24 April 2006

We reproduce below three recent articles dealing with developments in the Israel-Palestine conflict since the end of Ariel Sharon’s political career and the accession of Hamas to government in the Palestinian Authority. First is an article by Roland Rance from Socialist Resistance (www.socialistresistance.net) on the Hamas landslide. Then Eric Ruder of the US Socialist Worker (www.socialistworker.org) interviews Israeli socialist Tikva Honig-Parnass on the Israeli elections. Finally, we carry a response to the Israeli election results by Omar Barghouti, previously published in Counterpunch (www.counterpunch.org).

What is most striking about the articles is the description of the Palestinian peace process, once touted as a model for Ireland, as a mechanism for legitimising a brutal and racist colonialism. Irish republicanism, if it were not blinded by decay, demoralisation and parochialism, would be shaking in its boots. Also striking is the inability of existing Palestinian organisations to advance the democratic programme of the Palestinian masses – The PLO supports a two-state solution that capitulates to imperialism and Hamas, a former protégé of Israel, organised around a program for a medieval Islamic state.  Above all what shines out is the utterly ruthless hypocrisy of the imperialist powers, supporting ethnic cleansing by Israel under the banner of peace and democracy while at the same time using every weapon in their armoury to negate the outcome of the Palestinian elections – even demanding that Hamas cancel the political programme that it had presented to the electors.

Hamas victory ~ Israel’s former protege surpasses its rival
“All the parties support the war on Palestinians”
A Decisive Vote for Apartheid

Hamas victory ~ Israel’s former protege surpasses its rival - Roland Rance 

While the scale of the Hamas landslide victory in the Palestinian elections may have been unexpected, their victory will come as no surprise to anyone who has been following developments in Palestine.

The Hamas victory comes on the background (well-covered over the past decade in Socialist Resistance and Socialist Outlook) of the inevitable collapse of the Oslo agreement, the increasing corruption and arbitrariness of the Fatah-led Palestine Authority, and the apparent abandonment of the struggle by the Palestinian left.

During the first Palestinian Intifada at the end of the 1980’s, Israel fostered the growth of Hamas as a counter to the then-proscribed PLO. Religious fundamentalism was then seen as a lesser threat than secular nationalism.

Eventually, Israel was obliged to co-opt the PLO as its agent in controlling the anger of the Palestinian people. Now, Israel’s former protege has surpassed its rival, both in popular support and in militancy.

Despite the hostile rhetoric, many Israelis secretly welcomed the result. As Lebanese Marxist Gilbert Achcar writes in International Viewpoint, “the electoral victory of Hamas is the outcome that Sharon’s strategy was very obviously seeking”.

Once again, Israel can claim that there is “no-one to talk to”, that the Palestinians do not want peace, and all of the tired old arguments which twenty years ago were used against the PLO.
Before assessing the possible developments of this election, it is necessary to clear away some of the myths. First, the Palestinians have certainly not voted for Islamic fundamentalism and the imposition of sharia law. Although there was an election turnout of 80%, this was only of Palestinians living in the 1967 occupied territories. Those in exile, or in the state of Israel, were excluded.

Of those who voted, almost half voted for Hamas; the complicated electoral system turned this into nearly two-thirds of the seats.

In fact, on the national list, Hamas won 29 seats to Fatah’s 28; it was in the multi-member constituency seats, where Hamas won 45 seats to Fatah’s 17, that a slight voting majority was turned into a landslide. The voters’ desired outcome could almost be described as Fatah policies carried out by Hamas people.

Nor should we give credence to the Israeli claim that Hamas is only interested in anti-Jewish violence. In fact, since the beginning of an unofficial truce 11 months ago, not one Israeli has been killed in a Hamas attack.

Meanwhile, in the election week alone, two Palestinian children — one of them only nine years old — were shot dead by Israeli troops. It seems clear that Israel is trying to provoke Hamas into an armed response in order to vindicate the Israeli refusal of meaningful negotiations. 

