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IN HIS speech at Bar Ilan University on June 14, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu proposed a new Israeli ‘peace plan’, with preconditions that a Palestinian negotiator must first meet before he would ‘promptly’ engage in ‘unconditional’ bilateral talks to meet an international consensus demanding the creation of a Palestinian state alongside Israel. His preconditions added to the fourteen conditions the former Israeli government of comatose Ariel Sharon attached to Israel’s adoption in grudge of the 2003 roadmap for peace with the Palestinian side, on the basis of which the US administration of President Barak Obama and his presidential envoy George Mitchell are now urging an early resumption of ‘immediate’ Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, which Mitchell on June 26 hoped ‘very much to conclude this phase of the discussions and to be able to move into meaningful and productive negotiations in the near future.’
   Sharon’s conditional approval of the roadmap has condemned the blueprint as a non-starter, led to the Israeli military reoccupation of the Palestinian autonomous areas, aborted former US President George W Bush’s promise to Palestinians to have their own state twice in 2005 and 2008, and doomed the twenty-year peace process since the Madrid conference in 1991 to its current impasse that Obama and Mitchell are trying to break through. It is a forgone conclusion that Netanyahu’s preconditions – Palestinian recognition of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’, ‘demilitarisation’ of the prospective Palestinian less-than-a-sovereign state and preserving Israel’s illegitimate ‘right’ to expand its illegal colonial Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories – will fare worse than Sharon’s conditions.
   Netanyahu demanded that the ‘Palestinian population’, and not the Palestinian people – who live ‘in Judea and Samaria’, and not in the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territory, where there is an ‘Israeli presence’, and not an Israeli military occupation – should first agree to a ‘public, binding and unequivocal’ recognition that Israel is ‘the nation state of the Jewish people’ worldwide, and not the nation state of the Israelis. His demand was an arrogant precondition ridiculed by Gideon Levy in Haaretz on June 15 as an ‘excessive demand that Palestinians recognise the Jewish state by one who has failed to recognise the Palestinians as a people,’ sarcastically welcomed the next day by Ma’ariv’s chief political columnist, Ben Caspit, who wrote: ‘Welcome, Mr Prime Minister, to the 20th century. The problem is that we’re already in the 21st.’ Moreover, such a precondition ‘is almost humiliating and it is unlikely to be met’, by the Palestinian Authority, according to Avi Issacharoff, writing in Haaretz on June 17.
   Israeli analyst MJ Rosenberg wrote on June 19: Acceptance of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ is a non-starter at this point. And Netanyahu knows it. If that is a precondition for negotiations, there will be no negotiations. But without any definition of borders and with Netanyahu committed to expanding settlements in the West Bank, how can anyone seriously expect Palestinians to recognise Israel as a ‘Jewish state’? Aaron David Miller, a former senior US negotiator in the Mideast, said Netanyahu’s speech ‘was less about pursuing Arab-Israeli peace and much more about pursuing the US-Israeli relationship.’
   PA’s Prime Minister in Ramallah, Salam Fayyad, noted in a speech at Al-Quds (Jerusalem) University on June 22 that his Israeli counterpart’s speech missed all reference to the roadmap as well as to the thorny issue of expanding settlements and described the speech as ‘a new blow to efforts to salvage the peace process.’ Head of the Palestine Liberation Organisation’s department of negotiations affairs Saeb Erakat condemned Netanyahu’s speech as a ‘non-starter’. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas urged the international community to isolate him and his government. His Egyptian counterpart Hosni Mubarak, a close ally of Abbas and the US and Israel’s 30-year unwavering peace partner, said Netanyahu’s precondition ‘aborts the chance for peace’, although he declined to heed Abbas’ call for the isolation of Netanyahu and received him and others of his cabinet. Al-Baath, the mouthpiece of Syria’s ruling party, commented: ‘Netanyahu has confirmed that he rejects the Arab initiative for peace.’ In an editorial on June 16, the Saudi Arabian English daily ‘Arab News’ said his speech was ‘a challenge to the world community.’ Walid Jumblat, a leading figure of the March 14 bloc, which recently won the Lebanese elections, lambasted the speech as dragging the region into a ‘dangerous stage’ and one that ‘completely crippled’ any possibility to reach a peace settlement, adding that, ‘any talk about Israel as a Jewish state means closing the file on the (Palestinian right of) return,’ on which there is a consensus among rival Lebanese factions to reject the resettlement of half a million Palestinian refugees hosted by Lebanon since 1948.
