Everything's falling apart this morning. What a beautiful day, we're going to try and pick up the pieces all this week. The Palestine Papers are transforming the landscape, and showing that realists and leftists have had far greater insight into the region than the neocons and liberal hawks-- for years now.
How can the peace process survive this 2008 statement from Saeb Erekat, and maintain any pretense that it could deliver a just and lasting peace?
SE: It is no secret that on our map we proposed we are offering you the biggest Yerushalayim in history.
"These are not settlements," the Israeli negotiator insists here, in a borders conversation. Who was he fooling?
Another friend explains, "I would just like you to keep one thought in mind - for years we have been told that everyone knows the terms of a peace agreement, the problem was how to get there. Even the initial drop of documents shows this to be a big lie. Neither the Israelis, the US, nor even the Palestinian negotiators believed that the solution would be based on the Clinton parameters. The Israelis made it clear in the talks that they had created new facts on the ground that now had to be accommodated. That we were so lied to by so many so-called moderates for so many years is chilling."
Again I'm reminded of Michael Walzer's statement about the North Carolina black "resistance" in 1960: If we negotiate with you right now, our grandchildren won't be able to sit at the lunch counter! He was talking about the power imbalance, which is reflected in Erekat's craven statement. Imagine trying to negotiate with the Palestinians without taking Hamas into account. It's anti-democratic, it can't last.
Writes Darryl Li, "After the Palestine Papers from Al Jazeera, and missing the Tunisia story, someone should tell the NYT that it's official: when it comes to the middle east they officially do not matter as a source of info anymore."
And here, re power balance and Islamic movements, is Robert Grenier at Al Jazeera 3 weeks ago, speaking of the neocon wisdom of supporting Arab dictators as a means of suppressing the Arab street. I wonder how much of our bad policy in the Middle East has been driven by the Israel lobby, how many of our conventional ideas of the last 20 years have arisen from mistrust of Arabs:
"Regimes that fight, survive."
The words were those of a senior member of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), the "house" think-tank of AIPAC, the pro-Israel US lobbying organisation. Spoken at a scholarly conference in 1992, they were meant as a reproach to people like me, who argued that an ageing generation of autocratic leaders in the Middle East risked facilitating the rise of a wave of violent, anti-democratic Islamists unless they were willing to accommodate the aspirations of the seemingly more democratically-inclined Islamists in their midst...
WINEP, then as now, was generally representative of right-leaning political opinion in Israel, and this case was no exception. One of the more influential voices from that quarter belonged to Binyamin Netanyahu, who argued at the time that there was a clear alignment of interests between Israel and the secular regimes of the surrounding Arab states.
The Palestine Papers demonstrate that the liberal Zionists were the accurate ones, NOT the leftists, and not the Israeli right.
As Akiva Eldar described today, it indicates that the PA was/is willing to negotiate with Israel, but the current Israeli regime is not.
It does not vindicate the leftist fantasy that Hamas was willing to negotiate.
Nothing substantively has changed, except that the Palestinian people are urged to distrust rather than pursue.
Yes, I’m sure the Palestinian people will take comfort that the ‘liberal Zionists’ were ‘right’. Bravo Witty.
Don’t you mean neoliberal Zionists?
I’m not sure what a liberal Zionist is, or if there is such a thing, but I’d guess it is something like a moderate racist.
Nobody should ever be willing to negotiate from a position of weakness.
The war on terror and smearing people as terrorists doesn’t impress me. America’s founders were terrorists who pledged their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor to a violent struggle against the legitimate king. And they were nowhere near as sorely oppressed as the Palestinians are right now.
Israel doesn’t want the Palestinians to choose their own leaders, but I don’t happen to like the leaders that the Israelis have chosen. I don’t like AIPAC’s efforts to deny Americans a free choice of leaders. I don’t care how an American official feels towards Israel, what concerns me is if they care about America. And it looks to me as if the more an American official cares about Israel, the less they care about America.
