One of the common misconceptions heavily promoted by successive Israeli governments and their lobby in the US is that Israel keeps making generous offers of peace towards the Palestinians but keeps getting rebuffed, and that this is the main hindrance to achieving peace. That this goes against all the facts has been repeatedly pointed out but it has become one of those zombie lies that is trotted out routinely and is reinforced by the western media to justify Israeli excesses, apartheid policies, and the steady and continuous encroachment of Palestinian lands by the expansion of settlements in the Occupied Territories.
We can now witness another such meme in the making. The influential New York Times recently reported that the latest efforts at the never-ending US-sponsored ‘peace process’ risks being scuttled because the Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas reneged on a deal and instead sought recognition of Palestine as a state in various international agencies.
James North and Philip Weiss describe what really happened and how this media narrative is receiving some pushback before it, like past distortions, gets too entrenched as conventional wisdom. The pushback even caused the NYT Public Editor Margaret Sullivan to acknowledge that her newspaper had framed the story wrongly. Jonathan Cook has more.
But that is not going to end the issue. Expect to hear the story of how the ungrateful Palestinians sabotaged the peace talks cropping up all over the place.
The only offer that will be acceptable to the Palestinians is an agreement of the Government of Israel to resettle all Palestinians in refugee camps in what is now Israel. All the folderol about Jewish states, borders, and settlements is just so much boloney. Since any government agreeing to such a demand wouldn’t last an hour, Kerry is just wasting his time, just as his predecessors did. As a matter of fact, the Israel/Palestinian dispute, as things go is small beer compared to the ongoing events in Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Ukraine, and possibly Japan/North Korea, etc. If Messrs Haniyeh, Abbas, and Netanyahu signed a peace treaty tomorrow morning, it would not have the slightest effect on those other ongoing events. The US president and Secretary of State have more important issues to spend their time and energy on.
Actually, it is not in the interest of either Abbas or Netanyahu to agree on a peace settlement. Abbas would have to give up on the resettlement of Palestinians in refugee camps in Israel and Netanyahu would have to throw most of the settlers under the bus. Politically, neither of these positions is viable for either of them.
Prof Singham: Please note that comments # 1 and # 2 came from the same person, who has explicitly acknowledged using both those ‘nyms elsewhere on FtB.
Note also that this person, though otherwise often cogent, is widely considered insane regarding the politics of the Middle East.
@Pierce,
Yes, I am aware that slc1 and colnago80 are the same person and that his views on the Middle East are beyond the pale. I assumed that he had inadvertently used the older slc1 by mistake and not because he is being a sock puppet.
His comments about the use of nuclear weapons are ones that only a person with no ethical sense, actually no humanity, would contemplate. I have long stopped paying any attention to him on this issue because it is clear that he has a set of stock comments, probably on a file somewhere, that he cuts and pastes whenever anything even remotely related to Israel comes up.
But thanks for that link. To see all those barbaric comments (some of which have also been made in response to my posts, over and over again) lined up one after the other is really something. They are the kind of sentiments that require a groveling apology and penance if the person who made them wants to be considered a civilized person. People who say things like that don’t realize the harm they do to their own cause.
Fervent denunciations of both of us as anti-semitic stooges in 5, 4, 3…
Re Butler @ #5
Yawn.