resolve the Israel / Palestine conflict by means of ethnic cleansing.
He wants to strip Palestinian citizens of Israel of their citizenship
and to relocate them outside the future borders of Israel, borders that
would be redrawn to include Jewish West Bank settlements.
These ideas are not new, but as Jonathan Cook argues below, it is
significant that Lieberman's plans are reappearing at this point in the
public debate. Given Israel's currently low standing in the
international community (at least as far as diplomatic language is
concerned), and the Netanyahu government's failure to engage in the sort
of diplomatic charade known as the peace process, Lieberman apparently
sees an opening for his radical solutions. But also, as Ben White has
argued in a recent Al Jazeera article, Israel's deteriorating
international standing is being accompanied by increasing state violence
and displays of racist hatred against Palestinian citizens in Israel. As
Janan Abdu, wife of imprisoned Palestinian NGO leader Ameer Makhoul has
said: "They are afraid of us, of our identity, and how the youth are
proud to be Palestinian. I think we are entering a tough period and the
people will pay the price."
http://english.aljazeera.net/focus/2010/06/201062211432729531.html
Judith Norman
Jonathan Cook: Lieberman plan to strip Palestinians of citizenship
28/06/2010
http://www.maannews.net/eng/ViewDetails.aspx?ID=295288
Avigdor Lieberman, Israel's far-right foreign minister, set out last
week what he called a "blueprint for a resolution to the conflict" with
the Palestinians that demands most of the country's large Palestinian
minority be stripped of citizenship and relocated outside Israel's
future borders.
Lieberman warned that Israel faces growing diplomatic pressure for a
full withdrawal to the Green Line, the pre-1967 border. Lieberman said
that, if such a partition were implemented, "the conflict will
inevitably pass beyond those borders and into Israel."
He accused many of Israel's 1.3 million Palestinian citizens of acting
against Israel while their leaders "actively assist those who want to
destroy the Jewish state."
Lieberman's Yisrael Beiteinu party campaigned in last year's elections
on a platform of "No loyalty, no citizenship" and has proposed a raft of
loyalty laws over the past year targeted at the Palestinian minority.
True peace, the foreign minister claimed, would come only with land
swaps, or "an exchange of populated territories to create two largely
homogeneous states, one Jewish Israeli and the other Arab Palestinian."
He added that under his plan "those Arabs who were in Israel will now
receive Palestinian citizenship."
Unusually, Lieberman, who is also deputy prime minister, offered his
plan in a commentary for the English-language Israeli daily newspaper
Jerusalem Post, apparently in an attempt to make maximum impact on the
international community.
He has spoken repeatedly in the past about drawing the borders in a way
to forcibly exchange Palestinian communities in Israel for the Israeli
settlements in the West Bank.
But under orders from Benjamin Netanyahu, the prime minister, he has
kept a relatively low profile on the conflict's larger issues since his
controversial appointment to head the foreign ministry more than a year ago.
In early 2009, Lieberman, who lives in the West Bank settlement of
Noqedim, upset his own supporters by advocating the creation of "a
viable Palestinian state," though he has remained unclear about what it
would require in practice.
Lieberman's revival of his "population transfer" plan - an idea he
unveiled six years ago - comes as the Israeli leadership has understood
that it is "isolated like never before," according to Michael
Warschawski, an Israeli analyst.
Netanyahu's government has all but stopped paying lip service to
US-sponsored "proximity talks" with the Palestinians after outraging
global public opinion with attacks on Gaza 18 months ago and on a
Gaza-bound aid flotilla four weeks ago in which nine civilians were killed.
Israel's relations with the international community are likely to
deteriorate further in late summer when a 10-month partial freeze on
settlement expansion in the West Bank expires. Last week, Netanyahu
refused to answer questions about the freeze, after a vote by his Likud
party's central committee to support renewed settlement building from
late September.
