Den israelske journalisten Carolina Landsmann stiller "milliondollar-spørsmålet:
(Hele artikklen i Haaretz 17. november 2023 under Kilde).
"Israel's Million-dollar Question: What to Do With the West Bank and Gaza Strip"
Hun analyserer Israels ønske om fred, holdt opp mot økningen i bosettere på Vestbredden.
Og konkluderer at denne økningen er uforenlig med ønske om FRED.
Hun konkluderer selv slik:
" This column therefore demands that we ask ourselves the following – are “we” actually “the settlers”?
Skudeneshavn 18. november 2023
Jan Marton Jensen
På Twitter:
18. november 2023
https://twitter.com/janmarton/status/1725814406712344736
Kilde:
17. november 2023
Opinion |
Israel's Million-dollar Question: What to Do With the West Bank and Gaza Strip
 |
Settlers marching to the evacuated West Bank outpost of Homesh last May.Credit: Moti Milrod |
This column isn’t about Hamas. It doesn’t
address the question of what Hamas wants and doesn’t try to put the
events of October 7 into their historical context, much less into their
moral context. What’s theirs is theirs.
This
column also isn’t about the more general question of what the
Palestinians want and where their struggle is leading them. Nor does it
try to ask where they plan to go after October 7, even though if I were a Palestinian,
I would be talking about this and only this – what do we want? Where
are we heading? What life and what world do we want for our children?
This column is strictly about Israel, and
its million-dollar question – what does Israel want to do with the West
Bank and Gaza Strip and the millions of stateless Palestinians who live
in them?
Anyone
who says it’s impossible to completely separate the questions this
column isn’t asking from the ones it is would be correct. After all, the
desires of both peoples influence and are influenced by each other.
Nor is the reciprocal influence of both people’s desires the only thing
that makes it hard to answer this question. There’s also the question of
whether there even is such a thing as “Israel’s desire,” and if it is a
single desire rather than being as fractured as its people. And that
was true even before the deep incisions left by October 7, which, for many people, still hasn’t ended 40 days later, like a nightmare from which you can’t wake up.
Israel, its representatives and all Israelis see themselves, and depict
themselves, as seeking peace. Our hand is extended in peace. But ever
since 1967, the occupied territories have put our desire for peace to the test.
From the moment we captured these
territories, a tension was born between our desire for peace and our
desire for land. From the moment the territories were in our hands, it
was impossible to sever the question of our aspirations for peace from
the question of ownership over the territories.
The
slogan “peace for peace” is irrelevant with regard to the Palestinians,
because our conflict with them is territorial. If peace with them is
possible at all, it will only be in exchange for the territories.
For years, our attitude toward the
territories has expressed our desire for peace. And that is true
regardless of the question of our Palestinian partner.
The
settlement enterprise always undermined Israel’s willingness to seek
peace with the Palestinians. Everything Israel has built for civilian
purposes beyond its pre-1967 borders has undermined its desire for
peace, and even more so its international image as a peace-seeker. Every
settler living in the territories under the state’s aegis is a message
to the Palestinians and the world that Israel is not headed toward
peace.
The settlers know
that the settlements sabotage any possibility of territorial
compromise, without which there will be no peace. From the very first
day, they have striven to expand this enterprise, and the more they were
fed, the more their appetite grew. They now aspire to settle a million
Israelis in the settlements (and in an interview with the New Yorker
last week, veteran settlement leader Daniella Weiss laid out the next target – two million settlers, and then three million).
The
settlers are proud of the fact that they have created a situation that
negates any possibility of dividing the land. The settlers don’t want
peace.
If Israel wanted peace, it should have
overcome its desire for the territories and kept them as a deposit to be
traded for peace, without using them, taking them over or building on
them. Israeli recognition of the pre-1967 borders while maintaining a
strong guard on those borders would have sent a message to the
Palestinians, and to the entire world, that peace was just waiting for
the Palestinians.
Look,
Israel could have said, this is ours, and everything on the other side
of the border is yours – in exchange for peace. Then Israel could have
said wholeheartedly that it sought peace.
This column therefore demands that we ask ourselves the following – are “we” actually “the settlers”?
