My answer to Jon’s most recent post about Israel & the Palestinians
Jon wrote:
”With actual leadership, Israelis and Palestinians could strike useful, sustaining agreements. What both have now are tiny men, men who are out of ideas and have only themselves to blame for this dangerous failure.”
I wrote a long answer as a comment and said that this should probably be a post. Jon asked that I publish it as one. Here it is.
That’s been true since Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. This is fundamentally a fixable problem, and it could be accomplished by either side damned near unilaterally. Frankly, it could be accomplished by the US damned near unilaterally, and Trump was oddly enough in an excellent position to do it when he reached office because both sides were optimistic and both sides preferred him to Obama who was, in terms of the Middle East, a terrible President. It’s the least successful part of his Presidency.
What it would take from the Israelis is leadership willing to stand up to the Imperialistic Orthodox. No settlements, no We Are Entitled To Judea And Samaria. Just “we have to coexist with these people because they aren’t leaving and can’t leave.”
What it would take from the Palestinians is to take a page from Gandhi’s Indian playbook and do this without violence. A non-violent revolution committed to nonviolence gets a state. That would turn the entire issue into a civil rights issue and it would take what really scares the Hell out of the Israelis off the table because most Israeli policy regarding the Palestinians is predicated on reacting to the threat of violence.
What it would take from the Americans is the right offer to Israel. What worries the Israelis more than anything else? Safety. If the Palestinians don’t take the Safety issue off the table, the Americans can by working out a deal that trades damned near all land – the exception being most of East Jerusalem, which Israel would sooner wage nuclear war than give up – for a serious treaty, which doesn’t exist now, preferably in the form of full NATO membership such that an attack on Israel is an attack on the entire alliance with all parties obligated by international law to come to Israel’s aid. That could even possibly result in Syrian civilian (but not military) control over the Golan. I think most of the other NATO nations would go along with it if it resulted in a Palestinian state and defused one of the two sources of tension in the Middle East. (The other one is actually far bigger but this one gets outsized press and international concern.)
At this point, no one is moving. When someone really steps up it probably will. If someone really steps up.
08/16/2019 @ 4:32 pm
Why is it that the Palestinians need to be the ones who follow “Gandhi’s playbook”? Why not the Israeli’s (last I checked the Palestinians were dropping bombs from F-16s on Tel Aviv), or better yet, both???
BTW, you did make me laugh. You are vehemently opposed to BDS yet you can say stuff like “A non-violent revolution committed to nonviolence gets a state.”
What the hell do you think BDS is all about? It is a NON-VIOLENT means of fighting oppression and a movement for equal human rights.
P.S. I think I need to start working on a post to say what BDS really is and is not. Between the crap coming from the White House, the propaganda out of Israel and her supporters and the misleading BS out of the media I don’t think y’all have a clue.
08/16/2019 @ 5:18 pm
It’s interesting; I always get the sense that it’s Israel who’s asked asked to be restrained, to accept vulnerability.
Amy…we who have sense and want decency over there have to begin to see where we can find common purpose. What’s the better choice?
08/16/2019 @ 7:09 pm
You see that is where we differ greatly. You see Israel being asked to be restrained and I see Israel being told that collective punishment is in violation of the Laws of War and the Geneva Conventions. If you’re “restraint” involves bombing the crap out of people trapped in Gaza then something is seriously wrong.
Massive “prison” walls, threats to use nuclear weapons, “Israeli only” roads, apartheid policies (as defined by Tutu and Mandela), midnight harassment raids, arresting teen age girls & young children, firebombings of Palestinian homes by “settler” terrorists, war crimes galore and massed artillery barrages don’t speak to “vulnerable” (especially when compared to inaccurate and relatively rare rockets fired by religious radicals, who, according to the Palestinians I have talked to, both here and in Palestine are routinely detested by the average person over there.)
You want “vulnerable”? Try growing up as a Palestinian kid in Gaza. The thing is “vulnerable” grows up into angry adults who ultimately lash out at their oppressors. If Israel REALLY wanted peace they would stop CREATING the next generation of terrorists. For me, that would be “the better choice”.
P.S. Bib has publicly stated several times that there will never be a two state solution. He also is preventing Omar from entering Israel, partly, because she has called for a “one state solution”. THEN both our government and the Israeli government has worked DAMN hard to kill BDS, which is the only non-violent means of protest that the Palestinians have… what else is left for them? Desperation is the root cause of terrorism, IMO.
08/16/2019 @ 11:35 pm
The first thing I think BDS is about is not Palestinians but allies and, given that, it is not an alternative to violence at all. It’s just another weapon.
There are certain parties against whom non-violent resistance would work and certain parties against whom it wouldn’t. Non-violent resistance to the Nazis, for example, would have been ineffective. Non-violent resistance to ISIS would be ineffective. Non-violent resistance to Hamas would also be ineffective. Non-violent resistance to Israel would be very effective. If the Israelis were violent and the Palestinians were not, condemnation of Israel and aid to the Palestinians would be way ore widespread in the US. Palestinian sympathies would be way higher in Israel itself because the main issue with Palestinians for most of the Israeli population is fear of violence. But the Palestinian resistance movement has never been mainly non-violent.
08/17/2019 @ 8:09 am
Amy, should you come to the DC area, let me know, come to dinner. It’d be terrific to talk over these issues. If your children are with you, that’s great, too.
08/17/2019 @ 11:00 am
LOL Be careful of what you ask for! (my kids make me look calm, sedate and conservative).
08/17/2019 @ 11:19 am
…and my son is a champ marksman…I’ll risk it. 🙂 Really, it’s an open invitation.
08/17/2019 @ 10:58 am
Huh? You say that non-violence doesn’t work against religious nut jobs and right-wing fascists, but then you say that it WILL work against the religious nut jobs and right-wing fascists who are running Israel?
