Sunday, July 25, 2010
[The following, by Eamonn McDonagh, is crossposted from Z Word.]
El País today runs yet another of its habitual anti-Israel opinion pieces. Today's example of the genre is by Javier Valenzuela, who says that:
In the 1948 Israel was founded in more than three quarters of what had been that [British] mandate...
If you ignore the fact that in 1922 the British divided the territory under their control into two and gifted by far the larger part to the Hashemite family and that Israel accepted the UN partition plan of 1948 while the Palestinians and surrounding Arab states rejected it you may regard this as true.
... leaving 22% for the Arabs: East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza.
Note the use of the term "the Arabs". On the one hand Israel, a post-colonial nation state, on the other, "the Arabs", an inchoate mass of humanity. And this from a writer who would undoubtedly regard himself as a friend of the Palestinians. Note further what's elided here; the territories referred to fell into the hands of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and what was then the Kingdom and later became the Republic of Egypt. The complete absence of Palestinian sovereignty in these lands only came to be regarded as problematic once Israel conquered them.
Valenzuela goes on to describe the tears of joy the Oslo Accords caused him to cry and the sequence of events that, as he sees it, led to their failure:
But then came the assassination of Rabin, the suicide attacks in Israel...
No mention of the fact that Rabin was succeeded by the even more dovish Peres and that his government was destroyed by mass civilian casualty attacks carried out by those he declines to name; the same Palestinians who had signed the Oslo Accords.
... the slaughter of Palestinians in Hebron...
I presume he's talking about the Cave of the Patriarchs Massacre carried out by Baruch Goldstein. However, that happened in February 1994 while Rabin was murdered in November 1995.
... Sharon's provocation...
I guess he's talking about his visit to the Temple Mount rather than his removal of Israel settlers from Gaza, an event mentioned nowhere in this text.
...the Second Intifada, the death of Arafat, the rise of Hamas, the radicalization in Israel, the splits and the parting in two of the Palestinian camp....
No consideration that there could have been any causal factors for the Second Intifada other than Sharon's ill-advised visit to the Temple Mount. The Palestinians couldn't have had their own reasons for it. There's is but to react, to lash out, Israel even (especially?) in the eyes of outspoken friends of the Palestinians is the only actor in the conflict possessed of real political subjectivity; no better example of this than the way the Palestinian split is described above; it just kind of happened, no one willed it, no one is to blame for not stopping it from happening nor for not repairing it once it had.
And so on and so forth. Valenzuela eventually gets round to endorsing a one state solution, the polite person's way of referring to the end of Jewish self-determination.
It's dull indeed to have to keep refuting spiteful drivel like this article but still, it's necessary too.
