US president’s coming speech about Washington’s Mideast policy to demand PA recognize Israel, drop unilateral UN bid for statehood, while urging Israel to return to ’67 lines, cease settlement expansion
By Yitzhak Benhorin
May 17, 2011 “YNet” — WASHINGTON – US President Barack Obama is set to give his next political speech at 6pm Thursday, just hours before Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu leaves for Washington and according to a draft of the speech, obtained by Yedioth Ahronoth, the American president’s Middle East policy, though unwavering, may not be as discordant as some have feared.
Obama is expected to urge Israel to return to the 1967 lines while negating the Palestinian Authority’s planned unilateral bid for statehood in September.
According to the draft – which may change again by Thursday – Obama will call on Jerusalem and Ramallah to reignite the stalled Israeli-Palestinian peace process, saying it is the only way to achieve viable peace.
Obama stands to demand the Palestinian Authority recognize Israel as the Jewish state, and that the Palestinians unequivocally abandon terror.
He is also likely to stress Israel must cease any settlement expansion in the West Bank and further avoid any act which could be construed as changing the status quo on the ground.
The subject of Jerusalem also stands to be included in the American president’s speech: Washington sees the city as the capital of both Israel and the Palestinian state, with its east Jerusalem neighborhoods – which are largely populated by Palestinians – under the PA’s sovereignty, and its Jewish neighborhoods under Israeli sovereignty.
Following Netanyahu’s vehement speech before the Knesset plenum Sunday, it seems Washington has decided to lower its expectations of Netanyahu.
Still, State Department Spokesman Mark Toner said that the White House was not “as pessimistic” as reported, adding that the peace process “faces immense challenges.”
Israeli Media Reveals U.S. President’s Forthcoming Mideast Speech
By Xinhua
May 17, 2011 “Xinhua” – JERUSALEM — U.S. President Barack Obama will call on Israel to withdraw to the 1967 borders and agree to additional concessions that will enable a resumption of the peace process, Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth revealed on Tuesday.
The newspaper claimed to have obtained a draft of Obama’s planned speech at the State Department on Thursday in which he will outline his administration’s Middle East policy, in light of the anti-government protests that have swept the region over the past year.
White House press secretary Jay Carney said Sunday that Obama would raise the need for progress in the peace process. However, he did not reveal whether the president planned to present a diplomatic initiative to revive the process, after negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians broke down last September.
According to Yedioth Ahronoth, Obama will call on Israel to withdraw to the 1967 cease-fire lines with territorial adjustments that will be agreed on in the negotiations with the Palestinian National Authority. The president will label the West Bank settlements as “illegal” and emphasize that Israel must halt their construction.
Obama’s position on the settlement blocs, which Israel slates to remain under its sovereignty in any peace deal, is yet unclear.
The president is also expected to announce his solution regarding the status of Jerusalem and call for its division. The U. S. envisions the city as the shared capital of the two states, Israel and Palestine, side by side in peace.
Such a stand would essentially echo the so-called “Clinton Parameters” offered by then-president Bill Clinton in 2000, which called predominantly Arab neighborhoods to come under the Palestinian sovereignty while Jewish neighborhoods remaining within the Israeli territories.
Yedioth Ahronoth claimed that the contents of Obama’s speech were shared with Netanyahu’s national security advisor Ya’akov Amidror and his predecessor Uzi Arad in their recent discussions with senior U.S. officials.
Amidror and Arad were dispatched to Washington last week to prepare the ground for Netanyahu’s scheduled meeting with Obama on Friday, the report said.
The two purportedly met with White House national security advisor Tom Donilon, trying to convince him and other officials that Obama’s positions essentially matched those of the Palestinians.
The Israelis are said to have stressed that Obama’s initiative will not enable “real” peace negotiations and demanded that changes be inserted, according to the paper, which quoted an unidentified U.S. official as answering the two that “you are familiar with the positions of American administrations. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has already specified in detail an Israeli-Palestinian agreement last October.”
Amidror, however, on Monday categorically denied that such a meeting had ever taken place, saying that “Not one word in that article is correct.”
“There was no meeting with Donilon … no talks. The meeting simply never occurred,” Amidror told Army Radio.
Obama’s address will not be short of demands on the Palestinians, according to Yedioth Ahronoth. The president is expected to explicitly demand a Palestinian willingness to accept the conditions set forth by the Mideast Quartet, including a recognition of Israel’s right to exist, a renunciation of violence and incitement, and dropping a unilateral declaration of statehood at the United Nations in September.
As a precursor to his speech before a joint session of the U.S. Congress next Tuesday, Netanyahu on Monday evening presented lawmakers his basis for negotiations with the Palestinians, saying that Israel was prepared to “cede parts of our homeland for true peace,” though he assessed that there is no partner on the Palestinian side.
