As I keep saying, my voting Green is not a protest vote--I am voting for the Party which comes closest to representing my values. This position is a case in point. While not totally in line with my political view, the Green Party comes the closest to what I believe.
I wish that US media would get more voices from third parties out there. That is the only way that the US will see any change in its political system.
A Response From The International Committee Green Party Of The United States
Thank you for taking the time to think about the Green Party’s
platform on US Middle East policy and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
We welcome constructive discussion on all our positions, but especially
on this issue as it significantly impacts peace and security for
Americans as well as for all the peoples of that region.
For your information, our platform on this subject has evolved over
the past four years and will continue to do so. It represents discussion
and input from local members of state Green parties across the country,
and particularly state representative members of the USGP International
and Platform Committees where the work on this platform was drafted and
proposed before being approved by the Green Party as a whole at our
national presidential nominating convention in June. These Committee
members represent their own state parties and come from a variety of
backgrounds, education and experience including scholars of the Middle
East and Arab, Muslim and Jewish-Americans.
We realize that no modern conflict has been more intractable and
challenging than that between Israelis and Palestinians. We view this as
a struggle pitting values of cultural diversity, heterogeneity and
equality of different peoples, against values of tribalism, cultural
homogeneity and exclusivity. It throws into high relief pressing
contemporary questions that reverberate in ethnic conflicts worldwide—in
the Balkans, Cyprus, India, Kashmir, Northern Ireland, Pakistan,
Rwanda, Sudan and South Africa: How can different peoples live together
in peace and security with equal access to legal rights and resources,
without living in ghettoes? How can civic and governmental institutions
support the challenging but enlivening tension that comes from the
coexistence of multiple voices and historical narratives in a society,
as opposed to promoting the illusory stability of one dominant voice,
one historical narrative in any society? From this perspective, we
believe that this conflict tragically continues to be fueled by the
obsolete view that Palestinian-Israeli relations are a zero-sum game.
Palestine and Greens’ Ten Key Values
Our platform on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is primarily
informed by our ten key values, especially social justice, respect for
diversity, grass roots democracy, ecological sustainability, and
non-violence. We have aimed to be faithful to each of these values,
including their expression in international and humanitarian law, as we
considered each of the following aspects of this conflict:
1. Historical background that includes both the Nazi holocaust in
Europe and the expulsion of nearly 80% of the native Arab inhabitants of
historic Palestine at Israel’s creation;
2. Human rights including native rights, refugee rights, and the right to self-determination;
3. Natural resources (especially water) and sustainable economies;
4. Security for all;
5. Israel’s military occupation of East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank since 1967 and its consequences;
6. Validity of religious claims to the land;
7. Demographics;
8. The question of “two-state” vs. “one-state” solutions;
9. Eventual reconciliation.
We have approached the formation of a Green US policy on this
conflict holistically, evaluating each component of our platform mindful
of whether in the short and long-terms, it supports or opposes an
enduring peace, which we regard as more than the absence of violence.
While the Green Party recognizes the political status quo as expressed
in both the Republican and Democratic Party positions, our values
require us to look beyond the status quo and to consider the “imbalance”
of power that exists between Israelis and Palestinians and which is
supported by our government despite its disingenuous claim to be an
“honest broker”.
Concerns of Jewish-American Greens
In that regard, some Jewish-American opposition to our positions has
included: an insistence that we condemn all terrorism; that we affirm
Israel’s right to exist; that implementing the Palestinian right of
return should privilege Israel’s security and Jewishness; that we not
take sides (suggesting that we are “pro-Palestinian”); and that ultimate
support among Jewish communities for the Green Party and all its other
platform planks—especially admired environmental positions—is
jeopardized or withdrawn because of our platform on Palestine-Israel.
Regarding terrorism, we have stated repeatedly in press releases and
in the opening of the platform plank in question that we are committed
to non-violent conflict resolution and oppose all violence in this
situation, which means Israeli state-sponsored terrorism and Palestinian
terrorism/suicide bombings.
We also acknowledge that the Palestinian right of resistance to
occupation is sanctioned by international law primarily as an expression
of the right to self-determination, and that it must be understood as a
response to Israel’s illegal occupation.
[For example, see Richard Falk, Albert G. Milbank Professor of
International Law Emeritus at Princeton, “Azmi Bishara, The Right of
Resistance, and the Palestinian Ordeal,” Journal of Palestine Studies,
2002]
As former Israeli Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami put it in the
Israeli daily Ha’aretz, November 28, 2000, “Accusations made by a
well-established society about how a people it is oppressing is breaking
the rules to attain its rights do not have much credence.”
Non-Violent Resistance
Nevertheless, we reiterate that the Green Party supports non-violent
resistance, a position stated eloquently by former USGP Political
Director Dean Myerson in the Party’s October 23, 2000 press release:
“We acknowledge that Israel’s continued military occupation of Gaza,
the West Bank and East Jerusalem constitutes a clear violation of
Palestinian human rights under international law and numerous UN
resolutions. However, we urge Palestinians–especially in response to
provocations like those by Ariel Sharon and Israeli settlers–to refrain
from violence and to protest their injustice by mass non-violent civil
disobedience and non-cooperation, as well as by empowering leaders who
support such non-violent acts of liberation. In doing so, Palestinians
set a moral example and higher standard than their occupiers, which will
engender the respect and unequivocal support of the international
community.”
