The New Statesman has an essay 'On the responsibility of intellectuals' by George Scialabba who published a book titled 'What are intellectuals good for' back in 2009, when Obama's victory had raised expectations regarding what erudite and thoughtful people could do to make society better. Sadly, as Obama said of American foreign policy, what they could do was 'stupid shit'.
As the conscience of society, writer-thinkers should not be swayed by prevailing political opinion in the Israel-Hamas conflict.
I can think of no 'writer-thinker' who is my conscience or the conscience of any country of which I have knowledge. There is no harm in being 'swayed by prevailing political opinion' if that opinion is being expressed by Pundits who have had a great track-record in predicting important political changes or, indeed, who played a part in resolving thorny political questions. Our consciences should be swayed by the opinions of those smarter than us.
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
—WH Auden, “September 1, 1939”
Auden was wrong. Those to whom evil is done may be unable to do any evil because they keep getting killed or incarcerated if they try. Children know this. We do a lot of evil to battery chickens. We don't greatly fear a rebellion of the chickens which will end in our being put in cages and fed corn so as to furnish the dinner tables of our feathered friends.
“The 7 October attack by Hamas was morally barbarous and strategically futile.
Sadly, it may have been a stroke of strategic genius. We don't know what they have up their sleeve. It came as a shock to Israel that China seemed to side with Hamas. Now the Chinese have unveiled a new much cheaper type of military drone. Meanwhile, Putin is hinting that he will do nuclear proliferation just as China did during the Eighties and Nineties. The future is unlikely to conform to our complacent view of things.
Nothing justifies the killing of innocents, not even the denial of a people’s nationhood for 75 years,
The problem is that no Palestinian entity seems viable and cohesive. The question now is whether Hamas can take over the West Bank and East Jerusalem from a geriatric PLO. Moreover, it appears that the majority of Palestinians now reject a two state solution. Only the physical elimination of the Jewish population will satisfy them. Currently, they have rockets. What happens when they have state of the art drones?
the displacement of hundreds of thousands of them to make way for colonial settlers,
There were immigrants- refugees mainly- just as there are immigrant refugees in all the big Cities of the West. Of course, a White American like the author is welcome to hand back any real estate he owns to the indigenous people of that country.
or the killing of thousands of their own innocents in scandalously disproportionate ‘reprisals’.
America killed 1.3 million Muslims and caused the displacement of tens of millions more. This turned out to be a godsend only for Iran and China. That is the true scandal here.
And as for strategy, for the weak (and not only for them),
Hamas is not weak. It defeated the PLO and has launched many raids against Israel. It may be that the IDF will be slaughtered as it enters the tunnels of Gaza. Schlieffen and other military strategists have suggested that you can win on the defensive by inflicting disproportionate casualties. Maybe that is what will happen here.
nothing is less efficacious than such violence, which makes trust – the only reliable basis of lasting security – impossible. Better a people should suffer another 75 years of dispossession than that another such crime be committed in its name. Of course, those who would allow this people to go without justice for another 75 years, and who allowed it to go without justice for the last 75 years, share the murderers’ guilt, and with far less excuse.”
I suppose, we share guilt for the people killed in the War against Terror. But which of us is actually losing any sleep over this?
No one asked me for a public statement after the Hamas raid.
Because you know nothing useful in that connection.
If anyone had, this is roughly what I would have said, and I’ve used it as a kind of template in reacting to the innumerable public statements, solicited and unsolicited, that I’ve encountered since the event.
It is a useless template. Why not simply say 'Killing peeps is WRONG! Stop it!'?
The loudest class of reactions – the most numerous, most anguished, most indignant – has been to the least consequential of statements: those of university students. Several dozen student organisations, probably representing several hundred individuals, issued a statement after the raid that began by holding Israel “entirely responsible” for “all the unfolding violence”.
