aside the right of return for a moment; the '67 border would
reestablish Israel's legitimacy in many people's eyes, including the
Arab states.
That principle was honored during the Taba discussions in 2001 (as it was not during Camp David in 2000) and then thrown out by the incoming Bush Administration.
And today Netanyahu is trying to undermine that principle with his talk of defensible borders and settlements. Ari Shavit, a leading Israeli journalist, has defended Netanyahu's stance in the New York Times, saying it has unified Israel over the idea of a "Palestinian state," and Shavit has challenged Obama to compromise.
Ilene Cohen points out that Shavit's position is undermined by an article he wrote in the New Yorker in 2006 on Ariel Sharon. Here's what Shavit had to say then [emphasis Weiss's]:
When, in October of 1977, Sharon launched his ambitious settlement
project, there were fewer than five thousand Jews living in the
territories. Today, there are around a quarter of a million in the West
Bank alone. But his endeavor was absurd from the start. Fifteen years
after the decolonization of Algeria, he attempted a colonial project
that had an idiosyncratic rationale behind it: to create a situation
that would force the Jews to defend certain parts of the land whether
they liked it or not. If we put only military units at strategic
locations in the West Bank, Sharon believed, sooner or later a future
Israeli government will order them to withdraw. If, however, a civilian
fabric of life develops in the territories, there will be no
alternative but to remain. The project had no vision, no political
context, and no international legitimacy. Above all, it was profoundly
immoral. Israel was somehow fortunate to have the person who made the
mess try to clean it up. But, when it came to dismantling the
settlements, Sharon once again had no clear vision, no political
context, and only a limited degree of international legitimacy.
For many years, I've made a point of using the
word "colonial," just as I used "Palestinian state" in the late
seventies and early eighties, from before the PLO recognized Israel.
Initially, the words, like apartheid, are condemned as anti-Israel and
anti-Semitic; and then reality intrudes and they become part of the
vocabulary. As when Sharon said the word "occupation." (Though there
are still people who take umbrage at the use of the word.)So there was
Shavit calling colonialism colonialism. But if it is colonialism, then
who's the bad guy?
the Israelis and the "pro-Israeli" voices here is that the settlements
are not the issue or, as Netanyahu put it this past week, talking about
settlements is a waste of time. But, in fact, they are the fundamental
issue, since the settlements after all are Palestine, and the Israelis
know it–for that reason they are trying to make it go away. Worse,
some of them are suggesting a grotesque analogy: that if settlers
should have to leave Greater Israel, then Palestinians should have to
leave Israel. (I believe that Livni has suggested this.) Meaning
apparently that there is some equivalence between the rights of those
who participated in a colonial project of recent vintage (the
settlers), a project knowingly and willfully conducted in violation of
international law, and the rights of the indigenous people (the
Palestinians), who have done nothing but live on their own land in
their own villages–all the while watching Israel steal the rest
of their lands.
that they "know" the settlements are "a problem" . . . but, they seem
to suggest, not all that much of a problem. Since those words were
first said to me, the number of settlers has grown by more than
200,000. Whose fault is that?
