Obama offers real hope, Netanyahu's 'government of yesterday' offers nothing

[IndianaGreen]

Obama offers real hope, Netanyahu's 'government of yesterday' offers nothing

Author: Uri Avnery
People's Weekly World Newspaper, 06/04/09 16:42

Uri Avnery, former member of Israel's Knesset (Parliament), is a founder of Gush Shalom, the Israeli Peace Bloc.

As an Israeli patriot I must say, without the shadow of a doubt, that at this moment the president of the United States understands the interests of Israel much better than Israel's own prime minister and his ministers. In his memorable Cairo speech, as in his entire career so far, President Obama has opened up a horizon of real hope to the citizens of Israel as to the Palestinians and to all Arabs and Muslims -- as he brought hope to the citizens of the U.S., who elected him. Conversely, Netanyahu's 'Yesterday's Government' offers no solution of any kind, and its policy consists of clinging blindly to continued occupation and settlement expansion.

Each year in the beginning of June, Israeli peace seekers demonstrate, in order to remind their fellow-citizens that our country is maintaining a cruel occupation rule over millions of Palestinian inhabitants, already for more than two-thirds of Israel's total history. This year we are also demonstrating in the concrete hope that the end of the occupation is near, the beginning of peace between the state of Israel and the state of Palestine to arise, between Israel and the entire Arab world.

In the short term, the demand for ending settlement expansion, made so forcefully by President Obama, is a correct and justified demand. Not only because the president of the United States is demanding and pressuring, but mainly because that is the true and vital Israeli interest. Construction should be halted in all settlements without exception -- not a house and not a hut, not in isolated settlements and not in settlements blocks, neither natural growth nor artificial growth.

What has no right to exist naturally has no right for natural growth, either. The settlements should never have been built in the first place, and should not continue to exist. Young settlers should be told that they cannot build homes in an occupied territory which would not remain under Israeli rule, and that they must find their future within the recognized borders of Israel -- the Green Line borders. Soon, their parents would join them.

http://www.pww.org/article/articleview/15878/

[Voice for Peace]

1. K nt

[bluestateguy]

2. As I recall, Obama has not called for existing settlements to be torn down

Am I correct?

[shira]

3. it's unrealistic to expect MAJOR settlements to be abandoned or torn down

UNRES 242 stipulates that defensible borders be negotiated. The 1949 armistice lines are not sacrosanct. No return to the "Auschwitz" borders of 1949 was expected according to UNRES 242.

[Ken Burch]

6. It's pointlessly inflammatory to refer to the pre-1967 borders as the "Auschwitz" borders

Palestinians. Are. Not. Nazis.

Please don't ever make that insinuation again. It's beneath you.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

10. It's unrealistic to expect peace if they aren't.

Which, sadly, is not to say that you are wrong about them remaining.

[Igel]

4. "What has no right to exist naturally has no right for natural growth"

Of course, that's also the argument against the right of return for Jews to Israel.

In fact, if you have no right to exist, naturally you pretty much have no right to much of anything.

Quite a salient and crucial point Avnery's making there. Too bad that many who agree with him here would disagree with his logic being extended to anywhere else. It doesn't achieve the right goal, if transplanted.

[Name removed]

5. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Ken Burch]

7. The cost was less because the Israeli government SUBSUDIZED the settlements

Israel is the only country in history to have offered financial inducements to its citizens to live in occupied territory. Giving people low rents in exchange for living in what is effectively a war zone is moral numb.

There is no way you can defend the settlements and still claim to want peace. Peace means abandoning the notion of conquest.

And your side uprooted Arab families who'd lived in their homes for centuries in 1948. It was called Plan Dalet. If it's wrong to uproot the settlers, why was it right to uproot innocent Arab civilians?

No one is objecting to the settlements because the inhabitants are Jewish. The objection is that the settlements were built on land that is indisputably Palestinian.

And the worst of it is, you demand that people back your arrogant position and back it without question just to prove they don't "hate Jews".

Most Israelis are against the settlements. The settlements contribute nothing to Israeli security, and they stoke Palestinian rage.

There is nothing the Israeli government could offer the Palestinians that could ever, under any circumstances, make up for permanently annexing all the worthwhile land in the West Bank. There's nothing good left OUTSIDE the settlements.

Besides, all that benign imagery you spun about those settlers obscures the fact that the existence of those settlements made it impossible for most Palestinians to live a normal, benign life. And condemning this is not condemning a religion OR an ethnicity(and Israelis have never been of a single ethnicity in any case)but is a condemnation of a what was meant to be a national liberation movement but which turned into a right-wing colonialist project instead. The point of Zionism was to give the world's Jewish communities a place of safety, not to take land for the sake of taking land.

[Violet_Crumble]

9. Unfortunately there's a small number of supporters of the settler movement at DU...

And that poster is one of them, though it's been dishonest in the past and claimed it was opposed to the settlements. Now that the Obama administration is talking business and stating its opposition to settlement expansion, the true colours of this and one or two others are starting to show...

Not that there's ever much of any logic in that posters one-line comments, but it's showing a real disconnect from reality when it insists that the settlers will get violent. The vast majority of the settlers aren't there for religious or ideological reasons, but because of it being cheaper to live there than in Israel. They're not going to be violent and it's only the lunatic extremists that will be violent, but they are already so like nothing's going to change on that front...but to claim that the majority of settlers will be violent is an insane claim to make...

[Violet_Crumble]

8. Economic settlers are not going to be violent or resist being moved to Israel...

OTOH, the extremist settlers and their American "progressive" supporters who whine and moan about how the settlers shouldn't be moved are the only ones who are lunatic enough to want to violently resist (you call that terrorism when Palestinians do it). The settlements are in violation of international law and land and property was stolen from Palestinians who when they've been uprooted from their homes you've not had a shred of sympathy for them.

Israeli settlers aren't something special and don't get to ignore the laws everyone else gets to live by.

Get over it.

Of course when it comes to Jews, Zionists or Israelis, some of these American "progressive" supporters of Israel become no different than Meir Kahane