Lawrence of Cyberia, whom I've added today to my blogroll, has the cleverest About Me page I've ever read. Well he's a Brit. They're cleverer than us. But Lawrence has kicked around the Middle East and now is in Washington. Also here is Lawrence on why he and I are for the two-state solution not on justice grounds, but as a stopgap:
People like Nusseibeh advocate two states on the 1967 borders not
because they are closet Zionists, but because it is a practical way to
bring Israelis and Palestinians out of the unsustainable and
intrinsically violent master-slave relationship they are stuck in, and
to bring to the largest possible number of them the experience of
living as normal citizens in functioning nation states. (And some anti-Zionist Jews
support it for the same reason). It is the quickest and most practical
way to turn two peoples who currently relate to each other as occupiers
and occupied into full and equal citizens of independent countries who
relate to each other as neighbors. So advocates for two states
aren’t saying that 1948 doesn’t matter. They say that the underlying
Big Issues of 1948 – justice, equality, self-determination and
citizenship, etc. – matter as much to them as to anyone else, but that
the immediate practical concerns of everyday life matter too, and the
most pressing of these is to find some kind of formula under which
Israelis and Palestinians simply stay alive. If you can’t tackle that
immediate issue, then you’re not going to grapple with the rest.
because they are closet Zionists, but because it is a practical way to
bring Israelis and Palestinians out of the unsustainable and
intrinsically violent master-slave relationship they are stuck in, and
to bring to the largest possible number of them the experience of
living as normal citizens in functioning nation states. (And some anti-Zionist Jews
support it for the same reason). It is the quickest and most practical
way to turn two peoples who currently relate to each other as occupiers
and occupied into full and equal citizens of independent countries who
relate to each other as neighbors. So advocates for two states
aren’t saying that 1948 doesn’t matter. They say that the underlying
Big Issues of 1948 – justice, equality, self-determination and
citizenship, etc. – matter as much to them as to anyone else, but that
the immediate practical concerns of everyday life matter too, and the
most pressing of these is to find some kind of formula under which
Israelis and Palestinians simply stay alive. If you can’t tackle that
immediate issue, then you’re not going to grapple with the rest.
