The “Palestinian demographic bomb” is a myth created to continue discrimination against Palestinians and Israeli-Arabs.

In titling last Wednesday’s legal decision, upholding the controversial Citizenship Law that prevents Palestinian spouses of Israeli citizens from living in Israel “Human rights are not a prescription for national suicide”, the court’s majority well summed up the existential predicament Israel faces today - indeed, has always faced - as it attempts to be both Jewish and democratic.

“National suicide” is, of course, an incredibly loaded term in the Israeli context. In the historical shadow of the Holocaust, Chief Justice Asher Grunis’s appellation immediately raised the spectre of an existential threat to the Jewish people, or nation (Am Yisrael), being posed by the mere possibility of Palestinian Arabs joining Israeli society through marriage.

Right-wing lawmakers such as National Union chairman Ya’acov Katz have declared that the law would protect Israel from “the threat of being flooded with two-to-three million Arabs from outside its borders”. But such claims are utterly nonsensical. The true number, as Grunis and the five other Justices who joined the 6-5 majority surely know, would be in the low thousands.

So why would they argue that allowing Palestinian spouses to become Israeli, which as the decision’s title clearly admits is a basic human right, constitutes an act of “national suicide” for Israeli Jews?

To answer this question, we need to consider other possible meanings of the national suicide claim. We could imagine that the justices believe that recognising such marriages would accelerate the already “dangerous” trend towards demographic equality between Jewish and Palestinian citizens, based on higher fertility rates among Palestinians.

The only problem with this oft-repeated claim is that it’s false; the growth rate among the Palestinian population of Israel has actually slowed in the past decade, while those of religious Jews has exploded.

The true meaning of human rights

Simply put, the threat of a Palestinian “demographic bomb”, as Prime Minister Netanyahu has called it, is little more than a contrivance to justify the further exclusion of Palestinians from full citizenship rights within Israel.

But accurate or not, the average Jewish Israeli is likely not spending much time parsing the logic or statistical foundations of the High Court’s decision - because they understand the deeper meaning of the argument underlying the decision’s title: to extend full human rights to Palestinians will lead inevitably to the “national” - that is, political - suicide of Israel as a Jewish state.

Why?

Because to recognise that Jews and Palestinians can become one in the most intimate way possible - through love, sex and children - is to open Israeli Jews to the possibility that there is nothing essential that separates them from Palestinians, that as human beings with deep roots in this land, Palestinians have the same human rights as Israeli (or diaspora) Jews.

Once people accept this reality, Zionism - which, at its core, is based on the exclusive Jewish claim of rights to and sovereignty over the Land of Israel - loses whatever remains of its moral and political legitimacy.

Such a recognition, then, would spell the death knell, not of Israeli Jews as people, but of Zionism as a viable political ideology.

Indeed, the High Court’s decision reveals the paradox at the heart of Israel’s political foundations - that its very claim to be both democratic and Jewish has always been a lie, because no state which privileges, through law, power and policies, one group over others simply because of the most basic identity (religion, ethnicity or gender, for example) of its members, can be democratic in any meaningful sense of the term.

And so, with all the sadness and regret that such an occasion deserves, Justice Grunis declares that “a small group - those men and women in Israel’s Arab minority who want to marry residents of the region - must pay a heavy price for greater security for all Israelis, including their own”.

This language is crucial for two reasons: first, its unquestionable racism reveals the cancer at the heart of contemporary Israeli political ideology - not among the hilltop settler youth attacking Palestinian shepherds or the haredim who spit on pre-teen Jewish girls - but at the very heart of Israel’s political and juridical establishment.

If the highest judge of Israel’s highest court can stoop to such a decision, then Israel is not heading “down the slope of apartheid”, as Haaretz editorialised in criticising the decision - it’s already there. And the chances of it climbing out are slim indeed.

Second, the language reveals Justice Grunis’ understanding that, thanks in good measure to the past six decades of Israeli policy, Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza (not to mention the majority of Palestinian refugees) are citizens of nowhere. They are merely “residents” of “regions” whose future is still in dispute; a purgatory which Israeli courts have played a major role in sustaining through innumerable decisions that have legalised and institutionalised - at least as far as the Israeli state is concerned - occupation, settlement, expropriation of land and resources and the stripping of basic human rights from Palestinians, on both sides of the Green Line.

Apartness to apartheid

This “apart-ness” from Israeli Jews and the full benefits of citizenship that accrue only to them, is of course the core principle of apartheid as a political and territorial system. And it is the “heavy price” that must be paid “for greater security for all Israelis, including their own”.

“Their”, of course, refers only to Israeli Jews - not their Palestinian fellow citizens.

The indigenous population as the ultimate “other” against which a national identity must be forcibly constructed is a basic trope of almost every national identity that has emerged on the soil of a conquered people. In Israel’s case it goes back not merely to the beginning of Zionism, but to the construction of the earliest Hebrew/Israelite identity in the biblical era, as recounted in the Hebrew scriptures.

