Dude, rub your eyes, it really is happening: the progressive voice re Israel/Palestine is breaking into the MSM. The always great Christian Science Monitor (as a commenter pointed out) gives Steve Walt the last word in a piece debating how much money we give to Israel:
Professor Walt maintains he’s pro-Israel. The US refusal to put
pressure on Israel to settle with the Palestinians on a two-state
solution, he argues, is not helpful."Giving any country unconditional backing encourages irresponsible behavior," he says. It could lead to an apartheid state, or as Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert put it, Israel facing "a South African-style struggle."
And yesterday’s Hartford Courant offered a long profile of a Jewish activist whose dreams of a shared Jerusalem have stirred opposition from other American Jews. The piece openly pits activist Yehezkel Landau against Hartford’s Jewish establishment. Says one:
"Ultimately, I want the same thing Yehezkel wants — a Jewish state in
Israel, an Arab state in Palestine and a shared capital in Jerusalem,"
Fuchs says. "But where we may not see eye to eye is judging just how
sincere these peace offers are from Arab leaders. You have a government
now in Gaza whose avowed goal is to destroy Israel militarily. There
has to be a more concrete acknowledgment on their part of the right of
Israel to exist."
Landau is an evolved guy, as gentle as Richard Witty, and his response is clearly the Courant’s point of view:
"Because I have befriended so many Palestinians over the years. I can
distinguish between the extremists and the pragmatists in the Arab
community," Landau says. "I know that Palestinians suffer terrible
consequences from the extremists because I see them as humans just like
me. But too many Israelis live in isolation from their Arab neighbors
and they can only see them as enemies." [provocative emphasis all mine]…A regrettable result of the dispiriting cycle of violence in
Israel has been a hardening of attitudes among many of America’s
strongest supporters of Israel, he says."The problem is that Jews, like any people under mortal threat, retreat
into a kind of tribal bunker and become doctrinaire, one-sided," Landau
says. "Our imagination is crippled by war."
Landau is talking in his gentle way about the Israel lobby. Walt and Mearsheimer, who support the 2-state solution, were described as inflammatory 2 years ago. Well, they blew the dam. The water’s flowing.
