Sharon: SAfrica bantustan model for Palestinian "state"

["Fred Feldman" <ffeldman@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

More evidence that the top Israeli leadership has seen the growing parallels
between the "Jewish state" in Israel and the apartheid regime in South
Africa, and that they think that they are good.

The article also gives a good picture of the hopes and worries of  Israeli
liberals. In some ways like the forces who led the white South African
Liberal Party, they think that the intensifying drive to crush and exclude
the Palestinians will hit a wall, and that their privileges should be
preserved in a different way.

I was charmed by the phrase about the liberals "dismantling the 'right of
return land mine'" with a phrase about the rights of refugees and the
necessity of preserving the "Jewish character" of Israel.  We will see if
this mantra, even if repeated 3,000 times instead of three, will make the
Palestinian nation and their right of return disappear.
Fred Feldman


May 14 Ha'aretz
People and Politics / Sharon's Bantustans are far from Copenhagen's hope
By Akiva Eldar
During his visit two weeks ago to Israel, former Italian prime minister
Massimo D'Alema hosted a small group of Israelis - public figures and former
diplomats - to a dinner at a Jerusalem hotel.

The conversation quickly turned to the conciliatory interviews Prime
Minister Ariel Sharon gave to the press for their Independence Day editions.
One of the Israelis, of the type for whom it's second nature, no matter who
is in government, to explain and defend Israeli policy, expressed full
confidence in Sharon's peace rhetoric. He said the prime minister
understands the solution to the conflict is the establishment of a
Palestinian state beside Israel.

The former premier from the Italian left said that three or four years ago
he had a long conversation with Sharon, who was in Rome for a brief visit.
According to D'Alema, Sharon explained at length that the Bantustan model
was the most appropriate solution to the conflict.

The defender of Israel quickly protested. "Surely that was your personal
interpretation of what Sharon said."

D'Alema didn't give in. "No, sir, that is not interpretation. That is a
precise quotation of your prime minister."

Supplementary evidence backing D'Alema's story can be found in an
expensively produced brochure prepared for Tourism Minister Benny Elon, who
is promoting a two-state solution - Israel and Jordan. Under the title "The
Road to War: a tiny protectorate, overpopulated, carved up and
demilitarized," the Moledet Party leader presents "the map of the
Palestinian state, according to Sharon's proposal." Sharon's map is
surprisingly similar to the plan for protectorates in South Africa in the
early 1960s. Even the number of cantons is the same - 10 in the West Bank
(and one more in Gaza). Dr. Alon Liel, a former Israeli ambassador to South
Africa, notes that the South Africans only managed to create four of their
10 planned Bantustans.

The Bantustan model, says Liel, was the ugliest of all the tricks used to
perpetuate the apartheid regime in most of South Africa's territory. By
1986, unrest in the Bantustans turned into ongoing rioting and terror, which
descended into coups in the so-called independent regimes, and South African
intervention. The minuscule support the Bantustan governments did enjoy
evaporated, so by January 1994, they were finally dismantled and became
integrated into the united South Africa of black majority rule.

No country recognized the Bantustans nor did any drop embargoes against
South Africa. But veteran leaders of the black struggle against apartheid
remember that business people from Israel and Taiwan were the only
foreigners who developed business relations with the Bantustan governments.
The permission given to the largest of the Bantustans, Bophutatswana, to
open a diplomatic office in Tel Aviv infuriated American opponents of the
apartheid regime, including Senator Ted Kennedy, and some of the Jewish
congressmen of the time.

An Israeli who spent many years nurturing Israeli relations with Africa was
also at the dinner hosted by the Italian prime minister. He said that
whenever he happened to encounter Sharon, he would be interrogated at length
about the history of the protectorates and their structures.

Powell as Uriah

Presumably, the CIA has got its hands on a copy of the instructions sent to
Israel's foreign legations on how to explain Israeli policy regarding "The
Middle East after Saddam Hussein." After all, the document received only
low-level classification.

U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell could have saved himself the trip to
Jerusalem by reading in it what he heard in the Prime Minister's Office on
Sunday:

"Israel accepts the central principles presented in President Bush's speech
of June 24, 2002, and regards them as the basis for the continuation of the
political process. Israel welcomes any `road map' that matches the
above-mentioned presidential vision and which will lead to its
implementation on the basis of a new and different Palestinian leadership
and implementation of the reforms there."

The document also said that all the commitments are conditioned on the test
of a Palestinian campaign against terror.

That, more or less, is what Sharon told Powell.

A strange argument broke out between the two, however, over their
interpretations of Bush's "vision." Sharon argued the road map is not a
precise translation of the "vision," which is the only peace plan the prime
minister has accepted.

Powell, who just happens to be the person who was appointed by Bush and gets
his salary from Bush's government, replied that actually, the president
thinks the road map is a faithful reflection of his vision.

