Willem van Genugten en de Mensenrechten 30

Beste Willem van Genugten,

Laten we de feiten voor zich spreken.

Jij schrijft me vandaag dit: 'Interessant stuk gisteren in de Volkskrant: "Hou op met praten over vrede in het Midden-Oosten". Je hebt het wellicht gezien. Wie het goed leest, ziet aan het einde echter een verrassende move. Het woord "vrede" moet worden ingeruild voor "ontspanning": "Een geweldloze status quo is verre van bevredigend, maar is niet slecht." En dan: "De moedigen zijn vertrokken uit het Midden-Oosten. Een vrede van de moedigen moet wijken voor een bestand van de middelmatigen". In deze redenering behoort minister Verhagen tot de moedigen die blijven zoeken naar een uitweg. Diezelfde minister Verhagen liet gisteren, eveneens in de VK, uit zijn mond optekenen dat hij verbijsterd is over de nieuwste Israelische plannen en zinspeelt op diplomatieke sancties. Dat moet jou toch aanspreken, al zal het je vast niet ver genoeg gaan.'

Allereerst dit Willem. Bij ons thuis zijn we geabonneerd op de International Herald Tribune. Dan weet je meteen hoe de grote mensenwereld reilt en zeilt, in plaats van dat je je moet behelpen met de provinciaals georienteerde landelijke pers, zoals de Volkskrant, Trouw en de NRC. Ik vermeld dit om je erop te wijzen dat het stuk dat jij drie dagen later in de Volkskrant hebt gelezen oorspronkelijk eenderde langer was, te uitgebreid kennelijk voor de doorsnee Volkskrant-lezer. Al geruime tijd volg ik de opiniestukken van Roger Cohen en weet hoe kritisch hij publiekelijk is over de 'Joodse staat'. Dit in tegenstelling tot de Nederlandse intelligentsia die uitblinkt in zwijgzaamheid. Omdat ik het origineel heb gelezen weet ik ook dat Cohen als volgt eindigt: I agree with the Israeli author David Grossman when he writes: “We have dozens of atomic bombs, tanks and planes. We confront people possessing none of these arms. And yet, in our minds, we remain victims. This inability to perceive ourselves in relation to others is our principal weakness.” Maar die joodse kritiek ging de Volkskrant kennelijk iets te ver om door hun censtuur heen te komen. Dergelijke dingen kunnen, zo weet ik uit eigen ervaring, alleen in buitenlandse kranten als The New York Times geopenbaard worden. Nu we het toch over dit dagblad hebben: daarin stond ook een ander stuk dat jou ontgaan zal zijn:

OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR

Israelis and Obama

By HENRY SIEGMAN

Published: November 1, 2009

Polls indicate that President Obama enjoys the support of only 6 to 10 percent of the Israeli public — perhaps his lowest popularity in any country in the world.

According to media reports, the president’s advisers are searching for ways of reassuring Israel’s public of President Obama’s friendship and unqualified commitment to Israel’s security.

That friendship and commitment are real, President Obama’s poll numbers in Israel notwithstanding. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton sought to reinforce that message during her visit to Israel. The presidential envoy George Mitchell has reportedly been asked to make similar efforts during his far more frequent visits to Jerusalem.

The White House is about to set a new record in the number of reassuring messages and video greetings sent by an American president to Israel, as well as to Jewish organizations in the United States, on this subject. Plans for a presidential visit to Jerusalem are under discussion.

Presidential aides worry that the hostility toward President Obama among Israelis can be damaging to his peace efforts. This is undoubtedly true.

But a White House campaign to ingratiate the president with Israel’s public could be far more damaging, because the reason for this unprecedented Israeli hostility toward an American president is a fear that President Obama is serious about ending Israel’s occupation of the West Bank and Gaza.

Israelis do not oppose President Obama’s peace efforts because they dislike him; they dislike him because of his peace efforts. He will regain their affection only when he abandons these efforts.

That is how Israel’s government and people respond to any outside pressure for a peace agreement that demands Israel’s conformity to international law and to U.N. resolutions that call for a return to the 1967 pre-conflict borders and reject unilateral changes in that border.

