COMMENTS POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY JONATHAN FREEDLAND IN THE
GUARDIAN
The talking is over,
the occupation goes on. Will there ever be peace in the Middle East?
Let's be honest and put the responsibility where it belongs.
Netanyahu has always despised Oslo. We have many quotes from
him to that effect, quite apart from his actions.
And how can anyone speak of peace while seizing the homes
and farms of Palestinians and trying hard to make-over the ethnic composition
of East Jerusalem?
You cannot.
Israel keeps an old man, Abbas, propped up as “president,” a
man many would whose character resembles a kind of Palestinian Stepin Fetchit,
a man who has not faced election in years. He is their stage prop to wheel out
whenever there is a photo-op to show Israel is interested in peace.
Israel will not even talk to anyone else.
If Israel wanted peace it could have it tomorrow. Just
return to the Green Line and put your boundaries into law. Few may realize it,
but going on three-quarters of a century into its existence, it has no
boundaries.
Why would that be? Because the land seized in the 1967 War
is slowly being absorbed into some definition of Israel which exists nowhere
else than in the minds of leaders like Netanyahu. Peace while stealing?
Just look at Netanyahu’s attitude towards neighbor Syria.
Israel has conducted at least a hundred bombing runs against that war-torn
land. And it has been involved in helping the mercenary fighters there who try
destroying a legitimate government while posing as jihadis. It has talked of
seizing still more land as a buffer.
And it has made it clear it regards the illegally-seized
Golan Heights as its own in defiance of all international law. It is even
drilling for oil there and making arrangements to sell it. Does that sound like
a person who wants peace?
Netanyahu is now threatening Lebanon with another invasion.
The threats are heard regularly. As are the threats against Iran, a country
that has attacked no one in its modern history, except the terrorists at work
in Syria. Israel openly spurns the Iran nuclear agreement and prods the United
States to end it. Some devotion to peace.
________________________
Response (Promptly
removed by Guardian editors) to a reader pointing out how Israel gave back Gaza
for peace:
Israel never handed Gaza back to anyone, because in fact it
never had Gaza.
It had a handful of settlers running around behind barbed
wire with submachine guns and surrounded by soldiers.
They ran from an unsustainable and physically ugly
situation, by the way, doing such peace-loving things as they left as poisoning
their water wells and demolishing anything useful to others.
Hamas is a very key fact in the whole matter of peace. When
Hamas was largely a humanitarian agency, back in the days of Fatah, Israel's
security services actually secretly assisted it, hoping to make trouble for
Fatah.
When Hamas became a political party – political Hamas
actually stood for clean government as opposed to the old, well-known
corruption of Fatah - and won an open, observed, election, Israel changed its
stance. Suddenly Hamas was a terror group.
They were not. They were a democratic organization which, of
course, had no great affection for Israel.
Israel, after Hamas's election, actually seized by force of
arms many elected officials and threw them in jail. It assassinated a number of
Hamas officials and openly threatened to kill its leader several times.
What Israel doesn't like is that Hamas is democratic and
independent-minded. Israel's friends in the region are the King of Jordan, the
King of Saudi Arabia, and the dictator of Egypt. It embraces democracy nowhere
in the region. It hated Egypt's first and only democratic government (that of Mohamed
Morsi) and pressured the US to do something about it, which it promptly did,
instigating a coup by the armed forces and the setting up of a new dictator.
Israel also doesn't like Hamas because it will not
automatically agree to Israel's definition of itself, as “the Jewish state.”
Why? There are more than a million Palestinians living in Israel. What happens
to them if there were a strict definition of Israel as a Jewish state?
Anyway, the usual way of dealing with such issues is
negotiation, but Israel does not negotiate. It tries to dictate. That's not
peace. That's not even reality.
_____________________
Response (Promptly
removed by Guardian editors) to another reader who said that Hamas stood in the
way of peace:
Not at all. Hamas has always been ready to come to an
understanding, but Israel does not want an understanding, it wants to dictate.
