Friday, January 09, 2009

A two-state solution?


I hold no particular position in favour of one or two state solutions in Palestine and Israel; maybe because I'm too pessimistic to see any likelihood of a solution of any kind in the near or medium term.
Anyway, here is an update of the excellent postcards showing why a two-state solution is a ludicrous idea at the moment, unless the illegal outrage that are the West Bank settlements is properly dismantled.
I came across a website the other day, a very good example of the disingenuous sneakiness of the pro-Israeli camp. The website - PalestineFacts or something like that - purported to be a purely factual presentation of the situation in Palestine and Israel, allowing people to choose for themselves. The tone was fairly dry and academic, and there was official-looking information on how to cite the website. The historical stuff looked ok (I was specifically looking for information on the Palestinian killings of dozens of Jews in Hebron in 1929, to inform a post on Hebron).
But get to the settlements page and the site reveals its true colours. Far from being a 'factual' account, a substantial part of the page was occupied (no pun intended) by the argument that it wouldn't be acceptable for white neighbourhoods in the US to refuse black people the right to build houses in the middle of their communities, juts because they were black. So, the argument goes, it's racist of Palestinians to refuse to have Jewish settler neighbourhoods in their areas. No account taken, of course, of the fact that if a black community sought to build houses in a white neighbourhood in the USA they would presumably be aspiring to fit in and meet with their neighbours, and would build their homes in empty spaces after going through a due process of planning permission. Whereas these put-upon and racially vistimised settlers in the West Bank only have the intention of building ethnically pure communities where Palestinians are permitted occasionally as underpaid and abused labour and certainly not near any homes, and that these communities come aong not with planning permissions and local integration plans but with bulldozers, land confiscation plans and the full military might of the world's fourth largest military, and they then routinely shoot at, steal more land from, expropriate massively disproportionate amounts of water from and damage the olive trees and mutilate the sheep of their unreasonable Arab neighbours.
Wow, Palestinians are just so unreasonable as to not want shooting and their livestock torturing. Outrageous.

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