This morning on his WNYC show, Brian Lehrer expressed some impatience with the Palestinian refusal to come to the table without any Israeli shift re settlements. Maen Rashid Areikat, the Palestinian rep to the U.S., pointed out that negotiations have masked a continuous colonization of the territory on which Palestinians are supposed to make a state (on 1/5 of the original land of Palestine) and that these neighborhoods in East Jerusalem that Lehrer described as Israeli are illegally occupied. I wonder why these inequities are not as obvious as the nose on Netanyahu’s face, and disturbing to American liberals.
Below is Steve Walt at Foreign Policy. The emphasis is mine; it is a Harvard professor’s answer to Lehrer. When will the media begin to reflect this reality? Is Lesley Stahl’s investigation of East Jerusalem a starting point? Walt:
There is no evidence that anyone in the Obama team is committed to doing what it takes to actually get a meaningful deal, and so there won’t be one. Full stop. You’d have to fire the whole lot of them and start over, and appoint people who were willing to get really mad when they were repeatedly diddled by a client state, and who didn’t think that the best way to negotiate was to give one side a lot of goodies up front (in exchange for very little), while expecting the other side to accept a lot of promises to be redeemed at some unspecified point down the road (and maybe never).
Unfortunately, the odds that Obama will clean house and bring in a new team are about the same as the odds of my sprouting wings and flying to the moon. And the result, as I’ve said before, will be not “two states” but one, with all the attendant difficulties that this outcome will produce for all concerned. So I guess [Mara] Rudman should be congratulated for having the good sense to abandon this charade. My question remains: Why hasn’t George Mitchell done the same?