In Before Israel: The Canaanites as Other in Biblical Tradition, one of the most underutilised articles on the deep history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Robert L Cohn argues that there are two primary origin myths through which ancient Israelites understood their interactions with the native Canaanite population of the land they believed to have been promised and given to them by God.

The more well-known narrative, which he terms the conquest and settlement arche (origin myth), is located primarily in the Books of Joshua and Judges. In it, the Canaanites are depicted as the dangerous “other” who exist both before and within the People of Israel. To justify their dispossession by the People of Israel, they were described as “horrendous sinners” and “defilers” of the land; a belief that had to be constantly reinforced since the Canaanites were not merely continuing to live among Israelites, but were sharing their most intimate practices - from sex to worship - with them.

Indeed, the cultural and linguistic overlap between Canaanite and Israelite societies meant that Israelite religious and political leaders had to spend significant energy to ensure that the members of the tribes who defined themselves through their exclusive worship of only one God kept themselves apart from their polytheistic (or at least more theologically syncretistic) neighbours.

At the same time, they had to discourage any attempt to see or treat Canaanites as part of the Israelite community, or even as a legitimate presence in the land the Israelite tribes believed had been given to them by God.

What is interesting is that there is another, earlier, arche surrounding the Canaanites, this one from the Book of Genesis. In these earliest descriptions of Canaanites, they are not yet a conquered people, but rather the legitimate masters of their land. God’s promise to Abram - he had not yet become “Abraham” by entering into a direct covenant with God - was to give the land to him and his descendants in the future, after generations of suffering and servitude at the hands of others.

For the moment, as Cohn points out, Abram and his family were “the aliens, the wanderers, the endangered”, while Canaanites the legitimate occupants of the land.

This is one of the most powerful, yet disheartening insights of the Bible: that without power, without sovereignty and a state or government that can wield violence over others, people becomes aliens in their own land, or even worse, wanderers outside the bounds or protection of any political community. In short, “Palestinian”, which is the best contemporary description for the existence of Jews during their almost 2,000 years of exile between the destruction of the Second Temple in 70CE and the creation of the State of Israel in 1948.

The price of conquest

With the conquest of the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967 and the initiation of the settlement project by Jews in the Occupied Territories, Israelis were faced with a similar problem to that faced by their Israelite ancestors: how to keep the conquered population from corrupting and weakening the still fragile national identity while exploiting the people, territory and resources for the benefit of the core community?

The deeper and more entrenched the occupation became in the decades after 1967, the more integrated Palestinians became into Israeli society, and thus the more of a threat they constitute to the “national” existence of Israel as a Jewish, yet ostensibly democratic state.

Oslo was supposed to solve this problem by creating two ethnically and territorially differentiated states. But the peace process and its policy of “integration through separation” could neither slow down the continued territorial integration of the West Bank with Israel, nor offer the kind of globalised cosmopolitan identity that would overcome and heal the divisions and imbalances in power and rights between the two communities.

And so Chief Justice Grunis is right when he warns that Israel is headed for “national suicide” if it grants Palestinians the human rights they deserve; not physically, but as a viable polity.

The main question is whether, in an even more dystopian version of Thelma and Louise, Israel will take Palestine with it over the ledge - and whether Palestinian national identity imagined as a mirror image of an exclusive Zionist Israeli identity has become so weakened and corrupted through a century of conflict and occupation that it has neither the political nor ideological power to bring independence and justice to Palestinians.

Not suicide, but reinvention

The irony that Justice Grunis fails to note is that the only way for Israel to avoid suicide is precisely to respect and protect fully the human rights of everyone living in historic Palestine/Eretz Yisrael, without exception. It is only through a reinvention of Israeli national and political identity based on an open and holistic vision that Israelis Jews can ensure they retain their fundamental rights, as the country inevitably evolves away from a two-state system and towards a common, if conflicted, existence.

This is, not surprisingly, the same dilemma facing Israel’s Arab neighbours. But with the exception of Tunisia, which is just now celebrating the first anniversary of Ben Ali’s flight from the country, no governing elite has been willing to allow the real empowerment of their citizens through a real democratic process that is grounded in respect for the fundamental human rights of all citizens.

Whether in Tel Aviv, Cairo, Manama, Sanaa or Damascus, oppressive governments deploying chauvinistic identities that set neighbours against each other might survive in the near term. But the very ideology and tactics deployed to preserve them will ultimately cost the regimes, and the communities they claim to be protecting, their futures.

In choosing power over human rights, Israel is merely leading the way towards a future that has no place for Zionism or the region’s other repressive and chauvinistic political systems and identities, against which millions of citizens across the Arab world have rebelled in the last year.

Indeed, if the new year is anything like the one just past, the coming Arab Spring will see more and more of the supposed beneficiaries of the status quo reaching out beyond their narrow interests to begin the hard work of constructing a common future.

This will be the lasting legacy of the still inchoate revolutions of the last year, and it’s a future that not only Arabs and Israelis, but the world, has a powerful stake in helping to build.

