Smotrich has confirmed that the quest for ‘Greater Israel’ is real

The leaders of 56 Arab and Islamic countries advocated at the Riyadh Summit last week for the “two-state solution” and the need to establish a Palestinian state on the nominal borders of 4 June 1967, and tried to convince the world that it is the only solution to the Palestinian issue. In response, the extreme far-right Finance Minister of the occupation state, Bezalel Smotrich, insisted that 2025 will be the year that “Judea and Samaria” — the occupied West Bank — will be annexed to Israel and that he expects US President-elect Donald Trump to support this step. He basically confirmed that the quest for “Greater Israel” is real.

The nominal borders as at 4 June 1967 were the 1949 Armistice (“Green”) Line between the Zionist state of Israel and the West Bank, Gaza Strip and East Jerusalem. These occupied Palestinian territories combined make up no more than 22 per cent of occupied Palestine. This means that the 56 Arab and Islamic countries have agreed that 78 per cent of Palestinian land should be served to the Zionist occupation state on a silver platter. In fact, the 2002 Arab Summit in Beirut approved of this.

Some Arabs paid for advertisements in Israeli newspapers to promote this “Arab Peace Initiative”, but the Zionist Prime Minister at the time, war criminal Ariel Sharon, said that it “is not worth the ink it was written with” and rejected it completely. This rejection of the initiative continues to this day, despite Arab pleas and appeals, as well as the many humiliating concessions made by the Palestinian Authority since the 1993 Oslo Accords were signed. The occupation regime and parliament passed a bill recently refusing to recognise a Palestinian state, even if the entire world does so. The Israeli right and left, government and opposition, all agreed on this.

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Now Smotrich is working to bury the two-state solution once and for all, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu supports him. We have to ask, therefore, why the Arab and Islamic countries are trying to revive the moribund “two-state solution” despite it being biased and complicit with the occupation?

More than 30 years of “negotiations” have simply bought time for the occupation regime to steal more Palestinian land.

We now know — if anyone was ever in any doubt — that the settler-colonial state rejects sharing Palestine with the Palestinians, even if it is only 22 per cent of the historic territory. While arguing that chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are “anti-Semitic”, the Zionists have no qualms about stating openly that they want a Jewish state “from the river [Jordan] to the [Mediterranean] sea”. Intensive settlement activity — all illegal under international law — is swallowing up what remains of the West Bank and East Jerusalem, and probably northern Gaza as well if the occupation regime is allowed to get away with its ethnic cleansing and genocide. It would have made far more sense, therefore, for the Arab and Islamic leaders to turn this humiliating page, forget about a “two-state solution” and declare the death of the so-called “peace process”. At the same time, they could have announced their collective political and practical support for legitimate resistance to the brutal Israeli occupation.

I have been saying for years that the Palestinian Authority is wrong to participate in futile negotiations with the occupation state to establish an independent Palestinian state that the Zionists will never accept. And that this path will lead to the loss of what remains of Palestine and thus the liquidation of its cause.

I have also said that the Arabs are wrong to waste their time chasing the mirage of peace with a criminal, fascist, racist, expansionist regime which wants all of Palestine for itself; and, indeed, wants to establish “Greater Israel” from the Nile to the Euphrates, despite the peace treaties and normalisation agreements with its neighbours whose land it will steal. When the occupation finishes swallowing the West Bank and East Jerusalem with settlements and announces their annexation, it will devote itself to expanding at the expense of its Arab neighbours, into Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Egypt, even if it takes another eight decades. When the right time is right, the occupation will do this and will not care about any of the normalisers who are now supporting it against any and all legitimate resistance, thinking that they are thereby weakening Iran’s influence in the region and creating the appropriate conditions for a comprehensive peace deal.

Smotrich stood next to a map of the State of Israel in March 2023 in France, and “Israel” included Jordan, even though the Zionist entity signed a peace treaty with the Hashemite Kingdom in 1994. Didn’t the terrorist Menachem Begin sign a peace treaty with Egypt in 1979?

That won’t stop the Zionists. They want it all, and give nothing in return.

The issue is quite clear, but unfortunately the Arabs continue to bury their heads in the sand. If they were rational, they would have stopped the reckless promotion of the two-state solution illusion that the occupation regime does not want, and the normalisation countries would have severed, not strengthened their relations with it. Moreover, the Palestinian Authority would announce the end of security coordination with the enemy forces in the West Bank, the cancellation of the Oslo Accords, and its return to resistance against the occupation. If the Arabs were rational, they would have backed the legitimate resistance as their own first line of defence instead of abandoning the Palestinians in Gaza. Are they all insane?

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Translated from Echoroukonline, 16 November 2024

The views expressed in this article belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect the editorial policy of Middle East Monitor.