Still, the facts are that non-violent resistance by Palestinian,
Israeli and international peace activists has routinely been met with
violence by Israeli occupation forces and that thousands of Israeli and
Palestinian civilians have been killed or injured since the start of the
second Palestinian uprising (intifada). In response, the Green Party
has frequently joined the consensus at the United Nations (including the
Security Council and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights),
Amnesty International and other human rights and peace groups in calling
for a civilian monitoring and peacekeeping force in the Occupied
Territories. Unfortunately, these calls have consistently been opposed
by Israel with the support of the US government.
For example, see these Green Party press releases:
Greens Demand That Israel Cease Its Hypocritical ‘War on Terrorism’ Against Palestinian People (12.12.01)
Greens Call for an International Peacekeeping Body to Enforce a Middle East Ceasefire (04.03.02)
U.S. Greens Support Peacemakers in Israel and Occupied Palestine (04.09.02)
Israeli Forces are Targeting Nonviolent Palestinian, Israeli, and International Peace Workers (08.14.02)
Recognizing the Historical Context
In turning now to the other concerns about our platform on this
issue, we emphasize that our platform position evolved from a close
reading of the historical context from which this conflict continues to
emerge. We consider attention to this historical context, essential to
the resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Specifically, we view the persistence of the Israeli-Palestinian
conflict as epitomizing the ongoing, difficult transition in political
consciousness that has been taking place since the late 19th century. In
the past 100 years, presumptions of empire and colonialism, of the
military acquisition of territory and settlement of disputes by war,
have been challenged and some changes have occurred. We have seen the
formal breakup of colonial empires and the rise of nationalism, the
ascendance of international law in conflict resolution and the juridical
recognition of universal human rights, including the right of
self-determination of peoples. We believe that it is in the context of
this continuing progressive struggle in world consciousness that the
Palestinian-Israeli conflict must be viewed and for which it provides a
central touchstone.
Thus, contrary to those despairing descriptions of this conflict as
ancient or perennial, we view the struggle between Israelis and
Palestinians as neither thousands of years old–it is over a century
old–nor as a religious conflict, though religion has often been
politicized. Instead, we see this as a struggle between native claims to
land and self-determination versus theologically-justified colonial
claims to the same land. This struggle began slowly in the mid-1800’s
when British imperial interests in the region initiated the Jewish
colonization of Palestine. [e.g., Prof. Mazin Qumsiyeh, Sharing the Land
of Canaan, 2004]. It was then kindled for more than a half century
through a culture of pervasive European imperialism and anti-Semitism.
Although the rise of Palestinian and Jewish nationalism (Zionism) in the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were predictable responses to
this oppressive atmosphere, they also contributed to intensifying the
conflict.
Though disavowed by the Israeli government today, the historical
record clearly affirms the colonial nature of Zionism vis-à-vis the
non-Jewish inhabitants of historic Palestine. Tragically, this imperial
stance continues today not only in the Israeli military occupation of
the West Bank, East Jerusalem and Gaza, but also within Israel where
laws that clearly discriminate against its non-Jewish citizens make an
oxymoron of Israel’s self-identification as a “Jewish democracy”.
As stated explicitly in our platform, the Green Party acknowledges
and deplores the Jewish experience of European persecution that
culminated in the horror of the Nazi holocaust. We understand that such
persecution of Jews also contributed to a longing for freedom and the
human right of self-determination that, in part, fueled Jewish
nationalism (Zionism).
However, this aim has been pursued in violence and accomplished at
another people’s expense. Consequently, an unavoidable tension has been
created between European Jewish settler-colonial control and the
concomitant dispossession of an already inhabited land, and
self-determination by the native, non-Jewish majority. This tension is
the defining dynamic i.e., the problem–in the relations between
Palestinians and Jewish immigrants. It was so before Israel was created,
and remains so between Palestinians and the Zionist Israeli governments
that have defined Israel to this day.
Tragically, this crucial historical dynamic “the heart of the problem
that will not go away” is denied by the Israeli government and its main
supporter, the United States.
Yet, mindful of this dynamic, we suggest that the central question
then and now, is less whether there should have been Jewish immigrants
to Palestine and more about how they were there then, and how they live
there now given an unavoidable fact: the continuing presence of a
native, non-Jewish population who has aspired to liberate themselves
(from Ottoman and European colonialism) and form a secular,
multicultural and democratic Palestine.
Global implications and Green policy
It is relevant to underscore here that as Greens working for world
peace, our philosophy and values compel us to locate this conflict, as
any, in a larger socioeconomic and environmental context. Thus, in our
view, the extent to which Israel’s imperial-colonial stance toward
Palestinians continues and is supported by the US, there will be
significant and unsettling reverberations in the entire developing
world. As we are already seeing in Iraq, the credibility of the western
values of “equality among peoples”,the right of self-determination, and
the rule of law, is deeply questioned. Thus, the policy positions taken
by American Greens in this particular ethnic conflict set an important
standard, and send a message extending well beyond Israel-Palestine to
influence the resolution of other ethnic conflicts and pro-democracy
movements worldwide.
