Here is Sampo–my hiphop abbreviation for Samantha Power–suggesting that we should maybe impose a solution in Israel/Palestine. She said all this six years ago, before she got took to the woodshed:
“dreadful… a terrible thing to do, … fundamentally undemocratic,” she
said, it was essential to stop Israeli and Palestinian leaders who seem
“politically destined to destroy the lives of their own peoples.” She
suggested that just as “external intervention” in Rwanda might have
prevented genocide, doing the the same in “Palestine-Israeli situation”
would likely prove “lesser evils.”
Apparently Commentary and American Thinker (which teed up the Sandlers last week) have their knockers in a twist about this (I've decided not to use the word knickers anymore out of sensitivity). Sampo sounds very logical to me (and Richard Silverstein, whose post I link). The great Henry Siegman has suggested an imposed solution. So has Martin Indyk here, the protean Aussie whom I last saw buzzing around AIPAC in June. Let's remember that solutions were imposed on the Palestinians and Israelis in 47, not that anyone cared, and on India and Pakistan then. Fairness was an issue in both partitions. A lot of blood spilled over non-fairness then. But there's something to be said for the India/Pakistan lines.
The problem with imposing a solution, of course, is that Israelis are so reasonable and fair and western and democratic, who is anyone in the west to tell them what to do? They have always come up with the right answers there, and the Palestinians are rejectionist and backward. I wonder what the American people think. I'm sure Obama and McCain will argue over this at the next presidential debate and all the television networks can do think-pieces about imposed solutions and interview Les Gelb of the Council on Foreign Relations and Ken Pollack of the Saban Center, maybe even Sampo. Heck, she's gonna be secretary of state someday, god willing.
"I was not raised as a Zionist, but like all other Israelis I took it for granted that the Jews were a people living in Judea and that they were exiled by the Romans in 70AD.
"But once I started looking at the evidence, I discovered that the kingdoms of David and Solomon were legends.
"Similarly with the exile. In fact, you can't explain Jewishness without exile. But when I started to look for history books describing the events of this exile, I couldn't find any. Not one.
"That was because the Romans did not exile people. In fact, Jews in Palestine were overwhelming peasants and all the evidence suggests they stayed on their lands."
One further question is prompted by Dr. Sand's account, as he himself notes: if most Jews never left the Holy Land, what became of them?
"It is not taught in Israeli schools but most of the early Zionist leaders, including David Ben Gurion [Israel's first prime minister], believed that the Palestinians were the descendants of the area's original Jews. They believed the Jews had later converted to Islam."
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/cook.php?articleid=13569
No historian believes in the myth of Roman exile.
On the other hand, the exile of the Palestinians…
The problem with an imposed solution is that any solution imposed by the US is going to be an AIPAC-imposed solution, which is another way of describing all the 'imposed solutions' since 1917. The Palestinians have had one imposed solutions after another.
Ending apartheid was the solutions 'imposed' on the Afrikaaners. Its the same solution we need imposed on the Israelis.
I agree, otto. Why do you think this solution has not been imposed on the Israelis?
America had better get it's skates on if it's to fix anything as important as this. At the rate things are falling apart, it won't be able to impose anything on anyone fairly soon.
Imposing our will on 3rd parties simply makes us into a hated bully. We also are in no position to do so at this point.
We do have plenty of cards to play if we want to apply pressure to Israel and the Palestinians. I do not believe there is any political will in Washington to do so, though.
President Carter was able to pressure Begin into making the concessions necessary for the Camp David Accords, although I believe he paid a heavy political price for it. Too many interests in the US really do not want peace, and Obama is no Carter.
Monsters: Hillary Clinton, Samantha Power discusses Power's genocide hypocrisy.