No subject

leadership assumed from the outset that they would need to cage the
Palestinians into ghettoes, or Bantustans familiar from South African
apartheid. The failure of Camp David simply gave Barak and his successors
the pretext to implement the policy.

Second, the document reveals that Barak made a demand of Arafat he must have
known the Palestinian leader could not accept. Barak wanted formal
recognition not of Israel, but of Israel as a Jewish state. Much more than
semantics depended on extracting this concession. It required of Arafat that
he renounce the rights of two groups that constitute the overwhelming
majority of Palestinians. 

Recognition of Israel as a Jewish state would have forfeited the right --
protected by international law and United Nations resolutions -- of the
refugees to the homes they were ethnically cleansed from by the Israeli army
in 1948. Their right of return, whether realized in practice or not, has
been sacrosanct for Palestinians ever since. 

And recognition would have further condemned more than one million
Palestinian citizens of Israel to permanent status as marginalized outsiders
in an ethnic state that privileges the rights of Jews over non-Jews. In
effect, Arafat was being asked to give his blessing to Israel's attempts to
outlaw the Palestinian minority's campaign for the country's reform into a
"state of all its citizens" -- or a liberal democracy. 

Both Olmert and his foreign minister, Tzipi Livni, were briefed about the
Camp David document before they met current Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas at Annapolis. It is therefore notable that, rather than
abandoning a demand that had wrecked the Camp David talks, both made
recognition of Israel as a Jewish state a deal-clincher before the two sides
had even met. 

Also interesting is that, whereas Barak was reluctant to divulge the demand
he made of Arafat at Camp David, Olmert's government has been trumpeting it
from the rooftops. Why the about-turn? 

The most likely explanation is that Barak expected Camp David to fail and
was fearful that his demand for recognition might give away Israel's
ulterior motives. Olmert, on the other hand, has succeeded in dressing up
recognition of Israel as a Jewish state as the ultimate test of whether the
Palestinians are serious about accepting a two-state solution. It is a
maneuver he mastered last year when he needed to turn world opinion against
Hamas following its election victory.

In truth, Israel's need for recognition as a Jewish state is proof that it
is not a democratic state, but rather an ethnic state that needs to defend
racist privilege through the gerrymandering of borders and population. But
in practice Olmert may yet use the recognition test to back Abbas, a weak
and unrepresentative Palestinian leader, into the very corner that Arafat
avoided. 

Before Annapolis, Livni declared: "It must be clear to everyone that the
State of Israel is a national homeland for the Jewish people," adding that
Israel's Palestinian citizens would have to abandon their claim for equality
the moment the Palestinian leadership agreed to statehood on Israel's terms.


Olmert framed the Annapolis negotiations in much the same way. It was about
creating two nations, he said: "the State of Israel -- the nation of the
Jewish people; and the Palestinian state -- the nation of the Palestinian
people." 

The great fear, Olmert has repeatedly pointed out, is that the Palestinians
may wake up one day and realize that, after the disappointments of Oslo and
Camp David, Israel will never concede to them viable statehood. The better
course, they may decide, is a South African-style struggle for one-person,
one-vote in a single democratic state. 

Olmert warned of this threat on another recent occasion: "The choice ... is
between a Jewish state on part of the Land of Israel, and a binational state
on all of the Land of Israel." 

Faced with this danger, Olmert, like Sharon and Barak before him, has come
to appreciate that Israel urgently needs to persuade Abbas to sign up to the
two-state option. Not, of course, for two democratic, or even viable,
states, but for a racist Jewish state alongside a Palestinian ghetto-state. 

Jonathan Cook is a journalist based in Nazareth, Israel. His latest book
"Israel and the Clash of Civilisations: Iraq, Iran and the Plan to Remake
the Middle East" will be published next month. His website is
www.jkcook.net.