by James M. Wall
Israel’s response to the United Nations’ overwhelming vote to admit Palestine to the UN was easily predictable. Israel had been waiting for just this moment to announce it would build a settlement in Area E1 (East One).
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was harshly rejected at the UN General Assembly, a stinging defeat he knew was coming which explains why he did not attend the GA personally.
On November 29, 2012, the General Assembly elevated Palestine to a new status as a non member observer state. Such a rejection of Israel could not stand for one simple reason: Israel has other plans for Palestine, a long envisioned series of “worker bee” Palestinian bantustans located within an expanded state of Israel.
Netanyahu retaliated for the UN vote by announcing he had authorized the building of 3000 new Jewish housing units in Area E1, a plot of land east of Jerusalem. The new settlement would be adjacent to the major settlement of Ma’aleh Adumim, forming a solid line of east-west Israeli settlements.
This move was no surprise. E1 has been a potential location for more Israeli settlements since 2005. E1 has been sitting on the “peace process” negotiation table for the past seven years, a “loaded gun” which, as any Hitchcock fan knows, has to be fired before the film concludes.
The “loaded gun” is Israel’s “Doomsday Settlement”. The reference, of course, is best remembered as the key plot moment in Stanley Kubrick’s classic film, Dr. Strangelove and How I Learned to Love the Bomb, in which the Soviet Union’s “Doomsday Machine” is triggered after a crazed U.S. Air Force General orders a nuclear attack on Soviet cities. (See below for a clip from the film.)
The Soviet response was designed to trigger an automatic nuclear response, bringing an end to the two nations.
Israel’s “Doomsday Settlement” on E1 (see map above) “will render any prospective Palestinian contiguous state territorially impossible”, according to Daniel Seidemann, the Israeli founder of Terrestrial Jerusalem.
Seidemann (at left), a highly respected Israeli settler expert on territorial expansion, has condemned settlement construction on Area E1 as “the doomsday settlement”.
Nicola Nasser, writing for Palestine Chronicle from his home in Bir Zeit in the West Bank of Palestine, explains the significance of Seidemann’s “doomsday” designation:
“The site of some 4.6 square miles (12 square km) of this settlement on the easternmost edge of eastern Jerusalem will close the only territorial link between the north and south of the West Bank and sever it from East Jerusalem, the prospective capital of the State of Palestine, thus undermining any viable and contiguous Palestinian state on the territories occupied by Israel in 1967 and turning the recognition of the UN General Assembly on November 29, 2012 as merely a Palestinian paper achievement.”
Both the U.S. and the European Union had opposed the E1 plan since Israel first produced it in 2005, because, in a series of objections since 2005, Nicola Nasser reports:
they were alert to its potential undermining effect on the “peace process.” Now, the five permanent members of the UN Security Council and the United Nations have all warned against the E-1 plan. The White House and U.S. State Department described the plan as “unilateral,” “counterproductive,” “sets back” peace efforts, “especially damaging to efforts to achieve a two-state solution,” “complicate efforts to resume direct, bilateral negotiations” and “risk prejudging the outcome” of such negotiations, and “contrary to US policy.”
This latest move by Israel calls to mind a dying Jimmy Cagney’s Cody Jarrett character in the film, White Heat, who shouts to his dead mother,”Made it, Ma! Top of the world!”.
With his latest gesture of defiance to the world, Benjamin Netanyahu could have been shouting to Israel’s founding father, David Ben-Gurion, dead since 1973, “Made it, Mr. Prime Minister, we have finally reached the Jordan River!”
No wonder Jordan’s King Abdullah II decided this week would be a good time to pay a visit to his new state neighbor. He became the first leader to visit Palestine after its elevation to state status.
A closer look at the map (above) reveals what Israel has in mind for the future of the state of Palestine. The so-called “separation wall”, which is, in fact, a land-stealing wall built by Israel under the pretense cover of “security”, winds in the shape of a snake coiled to strike, with its head at the south of Jerusalem.
The tail of the snake coils around the northern part of Jerusalem, eating up rich Palestinian farm land, concluding west of Jerusalem.
Leaders of seven nations determined that following Israel’s second punitive military assault on Gaza in four years, the UN vote, and the Arab Spring hovering in the background, Israel had to be given a mild diplomatic reprimand.
Leaders of the seven nations,Australia, Brazil, France, UK, Sweden, Denmark and Spain, called in their resident Israeli ambassadors to demand an explanation for the timing of Israel’s announcement.
