I wouldn't necessarily call it "disturbing" but political Islam is definitely on the march throughout the ME.

Hamas won big in the local elections receiving an astounding seventy three percent of the vote in Nablus.

And of the potenial polities in the region, it has been widely thought that the Palestinians were the most secular.

The Arab League could do wonders for the confidence of the Israeli electorate -- and inspire a turnout for candidates who stand for active Israeli recnociliation and cooperation with an emerging Palestine -- by pushing for recognition and normalization with Israel among all of its member nations, aiding the development of a Palestinian civil infrastructure, and generally taking their fair share of responsibility for a productive peace process.

The degree to which Israel's friends will go to deflect responsibility never ceases to amaze me.  At any rate...

In 2002, the Arab League proposed full recognition of, and normalized relations with, Israel in exchange for Israel withdrawing to the 1967 borders.  Israel refused the offer out of hand.  So much for that irresponsible Arab League.  

In 2002, the Arab League proposed full recognition of, and normalized relations with, Israel in exchange for Israel withdrawing to the 1967 borders.  Israel refused the offer out of hand.

Israel clearly did not "refuse the offer out of hand."  The Guardian reported at the time [emphases mine]:

Aides to the Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, said the term "normal relations" was too vague and rejected any right of return for refugees, though reference to a "fair solution" may leave some room for negotiation. An aide to the prime minister said: "The new fact that the Saudi crown prince was able to get the peace initiative passed is a very interesting development, something that should be pursued, but it has to involve direct negotiations with Israel."

Isreal certainly did reject the offer out of hand. There were no attempts at further negotiation from Israel. The term used to describe the plan by Israel at the time was "non-starter," which is about as out of hand as you can get.




I'm banging my head against a brick wall making this point, I realize, but what the hell. To imply, as you do, that the Arab League made an offer of peace to Israel in good faith and it is only the intrasigence of the Israeli government that is at fault here, is so totally ridiculous that it makes one's jaw drop.




For more than 40 years, the Arab League has been at the forefront of Arab attempts to delegitimize, stigmatize and demonize Israel. The "peace plan" that you think of so highly was in fact nothing but a cynical ploy by the Arabs to attempt to get the weight of world opinion off their shoulders as the Palestinian intifada exploded and get it back on to the shoulders of Israel. There were no specifics, no follow-up, not even any actual attempt to talk directly to Israel to propose it. As such, it was not taken seriously.




And this goes to the heart of what Israel's supporters find most objectionable about the way the conflict is always portrayed. In the current post, the author states that there is a degree of optimism about the peace process among Palestinians and implies that it is up to Israelis to nurture that optimism, presumably by offering concessions of one sort or another. But peace will not be built by Israel making this or that concession to appease Arab opinion. We know after decades of experience that it won't matter. What's needed is a change in Arab attitudes, and that won't come from anything Israel does. Sure, it makes no sense for Israel to be needlessly provocative. And the occasional goodwill gesture can't hurt. But these are marginal issues. They won't bring about the necessary sea change in Arab attitudes to peace. We are talking about a fanatical, obssessive hatred that has festered and grown over decades. It won't change overnight.




We will know such a change in attitudes has occured when Arabs directly engage Israel and treat it with respect. They need to speak directly to the majority of Israelis who want peace and would be willing to sacrifice to get it. Once that happens, once Arabs go right into the belly of the beast and appeal directly to the people, then we will know it is time to take Arab peace proposals seriously.



Remember the lesson of Sadat. In 1977, Sadat went to Jerusalem and spoke to the Knesset. He made a direct appeal to Israelis and their government that said that Egypt was ready for peace. In today's Arab world, not even the Egyptians are ready any more to speak directly to Israelis. Until that happens, until the Arabs make a concerted effort to convince Israel that they are serious about peace and that the conflict is over - that all they want is fairness and justice and they are ready to treat Israel like any other country in the reason - until that happens, Israel simply has no reason to take anything any Arab government says seriously.

You start out by saying the Arab League needs to recognize Israel




No, I did not start out by saying the Arab League needs to recognize Israel. I said the Arab League needs to ENGAGE Israel. The two are entirely different concepts. Engaging means dialogue and trying to assure through words and deeds that one's intentions are not hostile. At the height of the cold war, for example, the US and USSR recognized each other. But the amount of engagement was pretty limited. As long as Arab media foment hatred against Jews and as long as they refuse to talk with the Israeli people, they simply can't be taken seriously as peacemakers.




Because you aren't doing anything but pouring out a stream of nonsensical propaganda and rhetoric, backed by nothing more than your own contrary opinion about the Arab League.




My post was anything but nonsensical. Even the most cursory glance at the history of the last 40 years will show how deep a role the Arab League has played in perpetuating the rejection of Israel that persists to this day.




Look, I know you're a confirmed Israel-hater. And like all haters, you will twist any statement and bend any argument to fit your preconceived notions. I won't budge your views one inch. But I hope that anyone else reading this exchange might get a better sense of the context of the current situation. They might hopefully understand that despite the best efforts of the media to portray the conflict as within Israel's ability to solve, the simple fact is that that is not the case. The best Israel can hope for under the present circumstances is a sustained period of non-belligerence. True peace can only come from a wholesale change in Arab attitudes.

