I would have more confidence if that could be sourced to something other than an editorial. And if that’s not an editorial, then it is very sloppy “reporting”.
Ouch.
Remember, folks: get power first and then promise to commit the ethnic cleansing.
And if they decide not to leave, we’ll still be responsible for them. *Unconditional *mutual responsibility is what lies at the very heart of the Israeli social compact. As long as they’re alive, they’re still our people.
Just accept that we don’t think the same way you do.
It is. Israelis are the only Jews relevant to the issue.
From the recent links
Unfortunately for Abbas, he can’t refer to American(Nato) Jews as Israeli, but he can certainly call all Jews in Israel Israeli. Does this mean that the Arab Israelis can’t live in the Palistinian state ?
Get real.
Jew,Israeli, there’s no real difference in Palestinian dicourse.
The man is an uber racist.
The “no Jews in NATO forces” comment is sourced to Palestinian WAFA news service.
It’s a bit amusing being lectured by someone who’s insisting that 21 Arab nations “recognize” Israel.
Perhaps that is true in some alternate reality, but not in the real world. In the real world Arab textbooks in every country except for Egypt and Jordan don’t refer to Israel and where Israel is located on the map there is simply a reference to “the Zionist Entity” or “Occupied Palestine”.
The Arab media in every Arab nation except for Jordan and Egypt and Al Jazeera never references Israel but instead refers to “the Zionist entity”.
Also, except for Egypt and Jordan not a single Arab nation has diplomatic relations with or officially recognizes Israel.
Not a single one other than Jordan and Egypt will allow Israel passport holders to enter, which is why an Israeli athlete was barred from a Tennis tournament in Qatar a few years ago and two Israelis traveling on a Kuwaiti Airliner from Canada to Europe were kicked off.
Several Arab nations even go so far as to refuse entry to anyone who has an Israeli stamp on their passport which is why the US State Department recommends people traveling in the region get two passports to avoid trouble.
BTW, I’m hardly an expert much less a “great expert”. I have a working knowledge of the region but have never claimed to be an expert, though on a thread filled with people who claim to be champions of the Palestinians and them admit they’re so ignorant of them they don’t even know who their PM is, I can understand people making a mistake.
And yet, surely the Israelis don’t expect every settlement to be preserved in whatever agreement is finally reached (assuming that eventually comes to pass), and it’s likely some Israelis will refuse to comply. They can always forcibly be removed, so I don’t really see this as an issue.
An anti-Semite, at least. But, I don’t see that that’s surprising. I mean, of course he’s an anti-Semite. You’re not going to find all that many pro-Jewish Palestinians out there. It’s not, or shouldn’t be, a surprise to anybody. If I were Palestinian, I’d probably be an anti-Semite too. The Palestinians are probably the only group in the world for whom hating Jews makes perfectly logical sense.
But that doesn’t necessarily signify anything. You don’t have to like somebody to negotiate with them, and if you’re going to make peace, it has to, by definition, be with your enemies. So, I don’t think that’s a bar to negotiation or peace.
Before you take too high a moral tone, recall that it was only a generation ago that the western US would not tolerate its own citizens of Japanese descent outside of internment camps.
People who take a very hard line during a war often become more generous after they’ve won.
If Abbas did say that — and I would want to see a translation from a neutral expert before accepting the editorial’s insinuations — then that’s very sad, and we’ll have to hope that something changes. Either his attitude, or his position as leader of the PA. I guess he thought nine years was long enough to wait to see if Israel would ever accept the Arab Peace Proposal.
Or, perhaps, he is only reacting to Netanyahu, who has spent much of this year insisting that it is not enough that the Palestinians recognize Israel, but that they recognize it as “the Jewish state,” a concept which should be anathema to any American who believes in our Constitutional guarantee of freedom of religion (I am here being generous with the ambiguity of the term “Jewish,” and am assuming that Netanyahu is speaking of a theocratic state, and not a racist state).
In June (several weeks before Abbas’s statement), Netanyahu seemed to agree with the alleged sentiments of Abbas, saying that in a two-state solution, Jews should come to Israel, and Palestinians should leave.
" I’m deeply attached to the Land of Israel. I’m deeply attached to our ancestral homeland, but I said: “There’s another people here. We’ll have to have a division”. I said, facing the Israeli people: “I will accept a Palestinian state”. Now, I say that President Abbas of the Palestinian Authority must do what I did two years ago. He must face his people, the Palestinian people and say: “I will accept the Jewish state”. I think this is critical. I think this is critical for the achievement of peace, and I want to tell you why. Because it’s not what you call Israel; it’s what Israel is. They say: “Well, you can call it Israel. You can call it David’s Empire. You can call it anything.” That’s not what I’m talking about. As far as I’m concerned, they can call their state Palestine or they can call it Arafat Land. They can call it whatever they want. But I wasn’t talking about what they call it. I’m talking about what it is. It is, for them, the nation-state of the Palestinian people. Israel is for us - the nation-state of the Jewish people. It’s the one and only state of the Jewish people. But this means that the Palestinians, if they choose, go there, and Jews, if they choose - I hope many of you choose that - go here. That’s what it means, can come here. That’s one thing it means.”
