Egypt and the Palestinian question

The Mubarak regime has been a tool with which Israel and the US have pressured Palestinians.

Abdullah Al-Arian
Aljazeera
Last Modified: 05 Feb 2011 13:50 GMT


There is a widespread view in Egypt that the Mubarak regime has served the interests of the West [GALLO/GETTY]

Along with the laundry list of domestic grievances expressed by Egyptian protesters calling for an end to the regime of Hosni Mubarak, the popular perception of Egypt's foreign policy has also been a focal point of the demonstrations.

Signs and chants have called on Mubarak to seek refuge in Tel Aviv, while his hastily appointed vice-president, Omar Suleiman, has been disparaged as a puppet of the US. Egypt's widely publicised sale of natural gas to Israel at rock bottom prices has featured in many refrains emanating from the crowds.

The widespread view among Egyptians that the regime has served the interests of the West has not been helped by Israel's call for world leaders to support Mubarak, or the apparent unwillingness by American officials to give the protests their full backing.

Plummeting status

In the shadow of the current cries to topple the Egyptian regime, the Mubarak government has had a tough time keeping its role in international affairs out of public view.

In the area where Egypt's foreign policy apparatus has served US interests most directly, Israel's security, the Mubarak regime's complicity in the failure to establish a Palestinian state has become widely publicised in recent years. Its role in placing the stranglehold on the people of Gaza, in conjunction with Israel, has seen Egypt's status in the region plummet to a level it has not reached in decades.

The Palestine Papers, the leaked internal documents of the Palestinian Authority (PA) that were recently exposed by Al Jazeera, provide further confirmation of Egypt's role in the impasse between Israeli and Palestinian negotiators.

While much of the coverage of the Palestine Papers has focused on the unprecedented concessions offered by Palestinian negotiators, and how swiftly they were spurned by Israeli and American representatives, Egypt's role as an instrument for added pressure stands out from the internal records.

As the peace process broke down over the past decade, Egypt was a party to many of the discussions and central to the security arrangements made between the PA and Israel.

Egyptian duplicity

Throughout the documents, Suleiman in particular is singled out as the point person whom Israeli and American officials could count on to execute their agenda of dividing the Palestinian factions or pressing the PA for greater concessions.

Barely a few months after the January 2006 Palestinian elections that resulted in a Hamas victory, PA leaders were already appealing for assistance in fending off their political opponents. At a meeting between leading Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat and US General Keith Dayton, the latter assured the Palestinians that the American administration is committed to reinforcing the PA's Presidential Guard to maintain Mahmoud Abbas' authority in the face of the newly elected Hamas government.

In support of his pledge, Dayton referred to discussions with Suleiman, who committed Egypt, along with Jordan, to providing training and equipment, "even at their own expense".

Later in the year, as the Palestinian factions were engaged in negotiations over the formation of a unity government, a European diplomat told Erekat that the American position on unifying the Palestinians was "prematurely negative". Erekat agreed, adding that Suleiman had also been discouraging of those efforts, saying that they would not work.

In early 2007, as the siege on Gaza had crippling consequences on the lives of Palestinians, negotiators complained that Egyptian leaders were duplicitous, speaking publicly in support of allowing goods into Gaza, but in reality, "it remains blocked on the ground .... This is a general problem with the Egyptians".

An internal report from April 2007 confirms these suspicions. The Agreement on Movement and Access states: "Although there has been political agreement by Omar Suleiman and President Mubarak on allowing exports through, this agreement has never been translated into operational reality."

Conditions in Gaza only worsened in the months ahead, thanks in large part to the stranglehold imposed by Israel and Egypt. As Hamas assumed sole control of Gaza by preventing a coup attempt by US-backed PA forces, Egypt determined to seal off the border.

In a February 2008 meeting between Ahmed Qurei, a high-ranking PA official, and Tzipi Livni, the then Israeli foreign minister, Qurei relayed the Egyptian position conveyed to him by their leader. "President Mubarak said they'll close down the borders after Sunday and whoever is caught on Egyptian territories will be considered illegal."