In his address, Netanyahu expressed Israel’s willingness to withdraw into several West Bank settlement blocs while maintain its military presence in the Jordan Valley. The future Palestinian state, he said, would be demilitarized and created only through a peace agreement.
Netanyahu outlined his preconditions for entering peace negotiations with the Palestinians, saying that these preconditions enjoyed the support of a majority of the Israeli public.
The Palestinians would first have to recognize Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people, Netanyahu said. A peace agreement also must end the conflict and any further Palestinian demands. Netanyahu said Palestinian refugees would not resettle in Israel and the settlement blocs would remain under the Israeli sovereignty.
Regarding Jerusalem, Netanyahu said the city would remain Israel’s “united capital,” a position echoed by all Israeli governments since 1967.
The prime minister added that Israel would not be able to strike a peace agreement with a Palestinian government if half of it was comprised of the members of Islamist group Hamas.
dimanche 15 mai · 00:00 – 23:30
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المظاهرات المليونية للدخول إلى فلسطين -Demonstrations to enter Palestine, المظاهرات المليونية, Maik Mikhail, Sam Ghareeb, Tony Bustany
This is a ONLINE event.Let’s all show our solidarity to Palestine on this day by changing our profile photo to Palestine flag and our status to FREE PALESTINE.هده مظاهرة مليونية الكترونية هنا على الفايس بوك.كل ما عليك فعله هو تغيير صورة البروفايل الى علم فلسطين يوم 15.05.2011 للتعبير عن تضامنك مع فلسطين .Questo è un evento ONLINE peri dimostrare la nostra solidarietà alla Palestina, in questo giorno, cambiando le nostre foto del profilo in bandiera della Palestina e il nostro status di liberare la Palestina.
Esto es un evento ”Online”. Vamos todos a mostrar nuestra solidaridad ese día (Mayo 15)con el pueblo Palestino cambiando nuestra foto a la bandera de Palestina y nuestro status a VIVA PALESTINA LIBRE! O “FREE PALESTINE”!
MAY 8, 2011
I teased a friend the other day: Do you feel safer in the new world order? We discussed the fact that there is a “new world order” whereby two states (regimes) in the world feel immune from International law, disregard existing mechanisms including the UN and Interpol, and send agents or machines regularly to other sovereign countries to engage in extrajudicial assassination of those they deem enemies. On most occasions, nearby civilians are killed or the victim turns out to be someone else. There is the argument that these people assassinated are bad guys and should be killed. My friend and I certainly do not have sympathy for Bin Laden and people like him. But violating laws is not the way to go (two wrongs do not make a right).
My friend points out that some two million Iraqis, half of them children, perished by the unjust US/UK led blockade, sanctions, and war. Millions suffered and over 60,000 were murdered by the Israeli policies of land theft, ethnic cleansing, regular massacres of civilians, and other war crimes and crimes against humanity. These are all acts of state terrorism in whole sale as opposed to the retail terror acts of Al-Qaeda. Yet imagine if Afghani commandoes (or Chinese or Irish for that matter) landed in a clandestine way in the US, Britain, or Israel and “took-out” one of the masterminds of such mass terrorism. Come to think of it, the stage is set now for this to happen since the message sent around the world is that “might makes right”. As humans, we have clear choices to make: we either support the notion of “dog-eat-dog world” and put our faith in military might OR we insist that another world is coming and that we can shape it with our hands using popular and nonviolent resistance.
My friend laments a history of our species of oppression, exploitation, destruction, and even mass murder (e.g. the genocide during slavery, during colonization in the Americas, the use of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki). She asks half jokingly why should we expect a dramatic change in our life-span? History does show that, slowly but surely, democracy and peace are spreading around the world. In Latin America an amazing progress transpired from the era of colonialism (including genocide and slavery) to the era of “banana republics” (ruled by ruthless, western-supported dictators) to the hard won democratic revolutions. A similar transformation is occurring in the Arab world. This Arab spring came later and is more painful because such a transformation threatens the implanted Western wedge that is the racist apartheid state of Israel. My friend and I debate whether acting is contingent on being 100% sure of winning! While a more rational reading of history would lead one to be more optimistic, acting on our beliefs and our ideals is not contingent on existing power structures or short-term outcomes but only on how we believe we should live and act. Self-transformation itself is a win!
