Reality: Peres doesn't speak for Israel
Rich Leonardi | 02.24.04 - 2:08 pm | #

The west bank and gaza strip are run by Hamas and Islamic Jihad. The Palestinian Authority is complicit in terror attacks on innocent civilians in Israel. Arafat has funnled money to suicide bombers and terrorist organizations.

Palestinians routinely have public displays of masked terrorists marching to the chant of jihad slogans. Children are often placed alongside terrorists during gun-battles in the hopes that they get shot - to be used as a ploy for a willing international media.

Palestinian culture is in general seeped in a death-cult that is bent on killing every single last Jew in Israel.

Hey, here's an idea: Let's give them a state!

(not)
Bobbert | 02.24.04 - 2:11 pm | #

He must be an antisemite.
al | 02.24.04 - 3:18 pm | #

Or perhaps a stake in peace, instead of nothing to lose.

Israel is now at a dead end, and the wall is an admission that the State has failed to integrate itself into the region.

Or do you propose to take the Palestinians' land away from them and ship them somehow to Jordan - maybe in sealed containers?

Do you think Perez is a fool? Write him and tell him so. But there are many others who realize that they are in a cul de sac.
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 02.24.04 - 3:23 pm | #

Even Sharon is proposing to evacuate Gaza. But apparently it is infeasible politically, and perhaps by conviction, stratetgic and otherwise, to do likewise in the West Bank.

A state with a wall around even part of its frontier is either a doomed state or a shriveled one.

The failure is essentially one of co-option. There has always been a certain amount of trade - even (unpublically) with such unlikely partners as Saudi Arabia - because money always flows downhill. Israeli air conditioner units or refrigerators, for instance, can get bogus brand name plates and be shipped to Riyadh.

But this is not enough. To survive the state must adapt to its environment.

The state's survival will be assured when there is an Israeli ambassador in Riyadh, as well as Cairo.
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 02.24.04 - 3:46 pm | #

Peres is wrong.
TC | 02.24.04 - 4:58 pm | #

Peres and Co had their chances in the 90s, there is a shelf life for ideas like his, his experimentation with Arafat cost the lives of a thousand Israelis. As a result its clear to anyone that the Arabs prefer killing Jews to the mundane business of running a country. There may be peacable Arabs in the woodwork somewhere but their numbers and influence will give even Ghandhi pause. The only question for the Israelis now is how high to build the fence/wall. Let the bloody Arabs seethe and whine.
Ivan | 02.24.04 - 4:59 pm | #

Pavel writes "Israel is now at a dead end, and the wall is an admission that the State has failed to integrate itself into the region."

In a region led by thugs, dictators, fascists and terror masters, yes, it's difficult for a republic to "integrate".
Rich Leonardi | 02.24.04 - 5:04 pm | #

Interestingly, he says nothing about East Jerusalem.
Anonymous | 02.24.04 - 5:58 pm | #

What's the alternative - a perpetual siege? It doesn't seem that the tide is running in Israel's favor - in fact, to the contrary. If the state had tried more seriously to co-opt the Palestinians there might have been a more favorable environment. People don't turn down equal treatment, respect and rewards, whatever their grievances.

But I suppose there was lack of trust, will, and the difficulties of absorbing immigrants, which soaked up resources.

The only hope is that there are apparently many Israelis who understand the dead end to which the policies of the state, and the attitudes of the culture, are leading.

But lots of Israelis hate Arabs, as well as vice versa? No? Don't they have expressions like 'Arab work', etc.

Wouldn't many ultras like to expel all the Arabs by main force?

That might work, as immoral as it would be, if Israel had the population the size of Egypt's.

So what are you going to do - hold on and grind your teeth until kingdom come? You might not have that long.

Or maybe it's too late. The state was a desperate expedient that could also have been a noble experiment. What went wrong?
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 02.24.04 - 6:08 pm | #

Pavel,

They tried to hand over sovriegn control of 98% of Palestine outside the 1967 borders. The offer was rejected. What more could have been done?
Franklin Jennings | 02.24.04 - 6:35 pm | #

From the Wadi al'Mitsrayim to the Euphrates.

Shouldn't be -too- hard to figure out.

Including the City of David and Jerusalem.
Steve | 02.24.04 - 6:46 pm | #

Franklin,

I dunno - was it truly sovereign and contiguous? I'm not up to speed on the details.

As for the Solomonic boundaries - not only is it not a practical goal considering the population and capcities of the state - Washington would not permit it in any case. That's part of the reality of living as a client.
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 02.24.04 - 6:54 pm | #

Pavel,
Of course, but as to the -right-. . .
Steve | 02.24.04 - 11:14 pm | #

Israel has enough problems - acquiring an empire would destroy it.
pavel chichikov | Homepage | 02.25.04 - 12:11 am | #

The Myth:
"Most Palestinians want to live in peace with Israel, he (Peres)said".

