Zahi Khouri is a big businessman in the West Bank who owns a business in southern Florida. He has a pro-two-state piece in the Orlando Sentinel, and says what everyone else does, Obama would have to overcome the force of the lobby in order to apply pressure to Netanyahu to end the occupation and allow the creation of a viable Palestinian state. Khouri’s piece is filled with optimism. He dreams of Palestinian children again getting to bathe in the Mediterranean, he dreams of a truth and reconciliation commission to address the refugees of ’48…. Below you’ll see an excerpt of Khouri’s piece, then see the first comment at the Sentinel site, from last night (and yes, it seems like a Jewish author): wipe out the Arabs.
Khouri:
I am an optimist because the Palestinian cause is like many successfully waged freedom struggles once deemed hopeless. I have seen Jim Crow segregation defeated in the American South, the Berlin Wall come down and apartheid dismantled in South Africa. I expect to see Israel’s occupation and discriminatory dual system of law vanquished in my lifetime.
President Obama’s leadership can help the U.S. establish a more secure region, though Israeli-Palestinian peace will not fix all the region’s problems. Twenty-one years ago, I thought peace would do far more. Unfortunately, the American wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the enormous danger of an Israeli-instigated confrontation with Iran mean that Israeli-Palestinian peace will go less far than two decades ago.
With peace, trade opportunities for Israel and Palestine would boom throughout the region. The fulfillment of international law in a peace deal would end the burgeoning South Africa-like campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions currently faced by Israel. And tourism would surely grow dramatically following a peace deal.
Now here is commenter MarkSolomon at 11:29 PM September 01, 2010
This smack-down of Israel is so divorced from reality as to relegate it to high comedy, if not for the identity of the libeler. The Israeli government, against the better judgment of its religious citizens as well as the majority of the diaspora, has bent over backwards, time and time again, to comply with Palestinian requests in the (unrealisitic) hopes of achieving peace with its neighbors. Despite the daily bombardment by Palestinians of civilian homes, Israel held back its fist at the request of PLO leaders who said that the problem of the "renegades" should be left with them to deal with. Of course, nothing was done. Israel withdrew from large swaths of militarily significant land areas upon the (empty) promises of peace, only to have to recapture the territory because peace was not forthcoming. Millions of dollars (bribe money?!) has been paid to the PLO from the United States and the European Union only to disappear into the Swiss bank accounts of PLO heirarchy/thieves. The only way to achieve peace with "peaceful" Muslims is to completely destroy them in battle.
