That fine old man of the Israeli Peace Movement, Uri Avnery, has a wonderful article in Counterpunch today. Can you imagine if he were in such a powerful position? Wow!

And yes Phil, be backs Obama!

http://counterpunch.org/avnery03242008.html

http://podblanc.com/?q=node/15737

I was impressed with Hanna's generosity of policy in the presence of Gershon Baskin's assumption of Zionism as a given.

He convinced me (not by an argument, just by his lack of negative reaction to Zionist assumptions) that many Palestinians probably bear a similarly generous perspective towards Israelis and Jews.

He is an older man, early 70's, and may not be representative of the fulcrum of Palestinian emphasis.

He was not compromising in the sense of white-washing his own personal or political experience. By his generosity, he conveyed to me the extent to which settlement expansion is a grand ignorance and self-defeat for all peace-seeking.

Likud doesn't want a two-state solution. They want a one-state solution with no viable Palestinian life in the West Bank.

The fingers pattern of settlement blocs and accompanying infrastructure was designed. It included the design of making Palestinian life non-viable, AND the design of making a relatively easy annexation (by closing the fingers, into a "fist" for analogy).

Likud's view is that the settlement bloc exercise is nearing completion, and if they can hold out as little as five more years (who knows actually), that they won't have to even deal with Palestinians in the West Bank.

So, the peace bloc does NOT take that view.

The peace bloc takes the view that Palestinian rights are co-existent, and don't disappear even with forced or "voluntary" resettlement.

When the radical anti-Zionists regard the peace bloc as complicit, they compel an either/or decision of either radical single-state (whatever flavor) OR radical Zionist.

We, peaceniks, are NOT in either, but do represent the civil solution to the problem, negotiation.

To the extent that anti-Zionists condemn peace advocates, they ENABLE the radical Zionist approach.

And, it is now somewhat hopeless. In today's Haaretz, there was an article on the utter dysfunction of Meretz, the only consistent advocate for peace among Israeli parties.

Labor might as well be Kadima now.

Rumsfeld was a Friedmanite recruited to Jabotinskianism.

The Neocon Jabotinskian Wolfowitz in the final stage of blending of Jabotinskianism and Friedmanite doctrine left the Pentagon for the World Bank.

Islamic groups have proven the toughest nut for Friedmanite ideologues to crack, and Hizbullah, Hamas, Iran and Malaysia have all quite reasonably shown complete contempt for the IMF and World Bank as tools of a sort of hybrid of

1) US Neocolonialism,

2) Zionist manipulation, and

3) a sort of ethnochauvinist exploitive economic behavior that was contributive to the Chmielnicki Rebellion as well as to hostility toward Jewish megawealth throughout Central and Eastern Europe since the 17th century.

Sara Roy's studies indicate that there might have been some sort of effort to control an emerging Palestinian state via international economic strictures.

Hamas, Hizbullah and Iran have made a complete hash of any such idea.

Is it surprising that "Abrams responded with 'nasty comments'?"

[Note that in the USA the sort of business practices historically associated with ethnic Ashkenazi communal economic behavior is called restraint of trade and is illegal.]

"Does [Abrams] secretly hope for failure in the peace process so that Israel will be the right wing fantasy of Eretz Israel, from the Mediterranean to the Jordan?"

Probably: the "two-state solution" may be the benchmark of pseudo-liberal conventional wisdom. But in reality, it will no more lead to peace than the Maginot Line prevented a second world war. At best, any patronizing two-state solution will be an analogue to South Africa's last decade of apartheid, when Coloureds and Asians were granted their own second-class, playpen parliaments in a last-ditch effort at marginalizing the black majority. It didn't work. In fact, the Potemkin parliaments accelerated apartheid's demise.

With the broad middle-ground completely lost in the Quartet's jackoff fantasyland of the two-state solution, it's the radicals that have a handle on reality: the militant zionists and Hamas both correctly realize that there WILL be a single state from the Mediterranean to the Jordan. The question is who will rule it. I'm betting on the Arabs, not the zionists. A patronizing two-state solution, featuring crippled, non-viable Palestinian statelets, will set the clock ticking on the last days of the doomed zionist apartheid state. Bring it on! Two states, one group of deluded suckers.

Must have been a huge pipe that you just smoked, boyeee! Get you feet back on the ground:

http://themagneszionist.blogspot.com/2008/03/another-method-of-stealing-land-from.html

Income disparity is greater now than it was in the last years of Apartheid.

As part of the agreement to transfer power from de Klerk to Mandela, SA has a constitution that is particularly hard to modify, the national bank is completely independent of the government, and the people who are in charge of the economy are exactly the same people that ran it at the end of Apartheid.

The World Bank, the IMF and the US government have all made it clear that there will be extremely negative repercussions if the government tries to redistribute even only part of the national wealth back to the native population from whom it was stolen.

And before someone babbles about all the effort that whites did to develop a modern industrial sector of the economy, just remember that SA's wealth comes from minerals that happened to be in the group long before whites came to Southern Africa.