Israel's agenda

Jonathan Steele has an article in today's Guardian titled Europe's response to the siege of Gaza is shameful. The sub-title alone turns years of zionist propaganda on its head:

The Palestinians have no partner for peace. They will only have one if Israel agrees to recognise Palestine's right to function

But the paragraph that represents a real departure from mainstream coverage is this:

The outcome of the current crisis is unclear. However it ends, the moment has surely come for Europe to break from its useless policy of backing the US and Israel. The Olmert government is trying to destroy not only Hamas but Mahmoud Abbas. Like Sharon's, it wants to undermine every moderate Palestinian by showing them up as powerless. It seeks only domination, not negotiation. Whether the ultimate agenda is to starve all Palestinians into fleeing to Egypt, Jordan and even further afield, or merely to keep Gaza as a prison of the unemployed and the West Bank as a bunch of Bantustans, Israeli policy mocks every UN resolution on the conflict.

It starts by taking us back to the idea that it is the Palestinians that have no partner for peace. It continues by suggesting that Israel is carrying on as it started, ie, by ethnic cleansing and by imposing apartheid type restrictions on those Palestinians who remain in Palestine. This should be standard commentary but it's rare for mainstream commentators to conjecture about Israeli motives on the basis of zionist history and a major, if often undeclared, tenet of the zionist ideology: the elimination of the Palestinians.