A just peace or no peace
by Ismail Haniyeh

Israeli unilateralism is a recipe for conflict – as is the west’s racist refusal to treat Palestinians as equals

Ismail Haniyeh
Friday March 31, 2006
The Guardian

Do policymakers in Washington and Europe ever feel ashamed of their scandalous double standards? Before and since the Palestinian elections in January, they have continually insisted that Hamas comply with certain demands. They want us to recognise Israel, call off our resistance, and commit ourselves to whatever deals Israel and the Palestinian leadership reached in the past.

But we have not heard a single demand of the Israeli parties that took part in this week’s elections, though some advocate the complete removal of the Palestinians from their lands. Even Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party, whose Likud forebears frustrated every effort by the PLO to negotiate a peace settlement, campaigned on a programme that defies UN security council resolutions. His unilateralism is a violation of international law. Nevertheless no one, not even the Quartet – whose proposals for a settlement he continues to disregard, as his predecessor Ariel Sharon did – has dared ask anything of him.

Olmert’s unilateralism is a recipe for conflict. It is a plan to impose a permanent situation in which the Palestinians end up with a homeland cut into pieces made inaccessible because of massive Jewish settlements built in contravention of international law on land seized illegally from the Palestinians. No plan will ever work without a guarantee, in exchange for an end to hostilities by both sides, of a total Israeli withdrawal from all the land occupied in 1967, including East Jerusalem; the release of all our prisoners; the removal of all settlers from all settlements; and recognition of the right of all refugees to return.

On this, all Palestinian factions and people agree, including the PLO, whose revival is essential so that it can resume its role in speaking for the Palestinians and presenting their case to the world.

The problem is not with any particular Palestinian group but with the denial of our basic rights by Israel. We in Hamas are for peace and want to put an end to bloodshed. We have been observing a unilateral truce for more than a year without reciprocity from the Israeli side. The message from Hamas and the Palestinian Authority to the world powers is this: talk to us no more about recognising Israel’s “right to exist” or ending resistance until you obtain a commitment from the Israelis to withdraw from our land and recognise our rights.

Little will change for the Palestinians under Olmert’s plan. Our land will still be occupied and our people enslaved and oppressed by the occupying power. So we will remain committed to our struggle to get back our lands and our freedom. Peaceful means will do if the world is willing to engage in a constructive and fair process in which we and the Israelis are treated as equals. We are sick and tired of the west’s racist approach to the conflict, in which the Palestinians are regarded as inferior. Though we are the victims, we offer our hands in peace, but only a peace that is based on justice. However, if the Israelis continue to attack and kill our people and destroy their homes, impose sanctions, collectively punish us, and imprison men and women for exercising the right to self-defence, we have every right to respond with all available means.

Hamas has been freely elected. Our people have given us their confidence and we pledge to defend their rights and do our best to run their affairs through good governance. If we are boycotted in spite of this democratic choice – as we have been by the US and some of its allies – we will persist, and our friends have pledged to fill the gap. We have confidence in the peoples of the world, record numbers of whom identify with our struggle. This is a good time for peace-making – if the world wants peace.

· Ismail Haniyeh is the new Palestinian prime minister and a Hamas leader. Email: ihaniyyeh@hotmail.com

Another brick in the wall
by Robert Fisk

While journalists continue to perpetuate the Potemkin-like landscape of the Middle East, the truth is, as long as Israel continues to steal Palestinian territory, it cannot expect Hamas to recognise it as a state, writes Robert Fisk
April 3, 2006

By Robert Fisk

We have been conned again. The Israeli elections, we are told, mean that the dream of “Greater Israel” has finally been abandoned.

West Bank settlements will be closed down, just as the Jewish colonies were uprooted in Gaza last year. The Zionist claim to all of Biblical Israel has withered away.

Likud, the nightmare party of Menachem Begin and Benjamin Netanyahu, has been smashed by the Gaullist figure of the dying Ariel Sharon, whose Kadima Party now embraces Ehud Olmert and that decaying symbol of the Israeli left, Nobel prizewinner Shimon Peres.

This, at least, is the narrative laid down by so many of our journalists, “analysts” and “commentators”. But it is a lie.

Only in paragraph two – or three or four – of the grovelling news reports from the Middle East do we read that Olmert’s not very impressive election victory will allow him to “redraw” the “frontiers” of Israel, a decision described as “controversial” – the usual get-out clause of newspapers that wish to avoid the truth: that Israel is about to grab more land and claim it to be part of the state of Israel.