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Nabil Elaraby, Secretary General of Arab League, asks Hamas chief Khaled Mashaal to deliver message to Syria to “work with integrity, transparency and credibility to halt the violence.”

The head of the Arab League said on Friday he had asked the Damascus-based leader of the Palestinian movement Hamas to ask the Syrian government to work to halt violence in the country.

Arab League Secretary General Nabil Elaraby was speaking alongside Hamas leader Khaled Mashaal after a meeting in Cairo.”I gave him a message today to the Syrian authorities that it is necessary to work with integrity, transparency and credibility to halt the violence that is happening in Syria,” he said.

Earlier Friday, a suicide bomber in Syria’s capital Damascus killed 25 people and wounded 46 others, local news station Addounia said.

The bomber blew himself up at a traffic light, according to state television. Footage broadcast by Syria Television also showed the shattered blood splattered windows of what appeared to be a police bus.

At least 44 people were killed last month by what the Syrian authorities said were two suicide bombings against security buildings in the Syrian capital.

Syria has been racked for 10 months by an uprising against President Bashar al-Assad in which the United Nations says more than 5,000 people have been killed. The government says armed “terrorists” have killed 2,000 members of the security forces.

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“These trees are holy to me. They’re so old you can’t put a value on them,” says Nidam Qaraweq, a Palestinian olive farmer from the West Bank village of Awarta.

He pokes at the blackened, and gnarled trunks which are hundreds of years old. A large piece of what is now charcoal breaks off in his hand.

“They’re all dead,” he says angrily.

Last month, around 20 of Mr Qaraweq’s olive trees were destroyed by fire.

He says Jewish settlers from the adjacent settlement of Itamar deliberately set his fields alight in an arson attack.

Some of Mr Qaraweq’s other olive groves lie in land that has been taken over by the Itamar settlement as it expanded.

A high metal fence surrounds the settlement and Israeli soldiers patrol the gate denying Palestinians entry.

Mr Qaraweq says the land has been stolen.

Each olive harvest, the Israeli army escorts Palestinian farmers into Itamar to allow them to pick their olives for a few days.

When this happened in October, the Palestinian say settlers attacked them with sticks.

Israeli soldiers had to intervene and the Palestinians were forced to leave.

The situation around Awarta is especially tense after two Palestinian teenagers from the village were convicted of murdering a family of five settlers including two children and a baby in March this year.

But the broad picture is that settler violence is on the increase across the West Bank.

‘Shameful’ inaction

The United Nations says the number of attacks by extremist Jewish settlers on Palestinians resulting in either injury or damage to property has roughly tripled since 2009.

The UN says so far in 2011 around 10,000 Palestinian-owned olive trees have been destroyed or damaged in attacks by settlers.

“They’ve made life very difficult for Palestinians in the West Bank,” says Ramesh Rajasingham, Head of the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs in the Occupied Palestinian Territory.

“You have settler attacks on Palestinian property, on shepherds. In some cases, they attack kids going to school.”

In June this year, I visited a mosque in the Palestinian village of al-Mughriah near Ramallah, which had suffered an arson attack.

Burning tyres had been thrown into the mosque and the walls had been sprayed with graffiti in Hebrew.

The imam told me he believed settlers were almost certainly to blame.

It has been just one of several attacks on mosques in the West Bank this year.

The UN says in 90% of complaints filed to the Israeli police by Palestinians against settlers, nobody is ever indicted.

“For a country such as Israel which has such excellent capacities in terms of rule of law, this level of inaction is really shameful,” says Ramesh Rajasingham.

“If you have this level of impunity, people will free to do it. If people feel they can get away with it then they have all the opportunity to continue such attacks.”

Revenge attacks

Some attacks by settlers are referred to as “price tagging”.

This is a policy of revenge carried out by Jewish extremists if any action is taken by the Israeli government or security forces against settlement expansion.

Typically price tagging happens after the Israeli authorities move to dismantle settler “outposts”, small Jewish communities build on occupied Palestinian land which even the Israeli government regards as illegal.

Usually it is Palestinians or their property which are attacked in revenge but occasionally action is taken against Israel’s security forces.

In October, an Israeli army patrol was surrounded and assaulted by a group of extremist settlers in the West Bank.

The attack on the soldiers came after a Jewish teenager was arrested on suspicion of carrying out an arson attack on a Palestinian mosque.

In clashes between settlers and Palestinians it is the Israeli army who have to intervene, often using tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse stone throwing Palestinian youths.

But some soldiers express frustration at the more extremist settlers.

“Both sides are as stupid as the other,” an exasperated looking Israeli commanding officer told me as his troops stepped in to stop fighting between settlers and Palestinians near Nablus last month.

The man who recently left his post as Israeli army commander of the West Bank, Nitzan Alon, went much further.

Brigadier General Alon said not enough had been done to tackle Jewish extremism referring to price tag attacks as “terror”.

“These acts not only should be condemned for their folly and wrongdoing but we should also have done more to prevent them and to arrest the perpetrators,” he said in his outgoing speech.