For example, as media and scholarly reports of the current
Palestinian uprising readily attest, there is a close identification and
empathy of millions of citizens of every formerly colonized country in
South America, Africa and Asia—including the Middle East—with the
Palestinian struggle, an empathy that is far beyond the reach of even
the most repressive governments in these regions. Attempts to reduce
such identification and empathy to expressions of anti-Semitism deflect
attention from the aforementioned political and psycho-cultural factors
that sustain this conflict. Moreover, accusations of anti-Semitism
heighten and perpetuate regressive elements on both sides for political
gain, trivialize the historic prejudice against Jews, and inhibit the
expression of genuine sympathy such peoples do have for Jewish
suffering, especially the Nazi holocaust.
In this regard, a close reading of the history of a self-identified
Zionist Israel reveals a stance that is a central and continuing
obstacle to peace. Zionist Israel continues to locate itself not where
it is–in an historically colonized Middle East–but in an imperial Europe
or the US. That is, by speaking throughout its history primarily from
the voice of a people identified not with the suffering of the
indigenous people (Palestinians) in a joint struggle for liberation and
self-determination, but as a nation identified with conquest and the
subjugation of that same people (including its non-Jewish citizens), a
Zionist Israel continues to identify with, and be identified by,
imperial economic and military policies among those in the developing
world.
At this moment in history, these facts remain: that Israel-Palestine —
the territory between the Mediterranean Sea and the River Jordan — is,
and always has been, a multicultural land; and that Israelis and
Palestinians are inextricably linked by their history and mutual
attachment to the same place they all call home. Separation has not and
will not work because, as history and ethnic conflict resolution
research demonstrate, some aspects of human experience, like attachment
to land and home, are simply not divisible.
By recognizing these facts, the problem then becomes one of creating a
political structure that gives maximum equality and freedom to all the
people of this land.
Growing Support for the ‘One-State Solution’
Unfortunately, not one of the various peace plans formally proposed
by the US, Europe or Israel — the Rogers or Allon Plans; Camp David I,
Oslo, Camp David II, the Saudi Plan, Roadmap as well as the Geneva
Accords — recognizes these facts. Yet, there are growing numbers of
Israelis and Palestinians who do acknowledge these realities and support
sharing the land. One recent example is the “Haifa Initiative” formally
proposed by Jewish and Palestinian citizens of Israel in Haifa in March
2004.
Indeed, as Israeli historians like Ilan Pappe and Tom Segev document,
the Haifa Initiative revives earlier Jewish and Palestinian voices like
those of Martin Buber, Judah Magnes and the pre-state peace groups Ihud
(‘Unity”) and Brit Shalom (“Covenant of peace”), voices which supported
sharing the land. [See Prof. Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine: One
Land, Two Peoples, 2004]
Also, the PLO adopted the stated goal of a single, secular democratic
state as early as 1968, although this goal was downgraded to the
two-state solution in the ensuing years under continual military and
political pressure. Nevertheless, as Israel has continued to expand
settlements and seize more Palestinian land within the Green Line and
the occupied territories (including via its illegal separation wall), a
majority of Palestinian Israelis and growing numbers of Palestinians in
the occupied territories/diaspora, as well as Israeli Jews, have revived
support for establishing one secular and democratic state as the only
just solution.
See, from Haaretz: “One-State Awakening” and “Cry, the beloved
two-state solution”, from the BBC: “Palestinian PM’s one-state call” and
from the Jewish Media and Communications Center “Poll Results on
Palestinian Attitudes”
Moreover, however much Palestinians have wavered from the one-state
solution in response to increasingly dire circumstances, Palestinian
refugees have consistently supported implementing their legal and human
right to return to their homes in Israel/occupied territories.
See “Palestinian Refugees and the Peace Process: An analysis of Public
Opinion Surveys in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip” and “Survey of
Palestinians finds no support for compromise on right of return”
Thus, the two-state solution is fundamentally challenged by these
realities: the powerful attachment of a native people (Palestinian
refugees) to their land in Israel/the Occupied Territories, whatever the
“territory’ is labeled; and by the fact that Israel within the “Green
Line” is not even now a “Jewish” state given that more than 20% of
Israeli citizens are not Jewish.
The Role of U.S. Greens
To conclude, as our platform states, our main role is to influence US
policy in this conflict in a way that is consistent with our values and
recognizes the facts without prescribing which model the people
involved should follow. In fact, our platform also states, ‘We reaffirm
the right of self-determination for both Palestinians and Israelis,
which precludes the self-determination of one at the expense of the
other.” Our call for a serious reconsideration of the one, democratic
and secular state solution aims to open a conversation in the US and
abroad about the only political structure we can envision that conforms
to our ten key values and international law, that fully recognizes the
historic and present realities, and that gives maximum equality and
freedom, including mutual self-determination, to all the people of that
land.
We invite you to join us in furthering this conversation.
In peace,
INTERNATIONAL COMMITTEE
Green Party of the United States
