The talks are surely a farce, but this is an amazing moment that we must celebrate: independent Palestinian voices are at last being heard in major American newspapers as a counter to the endless pro-Israel arguments. And they are speaking plainly to Americans about an American idea: equal rights.
The other day the New York Times ran Ali Abunimah on the centrality of Hamas to any discussion of the Palestinian future.
Today the LATimes features an Op-Ed piece by Ahmad Tibi, a Palestinian member of the Knesset, more prominently than Yossi Klein Halevi's counterweight hasbara. And Tibi tells Americans of the right of return to stolen farms and houses.
no Palestinian negotiator I know of will bow before the Israeli demand — put forward only recently, but increasingly adamantly — that Israel be recognized as an exclusively Jewish state.
This is an unreasonable demand, as it requires Palestinian negotiators to relegate more than 1 million Palestinian citizens of Israel to an inferior standing. Already, there are more than 30 Israeli laws that serve to discriminate against Palestinians. Abbas cannot be expected to sign off on such an injustice. Not only would he be consigning Palestinian citizens of Israel to second-class citizenship, he would be stripping away the right of return from Palestinian refugees who long to return to homes and farms stolen from them 62 years ago.
The only way out of the impasse is for Jews to recognize Palestinians as their equals and negotiate with them on that basis. A fair two-state solution requires the abrogation of all laws, both in Israel and the occupied territories, that raise Jews above Palestinians.
Yesterday the Washington Post Op-Ed page-- managed by my old friend Fred Hiatt, a true liberal notwithstanding the neocons garrisoning Washington for two decades-- ran an important piece on the talks by Hussein Agha and Robert Malley. The piece all but predicted the talks' failure, because the power differential between the Israelis and the P.A. is so crushing, and lamented that in the fallout, Palestinians were likely to be blamed for "obstinacy," and the atmosphere "poisoned."
And today? The Washington Post has printed a thrilling one-state argument by George Bisharat that includes the revolutionary-in-D.C. statement that the two-state solution has become "unrealistic":
Israeli perspectives are already beginning to shift, most intriguingly among right-wing leaders. Former defense minister Moshe Arens recently proposed in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz that Israel annex the West Bank and offer its residents citizenship. Knesset speaker Reuven Rivlin and Likud parliamentarian Tzipi Hotovely have also supported citizenship for West Bank Palestinians, according to the Haaretz. In July, Hotovely said of the Israeli government's policies of separation: "The result is a solution that perpetuates the conflict and turns us from occupiers into perpetrators of massacres, to put it bluntly."
Is one of these politicians the Israeli de Klerk? That remains to be seen. Gaza is pointedly excluded from the Israeli right's annexation debate. They still envision a Jewish state, simply one with a larger Palestinian minority. But their challenge to the two-state orthodoxy, which empirical experience has proven unrealistic, is healthy.
If Americans aspire to more than managing the Israeli-Palestinian conflict via perpetual and inconclusive negotiations, we should applaud this emerging discussion. Having overcome our own institutionalized racial discrimination, we can model the virtues of a vibrant, multicultural society based on equal rights. President Obama, moreover, would be a fitting emissary for this vital message.
Our world is rocking. If this is not a one-off, if it keeps up for the next year, Americans' views could change dramatically, and the evening news would start to play up the brutal Palestinian conditions and show Americans what it means to get 1/26th of the water that illegal colonists get. I should also praise Lourdes Garcia-Navarro for her humanizing reports from Gaza on NPR (even her get-the-other-side piece from Israel managed to include the horrifying dystopian description of remote-controlled machine guns on the border of the Strip, controlled by Israelis at computers).
Certainly the left will start to shift if Americans get this sort of fare on a regular basis. And maybe Chuck Schumer will be paid back for urging the "strangulation" of the Gazans. Tell me this is not a real sign that a compelling Palestinian argument, all people are created equal, is starting to break through to Americans.
And believe me, if Palestinians see that at long last their simple argument for self-determination is at last heard in the American capital, that they finally have a partner for gaining rights that Americans have taken for granted for years, this will transform their political culture.
“And believe me, if Palestinians see that at long last their simple argument for self-determination is at last heard in the American capital, that they finally have a partner for gaining rights that Americans have taken for granted for years, this will transform their political culture.”
Is this just a hope, or do you some basis for this suggestion?
