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    Islam Karimov: the kind of d..., 2003-06-11 19:36:33 | Main | raising the bar..., 2003-06-16 15:55:41

    and the worms ate into their brains:

    Only Nixon could go to China, maybe only Bush can do something about his idiot supporters, who remain insistently ignorant about basic facts, like, for example, the fact that the "security fence" isn't being built on the green line but putting 100,000 Palestinians between the line and the fence - which sort of defeats the onstensible purpose of ensuring "security" from said Palestinians.

    Instead the American press is filled today with columns about the "valid historic, legal and Biblical claims to the settlement territories", all stemming from 3,000 year old claims written by the occupier, apparently, as nothing in present law gives Israel a claim to occupied lands.

    With Arafat getting on TV and denouncing Palestinian terrorism, sensibly arguing that the "cycle of hell must be halted", you get Americans saying that the road map to "peace" begins by assasinating him, and from such folks you probably won't hear much about the Israeli attack on Monday that started the latest cycle round hell. This is what American journalists call the "unilateral surrender of Israel", or so says Bob Thomas, who thinks the Palestinians have "refused to endorse Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state", apparently ignorant of the fact that they did that some 15 years ago.

    Peace is Israel's to destroy, and I don't see how Bush is going to be able to get anywhere with the radical settlers, Hamas, or his own supporters. I will note that it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to start with the extremist settlers that are living in trailer parks in the middle of the desert, unless the point is to make this entire process appear more difficult than it really needs to be, which might be the point for the religious right-wingers managing this affair (namely: Sharon, Rantizzi , and Bush).

    It doesn't need to be. Almost 70% of those living in the settlments, induced financially to move there by Israeli state policies, would be willing to leave peacefully, and since they'll be leaving a lot of nice property behind, along with 80% of the Palestinian water supply and whatnot, the leftovers can be used to compensate returned Palestinian refugees and land already lost to the fence and the land occupied by the remaining 30% of the settlers, all without cramping Israel's style as an ultra-nationalist state. This is, in fact, exactly what the majority of Israelis support.

    The hardliners aren't going to stop blowing people up in the meantime, so it might make sense to get Israeli innocents that don't necessarily want to be in the middle of the gunfight out of occupied territory. This wouldn't be surrender, or 'land for peace', but dealing rationally with the legal ramifications of past UN resolutions Israel is presently ignoring and the obvious security threats that stem from living in areas surrounded by the enemy - or I should say living in areas that effectively surround the enemy, as the discontinuous cantons that make up Palestinian territories couldn't, really, be said to surround anything. That'll be the day, but I'm happy that Bush is actually making the effort, and really, if he rides Sharon hard enough to get the crazy bastard to obey the will of his own people it looks to me like there would be a chance for success: a chance in hell, but a chance. How the place ever got the monicker of "holy land" I'll never know, but with my disposition towards fundementalist religion I think it's an apt title for hell on earth.

    The Palestinians, as usual, are powerless really to do anything besides lash out in violently insane, useless attacks against innocents. People bitching about Abbas being powerless to stop Hamas are exactly right: you try cracking down on an organized, popular crime syndicate when you have to wait three days to get through an Israeli checkpoint.

    The only reference in the published road map to the land issue is "Israel’s readiness to do what is necessary for a democratic Palestinian state to be established". What that possibly means isn't defined, and the conditions for even discussing what that means is left until after a total ceasefire. That almost certainly means the road map will fail, and will provide political cover for Israel while it continues the annexation of Palestinian territories, which continues regardless in violation of all related UN resolutions. In effect the negotiations for a political solution won't even enter consideration until all Palestinian parties offer unnegotiated surrender.

    As with Iraqi sanctions, where the US' official condition for lifting sanctions was regime change - and hence Saddam's behavior respecting disarmament - the bar for the road map to go forward is set impossibly high, and the radical agenda will go forward unabaited.


:: posted by buermann @ 2003-06-12 19:16:30 CST | link





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