The situation came to a stalemate in the months leading up to Israel's December 2008 assault on Gaza that resulted in the deaths of 1,500 Palestinians, most of them civilians. As tensions were heightened, Erekat lamented to his Israeli counterpart that Suleiman was forced to cancel a meeting in the occupied territories. Amos Gilad, the director of Israeli military intelligence, speculated: "Regarding Omar Suleiman, maybe he delayed because he is afraid we will attack while he is here. It will hurt him. He will look like a collaborator."

A tool to pressure Palestinians

The image of Egyptian officials as tools to pressure the Palestinians also emerges out of conversations between US and Palestinian officials. In late 2009, George Mitchell, Barack Obama's envoy to the region, told Erekat that he had spoken with Suleiman and the two agreed that the PA could unilaterally declare new elections without any input from Hamas.

Furthermore, Mitchell and Suleiman agreed that any agreement would have to permanently eradicate any Hamas presence in the West Bank, while at the same time allowing the PA to resume control of Gaza, terms Hamas was sure to reject. But as Egypt was preparing a document on how the PA should proceed, Erekat assured Mitchell that: "Abu Mazen [Mahmoud Abbas] won't say no to whatever the Egyptians present to him".

Even when it appeared that the Egyptians were attempting to display some degree of autonomy, it became more evident in the documents that external pressure was never too far behind. Only a few weeks later, Erekat complained to US negotiators that Egypt's latest efforts to reconcile the Palestinian factions were straying from the official line. Daniel Rubenstein, the US consul general and chief of mission in Jerusalem, responded: "I can tell you, we did put pressure on the Egyptians. I read the document. It was a disaster."

As Erekat continued to grumble about the PA's weakened position and Egypt's lack of cooperation, General James Jones, the US special envoy for Middle East security, abruptly ended the meeting with his words: "It's insulting. We'll take care of this."

Jones appeared to have lived up to his promise. Only three months later, in January 2010, US negotiator David Hale assured Erekat that in recent talks with Suleiman: "The Egyptians brought ideas similar to our thinking."

In this instance, the US appeared to put pressure on the PA to accept the latest proposals by giving the impression that the US and its allies in the region were unified in their position. Hale further added of the Egyptians: "They talked with Netanyahu and think he is serious."

'Egypt's number two'

Given the critical role that Suleiman has played in advancing US and Israeli objectives, it was no surprise that Mubarak chose to appoint him as vice-president on January 29, a move rejected by protesters, but reassuring to Egypt's Western patrons. In the leaked documents, Israeli officials were already referring to Suleiman as "Egypt's Number Two" at a time when most observers believed that Mubarak was grooming his son to be succeed him.

Among Western policymakers, it seems Suleiman remains a popular choice to replace Mubarak, as the candidate uniquely suited to maintaining Egypt's current foreign policy, while also addressing domestic grievances expressed by protesters. That remains a distant prospect, given the unlikelihood that the Egyptian opposition would abandon its call to determine the nation's role in regional affairs. But it also demonstrates that, unlike Tunisia, Egypt is far too critical to US objectives in the Middle East to be left to its own devices.

Whatever the outcome in Egypt, it is clear that the recent revelations will have a dramatic impact on the settlement of the Palestinian question. Already weakened by the scandal of the Palestine Papers, Erekat may now have to do without the support of an Egyptian regime he termed, "our ally, our backbone".

In his first interview as vice-president, Suleiman decried as "unacceptable" what he called "foreign interference" in Egypt's current turmoil. Coming from a regime whose ability to endure through the decades is owed largely to foreign interference, the irony of those words will not be lost on the Egyptian people.

Abdullah Al-Arian is a doctoral candidate in the department of history at Georgetown University.

The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.

Zionist Prime Minister to meet with President Obama

US questions its unwavering support for Israel: Consensus forming in Washington that Israeli government is abusing support with policies seen to be risking US lives

Chris McGreal
The Guardian
Monday 5 July 2010

There are questions that rarely get asked in Washington. For years, the mantra that America's intimate alliance with Israel was as good for the US as it was the Jewish state went largely unchallenged by politicians aware of the cost of anything but unwavering support.


Binyamin Netanyahu, left, arrives in Washington tomorrow to patch up relations with Barack Obama and the US administration. Photograph: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images

But swirling in the background when Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, arrives in Washington tomorrow to patch up relations with the White House will be a question rarely voiced until recently: is Israel ‑ or, at the very least, its current government ‑ endangering US security and American troops?

