WHAT PEACE PROCESS?
Labour MP, John Austin, recently hosted a meeting for journalists and academics with Palestinian politician Hanan Ashrawi, following which he gives his assesment of the current state of the peace process.
The so-called Middle East peace process has reached a critical stage. In Israel we see a lethal combination of fundamental religious extremism, extreme right wing policies and militarism, given a veneer of respectability by the Israeli Labour Party whose leaders have become apologists for racism and fascism.
In the week that the BBC Panorama programme exposed Ariel Sharon's role in the Sabra and Shatillamassacres in Lebanon in 1982, and when Labour MPs at Westminster have been demanding that Sharon be indicted and put on trial for war crimes, our own Prime Minister appears smiling with the mass murderer and congratulates him on his restraint. Where is Labour's ethical foreign policy?
The Israeli government has no peace agenda; it has returned to a policy of fundamental Zionism. After decades of unaccountable occupation, the Palestinians must accept Israeli domination and in Hanan Ashrawi's words “be good little natives or lie down and die”.
And what is this talk of a “ceasefire”, as if there were a war between two nations? There is no war. There is an illegal occupation of the West Bank including Jerusalem and Gaza. Arafat is being asked to guarantee the safety of the Israelis! In what other conflict have the people under occupation and subjugation been seen to be responsible for the safety of the occupiers?
And what is this demand for security? Is it just security for Israel and not for the Palestinians? The illegal Israeli settlers are armed and allowed to act as vigilantes and the Israeli government's secret assassination squads roam freely in the occupied territories. Offices of the Palestinian National Authority are shelled. Palestinian homes are flattened by tanks, orchards destroyed and the world looks on.
The combination of gunfire and restrictions on movement has closed schools and colleges, hospitals and clinics. Britain and the European nations remain silent. Britain gets its policy from the United States, which in turn gets its from Israel. Even the so-called independent Mitchell report starts from an Israeli perspective and fails to recognise that there is an illegal occupation or that Israel is in defiance of the United Nations. There is not a state of war; there is a state of power imbalance. There are not two armies. There is one army and a people under occupation; and the people under occupation are required to show politeness and restraint.
Has the world gone mad? Jack Straw is an unknown quantity as Foreign Secretary but will he be able to break free from the Government's apparent Zionist agenda? Israel under Sharon has no plans for Palestinian self-determination only the creation of a series of Bantustans. Is Israel the apartheid state of the 21st century with Britain playing the support and apologist role played by Mrs Thatcher for S Africa in the 1980s?
There can be only one route to peace and security in the Middle east; an end to Israeli Occupation, and a fully fledged, viable Palestinian state within the 1967 boundaries, responsible for its own borders and with international recognition and guarantees of the right of return for refugees.
JOHN AUSTIN MP
June 2001
Hanan Ashrawi is currently Secretary general of the Palestinian Initiative for the Promotion of Global Dialogue and Democracy (MIFTAH) web-site www.miftah.org