Only if you start from a position of bigotry in favor of Jews do you ignore all solutions to the dispute that threaten the dominance of Jews as an ethnic group over the state of Israel, and say Arabs have to accept that dominance.




Ah, Arnold Evans - too bad I didn't have enough time to demolish your last bit of anti-Jewish sophistry.




Tell me, is it bigotry for the French state to favor French people? Is it bigotry for Japan to favor Japanese people? Only if you decide to call into question the entire concept of the nation-state, in which some people are citizens and others are not, would you answer yes to any of those questions. If you answer no, then you have to ask what makes Israel favoring Jews different from Germany favoring Germans? Why is the former "bigotry", with all the negative connotations that word implies, but the latter is not? Is it because Jews are spread all around the world, thus increasing the relevance of Zionism to many people? Maybe, but the Germans favor ethnic Germans who live all over the place as well, as do the Japanese. There are ethnic Germans in the Central Asian republics who went back to Germany and became citizens immediately, while Turkish families who have lived in Germany for four generations, or Korean families who have lived in Japan for an equal amount of time, are denied citizenship. Somehow this kind of "bigotry" does not seem to prick the conscience of the left. Only Jewish nationalism does.




Here's a newsflash for you Arnold: Zionism is no different from any other nationalism anywhere in the world. Every nation in the world has a history that at some point involves one people staking out a claim to the land to the exclusion of others. To say that of all the nationalisms around the world, Zionism is uniquely evil and deserves condemnation, is so patently ridiculous that such a thought can only be said to have its origins in anti-Semitism. No doubt you will protest such a label. No doubt you consider yourself a hell of an enlightened fair-minded guy. But you are anything but fair-minded here, for anything that holds Israel and/or Jews to a different standard than that to which all other countries in the world are held is - by definition - anti-Semitism.




In addition, what you say is not even logical. The Palestinians have never sketched out what peace would look like. They have never declared a vision for what would be in it for the Jews should they give in to their demands. They just make demands and then resort to terrorism when their demands aren't met.




If the Palestinians were serious about peace, they would have had a state of their own 70 years ago, when partition was first proposed. They could have had it 59 years ago, when the UN partition plan was announced. They could have had one in 1967, 1978, 1993, 2000, 2001 or any other time in fact if their leadership had done what Sadat did and sold the Israeli people on the idea they were serious about ending the conflict.

Every nation in the world has a history that at some point involves one people staking out a claim to the land to the exclusion of others.

The problem Brad is that there were already people living on that land of a different ethnicity and religion (the majority, in fact) who--understandably--did not want to accept their country being changed into a Jewish state. At some point, Israel needs to deal with this fact. It's not just that the Palestinians are monsters who hate Jews. They've been disenfranchised by the creation of the Jewish state and something needs to be done to provide them their own state or accept them into Israel as fully equal citizens. Unfortunately, as long as the conflict continues to fester, hatred and violence continue to grow.

One doesn't have to hate Jews or be against the existence of Israel as a Jewish state to simply think the Palestinians deserve some quick resolution to an injustice that has festered for more than 50 years. The conflict is certainly not all Israel's fault, but your constant blaming of the Arabs for everything isn't very fair either. There's a lot of blame to go around on both sides.

They've been disenfranchised by the creation of the Jewish state and something needs to be done to provide them their own state or accept them into Israel as fully equal citizens.

More than disenfranchised, they were driven from their homes because of their ethnicity.  And they had the same right not to be driven from their homes that you have not to be driven from your home because of your ethnicity.

The thing is that supporting this kind of ethnic bigotry is really not in line with the American national philosophy or with modern thought in the West.  True liberals are disappointed that it is taking so long for the United States to come to its senses, but it will - and it will stop supporting the bigoted idea that Israel should belong to the Jewish ethnic group.

When Israel loses Western support it will have no choice but to accept a South Africa-style solution of one multi-ethnic state.  Zionists are nuts but they aren't really suicidal.  I'd just rather it be sooner than later.

Here is the difference between Zionism and other nationalisms. There is a group of refugees today who are being denied the right to return to the place they were driven away from by force because of their ethnic group.




This is just simply a lie. There are countless examples around the world of people who were driven from their homes during a conflict and who are not allowed to return. Here's but one small example: in 1995, some 600,000 or so ethnic Serbs were expelled from a region of Croatia called the Krajina. They were simply told to leave at gunpoint and their houses are now occupied by ethnic Croats. No friggin' way are those Serbs coming back into Croatia. But do we see UN conferences expressing solidarity with the Krajina Serbs? Do we have the entire fucking world in high dudgeon because of this outrage? No.




Ah, you say, but surely two wrongs don't make a right. You're right, they don't. If the plight of the Krajina Serbs paralleled the plight of the Palestinian Arabs, then we would indeed have a case where we could say "two wrongs don't make a right." By any measure, what the Croats did to the Krajina Serbs was wrong.