Germany, which usually does Israel’s bidding because of a shared history of the Holocaust, did not vote with Israel at the UN. Instead, Germany abstained. A long-planned visit from Netanyahu to Berlin, went forward, ending in a mutual agreement “to agree to disagree”, not exactly a ringing endorsement for either nation.
U.S. and international media, on the other hand, posted a series of reprimands for Israel’s “doomsday settlement”. Phillip Weiss summarized these reprimands, casting it as a realization by the media observers that the “two state” solution is truly dead, which is, in actual fact, a long-overdue announcement.
It remains for the Guardian’s intrepid columnist, Glenn Greenwald, to post this indictment that the leader of the free world is still not willing to stand up to Netanyahu, even after this latest in a series of public face-slapping of the American government from Netanyahu.
And then finally, we have this, from Monday:
“The UN general assembly has overwhelmingly approved a resolution calling on Israel to open its nuclear programme for inspection.
“The resolution, approved by a vote of 174 to six with six abstentions, calls on Israel to join the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT) ‘without further delay’ and open its nuclear facilities to inspection by the International Atomic Energy Agency. Those voting against were Israel, the US, Canada, Marshall Islands, Micronesia and Palau. . . .
“The vote came as a sequel to the cancellation of a high-level conference aimed at banning nuclear weapons from the Middle East. All the Arab nations and Iran had planned to attend the summit in mid-December in Helsinki, Finland, but the US announced on 23 November that it would not take place, citing political turmoil in the region and Iran’s defiant stance on non-proliferation. Iran and some Arab nations countered that the real reason for the cancellation was Israel’s refusal to attend.”
So essentially, it’s the entire planet on one side, versus the US, its new right-wing poodle to the north [that would be Canada], Israel, and three tiny, bribed islands on the other side.
Israel’s nuclear arsenal has long been a pretend secret, so secret and so open, that no president has ever acknowledged the presence of Israel’s role as a nuclear military power. The secret is out now, thanks to another overwhelming vote in the UN General Assembly, a body which is apparently no longer willing to be repository of Israel’s private cache of immoral and illegal conduct.
Meanwhile, the “doomsday settlement” awaits its first construction tractors. As we wait, this short video from Dr. Strangelove is thought-provoking. The clip below opens with a conversation between the Soviet ambassador and the U.S. President. It takes place in “the War Room”. The ambassador and the president are soon joined by Dr. Strangelove:
The map above is from a newly-designed Palestine Chronicle web site.
Wallwritings 
Great work, Jim!
I went to hear Danny Seidmann speak at the UN Interchurch Center in New York. He is the foremost expert on how to share Jerusalem. I asked him if he thought President Obama would do anything to make a difference for Middle East peace in his second term. His answer was, “You can’t cross a precipice in small steps!” It’s high time that our president took some big steps. Please, Mr. President, lead or get out of the way.
Obama is neither a leader for peace and justice nor a humanitarian!
Now we are going to see how misplaced were the sincere hopes that the reelection of Obama would do any good in bringing peace to the Middle East. Not that Romney was a dreamboat. It’s just that he was no worse than Obama, and may not have been so bad on other issues. The problem is that our government has been hijacked by the Israel Lobby, hijacked by Wall Street, hijacked by Zionist press barons, and hijacked by other special interest. Our government is not allowed to pursue the enlightened national interests of the United States. The election was meaningless. — John Remington Graham of the Minnesota Bar (#3664X)
Jim: We are waiting for the President’s meaningfull reaction to the latest insultive actions of Benjamin Netanyahu. It seems to me the President has no other choice than to show his true feelings in regard to this “Doomsday Settlement” propsed by Prime Minister Netanyahue. Harris Fawell, Member of Congress, Retired (1998)
How long can this charade go on? The many years of lies and deceipt from Israel are building up to another version of the doomsday scenario. It cannot go on forever. Eventually the charade will build to a critical mass which will fall upon itself and crush Zionistic ideology and the Israel state itself. Sorry, but it is simple logic. Why can the Israeli government not see that. YOU CANNOT FOOL ALL THE PEOPLE ALL THE TIME. The question is: how far into the abyss will Israel and the Israeli people fall? Lies always fail. Truth always prevails (sometimes it takes a long time though). Perhaps that time will be soon upon us.
Let Israel build all it wants to in the West Bank and Jerusalem. The Palestinians displaced in 1948 can move in to all of the new construction once the land is returned to its rightful owners as it soon will be.
Our grants to Israel should be conditioned not only to no settlements in El, but also return of other stolen lands.