We are welcome to hold them entirely responsible for the fact that my fucking sink is blocked and the plumber is gonna charge me an arm and a leg to unblock it. Students should quit the Academy and train as plumbers. Incidentally, the Institute of Socioproctology is now offering PhD's in unblocking my fucking sink for the low low price of $9.99.
Academic luminaries such as Lawrence Summers, and more consequentially, billionaire donors such as Ken Griffin, Marc Rowan and Jon Huntsman demanded that the universities in question (Harvard and University of Pennsylvania – though Penn was guilty only of hosting a Palestinian literature festival several weeks before the attack) officially disavow the students’ statements.
Which they are perfectly at liberty to do.
There was, of course, little debate about the substance of the letter beyond hand-wringing, and it has now been deleted, with the (desired?) result that there will apparently be little more.
It was silly to say Israel was responsible for the rape and murder of Israelis.
Is this how such matters should be handled in a healthy democratic society,
Yes. Students may do stupid shit and Colleges are welcome to tell them to stop doing such stupid shit. Democracy is irrelevant.
or, for that matter, a self-respecting educational institution?
It doesn't matter if an educational institution is deeply ashamed of its needle dick. What matters is that it should try to get students to do sensible stuff rather than stupid shit.
Couldn’t Summers or some other Harvard eminence responsible for the instruction of the young have descended from Parnassus and shown the deluded students the error of their ways in face-to-face debate?
No. It is enough to signal that there will be adverse consequences for those who do stupid shit. You don't need to give every nutter face-time.
What did the students mean by their first sentence holding Israel “entirely responsible” for the attack?
They meant that Israel is responsible for Israel's existence. Attacking Israel is a good thing. The shame of it is that Israelis didn't just simply slit each others throats.
They could not have meant what the sentence appears to mean: that Israel rather than Hamas carried out the attack.
That is not what it appears to mean. You are responsible for something you caused to happen. If I enter a lion's den, I am responsible for the lion eating me.
They must have been making a statement about moral responsibility for the attack.
Not necessarily. There is a legal concept of 'vicarious liability'. In this case, however, it would be perfectly reasonable to say that the Israeli government was negligent. They should have had more troops on the border and had better intelligence.
To absolve Hamas of responsibility for murder is plainly wrong; therefore “entirely responsible” is indefensible. But what if the students had written “largely responsible”?
Vicariously responsible by reason of negligence would be fine. Provocation might also be mentioned.
Suppose that during the Vietnam War the National Liberation Front (NLF), or Viet Cong, had committed some atrocity comparable to Hamas’s?
Why go so far back in time? 9/11 was directly comparable to what Hamas did. Incidentally, various Palestinian outfits have killed plenty of Americans- including an Ambassador to the Sudan.
I don’t know how students then would have reacted, but surely millions of Americans would have agreed that the United States, as the aggressor, was “largely responsible for the unfolding violence”, even if NLF atrocities were also morally wrong.
Sadly, Americans didn't think they were an aggressor. They thought Uncle Sam was handing out sweeties and establishing Democracy and Human Rights and so forth.
Most of the world – though not Americans, by and large – believes that Israel is, in effect, the aggressor in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: for preventing the return of 750,000 Palestinian refugees to their homes after the 1948 war
Mahmoud Darwish's family did return to Israel in 1949. The fact is, there was a population exchange in the MENA such that about as many Mizrachi Jews were expelled as Palestinians. Most Jews were immigrants, not 'colonists', in Israel just as most White Americans are descended from European immigrants who entered the country after the indigenous people had been killed or expelled or confined on reservations.
Still, I suppose a White Londoner may regard people like me and Rishi Sunak as 'colonists' who have turned parts of London into mini-Calcuttas. No doubt, for this author, this licenses attacks by Whites on coloured people in London.
Israel and Pakistan came into existence at about the same time. There was far greater ethnic cleansing in Pakistan. Why should there be one rule for the Pakistanis and another for the Israelis? Is it because Jews are 'Deicides'?
and ever since; for continually extending its illegal settlements on Palestinian land in the West Bank;
rather than expelling Arab citizens?