Netanyahu would prefer to be seen as an indispensable ally in confronting Islamist terror. But his insistence on building Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem, which is causing a deep rift with Washington, is seen as evidence of a lack of serious interest in the establishment of a viable Palestinian state. That in turn is seen as fuelling hostility towards the US in other parts of the Middle East and beyond, because America is perceived as Israel's shield.

In recent months Barack Obama has said that resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was a "vital national security interest of the United States". His vice-president, Joe Biden, has confronted Netanyahu in private and told the Israeli leader that Israel's policies are endangering US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. Senior figures in the American military, including General David Petraeus who has commanded US forces in both wars, have identified Israel's continued occupation of Palestinian land as an obstacle to resolving those conflicts.

More recently, Israel's assault on ships attempting to break the Gaza blockade has compromised relations with Turkey, an important American strategic ally.A former director of intelligence assessment for the US defence secretary, last month caused waves with a paper called Israel as a Strategic Liability? In it, Anthony Cordesman, who has written extensively on the Middle East, noted a shift in thinking at the White House, the US state department and, perhaps crucially, the Pentagon over the impact of Washington's long-unquestioning support for Israeli policies even those that have undermined the prospects for peace with the Palestinians.

He wrote that the US will not abandon Israel because it has a moral commitment to ensure the continued survival of the Jewish state. "At the same time, the depth of America's moral commitment does not justify or excuse actions by an Israeli government that unnecessarily make Israel a strategic liability when it should remain an asset. It does not mean that the United States should extend support to an Israeli government when that government fails to credibly pursue peace with its neighbours.

"It is time Israel realised that it has obligations to the United States, as well as the United States to Israel, and that it become far more careful about the extent to which it test the limits of US patience and exploits the support of American Jews."

Cordesman told the Guardian that the Netanyahu government has maintained a "pattern of conduct" that has pushed the balance toward Israel being more of a liability than an asset.

"This Israeli government pushed the margin too far," he said. "Gaza was one case in point, the issue of construction in Jerusalem, the lack of willingness to react in ways that serve Israel's interests as well as ours in moving forward to at least pursue a peace process more actively."

It was a point made forcefully by Biden to Netanyahu in March after the Israelis humiliated the American during a visit to Jerusalem by announcing the construction of 1,600 more Jewish homes in the city's occupied east.

The Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth reported that at a meeting between the two men, Biden angrily accused Israel's prime minister of jeopardising US soldiers by continuing to tighten the Jewish state's grip on Jerusalem.

"This is starting to get dangerous for us. What you're doing here undermines the security of our troops who are fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. That endangers us and it endangers regional peace," Biden told Netanyahu.

Obama's chief political adviser, David Axelrod, said the settlement construction plans "seemed calculated to undermine" efforts to get fresh peace talks off the ground and that "it is important for our own security that we move forward and resolve this very difficult issue".

Netanyahu sought to head off the issue when he spoke to pro-Israeli lobbyists in Washington earlier this year. "For decades, Israel served as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Today it is helping America stem the tide of militant Islam. Israel shares with America everything we know about fighting a new kind of enemy," he said. "We share intelligence. We co-operate in countless other ways that I am not at liberty to divulge. This co-operation is important for Israel and is helping save American lives."

But that argument is less persuasive to the Americans now. Last month, Israel's ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, said the Jewish state had suffered a "tectonic rift" with America. "There is no crisis in Israel-US relations because in a crisis there are ups and downs," he told Israeli diplomats in Jerusalem. "Relations are in the state of a tectonic rift in which continents are drifting apart."

Oren said that assessments of Israeli policy at the White House have moved away from the historic and ideological underpinnings of earlier administrations in favour of a cold calculation.

Cordesman said it is too early to tell whether Netanyahu has fully grasped that while there will be no change in the fundamental security guarantees the US gives Israel, "the days of the blank cheque are over".

He added: "I think it is clear there is more thought on how to deal with Gaza, how to deal with the underlying humanitarian issues, less creating kinds of pressures which frankly, from the viewpoint of an outside observer, have tended to push Hamas not toward an accommodation but toward a harder line while creating of all things an extremist challenge to Hamas. But until you see the end result, some comments and some token actions don't tell you there's been a significant shift."