‘Exaggerated’ reports

However many settler leaders say he is wrong.

“I think that Commander Alon is exaggerating. He’s making a mistake, not being careful with his words,” says David Haivri, a settler and spokesperson for the Shomron Regional Council in the West Bank.

Mr Haivri says Nitzan Alon went too far with his accusations and argues there is not as much tension between settlers and Palestinians as people make out. He says the United Nations figures on settler violence are wrong.

“It seems that so-called human rights organisations are bouncing numbers off each other, building up statistics that don’t reflect what I see in the area where I live. There have been much more tense years than this one,” says Mr Haivri.

Around 500,000 Jewish settlers live in the West Bank and East Jerusalem, land that has been occupied by Israel since 1967.

Settlements are illegal under international law although Israel disputes this.

Many settlers believe they have a religious right to the land.

The vast majority of settlers are non-violent but some within the Israeli government acknowledge a growing problem with extremists.

This month, the Israeli Education Minister, Gideon Saar, strongly condemned the “price tag” policy conducted by extremist settlers.

“The price tag gangs that harass innocent people, damage property, attack Israeli soldiers and security forces, burn mosques and terrorise political opponents are a violent and dangerous cancerous growth that must be uprooted,” he said.

Mr Saar was speaking at a memorial service for the former Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Rabin, who was assassinated in 1995 by a Jewish extremist opposed to the Oslo Peace Accords that Mr Rabin had signed with the Palestinians two years earlier.

Settlement growth

For Palestinians, settlement expansion in the West Bank and East Jerusalem is an obstacle to peace. They say it makes a future Palestinian state less and less viable.

The United States, the European Union and virtually the entire international community feels the same.

The Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas refuses to return to peace talks with Israel until settlement expansion stops completely.

The Israeli government disagrees with his position and says settlement growth is a symptom of the Palestinians’ refusal to engage in talks.

The survival of the right wing coalition government is, at least to some extent, dependent on political parties that draw much of their support from people who favour settlement expansion on occupied Palestinian territory.

But if ever there is to be a Palestinian state, both Israeli and Palestinian leaders know that tens of thousands of settlers would have to be removed from their homes.

That would not happen easily and the number of settlers and their influence over Israeli government policy is growing by the day.

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Duizend Palestijnen voor één militair: dat zijn pas verhoudingen. Is die prijs te hoog of juist niet?

Uri Rosenthal weet het misschien, onze Expert in Evenwicht. De minister voor Buitenlandse Zaken blokkeerde onlangs in zijn eentje een gezamenlijke verklaring van de 27 EU-lidstaten, die was bedoeld om de vredesbesprekingen uit het moeras te trekken. Volgens Rosenthal was deze tekst onevenwichtig en buiten proportie: om te beginnen werden de wandaden van zowel Palestijnen als Israëli’s aan de kaak gesteld. Daarnaast verwees de tekst naar een twééstatenoplossing.

Nu wordt dat plan al bijna 45 jaar door de Verenigde Naties (kortom de gehele wereld) bepleit als de enige acceptabele, rechtvaardige oplossing voor het Midden-Oostenconflict. Evenwichtiger dan dat wordt het niet, zou je zeggen; legaler evenmin. Maar gelukkig is Uri ‘Geller’ Rosenthal er nog, de man die alles krombuigt tot het recht lijkt. Hij vond het een groot onrecht dat naast de Palestijnen ook de Israëli’s de maat werd gemeten, terwijl zij toch alleen maar de bezetters in dit verhaal zijn.

Evenwicht in het Nederlands beleid: een snelcursus.

1. Stel, Hamas blijkt in 2006 de onbetwiste winnaar van eerlijke Palestijnse verkiezingen. De partij komt aan de macht. Wat doe je dan? Je stelt een totale boycot in - die lui accepteren immers de grenzen van 1967 niet. Je zet anderhalf miljoen burgers gevangen op een gebied zo groot als twee keer Texel, onthoudt hun elk contact met de buitenwereld, en wacht tot ze genuanceerder leren stemmen.

Dat is de linkerschaal van de balans.

2. Maar dan. Na de Israëlische verkiezingen van 2009 worden ook daar twee extremistische partijen opgenomen in de regering: Israël Ons Thuis en Shas. Geen van beide Israëlische partijen accepteert de grenzen van 1967, ze streven naar een etnisch zuiver, joods Israël met behoud van de nederzettingen. Dus wat doe je dan?

Dan ga je over tot intensieve samenwerking. Het is precies wat Rosenthal op zijn eerste dienstreis naar Israël voorstelde aan zijn ambtgenoot, minister Lieberman.

Nu is Lieberman de voorman van Israël Ons Thuis. Toen enkele jaren geleden een groep Palestijnse gevangenen zou worden vrijgelaten, opperde hij de mogelijkheid om in plaats daarvan alle Palestijnse gevangenen in de Dode Zee te verdrinken. Hijzelf was bereid de bussen te regelen. Bij een andere gelegenheid had Lieberman geëist dat Arabisch-Israëlische parlementsleden geëxecuteerd zouden worden. Toch zag minister Verhagen er indertijd geen graten in hem in Nederland te ontvangen, en voor zijn opvolger Rosenthal is het vandaag eveneens business as usual.

