Haaretz publisher Amos Schocken called for international intervention against the Israeli government, as happened with the apartheid government in South Africa, due to the opposition of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to the establishment of a Palestinian state, and its continued expansion of illegal settlements in areas designated for the Palestinian state.
This came during Amos Schocken’s speech at the opening of the Haaretz Security-Political Conference, in cooperation with the New Israel Fund and the Political Security Unit of the Berl Katznelson Fund, which is being held in Tel Aviv.
“In the face of this disastrous government, there is no choice but to demand that other countries mobilize as they did to end apartheid in South Africa,” Shokin’s letter, published on the website of Haaretz, known for its center-left orientation, said today.
“If you want to ensure the existence and security of Israel, and you can also think about normalizing the lives of the Palestinians, our neighbors; the Palestinian state must be established, and there is no choice but to implement sanctions against opponents of Israel and against settlers in the occupied territories in violation of international law,” he added.
“Why doesn’t this happen as long as Israel has a government that opposes the establishment of a Palestinian state, continues to intensify illegal settlements in the Palestinian territories, and does not mind imposing a brutal apartheid regime on the Palestinian population?” he asked.
“The government must pay a price for defending the settlements and fighting Palestinian freedom fighters who are called terrorists in Israel,” he added.
Two-state plan
In contrast, Shokin called for advancing a political process with the Palestinians on the basis of the two-state plan, saying, “In February of this year, I published an article in which I said that it is difficult to find a better outcome from the war against Hamas than the immediate return of the kidnapped soldiers and the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state in accordance with the UN partition resolution of November 1947, which Israel extended its borders along the armistice lines to what is today called the Green Line.”
In this context, he recalled that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas himself agreed that the new Green Line (after Israel annexed more land to it) would be the borders of the Palestinian state he wanted!
He considered that “the advantages of this step are granting the Palestinians the right to self-determination, eliminating Palestinian and Jewish terrorism that costs many lives on both sides, and building a partnership between Israel and the Palestinian Authority based on security cooperation, as is already the case now.”
But he did not mention that the solution on which the Palestinian Authority was based does not include Israeli approval of the two-state solution, but rather is based on the establishment of a Palestinian Authority with reduced powers.
He believed that this solution involves “re-educating both peoples to recognize the positivity and connection between them, and the economic cooperation that will bring growth and prosperity to both countries,” he said.