December 10, 2007 The great international Middle East peace conference in Annapolis was supposed to end 60 years of strife between Israelis and Palestinians. It was essentially promoted as… oh, how should I put it?…George W. Bush’s final solution to the Palestinian question. Its objectives looked good on paper, but then so have all previous attempts to give the illusion that Israel accepts Palestine’s right to exist. Among the Annapolis conference’s founding principles [sic] were: • a “two state solution” is the only possible and legitimate outcome; This is essentially the script of the September 1993 Declaration of Principles that began the Oslo “peace process.” Despite Israel’s claim to respect UN resolutions, over the next decade, with U.S. acquiescence, it proceeded to double the number of illegal Jewish colonies in Palestine, as well as the number of illegal Jewish colonists. The farce only came to and end when Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat refused to be stampeded into an ignoble agreement. The Oslo negotiations were an political non-starter since Israel was prepared to give up nothing and the Palestinians were expected to surrender their rights, including the right of return. Given that this spectacle collapsed under the weight of its own hypocrisy, no sane person could have expected anything different from the Annapolis conference. As Benjamin Franklin said: “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.”
Of course, our servile media dutifully reported the events as if Franklin‘s quote did not apply. Unlike Oslo, the farce of Annapolis exploded immediately, like a cheap cigar. Although it concluded with a predictable joint declaration of optimism—Middle East peace between Palestine and Israel by the end of 2008—Israel rushed to sabotage it. On Nov. 30, it forced the U.S. to rescind its own UN Security Council resolution, just 24 hours after it was introduced. Why? Israel wasn’t given advanced notice, and it doesn’t like the composition of the Security Council—too many countries unsympathetic to Jewish genocide and apartheid. Israel’s deputy proconsul to the UN Daniel Carmon gave the standard excuse: “We feel that the appreciation of Annapolis has other means of being expressed than in a resolution.” [Translation: “Israel will not be bound by any international agreement, submit to any law, or recognize any limits on its right to subjugate Palestine.] (Is there anyone out there who can honestly deny that the U.S. is Israel’s bitch?)
The truth of the matter is that the 40 nations, territories and international organizations that gathered at Annapolis participated in a perverse ritual. Starring in the role of the Arab stooge was Mahmoud Abbas, who has built a political career out of collaborating with Israel at the expense of the rights of Palestinians. Unlike Yasser Arafat before him, though, Abbas is not part of the Palestinian government and therefore not competent to negotiate on its behalf. “Since the Annapolis meeting was known in advance to be a bigger farce than the Oslo negotiations, what was the bloody point?!” I hear you ask. Good question. Once you accept that peace was not the objective and that Israel had no intention of respecting Palestinian rights, the answer becomes both obvious and ominous. First, the real focus of the conference was Iran and its thoroughly legal nuclear power program. The Israel Lobby is frothing at the mouth over the U.S.’s reluctance to bomb Iran, and the conference gave Bush a forum to concoct support for an attack. The Palestinians were, and are, irrelevant to Israel except as a propaganda tool to be exploited from time to time. Hence, nobody should have been surprised that Carmon would put the U.S. in its place so peremptorily. The surprise is that the U.S. delegation to the UN took the whole thing seriously, and believed it could act on behalf of the U.S. The second answer has to do with the term “final solution,” which I used above to depict Bush’s attitude toward solving the Palestinian Israeli question. I chose this term deliberately, because Israel’s attitude toward Palestinians differs hardly at all from Nazi Germany’s attitude toward Jews, and because the Annapolis conference, to the extent it can be called a conference, is more in the spirit of the January 1942 Wannsee Conference, at which high-ranking officials of the Third Reich met just outside Berlin to discuss “the final solution to the Jewish question” (Die Endlösung der Judenfrage). About six months earlier, Hitler invaded Russia thereby bringing millions more Jews under Nazi occupation. The purpose of the conference was to decide how all Jews were to be removed from Nazi-occupied territories. (Despite post factum attestations and official propaganda, there’s no proof that the Nazis planned to commit a mass extermination. Israeli holocaust historian Yehuda Bauer, for one, scoffs at the notion and said that little of what was discussed at Wannsee—more a meeting than a conference—was executed in detail.)
What I wrote in 2001 about the similarities between the Nazis’ treatment of Jews and the zionists’ treatment of Palestinians is still relevant: In each case, the victims were deemed to be sub-human (Untermenschen) —not worthy of dignity, respect or legal protection under the law. To kill a Jew or Palestinian, to destroy his livelihood, to force him and his family out of their homes—these were accepted, sanctioned forms of conduct to destroy a specific group of people. Forms of sanctioned Israeli conduct at the time of the conference include: • Murdering Arabs by deliberately denying them medical treatment; How could anyone expect a peace agreement under these conditions! Why, then, was the Annapolis conference convened? To make genocide respectable; to gang up on Iran; and to have Abbas do Israel’s dirty work. At least the Nazis were honest fascists. | ||||||||||||||