Fury

The Hamas victory has unleashed a furious response, not only from Israel, but from the USA and the EU too. Having demanded that Palestinians practice “democracy” while living under military occupation, they now declare that the result of the democratic vote is unacceptable, and that, in order to be recognized, Hamas must reject everything it stands for and the platform on which it was elected.

There seems little likelihood of this happening. Hamas has clarified its pragmatic recognition of the fact of Israel’s existence, and declared that its interim aim is a truce lasting “a generation or two”.

There will be discussion and cooperation on the ground, but further political negotiations are unlikely, and the Oslo process is almost certainly finished.

A Hamas-led government is likely to demand the release of political prisoners as a precondition for any talks. Prominent prisoners, including Fatah leader Marwan Barghouti and PFLP leader Ahmed Sa’adat were elected. Sa’adat, convicted of the assassination of the rightwing Israeli minister Rehavam Ze’evi, is actually held in a PA prison, and Hamas has promised that his release will be one of its first acts.

Hamas will also lay far greater emphasis than Fatah on the right of return for Palestinian exiles. In an article in the Guardian, exiled Hamas leader Khaled Mishal reminded readers that “our people are not only those who live under siege in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip but also the millions languishing in refugee camps in Lebanon, Jordan and Syria and the millions spread around the world unable to return home”.

This issue will be a sticking point for both sides; Israel will maintain its permanent refusal even to discuss the matter, while Hamas will not be prepared, as Fatah has been, to play down the issue and hope for it to go away.

Indeed, the relationship between Palestinians living under direct Israeli rule, and thus living in exile, is likely to again become a central issue in Palestinian politics.
Conflict of Interest

It is thirty years since Palestinian academic Hussein Agha, now a member of the Palestinian negotiating team, pointed out the possible conflict of interest between those Palestinians desperate to end Israeli military occupation, who might accept a two-state approach, and those in exile, for whom return and the end of partition were central concerns. Fatah and the PLO originated from the Palestinian exile, and for ten years were based there exclusively. A crucial turning-point was reached in the first Palestinian Intifada, in 1987, when Palestinians in the 1967-occupied territories altered their slogan from “We support the PLO” to “We ARE the PLO”.
This assertion of the primacy of the internal struggle was one of the reasons that Arafat and his cronies accepted the Israeli invitation to return and act as surrogate rulers over the occupied Palestinians.

Rabin made it clear that they were to rule “without civil rights and without the rule of law”; this job description, combined with corruption and nepotism, arbitrary rule, and the lack of any coherent political strategy to confront Israeli brutality and intransigence, served to discredit the so-called “Tunisians” who had returned with Arafat.

The Hamas leadership, along with a new generation of leaders schooled in the Israeli prisons and the first Intifada, are seen as honest and competent, and not tainted by the failures and excesses of the past decade.

Their reality (and for many of them, their entire life) has been the Israeli military occupation, and the pressures on them to come to a deal to end the occupation, even at the expense of the Palestinian Diaspora, will be huge. For this reason, many Palestinian activists supported the demand for all Palestinians to take part in these elections.

Others, recognising this as a trap that would legitimise the Oslo agreement, rejected any participation in the elections; a position well expressed by economist Adel Samara in Ramallah, who wrote;

“Since it was expected that the PLC elections were going be used to terminate the Right of Return, and because the western capitalist pressures were expected as well, Islamic Jihad Movement, the Arab nationalist current and some socialists declared the boycott of these elections. I am, like all these people, proud to say that my thumb was not stained by the ink of these elections”.

A new PLO?

A reformed and reinvigorated PLO, with full participation of Palestinians both inside and outside Palestine, would be able to reassert the unity of the Palestinian people and to more effectively resist Israeli attempts at divide and rule. 

This alone, however, will not be sufficient to build a movement capable of defeating Israel and building a free Palestine.

This will need also the involvement of the left and liberal parties (who suffered a humiliating defeat in these elections, winning a total of just seven seats) and of the dormant Israeli radical left (who appear to have lined up behind Amir Peretz and the Labour Party, or even behind the dying Sharon’s Kadima).