Israel, a state that has nuclear weapons, shoots children for throwing stones. If the U.S. doesn’t veto the next UN resolution against the illegal settlements, will Israel nuke the U.S. in retaliation? How can any Jew who supports the hotheaded, pigheaded, racist state of Israel, call themselves liberal?
The release of the Palestine Papers has just begun. There’s much more to come. If the fools who attacked the Al Jazeera office think that they can silence the international media, they’re wrong. That’s something that even Israel and the United States can’t do, no matter how many people they arrest, persecute, and torture.
Nobody should be allowed to become a politician without having studied Newton’s basic laws of physics. For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Progress is only made when people stop beating their heads against walls and start tearing down the walls.
Israel: Tear down that wall!
yes, the liberal in liberal zionist is neoliberal.
“How can any Jew who supports the hotheaded, pigheaded, racist state of Israel, call themselves liberal?”
They are, at best, situational liberals, and at best, frauds.
If one cannot apply a principle to one’s self, then one does not hold that principle.
‘Everything’s falling apart this morning. What a beautiful day, we’re going to try and pick up the pieces all this week. The Palestine Papers are transforming the landscape, and showing that realists and leftists have had far greater insight into the region than the neocons and liberal hawks– for years now.
Writes Darryl Li, “After the Palestine Papers from Al Jazeera, and missing the Tunisia story, someone should tell the NYT that it’s official: when it comes to the middle east they officially do not matter as a source of info anymore.”
This reads like a coda on the last several years of your work. For months at a time, movement is imperceptible. Then you wake up one morning, and the landscape is altered beyond recognition — a whole mountainside has given way.
Ziodisestablishmentarianism — the movement for the separation of zionism and state — has found its groove. Rock on!
Here’s the NYT slant from Isabel Kershner and Ethan Bronner:
link to nytimes.com
As an ad slogan goes, ‘You won’t pay a lot, but you’ll GET a lot!’
Evidently the Times’ Israel PR flacks assume that no one’s actually going to read the transcripts and review the maps.
Israel’s proffered concessions are plain enough: transferring some of its own unwanted Israeli Arab villages across the border into the new Palestinian state, and offering to cede some remote rural land at the far ends of the West Bank and Gaza which — though similar in area to the West Bank settlements Israel would annex — didn’t approach them in value.
Caught flat-footed by the al Jazeera/Guardian scoop, the Old Grey Lady can only retreat into cautious, defensive bromides until it receives a complete briefing from its Israeli handlers on how to proceed.
Darryl Li is right: the NYT Israel PR Wire officially doesn’t matter.
Isabel K goes on to say:
This assertion isn’t sourced; it’s just Kershner’s editorializing. Yet given the vehicles for the leak — al Jazeera and the left-wing, Israel-skeptic Guardian — it’s rather more likely that the motivation was to expose Israel’s intransigence and eagerness for population transfers. But naturally, this angle isn’t explored.
Whether from engrained prejudice or simply a sense of what would benefit the Israelis, the Times prefers to spin the Palestine Papers as a minor, garden-variety internecine squabble among the Arabs, from which Israel can remain regally aloof.
Should we have expected any less from the ‘Saddam’s WMDs’ newspaper, and its exalted *amaneunses? *copyright Philip Weiss
Pursue what? The “process” was a two-decades old, ongoing fraud that permitted Zionists to gobble land, water, and homes from an indigenous population. This is the end of the illusion that the US is an “honest broker,” that Israel ever wanted peace, and that Fatah was interested in negotiating anything other their cushy salaries. Game over. Bring in the Russians.
It is like the Tunisia situation. Great news but will the good guys win ?
I actually think the PA are to be congratulated for not giving in on “Maaleh Adumim” and “Ariel”. Israel would only get around 250,000 settlers in such a deal and that would leave another 250,000 to be expelled.
Israel doesn’t want a civil war so needs to anchor at least 400,000 settlers to Israel. Which ain’t going to happen.
i want to know why this won’t be buried like every other atrocity. so far, i can’t see why this is going to change anything. i think you guys are dreaming. we have had a total coup that has gradually ocurred over how many years and the bosses are in place, period. i hope i am wrong.