Israel on the road to self-destruction
US Secretary of State John Kerry was right when he observed at a conference in Munich recently that if the current negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians fail — because, say, of new-fangled demands that Israel continues to make, including the demand that Palestinians recognize it as “the nation state of the Jewish people” — then the peace process aimed at achieving a two-state solution in historic Palestine is over, effectively for good.
What awaits Israel after that is a “delegitimization campaign that’s been building up,” he observed. People are very sensitive to it. There is talk of boycotts and other kinds of things. “Israeli politicians predictably berated Kerry for his remarks, claiming that this amounted to pressure exerted on Tel Aviv to make concessions.
But Kerry was ahead of the game when he proffered his warning. The “kinds of things” building up against Israel is more than mere “boycotts.” The movement known as The Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS), begun less than a decade ago, has morphed into a global campaign that is using economic, political and academic pressure to force Israel to comply with international law, end its occupation and colonization of Arab land, give full equality to Arab Palestinian citizens of Israel, and respect the right return of Palestinian refugees.
All of which echoes the anti-apartheid campaign against the white minority rule in apartheid South Africa in the 1980s. Clearly, the BDS movement was born out of frustration by people around the world at the inability of the UN and at the ineffectiveness of US diplomacy to broker a peace deal. And Kerry was right to remind Israelis that they should be alarmed at the prospect of seeing their state upgraded from a pariah to an apartheid state. The days are gone when Israel, initially seen as a haven for the Jews, could present itself as a victim state in a life and death struggle against Palestinian terrorists and intransigent Arab leaders reluctant to accept its existence (the 2002 Saudi-sponsored Arab Peace Initiative puts the lie to that notion). Israel is thus now faced with three options, and three options only.
It can go along with a two-state solution in historic Palestine. It can go along with bi-nationalism that sees the emergence of one state, for two peoples, of three religions. Or it can opt for apartheid, that is, the imposition of the rule of the gun on a subjugated people, a situation that, as the South African model would attest, could not have been sustained indefinitely.
Kerry was not, clearly, applying subtle pressure on Israel when he warned it to see the writing on the wall, that time was running out, that people around the world today are, as it were, prepared, ready, able and willing to do to it what others had done in the past to apartheid South Africa. What is equally clear is that if the current round of negotiations fails, that would be it. There will be no other “peace process” initiated by Washington, the UN or any other interested party for years to come Israel may see that as an “opportunity,” an opportunity to create more “facts on the ground,” an act that the whole world, without exception, sees as a violation of international law.
What Israel sees as an opportunity for itself, Kerry quite presciently sees as a disaster for an entity that appears hell-bent on self-destruction.
Disclaimer: Views expressed by writers in this section are their own and do not necessarily reflect Arab News' point of view