The responsibilities of the Palestinian and Israeli left are enormous, and unless they respond more effectively in the coming period than they have since Oslo, they will again be abandoning the field to the fundamentalists in both communities.
 

“All the parties support the war on Palestinians” 

 Eric Ruder interviews Tikva Honig-Parnass

Q: What does the founding of the new party Kadima represent? Will it survive Ariel Sharon’s departure from the scene? Has Kadima completely changed the character of Israeli politics? 

A: The appearance of Kadima is an expression of a process that has been underway for a long time. What once seemed to be essential differences between the Zionist right and left with respect to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have been blurred--to the point where they have almost entirely disappeared. 

Both left and right always shared the principal aims of Zionism--to build an exclusive Jewish state with a Jewish majority that rules directly and indirectly over the whole of historic Palestine, while preferring the solution of mass expulsion of Palestinians when circumstances permitted. 
The Oslo “peace process,” led by the Zionist left, was a temporary deviation from their original approach of emphasizing the need for the inevitable elimination and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. 

Since the failure of the Oslo framework, which was intentionally caused by the Labor government of Ehud Barak in 2000, the left has signed up with the mainstream consensus shared by most of the Zionist parties, with the exception of the messianic, fanatic right wing of the settlers and transfer parties. 

Kadima, which presents itself as a “centrist” party, is the embodiment of this consensus and therefore has attracted leaders from Likud (like Ariel Sharon, who founded the party and was its leading candidate until his stroke) and Labor (like Shimon Peres), as well as many supporters who traditionally voted for these parties. In addition, most of those who previously voted for the racist populist party of Shinui, which has lost almost all of its support according to the polls, have shifted their allegiance to Kadima. 

Hence, Kadima will almost certainly win the coming elections and lead the future government coalition. The only real question is how big a victory it will enjoy. Although the distinct political organizations of the Likud and Labor parties still exist, they differ from Kadima only tactically, and thus are part of the broad consensus emerging in Israeli politics. 

The collapse of Oslo has ended the left’s rhetoric of “peace and negotiations” and opened the way for it to explicitly adopt the strategy of unrestrained warfare directed at Palestinians (economically, socially, politically, geographically and so on). It’s presumed that this pressure will ultimately force the Palestinians to accept Israel’s dictates. 

In the meantime, the so-called left, center and right are united around the “unilateral” strategy first initiated by the Labor party and later adopted by Sharon (and his successor, Ehud Olmert). The approach of unilaterally imposing Israel’s will on Palestinians was embodied in the misnamed “disengagement” from the Gaza Strip and the erection of the “separation wall,” which has annexed large areas of the West Bank to Israel. 

Even if Labor and Meretz (the party associated with Israel’s Peace Now movement) pay lip service to preferring negotiations with a moderate Palestinian leadership to policies of unilateralism, they have de facto been supporting the daily policies of Sharon and Olmert, which are in fact policies of elimination and ethnic cleansing in slow motion. 

In recent days, Kadima has announced plans to carry out the hiving off of the Jordan Valley from the rest of the West Bank, and the bifurcation of the north of the West Bank from the south. 
Furthermore, at a time when killings and arrests are committed daily by the Israeli occupation army, and while settlement construction continues unabated, the Labor and Meretz parties are declaring their willingness to join the future Kadima government. They claim that Kadima has adopted their “moderate” approach to the “conflict” and their readiness to make “concessions” to the Palestinians. 

In a sense, this is true--Kadima has adopted the hypocritical method that traditionally characterized the Zionist left: speaking about “peace” while carrying out the cruelest policies. This is the “secret” of Kadima’s likely victory--which in all likelihood will thrive as a party because it embodies the refusal of the majority of Israelis to recognize the national rights of the Palestinians as a condition for a just peace. 

Q: The traditional parties in Israeli politics are Likud and Labor. What accounts for their decline? 