   However Obama and Mitchell insensitively ignored all negative Palestinian and Arab reactions, repeatedly and on record renamed Israel as the ‘Jewish’ State of Israel, with Obama lightly trying to defuse the explosiveness of Netanyahu’s demand by stating that it was ‘exactly what negotiations are supposed to be about,’ because ‘this is what both America and Europe are asking,’ according to Italian foreign minister Franco Frattini.
   Angrily describing Netanyahu as a ‘swindler’ who plays ‘tricks’ with peacemaking, Yasser Abed Rabbo, secretary general of the PLO’s executive committee, said the Israeli premier wants Palestinians to ‘become Zionists.’ Mere heartfelt commitment to Zionism will not be enough, however, Hasan and Ali Abunimah wrote in The Electronic Intifada on June 17, for the Palestinians’ conversion to have ‘practical meaning’, Netanyahu explained, ‘there must also be a clear understanding that the Palestinian refugee problem will be resolved outside Israel’s borders.’ In other words, ‘Palestinians must agree to help Israel complete the ethnic cleansing it began in 1947-48, by abandoning the right of return,’ Abunimah brothers added.
   In a statement, five PLO member factions, namely the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, the Palestinian People’s Party, the Palestinian National Liberation Movement and the Palestinian Popular Struggle Front, said Netanyahu’s speech was ‘tantamount to a declaration of war on Palestinians’ national rights.’ For the first time since the Palestinian-Israeli ‘peace process’ was launched some twenty years ago, the voice of the PLO peace partners was much louder and harsher in criticising Israel than that of their opposition among the non-PLO factions, like Hamas and the Islamic Jihad. Netanyahu seems to have succeeded where four years of Egyptian efforts have failed to make Palestinians speak in one voice.
   When Netanyahu makes Palestinian recognition of Israel as a ‘Jewish state’ as the cornerstone of his ‘peace’ policy and has Avigdor Lieberman, who calls on record for the transfer of Israeli Arab Palestinians, as the foreign minister of his ruling coalition, he officially raises ethnic cleansing to the level of state policy, and may be this is why French President Nicolas Sarkozy reportedly urged visiting Netanyahu on June 30 to replace his top diplomat and ‘to get rid of that man’, whom he declined to meet when Lieberman was recently in Paris, leading Israeli member of Knesset Afu Aghbaria (Hadash) and ten others of his parliamentary colleagues to call on world leaders to declare what they condemn as the ‘racist’ Lieberman a persona-non-grata. Another Hadash MP, Hanna Swaid, wrote to Mitchell: ‘The recognition of Israel as a Jewish state harms the Arab citizens (25% of the population), undermines their legal status in the country and puts them at the heart of the struggle with no representation in the negotiations.’
   Recognising Israel as a/or the ‘Jewish state’ should be rejected not only because it politically forecloses whatever chance remains for the resumption of peace talks and sets the regional stage for the alternative, which another peace partner to Israel, Jordan’s King Abdullah II, has repeatedly warned against because it ‘would have adverse and catastrophic consequences on the whole region,’ but more importantly because strategically such a precondition, if it gains international recognition, would inevitably be used by Israel as a casus belli to officially resume – what has been so far claimed an unofficial policy by neutral monitors and officially denied by Israeli politicians – and defend its ethnic cleansing of native Arab Palestinians as an internationally-recognised state policy inside its borders, and in the Palestinian territories it occupied in 1967 outside them, and as an international carte blanche vindicating what the Israeli historian, Ilan Pappe documented as its more than sixty-year old ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’.
