, the city will eternally remain the unified and undivided capital of Israel. Jerusalem has come to form 15 per cent of the West Bank's area since successive Israeli governments have annexed settlements to it starting in 1967. - Netanyahu struck at President Obama when he stressed the right of Jewish settlers to construct in order to meet the demands of their natural growth. In doing so, Netanyahu sought to mislead the Americans, for he promised that no Palestinian land would be seized to build new settlements upon. Netanyahu knows well that he doesn't need to seize new Palestinian land in order to construct new settlements, for Israel has a large store of land already seized from the Palestinians on which it can build residential units for hundreds of thousands of settlers. The misleading nature of Netanyahu's doubletalk of the need to meet the demands of natural growth is made clear by data from the Israeli Central Statistics Bureau. The number of settlers in the West Bank has jumped from 110,000 when the Oslo Accords were signed in 1993 to 300,000 at the present time. In occupied Jerusalem, the number of settlers has leaped from 80,000 to 200,000. In other words, if we gave in to the logic of "natural growth", the number of Jewish settlers might reach a million, which would mean increasing the number of Israeli settlements and residential units in the West Bank, which Netanyahu described many times during his speech as the "land of the forefathers". - Netanyahu demanded security arrangements that would guarantee Israel's capacity for self-defence. Even though this demand carries little real meaning, Netanyahu has gone to great lengths on numerous occasions to explain what he means by security arrangements. Netanyahu holds that any settlement must entail Israel maintaining the Jordan Valley region, which forms 20 per cent of the West Bank, and the Israeli army maintaining control over the West Bank's mountain peaks and freshwater reservoirs. If we add the area of these sites to the land where there are settlements and the annexation wall, as well as Jerusalem and its surrounding settlements, less than 50 per cent of the West Bank would be left for the Palestinians, and this area would be geographically non-contiguous. - Netanyahu clearly stipulated that negotiations would only be entered into with the Palestinian Authority (PA) led by President Mahmoud Abbas and in control of the Gaza Strip, meaning that Hamas rule in Gaza must be overturned. In other words, Netanyahu is stipulating a Palestinian civil war between Fatah and Hamas in order to negotiate with the PA. Under all these hindering stipulations, the most that Netanyahu is offering to the Palestinians is a state that lacks any real sovereignty. As Netanyahu clearly stated, this state would not have the right to control its borders with its neighbours or to run its border crossings. It would further be demilitarised, and would even be barred from freely forming foreign alliances independently of Israel. It seems ungainly that President Obama would welcome Netanyahu's speech, and this raises questions over the actual change mentioned in his Cairo University speech. This questioning is made all the more insistent by the steps the Obama administration has taken towards congruence with Netanyahu, despite his openly declared positions that contradict Obama's on a settlement to the conflict. In his recent visit to Israel, US envoy George Mitchell drew attention when he denied the accusations attributed to him that Israel's governments have been providing misleading reports on settlement activity in the West Bank. He also tried to grow closer to Netanyahu by speaking of "Jewish" Israel, a characterisation that conforms to the Israeli demand that the Palestinians recognise Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people. It is ironic that at the time Mitchell reneged on his accusations of Israel lying in its reports on settlement activity, the leader of the settlers in the West Bank admitted that Israel's governments had relied on a "culture of lying" in its reports to the Americans on construction in the settlements. On an Israeli television Channel 10 programme last week, head of the right-wing National Union Party and prominent West Bank settler leader Jacob Katz said that a "magnificent" settlement project had been constructed in the West Bank through cooperation with Israel's governments in misleading the Americans. Katz said that former prime minister Ariel Sharon, when he was infrastructure minister in the government of Yitzhak Shamir, had contacted him and asked how many residential units had been built in the settlements and he replied 15,000. Sharon responded in an apologetic tone that he was not the one asking, but rather Shamir, and agreed with him to tell Shamir that 12,000 units had been built. An hour later Sharon contacted him again and asked him to only talk about 8,000 units. Katz says that he and Sharon were in contact until the end of the day, when it was finally agreed that Shamir would be informed that only 2,000 residential units had been built. Katz says that in turn Shamir only informed the Americans of 1,000 constructed units. At this current time of division, Palestinian consensus on anything is rare, and yet all the Palestinian factions are in absolute agreement with regards to rejecting Netanyahu's speech. Spokesperson for the Palestinian President's Office, Nabil Abu Rudeineh, says the speech "destroyed all peace initiatives and solutions" in the region. He begs the US administration to take responsibility for countering its orientation. Meanwhile, PLO Secretary Yasser Abed Rabbo says that Netanyahu wants to "form a Palestine state that is an Israeli protectorate, as though he wanted the Palestinians to join the Zionist movement." He also says that Netanyahu is trying to impose a solution in which there are no rights for refugees, no Jerusalem, and no sovereignty. Hamas spokesperson Fawzi Barhoum said that the speech reflected a "racist and extremist ideology" that "destroys all the rights of the Palestinian people". Barhoum says that Netanyahu's speech "supports his government's extremist and racist programme that aims to make the Palestinian people a mere tool for protecting the occupation while stripping it of its rights and principles".