Zeer weinig landen hebben de kolonist Lieberman (hij woont in een illegale nederzetting) willen ontvangen. Internationaal een persona non grata - behalve hier. Bij ons valt met racisten te praten.

Dat is de rechterschaal van de balans.

Maar nu komt het. Volgens Uri’s Wetten van Evenwicht past in de rechterschaal namelijk nog veel meer. Zo heeft Hamas inmiddels herhaaldelijk aangegeven een Palestijnse staat binnen de grenzen van 1967 te accepteren. Dit feit wordt door Israël (en dus ook door Nederland) consequent verdoezeld en genegeerd teneinde nooit met wie dan ook te hoeven praten. En waarover zou je ook? Want wat blijkt: géén van de grote Israëlische politieke partijen – of het nu Israël Ons Thuis betreft, Shas, Likud, de Arbeiderspartij of Kadima – neemt in het partijprogramma 1967 op als uitgangspunt voor de grenzen van Israël. Integendeel: Likud verdedigt in zijn statuten open en bloot de Groot-Israël-gedachte. Met Netanyahu valt dus sowieso over niets te onderhandelen. En als de Israëlische premier in het Amerikaans congres luid en duidelijk verkondigt dat hij een terugkeer naar de grenzen van ’67 totaal verwerpt en daarmee de Palestijnen elk perspectief op een levensvatbare staat ontneemt, houdt Nederland zijn mondje dicht.

Ook als Geert Wilders in Israël voor deportatie van de Palestijnen pleit, zwijgt dit kabinet. Die Wilders toch, met zijn malle oproepen tot etnische zuivering. Die zit écht niet in de regering hoor.

Rosenthal protesteert pas als een moegetergde president Abbas bij de VN een aanvraag indient tot erkenning van de staat Palestina, binnen de internationaal erkende grenzen, conform het internationaal recht.

Rosenthal was het ook, die tegen alle internationale richtlijnen in zijn ambtenaren opdroeg voortaan niet meer over de ‘bezette gebieden’ te spreken, maar over ‘betwiste gebieden’. Dat klinkt al een stuk gebalanceerder.

Kijk, dat de minister zelf is getrouwd met een Israëli, dat in de fractiekamer van de PVV prominent een reusachtige Israëlische vlag hangt en dat het huidige regeerakkoord slechts één buitenland met name noemt (’Nederland wil verder investeren in de band met Israël.’) – dat doet natuurlijk allemaal niet ter zake. Maar er is stilaan wel héél veel evenwicht in Nederland.

Uri Rosenthal, onze man in Groot-Israël.

Wat is een Palestijn eigenlijk waard, meneer de minister? En wat is een Israëli u waard? Het is uw vak, diplomatieke verhoudingen, dus u weet dat soort dingen.

Anders zal ik het zeggen. Duizend tegen één. Dat is de wisselkoers in het Midden-Oosten.

Met de stilzwijgende steun van de ene na de andere Nederlandse regering zijn de kansen op een rechtvaardige vrede stilaan verkeken. En met de hulp van dit kabinet nadert een decennialange kolonisatie nu haar voltooiing. Nog een paar jaren treiteren en volbouwen, maar dan heb je ook wat.

Dan doemt eindelijk, alsnog, in oudtestamentische glorie voor ons op: ‘een land zonder volk voor een volk zonder land’.

Een Palestijn is vandaag eenduizendste mens. Nog even, en dan de diaspora: opgelost, weg.

Evenwicht.

Fraaist van al blijft deze prestatie: Israël is er, mede dankzij het Nederlands beleid, in geslaagd de Israëli’s voor te stellen als de slachtoffers van deze bezetting. Palestijnen die ondanks alles blijven hameren op het internationaal recht worden nu behandeld als rigide dromers, of beter nog: als extremisten (ik zie de brieven alweer verschijnen, waarin ik voor antisemiet word uitgemaakt). En terwijl de Israëlische regering jammert over een gebrek aan gesprekspartners, bouwt ze maar door op Palestijnse grond, blijft ze het westen maar chanteren, als vormde het land een vuurtoren van verlicht humanisme in een zee van vijandig extremisme. Intussen is vrijwel geheel historisch Palestina nu geannexeerd.

Wij gedogen het, zoals wij in eigen land Geert Wilders gedogen en er intensief mee samenwerken. Wij gedogen de schepping van Über-en Untermenschen.

Anders valt niet te verklaren dat joodse kolonisten op Palestijnen mogen schieten als wild wanneer deze hun olijven gaan oogsten, dat een leger witte fosfor uitstrooit over burgers, dat het scholen met vluchtelingen bombardeert, non-stop Palestijnse huizen vernietigt en een radeloos volk domweg laat creperen - zonder dat iemand dit stopt.

