A group of us here in Sydney was discussing a book that traces the travails of a Jewish family spread out in Austria and France during WW II. It is a very poignant story told with great sympathy, compassion and understanding by the author several generations down the family line. Luckily, this family escaped what many Jews suffered in a holocaust engineered by Hitler’s Germany. In the midst of this discussion, someone raised the question: has it ever bothered the successive governments in Israel that the same (Jewish) people who have been one of the most persecuted in history are now dishing it out to the Palestinians? The Palestinians have been displaced, bombed, terrorised, hunted, blocked, balkanised and what not, and Israel still manages to do it all with a clear conscience as if the Palestinians were the initiators and perpetrators of all the historical pogroms, including the Holocaust that the Jews suffered, when all this happened and was done to them in Europe. It is a cruel travesty of history that the victims (the Jews) are now the perpetrators of crimes against humanity on people (the Palestinians) who, historically, have had nothing to do with the persecution of Jews. Still, they have been deprived of their homeland. They are now living under Israeli occupation in what little is left of their homeland. Moreover, even that too is coveted by Israel, with Jewish settlements springing all around them, parcelling their land into Bantustans of the South African apartheid era. In an era when the question of human rights is sought to be made a central issue of international politics, Israel is the only country that still manages to flout them with impunity. The Israeli occupation of the West Bank, including Jerusalem, and Gaza (blockaded and bombed) are illegal under international law. However, in the case of the Israeli usurpation of Palestinian lands, international law apparently has no validity, with Israel able to interpret and twist it to its requirements. For instance, some of the European countries recently criticised another bout of occupation settlements that Israel is building, which are patently illegal, but Israel simply dismissed their objection as ‘partial, biased and one-sided depiction of realities on the ground’. There is a method behind this madness. It is two-fold. First, it is meant to create new ground realties as a fait accompli. Second is to make existence for the Palestinians so miserable and horrible that they might have no option but to leave to create more ghettos in neighbouring Arab countries. After all, Israel denied for quite a long time (some still do) the existence of a Palestinian entity and identity. They wanted to squeeze them out (it remains the ultimate goal) to seek a ghettoised existence in other Arab lands. But so far it has worked only partially. The underlying policy though remains the same, with the Israeli Arabs also coming under a tightening regime of a discriminatory legal dispensation for them. Indeed, the siege mentality enveloping the Israeli state, despite being the strongest country in the Middle East and enjoying the protection of the world’s most powerful country (the United States) is such that it sees enemies everywhere. As David Shulman, professor of Humanistic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem writes in an article titled, “Israel in Peril”, “… Like many Israelis, he [Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu] inhabits a world where evil forces are always just about to annihilate the Jews, who must strike back in daring and heroic ways in order to snatch life from the jaws of death.” He adds, “I think that, like many other Israelis, he is in love with such a world and would reinvent it even if there were no serious threat from outside.” Shulman is spot on about this enveloping psychology of the state of Israel where the existence of the country and the Jewish people is always on the line, requiring preventive and pre-emptive action. Commenting on the policy of Jewish settlements in the occupied territory, Shulman says, “By now, a huge portion of the West Bank has, in effect, been annexed, perhaps irreversibly, to Israel. No state can be constituted on the little that remains…” The Netanyahu government continues to invite the Palestinian Authority for ‘unconditional’ talks on the two-state solution. It is a cruel joke that Israel keeps playing on the Palestinians, knowing that a two-state solution in truncated Palestine with a non-contiguous territory, and under overall Israeli control, is an insult to the Palestinian people. Tony Judt, historian and essayist, characterised as a self-hating Jew, and once a great admirer of the kibbutz-loving Israeli experiment as a “social-democratic paradise of peace-loving, farm-dwelling Jews…” was later turned off by his experiences in the country. He came to see in Israel “a Middle Eastern country that despised its neighbours and was about to open a catastrophic, generation-long rift with them by seizing and occupying their land.” How true it is and getting worse by the day, with the Palestinians copping the lot with graffiti in some places calling for ‘Death to the Arabs’, and ‘Arabs to the gas chambers’ as reported in a recent article in The New York Review of Books by Jonathan Freedland. The question is: how long will Israel be allowed to exercise its sense of entitlement and perpetual victimhood at the expense of the Palestinians? The answer obviously is, as long as the United States and its European allies will continue to indulge Israel. The United States’s political system is held hostage to the Jewish lobby in that country. So much so that Netanyahu has had the temerity to lecture, snub and demand answers from President Barack Obama because of the political and economic weight of the Jewish lobby. As for Israeli society, according to Peter Beinhart, “… the Netanyahu coalition [and its social foundation] is the product of frightening, long-term trends in Israeli society: an ultra-Orthodox population that is increasing dramatically, a settler movement that is growing more radical and more entrenched in the Israeli bureaucracy and army, and a Russian immigrant community that is particularly prone to anti-Arab racism.” It is a depressing picture for the Palestinians and the only way for things to change is one, by pressure from the United States and, two, for the Arab world to unite on the issue of justice and freedom for the Palestinians. On both counts, there is not any significant movement. Moreover, such impotence and indifference on the part of world tends to reinforce simply the Israeli view that if they continue on their course, the fait accompli of their occupation will acquire the stamp of legality. David Shulman writes in The New York Review of Books that the system that underpins Palestinian Bantustans “… someday, as happened in South Africa…will inevitably breakdown.” Furthermore, “To prolong the occupation is to ensure the emergence of a single polity [with] necessary progression to a system of one person, one vote.” In that case, Israel must face the likelihood that “unless the Occupation ends, there will also in the not so distant future be no Jewish state.” The writer is a senior journalist and academic based in Sydney, Australia. He can be reached at sushilpseth@yahoo.co.au