Here is a pretty darn good post at TPM by Bernard Avishai from Hebron.
It's goodness stems from its honesty about the disgusting conditions created by the settlers and the threat they represent to any fairness in Palestine, and the fact that this has been Israeli policy…
Netanyahu speaks of "economic peace" as alternative to the peace process. This is also absurd. Palestinians cannot build businesses with 500 checkpoints across the West Bank. Those checkpoints are mainly to protect the settlers.
The simple fact is, this problem is too big for Israel….
We will need the world's involvement; anyone who tells you something different is either covering for the settlers, or afraid for electoral reasons to appear squishy about Israeli autonomy, or arrogant, or ignorant, or thick, or all of these at once. This post is not the place to describe what involvement means, though the contours of a two-state deal have been obvious for many years.
I say "pretty darn good" because unlike Avishai, I have only been in Israel 10 days and I could have told him a lot of this. The left has been passing this knowledge for a long time. I went to Hebron for a few hours in '06 and saw apartheid. Avishai mentions a yellow line from Kiryat Arba to Hebron that no Arab is allowed to walk on. Disgusting. The idea that after getting a blank check from the west to ethnically cleanse for x decades, Israel suddenly will seek a fair solution imposed by the west to save what's left of its soul–that's true chutzpah. Mainstream Israel and the lobby have been thumbing their nose at world opinion for decades. Now they need us. Someone has to remind me why I'm supposed to feel romantic about a bifurcated Palestinian state. I don't mean to sound uncompassionate. I am compassionate. But my chief compassion is for a people who have been uprooted and hounded for 60s years with all the demons of the Holocaust projected on to them.