But they are not parallels. For the umpteenth time: The Palestinians WERE NOT EXPELLED in 1948. Or, to be more precise, the vast majority of them were not expelled. They were encouraged to leave by the invading Arab armies that thought they would wipe out the nascent Jewish state before it got started. There were also refugees who fled as a consequence of the war itself, as there is in all wars. Yes, there were expulsions, but those are not, contrary to Palestinian mythology, the whole, or even the main part of the story.




But again unlike the Croats, Israel has been willing at every stage to share or partition the land. IT is worth recalling that the original UN partition plan called for Israel to be only on that part of the land where there was a clear Jewish majority. It was far less land than the borders that emerged after the conflict in 1948 (so your statement that the partition plan gave Jews a disproportionate amount of land given their population is another lie). It was ONLY the inability of the Arabs to countenance ANY Jewish state that forced Israel to conquer more land. Sure Israel took advantage of the situation to make its overall position more secure. But it was the aggression of the Arabs that lost them the land - make no mistake.




The Palestinians remind you of the old joke about the guy who kills his parents and then wants sympathy for being an orphan. It is their aggression that lost them their land. It is their utter inability to compromise that prevents justice. As soon as they realize that Israel will not commit suicide and that they must compromise and live with that compromise, then there can be peace.

The thing is that supporting this kind of ethnic bigotry is really not in line with the American national philosophy or with modern thought in the West.

Arnold, I agree that ethnic nationalism is not the American way. But at the same time, I think we need to give other nations leeway to decide their own way of organizing themselves. I prefer to see states secular and blind to race, religion, etc. However, I don't automatically condemn every state that wants to be Kurdish or Islamic or Armenian or Jewish or Christian or whatever as inherently bad. It all depends on how they treat people under their control who do not belong to the favored group. Where I criticise Israel is in their treatment of the Palestinians. I don't think they've realistically dealt with the issue that there were and are a huge number of Arabs living under their control without basic rights.

IT is worth recalling that the original UN partition plan called for Israel to be only on that part of the land where there was a clear Jewish majority. It was far less land than the borders that emerged after the conflict in 1948 (so your statement that the partition plan gave Jews a disproportionate amount of land given their population is another lie).

It isn't a lie Brad. It all depends on how you are defining population. You and Arnold are defining population differently. Don't accuse him of lying when he's got as legitimate view as you do. He's looking at the total population of British Palestine. You're looking at the population of the 55% of British Palestine that was reserved for Jews. In that portion, approximately 55% (if I remember right) of the population was Jewish). The UN sort of "gerrymandered" Palestine to create an area that had a Jewish majority. Maybe that was justified. But please don't accuse people of lying when all they are doing are looking at different facts than you're looking at.  

My understanding is that the partition created two regions both with Arab majorities with the expectation that one region would be ethnically cleansed.

Arnold, there was a Jewish majority in the Jewish area. In his history of the conflict, Israeli historian Benny Morris (Righteous Victims)gives the population figures, but unfortunately I've lent my copy of Morris to someone else. I think the Jewish area of Palestine was about 55% Jewish, 45% Arab, more or less. To get a Jewish majority on a large part of it, however, Palestine had to be divided rather strangely.

All of this population history, however, doesn't really matter at this point. We now have approximately 5-6 million Jews living in Palestine/Israel whose rights need to be protected. We also have an equal number of Palestinians and Palestinian refugees living on the same land or in nearby refugee camps. Their rights also need to be protected too.

 

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon has expressed the wish to attend the Arab League Summit in the Lebanese capital of Beirut later this week, and has asked the United States to intervene in his favor.

"I suggested I'll go to Beirut to talk to the Arabs directly about what might be achieved," the prime minister said in his interview with the Washing Post published on Saturday.

"I would welcome an American initiative to advance such a move," he declared.

I guess that the idea that all of the alternatives to a two-state solution are "very bleak" is the product of immersion in Zionist propaganda.

Of course Arnold Evans would rely on such a guess.  Could anyone think Mr. Evans really believes Jewish national interests are anything but nefarious?  Not from anything written here.

This is what anti-Zionists never understand: it was the idea of a Jewish state, not the specifics of that state, that was rejected.

Brad, I think one of the reasons the debate about Israel-Palestine is so bitter is that people on either side have trouble seeing it from the other side's perspective. I agree with you that the Arabs did reject the very idea of a Jewish state (and many Arabs still do). But this rejection is perfectly reasonable from an Arab perspective, just like it would be perfectly reasonable for say American Protestants to object to the creation of a Catholic State in their land--or for non-hispanic Californians to object to the creation of a Mexican state in California.

This is not to say that the creation of a Jewish state was wrong. From a Jewish perspective, it was absolutely necessary--not because (as some opponents of Israel seem to imply) that the Jews were nefarious evil people trying to steal land for themselves from poor helpless Arabs. The Nazis had just tried to completely wipe out the Jewish people, culture, and religion. Even before the Nazis, the Jews were generally treated like crap in Europe. From a Jewish perspective, creating a Jewish state was essential to protecting both lives and culture from utter destruction.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if everyone would open their minds and realize that neither of these peoples is "evil"--but each has experienced the same situation from vastly different perspectives, we might stop passing blame and start trying to build bridges.