Tuesday, December 14, 2010

Rescuing Zionism at Palestinian expense


A GOOD PIECE

Ali Abunimah, The Electronic Intifada, 13 December 2010

" Standing in front of a huge banner of an Israeli flag merging into the American Stars and Stripes last Friday, US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton gave yet another set-piece speech laying out how US "engagement" would help bring peace in our time.

Speaking at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center in Washington, DC with Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak and key Israel lobby figures looking on -- including Salam Fayyad, the puppet "prime minister" of the US- and Israeli-backed Palestinian Authority -- Clinton asserted that "a Palestinian state achieved through negotiations is inevitable" ("Remarks at the Brookings Institution's Saban Center for Middle East Policy Seventh Annual Forum," 10 December 2010).

What Clinton laid out in diagnosis and prescriptions, however, ensures that a Palestinian state is anything but inevitable. It is vanishingly unlikely.....

For the discredited Palestinian Authority "leadership" which rushed to Washington as soon as Clinton beckoned, the secretary of state had these instructions: "To demonstrate their commitment to peace, Israeli and Palestinian leaders should stop trying to assign blame for the next failure, and focus instead on what they need to do to make these efforts succeed." She warned Palestinians specifically, in reference to efforts to get more states to recognize Palestine: "Unilateral efforts at the United Nations are not helpful and undermine trust." Recently, Brazil and Argentina joined more than a hundred countries that recognize the nonexistent "State of Palestine" declared by the Palestine Liberation Organization in November 1988.

In other words, Palestinians must continue to take it on the chin as Israel does what it pleases with American support. Only Palestinians intent on committing national suicide could go along with such a charade. Those who support genuine peace for Palestinians and Israeli Jews, based on universal rights, equality, restitution and the decolonization of the relationship between the populations, must escalate the real peace process: boycott, divestment and sanctions to force Israel to respect Palestinian rights and obey international law."

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