The expected decline of Labor’s share of the vote is a decisive stage in the gradual process that has taken place since 1977, when Likud first ascended to power. This process is a consequence of the convergence of the policies--both economic and political--of what used to be the two main parties, Labor and Likud. 

Labor has traditionally represented the interests of Israel’s capitalist class, especially since the introduction of privatization and “free market” policies that Labor implemented in the mid-1980s. Israeli capitalists supported the Oslo agreement because it helped them accomplish their goal of integrating into the globalized economy and playing a hegemonic role in the “New Middle East,” while using the Palestinians as a cheap labor force. 

Due to developments within the Israeli economy, however, Israeli capital has since lost interest in Palestinian workers, thereby removing their objection to the strategy of war and ethnic cleansing undertaken by Israeli governments since the Palestinian Intifada, or uprising, which began in 2000. 

Kadima now embodies this approach and wholeheartedly supports pushing Israel’s borders to the east to incorporate the large settlement blocs and newly confiscated agricultural lands of dispossessed Palestinian villages. 

The settlements currently being built and expanded in the vicinity of Israel’s imposing apartheid wall are areas where important alliances have been forged between the settlers, the state agencies that subsidize and build the walls, and real-estate corporations and high-tech industries--the representatives of both the old economy and the new. Israel’s high-tech firms have transferred many of their factories into the newly annexed areas west of the apartheid wall, where a captive, skilled and cheap Jewish labor force and massive government subsidies have provided these companies optimal conditions. 

Parts of big capital still support the Labor party--first, because its strategy toward the Palestinians is not essentially different than that of Kadima, and second, because these sections of capital support Tony Blair’s “third way,” the variant of conservative social democracy also endorsed by Amir Peretz, who is the newly installed Labor party chairman and the leader of the Histadrut, Israel’s main labor federation. Like a growing number of their counterparts abroad, Israeli capital sees the need to restrain the “wild free market” in order to insure the survival of the neoliberal project in the long run. 

In the past, the bulk of Labor’s constituency came from well-to-do Ashkenazi Jews (Jews of European origin), who for decades made up the bulk of the Israeli “peace camp.” For them, the Labor party served as the bulwark for preserving the Ashkenazi-capitalist hegemony. 
The Mizrahim (Jews of Arab origin) on the other hand supported Likud. They have made up the majority of the Jewish working class (alongside the Palestinian citizens of Israel) and the majority population of the development towns, built in the 1950s and 1960s in border areas where no Jews previously lived. 

The historical tendency of the Mizrahim to vote for Likud was an act of protest against the Ashkenazi elite, which had led the ideological and political charge to erase their Mizrahi-Arab identity. Voting Likud also provided the Mizrahim with a means to demonstrate their support for patriotic militarism and Israeli security--a litmus test of sorts for allowing them to join Israeli society, steeped as it is in anti-Arab racism. 

Amir Peretz is of Moroccan origin and was raised in the development town Sderot. His positions on Palestinian and “security” issues, even by his own admission, are no different from those of Kadima. 

This is likely to bring about a change in the political voting patterns of development-town Mizrahi residents. Their identification with the Mizrahi origins of Amir Peretz, together with his social economic approach, is likely to lead this constituency to “safely” express itself in support for the Labor party. 

But the support of the development towns has not halted the shrinking of the Labor party’s support. Precisely because of this new support for Labor among Mizrahim, a mass desertion of the racist Ashkenazi middle classes has taken place, leaving what they considered “their” party to join the newly formed Kadima. 

The election of a Moroccan as Labor’s candidate for prime minister, together with the support of the Mizrahim in the development towns, constitutes a perceived threat to the Ashkenazi identity of the Labor party. 

Kadima became an attractive alternative because it adopted the Labor party’s known “pragmatism.” This applies not only to Kadima’s approach to unilateral implementation of the “peace plan,” but also to their strong political and ideological orientation toward the U.S. 

Kadima’s adoption of an approach that defers to the dictates of U.S. imperialism as a central dimension of Israeli strategy is something that Likud in the past (and what remains of it in the present, together with the fanatic right) don’t share to the same extent. 

