Lieberman's "Blueprint for a resollution to the conflict"

It would not be wrong to contend that the journalist Jonathan Cook, who is based in Nazareth, refrains from making any conclusions which might be based on prejudice. He has a wonderful habit of reporting things as they are and leaving it to us to come to our own conclusions.

In his latest article, "Israeli foreign minister wants Palestinians stripped of citizenship and relocated" he invariably lets the foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman, do the talking. However, the author of 'Blood and Religion', which was published in 2006, is totally aware that this is no idle chatter of some isolated right wing nutter but that the ideas being experessed by Lieberman are, and have been for some time, "salonfähig" in the oxymoronic "Jewish Democracy". Therefore, we would do well to heed the nonsense that Lieberman is spouting out and to condemn it as nonsense and to do everything to make sure that it is viewed by the international community as such.

This week Lieberman set out what he called "a blueprint for a resolution to the conflict" by demanding that most of the country's large Palestinian minority be stripped of citizenship and relocated outside Israel's future borders. Now, how can this blatant ethnic cleansing be packaged and sold to Joe Soap and Otto Normalverbraucher? Well, Lieberman continues by saying that the solution envisaged by the international community would lead to the "one-and-a-half to half state solution", in other words, to a "homogeneous pure Palestinian state", from which Jewish settlers were expelled, and "a binational state in Israel", which included many Palestinian citizens." This is not a new ruse and once again we have the Zionists trying to con the international community into believing that they are actually being denied land that is rightfully theirs. The point is that those Palestinians who remained inside the 'Green Line' after 1949 are those who, for one reason or another, were not ethnicallly cleansed and the settlers who are in the West Bank and East Jerusalem are illegally occupying someone else's land. The issues here are not complicated and it is quite simply a matter of either redressing the wrongs that have been committed on the Palestinian people, or allowing those injustices to continue.