The inimitable Morton Klein, in a piece published by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency:
It is a racist notion that Jews cannot live in the West Bank but Palestinians can. How is it that Arabs make up 15 percent of Israel's population, but the Arabs won't permit even less than 10 percent of the population in the West Bank to be Jews?…
[E]ven worse, Mitchell explains away Palestinian terrorism by stating that "a cessation of Palestinian-Israeli violence will be particularly hard to sustain unless Israel freezes all settlement activity." Still worse, he accepts explicitly the idea that Palestinian Authority action in fighting terrorism is largely conditional on further negotiations and the relaxing of Israeli security measures rather than being binding on international obligations under the Oslo Accords….Mitchell apparently refuses to focus objectively on the evidence and distinguish between the real aggressor and the real victim.
It is amazing that this neoconservative argument was at the heart of last November's election and was never openly debated. Klein and I both wanted it debated. I thought I would win, especially when people like Klein began accusing fairminded people of being "racist". It wasn't debated. And yes, I did win. But because they weren't debated, the issues remained latent in our politics. If they had been discussed, Americans would have gotten to explicitly apply the Iraq lesson to Israel/Palestine: dispossession/political disagreements/occupation lead to terrorism. Klein's righteous posture masks his refusal to let Palestinians have even one fifth of historical Palestine. Despotism, from a man enjoying the greatest minority rights in the world.
(Phil Weiss)
