"Friends tell friends the truth. Friends don't enable self-destructive behavior. Even if you put morality and values entirely to the side, the current trajectory of West Bank settlement has no good outcome for Israel."
That is Josh Marshall's conclusion about Obama and the U.S. failure in its relationship with Israel.
What is that truth that is so hard to say? It is the west decided to make amends to the Jews by making Palestinian Arabs pay the price. The inevitable result is that Israel is oppressing the Palestinians who see the Israelis as enemies. The western powers allowed a refuge to be created for the survivors of what we have come to call the Holocaust. The Nazis were of course responsible for the death camps. But there was plenty of complicity and passivity and collaboration in anti-semitism by all the western countries until the U.S. and England were themselves under attack. We have excused ourselves with romanticized stories like Schindler's List and the one about the Danes wearing yellow stars of David (they didn't but behaved more admirably than others).
But now - fifty years after the young State of Israel vanquished the army of Egypt - the pride of the Arab world - there is scarcely a truce between Palestinians and Israelis. Gaza is an open air prison and the west bank is weakly governed by the defanged Palestine Liberation Organization. And Israelis steadily take more Palestinian land - citing specious arguments about recovering the ancient land of Israel. An argument with less plausibility than Mexico has a right to re-take Texas, Arizona, Nevada, and California. -gwc
Thoughts on The UN Resolution
by Josh Marshall
***the whole drama confirms what I believe is the overriding reality of the current situation, which is that America's hyper-support of Israel and (by default) the Israeli settlement project has made the US into a dangerous enabler of Israel's own self-destructive behavior. There is no longterm solution to the conflict other than some form of partition of the land. This is dictated by an iron grip of demography and ideology.
You can either have partition, a binational state or a state in which Jews and a portion of the Arab population (those who are currently citizens of Israel) have political rights and the majority of Arabs (those who now live in the territories) do not.
You can call that last option anything you want. But the countries of the world will never and should never accept it. The binational option would be the end of Zionism and either a politically unstable and unworkable state or a slow motion and perhaps fast motion bloodbath. The least bad option for everyone is partition (indeed, it needn't be a bad option at all with creativity and good will, but both are close to non-existent).
This is obvious. The alternative ideas one hears from the Zionist right are either ugly or fantastical. From a Israeli and Zionist perspective, whether the Palestinians are nice or pragmatic or want peace or don't is basically beside the point. The trajectory is the same regardless. These questions affect timing and process, not end result.
The US's hyper-protection, not only from genuine threats (which I strongly support) but even from symbolic criticism, has simply enabled Israel's self-destructive behavior, allowed the Israeli political nation to ignore these realities and pretend that somehow they'll go away.***
This is obvious. The alternative ideas one hears from the Zionist right are either ugly or fantastical. From a Israeli and Zionist perspective, whether the Palestinians are nice or pragmatic or want peace or don't is basically beside the point. The trajectory is the same regardless. These questions affect timing and process, not end result.
The US's hyper-protection, not only from genuine threats (which I strongly support) but even from symbolic criticism, has simply enabled Israel's self-destructive behavior, allowed the Israeli political nation to ignore these realities and pretend that somehow they'll go away.***
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