So apparently Abbas and Netanyahu agree. Netanyahu did not talk about outright prohibition of Palestinians in Israel, as Abbas allegedly did with regard to Jews in Palestine, but that can be ascribed to the difference in care an actual Prime Minister with the power to carry out such a threat must take with his words, while Abbas is basically just trying to talk tough from a position of no real power.
Perhaps you would be kind enough to point out the posts that denied Israel’s right to exist, as opposed to its right to do whatever it wants.
By that logic, so is Netanyahu, since he has insisted all year that there is no real difference.
I realize that you must be very embarrassed about exposing your ignorance in your previous post, but It’s not amusing at all to be deliberately misquoted. I never said that they recognized Israel. I clearly stated, twice, that they offered to recognize Israel under certain conditions, and that Israel rejected those conditions.
In your previous post, you quoted me doing so, so you couldn’t have missed it.
I welcome honest debate.
Too late to edit, but I would like to amend that to “exposing your ignorance of the Arab Peace Initiative.” We were discussing a fairly narrow issue, and I did not mean to imply that you are ignorant in general. I would have given you a pass entirely if you had not been so condescending about your superior knowledge, and my own alleged lack of knowledge.
And it’s not just me: you said to somebody else in this thread “you display a jaw-dropping level of ignorance about Jews, Zionism, and Israel”
Maybe tone it down a bit?
Often? You wouldn’t bet you own family on ‘often’, yet you expect the Jews to. This is honest debate?
Israel is a ‘Jewish state’ because it was formed by Zionists who were ethno-nationalists, not theocrats. A goodly number of 'em were atheist socialists.
The US of A is not a country formed on the basis of ethno-nationalism, but many other countries are of course so based. No-one bats an eyelid at the notion that Japan is a country based on the Japanese people, or Germany a country based on the German people - or for that matter Egypt a country based on the Egyptians (after a flirtation with “pan-Arabism”). It is not of course that no folks in these other countries are not simultaneously citizens and members of groups not German, Japanese or Egyptian.
Countries based on devotion to shared constitutional values are less common than those based on some sort of ethno-nationalism. Though I have my critisisms of entho-nationalism as a concept and I think all countries would be better off to discard it, and that it has caused untold trouble in the last century, the attempt to paint Israel as either a theocracy or racist is misplaced.
What are those conditions? I missed that.
Thanks.
So what are you proposing? That Israel refuse to negotiate until the Palestinians concede in advance that all the settlements will remain as is?
http://www.haaretz.com/news/arab-sta…ative-1.216851
“The plan offers Israel recognition and permanent peace with all Arab countries in return for Israeli withdrawal from lands captured in the 1967 Six Day War. It also calls for setting up a Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital and a just solution to the issue of Palestinian refugees.”
Those non-negotiable conditions being that Israel unilaterally concede all territories, including ones which were Jewish villages that were ethnically cleansed circa '48, give Hamas freedom of movement and full importation rights, and let Hamas set up shop within short range rocketing distance of every Israeli city, town, and village.
And Israel had the nerve to refuse. Go figure, eh?
Clinton’s Bridging Proposal remains the best offer that’s been on the table and I’d wager, it’ll form the nucleus of any successful peace offer. But the more time slips by, the harder it gets. It was Prince Bandar, after all, who said that if Arafat didn’t accept the offer he was given it wouldn’t be a"shame", it would be a “crime”. We’re roughly a decade past that point, past the point where we would have seen a sovereign, independent Palestine being set up along side Israel, with Israel’s blessings and cooperation.
How do you think things have turned out since that rejection?
If you would care to point out anything in those terribly harsh conditions that you could not say about any other neighboring countries in the world, I will try to address it. Every country is within rocket range of its neighbors. But I said, a couple hundred posts ago, that I would be enthusiastically in favor the US (or the UN, or NATO, or whomever) setting up a base in the Negev and guaranteeing Israel’s safety with a swift and devastating response to any attacks.
IMO the offer given to Arafat at Camp David was much, much worse than the offer above. Everybody “knows” that Israel offered him 90% of the occupied territories. What they don’t mention is that the 10% Israel wanted to keep included the border with Jordan (including the crucial Jordan river), and Israeli-only highways and settlements that cut the territories up. It also stipulated that the “right of return” for people evicted from present-day Israel would be permanently forfeited. Arafat would have been left with borders he couldn’t approach, lack of water rights in his own country, and his citizens having to line up at Israeli checkpoints to travel within their own country.
http://www.palestineremembered.com/images/Palestine-Shrinking.jpg
What is less well known is that after Arafat rejected the Camp David offer, Clinton and Barak came back with the bridging proposals you mentioned, which Arafat did not reject (but did not unequivocally accept, either). Negotiations continued at Taba, Egypt, and were reportedly very close to agreement, but talks were suspended for the January 2001 Israeli elections.
Unfortunately for peace, the hard-liners won. Sharon became PM, promptly rescinded the more generous proposal, and that was that.
So, to answer your question, I think that things have turned out tragically.