Editor's NOTE:

In opposition to the argument made by Anthony Cordesman that the United States has a moral obligation/committment to the security of Israel, the truth is that from a moral perspective, the modern state of Israel has no claim whatsoever to the land it currently occupies in Palestine since it was taken from the Palestinian Arabs by force (the Nakba).

If the US is to salvage the moral highground, it should insist that at a minimum Israel must (1) return to the pre-1967 borders, (2) allow the return of those exiled Palestinian Arabs who desire it and (3) properly compensate the victims (and or their families) of the Israeli atrocities in the period 1945-1950 during which several million Arabs were forcibly sent into exile and or murdered by the Hagana (pre-Israeli "defense" force). Israel should also make reparations to the remaining Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and Gaza who have been since 1967 subjected to occupation and progressive encroachment on their land.

All subsquent US aid to Israel should be made conditional on Israel's compliance with the "3" points above. Each American of good conscience should ask that this be done in our names and should frequently contact their Congressional Representatives, Senators and the Obama administration in an concerted effort to accomplish same.

The "two-state solution" is effectively dead as is any other so-called Israeli/Palestinian peace initiative unless and until Israel is willing to observe the bear minimum (universal) moral norms. Israel's current policy vis a vis Gaza and the West Bank are not only illegal under international law and US law but are gravely immoral (from an Aristotelian/Thomistic [golden-rule] perspective) as well.

--Dr. J. P. Hubert


How Did The Jewish Zionists Acquire Palestine?




The roots of Israeli exceptionalism

By Mohamed El-Moctar El-Shinqiti
Aljazeera
Monday, June 28, 2010
09:56 Mecca time, 06:56 GMT

An American academic once told me: "Many people in the Islamic world think America does not believe in human rights, but they are wrong; America believes in human rights indeed, the problem is the American definition of human."

In other words: the American definition of 'human' is not a universal one. This is not purely an American characteristic; every culture faces the challenge of broadening its cultural limits and universalising its moral norms.

But among all human cultures and ideologies, the Israeli case is unique in its double standard.

Criminality wrapped in self-righteousness and aggression immersed in victimhood are a few striking characteristics of the Israeli reality and discourse.

The Israeli personality

The duality of "Israel's insistent emphasis upon its isolation and uniqueness, its claim to be both victim and hero," as Tony Judt wrote in Haaretz a few years ago, reflects the fragility and self-centeredness of the Israeli personality. This is not, unfortunately, exclusive to Israel's political elite, but rather it extends to their Zionist supporters worldwide, including those, such as novelist Elie Wiesel and philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy, who portray themselves in humanistic and aesthetic images.

I was profoundly moved by the graphic description of the atrocities committed during the Holocaust in Elie Wiesel's Night, which depicts his and his father's experience of a terrifying process that violates human life and degrades human dignity.

But I was struck by the tone of self-righteousness and self-justification in Wiesel's fictional Dawn, particularly when he writes: "The commandment thou shalt not kill was given from the summit of one of the mountains here in Palestine, and we were the only ones to obey it. But that all over ... in the days and weeks and months to come, you will have only one purpose: to kill those who have made us killers."

When the Jewish South African judge, Richard Goldstone, exposed Israeli war crimes in Gaza, Wiesel called that "a crime against the Jewish people". But this is simply an immoral use of past atrocities as a moral justification for present brutalities and oppression.

Moreover, one cannot but entertain two questions here: Firstly, what kind of moral claim does Wiesel, who was born of a Romanian father and a Hungarian mother, have over the divine call at Mount Sinai in the heart of a Middle Eastern desert? And secondly, by which moral or legal norm are the Palestinians of today responsible for the wrongdoings of the Germans of yesterday?

Self-serving myths

Israel uses past atrocities as a moral justification for present brutalities [GETTY]The worst of this hypocritical language, however, can be found in Bernard-Henri Lévy's article about Israel's aggression against the Gaza Freedom Flotilla published in Haaretz on June 8, 2010.

Lévy presents himself in self-glorifying terms as being "someone who takes pride in having helped to conceive, with others, this kind of symbolic action ‏(the boat for Vietnam; the march for the survival of Cambodia in 1979)...".

