“Electing” the Unilateral Solution and the Victory of “No Partner” Motto.
Ramallah: The Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR) announced today the publication of its second strategic report on the Israeli scene for the year 2005.
MADAR’s 2006 Strategic Report on the Israeli scene for the year 2005 consisted of six chapters and an executive summary. A team of Palestinian intellectuals, academics and specialists in the Israeli affairs authored the report, which is extended over 232 pages.
The report reviews and analyzes in-depth the most important events and developments of a great strategic significance that transpired during the year 2005 at the Israeli political, economic, security and social levels. In addition to that, the report includes one whole chapter about the status of the Palestinians in Israel and the state policies towards them.
The nature and magnitude of the dramatic changes and developments, which have shaken the Israeli society during the year 2005, imparted a unique significance to the repot. The authors succeeded in reviewing and discussing most of such events and developments and showed an excellent faculty in comprehending the essence underlying the Israeli scene by applying a social, historical contextual frame of analysis. The unique combination of inductive and deductive research methodologies employed by the authors offers the readers a powerful tool to understand in depth how such events and developments had affected the Israeli scene during the year 2005.
Below is the Synopsis of MADAR’s 2006 Strategic Report.
MADAR's 2006 Strategic Report, which published by the Palestinian Forum for Israeli Studies (MADAR),
concludes that the year 2005 witnessed Israel's unabated, relentless and continuous efforts to deliver the deathblow to the remnants of the negotiation process it had with the Palestinians.
According to the authors of the report, to finish off the negotiation process Israel turned to a variety of means including intensified and consistent attempts to marginalize the Palestinians entirely, introducing unilateral settlement proposals for the conflict, such as the unilateral withdrawal, and then unilaterally embarking on the demarcation project of Israel's final and permanent borders.
Likewise, the authors of the report expected that Israel, for the foreseeable future, will continue to impose its political will, regional policies and strategic vision on the Palestinians in particular and the Arab states on the whole in a unilateral manner without making any compromise on its own part. Similarly, Israel will invest its utmost efforts to divert world attention to other regional conflicts away from its conflict with the Palestinians. Benefiting from the passive and ineffective Arab role, taking advantage of the comprehensive, unlimited support provided by the current American administration, and capitalizing on the almost absolute EU's silence on what transpires at the Middle East arena, Israel will continue to pursue its strategic goals unilaterally and uninterrupted.
At Israel’s domestic level, the report, which is consisted of six chapters and extends over 232 pages, argues that during 2005 Israel witnessed a continuous phenomenon of domestic political instability. This phenomenon manifested, inter alia, in the acute internal political conflicts within Israeli political parties and movements that led ultimately to the collapse of Israel's ideological parties and the shift towards personality-oriented parties where the person's leadership traits, authority and charisma came to replace ideology. "Kadima" party is the conspicuous example of this dramatic shift.
On another level, the election of Amir Perets (a Sephardic Jew) to lead Israel's labor party came to mark a noticeable change within the leadership of the traditional Israeli political parties, which has been until Peretz elections under the reign of Ashkenazi leadership. The election of Amir Peretz came to emphasize for the Israeli society at large that Sephardic Jews are able and capable to hold the reins not only of political parties but of the government, too. It also came to dissipate the prevailing perception that Sephardic Jews can only be religious leaders as is the case with Shas party (the religious Sephardic Jews party). Nevertheless, the election of Amir Peretz had aggravated the ethnic schism and cleavages within Israel.
With respect to Israel's security and military scene during 2005, the report discusses several relevant issues. The Iranian nuclear program, the Syrian-Lebanon relations and Hezbollah file had preoccupied Israel's security and military strategists, yet Israel had only employed its vigorous diplomacy in dealing with such files so far. Along the same vein, during 2005 Israel continued its vehement and unrelenting efforts toward accomplishing its military supremacy in the Middle East as a part of a larger strategic plan of building a vital security space that insures its military and technological, especially military technology, preeminence not only over the neighboring Arab countries but over Turkey and Iran, too.
Not least significant, the most important questions that kept the Israeli leadership busy during the year 2005, according to the authors are: how to maintain and secure the state of powerlessness of the neighboring Arab states and how to continue inflicting painful strikes against the Palestinians. All this, according to the authors, aims at creating a regional fait accompli in which Israel's security lies at its core and that the Palestinian "terror" is still chasing and hunting the Israelis.
In addition to that, the Israeli army during the year 2005 received significant military aid from the US, especially in the field of computerized weapon systems in various military domains, that is in addition to the provision of US advanced weapon systems to Israeli army units which surpasses what Arab armies own altogether.
In respect to Israeli economic scene, the phenomenon of contradictions and inconstancies continued during 2005 and led to economic instability consistent with the prevailing political instability. However, the major shift, which was corroborated and fixed during 2005, was the deep economic restructuring of the Israeli economy in order to meet the demands of the global economy. Economic globalization underpinned by the neo-liberal economic precepts penetrated Israel's economy and the last dose of deep economic restructuring during 2005 led to the creation of a poor society inside Israel, a state used to be until recently a welfare state.
Sharon's policies, represented by Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu, Sharon’s former finance minister, opened the doors widely for the forces of privatization to capture every possible economic sphere in Israel’s space.
At the same level, Israel's fiscal policies during 2005 played a major role in liquidating Israel’s welfare state for the benefit of local and foreign capital controlled by a narrow group of families and oligarchs. To add fuel to the fire, the Israeli government during 2005 announced its program of tax reform, which in its turn aggravated the socio-economic inequalities within the Israeli society. Israel’s macroeconomic, restructuring, deregulation, fiscal and tax reform policies throughout the year of 2005 created not only pockets of poverty but abject poverty among wide segments of its population and a severe socio-economic polarization has been one of Israel’s major societal features during the last year. Consequently, Israel's deep economic restructuring highly affected its middle class and the shrinking of the latter is conspicuously expressed by its gradual withdrawal from the public active domain. On the whole, Israel’s economic policies during 2005 led ultimately to the rise of unemployment rates, crime, corruption, theft, violence as well as the increasing discrimination against various sectors in Israel.
Finally, the hiatus between Israel, as a state and institutions, and its Arab Palestinian citizens during the year 2005 largely deepened. The state of Israel, represented by its institutions, continued during the year of 2005 with its policies of exclusion, marginalization and discrimination against the Palestinian society inside Israel. Israeli institutions, according to the report, had referred to all possible methods to prevent its Palestinian citizens from active participation in the state life such as depriving them the rights to assume senior public administrative positions and/or key positions in the state apparatus. We refer here to positions with decision-making power. The state of affairs transpired during the last year, had once again, uncovered the essence underlying the growing chasm between Israel, as a state, and its Palestinian citizens. Successive Israeli governments along with their official institutions remain faithful to the tendency that continues to emphasize, simultaneously and systematically, the Jewishness of the state and its democratic character. This duality, which the Israeli governments seek fiercely to construct and repeatedly try to emphasize its existence, is no more than an illogical duality and/or an oxymoron. This combination of contradictory and incongruous meanings could not be fathomed unless it incorporated in the larger framework of the political and military conflict between Israel on one hand and the Palestinians and Arabs on the other.
Accordingly, the Israeli governments did not improve their approach in dealing with their own Palestinian citizens. To the contrary, the Israeli governments have been escalating their discriminatory policies against the Arab Palestinians inside Israel and have continued to apply double standards in their public policies. All this, however, aims at seizing the remaining lands belong to the Palestinian Arabs living in Israel.