Israël streeft naar een land voor joden en enkel joden. Nederland heeft als bevriende natie Israël altijd de hand boven het hoofd gehouden in een beleid van moedwillige zuivering. De conclusie moet luiden dat onze regering gelooft in mensen en ondermensen. En zo niet – Doe Dan Iets, meneer Rosenthal.

Intensiveer de tegenwerking en dwing voor één keer evenwicht af.

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UNITED NATIONS (AP) — The Security Council took its first official step Wednesday to consider the Palestinians’ request for U.N. membership.

Lebanese Ambassador Nawaf Salam, who holds this month’s rotating council presidency, announced that he was forwarding the Palestinians’ request to the committee on new admissions, which includes all 15 member states on the council.

The step is required by council rules of procedure.

The committee will meet to consider the request for membership on Friday.

Palestinian U.N. envoy Riyad Mansour thanked the council for quickly and unanimously agreeing to act on the Palestinian application.

“We hope this process not to take too long before we see positive action,” he told reporters.

The process could take weeks before it comes to a final vote in the council, where the United States has vowed to veto the measure should it receive the necessary nine of 15 council votes in favor of membership for Palestine.

Mansour did not address U.S. opposition, but said instead: “As you see, the process is moving forward step by step and we hope that the Security council will shoulder its responsibility and approve our application.”

Israel joins the United States in opposing the Palestinians unilateral declaration of statehood and bid for U.N. membership and its ambassador to the world body restated that position Wednesday.

“I would like to emphasize that a viable Palestinian state will not be achieved by imposing things from the outside, only through direct negotiations.” Ambassador Ron Prosor told reporters: “That’s the only way we are going to move forward to a substantial peace by both sides,”

The United States along with its partners in the Quartet of Mideast peacemakers — the U.N., the European Union and Russia — have called for the Israelis and Palestinians to return to negotiations and reach agreement by the end of next year. Success in the talks and a final agreement in long-stalled talks would erase any opposition to Palestinian membership.

But the Palestinians have indicated the Quartet’s latest plan for negotiations was not sufficient because it does not specify two preconditions: Israel acceptance of borders that existed before the 1967 War and that Israel to stop building Jewish settlements in the lands the Palestinians claim for their state.

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(Reuters) - President Mahmoud Abbas looks certain to fail in his bid to win United Nations membership for a Palestinian state, but his move has rekindled admiration for him back home, revealing the defiant side of an often understated man.

The initiative is fiercely opposed by the United States and his decision to forge ahead has thrust the Palestinian issue to the top of the U.N. agenda, challenging the view of critics who accuse him of yielding too swiftly to foreign pressure.

At 76, some observers believe Abbas has his legacy in mind as he nears the end of a career defined by failed efforts to negotiate the creation of a Palestinian state in territories captured by Israel in a 1967 war.

“He is starting to develop a public persona different to the prevailing one: that he can challenge even the position of the United States if it does not match Palestinian interests,” said Bassam al-Salehi, secretary general of the Palestinian People’s Party, part of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO).

Abbas has been involved in Palestinian politics since the 1950s, part of the generation led by the late Yasser Arafat, whom he replaced as president in 2005.

Whereas Arafat was flamboyant and mercurial, striding the world stage in army fatigues and distinctive keffiyeh headdress, Abbas cuts a low-key figure, opting for suits and ties, and presenting a much more moderate face of Palestinian nationalism.

He was an architect of the Oslo peace accords which helped launch the peace process in the 1990s. But repeated rounds of direct negotiations with various Israeli leaders brokered by Washington have left full statehood as remote a dream as ever.

Palestinians point to the expansion of Jewish settlements on land where they want to found their state as one of the main reasons for that. Israeli officials counter by saying the Palestinians have rejected generous deals down the years.

After the failure of the last round of talks in September 2010, Abbas drew up the new strategy of seeking statehood recognition directly from the United Nations.

“Let me be frank, we are facing a historic and difficult period,” Abbas said in a televised speech to his people last Friday, spelling out his U.N. plan.

“You certainly don’t believe me,” he joked, signaling he was aware of his reputation not to follow through on threats.

HOSTILE TO VIOLENCE

Abbas is a refugee from a town in what is now Israel, but his vision for ending the conflict is built around the idea of establishing of an independent Palestine in the West Bank, the Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem alongside Israel.

His opposition to the use of violence has bordered on outright disdain. That has fed his rivalry with the Hamas Islamist group, which wrestled control of Gaza from him in 2007.

He has described as “futile” the firing of rockets into Israel by militants in Gaza, and the security forces he has built up in the West Bank are trained to cooperate with Israel rather than fight it.

His rise to the presidency was welcomed by the United States and Israel, which accused Arafat of fomenting the violence that raged in the last years of his life. Abbas worked to stop it.

But today, his people are wondering what he has to show for his efforts. Abbas himself has not hidden his disappointment in President Barack Obama, particularly for his failure to convince Israel to halt the expansion of Jewish settlements.

