Israel makes military preparations for UN vote on Palestinian state By Danny
Richardson
8 September 2011

On Tuesday evening, the Israel Defence Forces killed a commander of the
Popular Resistance Committees’ military wing in a fire exchange and air
attack on an alleged mortar unit in the Gaza Strip. The attack by the IDF is
only the latest development in a stepped-up offensive against Gaza and the
Palestinians, as Israel prepares for a possible full-scale military
intervention.

The IDF is training settler “security squads” in the West Bank and preparing
to arm them with stun grenades and tear gas ahead of an expected yes vote
for Palestinian statehood in the United Nations General Assembly later this
month.

The IDF claims that it is training and arming the settlers in preparation
for a potential eruption of Palestinian mass protest, as happened in May on
the anniversary of the establishment of the state of Israel—called the
“nakba,” or catastrophe, by the Palestinians—and in June on the anniversary
of the 1967 war. In truth, its actions suggest it is seeking to provoke a
military confrontation.

Palestinian Authority (PA) President Mahmoud Abbas, whose Fatah movement
controls the West Bank in collusion with Israel and the United States,
announced last year that he would go to the UN to seek membership for a
state of Palestine. But he has insisted that the move is not in place of
negotiations, but rather in addition to them. Even should the UN vote to
recognise a Palestinian state, he will continue to seek a negotiated
settlement with Israel.

“Our first, second and third priority is negotiations,” he said on Monday.
“There is no other way to settle this. No matter what happens at the UN, we
have to return to negotiations.”

Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu rejected these conciliatory
statements, saying that a Palestinian bid for statehood would “set back
peace, and might set it back years.”

Netanyahu has no intention of negotiating a deal with the PA. Israel has
just approved plans to build some 300 new housing units in Ariel, one of the
largest settlements in the West Bank, and 1,600 new housing units in East
Jerusalem, which the Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.
This provocative move comes despite the demands of Israel’s massive social
protests for affordable housing in Israel itself. The government has for
years refused to construct low- and moderate-income housing within the 1967
borders in order to force people to live in the West Bank and East
Jerusalem.

Abbas, who for decades has staked everything on reaching a negotiated
settlement with Israel that would establish a truncated Palestinian entity
in the West Bank and Gaza, has been thoroughly discredited by Netanyahu’s
refusal to engage in negotiations or comply with an insincere request from
US President Barack Obama for a temporary freeze on settlement expansion.

The publication by *Al Jazeera *of the “Palestine Papers” in January exposed
the Palestinian Authority and Abbas as utterly subservient to US and Israeli
interests, ready to reach a deal that would jettison every historic
aspiration of the Palestinian people, including the loss of East Jerusalem
and the right of return for exiled Palestinians. Abbas was ready to agree to
mass transfers of Palestinian Israelis to a future Palestinian statelet, a
form of ethnic cleansing designed to meet Israel’s goal of a demographically
secure “Jewish state.”

Abbas sought to secure a deal with the Islamist movement Hamas, which
controls Gaza, to establish a national unity government—which months later
has still not been formed—to provide some credibility to his bid for a
Palestinian state.

Washington has vowed to use its veto power at the Security Council to stop
the PA’s bid for statehood going ahead, leaving Abbas no option but to go
straight to the General Assembly, where there is no veto. With only observer
status, the PA is reliant on other nations to push through the statehood
resolution, but is expected to win the required two-thirds majority, or 128
votes. The PA claims that more than 100 countries have endorsed the
declaration of independent statehood. The US, Germany, Italy, the
Netherlands and the Czech Republic are the only Western countries so far
committed to vote against it.

According to documents seen by *Ha’aretz, *the IDF claims that a yes vote
will lead to a public uprising “which will mainly include mass disorder,”
including “marches toward main junctions, Israeli communities, and education
centres; efforts at damaging symbols of [Israeli] government.”

 The Palestinian Authority has repudiated any suggestion that it is planning
or supporting any mass demonstrations.

*Ha’aretz *states that the IDF has already held training exercises with the
settlements’ chief security officers at a military facility near Shiloh and
trained “readiness squads” at a command centre at its Lachish base. The
readiness squads are made up of settlers, mostly army reservists who already
know how to use automatic weapons.

An IDF spokesman said, “The IDF is holding an ongoing professional dialogue
with elements in the settlement leadership, with the routine security
personnel, and is investing many resources in training forces from a
defensive standpoint and in readiness for possible scenarios. Central
Command has recently completed much training for the emergency response
squads, and this training is ongoing.”

The military preparations, known as “Operation Summer Seed,” include the
determination of “red lines” or boundaries for each settlement in the West
Bank. Should Palestinian protesters cross the red line, troops will be
authorised to open fire, just as they did during the years of confrontation
with Syria before 1973.

Israeli troops shot and killed 23 unarmed protesters, including a woman and
a 12-year-old boy, and wounded about 350 during the demonstrations last
June, when protestors from refugee camps in Syria approached the border with
the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights on the anniversary of the start of the
1967 war. They followed larger, coordinated protests three weeks earlier on
four fronts—Syria, Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank—and attempts on two
others, in Egypt and Jordan, that were thwarted by those governments.

The US State Department came down firmly on the side of Israel, saying that
the protests were provocative and Israel as a sovereign state had the right
to defend its borders.

Israel has long permitted settlers to carry weapons. Since the beginning of
2011, B’Tselem, the Israeli human rights organisation, has called for the
police to investigate 42 cases of Jewish settler violence, including the
murder of two Palestinian teenagers.

In a clear indication of Israel’s preparations for warfare, the IDF has also
drawn up contingency plans to call up reservists. It has also strengthened
its border with Egypt, following the attacks near the southern Israeli town
of Eilat last month that claimed the lives of eight people and injured
dozens more. The IDF has deployed highly advanced technology in the area
pending the completion of a border fence sometime in 2012. It has also
closed Highways 10 and 12.

The Obama administration has threatened to halt its annual financial grant
of $470 million to the PA if it proceeds with its plans to ask the UN for
recognition. Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said that US Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton made the threat in a phone conversation.

Republican Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, head of the House of Representatives Foreign
Affairs Committee, is also seeking to block funds to any UN member who
supports the vote for a Palestinian state. She is proposing as well to
withhold a portion of Washington’s UN dues and stop altogether its
contributions to the UN Human Rights Council. Citing a similar threat to the
UN member states that supported the PLO’s push in 1989 for a Palestinian
state, she boasted that “the PLO’s unilateral campaign was stopped in its
tracks…. The UN was forced to choose between isolating Israel or receiving
US contributions. They chose the latter.”


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