Other looming diplomatic headaches for Israel are the return of the
Goldstone Report, which suggested Israel committed war crimes in its
attack on Gaza, to the United Nations General Assembly in late July, and
Turkey's adoption of the rotating presidency of the Security Council in
September.
Warschawski, a founder of the Alternative Information Centre, a joint
Israeli-Palestinian advocacy group, said that, faced with these crises,
Israel's political elite had split into two camps.
Most, including Lieberman, believed Israel should "push ahead" with its
unilateral policies towards the Palestinians and refuse to engage in a
peace process regardless of the likely international repercussions.
"Israel's ruling elite knows that the only solution to the conflict
acceptable to the international community is an end to the occupation
along the lines of the Clinton parameters," he said, referring to the
two-state solution promoted by former US president Bill Clinton in late
2000.
"None of them, not even Ehud Barak [the defence minister and head of the
centrist Labour Party], are ready to accept this as the basis for
negotiations."
On the other hand, Tzipi Livni, the head of the center-right opposition
Kadima party, Warschawski said, wanted to damp down the international
backlash by engaging in direct negotiations with the Palestinian
leadership in the West Bank under President Mahmoud Abbas.
Lieberman's commentary came a day after he told Livni that she could
join the government only if she accepted "the principle of trading
territory and population as the solution to the Palestinian issue, and
give up the principle of land for peace."
Lieberman is reportedly concerned that Netanyahu might seek to bring
Livni into a national unity government to placate the US and prop up the
legitimacy of his coalition.
The Labor Party has threatened to quit the government if Kadima does not
join by the end of September, and Livni is reported to want the foreign
ministry.
Lieberman's position is further threatened by a series of corruption
investigations.
However, he also appears keen to take the initiative from both
Washington and Livni with his own "peace plan." An unnamed aide to
Lieberman told the Jerusalem Post that, with a vacuum in the diplomatic
process, the foreign minister "thinks he can convince the government to
adopt the plan."
However, Warschawski said there were few indications that Netanyahu
wanted to be involved in any peace process, even Lieberman's.
Last week Uzi Arad, the government's shadowy national security adviser
and a long-time confidant of Netanyahu, made a rare public statement at
a meeting of the Jewish Agency in Jerusalem to attack Livni for
"political adventurism" and believing in the "magic" of a two-state
solution.
Apparently reflecting Netanyahu's own thinking, he said: "The more you
market Palestinian legitimacy, the more you bring about a detraction of
Israel's legitimacy in certain circles. [The Palestinians] are
accumulating legitimacy, and we are being delegitimized."
Warschawski doubted that Lieberman believed his blueprint for population
exchanges could be implemented but was promoting it chiefly to further
damage the standing of Israel's Palestinian citizens and advance his own
political ambitions.
In his commentary, Lieberman said the international community's peace
plan would lead to "the one-and-a-half to half state solution": "a
homogeneous, pure Palestinian state," from which Jewish settlers were
expelled, and "a bi-national state in Israel," which included many
Palestinian citizens.
Palestinians, in both the territories and inside Israel, he said, could
not "continue to incite against Israel, glorify murder, stigmatize
Israel in international forums, boycott Israeli goods and mount legal
offensives against Israeli officials."
International law, he added, sanctioned the partition of territory in
which ethnic communities were broken up into different states, including
in the case of the former Yugoslavia. "In most cases there is no
physical population transfer or the demolition of houses, but creating a
border where none existed, according to demographics," he wrote.
Surveys have shown that Palestinian citizens are overwhelming opposed to
"population transfer" schemes like Lieberman's.
Critics note that Lieberman has failed to show how the many Palestinian
communities inside Israel that are located far from the Green Line could
be incorporated into a Palestinian state without expulsions.
Legal experts also point out that, even if Israel managed to trade
territory as part of a peace agreement, stripping Palestinians of their
Israeli citizenship as a result of such a deal would violate
international law.
Jonathan Cook is a writer and journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. A
version of this article appeared in The National published in Abu Dhabi.
It is reprinted here with the author's permission.
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