The wall
Yes, true, the smaller and more vulnerable Jewish colonies illegally built on Palestinian-owned land may be abandoned – stand by for more of the grief and tears that we witnessed in Gaza. But the rest – the great semi-circle of concrete that runs around east Jerusalem, for example – will not be depopulated.

Let’s start with the wall. It will soon run from top to bottom of the occupied Palestinian West Bank – and it is going to stay.

It is higher in the long sectors where it has been completed (east of Jerusalem, for example) than the Berlin Wall. Yet journalists go on calling it a “security barrier” or a “fence” – because the as-yet-uncompleted sectors of the wall are still coils of barbed wire.

This is part of the dream world that editors and reporters have constructed for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It exists in the same Potemkin landscape that allows journalists to call the occupied Palestinian territory “disputed territory” – after former US secretary of state Colin Powell ordered his diplomats in the region to use this mendacious phrase – and to call Jewish colonies illegally built on Arab land “settlements” or, my favourites now, “Jewish neighbourhoods” or “outposts”.

It is the same stage on which Israelis are killed by Palestinians, which they are, but on which Palestinians die in anonymous “clashes”. (With whom – and killed by whom – exactly?)

And each of these little lies, of course, contains a kernel of truth. The occupied territories are “disputed” between Israelis and Palestinians, the first claiming that God gave them the land, the second producing land deeds to prove that the law entitles them to their own property.

If illegal colonies such as Maale Adumim are built adjacent to Jerusalem – itself illegally annexed by Israel – then of course they are “neighbourhoods”. And since the wall – which has gobbled up 10% more Palestinian land for the Israelis – is to prevent suicide bombers (and has been fairly successful in doing so), it is a “security barrier”.

I seem to recall that the East Germans called the Berlin Wall – or “Berlin Fence” as I suppose we would have to call it if built by the Israelis – a “security barrier”.

Forget the illegality of occupation, then, and the illegality of stealing someone else’s home and land, and the illegality of building a wall that thieves yet more property from the 22% of mandate Palestine that the Palestinians are supposed to negotiate for.

Let me be frank. If I were an Israeli I, too, would have built a wall to prevent the suicide executioners of Islamic Jihad and, earlier, of Hamas.

But I would have built it along the international frontier of Israel – not used the wall as a cheap method of stealing more land.

Illegal

Indeed, under UN Security Council Resolution 242, which is meant to be the foundation of any peace, the acquisition of land through war is stated to be illegal. The wall itself is illegal. The International Court also ruled it to be illegal. And Israel ignored this ruling. So, of course, did the US.

But now the burden of all this post-election theft is to be placed upon Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas.

This colourless, helpless man, who presided over the Palestinian Authority’s continuing corruption, is supposed to persuade the new Hamas government to accept all of Israel’s land-grabs, to pick up where the Oslo process left off (which still left Jerusalem exclusively in Israeli hands), and to abandon all violence – which means to surrender whenever Israeli troops raid refugee camps or cities in the West Bank.

The point is that Hamas members have been as assuredly elected representatives of the Palestinians as Olmert and his forthcoming allies in government are representatives of Israelis.

But this does not allow them to make any “controversial” plans to redraw their “border” with Israel, not even to insist that Israel withdraws – or redeploys – to its internationally recognised borders. (I’m talking about the pre-1967 frontier, not the 1948 one.)

They cannot demand fulfilment of UN Resolution 242 because President George W Bush has already made it clear that the vast Jewish colonies east of Jerusalem, and Jerusalem itself, will remain in Israeli hands.

Sure, 14 of the 24 Hamas ministers have been in Israeli prisons. But what are Palestinians supposed to think when they realise that 15 Israeli generals have been elected to the new Knesset, along with six secret service agents?

Yet even this is not the point. If the Israelis want Hamas to acknowledge the state of Israel, then Hamas should be expected to acknowledge the state of Israel that exists within its legal frontiers – not the illegal borders now being dreamt up by Olmert.

We will have to abandon the idea that Ariel Sharon – an unindicted war criminal after his involvement in the 1982 Sabra and Chatila massacres – was really going to give up the major Jewish colonies built illegally on Arab land or the illegal annexation of Jerusalem.

Certainly, Olmert is not going to do that.

He is going to create wider frontiers for Israel and steal – let’s call a spade a spade – more Arab land in doing so.

The US will go along with this next illegal land-grab. But will the European Union? Will the UN? Will Russia? Will Tony Blair?

Israelis deserve peace and security as much as Palestinians. But “new” and expanded “controversial” Israeli frontiers will not bring peace or security to either. – The Independent