LOEWENSTEIN, Jennifer. “Israel will accept no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately control”

Dr Jennifer Loewenstein is the Associate Director of the Middle East Studies Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Madison, Wisconsin, USA and has been a Visiting Research Fellow at OxfordUniversity's Refugee Studies Centre (for biographical details see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Loewenstein ).

Dr Jennifer Loewenstein on Zionist Israeli racism: “The destruction of Gaza has nothing to do with Hamas. Israel will accept no authority in the Palestinian territories that it does not ultimately control. Any individual, leader, faction or movement that fails to accede to Israel’s demands or that seeks genuine sovereignty and the equality of all nations in the region; any government or popular movement that demands the applicability of international humanitarian law and of the universal declaration of human rights for its own people will be unacceptable for the Jewish State. Those dreaming of one state must be forced to ask themselves what Israel would do to a population of 4 million Palestinians within its borders when it commits on a daily, if not hourly basis, crimes against their collective humanity while they live alongside its borders? What will suddenly make the raison d’etre, the self-proclaimed purpose of Israel’s reason for being change if the Palestinian territories are annexed to it outright?” [1].

Dr Jennifer Loewenstein as a signatory to a latter entitled “The reality of the Geneva Accord”, 2003: “The Geneva accord was signed Monday 1 December 2003 amid great media and political fanfare. The 50-page document lays out a plan for a presumed "peace agreement" between Israel and the Palestinian people. We, the undersigned, consider this initiative as inconsistent with the prerequisites of a just and durable peace for the following reasons:

1. It attempts to nullify the Palestinian right of return, both as a collective national right and as an individual right. By doing so, it strengthens existing attempts to relocate and scatter Palestinian refugees throughout the world and gives credence to plans to abrogate international law pertaining to the inalienable nature of the right of return. The net result would be to extract the very anchor of the Palestinian struggle for self-determination: the indivisible oneness of the Palestinian people and their right to their homes, properties and homeland.

2. It provides a Palestinian-Arab cover for the exclusive nature of the Israeli polity as a "Jewish State", thus abrogating the national character of the Palestinian people within 1948 borders. It therefore fails to recognize the right of the 1.2 million Palestinian citizens of Israel to live in a democratic state for all its citizens: Jews and Palestinians, and it sets the stage for mass transfer and ethnic cleansing in the future to maintain demographic Jewish dominance.

3. It accepts the reconfiguration of Jerusalem based on Israeli annexation plans, and grants Palestinian-Arab legitimacy to the colonial process that altered the Arab character of Jerusalem, making it impossible for the Palestinians to exercise control over "East Jerusalem", not to say anything about "West Jerusalem", which was conquered and ethnically cleansed in 1948.

4. It permanently accepts the presence of the vast majority of Israeli settlement colonies, particularly those that surround Jerusalem from the east, south, north and northwest, where most post-1967 settlers live, and alters the geography of Palestine to accommodate such colonial seizures.

5. It codifies a process that would limit the upper ceiling of a potential Palestinian polity to a truncated and demilitarized entity void of sovereignty, and sets in motion a process of expanding Israeli political oversight and control over any potential Palestinian entity.

6. It paves for an economic-political relationship that subordinates the Palestinian people to an exclusive and dominant Israeli polity, thus strategically de-linking the Palestinians from the Arab people and subjugating the national interests of all Arabs to the singular power of an Israeli-US alliance.

7. It allows for Israeli military and economic penetration and permanent outposts into the presumed Palestinian entity.

8. It leaves open all Israeli claims to the region's water resources, natural wealth and airspace. The text makes several references to annexes, but these issues have, in effect, been deferred, and may become the "final status" issues of the Geneva understanding.

9. It dilutes the international consensus on the conflict and attempts to transform the basis of the Palestinian struggle from one of national self-determination and return to that of modified civil rights within a prescribed political framework.

10. Most importantly, it weakens the national unity and resolve of the Palestinian people, leading to the potential defeat of the current Intifada in the same manner that Madrid and Oslo [accords] destroyed the first a decade ago.

11. It diminishes European commitment to Palestinian sovereignty and, most importantly, it expands the margin of Palestinian concessions, which have been bottoming out during the past two decades, making it very difficult for future Palestinian negotiators to back away from these concessions, including the renunciation of the right of return.

12. It assumes the Palestinian victims of Israel are the criminals, and the new judges allegedly more liberal than previous ones in the sentencing.

The Geneva accord is a natural extension and an inevitable result of the "Road Map" and all associated models. The outcome of all, if allowed to succeed, would be to terminate the Palestinian march to freedom, to nullify indefinitely and delegitimize the Palestinian right to return, and to subordinate the Arab nation to a heavily militarized outpost with normalized relationships with its surrounding.” [2].

[1]. Dr Jennifer Loewenstein, “If Hamas did not exist”, The Palestine Chronicle, 31 December 2008: http://www.palestinechronicle.com/view_article_details.php?id=14575 .

[2]. Dr Jennifer Lowenstein as a signatory with many other scholars to a letter entitled “The reality of the Geneva Accord”, 1993, Spotlight, 6 December 2003: http://74.125.155.132/search?q=cache:TtwoKvKTA1IJ:www.redress.btinternet.co.uk/petition3.htm+%22Jennifer+Loewenstein+PhD%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=au .