I hope you realize just how crazy that sounds (and actually IS)?
08/17/2019 @ 1:31 pm
They’re running Israel by coalition and are in part kept in power by the perception of a mortal threat. Most of Israel is secular. Saying that what appeals to Netanyahu appeals to the Israelis is like saying that what appeals to Trump appeals to Americans.
08/17/2019 @ 2:50 pm
“They’re running Israel by coalition…”
As you said yourself, the aforementioned coalition is comprised of “the Imperialistic Orthodox”, the “We Are Entitled To Judea And Samaria” terrorist settlers, the far right wing-nuts, etc. These factions are all supported by a large minority individually, which represents the MAJORITY of Israelis supporting the coalition so your example is pretty bogus.
What would be a more apt example is saying that “what appeals to Netanyahu appeals to the Israelis”… period. What keeps them in power isn’t “moral fear”.
I mean lets be honest here… Israel has the most modern and largest military in the Middle East (ranked #8 in the entire world). Being “mortally fearful” of Palestinians who have no planes, no, nuclear weapons, no artillery, no army/navy/air force, no chemical & biological weapons stockpiles, no guided missiles, etc. is either insane or a strategic policy of propaganda to obscure their aggressions against an oppressed people. In other words, selling the concept of being “mortally fearful” is a ploy which 99% of the rest of the world no longer buys.
The other reason I don’t buy that idea at all is that the only two countries who are even close to having Israel’s military power are Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Both of them are Israel’s undeclared allies, FFS. If what you say is true why is Israel being BFFs with the people they “allegedly” are “mortally fearful” of???
08/17/2019 @ 4:31 pm
What makes you think the biggest threat is military? The military doesn’t do a lot of good against a suicide attack on a public place. When it comes to the West Bank and Gaza, what scares them is terrorism. It’s a little country. Everyone knows war dead and/or terrorism dead. For us, a terrorism event happens in Texas, thousands of miles away. For them, terrorism is local. Even here in the US, I’m one degree of separation from a terrorist attack in Israel. It isn’t abstract there, it’s personal.
08/18/2019 @ 3:10 am
You can’t annihilate, eradicate, and obliterate a sovereign entity by terrorist suicide attacks.
08/18/2019 @ 7:54 am
You don’t have to. You just have to generate enough fear to affect policy and elections. If you’re trying to address the Palestinian/Israeli conflict, policy and elections is the obvious path.
08/18/2019 @ 10:17 am
There has only been two Palestinian related bombing in the last ten years…
There has been more attacks of LGBTQ people than that, in the same time frame. do we get to fire up our rainbow colored F-16s to bomb the crap out of Orthodox neighborhoods because we are in”mortal fear” of future attacks???
What about the US Jewish, Black and LGBTQ communities using missiles, snipers and artillery barrages to take out any neighborhood that a White Supremacists lives in?
Sorry, but when you are firebombing people’s houses at night, destroying their crops and then literally driving them from their homes (so that “your people” can occupy them) you don’t get to say that it is based on being “mortally fearful”.
08/18/2019 @ 10:34 am
Exactly how are you defining bombing and why would you limit your examination of terrorist attacks to bombings? There was a firebombing of an Israeli police station this year. I’m assuming you’re not counting any missiles coming from Gaza, which were aimed at civilians in Sderot on a daily basis for about three years before being answered at all, certainly within the last ten years. And why exactly are you discounting any other form of attack? The one I have the closest connection to, which is to say I know someone who knew a victim personally, was the stabbing of a rabbi while he was worshipping in a synagogue.
I was at Torah study at my old Temple in NC about four years ago (I’ve been in NY for three). A woman there had an app on her phone stating when missiles were incoming to Israel and where they were apparently headed. It rang during study, she went out into the hall to call her son in Israel (he was visiting) to warn him that a missile was headed for where he was. He replied that they’d already evacuated.
Think about this for a minute. Missiles coming in to civilian areas are so frequent that there’s an app for it. And you’re going to base what you think Israeli civilian fears should be on a figure of two bombings in ten years?
If you want to make a real case, make one. This one was insanely disingenuous. You know numbers and this looks like an attempt to lie with statistics. Not that I think the figure originated with you but if you’re going to read something that obvious, please take the trouble to vet it before using it. Thank you.
08/18/2019 @ 11:15 am
Before you go further off on your tangent, I only mentioned suicide attacks because YOU did…
“The military doesn’t do a lot of good against a suicide attack on a public place.”
If you want to address all of it (yeah, including things like Israel snipers shooting over 6,000 unarmed Palestinians over the last year) we can do that if you want.
P.S. I’ve tried to remain civil, but if you are going to imply that I am a liar and/or stupid then the gloves are coming off. If you want to debate the facts, fine. If you are going to go personal then that’s fine too, but will be a lot uglier.
P.P.S. Vet THIS…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Palestinian_suicide_attacks
08/18/2019 @ 5:12 pm
I don’t think you’re lying or are stupid. Quite the contrary. Sorry I used the expression “lie with statistics,” by which I meant using accurate statistics to create a false impression. No, I am not calling you a liar; I assume your fact is accurate.
What you were answering was whether Israelis had any reason to fear Palestinians in spite of Israel’s overwhelming military advantage.. That’s the context. That was Ron’s point. You are perfectly aware that Israeli fears aren’t based on two events in ten years. That would be absurd. That implication is not an indicator of your stupidity – because I don’t believe for a second you think it’s accurate; it’s based on an assumption of my stupidity or, at the very least, an assumption of the stupidity of whoever reads this. I don’t think you’re stupid, but I object to your acting as though I am.
08/18/2019 @ 5:15 pm
What was my fault was using suicide bombers as an example to Ron. Any terrorism would do.