01 March 2016By Khalid Amayreh
Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is quite addicted to lying.
However, what makes this conduct on his part especially malicious is that he
lies quite knowingly, without a twinge of conscience or feeling of regret.
During his visit to a small settlement in the southern Hebron hills Monday,
the Israeli premier claimed that Palestinians were revolting against Israel
because they wanted to kill Jews.
As usual, Netanyahu completely ignored the decades-old military occupation by
Israel of Palestine and the conspicuously criminal treatment meted out to
millions of Palestinians whose only "guilt" is their being born non-Jewish.
Netanyahu, who arrived at the settlement to show solidarity with the family of
a settler woman who was killed a few days ago, allegedly by a Palestinian
youngster, took advantage of the tragedy to hurl lies right and left in order
to justify his intransigence and anti-peace discourse.
He overlooked the fact that since the beginning of October, trigger-happy
Israeli soldiers and settlers killed more than 160 Palestinians, many in an
execution style and without the slightest provocation.
According to eye-witness testimonies, Israeli soldiers and settlers on several
occasions placed a knife or sharp object next to the Palestinian victim to
give the impression that he was trying to stab Israelis.
More to the point, Israeli security forces made sure that Palestinians shot
were left to bleed to death.
The murderous executions prompted the Foreign Minister of Sweden Krister
Wickman to demand an inquiry into these crimes.
Israel, which always adopts a holier-than-thou attitude toward international
criticisms, rejected the Swedish call, arguing that Israel has the right to
self-defense. Killing the two-state solution The truth of the matter is that
Israel has effectively killed any remaining prospects for a viable peace with
the Palestinians by decapitating -once and for all- any remaining chances for
the establishment of a viable Palestinian state, thanks to the ubiquitous
metastasizing of Jewish settlements in the West Bank, especially East
Jerusalem.
I think all honest observers, Palestinian, Israeli and international, agree on
this prognosis. Hence, it would be an expression of dishonesty or utter
ignorance and naïveté to deny the obvious. This is unless what Israel, its
guardian ally, the US, and the rest of the international community have in
mind for the Palestinians is an insignificant state not worthy of the name,
e.g. a state without Jerusalem, without demographic and territorial
contiguity, without the right of return for the refugees, and without an
Israeli withdrawal to the 1967 borders.
Needless to say, the vast majority of Palestinians would utterly reject such a
deformed entity even if the entire world sang the hymns of praise for such
misshapen creature. Now Israel is facing a real dilemma, which makes Netanyahu
and his ministers make nervous and totally mendacious statements almost on a
daily basis. Indeed, with the two-state solution now effectively in the belly
of earth, Israel has only two alternatives left: Either one state for all-
from the River Jordan to the Mediterranean-or an open-ended conflict.
But one state is impossible since it constitutes the antithesis of Zionism,
and an open-ended conflict is a nightmarish scenario with unpredictable
consequences. Facing this increasingly stark dilemma (stark because there are
today in mandatory Palestine as many Palestinians as there are Jews and the
Palestinian population is forecast to exceed the Jewish population in a few
years), Israel is now trying to effect more ghoulish tactics in the hope that
more pressure on Palestinians would force them or many of them to leave their
ancestral homeland. One Israeli commentator remarked last week that if Bashar
Assad could banish millions of Syrians around the world with total impunity
and without incurring the wrath of the world, Israel should be able to oust
some Palestinians without creating a huge international crisis. In fact,
Israel is already trying this ghoulish scenario.
Last week, it was reported that poverty in the West Bank and Gaza Strip has
reached unprecedented levels, with many Palestinians selling their assets to
remain afloat. One Palestinian economist was quoted as saying that "I wouldn't
be surprised to see starvation in some parts of the West Bank."
Hence the alarming question: Would the loaf of bread be used as Israel's
ultimate weapon to force the Palestinians to leave their homeland, thus
enabling Israel to succeed in liquidating the Palestinian cause once and for
all?
Khalid Amayreh is a veteran Palestinian
journalist based in Dura in Occupied Palestine
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