But when it comes to Gaza's plight, Lévy simply dismisses the tragedy by denying the existence of the Israeli blockade and attacking easy targets, such as "the fascislamist government of Ismail Haniya" and "the Islamist gang who took power by force three years ago".

Thus, he shamelessly dismisses the grand effort of the multiethnic, multinational and religiously diverse group of humanistic leaders and activists on the Freedom Flotilla.

Moreover, Lévy lacks the objectivity to address the fascizionist - to borrow from his own terminology - gangs who aggressively invaded Palestinian land over six decades ago, and uprooted a whole population forcing them into the new Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps - Gaza and the West Bank.

Indeed, for those who put their selfish desires above the moral principles of justice and compassion, their self-serving myths are better in their eyes than the ugly truth.

Jewish humanistic intellectuals, such as Professor Tony Judt and musician Gilad Atzmon deplore Israel's self-indulgence and lack of maturity. Judt writes: "Israel still comports itself like an adolescent: consumed by a brittle confidence in its own uniqueness; certain that no one 'understands' it and everyone is 'against' it; full of wounded self-esteem, quick to take offence and quick to give it ... that it can do as it wishes, that its actions carry no consequences, and that it is immortal."

Atzmon writes: "We are dealing here with a uniquely and seriously disturbed immature nation. We are dealing with a self-loving narcissistic child .... The more the Israelis love themselves and their delusional phantasmic innocence, the more they are frightened that people out there may be as sadistic as they themselves proved to be. This behavioural mode is called projection .... Jews have a very good reason to be frightened. Their national state is a racist genocidal entity."

'Holocaustianity'

What is most disappointing, however, is not the Zionist self-righteousness and narcissism; rather it is the Western acceptance and support of this attitude - an attitude that is better understood when placed in a historical context.

The main theoretical basis of the acceptance of Israeli exceptionalism in Western culture is the diversion, mainly within the Protestant branch of Christianity, of the Christian incarnation of God in the person of Jesus to a new incarnation of God in the Jews as a people - the Chosen People.

This tendency started with Martin Luther (1483-1546) who subdued Christianity theologically and morally to the Jewish factor in his small epistle That Jesus Christ was Born a Jew. Luther wrote in that epistle: "When we are inclined to boast of our position, we should remember that we are but Gentiles, while the Jews are of the lineage of Christ. We are aliens and in-laws; they are blood relatives, cousins, and brothers of our Lord."

Through this Luther - who was paradoxically a staunch anti-Semite - inadvertently opened a theological window, that would centuries later allow the 'cult of Israel', as it has been dubbed by the American writer Grace Halsell, to replace Christianity in most Protestant denominations, especially among American Baptists. After all, what they are doing is no more than a literal implementation of Luther's deification of the Jews.

Professor Yvonne Haddad of Georgetown University's Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding calls this heresy 'Holocaustianity'. And within this new heresy lie the roots of the Israeli exceptionalism.

Trivialising the Holocaust

Israel is becoming a moral burden for those who value social justice [GETTY]Professor Judt writes that: "What Israel lost by its continuing occupation of Arab lands it gained through its close identification with the recovered memory of Europe's dead Jews." But he knows well that the memory of the dead is the worse moral justification for murdering innocents: "In the eyes of a watching world, the fact that the great-grandmother of an Israeli soldier died in Treblinka is no excuse for his own abusive treatment of a Palestinian woman waiting to cross a checkpoint. 'Remember Auschwitz' is not an acceptable response."

But that is exactly the kind of moral justification we have from the Israelis today.

When an advisor to Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, tried to attack Helen Thomas' remarks in which she said Israelis should "go home ... [to] Poland, Germany ..." all he did is remind her that some of his relatives were killed in Poland and Germany more than half a century ago, as if that is a good reason to starve the Palestinians to death and to kill humanitarian activists in international waters today.

After all, the Israeli politician was just confirming what Thomas said: you belong there; not here.

This is how the Holocaust memory, a memory of a human tragedy by any and every measure, is trivialised by Israeli criminality.

A moral burden

Many political thinkers and politicians have recently realised that Israel is becoming a liability and a strategic burden for the US. It has always been a strategic burden. But the problem is much deeper. Israel is becoming a moral burden on all those who have an ethical conscience, including Jews who value human dignity and social justice.