The Israeli Supreme Court does say some such settlements are illegal. The problem is land seized for a military purpose is deemed to be legally acquired. This means that Israel responds to Palestinian 'pay for slay' by saying it needs to acquire land to improve security but what this actually means is more settlers who are likely to vote in a particular way. So this is real estate as a sort of 'blood money'. Furthermore, because there are half a million American citizens in Israel, 'pay for slay' can lead to reduced international funding. Terrorism merely takes replaceable lives while yielding territory. In this context, only wiping out Jews will give Palestinians what they want because they can't stop their people doing 'pay for slay' with the result that Israel has an excuse to grab territory. Who knows, maybe Israel will take a bite out of Gaza as reparations while claiming it has to do so for security reasons.
The problem with shady real estate deals sanctioned by certain politicians is that they are happening in every country. Israel is not unique in having a lot of immigrants and a lot of shady real estate deals.
for devastating southern Lebanon in 1978 and 1982 in an attempt to destroy the Palestine Liberation Organisation (PLO);
The Lebanese think the PLO devastated their country. They had previously tried the same trick in Jordan.
for refusing to accept the results of the 2006 Palestinian election, in which Hamas was chosen as the Palestinians’ political representative;
this wasn't accepted by the PLO with whom Israel had made the Oslo agreement.
and for imposing an inhumane blockade on the two million inhabitants of Gaza,
which blockade was humane? Which army has used very humane measures to kill the enemy?
and carrying out vastly disproportionate reprisals,
like the American war on Terror? Perhaps, this dude thinks Hiroshima and Nagasaki were very humane responses to Pearl Harbour.
mostly affecting civilians,
there were no civilians in Dresden or Hiroshima- right?
after previous Hamas attacks. I’m pretty sure the rest of the world, having supported countless UN resolutions demanding that Israel give back the West Bank,
the rest of the world doesn't give a shit about the Palestinians. It turned out that Israel produces useful tech which other countries want to buy. The PLO did export some terrorism and extortion but the Taliban and Al Qaeeda and El Shabab and Boko Haram and ISIS did a much better job. Incidentally, Israel helped train the Afghan mujahideen in Pakistan.
would have ignored the students’ statement or rebuked them for rhetorical ineptitude but not seen it as an existential threat to Israel or to Jews.
The names of those students will have been noted by various Intelligence Agencies- including Arab ones. There may be tears before bedtime for some of the non-American signatories.
Student-bashing is a species of left-bashing.
Woke bashing. Anti-Semitism is considered right wing in most parts of the world. Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood offshoot. It isn't Marxist. It is deeply orthodox.
If war is politics by other means, so are polemics about foreign policy.
Political polemics are political. War, speaking generally, is not though defeat may result in the collapse of the regime.
The right and the centre have shown themselves determined to locate and publicise “irresponsible” formulations by the left.
Hamas is right wing.
That would be welcome if they also deigned to take notice of the non-foolish things leftists have to say – often in the same piece – about centrists’ and rightists’ cherished illusions and guilty silences.
I may say something non-foolish from time to time. That is no reason to listen to me. At least this was the verdict of my Mummy and Daddy who loved me dearly but were careful to live at least two thousand miles away from anywhere I resided.
In “Notes on Nationalism” (1945), George Orwell observed: “The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them.”
If you have a side, you don't want to hear about the naughty things it did.
The opinion and commentary I have read so far – in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Foreign Affairs and online sites such as Unherd, Quillette, Compact and Persuasion – has been almost wholly devoid of any mention of Israel’s many crimes against the Palestinians,
like what? The problem with saying something is a crime or that it is illegal is that people expect you to provide alethic information in support of your claim. I have frequently gone to the Police Station to report Margaret Thatcher's raping me with her eyes any time she appeared on the TV screen. Sadly, I was not able to substantiate my allegations with DNA evidence.
as though that would be to minimise the horror of Hamas’s attack or deny Israel’s right to lawful self-defence.