I ask my friend to imagine activists 10 years before each of these events and what motivated them to act (even as they did not foresee the end): the collapse of the Berlin wall, the freedoms in the countries of Eastern Europe, the end of apartheid in South Africa, the end of segregation in the South of the US, the woman suffrage, and the end of the US supported Pinochet, Suharto, and Mubarak regimes. In each of those instances and hundreds more, many activists died even before seeing the end of the struggle. In each of these cases, some thought it was a hopeless struggle against incredible odds. But even some activists did not understand how close they were to winning. Some even gave up the struggle a year or two before it triumphed.
Even when it seems most entrenched the status quo will not stay the same. The mighty Persian and Roman empires ended. Who now remembers that in the 19th century, Portugal, Spain, and England had armies and colonies around the world and seemed invincible. Even Hitler’s relatively short-lived third Reich seemed invincible. Human constructs are invariably changeable by new human constructs ESPECIALLY if they are repressive and antagonize too many people. The Israeli and US regimes are thus more susceptible on this front than any other in existence today. Martin Luther King Jr once said of the US: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today — my own government..” Israeli historian Benny Morris stated “The Jewish generations of 1948, however, knew the truth and deliberately misrepresented it. They knew there were plenty of mass deportations, massacres and rapes . . . . The soldiers and the officials knew, but they suppressed what they knew and were deliberately disseminating lies.” Ilan Pappe summarized years of his historical research thus: “Jews came and took, by means of uprooting and expulsion, a land that was Arab. We wanted to be a colonialist occupier, and yet to come across as moral at the same time..” These ‘original sins’ (as another Israeli historian titled his book) will catch up with this generation.
I tell my friend that the sins of the past come to haunt people whether at the individual level or the national level. Similarly, the good deeds do get repaid sooner or later. I remind her that her good deeds were already rewarded many times over as she herself acknowledged to me. I am sure the many Israelis and US citizens who worked very hard for peace with justice will be vindicated. She states that our biggest troubles are not sustained by those who work against us but the masses who are apathetic. Apathy indeed is the scourge of humanity. Each of us should look themselves in the mirror everyday and honestly think if they have done enough! Here in Palestine, like in other parts of the world there are also those who act and those who are apathetic. The latter may watch TV, may feel pangs of frustration or anger but are not willing to sum up the inner courage (present in all of us) to finally act on their convictions. On our deathbed, will we lament a life wasted or smile at a life of achievement for fellow human beings.
My friend and I are pleased to be alive in this day and age and continue to be very optimistic. We are grateful for the tentative initial steps of reconciliation of the Palestinian house (but must keep pushing) and we are grateful for the failure of Netanyahu to get Europeans to pressure the Palestinian people to keep their divisions. We know Netanyahu will next go to the US but there he will have to pass through demonstrators to get to the Israeli occupied halls of Congress. And the US is already 14 trillion in debt, one third of it caused directly by the Israel-first lobby. But AIPAC is being challenged.(1)
Meanwhile, the struggle here in the last land of apartheid continues. Saturday, our friends Yusuf and Musa AbuMaria were attacked and injured by Israeli forces in a peaceful demonstration in Beit Ummar near Hebron (Yusuf had two breaks in one arm) and we attended two conferences in Hebron the same day. One was the Palestinian Forum for Medical Research first biomedical research symposium (2) where one of my master’s students presented her research results. The second was attended by 300 activists nearly half Israeli and was titled “Joint Struggle for an End to the Occupation and Racism”. The final declaration from this conference is meaningful in showing the change happening on the ground in joint struggle (as opposed to normalization)(3).
Join us 15 May 2011 on the streets as we launch a global intifada (uprising) using popular resistance methods. It will not be the end but the beginning of the end as hundreds of demonstrations and marches are held around the world (including marches to checkpoints) and from nearby countries to the borders of occupied Palestine.
We will say that 63 years of destructions and war is enough and our Nakba must end. Some are calling this the third intifada (4) but it is actually the 14thor 15th and it is likely going to be the last (5). In follow-up you can join us in Palestine this July (see PalestineJN.org) to take a bigger step forward.
In the meantime, as our friend and martyr Vittorio reminded us to always “STAY HUMAN”.
Notes
1) From May 21 to 24, 2011, come to Washington DC and join CODEPINK with a coalition of over 100 organizations, including Jewish Voice for Peace and the US Palestinian Community Network, at the historic gathering Move Over AIPAC: Time for a New Middle East Policy!http://salsa.democracyinaction.org/o/424/p/salsa/web/common/public/signup?signup_page_KEY=5832
5) See the book Popular Resistance in Palestine: A history of Hope and Empowerment”
Posted by Qumsiyeh at 5/08/2011 0 comments
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By: George S. Hishmeh
The Arab Spring, which has upturned the Arab world like a tsunami, led many in Israel and their allies in the West, especially the United States, to mistakenly believe that it has muffled for good the Palestinian drive to regain their rights in their Israeli-usurped homeland. But the uprisings continued undeterred in some of the key autocratic Arab regimes since last January.
