Israel is threatening that it will not enter into any negotiations with the Palestinians if the international community should in any way, shape or form endorse the Goldstone report on Israeli war crimes in Gaza.
This takes an awful lot of nerve, considering the context.
Israel is refusing to recognise that Palestinian refugees, like refugees all over the world, have a right of return to the homes and lands from where they were deported. Israel refuses to accept the 1967 borders as the starting point for negotiations to create two states. For example, it considers occupied East Jerusalem its, alone. It considers large settlement blocks as non-negotiable. It considers the Jordan Valley as well as the Golan Heights of supreme strategic military importance, and hence also non-negotiable.
Israel is in effect willing to negotiate only over what is left of the occupied West Bank once East Jerusalem; settlement blocks and the Jordan Valley are taken out of the equation. And over this remaining 12 or 13 per cent of historic Palestine, Israel still wants to negotiate. But not if the Palestinians have the nerve to set preconditions for talks.
Israeli preconditions, you see, only look like preconditions, they are in fact an entirely rational framework for a government that considers it has divine entitlement to the land.
Israel, furthermore, rejects any suggestion that its military or political leaders could possibly be guilty of war crimes. The fact that an independent committee of world-renowned jurors should raise that possibility only shows that the world is inherently anti-Semitic. That one of those jurors should happen to be both Jewish and a Zionist matters not to the paranoid mind.
It is tempting to wonder what the Palestinians did to deserve an enemy like this. More puzzling, perhaps, is the world’s abject failure to deal with what is clearly a rogue state with a rogue-state mentality.
How long can this continue? How long can a country that clearly has so much contempt for international law, for the demands of peace and for human rights continue to lead the world by its nose?
One hopes that this current Israeli government, composed as it is of settlers, bigots and rejectionists, will finally force the scales from everyone’s eyes. One hopes.
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