As Obama addressed the United Nations on Wednesday, dismissing the Palestinians’ U.N. quest as a mistaken mission, Abbas on several occasions put his hand to his head and his delegation later poured scorn on the U.S. position.

Palestinians familiar with Abbas say he is still hurt by the fall-out from an early encounter with the Obama administration.

It was widely assumed that he caved into U.S. pressure when in 2009 he approved a U.N. decision to delay action on a report into the 2008-09 Gaza war which was highly critical of Israel.

He later reversed his position, but by then his public image was already in tatters. The experience toughened his resolve.

“He took very unpopular decisions. So he’s saying: ‘What can I give the people?’” said a PLO official, discussing the motivations behind the U.N. statehood bid.

“All of us said, ‘We go to the United Nations’.”

Since the 2009 public relations disaster, Abbas has undoubtedly stiffened his resolve.

He fended off Western pressure to drop his conditions for a resumption of negotiations with Israel, including a complete halt to settlement building.

He also defied U.S. pressure by bringing a resolution to the U.N. Security Council earlier this year condemning the settlements. The United States vetoed the measure.

His newfound stubbornness has boosted his standing in the polls, with a survey this week by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research (PSR), showing that 83 percent of Palestinians support the U.N. statehood bid.

“There’s no doubt that Abbas’ popularity has improved,” said PSR director Khalil Shikaki. “(But) the changes are not dramatic. He is not a charismatic leader. People respond to the message rather than the man.”

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Istanbul (CNN) — Turkey’s prime minister said the country would follow aid ships to Gaza, in an effort to stop incidents like last year’s raid by Israeli commandos that killed eight Turks and one Turkish-American.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Al Jazeera television network Thursday that “Turkish warships are primarily responsible to protect our ships that carry humanitarian aid to Gaza. From now on, we will not allow these ships to be subjected to attacks from Israel similar to what happened with the Freedom Flotilla … Israel will be answered appropriately.”

The tough talk from Erdogan comes during an escalation of tensions between Israel and Turkey.

On Wednesday, Israeli officials said Turkey had expelled three Israeli diplomats from the Israeli Embassy in Ankara.

A day earlier, Erdogan compared Ankara’s once-close ally in the Middle East to a “spoiled boy” and announced additional sanctions would soon be imposed, according to the semi-official Anatolian agency.

The Israeli government has not yet commented publicly on the remarks made by Erdogan to Al Jazeera.

But Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper reported Friday that Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman was drawing up a series of tough measures against Turkey in response to its moves.

Israeli government officials told CNN that lots of ideas on a possible Israeli response were being discussed but that nothing definite had been decided on.

Speaking Wednesday at a naval academy event, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu took a conciliatory tone, saying the recent increase in tensions with Turkey “was not our choice then, and it is not our choice now.”

But, he added, Israel had the right to defend its coast and to prevent smugglers and flotillas reaching the Gaza Strip.

Turkey declared last week it was downgrading relations with Israel, suspending all military agreements between the two countries and giving senior Israeli diplomats less than a week to leave Turkish territory.

Erdogan’s government is incensed that Israel refuses to apologize or pay compensation for the eight Turks and one Turkish-American killed in May last year.

The humanitarian workers and activists were shot dead by Israeli commandos in a botched raid on an aid convoy that was trying to break Israel’s sea blockade of Gaza. The blockade was imposed, according to the Israeli military, to prevent the smuggling of weapons to the Hamas-ruled coastal enclave.

A United Nations investigation into the violent maritime event released a week ago found that the Israeli blockade of Gaza was a “legitimate security measure” in compliance with international law, but it said that Israel had used “excessive and unreasonable” force in the takeover of the ship.

Israel insists that its soldiers acted in self-defense after being assaulted by the Turkish activists.

Turkey and Israel have been negotiating for months in an attempt to improve their faltering relationship, but those efforts have failed. The release of the U.N. report was delayed while those negotiations continued.

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JERUSALEM (AP) — Rising tensions with some of its closest and most important allies have left Israel increasingly isolated ahead of a momentous vote on Palestinian independence at the United Nations.

Troubles with Turkey, Egypt and even the U.S. are adding to Israel’s headaches ahead of the vote, which is shaping up to be a global expression of discontent against the government of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

The Palestinians plan to ask the United Nations this month to recognize their independence in the West Bank, Gaza Strip and east Jerusalem — areas captured by Israel in the 1967 Mideast war — probably by embracing them as a “nonmember observer state.” The measure is expected to pass overwhelmingly in the U.N. General Assembly.

The assembly’s decisions are not legally binding, so the vote will be largely symbolic. But the Palestinians hope the measure will increase the already considerable pressure on Israel to withdraw from occupied territories, and add leverage should peace talks resume. The Palestinians refuse to negotiate while Israel continues to expand Jewish settlements in the West Bank and east Jerusalem.

Ghassan Khatib, a spokesman for the Palestinian government in the West Bank, said Israeli isolation is playing right into Palestinian hands. “We are seeing that result in increased support for us in the United Nations,” he said.

