Sandy Tolan’s 2006 book, The Lemon Tree is a true story about the human costs created by the formation of the state of Israel. Tolan movingly shares the history of a Palestinian family displaced by Bulgarian Jews who were fleeing the Holocaust. It is an important work which demands a reading – or re-reading – as we stand on the precipice of Middle East catastrophe.
With Gaza in rubbles, Barack Obama at the helm, George Mitchell willing to get real, and Israeli elections looming, it is critical that politics be set aside for the sake of responding to the fierce urgency of the moment.
In the February 4, 2009 online edition of The Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/... Mr. Tolan writes about why the two-state solution may soon become impossible and how it is that the world finds itself in such a bleak place:
"Consider:
•In 1993, when Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestine Liberation Organization leader Yasser Arafat famously shook hands on the White House lawn, there were 109,000 Israelis living in settlements across the West Bank (not including Jerusalem). Today there are 275,000, in more than 230 settlements and strategically placed "outposts" designed to cement a permanent Jewish presence on Palestinian land.
•The biggest Israeli settlement outside East Jerusalem, Ariel, is now home to nearly 20,000 settlers. Their home lies one third of the way inside the West Bank, yet the Israeli "security barrier" veers well inside the occupied territory to wrap Ariel in its embrace. The settlement's leaders proclaim confidently that they are "here to stay," and embark on frequent missions to seek new waves of American Jews to move to the settlement.
•A massive Israeli infrastructure to serve and protect the settlements – military posts, surveillance towers, and settlers-only "bypass roads" that allow Israelis easy access to prayer in Jerusalem or the seaside in Tel Aviv – has cut the West Bank into tiny pieces, fragmenting Palestinian life.
•To maintain separation between West Bank Arabs and West Bank Jews, Israel has erected more than 625 roadblocks, checkpoints, and other barriers – a 70 percent increase since 2005 in a land the size of Delaware, the second-smallest state. Israelis rarely encounter such obstacles, but Palestinians seeking to travel between villages and towns must seek permits, and even then, a short journey can take hours.
•Israel's "suburbs" in Arab East Jerusalem, home now to nearly 200,000 Jews, form a concrete ring, isolating the would-be Palestinian capital from the rest of the West Bank. It is therefore increasingly difficult to imagine how a Palestinian president would govern from a capital that is sealed off from the people of his nation.
These massive changes on the ground – the majority made since the initiation of the Oslo "peace process" – have, after 41 years, rendered the two-state solution all but impossible. Workaround "fixes"– land swaps, consolidated settlements, and networks of roads and bridges to funnel Palestinians under and around the Jewish West Bank presence – have become increasingly hard to imagine. The goal, after all, is a "viable, contiguous" Palestine, not one cut up by the visions of Israeli engineers in order to maintain an everlasting Jewish presence on Arab land."
Committed, often extremist Israeli settlers vowing mass mutiny from the Israeli Army over expulsion further threaten whatever fragile wisps for peace remain.
"Daniella Weiss moved from Israel to the West Bank 33 years ago. She has been the mayor of a large settlement. "I think that settlements prevent the establishment of a Palestinian state in the land of Israel. This is the goal. And this is the reality," Weiss told 60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon." http://www.cbsnews.com/...
Further,intentionally complicating the situation is the sinister, often unseen hand of Christian Zionist groups such as John Hagee’s Christians United for Israel,and their American Orthodox Jewish counterparts, groups such as Yechiel Eckstein’s International Fellowship of Christians and Jews,http://www.ifcj.org/... Together, these religious ideologues from opposite sides of the messianic fence continue doing unspeakable damage as they continue to raise millions of dollars used to further the in-gathering of Jews to the disputed territories. . . all in the name, of course, of love.
In Tom Friedman’s January 24 New York Times op-ed, "This Is Not a Test," http://www.nytimes.com/... he writes,
"It’s five to midnight and before the clock strikes 12 all we need to do is rebuild Fatah, merge it with Hamas, elect an Israeli government that can freeze settlements, court Syria and engage Iran — while preventing it from going nuclear — just so we can get the parties to start talking. Whoever lines up all the pieces of this diplomatic Rubik’s Cube deserves two Nobel Prizes."
Mitchell’s appointment as Special Envoy to the Mideast has, so far, been well received by the majority of American Jews which says an awful lot about where the community's stance regarding the need for a solution. It doesn’t help though when Abe Foxman, national director of The Anti-Defamation League, so cynically rues the Mitchell appointment:
"Sen. Mitchell is fair. He's been meticulously even-handed . . . But the fact is, American policy in the Middle East hasn't been 'even handed' -- it has been supportive of Israel when it felt Israel needed critical U.S. support. . . . So I'm concerned. I'm not sure the situation requires that kind of approach in the Middle East."
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/...
President Obama, Special Envoy Mitchell, Secretary Clinton. . . the time is now to prove that being fair and even-handed is precisely what is needed, and now.