Even those who spent their lives advancing the Zionist cause are today realising the moral paradox of their life's achievement. Henry Siegman, a German-born American writer who served as the executive director of the American Jewish Congress from 1978 to 1994, wrote in Haaretz on June 11, 2010: "A million and a half civilians have been forced to live in an open-air prison in inhuman conditions for over three years now, but unlike the Hitler years, they are not Jews but Palestinians. Their jailers, incredibly, are survivors of the Holocaust, or their descendants."

All decent human beings must support the oppressed Palestinian against the Israeli oppressor.

The oppressed Arabs of Palestine (Muslims and Christians) are rendering through their suffering a great service to the entire body of humanity, by exposing the most self-centered and supremacist ideology in our world - an ideology that is wrapped today in a bloody sacredness.

US Funds Israel’s Apartheid Roads Plan

MORE EVIDENCE FOR ISRAELI APARTHEID STATE

Settlers benefit from Israeli-only routes

By Jonathan Cook

May 16, 2010 "Information Clearing House" -- Jerusalem -- The construction of sections of a controversial segregated road network in the West Bank planned by Israel for Palestinians -- leaving the main roads for exclusive use by settlers -- is being financed by a US government aid agency, a map prepared by Palestinian researchers has revealed.

USAid, which funds development projects in Palestinian areas, is reported to have helped to build 114km of Israeli-proposed roads, despite a pledge from Washington six years ago that it would not assist in implementing what has been widely described as Israel’s “apartheid road” plan.

To date the agency has paid for the construction of nearly a quarter of the segregated road network put forward by Israel in 2004, said the Applied Research Institute of Jerusalem (ARIJ).

The roads are designed to provide alternative routes to connect Palestinian communities, often by upgrading circuitous dirt tracks or by building tunnels under existing routes.

Meanwhile, according to human rights groups, Israel has reserved an increasing number of main roads in the West Bank for Israelis so that Jewish settlers can drive more easily and quickly into Israel, making their illegal communities more attractive places to live.

The US agency’s involvement in building a segregated West Bank road infrastructure would run counter to Washington’s oft-stated goal, including as it launched “proximity talks” last week, to establish a viable Palestinian state with territorial contiguity.

“The displacement of Palestinians from the West Bank’s main roads improves the appeal of the settlements by better integrating them into Israel,” said Suheil Khalilieh, the head of settlement monitoring at ARIJ. “Conversely, creating an inferior, alternative network of local roads makes travel between the main regions of the West Bank difficult and time-consuming for Palestinians.”

Israel proposed the creation of two separate road systems in 2004, after many of the West Bank’s main roads had been sealed off to Palestinians following the outbreak of the second intifada.

Ariel Sharon, the then-prime minister, argued that segregated infrastructure would create “contiguity of transportation” for Palestinians and help to alleviate economic hardship resulting from hundreds of roadblocks and checkpoints that restrict Palestinian movement.

The international community was asked to finance 500km of roads for the Palestinians, later termed “fabric of life” roads, including upgrading agricultural tracks and constructing many underpasses and bridges, at a cost of $200 million.

The Palestinian Authority, however, objected, saying the plan would further entrench the illegal settlements in the West Bank and justify confiscating yet more Palestinian land for the new roads.

That position was backed by international donors, including the US, which declared it would not finance any road projects against the PA’s will.

Despite the US promise, however, a map of the West Bank recently published by ARIJ shows that 23 per cent of the “alternative” road network Israel proposed has been built with USAid money.

Many of these roads are located in so-called Areas B and C, more than 80 per cent of the West Bank that was assigned to Israeli security control by the Oslo accords. Israel oversees all road projects in these areas.

Mr Khalilieh said the PA was being effectively bullied into conceding the road infrastructure wanted by Israel.

“What happens is that USAid presents a package deal of donations for infrastructure projects in the West Bank and the Palestinians are faced with a choice of take it or leave it. That way the PA is cornered into accepting roads it does not want.”

He said some roads were also being approved because of a lack of oversight by the PA. An inter-ministerial committee to vet proposed roads to ensure they did not contribute to the Israeli plan had been inactive since 2006, he said, following the split between Fatah and Hamas in the Palestinian elections.