   Politically this would rule out the Palestinian refugees’ ‘Right of Return’ and legitimise Lieberman’s ‘transfer’ dreams (expulsion en masse of Israel’s Arab-Palestinian citizens as well as Palestinian natives of East Jerusalem) to be made true as soon as the political timing render their realisation feasible, to throw ‘the Arabs into the sea’, according to Aharon Barak, the former president of the supreme court of Israel from 1995 to 2006, who was speaking at the Rabin Centre in Tel Aviv on June 25.
   Israeli governmental and parliamentary officials of Netanyahu’s ruling coalition criticised Barak’s support for ‘a state for all its citizens’. It would be very instructive here to recall the first prime minister of Israel and forefather of ethnic cleansing David Ben-Gurion’s reaction to the news that the world renowned physicist Albert Einstein declined the offer of the Israeli presidency in 1952: ‘Tell me what to do if he says yes! If he accepts, we are in trouble,’ he said, because Einstein ‘would distinguish between Jewish homeland and state, and argued for a bi-national state where Jews and Arabs shared a common land, not a strictly defined ‘Jewish state’, according to Fred Jerome, who in June published his new book, ‘Einstein on Israel and Zionism: His Provocative Ideas about the Middle East’ (St Martin’s Press).
   More instructive than Einstein’s arguments and Ben-Gurion’s reaction was the US President Harry S Truman’s proclamation, just 11 minutes after the state’s unilateral declaration, that, ‘The United States recognises the provisional government (proclaimed by Jews ‘in Palestine’) as the de facto authority of the new State of Israel,’ and NOT as ‘the new Jewish State’ as proposed by the American Jewish leaders, crossing out the proposed words and replacing them in his own handwriting with ‘the new state of Israel.’ Obviously, Netanyahu’s precondition ‘was devised because Netanyahu understands that Palestinians will never accept it because it negates their standing in a land they have inhabited from time immemorial’ (Rosenberg on June 14).
   Czech Republic Foreign Minister Jan Kohout, visiting Israel on June 28, said in an exclusive interview with The Jerusalem Post: ‘First we have to understand what is meant by this [Jewish state demand]. So far, I can say that I don’t have a clear picture on that.’ ‘Resolution 181 (UN Resolution 181, also called the 1947 UN Partition Plan) calls for recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. But at the same time it gives equal rights to all of its citizens,’ said Kohout, who seemed not interested in recent history to note that the Israel recognised by the UN Resolution 181, which at the time had a population of some (500,000) Jews and (438,000) Arab Palestinians, is very much smaller than the one we know now, which enjoys a de facto, but not yet a de jure, international recognition, thanks to Israel’s ‘War of Independence’ using Plan D to ‘cleanse’ Palestine, according to Pappe and to five major territorial expansionist wars, dubbed ‘preventive’ or ‘pre-emptive’ wars by Israeli strategists, who launched them to secure their ethnic cleansing exploits, claiming with their former premier, Golda Meir, that there was ‘no Palestinian people’ to cleanse.
   To ethnically cleanse the Palestinians was the very basis of Israel’s raison d’être. Speaking of the Arabs of Palestine (Complete Diaries, June 12, 1895 entry), Theodore Herzl, founder of the World Zionist Organisation, said: ‘Spirit the penniless population across the frontier by denying it employment... Both the process of expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.’ The tragic result was summarised by Israel’s minister of defence during the 1967 war, Moshe Dayan, in an address to the Technion, Haifa, (Haaretz, April 4, 1969): ‘Jewish villages were built in the place of Arab villages. You do not even know the names of these Arab villages, and I do not blame you because geography books no longer exist. Not only do the books not exist, the Arab villages are not there either. Nahlal arose in the place of Mahlul; Kibbutz Gvat in the place of Jibta; Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Huneifis; and Kefar Yehushua in the place of Tal al-Shuman. There is not a single place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population.’