Now, all that's left is to ask Bush why he sent his ambassador to Israel,
Daniel Kurtzer, to Jerusalem two weeks ago, to give the Israeli prime
minister a copy of a peace plan that does not reflect the president's
vision.

Between the lines, the leader of the free world should be insulted. In
effect, the prime minister is saying the president did not notice he was
hoodwinked by the Quartet, including Powell, who sold him a road map that
leads somewhere Bush did not intend to go.

As published here three weeks ago, Knesset Speaker Reuven Rivlin has already
told the members of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish
Organizations that British Prime Minister Tony Blair hypocritically seduced
Bush into adopting the Quartet road map. Rivlin did not invent the idea of
Bush falling into a plot laid by Blair. Rivlin picked it up at the highest
levels of Israel's government, where he also picked up that his primary
mission in New York was to kill the map, softly or not.

In the summary of the notes on the autopsy of the dead Powell mission, the
Foreign Ministry made the following distinction: Powell was like the
biblical Uriah the Hittite, sent by King David into battle. But an
experienced general like him is not a sucker. He understood the map could
turn him into the scapegoat of the Christian neo-conservatives and the
opportunistic Jewish busybodies. The Foreign Ministry's assessment is that
Powell will tell the president something along these lines: "I was deeply
impressed by the readiness of the two sides to put an end to the age-old
conflict between them. This is your opportunity to put another feather in
your crown. Your involvement is more important than ever, for that, so I
recommend you name a special presidential envoy to implement your vision."

Confirmation of that can be found in Powell's decision meanwhile to postpone
the appointments of the supervisors meant to implement the road map. State
Department staffer Richard Erdman, who was designated to head the team, has
a piece of paper saying he's the next ambassador to Algeria. Powell's
assistant, David Satterfield, has meanwhile been asked to stay here only
until the weekend.

The non-governmental formula

A few hours before Powell's plane landed here, a not-very-large group of
Israelis and Palestinians who have already expressed support for the road
map, lined up at passport control to leave for Copenhagen. Among the
Israelis were MK Haim Ramon and former minister Uzi Baram, former MKs Dalia
Rabin-Pelossof and Abdul Wahab Darawshe, Maj. Gen. (res.) Shlomo Gazit, Dr.
David Kimche and Reuven Merhav, two former directors-general of the Foreign
Ministry. Along with authors Sami Michael and Amos Elon, businessman Dov
Lautman, former ambassador Avi Primor and Nadia Hilu from Na'amat as well as
a group of academics, they were all signing onto a declaration of peace rare
in its content and the composition of its signatories.

Under the rubric of the International Alliance for Arab-Israeli Peace (The
Copenhagen Group), the Israeli group joined a group of Palestinian security
officials and public personages, ex-generals and business people from
Jordan, and former diplomats and writers from Egypt. Their joint declaration
said: "The peace forces in Egypt, Israel, Jordan and Palestine have agreed
to join hands to work together for the mobilization of the Arab and Israeli
peoples and world public opinion to achieve a comprehensive, just and
lasting peace in the Middle East."

The conference participants prepared a short and simple peace formula for
their governments: "United Nations Security Council resolutions 242 and
1397, and the Arab Peace Initiative (the Saudi Initiative) adopted by the
Arab League Summit in Beirut in March 2002, especially the principle of
exchange of full Israeli withdrawal from the occupied Arab territories of
1967 for a full peace, normal relations and security arrangements not only
between Israel and the adjacent states but with the Arab world; Security for
both sides, starting with an end to all violence; Respect for human rights,
international humanitarian law, and the environment; Evacuation of all
settlements in all areas occupied in 1967, excluding those that are included
in land swaps; Agreed borders based on and equal to June 4, 1967; Jerusalem
as the capitals of two independent states."

The "right of return land mine" was dismantled with the following
interesting formulation: "A just and agreed upon solution of the refugee
problem consistent with the Palestinian determination for the fulfillment of
all relevant UN resolutions including UN General Assembly Resolution 194 and
with the Israeli determination to maintain the Jewish nature of the State of
Israel, without prejudice to the Arab population of Israel and according to
the bilateral peace agreement."

The "alliance" members agreed, "Peace is too important to be left only to
governments."

Powell's return to Washington without an Israeli signature on the road map
is evidence that it's also impossible to trust the most powerful government
in the world. The crises afflicting Meretz and Labor and the silence in
Shinui on all the issues regarding the peace process, show that peace cannot
be left to the political parties.

On the Palestinian side, meanwhile, the tension between Yasser Arafat and
Abu Mazen has also been a bad influence on the dialogue between Israeli and
Palestinian peace groups. To remind everyone who's the boss, Arafat is
delaying the launch of the Nusseibeh-Ayalon initiative, and for the same
reason, the Beilin-Abed Rabbo agreement, which has Abu Mazen's support, is
also suffering from takeoff problems.
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