The great Henry Siegman has broken with so many communal vows of the Jewish establishment, and here he is with angry words at Foreign Policy, about colonialism, land grabs, “consensus of thieves,” and the Israel lobby’s collusion. Notice especially how Siegman thinks a fair partition would be on the original ’47 lines. I wonder how long before Siegman is talking about the rights of Palestinian refugees…
And is there anyone who witnessed the frenzied applause that greeted Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s most recent speech before the U.S. Congress in which he left no doubt about his government’s intentions for East Jerusalem and for the West Bank, or heard President Obama’s assurances to AIPAC’s conventioneers that the ties that bind the U.S. to Israel are forever “unbreakable,” who still believes that the U.S. will ever exert the kind of pressure on Israel that will finally change its cost/benefit calculations with regard to its colonial project?….
The Palestinian “crime”– turning to the U.N. for relief from one of the longest military occupations in modern history, in part to deter those within its own ranks who have lost all hope from resort to violence — that has elicited so draconian an American response might in fact be seen as an act of statesmanship, to be encouraged and rewarded. But stealing the Palestinian people’s territorial patrimony — which is how the U.N. Partition Resolution of 1947 defined not only the West Bank but territory twice its size — is a crime in international law, as is the transfer of Israel’s citizens to those territories. Yet these crimes have never drawn more than empty American reproaches, invariably followed by solemn reaffirmations of the immutability of America’s bonds with Israel..
[U.N. General Assembly affirmation of Palestinian state] is likely to trigger a global reaction to Israel’s continuing efforts to dispossess Palestinians from the 22% of Palestine that has been left them.