Thank you, Jim, for including a map in your excellent analysis. Most of our media deliberately skip maps because they clearly expose and reveal the extent of Israel’s continued theft of Palestinian lands.
Israel’s announced “Doomsday settlement” land grab poses an “Existential” challenge for Palestinians. E-1 settlement is designed to split the West Bank in two and prevent Jerusalem from being a “shared” capital.
It is certainly high time for President Obama, EU, and the UN Security Council to take a bold step to stop Israel’s grand theft.
This takes us to the ONE-STATE solution that will ensure that Israel will be annointed as the world’s only Apartheid non-democratic state.
I have no doubt that, if this calamitous Israeli action is not stopped in time, the next Palestinian Intifada will bring down the current leadership and replace it with a vibrant underground leadership that will call for all-out resistance against the tyrannical occupier.
This latest eruption of the Zionist psychosis is sooooo representative of the Zionists’ penchant for “opportunistic” behavior. They are masters at timing their criminality around election cycles (US or Israeli, equally, or Palestine 2006), announced-but-not-yet-in-place cease fires, manufactured Occupied Palestine and (periodic) Occupied Lebanon “crises,” 9-11, UN activity, humanitarian boat missions, the 1967 6-day war, the USS Liberty, assassinations, and on and on. And the world treats each incident as a discrete issue without tying all together as acts in a long-running play whose denouement is intended to be the “final solution” of expulsion of every last Palestinian from the Holy Land. I think that they’re nearer the final act than any of us can imagine. Perhaps this unfolding E1 travesty, or Syria, or Iran, or a sure-to-come provocation designed to break the perilous Gaza cease fire, or some combination, will be the signal for the curtain to fall. Will we never confront and end the impunity to which the Zionists have become so accustomed that their arrogance is de riguer and self-fulfilling?
Thanks Jim! For the benefit of readers who haven’t been to (the State of) Palestine, the map doesn’t quite do justice to your observations:
Ma’ale Adumim sits at the edge of the Judaean Wilderness (desert) from which one can see the Dead Sea 3500′ below down a fairly steep slope marked by deep gorges — there is no way to connect by road what will become two utterly divided portions of the West Bank, the north and the south. That is, the Wilderness is a natural barrier, having the effect of an extension of the Wall down to the Jordan Valley.
We have seen the results of the mythical discontiguous state of Gaza and the West Bank. Now there will be three isolated and encircled areas, the largest being less than 50 miles across its longest span and that punctuated with innumerable settlements, checkpoints and other movement restricting measures.
Can we now have the funeral liturgy for the two-state fantasy, and begin to talk only of the only remaining possibilities: one state or transfer?
Local efforts can help Palestinians
http://tinyurl.com/a8xcyo6
In response to Palestine’s status being upgraded by an overwhelming majority vote in the United Nations, Israel approved the construction of an additional 3,000 housing units in Jerusalem and the West Bank, clearly demonstrating the contempt with which it views everyone else. What chutzpah.
Although Palestine’s new status allows Israel to be held accountable in the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity during its brutal assaults on Gaza and for settlement construction on occupied land, that alone cannot create a just two-state solution with equality between and within both states and right-of-return for Palestinian refugees to their homeland.
In fact, heavy promotion of that segregated model by Israeli lobby groups that are concerned about “demographics” — i.e., loss of a Jewish majority — aim to block those objectives and forever institutionalize apartheid.
There’s much we can do in our own communities to advance human rights for the Palestinian people:
Educate about the history of Palestinian dispossession and their internationally established right-of-return.
Encourage Nakba (“catastrophe”) commemoration days, memorial museums, exhibits and oral history projects.
Understand the current violent oppression as ongoing fulfillment of a century-old Zionist vision.
Recognize that historic Palestine is already a single state with half the population holding the other half captive under occupation and blockade with an arcane network of ethnic fragments developed by Israel for privileged Jewish citizens.
Envision a single, integrated constitutional democracy with freedom, equality and restorative justice for all citizens, irrespective of religion or ethnicity.
Mariah Leung, Co-director
Al-Nakba Awareness Project
Eugene
The question was asked: How long can this poltical insanity go on? I have been watching it for the past 59 years. It won’t stop until the United States tells Israel to stop the nonsense. And when will this happen? Most likely never. In the meantime the Arab world gets more resentful of American Middle East “foreign policy.” Eventually this will lead to an explosian, sooner now than it has ever been. Again, I ask the question, What are we, the most powerful nation on the plant earth, afraid of? We are on the edge of a moral failure and when that happens we become irrational. Again, thanks Jim, for sharing.
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