How do you expect their political culture will change? Are you confident?
Their political culture will change when they see that their voices carry weight, that they are in charge of their own destiny. When that happens, a leader who represents the will of the people, the Palestinian people that is, will emerge. He or she will earn the popular support of his/her people.
For the time being, Abbas is nothing but a sock puppet. Given the fact that current political conditions prevent Palestinians from freely electing their own leadership — due to US and Israeli interference — Palestinians do not feel that there is any point in investing their energy in such a political change. In 2006 they elected a party to represent them. Bush showered the world with rhetoric claiming to support democracy in the Middle East only to crush it when the Palestinians chose the wrong party. The outcome wasn’t to Bush’s/Israel’s liking. And so, democracy in the Middle East, for the time being, was scrapped. After all, democracy is only good so long as it meets the needs and interests of the empire.
“Their political culture will change when they see that their voices carry weight, that they are in charge of their own destiny.”
True.
Philip and others – the above link to the Wash Post ‘One State’ Bisharat article above is broken
here is an active link that will take you there
link to washingtonpost.com
I just love your optimism, Phil. I felt a touch high-on-life while reading your article and following your thinking. Why for a moment I even forgot there was actually an israeli boot on the neck of every Palestinian!
Oh well, I’ll just have to enjoy the bright feeling while it lasts, eh? The old cynic that I am.
great post Phil
“If this is not a one-off, if it keeps up for the next year, Americans’ views could change dramatically, and the evening news would start to play up the brutal Palestinian conditions and show Americans what it means to get 1/26th of the water that illegal colonists get”
We can hope, pray and push. The water rights issue was a real sticking point for Arafat. But of course Dennis Ross and team spun that fall out as all of Arafat’s fault.
Phil “And maybe Chuck Schumer will be paid back for urging the “strangulation” of the Gazans.”
Rep Ros Lehtinen, Lantos and many more
Phil “Tell me this is not a real sign that a compelling Palestinian argument, all people are created equal, is starting to break through to Americans.”
But by then illegal Israeli settlements will have expanded in the West Bank and East Jerusalem
The show was a farce.
The talks are serious.
Again, the test of the talks is their product, not the obstacles and cynicism.
The need for peace is never-ending, the need for consented peace. Even with a strained process (EVERY possible one here would be), the product is still the only measure.
“We want to be at the table, and we will kill to be able to do so, and then we’ll refuse to sit at a table with Israelis in the name of Israel” is also a farce, worse than a farce.
The problem with all peace talks to date is that they are guaranteed to produce a “solution” which lies well on the Zionist end of the spectrum. Basically, it boils down to what fraction of the 22 percent of their original land are Palestinians willing to settle for. “Liberal” Zionists favor giving a higher fraction of the 22 percent and rightwing Zionists favor a smaller fraction, in some cases all the way down to zero.
And Israel gets to keep many of its settlements, so crime pays as it generally does in real life, whereas even a token admission of Palestinian refugees inside the 67 borders of Israel (something you favor if they are old survivors of 48 with one foot in the grave) is unlikely to occur.
What the liberal American mainstream hopes is that the liberal Zionists get their way and that the Palestinians have been beaten down enough to accept the scraps that will be offered (and portrayed as “generous”). That’s called a “compromise”–when Zionists get more than 78 percent of what they want and Palestinians get less than 22 percent.
If Palestinians are willing to accept this, so be it. It’s their decision. But probably many won’t, but that’s okay–they get to be the scapegoats in the American press. (Unless the Israeli right is too stupid to play the game, which they might well be.)
Are published words a perception/observation or an action/advocacy.
Bisharat: ‘Although the one-state option is sometimes dismissed as utopian, it overcomes major obstacles bedeviling the two-state solution. Borders need not be drawn, Jerusalem would remain undivided and Jewish settlers could stay in the West Bank. Moreover, a single state could better accommodate the return of Palestinian refugees. Israelis would enjoy the international acceptance that has long eluded them and the associated benefits of friendship, commerce and travel in the Arab world.’
Nice job of selling the positives. There’s another huge positive: the terrorist threat to the US would greatly diminish. [But do the authorities actually want this? Security is a big industry, and Israel is an important contractor.]
And the brilliant ‘Israeli de Klerk’ metaphor kills two birds with one stone, both implicitly assuming Israeli apartheid, as well as pointing to the one-state way out: no Palestinian bantustans.