Q: What impact has Hamas’ victory in the Palestinian elections had on the Israeli political situation? And what’s behind Israel’s recent abduction of a secular Palestinian figure from a Jericho prison? Is there a connection between the raid and the upcoming elections? 

A: The Hamas victory will not change in any essential way the war plan that Israel has pursued for some time now. 

Following the directives of the U.S., Israel did all that it could to weaken Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah faction. Both the U.S. and Israel opposed Abbas’ request to delay the elections, refusing to provide him with the smallest of crumbs to ensure his victory. 

This was not done because of the contradictory position toward the Palestinian Authority of seeking to weaken it on the one hand while preserving it symbolically. Rather, the growing power of Hamas (it’s not clear to what extent Hamas’ outright victory had been predicted) was supposed to be used to buttress Israel’s argument that “there is no one to talk about peace with,” thereby allowing Israel to unabashedly continue its wholesale war. 

The raid on the Jericho prison and the transfer of its prisoners to Israeli jails reflects the way in which Israel, in collaboration with the U.S. and Britain, is going to exploit the Hamas victory. 
The operation, which was an armed incursion into a jail under Palestinian sovereignty, has openly and cynically violated the agreement with the PA about the prison and those detained there. However, the point was also to send a larger message to Hamas (and all national forces) that a new era has begun, in which no past agreements are valid and the way is cleared for sheer military power to determine the fate of the Palestinians. 

Of course, the U.S. and Britain also aimed at strengthening the position of Olmert in the elections. The argument that he lacks the military credentials of, say, Likud head Benjamin Netanyahu can now be countered by pointing to the Jericho operation as proof of his ability to continue the force-centered approach of Sharon.

A Decisive Vote for Apartheid

Omar Barghouti

"Israel votes for disengagement and final borders" and "Israelis abandon the dream of Greater Israel" were the main themes in the spin that characterized mainstream, even some progressive, media coverage of the Israeli parliamentary elections which took place on March 28. In reality, the election results revealed that a consensus has emerged among Israeli Jews, not only against the basic requirements of justice and genuine peace, as that was always the case, but also in support of a more aggressive form of ethnic cleansing of Palestinians and cementing Zionist apartheid.
In the 2006 Knesset elections, Israelis have indeed overwhelmingly voted for "disengagement," not from the Occupied Palestinian Territory (OPT), but only from the Palestinians -- whether in Israel, in the OPT or in exile. Palestinian lands are clearly precluded from this disengagement. An objective examination of the election results and the political platforms of the parties represented in the new Israeli parliament will show that the celebration of the "shift to peace and realism" by Western and Israeli media pundits alike is not only unwarranted but quite deceptive as well. If anything, an avid adoption of the right's agenda has taken place.

Before exposing the spin, readers must be cautioned that "right," "left" and "center" are relative terms; they have substantially different meaning in the Israeli political context than in any comparable parliamentary system, including the Palestinian Legislative Council. With the exception of the Palestinian dominated political parties, all Israeli parties represented in the seventeenth Knesset converge on the three fundamental No's of Zionism: No to the return of Palestinian refugees who were uprooted by Israel during the Nakba (catastrophe of dispossession and expulsion around 1948); No to a complete end of the occupation and colonization of the Palestinian territory occupied by Israel in 1967; No to full equality -- in the law as well as in government policies -- between Israel's Jewish citizens and its Palestinian citizens, the remaining indigenous population of the land. 

Some may argue that the "ultra-dovish" Jewish-Israeli party, Meretz, has dissented from the consensus on the second clause, when it supported "ending the occupation." In fact, Meretz has never accepted a complete return to the internationally recognized borders of 1967, which put East Jerusalem with its Old City on the Palestinian side. It has always argued for keeping parts of the OPT under Israeli control, not to mention that its consistent position against Palestinian refugee rights and full equality in Israel makes the xenophobic right parties in Europe sound quite liberal in comparison. 