After PA officials were presented with ARIJ’s map, Salam Fayyad, the Palestinian prime minister, issued a statement last weekend denying that the PA had contributed to the Israeli-proposed road network.

However, in a sign that such reassurances were unlikely to dampen concerns, he reconvened the inter-ministerial committee to conduct field visits to check on road projects that had been carried out or were in progress.

Ghassan Khatib, a Palestinian government spokesman and a former planning minister, said the PA was taking the issue “very seriously” and was doing everything possible to resist the emergence of an “apartheid system” in the West Bank.

He added that, if roads were being built that served the settlers’ interests, “that is not supposed to happen”.

According to USAid’s figures, it has financed 235km of roads in the West Bank in the past decade, and is preparing to add another 120km by the end of this year.

Critics add that in some cases the upgrading by USAid of minor roads, even those not included in the Israeli plan, has worked to the same end of keeping Palestinians off the West Bank’s main highways.

USAid officials were unavailable for comment.

Among roads for Palestinians funded by USAid are several projects south of Bethlehem that appear to be providing an “alternative” to Road 60, a busy highway that has traditionally linked Jerusalem with the Palestinian cities of Bethlehem and Hebron in the southern West Bank.

Israel has increasingly restricted Palestinian access to Road 60 because it also serves as a fast direct route for Jewish settlers in the Gush Etzion bloc driving to and from Jerusalem.

As a result, residents of several nearby Palestinian villages, including Batir, Wadi Fukin, al Walaja and Husan, have been forced off Road 60 and on to USAid-funded side roads and underpasses to connect them to Bethlehem and other neighbouring communities.

Sarit Michaeli, a spokeswoman for B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, said 170km of roads in the West Bank were either off-limits to Palestinians or highly restricted, creating what the organisation has called “forbidden roads”.

B’Tselem noted that, after the 2004 scheme for complete separation was rejected by donors, Israel adapted the plan, using bridges, tunnels and interchanges to create partial separation, with Israelis “traveling on the fast upper levels, and Palestinians on the lower levels”. It concluded: “The plan allows Palestinian vehicles to travel on only 20 per cent of the [West Bank] roads on which Israeli vehicles travel.”

Ms Michaeli added that the growing dependence of Palestinian traffic on underpasses meant that Israel was in a position to control or even sever connections between Palestinian areas with only one military jeep.

Ingrid Jaradat Gassner, the director of Badil, a Bethlehem-based organisation that has lobbied against road segregation in the southern West Bank, said there was considerable domestic and international pressure on the PA to agree to roads dictated by Israel, if only because they often eased the existing restrictions on Palestinian movement.

“Sadly, the PA is helping to build its own Bantustans,” she said. “Palestinian towns and villages connected by back roads and tunnels while the settlers control the main highways is what the US appears to mean when it talks about a viable Palestinian state.”

Israel's Fated Bleak Future

By John J. Mearsheimer

May 9, 2010 "Chicago Tribune" -- President Barack Obama has finally coaxed Israel and the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. He and most Americans hope that the talks will lead to the creation of a Palestinian state in Gaza and the West Bank. Regrettably, that is not going to happen. Instead, those territories are almost certain to be incorporated into a "Greater Israel," which will then be an apartheid state bearing a marked resemblance to white-ruled South Africa.

There are four possible futures regarding Israel and the occupied territories. The outcome that gets the most attention is the two-state solution, where a Palestinian state would control 95 percent or more of the West Bank and all of Gaza, and territorial swaps would compensate the Palestinians for those small pieces of the West Bank that Israel would keep. East Jerusalem would be its capital.

The alternatives to a two-state solution all involve creating a Greater Israel — an Israel that effectively controls Gaza and the West Bank. In the first scenario, it would become a democratic binational state in which Palestinians and Jews enjoy equal political rights. This solution would mean abandoning the original Zionist vision of a Jewish state, since Palestinians would eventually outnumber Jews.

Israel could also expel most of the Palestinians from Greater Israel, preserving its Jewish character through ethnic cleansing. Something similar happened in 1948, when the Zionists drove 700,000 Palestinians out of the territory that became Israel. The final alternative is some form of apartheid, whereby Israel increases its control over the occupied territories, but allows the Palestinians to exercise limited autonomy in a set of disconnected and economically crippled enclaves.

