Thursday, April 23, 2015

EU’s Israel-Palestine Policy Is Out Of Touch With Reality

In a letter calling on European Union foreign affairs chief Federica Mogherini to promote and implement a 2012 plan to mark produce and products for the European marketplace from the Israeli-occupied West Bank, 16 EU foreign ministers stated that what they are requesting is “an important step in the full implementation of EU longstanding policy in relation to the preservation of the two-state solution”.

If that’s what they truly believe, the 16 who signed the letter – they included the foreign ministers of Britain and France but not Germany – are clearly out of touch with reality because the two-state solution has long been dead, killed by Israel’s on-going colonisation and ethnic cleansing by stealth.

There are, of course, two other possible explanations.

One is that those who signed the letter (as well as their EU ministerial colleagues who didn’t) are entertaining the hope that the Palestinian Authority can be bullied and bribed into accepting a two-state solution on Israel’s terms – terms which would leave Israel in occupation of large chunks of the West Bank and the Palestinian “state” little more than a collection of disconnected Bantustans, with Israel’s various security services still in overall control.

The other possibility is that those who signed the letter (as well as their EU ministerial colleagues who didn’t) know that the two-state solution is dead but must go on pretending it isn’t because the only alternative if there is ever to be justice for the Palestinians is one state with equal political and human rights of every kind for all. And that is something European governments do not want to think about. Why?

If Zionism does not resort to a final ethnic cleansing, the day is coming when the Arabs of what is today Greater Israel will outnumber the Jews, so one state for all would lead in time to the de-Zionisation of it. The end of the Zionist enterprise. That being so, the obvious implication is that getting to the point where a one state solution might be possible would require the EU to play its necessary part in putting Israel on notice that unless it ends its defiance of international law and becomes serious about peace on terms the Palestinians could accept, it will be isolated and subjected to sanctions of the kind that played a major role in pushing South Africa’s apartheid regime to its end.

Read the entire article