The Reality:
A poll in 2002 at Najah University in Nablus showed that 87% of Palestinians surveyed favored continuing terror attacks, and 87.5% were in favor of 'liberating ALL of Palestine.' (Friedman, New York Times, cited by Dershowitz in The Case For Isreal). The real reason that Arafat walked away from the Oslo giveaway becomes apparent: 98% of the territories (with the other 2% being held on for legitimate security reasons, to be compensated for with land from Isreal) would never be good enough. 100% would never be good enough. The stated goal of Arafat and the PLO, and the still implicit goal, has always been the extermination of the Jewish state and the deportation of all Jews. He will never settle for less. This should not be surprising, as the Palestinians rejected a two state solution in 1917, 1937, 1947, and most recently, 2002. Each time they responded with terrorism against Jewish civilians. In 1937 it worked; against the railings and acts of mass murder and terrorism of the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the British halted all immigration out of Europe. as a result perhaps a million Jewish lives that could have been saved ended up as soap bars in Auschwitz or Dachau. The Grand Mufti actively promoted and encouraged Hitler, to whom he was adviser and ally, to break out of his European arena and initiate the Final Solution in Palestine; and personally urged all Palestinians to rise up and kill Jews. The Palestinians complied, and actively fought on behalf of the Nazis, committing atrocity after atrocity against the Jews in Palestine during WWII, just as they actively fought on the side of the Ottoman Turks in WWI. Declared a Nazi war criminal following WWII In 1947, the Mufti was enthusiastically granted asylum in Egypt. The Nazis had a hell of a following in much of the middle east, especially in regards to their “Jewish Policy”. In spite of his being a Nazi war criminal, or perhaps because of it, al-Husseini was elected in 1948 to be Palestinian Council President. Evidently fond memories remained of his organizing Arab youths into the Nazi Scouts, ed after the Hitler Youth, and terrorizing Jews. In Egypt he continued to initiate acts of terrorism against the Jews, and rallied support for the ill-fought genocidal war of annihilation against Isreal following the UN division of Palestine, which so criminally attempted to grant areas of Palestine in which there was a Jewish minority the right to self-determination and to live free of the pogroms which the Arabs and Palestinians had been waging since the Arabs and Palestinians rejected with terrorism and the mass murder of Jewish children, women and old men following the Balfour Declaration in 1917. I fail to see, given the moral culpability of the Arabs and Palestinians in contributing to the Holocaust, why Isreal should not have been the recipien
Bryan Hughes | 02.25.04 - 1:38 am | #

Cont:
I fail to see, given the moral culpability of the Arabs and Palestinians in contributing to the Holocaust, why Isreal should not have been the recipient of the rearrangement of real estate which is the normal and just course of affairs following such an epic battle of good versus evil as constituted the Second World War. Given this long history of anti-Semitic hatred of the Palestinian against the Jew, why on earth should Isreal EVER make peace with them? By every moral standard, the Palestinians have the least case of a dispossessed people (primarily by their own actions and their active support of those who would have exterminated every last Jew) to have a state of their own. Yet out of all the dispossessed peoples in the world, some, such as the horribly wronged Kurds and Tibetans, who truly deserve a State of their own, the Palestinians receive the greatest airplay--yet their case is the weakest. Why? And yet, Isreal has repeatedly offered the losing side in a war she did not start the chance for peace. This speaks only to the morality of the Jews, not the legitimacy of the claims of the Palestinians. In 2002, in continuance with a long line of anti-Semitic tradition, Arafat, who has publicly declared the old Grand Mufti his personal hero, and the hero of all Palestinians, yet again launched still another bloody massacre on the most defenseless elements of Jewish society--a long hallmark of both the Palestinians and the Arabs: They have targeted Jewish civilians deliberately in every war they have initiated; Isreal responds by attacking military targets and limiting civilian casualties far more effectively than, say, America. Yet somehow the Jews end up being the bad guys in all of this? The moral clarity in the line of reasoning that hold Isreal as primarily responsible for this mess is weak at best. Apparently Arab and Palestinian propaganda is quite effective in persuading the hearts and minds of much of the West. And why should this not be so? Another cultural element is evident in the double standard so criminally applied against Isreal in her war to preserve the only democracy in a region of the world controlled by tyrants and savage, blood soaked murderers. For every injustice rightfully condemned that Isreal commits, there are 100 Arab and Palestinian atrocities. Yet somehow, these just don't merit the same airplay. You see, crimes are somehow just a little bit worse when committed by a Jew.

This is why Sharon is representative of Isreal today: not Peres. The Palestinians have only themselves to thank for this state of affairs, yet somehow, Sharon is at fault, and according to the Bucchaninites on the right and the Edward Saids of the Left, is an inhuman monster for defending Isreal against terrorism. Sharon takes a lot of heat, as do his supporters, in Isreal, or (thank God) in America. Yet Isreal is a representative democracy, attacking the “Sharonites” is an attack on will of the people of Isreal themsel
Bryan Hughes | 02.25.04 - 1:39 am | #

Yet Isreal is a representative democracy, attacking the “Sharonites” is an attack on will of the people of Isreal themselves; they put him in office for a very good reason: national survival.
Bryan Hughes | 02.25.04 - 1:40 am | #