On Wednesday, China announced it would support the Palestinian bid. And a French Mideast envoy, Valerie Hoffenberg, said she had been fired after publicly arguing against the Palestinian initiative. France has not publicly said how it will vote, but her comments signaled that the government favors the Palestinians.

The vote is seen by many not only as a message of sympathy with the Palestinians, but also a barometer of discontent with Israel’s settlement policies. Some 500,000 Israelis now live in territories claimed by the Palestinians.

“There’s no question that had Israel been seen as a country doing its utmost to promote peace, no such vote would be taking place,” said Yossi Beilin, Israel’s former deputy foreign minister.

Beilin cited Netanyahu’s refusal to extend a freeze on new settlement construction a year ago as the “mother of all sins” that put him at odds with the international community. The decision, made over the very public objections of President Barack Obama, caused a brief round of peace talks to collapse.

Since then, relations with Obama have been further strained. In May, Netanyahu paid a tense visit to Washington, where he objected before cameras to Obama’s call that the 1967 boundaries be the basis of a future agreement with the Palestinians. American officials privately express deep frustration with Netanyahu.

Even so, Washington has been trying to pressure the Palestinians to give up the U.N. bid, saying peace can only be achieved through negotiations.

Closer to home, Israel has watched Egypt, perhaps its most critical regional ally, cool relations since the ouster of longtime President Hosni Mubarak in February. Mubarak was seen by many of his people as too sympathetic to Israel, negotiating an unpopular deal to supply it with natural gas, for example.

Israel-Egypt relations took a hit last month when five Egyptian police were killed during a firefight between Israeli forces and fleeing militants. Egypt was outraged, and mass demonstrations against Israel erupted in Cairo. Israel later apologized. But there have been calls in Egypt to cancel the 30-year-old peace agreement with Israel — which is an absolutely critical element of Israel’s regional strategy.

Another key regional ally, Turkey, has greatly curbed diplomatic and trade ties with Israel following Israel’s deadly raid on a protest flotilla that tried to breach the Israeli blockade of the Gaza Strip last year. Nine Turks, one of them an American citizen, were killed in clashes with Israeli naval commandos.

Israeli officials have tried to play down the tensions, saying that Israel has long faced hostility on the diplomatic stage. They also say that Israel has enjoyed some key victories recently, such as last week’s U.N. report on the flotilla incident that defended its blockade of Gaza. Yet one official acknowledged the “new challenges” are a source of concern. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he was discussing sensitive internal discussions.

Dore Gold, a former Israeli ambassador to the U.N. who is close to Netanyahu, said it is “a mistake to judge Israel’s international standing by recent events.”

He said Turkey’s animosity toward Israel is part of a broader shift by the country’s Islamist government that “is troubling not just for the Jewish state but for many of Turkey’s neighbors.”

And any anti-Israel resolution at the U.N. passes automatically, thanks to the dominance by developing nations that are sympathetic to the Palestinians, he said. “It’s conventional wisdom that if there was a resolution whose first clause was anti-Israel and whose second clause was that the earth was flat, it would pass,” Gold said.

Israeli opposition leader Tzipi Livni, however, accused Netanyahu of weakening the nation’s interests. “Israel’s isolation is affecting its security and its economy,” she told a conference Wednesday.

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ISTANBUL—Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Tuesday that his country was suspending defense trade with Israel completely and that Turkish naval vessels would be seen in the Eastern Mediterranean more often, as Ankara ratcheted up pressure in a rising dispute with its former ally.

Speaking to reporters in Ankara after giving a speech at the Ankara Chamber of Commerce, Mr. Erdogan repeated plans announced Friday to downgrade diplomatic relations with the Jewish state and suspend military agreements, specifying that the suspension of would include trade in defense goods.

“Trade relations, military relations, defense industry—these we will suspend. These will be completely frozen and that process will be followed also by very different sanctions,” Mr. Erdogan said. Those measures still to come would be a “Plan C” to the “Plan B” already announced, he said.

So far, Turkey has announced no general trade sanctions against Israel. A spokesman for Mr. Erdogan said the prime minister had been referring in his remarks only to trade in defense goods, and not to trade in general. On Monday, Turkey’s economy minister had said there would be no broader trade sanctions “for now.”

Turkey and Israel did just under $3.5 billion worth of trade in 2010, according to official Turkish figures, and trade was up by a quarter in the first six months of this year.

Responding to a question asking whether reports that Turkey would begin patrolling waters off Israel and whether that risked conflict, Mr. Erdogan said that Turkey had a right to do so. “The eastern Mediterranean is not a foreign place to us … Of course our vessels will be seen from now on very often in these waters. We will see [them] very often,” he said.

He also confirmed that he would be traveling to Egypt soon, and that he “might” also visit Gaza, if that could be arranged.

Turkey has said it is acting over Israel’s continued refusal to apologize for the killing by Israeli commandoes of eight Turish citizens and one American of Turkish extraction on board the Mavi Marmara aid ship as it sought to break Israel’s blockade of the Gaza strip last May.

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