On Monday Benjamin Netanyahu wrote in the Wall Street Journal an opinion piece (paywalled) about Israel’s three prerequisites for peace, the third of which is the deradicalization of Palestinian society, saying that children are taught to “cherish life rather than death,” and drew as examples of “successful deradicalization” Germany and Japan after the Allied victory in World War II, and that both nations are great allies of the U.S. and promote peace, stability and prosperity in Europe and Asia.
In Netanyahu’s and the Zionists’ minds, “deradicalizaion of Palestinian society” means forcing them to forsake their rights, and acquiesce to their oppression by the Zionists. Netanyahu’s examples of post-war Germany and Japan are unapt and disingenuous because, for one thing, the Germans and Japanese did not live under the Allies’ oppression; for another thing, Germany and Japan are countries with self-sovereignty and militaries. The Zionists look to impose what Ytzhak Rabin stated, “a Palestinian entity which is less than state.”
The Zionists will never achive peace through these terms of theirs.
I am no fan of Netanyahu and I am not even a Zionist. However, I do believe the Palestinians need to accept that they have been screwed over by the tides of history and focus on a path forward that doesn’t involve taking back land that Israel is using as their country. I don’t want to see anyone to acquiesce to oppression, but it seems like they might want to accept the reality of the situation.
The official position of the Israeli government is, or was
that Jewish refugees/emigrants [does not say anything about non-Jews] from Arab lands (+ non-Arab lands like Iran, Lebanon, Morocco, Afghanistan, etc.) have legal claims against those countries.
Let’s just hope this isn’t Netanyahu looking to take a page out of the WWII playbook to find his path to deradicalization. I mean, the Allies firebombed German and Japanese cities in order to achieve that victory.
Make no mistake, that is exactly what Netanyahu wants to do. He is just biding time in the hopes that his buddy Trump gets back into power somehow. If that happens, I fully expect Netanyahu to actively drive all of the Arabs completely out of Gaza (and kill anybody that attempts to resist).
The problem is precisely the reality of the situation—the Zionists demand peace on their terms which the Palestinians reject—which only portends to worsen, not improve as the Zionists claim to desire, as the Zionists outdo themselves slaughtering Palestinians in their “deradicalization” efforts, compelling outside forces that are as extremist as the Zionists themselves to intervene.
It’s tantamount to blaming the rape victim for seeking justice for their rape.
This. I’m far from an expert, but my understanding is that the West Bank already meets all three of those criteria, yet Israel isn’t leaving them alone to make their own country. Instead they continue to send colonists to take more territory from them.
Oh wait. Is this going to be another anti-Zionist thread or turn into another “One state is the only compromise solution that takes into account both parties’ claims in regard to Palestine” thread?
Netanyahu is the longest tenured prime minister in Israeli history. He clearly represents enough Israelis that his vision is their vision. Why should we care what an ineffective opposition thinks when we are witnessing ethnic cleansing on a massive scale?
Ummm…this statement is so naive that even us Israelis who despise Netanyahu will not be able to join this thread .
The starting point must be to recognize that it is the Palestinians who are proudly committed to doing the ethnic cleansing .
The slogan “from the river to the sea” means one and only one thing; genocide of all the Jews in Israel.
(And no, despite what the president of Harvsrd says, it does not “depend on context”)