JOHN CHUCKMAN COMMENT: EXACTLY WHY PEACE CANNOT COME FROM ISRAEL - THERE IS NO ENGINE FOR DOING IT AND STRUCTURAL REALITIES DICTATE VIRTUALLY ENDLESS HOSTILITY - AS FAR AS PEACE DICTATED FROM OUTSIDE, AMERICA ABDICATED ITS RESPONSIBILITY - ONLY THE QUIET ENDURING REALITY OF THE PALESTINIAN PEOPLE MEANS CHANGE SOMEDAY

John Chuckman


COMMENT POSTED TO AN ARTICLE BY PHILIP WEISS IN MONDOWEISS



‘The Israeli spring won’t happen next week (and that should cause reflection)’



The very nature of the way Israel is constructed, its political system, plus the problem of its placement would seem to dictate almost perpetual hostility and conflict.

No party in Israel can ever get a real majority. Whoever forms a government must deal with the extremists and ultra-Orthodox. So, the most extreme and hostile people perpetually maintain leverage beyond their numbers. No change seems possible there.

The Zionists made the deliberate choice of going to a part of the world less than welcoming to them. Israel only gains “friends” with tyrants in the region, men like the Saudi Crown Prince or Egypt’s tyrant president-for-life. The men who keep their own populations suppressed and regularly chop heads. The tyrants’ own futures are not limitless in a modern and changing world.

The extremely hostile principle of Ze’ev Jabotinsky’s “iron wall” has been applied by Israel from the very beginning, making it no friends among neighboring people and also giving its own people a sense of hostility and even contempt towards neighbors.

Genuine peace or settlement simply cannot be generated from within Israel. There’s no engine for doing it.

It has always been the case that it must be pushed from outside.

The United States is the obvious chief candidate for that job since it is Israel’s chief sponsor.

But Israel has the United States’ political system under a good deal of subtle control through its many lobbies.

The American system of lobbies and cash for campaigns is a self-inflicted wound, but it not going to change for the foreseeable future. Why? because everyone in office now benefits from it.

So, expectations for any kind of real change in Israel/Palestine, I believe, are pretty close to fantasy.

We now have the added element of a completely unprincipled man like Trump being President and literally giving away things he has no legal authority to give – recognition of Jerusalem and the annexation of the Golan – both violations of international law and of diplomatic protocols.

He does so to assure his war chest, and some favorable publicity, for the 2020 re-election campaign. But in doing so, he not only violates the rule of law, he feeds the worst expectations of Israeli extremists.

I can see no light at the end of the tunnel.

Except the enduring reality of the Palestinian people themselves, their remarkable forbearance and bravery.

Israel can ignore them a long time, as it already has, but not forever. And there is a limit as to how much humiliation and abuse a society can keep heaping on another people. It simply cannot go on forever as it has. It has a long-term destructive effect on your own people.

Israel’s governments have always hoped they could make the Palestinians miserable enough to leave (something which was Moshe Dayan’s explicit advice after the 1967 war of acquisition), but they are not leaving. And goofy dreams of shipping them all off to Jordan or the Sinai or someplace else are just that, goofy dreams. No one will take millions of people. They have no place to go.

And, of course, there’s that unavoidable reality of the Palestinian fertility rates being higher than European Israel’s. That’s always the case for poorer and repressed people. Over time, that means big changes.