The other day the Washington Post ran this readers’ poll (for which we can’t find the link):
Today’s Opinions poll
Is President Obama overestimating Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas’s willingness to recognize Israel’s right to exist?
Yes
73%
No
27%
11692 people have taken this poll.
This poll is completely deceptive. In the most significant compromise in the history of the conflict, in 1988, the Palestine Liberation Organization accepted Israel’s right to exist within secure borders. It reaffirmed this acceptance in the declaration of the Oslo principles in 1993, with the famous handshake on the White House lawn.
That is a fait accompli; and if 73 percent of Washington Post readers are ignorant, it is surely because the newspaper is misleading them. The Post is purposely conflating that long-ago demand by Israel, that Palestinians met, with the latest demand by Israel, that Palestine recognize Israel as a Jewish state, a trap set by Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu so that the failure of the current talks will be blamed on the Palestinians, not the Israelis, who will not return to the pre-67 borders and give up their colonies inside the West Bank, East Jerusalem, and the Golan Heights.
It is often said that Yasser Arafat was the only Palestinian leader who could effect such a compromise, who had the ability to bring Palestinian opinion to favor an overwhelming compromise on land and likely negotiations over the right of return.
Those days are now over, and the Oslo agreement is in serious jeopardy because of Israeli intransigence. The Post is readying American opinion– to blame the Palestinians.
The Washington Post is the epicenter of conventional wisdom in the beltway. These people are by nature reactionary and by that I mean they reflect the opinions of the past, because of their age, because they rose in such a value system.
Will the students of America, especially at liberal universities, accept this blindly the way they did 10-15 years ago after the Clinton initiative failed?
73% of 12000 people are ignorant yet still answer. Thats the goal of The Washington Post….to perpetuate ignorance
That’s just hilarious. Some vague question that’s based around the premise of “let’s talk about what we think Abbas REALLY thinks!” or some irrelevant garbage like that.
Personally, I think there should be a lot more focus, in terms of problems on the road to actual peace, on the fact that considerable sub-sections of the pro-Israel camp seemingly find it incredibly difficult to realize that the Palestinians exist, or the Palestinian consciousness exists.
Let’s see pro-Israel leaders and pundits all collectively acknowledge the reality of the existence of the Palestinians before anyone starts waffling and wailing and surmising on what Abbas thinks without actually asking him what he thinks.
There was an old joke current years ago about I/P: A scorpion wants to cross a river in the MIDDLE EAST and asks a frog to carry him; but the frog says, no, you’ll sting me; but the scorpion says, No, I won’t because I want you to carry me over the river; so the frog takes him on his back and begins to swim across the river; at which point the scorpion stings him. As they are both going down, the frog asks the scorpion why he did it, and the scorpion says — it’s because this is the MIDDLE EAST.
One could also say, it was the scorpion’s nature.
OK, very funny. Who’s the scorpion? Israel? Or someone else?
Anyhow, WaPo and the other speakers for power are reactionary because that’s who hold power. REACTIONARIES: REAL AWFUL PEOPLE but very powerful.
Are they conservative? Sometimes. They are conservative in that they want the powerful to continue to hold (and increase) their power.
But they never hesitate to adopt change (once thought to be the opposite of conservatism) when it might help them — the 2008 mortgage/derivatives BANK horrors, all modern science and engineering, lots of change. Most of the change is poisoning the plant, and the POWER folks are content because they are incapable of sympathy for unpowerful people and incapable of imagining that they themselves might lose power (as they would if climate change proceeds as expected and remains unopposed). The oligarchs hold all the power, all power of governance.
Guess we non-oligarchs must suck it in.
REACTIONARY are not holding to OLD ideas or OLD people. They are GRASPING people and what they are grasping is power today, damn the torpedoes of climate change and other environmental disasters.
Another way of looking at it is, because Zionists regard the “Land of Israel” as Israels sovereign territory, including Judea and Samaria, then Abbas does not, nor can he recognize Israels right to exist.