Like Israel’s government, Israel’s public never tires of proclaiming to pollsters its aspiration for peace and its support of a two-state solution. What the polls do not report is that this support depends on Israel defining the terms of that peace, its territorial dimensions, and the constraints to be placed on the sovereignty of a Palestinian state.

An American president who addresses the Arab world and promises a fair and evenhanded approach to peacemaking is immediately seen by Israelis as anti-Israel. The head of one of America’s leading Jewish organizations objected to the appointment of Senator Mitchell as President Obama’s peace envoy because, he said, his objectivity and evenhandedness disqualified him for this assignment.

The Israeli reaction to serious peacemaking efforts is nothing less than pathological — the consequence of an inability to adjust to the Jewish people’s reentry into history with a state of their own following 2,000 years of powerlessness and victimhood.

Former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, whose assassination by a Jewish right-wing extremist is being remembered this week in Israel, told Israelis at his inauguration in 1992 that their country is militarily powerful, and neither friendless nor at risk. They should therefore stop thinking and acting like victims.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s message that the whole world is against Israel and that Israelis are at risk of another Holocaust — a fear he invoked repeatedly during his address in September at the United Nations General Assembly in order to discredit Judge Richard Goldstone’s Gaza fact-finding report — is unfortunately still a more comforting message for too many Israelis.

This pathology has been aided and abetted by American Jewish organizations whose agendas conform to the political and ideological views of Israel’s right wing. These organizations do not reflect the views of most American Jews who voted overwhelmingly — nearly 80 percent — for Mr. Obama in the presidential elections.

An Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement has eluded all previous U.S. administrations not because they were unable to devise a proper formula for its achievement; everyone has known for some time now the essential features of that formula, which were proposed by President Clinton in early 2000.

Rather, the conflict continues because U.S. presidents — and to a far greater extent, members of the U.S. Congress, who depend every two years on electoral contributions — have accommodated a pathology that can only be cured by its defiance.

Only a U.S. president with the political courage to risk Israeli displeasure — and criticism from that part of the pro-Israel lobby in America which reflexively supports the policies of the Israeli government of the day, no matter how deeply they offend reason or morality — can cure this pathology.

If President Obama is serious about his promise to finally end Israel’s 40-year occupation, bring about a two-state solution, assure Israel’s long-range survival as a Jewish and democratic state, and protect vital U.S. national interests in the region, he will have to risk that displeasure. If he delivers on his promise, he will earn Israelis’ eternal gratitude.

Henry Siegman, a former national director of the American Jewish Congress, is director of the U.S./Middle East Project.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/02/opinion/02iht-edsiegman.html?_r=1

En kijk eens aan Willem, wie dat geschreven heeft. Begrijp je nu waarom ik van iemand die internationaal recht doceert verwacht dat hij zich publiekelijk uitspreekt over de al decennialang durende grootschalige schendingen van het internationaal recht, die Israel zich kan permitteren dankzij de opportunistische motieven die zowel Amerikaanse als Europese politici en academici erop nahouden? Laat de politiek aan anderen over, een hoogleraar in het internationaal recht dient zich in te zetten voor dat recht, en niet voor de positie van een of andere minister van Buitenlandse Zaken. Om het nog eens goed tot je te laten doordringen geef ik je het originele stuk van Roger Cohen, dat verminkt door de Volkskrant werd overgenomen:

Op-Ed Columnist

A Mideast Truce

By ROGER COHEN

Published: November 16, 2009

I’ve grown so pessimistic about Israel-Palestine that I find myself agreeing with Israel’s hard-line foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman: “Anyone who says that within the next few years an agreement can be reached ending the conflict simply doesn’t understand the situation and spreads delusions.”

That’s the lesson of early Obama. The president tried to rekindle peace talks by confronting Israel on settlements, coaxing Palestinians to resume negotiations, and reaching out to the Muslim world. The effort has failed.

