by Sonja Karkar
Women for Palestine
Contributed by Lucia
"...... An expanding Settler State or a Palestinian State?
Certainly, any Palestinian state proposed today would not be the state envisaged by the architects of Oslo. Israel’s Wall, the settlements and the Israeli-only roads have made sure that any Palestinian state will be forever compromised by the Israeli colonial settlement enterprise. That in itself would be reason enough for Israel to cite security concerns and keep its military presence in and around the settlements or at least give itself the right to enter and leave Palestinian territory at will. Israel would also continue to control the borders and airspace which will greatly affect the viability of the Palestinian state, and in particular, put the Palestinian economy and trade at the complete mercy of Israel. The way Israel has set it all up now with settlements, restricted roads, military reserves and no-go zones on 93 percent of the Palestinian West Bank seems much more like a settler state where Palestinians will only have semi authority in the enclaves allotted to them than the sovereign Palestinian state everyone is talking about.
Should the Palestinians acquiesce to some semblance of a state on the fragments of land remaining in these latest talks, they would find themselves in an impossible situation – completely subject to Israel’s whims and utterly and indefinitely dependent on humanitarian aid from the international community. Already Israel has disconnected much of occupied Palestine from its agricultural base. Farmers are being prevented from accessing their land while Israel controls the main aquifer water resource of the West Bank. No longer able to depend for their livelihood on their long-established agricultural industry, the Palestinians are being forced to buy Israeli goods and are not even able to purchase goods from the Arab states at more competitive prices.
Such conditions are disastrous beginnings for a nascent state, and even more disastrous, would be a pseudo-state locked within Israel’s illegally-acquired settlement heartland and perpetually vulnerable to Israel’s long-pursued claim to all of the land......"
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