Just recently, Meretz's leader, Yossi Beilin, wrote to Avigdor Lieberman -- seen by some analysts as the new leader of the "fascist" right in Israel -- admiring him for being "very intelligent, a successful politician, an excellent man of action, and a smart Jew," further praising him for "guiding us to a situation in which the Jewish people, too, will indeed finally have a Jewish state of its own." Lieberman has called for ethnically cleansing Israel of half a million of its Palestinian citizens by "adjusting its borders" to leave them out, denying them citizenship and any pertinent rights. It is worth noting that most of the land belonging to this target group has already been confiscated by the state over decades. Opportunistic politicking notwithstanding, Meretz was squarely rebuffed by Israeli voters, winning only 5 seats in last week's elections, compared to its already paltry 6 seats in the 2003 elections. 

In sharp contrast to the steady fall of the "left,", Lieberman's ultra-right party, Israel Our Home, whose main constituency is among the Russian-speaking immigrants, won an astounding 11 seats on a platform which explicitly calls for denying Israeli citizens "the right to live in the state on the grounds of religion and race," as the Israeli commentator Akiva Eldar writes.[1] Although other extremist parties that sat in the Knesset, like Rehavam Ze'evi's Moledet, have in the past advocated a similarly fascist agenda, this is the first time in Israel's history that any such party is embraced as part of the mainstream. "Lieberman's acceptance into the heart of the consensus," cautions Eldar, "is evidence of the moral degradation of Jewish Israeli society." 

A recent study of Israeli racism [2] confirms this "moral degradation." More than two thirds of Israeli Jews stated they would not live in the same building with Palestinian citizens of Israel, while 63% agreed with the statement that "Arabs are a security and demographic threat to the state." Forty percent believed "the state needs to support the emigration of Arab citizens." This general shift of Israeli public opinion to extreme right positions well explains the remarkable rise of Lieberman.
But one does not have to be Lieberman to be a racist, as Ha'aretz writer Gideon Levy notes.[3] "The 'peace' proposed by Ehud Olmert is no less racist," he argues, adding: "Lieberman wants to distance them from our borders, Olmert and his ilk want to distance them from our consciousness. Nobody is speaking about peace with them, nobody really wants it. Only one ambition unites everyone - to get rid of them, one way or another. Transfer or wall, 'disengagement' or 'convergence' - the point is that they should get out of our sight." 

Olmert's Kadima party, whose 29 Knesset seats make it Israel's principal party, was given a reasonably strong mandate by the Israeli electorate to "disengage" or "separate" from the Palestinians, both popular Israeli -- and increasingly Western -- euphemisms for separating Palestinians from their best lands and water resources, incarcerating the former in Bantustans not very different from South Africa's, while maintaining Israeli control over the latter. Hailed in the leading Western newspapers as a force for peace, Kadima's program not only categorically rejects the internationally sanctioned rights of Palestinian refugees but also calls for the permanent annexation of the largest Jewish colonies, all illegal according to international law, as well as the vast Jordan Valley portion of the West Bank. Such a plan, more or less endorsed by the Bush Administration, effectively blocks any realistic prospects for a "viable" Palestinian state -- let alone a truly sovereign state within the 1967 borders, in accordance with UN resolutions. It is therefore a recipe for further conflict and bloodshed, not peace. Hardly a "center" party, by any fair standard.

The good news in this election, one may stubbornly argue, is that Labor, the stalwart crucible of the Israeli left, gained in this election, raising hope for a "center-left" coalition that seeks a peaceful settlement with the Palestinians. It is true that, unlike Likud, Labor has largely maintained its presence on the Israeli political map, but, in the 2003 elections, Labor and its ally, One Nation (led then by Amir Peretz, Labor's current leader), won 22 seats. In the current elections, Labor went down to 19. Regardless, Labor's platform is the true cause of concern, not its number of seats. 
If there was serious doubt in the past about Labor's left credentials, now one can say with certainty that the party has none. Its dovish reputation has never really been deserved. Labor Zionism is, after all, historically responsible more than any other force in Israel for the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in 1948 and 1967; for the proliferation of illegal colonies in the occupied territory; for championing the racist discourse about the Palestinians constituting a "demographic threat;" and for devising military and political strategies -- including the Wall -- intended to make the lives of Palestinians under occupation so miserable as to consider leaving. Labor, historically "given to evasion and denial," as Geoffrey Wheatcroft puts it [4], played the key role in Israel's colonial project, while simultaneously projecting a false image of democracy and enlightenment to a misinformed and largely duped Western audience.