The only reason I’d ever want to be a journo would be to demand of President Obama at a press conference: ‘Why do you favor bantustans for Palestinians, but not for black people?’ [Then you'd hear my screams of 'Don't taze me bro!' as the Secret Service goons dragged me out of the East room for the felony offense of lèse majesté.]
Bisharat mentions that the main obstacle to a single-state solution is the belief that Israel must be a Jewish state, but doesn’t explicitly explode the ‘Israel’s right to exist’ canard beloved of politicians, which of course is code for ‘Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.’
Believe it or not, this misleading but reasonable-sounding slogan still needs to be decoded for many Americans.
“And the brilliant ‘Israeli de Klerk’ metaphor kills two birds with one stone, both implicitly assuming Israeli apartheid, as well as pointing to the one-state way out: no Palestinian bantustans.”
Yes, brilliant, BRILLIANT! Everything people write is brilliant as long as you agree with it.
There’s no need for an Israeli de Klerk because there is no apartheid. Having just returned from a trip to South Africa, the black and white South Africans I met who have actually been to Israel are offended by the apartheid label.
There’s much more need for a Palestinian Mandela, a person who categorically rejects violence and policies motivated by rage. No one like that exists (well, maybe Sari Nusseibeh), mostly because people like you would probably call him a traitor to the cause for not affirm your (sorry, their) right to “resistance.”
As I’ve pointed out many times, the idea that Palestinian voices have ever been excluded from the major newspapers is a complete fallacy; Ali Abunimah, the pro-Palestinian shill, is quoted all the time, as are many others.
“Having just returned from a trip to South Africa, the black and white South Africans I met who have actually been to Israel are offended by the apartheid label.”
Yes, I’m sure. The black South Africans who know that Israel was allied with apartheid South Africa are probably deeply offended with what Desmond Tutu said about this. Two sets of laws for two different groups of people in the West Bank–why would anyone think that was apartheid?
“There’s much more need for a Palestinian Mandela, a person who categorically rejects violence and policies motivated by rage.”
There’s also need for an Israeli leader with a conscience, but fat chance of that.
“the idea that Palestinian voices have ever been excluded from the major newspapers is a complete fallacy; Ali Abunimah, the pro-Palestinian shill, is quoted all the time, as are many others.”
Yes, pro-Palestinian columnists are all over the NYT op ed page and though I don’t read them, I’m sure they dominate the WSJ. Let’s see, there’s Tom Friedman, the guy who casually supported bombing civilians in Gaza. There’s David Brooks, who is if anything even more enthusiastic about bombing Arabs. About the only regular who actually sounds like he sympathizes a tiny bit with Palestinians is Kristof and he writes about the subject once every few years. Most of the guest op ed pieces on this subject are pro-Israel. But other than that, your point is, well, pretty much non-existent.
Nicholas Kristof wrote an entire series of columns on the Israel-Palestine conflict. But why would you know, since you can’t be bothered to read them?
“Nicholas Kristof wrote an entire series of columns on the Israel-Palestine conflict. But why would you know, since you can’t be bothered to read them?”
I read them, they were discussed here, and I just referred to them above. Your comment was stupid.
You wrote that Kristof writes about the subject once every few years. That’s patently untrue, since he wrote a complete series on the subject just a few months ago, and they were not his first columns on the issue either.
Maybe the South Africans didn’t tell you that apartheid ended in the mid 1990s.
I visited Soweto in 1982, when it was still off-limits to white South Africans, though my foreign passport gave me entrée.
The analogy between apartheid-era racial zoning (under the now-repealed Group Areas Act), and land use both in Israel and occupied Palestinian areas, has many parallels.
““Having just returned from a trip to South Africa, the black and white South Africans I met who have actually been to Israel are offended by the apartheid label.”
They have every right to be offended by the apartheid label, becasue as desmond tutu (another black South African who’s actually been to Israel) said, Israel is worse than apartheid. That’s why Unions is South Africa are boucotting Israel for it’s apartheid practices.
Yeah, newsflash: black South Africans don’t listen to everything Tutu says anymore. You know little about apartheid if you actually believe that Israel is worse.
The unions advocate boycotting Israel because they’re leftist and it’s the leftist thing to do, like supporting the Soviet Union was twenty-five years ago.
