One astonishing thing about this moment is the Elevation of Rashid Khalidi. As anyone who has heard this softspoken brilliant man speak knows, it’s about time. Back in ’08, Obama threw him under the bus. But now the American media are turning to him! Next, Ali Abunimah… I noted that Khalidi got two MSM platforms yesterday. Now here he is on NPR’s Talk of the Nation yesterday.
I think the United States and Israel and the Europeans and everybody else has to be awakened to the fact that this is not your grandfather’s Middle East. This is not a Middle East where colonial powers or external powers could push people around and pliable, pliant governments would do as they were told, whether by Moscow or Washington or, in an earlier era, by London or Paris. This is an era of growing demand for popular sovereignty. Even if there are not successful or fully successful democratic transitions, people will have a bigger voice. And the people’s voice has been kept out of this. Most people in the Arab world are deeply sympathetic to the Palestinians. Most governments have done what Washington wanted for the past several decades. That’s the reality. Israel was very comfortable with that, because its patron, the United States, made sure that the Arabs were essentially kept out of the equation, except those people who are wheeled in to fund with the Americans had decided they wanted to have happen and Israel was willing to have happen…
United States is between a rock and a hard place. The rock is the domestic realities where Israel is concerned, where, basically, the Israeli position is the bottom line. Whatever position an Israeli government takes is the bottom line for whatever administration is in office. And the hard place is that the Middle East is a much less-forgiving zone of American hypocrisy – you know, rhetoric in favor of self-determination, but voting against a Palestinian state at the United Nations. It’s not an enviable place that this administration is in, and it’s the political realities, and this kind of – the domestic the political realities in this country and our inability to understand that this is really a foreign policy problem, that this is not – and that there are very important interests to the United States. ..
if the ’67 borders aren’t a basis, then what is the basis? What are the borders of this state that we’re asked to guarantee? They’re, apparently, quite flexible. If conquest – if we’re going to throw it the U.N. charter and we’re going to throw out everything that has emerged since World War II in the way of international law and say that conquest is a basis to throw out U.N. Security Council Resolution 242, the acquisition of territory by force is perfectly okay.