Under Peretz, a committed union leader and a Jew belonging to the down-trodden "Sephardic" (meaning Mizrahi/Arab) community, Labor has shifted to the left, argue Israel's apologists, in an attempt to further polish their spin. Reality on the ground was, again, at odds with such a cunningly crafted image. As soon as he was elected Labor's new chairman, Peretz, a self-declared "man of peace," announced [5] that he favored a "united Jerusalem" as Israel's capital and resolutely opposed permitting Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties in Israel, both positions in contravention of international law. Furthermore, his first innovative idea in the political arena must have extinguished any naively misplaced hope for progress towards a just peace under his leadership. The "Hong Kong paradigm," the idea of "leasing" from the Palestinians for 99 years the land on which the largest Jewish colonies were established, was to become Peretz' creative contribution to the search for peace. Meron Benvenisti, an Israeli writer and a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, shrewdly commented on this scheme saying [6]:

"It is impossible to give any more fitting expression to the colonialist nature of the annexation of parts of the West [Bank] than the example of the takeover by the British Empire of parts of the hapless Chinese Empire. Indeed, the inventors of the Hong Kong paradigm identified the similarity: robber capitalism that operates under the auspices of military power against an impotent rival, the bullying takeover of land and water resources while displacing the natives, and making huge profits while exploiting patriotic sentiments and nationalist urges."

Given the above, it is little wonder that Palestinians and discerning observers around the world were not fooled by the media spin about Israel's elections bringing us any closer to peace based on the minimal requirements of justice. Perhaps no one sums up this election better than Gideon Levy, who writes [7]:

"Contrary to appearances, the elections this week are important, because they will expose the true face of Israeli society and its hidden ambitions. More than 100 elected candidates will be sent to the Knesset on the basis of one ticket - the racism ticket. An absolute majority of MKs in the next Knesset do not believe in peace, nor do they even want it - just like their voters - and worse than that, don't regard Palestinians as equal human beings. Racism has never had so many open supporters."

Omar Barghouti, independent political and cultural analyst who has published essays on the rise of empire, the Palestine question and art of the oppressed. He holds a Masters degree in electrical engineering from Columbia University, and is currently a doctoral student of philosophy (ethics) at Tel Aviv University. He contributed to the published book, The New Intifada: Resisting Israel's Apartheid (Verso Books, 2001). He is an advocate of the secular, democratic state solution in historic Palestine. His article "9.11 Putting the Moment on Human Terms" was chosen among the "Best of 2002" by The Guardian. He can be reached at: jenna@palnet.com
 

References:

[1] Akiva Eldar, Lieberman -- nyet, nyet, nyet, Ha'aretz, Macrh 13, 2006.
[2] Eli Ashkenazi and Jack Khoury, Poll: 68% of Jews would refuse to live in same building as an Arab, Ha'aretz, March 22, 2006.
[3] Gideon Levy, One Racist Nation, Ha'aretz, March 26, 2006. 
[4] Geoffrey Wheatcroft, After the rhapsody, the bitter legacy of Israel and the left, The Guardian, March 24, 2006.
[5] Mazal Mualem, Gideon Alon and Zvi Zrahiya, Labor Party votes to quit PM Sharon's government, Ha'aretz, January 1, 2006.
[6] Meron Benvenisti, The Hong Kong Trick, Ha'aretz, January 1, 2006.
[7] Levy, op cit.