It has alienated Israel, where Obama is unpopular, and brought the president of the Palestinian Authority, Mahmoud Abbas, close to resignation. It’s time to think again.

What’s gone wrong? There have been tactical mistakes, including a clumsy U.S. wobble toward accepting Israeli “restraint” on settlements rather than cessation. But the deeper error was strategic: Obama’s assumption that he could resume where Clinton left off in 2000 and pursue the land-for-peace idea at the heart of the two-state solution.

This approach ignored the deep scars inflicted in the past decade: the killing of 992 Israelis and 3,399 Palestinians between the outbreak of the Second Intifada in 2000 and 2006; the Israeli Army’s harsh reoccupation of most of the West Bank; Hamas’ violent rise to power in Gaza and the accompanying resurgence of annihilationist ideology; the spectacular spread of Jewish settlements in the West Bank; and the Israeli construction of over 250 miles of a separation barrier that has protected Israel from suicide bombers even as it has shattered Palestinian lives, grabbed land and become, in the words of Michael Sfard, an Israeli lawyer, “an integral part of the West Bank settlement plan.”

These are not small developments. They have changed the physical appearance of the Middle East. More important, they have transformed the psychologies of the protagonists. Israelis have walled themselves off from Palestinians. They are less interested than ever in a deal with people they hardly see.

As Ron Nachman, the founder of the sprawling Ariel settlement, comments in René Backmann’s superb new book, “A Wall in Palestine,” the wave of Palestinian suicide attacks before work on the barrier began in mid-2002 meant that: “Israelis wanted separation. They did not want to be mixed with the Arabs. They didn’t even want to see them. This may be seen as racist, but that’s how it is.”

And that’s about where we are.

With Palestinians saying, “Not one inch further will we cede.” The myriad humiliations of the looping barrier, which divides Palestinians from one another as well as from Israel, have cemented this “Nyet.”

On the surface, Obama’s decision to tackle settlements first was logical enough. Nothing has riled Palestinians as much as the continued flow of Israeli settlers into East Jerusalem and the West Bank. Both Oslo (1993) and the Road Map (2003) called for settlements to stop, but the number of settlers has risen steadily to over 450,000.

The president was categorical in his Cairo speech: “The United States does not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlements.”

Nor do I. But facts are hard — and Obama has tried to ignore them. The history briefly outlined above makes clear that the right-wing government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu won’t deviate from the pattern of settlement growth established since 1967.

Indeed, Backmann’s book (from which the Sfard quote is also taken), demonstrates a relentless continuity of Israeli purpose, now cemented by a fence whose aim was in fact double: to stop terrorists but also “to protect the settlements, to give them room to develop.”

That is why, even at 250 miles, the barrier (projected to stretch over 400 miles) is already much longer than the pre-1967 border or Green Line: It burrows into the West Bank to place major settlements on the Israeli side, effectively annexing over 12 percent of the land.

The United States condoned the construction of this settlement-reinforcing barrier. It cannot be unmade — not for the foreseeable future. Peace and walls do not go together. But a truce and walls just may. And that, I must reluctantly conclude, is the best that can be hoped for.

Obama, who has his Nobel already, should ratchet expectations downward. Stop talking about peace. Banish the word. Start talking about détente. That’s what Lieberman wants; that’s what Hamas says it wants; that’s the end point of Netanyahu’s evasions.

It’s not what Abbas wants but he’s powerless. Shlomo Avineri, a political scientist, told me, “A nonviolent status quo is far from satisfactory but it’s not bad. Cyprus is not bad.”

I recall my friend Shlomo dreaming of peace. That’s over. The last decade destroyed the last illusions: hence the fence. The courageous have departed the Middle East. A peace of the brave must yield to a truce of the mediocre — at best.

At least until Intifada-traumatized Israeli psychology shifts. I agree with the Israeli author David Grossman when he writes: “We have dozens of atomic bombs, tanks and planes. We confront people possessing none of these arms. And yet, in our minds, we remain victims. This inability to perceive ourselves in relation to others is our principal weakness.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/17/opinion/17iht-edcohen.html

Meer later.