A couple weeks back I noted that both NY Times correspondents in the Jerusalem bureau are married to Israelis. And one of the spouses, Hirsch Goodman, has been engaged in what appears to be lobbying for the two-state solution.
Years ago the Times, wary of accusations of dual loyalty, would only assign gentiles to cover Israel/Palestine. I'm glad that discriminatory policy has ended; but it's hard to say that this extraordinary degree of intimacy has been good for readers. Can I show an effect?
A week ago Brian Lehrer, the popular host of a show on WNYC, the New York public radio station, interviewed Mustafa Barghouti, the impressive Palestinian leader, and asked him a question I found stunning: And why do you believe that the window on the two-state solution is closing? Lehrer's tone suggested some degree of incredulity at this preposterous idea.
But the idea that the two-state solution has passed its sell-by date is a commonplace one on the realist/left. Tony Judt said so many years ago in The New York Review of Books, many of whose Jewish readers were enraged by the statement. Judt was prophetic. A recent issue of the LRB on Gaza was filled with voices saying as much. The same with the American Conservative. Lately Stephen Walt at Foreign Policy did two great realistic posts on What America should do if the 2-state solution is dead. He got a ton of comment.
Saying that the two-state solution is dead is hard on believers in the Jewish state, even leftwing ones. They don't want to concede as much. It would mean that the dream is dead.
I bet Lehrer's information about Israel/Palestine is coming chiefly from the Times; New York media types rely on the Times to tell them about the situation.
And that's the point: by and large, The Times has done a lousy job of reporting on this reality. It has generally behaved as if the two-state solution is a live option, to be taken off the shelf as soon as the political constellations align correctly, and then implemented. This is something of a delusion. The constellations have never aligned in the 61 years since the U.N. said there must be an Arab state, and history doesn't stand still: unending Palestinian statelessness has produced dispossession, hopelessness and apartheid for Palestinians in the occupied territories, while Jews in Israel are enjoying their vaunted western lifestyle and sending their president to Davos to talk about shared values right after Gaza.
So here is the problem with having both reporters married to Israelis: The reporters lack detachment. Their associations with Israelis have caused them (or appeared to have caused them, which is the same difference) to invest in the idea of the two-state solution and thereby to miss the real and crucial story.
Israelis have a right to believe anything they like. It's not my country. Americans have a right to know.
We simply have to get yellow stars and tattoos on these people. What if I said that "Pig Weiss's" wife influenced him to be an anti-semitic self hating Jew. Actually I think he came to that by himself. The reason that the news organizations are where they are is because if they were in Gaza they would be under direct physical threat. Not to mention the fact that they can get a drink.
Please. Phil's wife is a Quaker. Unlike the rest of Phil's Phools, Quakers are not known for their antisemitism.
Hold on a moment. Wasn't Nixon a Quaker?
Phil, Palestinian demographic dominance of the West Bank did not make them masters of Jordan, or even the West Bank, from 1949-67. All Israel has to do to avoid a one-state solution is NOT annex the West Bank, legally it is under belligerent occupation of one type of another since '49, so there can be Israel plus a PA in a legal gray zone forever. All you get if the Palestinians march on the '49 borders is a bunch of non-citizen rioters assaulting a legally-constituted state across a recognized cease-fire line, which is a mass terror attack by anyone's definition. Mass non-violence within the West Bank might cause a withdrawal, but nothing defines '49 Israel as Palestine except the Palestinians' cries of "WANT IT! DEATH TO THE JEWS!"
A week ago Brian Lehrer, the popular host of a show on WNYC, the New York public radio station, interviewed Mustafa Barghouti, the impressive Palestinian leader, and asked him a question I found stunning: And why do you believe that the window on the two-state solution is closing? Lehrer's tone suggested some degree of incredulity at this preposterous idea.
Why doesn't Lehrer look at a fucking map of the area.
Ethan Bronner of the NY Times regularly engages in misinformation, such as when he casually (see p.2) says the Separation Wall's is keeping out suicide bombers. He fails to mention that the any Palestinian can easily drive through many checkpoints (as I do) if he/she appears 'Israeli enough' to the semi-laissez-faire watch-keeping soldiers. That is not to mention the many gaps (at present) in the wall's course which allow any would-be bomber with legs to pass from the West Bank.
The point is: Bronner fails to mention that the Wall is a landgrab meant to make facts on the ground, fails to mention that it was found illegal in 2004 by the International Court of Justice even on grounds of providing security against suicide bombers.
^Three in a row. Working hard, aren't we?^
"Mass non-violence within the West Bank might cause a withdrawal"…
Koo-koo land. Removal of outposts, maybe. Withdrawal of the settlements, highly dubious.
"All Israel has to do to avoid a one-state solution is NOT annex the West Bank…"
That's what's happening now, that's what happened back in the post-'67 years, the Allon Plan, the Rogers Plan, the Jordanian Option, Madrid, Oslo, Camp David, Taba, the Road Map, the Arab League proposal, Annapolis, two Intifadas, Lebanon incursions, two Iraq wars, Syrian Heights, Sinai, and the One-State Solution is gaining more and more steam. Avoiding it may not be much of a possibility as even an Israeli Prime Minister uttered the words of "one man, one vote" in Israel.
