Sunday, July 26, 2009
This is just a quick link to follow -- an "aside." These are links to interesting things that, for one reason or another, I didn't place into a full posting. Click the link to visit the full article. Go to the blog index for a regular listing of posts.
Joseph Puder: Wrong, Mr. President -- Jewish Settlements Expedited Peace Talks - '...The real obstacle to peace is the refusal of the Arab world to accept the existence of a Jewish state in their midst. Although it occupies one-thousandth of the combined size of Muslim states, Israel’s existence in the Middle East is, to most Arabs, unacceptable and should be fought to the last drop of (Israeli) blood. The Palestinian struggle is not so much for Palestinian self-determination as it is for the destruction of the Jewish, infidel state...' [It's hard to argue with that.]
I agree completely. Historically speaking, this has been one of the most powerful tools used to get the Palestinians to the table.
(It's also a powerful message, if you stop to think about it. Time and time again, Palestinians would murder Israeli civilians in cold blood as they traveled through the rolling hills of the West Bank. Israelis responded to the murders, more often than not, by establishing a new community on the spot of the murders -- and naming the town after those who had been murdered! When Palestinians see this happen, over and over again, what does this teach them about the effectiveness of terror?)
Israel was more than ready to hand back the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights in 1967, in return for a comprehensive peace treaty. There were no takers. In the mid-seventies, after waiting nearly a decade for a chance to give the territories back in exchange for a treaty, Israel finally started to make good use of the land. And then it STILL took another twenty years before Palestinians were willing to say, okay, maybe we'll agree to peace... if you give us all of what you offered and we refused thirty years ago.
It doesn't work that way. The Palestinians, if they ever want to live peacefully, must recognize some unpleasant truths -- that they missed their chance, not once but several times, to have the State they claim to want. It's time to live with what has happened since then -- and agree to what Israel is willing to offer you now.
respectfully,
Daniel in Brookline
It's good to see more and more commentators speaking and writing more thoughtfully and with more probative effect concerning "the settlements."
In general terms, as long as one ("The One," in this case) is dealing with OPM (other people's money) or OPL&W (other people's lives and welfare), it's very easy to think abstractedly, to think in a priori terms, to therein dictate to others, to conceive "principles" and then apply them to others without being required to apply them to one's self in any concrete sense, beyond political and ideological considerations.
All of that is especially easy when one - when "The One" - is an ideologue cum egoist of the first order and any need for a better grounded coherence and gravitas is relegated to a secondary or even a tertiary status/priority.
Is that an exaggeration? Perhaps, but it's not obviously an exaggeration. Obama is not a Caligula or a Nero figure, that would certainly be an exaggeration, but he is far indeed from the Lincolnesque figure he imagines himself to be, or perhaps merely portrays himself to be, before a public and press given to wholesale credulity and moments of obsequiousness, at times rather extended "moments."