Raymond Deane, The Electronic Intifada, 11 February 2008
(Raymond Deane is a composer, and a founding member of the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign)
"......I have described Cook's diagnosis as "uncompromisingly grim," and it must be said that Israel and the Clash of Civilisations left this reader with a depressing sense of impotence. Cook attempts to cheer us up in his final paragraph, concluding that "The most likely outcome [of US-Israeli efforts to remake the Middle East] ... was the forging of new political, religious and social alliances across the Middle East whose effects it was almost impossible to predict or imagine." Perhaps, however, there is more hope to be gleaned from the preface: "It is not entirely accidental that in dragging the US into a direct occupation of Iraq that mirrors Israel's own much longer occupation of the Palestinian territories, Israel has ensured that the legitimacy of both stands or falls together." Perhaps we are not too far from the day when the illegitimacy of the Iraq adventure will become so patent to Americans themselves that their blind support for the Zionist project will at last evaporate."
No comments:
Post a Comment