Hamas has delivered. Israel's Defense Minister Ehud Barak is saying that the Egyptian-negotiated truce between Israel and Hamas is a success, he hopes it lasts a year.
years "destroying the Hamas regime down to the last office and the last
activist… you control another people against their will".
He said that such circumstances would strengthen Palestinians'
support in Gaza for Hamas rather the Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas and his Fatah party.
Now's the time. A year ago MJ Rosenberg said there was a giant schism in the American Jewish community. He was right. Since then Jeffrey Goldberg and J Street have splintered off the Israel lobby, because they feel an urgency about the two-state solution and are not indifferent to Arab suffering. It is said that when Arafat died, he was the only thing that held the Palestinians together on the "peace process." Maybe. But who could see then the crack in the Israel lobby? American Jews must learn to respect Hamas.
Is not the core problem just another version of the oppressed becoming the oppressor? If so, shouldn't any plan for peace stress less the the existence of any present and future nation state, and more, minority protection?
The Israeli economic blockade is still active (maybe to a lesser extent).
So the truce has been a success for tunnel building.
A follow up: When does the need to protect minorities supercede the need to protect the majority, i.e., if there is no longer a worthy majority culture and structure, then what is there but a giant hole–to be filled by whichever group can do it? What does anyone reading this wish to impose on the whole, absent the pre-1965 American culture and its principles?