NOVANEWS
Haaretz is the most left-wing Israeli paper, and publishes Yitzhak Laor, Amira Hass, and Gideon Levy, but it is not a leftist paper. Haaretz occasionally manages to combine the most bizarre sentiments in one editorial page, and even in one article. Here’s one writer quoting the racist prescriptions of the most blithely racist writer in the American commentariat:
“Shame on them…. The people running Israel and Palestine have other priorities. It is time we left them alone to pursue them – and to live with the consequences.” That is the advice of influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in an article published last week.
The article also stated: “It is long past time that we stop being their crack dealers.” Friedman proposes that the United States stop giving Israel and the Palestinians aid and gifts to persuade them to talk to each other. For now, however, Friedman can relax…
“Shame on them…. The people running Israel and Palestine have other priorities. It is time we left them alone to pursue them – and to live with the consequences.” That is the advice of influential New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman in an article published last week.
The article also stated: “It is long past time that we stop being their crack dealers.” Friedman proposes that the United States stop giving Israel and the Palestinians aid and gifts to persuade them to talk to each other. For now, however, Friedman can relax…
Giving the Palestinians an American general to train their troops to repress their own people and using aid from the European Union to pay for the occupation create an unsustainable economic infrastructure and a collaborator layer in Ramallah is the same as giving the Palestinian people crack. What fun for the kiddies in Nablus. The Marxist philosopher Shlomo Avineri (even their Marxists become Zionists) tells usthat
Obama believed that his determination and his international standing would lead Israel and the Palestinians to soften their stances. … Washington needs a Plan B, a paradigm shift. For 17 years Israel and the Palestinians have been trying to reach a final agreement, either directly or with U.S. mediation. Israeli prime ministers, American presidents and even Palestinian leaders have come and gone, and still no peace agreement. The gaps, it turns out, are too great. And so, the United States must abandon its fruitless efforts to obtain a final agreement in favor of examining the option of interim agreements or partial, perhaps even unilateral, measures.
The Palestinians must “soften” their sclerotic stance on accepting 100 percent of the 22 percent of the land that was 93 percent theirs in 1947, with the result that “History, to which Israel and the Jewish people cling so tenaciously, is denied to the Palestinians, whose mere invocation of it is decried as obstructionist… the Palestinians are supposed to begin negotiations at whatever point Israel (backed by the US) says they should, a point that alters in line with the diminished realities Israel has imposed on them.”
What’s finally interesting is that both Avineri and Barel are more clear-eyed about what is at stake here than most writing here. Barel notes that America needs “peace” more than the parties involved. This is true, so long as we solely understand the term, the “parties involved” to refer to the leadership and social elites. The Palestinian negotiating team only cares about maintaining its government’s grip on power, and the Israeli leadership is in the quixotic position of possibly inciting social breakdown if it pursues peace.
Randolph Bourne wrote that war is the health of the state and that’s nowhere truer than in Israel (evident in a near-tripling of the market capitalization of the Tel-Aviv Stock Exchange since 2000). Barel adds that what America needs is “progress on American recognition of a Palestinian state”— code for “progress” on the veneer of peace that will let the Gulf States and especially Saudi Arabia control societal anger towards Israeli policies and their tacit collaboration with those policies, and also keep the oil profits funneled toward XOM and the arms funneling out from Boeing and the Pentagon.
Avineri is even more honest: “the United States must abandon its fruitless efforts to obtain a final agreement in favor of examining the option of interim agreements or partial, perhaps even unilateral, measures,” turning the peace process from one that in principle was oriented towards peace but that in practice was focused on process into one that’s even in principle abandoned peace in favor of process. Process is all that’s needed to keep the whole jig whirring more-or-less smoothly along, while the profits keep flowing in and up and the body-count edges daily higher.
Technorati Tags: class war, collaboration, Israel, PA, Palestine, Ramallah, Zionism
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