jason alexander
Jason Alexander, the actor famous for his Seinfeld part, recently went to Israel and Palestine with the group One Voice to jumpstart the peace process. Larry Derfner has a great column on the effort at +972. (hat tip Annie) Excerpts:
Alexander writes that he’s been talking peace with Israelis and Palestinians for 20 years, which means he probably has a good deal of knowledge about the conflict, and also some perspective. So I’m convinced that privately, he’s not even-handed; privately he knows that Netanyahu and the Israeli government are the rejectionists in this deal, while Abbas and the Palestinian Authority are the conciliatory ones…. He knows the settler movement at least used to have a fight on its hands, and that it doesn’t anymore. There’s no way an intelligent, knowledgeable, liberal person, which I assume Alexander to be, can really believe that Israel’s leadership and the West Bank’s leadership are equally to blame for this long coma in the peace process.
So why does Alexander write this “yes, you can” crap? Either he’s lying to himself, or he’s afraid – afraid to blame Israel and not the Palestinians, afraid to be called a self-hating Jew, an Arab-lover, afraid of being written off as biased against Israel.
…I imagine Abbas reading his op-ed and saying, “Thanks for nothing, shmuck,” and I imagine Netanyahu reading it and saying, “That’s my boy, George.” …He comes here to try to effect change, to push forward the two-state solution, and only ends up digging the stake another little teeny, tiny bit deeper into the two-state solution’s heart. With all due respect to Alexander’s good intentions, this is Middle East peacemaking, George Costanza-style.
the problem is that this conflict is plagued by faint-hearted, even-handed, liberal failures just like him. From Obama to Ban Ki-Moon to Sarkozy to Ashton to Blair to Merkel to Cameron, from the New York Times to CNN to the BBC, everybody out there is afraid to say out loud what, from all impressions, they know to be true: that the Israeli government is the problem here and the Palestinian Authority is not..
[[Space reserved for Richard Witty’s nit-picking, petulant response]]
Thanks to Larry Derfner and +972 for telling the truth about the phony “peace process.” Is it possible to imagine Derfner’s argument appearing in any mainstream American media outlet?
Are we supposed to care about what Jason Alexander maybe privately thinks? No offense, but it doesn’t matter what goes on in his head, what matters is what he actually says and does.
Derfer gets it all right.
I think he’s attacking the sham of liberal Zionism here but isn’t he a liberal Zionist? Maybe he’s an honest one at least.
Derfner: “…So why does Alexander write this “yes, you can” crap? Either he’s lying to himself, or he’s afraid – afraid to blame Israel and not the Palestinians, afraid to be called a self-hating Jew, an Arab-lover, afraid of being written off as biased against Israel. So he plays patty-cake – he doesn’t play the “blame game,” he’s “constructive,” he doesn’t take sides, he deals out the same advice to Israelis and Palestinians, and thinks he goes home a peacemaker…”
…The problem, of course, is not that Jason Alexander is too faint-hearted to tell the truth about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and thereby possibly help change it; the problem is that this conflict is plagued by faint-hearted, even-handed, liberal failures just like him…”
I sooo agree, and of course Jason Alexander is NOT the only one spouting this unadulterated conciliatory BS. Who is paying for this crap?
I had to painfully listen to the same claptrap coming from Mark Rosenblum at an Ilan Pappe event I wanted to go and see. It was painful listening to this condescending excuse-making pro-zionist fake peace-maker.
Mark Rosenblum apparently “a founder of Americans for Peace Now and the Israeli-Palestinian Youth Dialogue program” — IMO a total fake.
http://www.ecww.org/town-hall-event
You can listen to the event here by clicking on the photo:
http://www.edmaysproductions.net/piratetvsubdirectories/archive4.html
Thank you Pirate TV Seattle!