Protect your skin from oxidation caused by the sun, Free
Radicals and the crows feet caused by age for pennies a use!
http://pd.gophercentral.com/u/1147/c/186/a/504
-----------------------------------------------------------

Israeli tactics are 'uniting' Palestinians
by: Jonathan Cook
The National

Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel's prime minister, is in the
United States this week, but few observers expect an
immediate or significant breakthrough in the stalled
peace talks with the Palestinian leadership.

In public, Mr. Netanyahu maintains he is committed to the
pledge he made last year, shortly after he formed his
right-wing government, to work towards the creation of a
demilitarised Palestinian state.

But so far he has proved either unwilling or unable to
renew even a partial freeze on Jewish settlement building
in the West Bank - a key condition set by Mahmoud Abbas,
the Palestinian president, for reviving the negotiations.

Most of Mr. Netanyahu's cabinet, including Avigdor Lieber-
man, his foreign minister, barely conceal their opposition
to Palestinian statehood. Instead, Mr. Netanyahu has
imposed a precondition of his own: that the Palestinians
recognise Israel as the state of the Jewish people.

A leading analyst of Palestinian politics says the picture
is not as bleak for the Palestinians as it might appear.

Asad Ghanem, a professor of political science at Haifa
University, predicts Mr. Netanyahu and his cabinet will
eventually come to rue their obduracy.

The intransigence and the unabashed espousal of "an
ideology of Jewish supremacy" by Mr. Netanyahu and his
supporters will lead to the gradual "reunification" of
the Palestinian people, Dr. Ghanem said in an interview.

In clinging to a vision of Greater Israel, Mr. Netanyahu
and the right are fuelling a potentially powerful
Palestinian nationalism that could yet come to crush not
only the occupation but Israel's status as a Jewish state,
said Dr. Ghanem, the author of several books on Palestinian
nationalism.

Dr. Ghanem, who belongs to Israel's Palestinian minority,
a fifth of the country's population, noted that the
original goal of Israel's founders was to use a sophist-
icated version of divide-and-rule political tactics to
weaken an emerging Palestinian national movement that
opposed Zionism.

The war of 1948 that created Israel led to the first
and most significant division: between the minority of
Palestinians who remained inside the new territory of
Israel and the refugees forced outside its borders, who
today number at least 4.7 million, according to the
United Nations Relief and Works Agency.

Since 1967, Israel has fostered many further splits:
between the cities and rural areas; between the West
Bank and Gaza; between East Jerusalem and the West Bank;
between the main rival political movements, Fatah and
Hamas; and between the PA leadership and the diaspora.

Israel's guiding principle has been to engender discord
between Palestinians by putting the interests of each
group into conflict, said Dr. Ghanem. "A feuding
Palestinian nation was never likely to be in a position
to run its own affairs."

He is dismissive of plans by Mr. Abbas and his prime
minister, Salam Fayyad, to try to revive the Oslo
process by bypassing Israel and seeking the international
community's blessing for the establishment of a Palestinian
state next summer.

Palestinian leaders who have pursued statehood, Dr. Ghanem
added, have done so on terms dictated by Israel.

First the rights of the refugees to be considered part of
the Palestinian nation were sacrificed, then those of the
Palestinians inside Israel. Next parts of East Jerusalem
and all of Gaza were excluded. And now finally, he said,
even significant parts of the West Bank were almost
certain to be counted outside a future Palestinian state.

"The core of the negotiations for Abbas is about ending
the occupation, but he has progressively conceded to
Israel its very narrow definition of what constitutes
occupied land. The rights of the refugees and other
Palestinians to be included in the Palestinian nation
now exist chiefly at the level of rhetoric."

The Israeli right's insistence on Palestinian recognition
of Israel as a Jewish state would accelerate the unravell-
ing of Israel's long-term policy of fragmenting the
Palestinian people.

"All Palestinians are affected by such a demand, not just
those living inside Israel. The Palestinian national move-
ment accepted Israel as a state decades ago but Netanyahu
is not satisfied by that.

"He wants to reopen the 1948 file," Dr Ghanem said, referr-
ing to the war that established Israel by expelling and
dispossessing 80 per cent of the Palestinian people. "He
is provoking the Palestinian national movement to reassess
the accepted two-state model for ending the conflict."

As fewer and fewer Palestinians clung to the belief that
Israel would ever agree to partition the territory, the
physical and ideological barriers between the Palestinian
sub-groups were starting to crumble, he said.

The separate struggles of the Palestinians - for civil
rights among Israel's Palestinian minority; for national
liberation by those in the occupied territories; and for
the right of return among the diaspora - were being
superseded by "a common fight against the reality of an
ethnic apartheid".

Dr. Ghanem added that, when Palestinians came to realise
that they would never be offered more than a "crippled
state" by Israel, the new paradigm would become "one
binational, democratic state for all Palestinians and Jews
in historic Palestine".

The different Palestinian factions would eventually merge
their political platforms. The civil rights movement rapid-
ly emerging among Palestinians inside Israel would then
serve to complement the fledgling anti-apartheid struggle
in the occupied territories.

Palestinian analysts in the occupied territories were less
sanguine.

George Giacaman, head of Muwatin, an institute promoting
Palestinian democracy, said the reunification taking place
among Palestinians was "mainly symbolic".

"There is a new sense of a common cause and struggle,"
Mr. Giacaman said, "but the geographic divisions between
Palestinians are so deep and have been in place so long
it is difficult to see them being overcome."

Still, maintains Dr Ghanem, Palestinians in Israel and the
occupied territories, as well as the millions of refugees,
will one day come to thank Mr Netanyahu for bringing them
together.

-----------------------------------------------------------
YOUR VIDEO SNACK BAR
Top Viewed Videos...

1. All the Single Babies
http://c.gophercentral.com/Icgl

2. Celebrities: Before and After Make-Up
http://c.gophercentral.com/lhPb

3. Amos N´ Andy - In the IRS Office
http://c.gophercentral.com/DVhQ

4. The D-Day Invasion
http://c.gophercentral.com/DDAx

5. The Spanish Civil War
http://c.gophercentral.com/3K42

6. The Human Slinky
http://c.gophercentral.com/Wwa9


-----------------------------------------------------------
Follow Your Favorite GopherCentral Publications on Twitter:
http://www.gophertweets.com/ More Coming Soon!
------------------------------------------------------------
Check out Political Videos on the Net at evtv1.com
http://www.evtv1.com/Politics.aspx
------------------------------------------------------------