   It seems clear now that the UN General Assembly Resolution 4686 of 1991, which revoked an earlier one equating Zionism with racism (the 1975 Resolution 3379), was a premature measure.
   Kohout whose country was the former rotating president of the European Union is not a rare species in demanding to ‘understand what is meant’ by the ‘Jewish state’ precondition. One could not but recall the Venetian word ‘ghetto’, once meant for the Jews of Europe. The Israeli leadership seems now in the grips of a ‘ghetto mentality’ racing against the modern times of pluralism and coexistence, when nations are moving towards a globalised 21st-century identity of citizenship by allegiance, regardless of race, creed or gender, and at a time when the French translation of Israeli academic Shlomo Sand’s ‘The Invention of the Jewish People’ is granted this year’s French prestigious Aujourd’hui Award for a book which argues that Zionism in modern times ‘invented’ the concept of the ‘Jewish people’ as well as their ‘imaginary’ historical connection to Palestine.
   Nicola Nasser is a veteran Arab journalist based in Bir Zeit of the Israeli-occupied Palestinian territories

MUCH of the increase in the world’s military spending in the 2000s is connected to the escalating costs of the George W Bush administration’s ‘war on terror’ throughout the decade. This rapid and continuing rise in military spending – charted by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute and analysed in the last two columns of this series – was always a diversion from the needs of the planet and the majority of the world’s population; this becomes even more evident during a period of financial crisis, food insecurity, dislocation, and severe climate change (see ‘Iraq, AfPak, beyond: the global cost of war’, June18; ‘A tale of two paradigms’ June 25).
   The pressing social realities of (for example) hunger and unemployment may not be enough to persuade governments to refocus energy and resources away from wasteful military spending. But the global financial downturn has put heavy pressure on government budgets, and as a result military expenditure is being scrutinised more coldly than has been the case for several years.
   This may not be a ‘progressive’ way of making hard choices about public needs, but the effect can be to open up debate about what kind of ‘security’ it is that countries and their citizens – and the world itself – now need.
   
   The project of power
   THE case of Britain – a nuclear-weapons power, a member of the United Nations Security Council, a leading participant in the G8 and G20, and a major player in international security – is an interesting study in how the issue of military expenditure is becoming entwined in these larger arguments about security needs.
   Three factors are especially relevant in the current British context. First, a painful recession involving cosmic levels of debt in a globally exposed financial economy entails cuts in public spending that will last until at least the mid-2010s. Second, a general election must be held by early June 2010, and whichever party wins power will be obliged to conduct a defence review which will include substantial savings. Third, two very big projects that will dominate the equipment budget for until 2020 and beyond must be addressed as part of the military-spending plans – projects that are particularly interesting for what they say about how Britain views itself and its role in the world. If either or both of them were to be cancelled, this could provide real potential for a positive rethinking of Britain’s whole approach to international security.
   The first of these two projects is the plan to replace the Trident submarine-launched nuclear missile system by the mid-2020s with a broadly similar system. Most of the construction expenditure will go on four very large new missile-submarines; but far more of the overall cost will be consumed by the Atomic Weapons Establishment at Aldermaston, west of London, where the nuclear weapons are researched and built.
   Aldermaston alone costs around £1 billion ($1.65 billion) a year, a figure which is rarely included in the cost of the new weapons. But if it is included among all the other costs over the lifetime of the whole Trident replacement system, the total planned spending on this project is around £50-£70 billion – far greater than most official figures, and with much of it ‘frontloaded’ in the 2010s.
   The second project is the plan – already delayed – to build two huge new aircraft-carriers. These will be very much larger than any warship ever deployed by the Royal Navy, much bigger even than the second-world-war battleships. They are designed to fly off the new American F-35 advanced multi-role warplane, which is greatly more costly even than the carriers themselves.