The two-state solution is the best of these alternatives, but most Israelis are opposed to making the sacrifices that would be necessary to create a viable Palestinian state. There are about 480,000 settlers in the occupied territories and an extensive infrastructure of connector and bypass roads, not to mention the settlements themselves. A Hebrew University Truman Institute poll in March of West Bank settlers found that 21 percent believe that "all means must be employed to resist the evacuation of most West Bank settlements, including the use of arms." They needn't worry, however, because Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is committed to expanding the settlements throughout the occupied territories.

Of course, there are prominent Israelis like former Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert who do favor a two-state solution. But that does not mean that they would be willing or able to make the concessions necessary to create a legitimate Palestinian state. Olmert did not do so when he was prime minister, and it is unlikely that he or Livni could get enough of their fellow citizens to back a genuine two-state solution. The political center of gravity in Israel has shifted sharply to the right over the past decade, and there is no sizable pro-peace political party or movement they could turn to for help.

Some advocates of a two-state solution believe the Obama administration can compel Israel to accept a two-state outcome. The United States, after all, is the most powerful country in the world and should have great leverage over Israel, because it gives the Jewish state so much diplomatic and material support.

But no American president can pressure Israel to change its policies toward the Palestinians. The main reason is the Israel lobby, a powerful coalition of American Jews and Christian evangelicals that has a profound influence on U.S. Middle East policy. Alan Dershowitz was spot on when he said, "My generation of Jews … became part of what is perhaps the most effective lobbying and fundraising effort in the history of democracy."

Consider that every American president since 1967 has opposed settlement building, yet none has been able to get Israel to stop building them. There is little evidence that Obama is different from his predecessors. Shortly after taking office, he demanded that Israel stop all settlement building in the occupied territories. Netanyahu refused and Obama caved in to him. The president recently made it clear that he wants Israel to stop building in East Jerusalem. In response, Netanyahu said that Israel would never stop building there, because it is an integral part of the Jewish state. Obama, under pressure from the lobby, has remained silent and certainly has not threatened to punish Israel.

The best Obama can hope for is to push forward the so-called peace process, but most people understand that these negotiations are a charade. The two sides will engage in endless talks while Israel continues to colonize Palestinian lands. The likely result, therefore, will be a Greater Israel between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.

But who will live there and what kind of political system will it have?

It will not be a democratic binational state, at least not in the near future. The vast majority of Israel's Jews have no interest in living in a state dominated by Palestinians. Ethnic cleansing would guarantee that Greater Israel retains a Jewish majority, but that murderous strategy would do enormous damage to Israel's moral fabric, to its relationship with Jews in the Diaspora, and to its international standing. No genuine friend of Israel could support this crime against humanity.

The most likely outcome is that Greater Israel will become a full-fledged apartheid state. There are already separate laws, separate roads and separate housing in the occupied territories, and the Palestinians are essentially confined to impoverished enclaves. Indeed, two former Israeli prime ministers — Ehud Barak and Olmert — have made just this point. Olmert said that if the two-state solution collapses, Israel will face a "South African-style struggle." He went so far as to argue, "as soon as that happens, the state of Israel is finished."

Olmert is correct. A Jewish apartheid state is not sustainable over the long term. The discrimination and repression that underpin apartheid are antithetical to core Western values. How could anyone make a moral case for it in the United States, where democracy is venerated and segregation and racism are routinely condemned? It is equally hard to imagine the United States having a "special relationship" with an apartheid state. It is much easier to imagine Americans strongly opposing that racist state's political system and working hard to change it. An apartheid Israel would also be a strategic liability for the United States.

This is why, in the end, Greater Israel will become a democratic binational state, whose politics will be dominated by its Palestinian citizens. This will mean the end of the Zionist dream.

What is truly remarkable about this situation is that the lobby is effectively helping Israel destroy its own future as a Jewish state. On top of that, there is an alternative outcome that would be relatively easy to achieve and is clearly in Israel's best interests: the two-state solution. It is hard to understand why Israel and its American supporters are not working overtime to create a viable Palestinian state and why instead they are moving full-speed ahead to build an apartheid state. It makes no sense from either a moral or a strategic perspective.