There’s much more need for a Palestinian Mandela, a person who categorically rejects violence …
Proving yet again that your knowledge of the history of South Africa is just as faulty as your knowledge of what goes on in Israel.
Nelson Mandela never categorically rejected violence. He spent decades in jail because he refused to categorically reject violence as a condition of his release by the white South African government.
You might want to read this from Tony Karon, the former South African, and Time editor.
link to thenational.ae
An excerpt:
Nelson Mandela told black Africans to put down their guns and used his position of leadership to build an inclusive nation. I see no one with a scintilla of his character on the Palestinian side.
And let us not forget that ANC “violence” consisted of blowing up government buildings, not target pregnant women in automobiles.
Keep trying, though.
“And let us not forget that ANC “violence” consisted of blowing up government buildings, not target pregnant women in automobiles.”
Never heard of necklacing, I guess. That was one of the tactics in the street fighting between the ANC and Inkatha, widely (and correctly) believed to be allied with the apartheid government.
The ANC also tortured prisoners it held in Namibia. They weren’t spotless lambs, unfortunately.
And as for the apartheid comparison, you haven’t actually gotten around to explaining why having two sets of laws for two different groups of people on the West Bank isn’t fairly described as “apartheid”.
I guess it’s just nicer, that’s all. The claims you pass on secondhand of what some South Africans allegedly told you don’t mean anything.
The ANC necklaced other black people, not the supporters of apartheid. Please, please, try to compare them with Hamas. It is an insult to the ANC and the anti-apartheid movement.
West Bank Palestinians are under Palestinian rule, not Israeli rule. You’ll have to ask them why things aren’t so good.
RE: “Tell me this is not a real sign that a compelling Palestinian argument, all people are created equal, is starting to break through to Americans.” – Weiss
MY SNARK: Major Phil to ground control?
Natalie Merchant – David Bowie’s Space Oddity – Live 1999 (VIDEO, 04:20) – link to youtube.com
RE: “the horrifying dystopian description of remote-controlled machine guns on the border of the Strip, controlled by Israelis at computers” – Weiss
MY COMMENT: I halfway expect to see these remote-controlled machine guns used along our border with Mexico in the not too distant future. To save money, they will probably be controlled by people in India (at computers).
SEE: The Spot-and-Shoot Game, By Jonathan Cook, 08/01/10 – link to gazashout.com
“To save money, they will probably be controlled by people in India ”
This would be hilarious if it were not so likely.
Not only are there more even-handed op-ed pieces, news coverage (page 1 coverage even) may be changing, based on a page one article in a so-called newspaper of record, the headline of which is “Revamped W Bank force has a key role” While the article starts out as if it’s just another Israel coddling piece, lo & hehold, as it moves along, the Palestinian perspective actually gets as much coverage as the Israeli viewpoint, something that I can’t recall ever having happened before, at least in this daily rag. The importance of this is that it’s one thing for the editorial pages to let in heretofore taboo material but quite another when this happens on the frontpage. After all, top-ed articles represents personal opinion, not news, and especially not official news, the kind that the media of record (NYT, WT, LA Times, Times Magazine, ABC, CBS & NBC TV, not to mention NPR, FOX, etc. etc.) passes on to us as just the way it is, nothing but the truth. so don’t pester us with any alternative explanations. The significance of this new development may be, as stated throughout this thread, that the media walls may be tumbling down, such that the truth now has a chance. Maybe, maybe not but if so, credit progressives, credit the Internet & the alternative media, including but not limited to mondoweiss.com, but most of all credit the Palestinian people, defiant, irrepressible and courageous in their refusal to bow down to injustice.
Also remarkable: Time Magazine feature article on why Israel is not interested in peace gets slammed by “Remember the Holocaust”-review as it hits the shelves:
link to israelnationalnews.com
Phil
Change will happen, because the world has changed, the internet changed it, blogs changed it, you tube changed it, and so did many knowledgeable sorts like yourself, Alan Hart, Robert Fisk, Chris Hedges and many more who kept telling the truth. For the current regime it is death by a thousand pinpricks. There should be a one state solution and the new state should be called either Canaan or Abraham. Both Jews and Palestinians are Canaanites (according to Israel Finkelstein and others). Maybe we can change the name of Iraq to Mesopotamia.
Maybe we can change America and call it Hopi or Sioux.
Maybe we can change France and call it Algeria.
Oh, wait…