descendants who never lived in the Palestine Mandate) is the most
that he can expect from a sovereign state that his people tried to
destroy at birth.
reading of history is "revisionist" and not to be taken seriously. It
is precisely the work of most of the "New Historians" they deplore, that I look at. For example, Benny Morris, Meron Benvenisti and even the anti-Zionist Avi Shlaim
are quite clear that Palestinian irregulars attacked in '47-'48. Shlaim
doesn't emphasize this fact, but he doesn't deny it.
Benvenisti lived in a Jerusalem
under siege at that time, even playing soccer with some of the young
men who were later killed in attempting to defend the kibbutzim of the
Etzion Bloc that all fell to Arab forces.
to me how the failures of the "peace process" to give anything to the
Palestinians for lo these many years has caused many to look back not
to '67 but to '48…." It's not true that the peace process of the '90s
was a total failure; it was literally murdered by enemies of peace
before it could reach its hoped-for conclusion.
and three devastating terror attacks in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv that led
to the narrow election of Netanyahu over Peres in the following spring.
In between these terrible events, Israel withdrew its occupation from
90% of the population of the West Bank, leaving the overwhelming
majority of Palestinians in the territories free to vote for a
self-governing framework called the Palestinian Authority and a process
in place to negotiate a complete end to the occupation. Extremist
violence from both Palestinians and Israelis defeated peace-seeking
forces on both sides. The Oslo peace process had flaws: among other
things, Israel failed to curtail settlement expansion, Palestinians
failed to end terrorism and too much was left up in the air for
final-status negotiations, but it was a way out for both
peoples which got tragically derailed.
A quick response, Ralph, from me, Phil Weiss: I appreciate the India/Pakistan analogy, which has become my central way of looking at the "situation." Palestinians have had no state for 60 years even while the other great partition of '47 created two states, in violence. Palestinians have had no representation. Yes you can blame the Jordanians and the Arabs themselves, but even Harry Truman said, Hey you Israelis have overrun the boundaries established by Partition. And later they took the whole of Mandate Palestine. Yes there have been piecemeal efforts to give the Palestinians authority, but it obviously feels to these people like Bantustans. Limited, debasing. I despair of the ability of these two brutalized peoples to figure out their own futures. Don't you ever want to see an imposed solution? As an American, I often do.