PS Since when did Israel deal with legalities? They're obligated by many resolutions which they refuse to recognise.
Ask Serbia how the whole Military Frontier project is going.
The United States allows its allies to "straighten the line" in extremis, when troublemakers threaten the existence of a US ally. Rockets on the capital are the 1995-edition definition of "in extremis."
The West Bank is not Israel. Israel will not accept it, not in toto. Jordan formally abandoned its claims in 1988. West Bankers have no legal claim on Israel, either to sovereignty or citizenship, under any legal code that has ever ruled the West Bank since '67, and before that they were Jordanian. They have the option of the PA, Jordan, or a legal no-man's-land like the Sheba'a Farms, which Lebanon claims to maintain its state of war against Israel even though the last sovereign was Syrian. Both Palestinian and Israeli lawyers have insisted for 40 years that Israel is not the sovereign in the West Bank, so it's a little hard to reverse that. The PA may claim to be sovereign over all of former Mandate Palestine, but that is nothing new. Palestinians do not get all of Israel just by saying a withdrawal is impossible, even if it is. Ask Serbia, again, how the Military Frontier project went–they did not get all of Croatia just because the Serbs there willed it.
Newspapers are going down; mainly because they don't tell the truth anymore. Who cares what the NYTimes correspondents are married to? The only reason people read them is to find out which way the wind is blowing in Israel and what the latest Party Line is.
Anyone with a warm brain is watching Al Jezeera direct coverage from Gaza and YouTube phone videos. The truth.
Who are you going to believe, your eyes? or what the Jews tell you to believe?
The two-state solution has completed its progression from worthy (and often disingenuous) aim to meaningless slogan, concealing Israel's absorption of all Palestine/Israel and confinement of the Palestinians into enclaves.
The fact that the West Bank reality means the end of the two-state paradigm has started to be picked up by mainstream, liberal commentators in the US, in the wake of the Israeli elections. Juan Cole, the history professor and blogger, recently pointed out that there are now only three options left for Palestine/Israel: "apartheid", "expulsion", or "one state".
The path of the wall, and the number of Palestinians it directly and indirectly affects, continues to make a mockery of any plan for Palestinian statehood. Jayyous is just one example of the way in which the Israeli-planned, fenced-in Palestinian "state-lets" are at odds with the stated intention of the quartet and so many others, of two viable states, "side by side". As the World Bank pointed out (pdf), land colonisation is not conducive to economic prosperity or basic independence.
In occupied East Jerusalem meanwhile, Israel has continued its process of Judaisation, enforced through bureaucracy and bulldozers. The latest tightening of the noose in Ar-Ram is one example of where Palestinian Jerusalemites are at risk of losing their residency status, victims of what is politely known as the "demographic battle".
It is impossible to imagine Palestinians accepting a "state" shaped by the contours of Israel's wall, disconnected not only from East Jerusalem but even from parts of itself. Yet this is the essence of the "solution" being advanced by Israeli leaders across party lines. For a real sense of where the conflict is heading, look to the West Bank, not just Gaza.
Israel's targeting of civilian resistance to the separation wall proves the two-state solution is now just a meaningless slogan
You don't seem to understand, Israel can pull back to the wall tomorrow if it likes, and bomb any rocket launch sites, storage centers, or agglomerations of combatants indefinitely.
There will be one state, Israel, and a large Palestinian wasteland resembling the "unrecognized villages" as long as rockets fall on Israel. If necessary for survival, it can turn off the water and electricity in Palestine permanently.
You don't get to engage a modern state in a war for its survival and then complain that it's waging war.
You do if you're a member of Phil's Phools.
Yeah, that's the ticket. Chris is fighting for his survival. No cost is too great. Help him out. Contact you local congress people. Let's jack up total direct and indirect foreign aid to Israel per annum to 50% from the current 25%. And let's keep up our policy of borrowing at interest to give that money to Israel upfront, at the beginning of the year, and without interest. That's the least bankrupt and foreclosed Main St can do
to assure Madoff clones can continue to prosper.
I guess Alice has taken off the gloves and the facade of dealing with truth and facts. It's all Phil's Phools can muster, smoke and mirrors.
I love your reasoning spud. The security wall has cut way down on suicide bombers. The evidence shows that. But even if it does the ICC says its illegal.
If Walt and Meirsheimer's predictions are as accurate as their book, then Israel has nothing to worry about.
link to hks.harvard.edu
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"[A]s I will show, this study is so filled with distortions, so empty of originality or new evidence, so tendentious in its tone, so lacking in nuance and balance, so unscholarly in its approach, so riddled with obvious factual errors that could easily have been checked (but obviously were not), and so dependent on biased, extremist and anti-American sources, as to raise the question of motive: what would motivate two well recognized academics to depart so grossly from their usual standards of academic writing and research in order to produce a “study paper” that contributes so little to the existing scholarship while being so susceptible to misuse? [Page 6]."
It's unfortunate M&W don't have the guts to debate Dershowitz.
Dershie's POV is described correctly in the comment by Julian. Why bother? Carter has it right.