Today in an editorial, the New York Times all but throws in the towel on the two-state solution:
With only a year left in office, President Obama is unlikely to make another run at a peace process or even apply serious pressure on Israel to halt settlement-building. With the Kerry and Shapiro speeches, the administration is hoping to prod Israelis and Palestinians to think hard about the future they are creating. Tragically, it may already be too late for the one formula that has the best chance of establishing a durable peace: two independent states, side by side.
What drives this understanding? State Department officials, as the Times states.
Last week the US Ambassador to Israel, Daniel Shapiro, lit up the Israeli establishment with a speech suggesting that Israel was installing apartheid in the West Bank and that it was hurting the United States.
too many attacks on Palestinians lack a vigorous investigation or response by Israeli authorities; too much vigilantism goes unchecked; and at times there seem to be two standards of adherence to the rule of law: one for Israelis and another for Palestinians.
Hovering over all of these questions is the larger one about Israel’s political strategy vis-à-vis its conflict with the Palestinians. What is Israel’s plan for resolving the conflict? For remaining a Jewish and democratic state?… What tools can Israel provide to assist us in our global diplomatic defense of Israel, to which we will always be committed?
Last month, Secretary of State John Kerry lit up the same government by telling a pro-Israel thinktank in D.C. that there is an “untenable one state reality” taking hold between the river and the sea and that the Israeli government seems to endorse this process. Soon after that he suggested Israel is creating an apartheid state (to David Remnick at the New Yorker): “Will it be a democracy? Will it be a Jewish state? Or will it be a unitary state with two systems, or some draconian treatment of Palestinians, because to let them vote would be to dilute the Jewish state?”
The sad thing about this process is that it should not be the labor of the State Department to acquaint the American elites — via the New York Times editorial board– with the reality in Israel and Palestine. The paper’s own reporters failed miserably in this basic descriptive duty; both Ethan Bronner and Jodi Rudoren failed to report rampant apartheid conditions and the rightwing Israeli polity’s support for the settlers because of what I conclude after long study were Zionist attachments these reporters were never upfront about. A generational attachment to Zionism extends throughout the Times’s chattering department, from Paul Krugman to Thomas Friedman to Roger Cohen to David Brooks (who has lately described the entire occupied West Bank as “Israel”). Cohen and Brooks are at least transparent about it.
Of course, our press generally has failed at this important task– and surely for the same sociocultural reason, because reporters and editors deferred to idealistic Zionists in their own ranks and leadership. Robert Simon tried at 60 Minutes, Karl Vick tried at Time. The Nation did a good job with its Apartheid on Steroids piece of a few years back, but generally the American press has failed a central informational task. NPR has been miserable. The New York Review of Books was too pained by the sight to look (though it managed to publish David Shulman). The New Yorker did publish Yousef Munayyer on the need to imagine a one-state outcome, years ago, but that was an exception; the magazine has largely treated one-state as a threat to Zionist dreams and world order, rather than the lived-reality of Palestinians right now.
So Americans who wanted to understand what is really going on over there have had to rely on witnesses like Diana Buttu, Rula Jebreal, Phyllis Bennis, Mazin Qumsiyeh, Max Blumenthal, Ali Abunimah, Munayyer, and Mustafa Barghouti to convey this reality. All of these people have been shunned by the mainstream to one degree or another because of their heresy. Blumenthal said that it was because of the elite’s belief in a “dreamcastle Israel” that his important book never got a hearing in the New York Times or NPR; and he stamped a generation with that remark.
We can only hope that the (relative) bravery of high State officials will enable the media to step up to its duties at last. (And I say this as someone who made a living out of the media’s abdication; I hope that part of my job description ends.)
Despite this, CNN still puts this story out on their website’s front page:
“Au revoir and shalom: Jews leave France in record numbers”
http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/22/middleeast/france-israel-jews-immigration/index.html
The story lays out numbers (unchallenged) from the Jewish Agency, and makes the case that Israel [as it stands] is necessary as an island of protection for world Jewry due to perceived rising antisemitism in Europe: “Israel’s Jewish leaders have always proclaimed that the country will always offer a home to Jews from anywhere in the world.”
Nothing on the displaced peoples who have no comparable safe haven.
Nothing on statistics of anti-arab nor anti-muslim attacks.
Nothing on emigration FROM Israel.
Nothing on the question of what people will do in the name of creating the feeling of a “safe place.”
Nothing on the questionable nature of the statistics from the Jewish Agency, its ties to the Israeli governmnent, and therefore ties to ethnic cleansing, of which an appeal to judaic-only migration to Israel is a significant component.
Is CNN therefore, with this story, cheerleading ethnic cleansing?
And, topically, actually BEHIND the NYT on the matter?
Or is it just me?
So am I wrong in interpreting this as naked propaganda?
Dreamcastle Israel? With whipped cream and a cherry? But — importantly — can only be looked at through rose colored glasses. Best, indeed, not to look at the reality at all. That’s why NYT & NPR et al. refuse to report on the unpleasant realities, like Victorians who refuse to speak the words “piano legs” because in their time to mention “legs” was obscene (or something like that). Does make you wonder what the schools of journalism have to say about such “reporting”. See no evil, speak no evil.
And USA will protect Israel no matter how far it slides into apartheid, fascism, or anything else.
This is a long problem with the NYT and foreign policy in general– they tend to let the American government set the agenda. They act like they need its permission to report on some stories, no matter how obvious.
Thanks for this excellent article on the sad state of the press.
The massive injustices inflicted on the people of Palestine cannot be justified by
1. the Torah
2. the Holocaust
3. a hypothetical future persecution of Jews in the U.S.
or any combination of these.
The only reason these injustices have been sustained is because the U.S. public has been kept unaware of them.
The U.S. public deserves an apology, and the people of Palestine deserve an apology.
Again, this is yet another reminder that we will never see the Palestinian people have their freedom, will never have the right to return, will have lost their lands, farms, and other resources, and many of them will be killed, injured or chased away. They will be marginalized, and no other nation will lift a finger to help them, not even their Arab brothers in surrounding nations (shame on them all).
Whether some ruthless zionist said this or not, the zionists have fulfilled that statement.
“We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population.”
The above crimes which we see going on today, also indicates these are people with terroristic tendencies, resort to ruthless crimes against humanity, and are resorting to a slow genocide of people who have no voice, nor support from the world community. At this point it seems no one gives a damn.
Meanwhile in the US the zionists have made American people believe that Iran is the terror state, although I have not heard of any Israeli scientist being brutally killed by Iran yet.