Palestine Video: Palestinians in Israel Mark Black October in Kefr Kanna

Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Palestinians in Israel Mark Black October in Kefr Kanna

Black October of Ehud Barak: Decade to the Slaughter of Palestinians in Israel:

Monday, 04 October 2010 05:39 Michael Warschawski, Alternative Information Center (AIC)

"October 2010. Ten years have passed since the slaughter of the Palestinian population in Israel, a slaughter orchestrated by Ehud Barak and, let’s not ever forget, Professor Shlomo Ben Ami.

Two days prior, in areas around mosques and throughout the West Bank, primarily near the checkpoints, the Israeli army slaughtered tens of young, unarmed Palestinians, later resulting in the use of small arms by the Palestinian police in order to protect their children. The timeline here is extremely important as there are few events the Israeli government has so grossly distorted, and not by chance.

In essence, everything began in August 2000: Ehud Barak is interested in burying the Oslo peace process once and for all, a process he opposed from the first day. Before Binyamin Netanyahu attempted to stop the process, but his right-wing positions were a liability: everyone expected this and President Clinton put on the pressure. In order to eliminate the Oslo process, there was a need for a “left-wing” person elected by the peace camp on a seemingly anti-Netanyahu platform of “peace”.

Indeed, in August 2000 Ehud Barak explodes the talks with Yasser Arafat, but not without first preparing a media team, the job of which was to place blame on the President of the Palestinian Authority for this explosion. The propaganda work was well planned and successful: for two years, the entire world spoke about Arafat’s rejection of Ehud Barak’s “generous offers” and only after two long years was it possible to hear Clinton’s advisor Robert Malley and the (Israeli) journalist of French channel 2, Charles Enderlin, putting the picture straight. Too late. Eventually even Barak would admit that the picture was more complex than “rejection of the generous offer”.

One of the victims of Ehud Barak's big lie was the Israeli “peace camp”, which collapsed and died within one week and has yet to return to life. Although elected thanks to mobilization of the Israeli peace camp, Ehud Barak did not like them, and he always preferred the settlers, whom he dubbed “my dear brothers” over the softies of Peace Now.

Ehud Barak’s plan was to succeed where Binyamin Netanyahu failed, and to dismantle both the Palestinian Authority and the Oslo process or, in other words, to reoccupy the few achievements of the Oslo process. This “reoccupation” was both geographic – end to Palestinian autonomy and resurrection of Israeli military control over the entire West Bank and Gaza Strip, and political – an end to “reciprocity” which began to be created between the state of Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organisation, and the extended ruling powers that the latter attained.

In the eyes of Netanyahu, Yitzhak Rabin was a traitor – and Netanyahu’s incitement resulted in his killing as a traitor; in the eyes of Barak, Rabin wasn’t a traitor but a naïve person who believed the Arabs and thus endangered the existence of the state of Israel (“a villa in a jungle” he said in an interview) through the concessions he made, and primarily those he intended to make to the Palestinians within the Oslo process framework.

Netanyahu jammed the process, Barak eliminated it and Ariel Sharon orchestrated the re-occupation, with blessings from the government of George Bush within the framework of the neo-conservatives’ global preventative war. This is the reason that I insist on erasing from the political dictionary the misleading concept, in my opinion, of a “second Intifada”: Intifada means uprising, and the 1987 Intifada was indeed an uprising, a popular Palestinian initiative. What occurred in October 2000 is not a Palestinian initiative but an Israeli one, not an uprising of the occupied population but an intentional, pre-planned attack of the Israeli colonial regime, to which the Palestinian population responded with the meager means at its disposal including, after a time, the use of light weapons by Palestinian police.

Between 30 September and 4 October 2000, tens of young Palestinians were killed in Jerusalem and near the checkpoints in what can be defined only as shooting practice of Israeli sharpshooters against young rock throwers. Only with the pressure of the mothers did the Palestinian police decide, later on, to make use of the weapons at their disposal. Ehud Barak attained his goal: now it was possible to reoccupy the West Bank and Gaza Strip (and to finally end the Oslo process), and no one beats Ariel Sharon in completing a job.

However, before the government passed to Sharon, Ehud Barak managed to “burn into the minds” of the Palestinian minority in Israel. One of the results of the Rabin government was a substantial change in the position of Palestinian citizens of Israel and partial recognition of the need to “limit the gap” between them and the Jewish majority. “Not equality, for we are a Jewish state,” Rabin said to Palestinian Knesset members, whom he needed to promote the “peace process”, but “less inequality.” He promised and produced. Budgets were allocated to the Arab municipalities, developments plans were finally approved and most of all the state of Israel recognized, for a moment, the existence of the Palestinian national minority and its legitimacy in the state.

The slaughter of October 2000 had one message: “the party is over!” Don’t forget that you are a tolerated minority whose rights are dependent on loyalty to the state of Israel, according to the rules determined by the Jewish majority. Does this sound familiar? It was not Ivet Liberman who invented “no loyalty, no citizenship”, but Ehud Barak and Shlomo Ben Ami, in the blood that was spilt in October 2000. Indeed, after he again determined that Israeli is a Jewish state and put the Palestinian citizens back in their “place”, Barak could make time for the elimination of the Oslo process, through his close friend Ariel Sharon.

Ten years later, with the many thousands of dead and destruction of everything that was built in the previous two decades, Barak Obama is attempting to advance the policies of Clinton. In Jerusalem, however, neo-conservatism still reigns.

Translated to English by the Alternative Information Center (AIC)