Another great one from Helena

Here is an important and easy to understand posting from Helena Cobban's blog titled Just World News (which I love and highly recommend to those interested in world affairs and more specifically the Israel and Palestinian conflict). She in turn posted this editorial which was written by Amos Gvirtz, an Israeli citizen who works intentionaly to inform his compatriots of how the Israeli government's occupation is affecting Palestinians. As Helena explains, "He was the founding chairperson of the Israeli Committee Against Home Demolitions, and every week since summer 2006 he has published a short essay under the title “Don’t Say We Did Not Know.”

Here is a link to his website (which is worth checking out) and his editorial that was featured today on JWN.

Prioritizing Peace over Settlements

By Amos Gvirtz

A short while after his victory in the 1977 elections and his appointment as prime minister, Menahem Begin announced: "There will be many more Elon Morehs [an early ideological West Bank settlement]." And he went on to say, "So that a left-wing government will not be able to return the territories."

In order to give weight to this announcement, the Begin government declared the settlements to be areas of national priority. This meant that the government viewed the construction and development of settlements in the occupied territories as a supreme Israeli interest. And in fact, since then and until today the settlers receive extensive benefits, far beyond what is allocated to any other population in Israel. This is also true for industrialists and business people who build their factories and businesses in the occupied territories.

Since the Begin government, no Israeli government has changed this priority, including the Rabin government, which while it froze settlement construction, paved bypass roads for the settlers, with all their ramifications.

Thus even during the seven years of the Oslo process, no Israeli government changed the policy which viewed the establishment and development of settlements as a supreme Israeli interest! We witnessed a political process, which seemed to most of us to be a peace process, at a time when the occupation actually continued to deepen! And in fact, during the time of the Oslo process, the number of settlers increased from 110,000 to 204,000; Israel demolished more than 1,000 Palestinian homes in the occupied territories; implemented two expulsions; and confiscated some 40,000 acres of Palestinian land. From the Palestinian point of view, these are unilateral acts of war by an occupying power against a defenseless civilian population.

After the 1999 elections, Prime Minister Ehud Barak added fuel to the fire when he appointed Yitzhak Levy of the National Religious Party as Minister of Housing in his government. The results were not long in coming: construction in the settlements reached new heights. The Meretz Party, which also sat in Barak's government, fought against the corruption of the Sephardic religious party Shas (thereby deepening the rift with the Sephardic population in Israel), but failed in its role as guardian of the peace process. This failure marked one of the biggest mistakes of the Israeli Left, which occupied itself with political issues, while the Right created facts on the ground, with the goal of making the settlement process irreversible.

Israeli governments have developed a fixed pattern of behavior: they "agree" to American and European demands on the peace process, and at the same time deepen the occupation. We saw how the Olmert government did this during the Anapolis process.

Given all this, I have reached the conclusion that today the central demand of the Israeli Left must be, first and foremost, the cancellation of the priority status of the settlements in the occupied territories; the total cessation of funding for the settlements and the illegal outposts; upholding the law against settlers who expel Palestinian farmers from their lands and then take them over; the cessation of all land theft; a total cessation of house demolitions; a total cessation of the expulsion of Palestinians from the areas of the Southern Hebron Hills, the Jordan Valley, Jerusalem and Ma'aleh Adumim; the encouragement of settlers to return to Israel; and of course an end to the theft of West Bank and Golan Hight water. Only when these conditions are fulfilled, can it be said that the government of Israel has changed its policy from prioritizing the occupation to prioritizing peace, and only then will there be a chance for a political peace process to succeed."