   The plan, even taking account of recent delays, is to build the carriers by the mid-2010s and deploy them at sea with the squadrons of F-35s by 2020. Along with Trident and its replacement, they are expected to give Britain a worldwide military capability, not least in the energy-rich waters of the Persian Gulf.
   These projects fail to address the core strategic question of whether they are relevant to a world in which irregular warfare seems much more likely than major state-on-state conflicts. More immediately, however, the money to furnish them will simply not be there unless major (and almost certainly unpopular) cuts are made in other public-funding streams.
   In principle, the Labour government led by Gordon Brown could cancel the carriers in favour of much smaller and more versatile warships; and/or scale down Trident and its replacement to a much more minimal force. In practice, it is unlikely to make any such changes before the (probable) May 2010 election.
   
   An emerging opportunity
   A NEW report from the London-based Institute for Public Policy Research is significant here, even more for its provenance: it comes from a centrist think-tank with a modestly progressive tinge, is prepared by a commission whose members ended up being drawn from the establishment (including former ministers and retired soldiers), and it is in part funded by defence companies.
   At first glance, the conclusions of Shared Responsibilities: A national security strategy for the UK on the matters of Trident replacement and the aircraft-carriers are mild – the report questions their relevance rather than condemns them outright. But two things give the report more bite than may appear. The first is that impeccably elite figures – with hundreds of years of political, military and diplomatic experience between them – are asking these questions in a manner which legitimises them in terms of wider debate.
   The carriers, as currently envisaged, will give Britain a global power-projection capability superior to any country except the United States; and the Trident replacement will be versatile and multi-purpose – much more than a last-ditch deterrent. Many independent analysts have challenged these ‘givens’ of British defence policy – and scarcely been noticed within the dominant political culture (and where noticed at all, often dismissed in a word). This commission cannot be so dismissed – and even its modest interrogation means that others can press further.
   The second point is that Shared Responsibilities does begin to look at international security in a manner which goes beyond the ‘control paradigm’ – maintaining the status quo – that still underlies Britain’s defence outlook, despite the manifest problems in Iraq and Afghanistan.
   The IPPR report recognises that new issues are emerging – among them climate change, global poverty and inequality; and that these increase the risk of conflict stemming from fragile and unstable states. There are, too, new vulnerabilities being created by advances in bio-technology; security problems in the world’s mega-cities; and the risk of slow but steady slippage towards nuclear proliferation.
   Again, none of this is new for the readers of this column in openDemocracy, or for some small independent think-tanks such as the Oxford Research Group. Indeed, what the IPPR report does is to inject a dose of legitimacy into a debate on these much wider security issues that is normally consigned to the margins of official strategic analysis.
   But that in itself is a sort of breakthrough – and it will have a particular salience in the post-election period in Britain in mid-2010. The rising security significance of the global socioeconomic divide, plus environmental constraints such as climate change, are at last becoming recognised; the inability to pay for the defence shopping-list beloved of Britain’s major arms industries completes the double-whammy.
   In consequence, a period is approaching when Britain may have a once-in-a-generation opportunity to wean itself from its ‘delusions of post-imperial grandeur’. Farewell Trident, farewell aircraft-carriers: and towards a security policy that is in tune with the real and emerging international-security issues of the next decades? The prospect is far from certain, but at last it is being put on the agenda of those near the heart of power.
   openDemocracy, July 2. Paul Rogers is professor in the department of peace studies at Bradford University, northern England.

Indian envoy’s comments
on Tipaimukh

Instead of supporting his colleague Dr Dipu Moni on her belated realisation that Pinak Ranjan Chakravarty might have overstepped the boundaries of diplomatic norms, Syed Ashraful Islam came out with untenable excuses to defend the Indian envoy. As official spokesperson of the party in power Mr Islam’s view will be construed by many as the government stand. I think our government need to clarify their official position to the people immediately to avoid further misgivings on the issue.
   Nuruddin Azam
   Australia

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