In Tunisia and Egypt, for example,the Western media virtually dropped any mention of the 63-year-old Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Some Palestinians seemed disheartened. But an unexpected American poll, conducted in Egypt, turned the situation upside down. A majority of Egyptians (54 per cent), according to the American-led poll, conducted by the respected Pew Research Centre and based on face-to-face interviews, wanted to annul the 1979 peace treaty with Israel. Only 36 per cent voted to keep the agreement, which has been described as “a cornerstone of Egyptian foreign policy and the region’s stability” during the ousted regime of Hosni Mubarak, now in jail.
The finding, reported The New York Times, “squares with the overwhelming anecdotal evidence that Egyptians feel Israel has not lived up to its commitments in its treatment of the Palestinians”.
Interestingly, the poll also found that 39 per cent of Egyptians believe the US response to the uprising in their country was negative, compared to only 22 per cent who said it was positive.
The second punch that followed was the unexpected announcement in Cairo of a reconciliation between the two feuding Palestinian factions, Fateh, led by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, and Hamas, the Islamist group which controls Gaza Strip. The significance of the much-awaited agreement, scheduled to be signed this week, was underlined by a statement from an Abbas aide who said last month that he was prepared to give up hundreds of millions of dollars in US aid if that was what it took to forge a Palestinian unity deal.
Israel and, very likely, a number of Western powers are not expected to praise this feud-ending agreement that, it was hoped, could pave the way for immediate resumption of negotiations between the Palestinians and Israelis.
As expected, Israel is already on record as saying the new accord, which was brokered in secrecy by Egypt, would not secure peace in the Middle East. Israel’s relations with Hamas, which has ruled Gaza Strip since 2007 after ousting Fateh in a civil war, has been bitter and bloody. But all this should not stop the behind-the-scene efforts to bring the two sides together.
The Palestinian side has, regrettably, offered to abandon its efforts to win membership in the UN General Assembly, which endorsed Israel’s admission to the world body, if Israel comes forth with a genuine offer.
Another positive step was the agreement of the Palestinian factions to name leadingindependent figures to the proposed interim government pending new elections within one year, if not earlier. The 22-member Arab League, which already endorsed an Arab peace proposal several years ago, has also been chosen to oversee the implementation of the reconciliation agreement.
If the two sides and their supporters wish to disrupt all these attempts at finding a solution, one does not need more than a troublemaker to undermine these efforts. For example, the US and Israel, as well as some European nations, have refused to deal with Hamas since they consider it a “terrorist” organisation, and any future Palestinian government would have to renounce violence and endorse Israel’s right to exist.
Obviously, the other side can come up with a convincing list. For example, what about Israel identifying its borders or initiating withdrawal from all occupied Palestinian territories?
Turkish President Abdullah Gul said it most succinctly in his recent op-ed in The New York Times: “History has taught us that demographics is the most decisive factor in determining the fate of nations. In the coming 50 years, Arabs will constitute the overwhelming majority of people between the Mediterranean Sea and the Dead Sea. The new generation of Arabs is much more conscious of democracy, freedom and national dignity. In such a context, Israel cannot afford to be perceived as an apartheid island surrounded by an Arab sea of anger and hostility.”
His conclusion: “It will be almost impossible for Israel to deal with the emerging democratic and demographic currents in the absence of a peace agreement with the Palestinians and the rest of the Arab world. Turkey, conscious of its own responsibility, stands ready to help.”
* An Arab American columnist based in Washington. – Hishmehg@aol.com
By David Hochman
For more than half a century, Helen Thomas owned the most valuable piece of real estate in the White House briefing room. Her front-row seat at presidential press conferences and its attendant benefits—she was often called on first and usually ended the gatherings with a signature “Thank you, Mr. President”—made her the unofficial dean of the White House press corps. Her bold, irksome questions were like hot pokers to 10 U.S. presidents, and her fearless approach rattled press secretaries and set a tone for generations of straight-shooting, badgering reporters.
Last summer, still working full-time at 89, she saw her decades-long career fall to pieces after a two-minute video clip went viral on YouTube. A Long Island rabbi and blogger visiting the White House turned his camera on Thomas on May 27 and asked for “any comments on Israel.” Thomas instantly shot back, “Tell them to get the hell out of Palestine,” adding that the Jews “can go home” to “Poland, Germany and America and everywhere else.” Endless media outrage ensued, prompting Thomas to issue an apology and abruptly “resign” from Hearst Newspapers on June 7. Her speaking agency dropped her, journalism schools and organizations rescinded awards named in her honor and she lost that prized seat in the White House.
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