Yesterday I mentioned a Jerusalem Post editorial about settler violence, prompted by the enchanting picture below. I did not get into the full religious delusion of the editorial itself. I am going to excerpt key phrases in that editorial now, to convey as much. And you think we Americans had it bad with Christian fundamentalists! From the JPost:
"…a photo of 'a Jewish settler' confronting
unseen Palestinians in northern Samaria….No group could better undermine the case for Jewish rights
in the West
Bank than settler radicals. In a world predisposed to see all of Judea
and Samaria, and east Jerusalem, as Palestinian… [settler violence has]
spiked, serving to close minds and harden hearts [my emphasis; whose minds are they talking about??] to Israel's legitimate
security concerns and historic civilizational tie to the West Bank. This behavior bolsters the notion that peace can be achieved only by a full Israeli withdrawal to the 1949 armistice lines…
Let's be clear. Only a small number of Israelis living over the
Green Line are extremists. And in some areas, olive harvests really do
pose a genuine security dilemma – with trees growing in proximity to
schools, for instance. [As fervid as the witches warning Macbeth about the Birnham woods!]
…Settler leaders recently launched an advertising
campaign to tell Israelis why we should feel connected to Judea and
Samaria. But radicals running wild in the hills of Judea and Samaria
achieve the opposite. How sad that a relatively small group of fanatics
has been able to divert the spotlight…
Of course it is Palestinian intransigence that is
torpedoing such a solution.
Is it necessary to expain how deluded this is? Palestinian intransigence? What about the insistence in a major newspaper that the whole of Palestine belongs to Jews because of the bible? Would this madden Palestinians who have had no right of self-determination for 60 years even as India, Pakistan, and Israel got theirs? Would it frustrate the two-state solution? My friend Steve F. insists that most of Israeli society is for a 2-state solution. Certainly Olmert is. He can say so only as he is leaving office. And the Jerusalem Post, a leading newspaper, insists on the right to Judea and Samaria? Puts "settlers" in quotation marks? One can only wonder what kind of dreamworld these people are living in, and why Americans hearts and minds, the only hearts and minds that might be open to this madness, are supporting them in this delusion. Remember that David Horovitz, the editor of the JPost, was an honored guest at AIPAC, surrounded by rightwingers, without a non-Zionist in sight. It seems that all these people are truly committed to apartheid–and what Olmert called an apartheid struggle–in the expansive Jewish state whose boundaries they refuse to define.
The JPost and its minions suggest that a civil war is coming within Jewry and Israel over this question. One that actually puts Jeffrey Goldberg and me on the same side, behind Obama, and the bitterenders like Kristol and Horovitz on the other. Obama I have said can triangulate Mearsheimer, Mel Levine, and even Marwan Barghouti, the Fatah guy who in prison worked with Hamas guys to forge a two-state solution offer, and who may be coming out soon. But is it too late to triangulate?
