Netanyahu's preconditions make peace offer unrealistic

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu Sunday offered a thorn-encrusted olive branch to the Palestinian people while at the same time holding Israel up to the world community as a perpetual victim.

Netanyahu’s offer of peace was nothing new. He said he would accept a demilitarized Palestinian state. He also said Palestinians would have to recognize Israel as a purely Jewish state.

Both preconditions are unacceptable to Palestinians. To recognize Israel as a purely Jewish state would be to accept systemized racism where civil rights are afforded based upon one’s religion and ethnicity. It would officially relegate the 1.4 million Christian and Muslim Arab citizens of Israel to second or third class status.

Netanyahu chose not to disclose that Palestinians already offered to recognize the state of Israel under the Arab Peace Initiative in 2002. He also failed to mention the 2003 U.S. Road Map for Peace, which also called for a Palestinian state and a halt to settlement activity.

A demilitarized Palestine, with no set borders and no ability to forge alliances, would continue to be at the mercy of the occupier Israel, which has shown no mercy repeatedly on a daily basis and through its massacres at Jenin, Beit Sahour and most recently in Gaza.

During his speech, Netanyahu would not accept responsibility for the 7.8 million Palestinians who are refugees — the largest refugee group in the world — though they are displaced because of Israel. He will not allow them to return to their homeland or to be compensated for the loss of property — in violation of UN Resolution 194.

Disregarding Obama's demand to freeze settlement expansion, Netanyahu didn’t mention the existing illegal colonial settlements. Those settlements have carved up the West Bank and encircled Jerusalem, cutting off the Holy City from Christian and Muslim Palestinians. In a cleverly worded statement Netanyahu did say Israel would not build new settlements on Palestinians’ land. However, he failed to mention the more than 70 percent of public land in the West Bank, which Israel has appropriated as “closed military zones” or nature preserves. His careful use of semantics could mean Israel could continue to build on that land with impunity.

Netanyahu said Sunday Israel will only accept a united Jersusalem as its capital in defiance of UN Resolution 242, which calls for Israel to withdraw from all Arab lands it occupies, including the West Bank, Gaza and East Jerusalem.

That Netanyahu chose to give his speech from Bar-Ilan University was no mere coincidence. Bar-Ilan was founded by Rabbi Meir Bar-Ilan in order to forge secular learning and the ideology of Zionism, which has at its core the ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people. Netanyahu was sounding conciliatory to the world while sending his constituents in Israel an implicit message: Zionism lives on.

Netanyahu is arguably the most radical leader Israel has had. He has been unequivocal in his refusal to consider statehood for Palestinians and this speech, with its impossible demands, proves he hasn’t deviated from that stance. Netanyahu has not once abided by obligations Israel agreed to in various peace plans, from Oslo through the Road Map. He was once quoted in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz as saying the solution to the conflict between Israel and Palestine is to give every Jew a revolver.

In keeping with his anti-peace stance, Netanyahu appointed the extremist, right wing Avigdore Lieberman as his foreign minister. Lieberman, who has said Palestinians should be drowned in the Dead Sea, also recently introduced a bill that would have prohibited Israeli Arabs from commemorating the Nakba of 1948, a seminal turning point in Palestinian history.

AMP calls on the President to strongly urge the prime minister to abide by U.S. demands to freeze settlements. AMP also calls on President Obama to demand that Netanyahu uphold the international resolutions he’s already agreed to, namely UN Resolution 242.

In the end, Israel’s unjust policies toward Palestinians are allowed to exist because of the ample, unconditional funding it receives from the United States. AMP calls on members of Congress to see Netanyahu’s speech for what it was – an insincere gesture aimed at ensuring Israel’s occupier status in the Middle East – and to halt the $5 billion in annual aid, subsidies and loan guarantees the United States gives to Israel.

AMP calls on all those who love justice and peace to call on your elected representatives and urge them to halt U.S. aid to Israel.