Some Israelis have committed war and other crimes against Palestinians and some have been jailed for it in Israel.
On the contrary, the usual judgement about comparative criminality is implied, for example, in this entirely typical article from New York Magazine:
“The Israel Defense Forces do not, as a matter of policy, aim to kill Palestinian civilians, though it is debatable how sorry they really are when they inevitably do. This differentiates them from Hamas, which glorifies the killing of innocent Israelis (because again, in their worldview, no Israeli is innocent).”
The problem with Hamas is that it may also think the killing of any infidel or apostate is pleasing to God.
In the 15 years before the Hamas attack, Palestinians suffered 6,407 fatalities and 152,560 injuries in comparison with Israel’s 308 and 6,307, respectively.
Between 1970 and 1978, about 10,000 Palestinians were killed in Jordan and Lebanon. Speaking generally, they- or rather some lunatic faction- was the aggressor.
Obviously, every event has both immediate and ultimate causes. In the present case, one should ask both who is responsible for the massacre and who is responsible for its context, the conflict that has generated so many past and (probably) future massacres.
One should ask why the Brits didn't create a Palestinian state at the same time as Israel. The answer, then and now was that the thing was neither economically viable nor politically feasible because of lack of cohesion among the Palestinians.
This is the left-wing reflex, which infuriates left-bashers, who insist that talk of root causes is merely an excuse for “revolutionary” violence.
The Left might say 'root cause' of naughtiness is greedy Capitalist pigs. Left-bashers might say 'root cause' of the Left being utterly shit is that it holds to a paranoid delusion system. This is not to say there aren't plenty of crazy Right Wing peeps who think the Post Office is a cover for a paedophile ring. Also, George Soros is putting something in my beer which is turning me totally queer.
That is an evergreen fallacy: that to explain is to justify.
It may be. It may not be. No fallacy arises in Gricean implicature.
It is doubtless, in some cases, an honest confusion; in others, an ideologically motivated dodge.
This guy thinks people care about 'dodging' stupid shit. We aren't kids playing dodge-ball.
In the latter case, its purpose is to deny that, beyond simply denouncing terrorism by the designated enemy, anything morally relevant remains to be said.
Who has any such purpose. Lots of 'morally relevant' stuff remains to be said- e.g. will you pay for this dinner? I mean, I listened to you gas on about Gaza and so you fucking owe me, dude.'
But some things do remain to be said. First, that by the ordinary definition of terrorism – deliberate violence against civilians for political purposes – both Israel and the United States have also been guilty of terrorism: the former during its 1978 and 1982 invasions of Lebanon, as well as many of its bombing raids in that country at other times, and its blockade and bombing of Gaza; the US far more extensively, through its support, training and arms sales to many brutal regimes and insurgencies; the latter’s large-scale bombing of cities in the Second World War, the Korean War and the Indochina War; and the Iraqi sanctions, which killed tens of thousands of civilians.
This dude is American. He is welcome to try to bring prosecutions against American commanders if such is the case. How about just handing back any real estate he might own to the First Nations from whom it was stolen?
Second, that the definition of terrorism should perhaps be broadened to include reprisals that can hardly fail to produce civilian casualties, like the bombing, strafing and bulldozing of inhabited areas where terrorists may be hiding;
why stop there? Why not broaden the definition of terrorism to include failing to come and do the washing-up which has piled up in my sink? Is it not the case that I could get some dangerous, perhaps fatal, illness as a result of exposure to bacteria growing there?
or that cause a grave deterioration in the life of an entire society, like large-scale jailings, house detonations, curfews, roadblocks, checkpoints, school closings, border closings, import restrictions, destruction of cultural, administrative and agricultural resources, and more.
What about farting in a crowded lift? Is that not terrorism? The plain fact is, if you spend time reading the New Statesman then you are a terrorist because you have not been actively trying to prevent death, injury, or grave hardship to me by reason of my not wanting to do the fucking washing up.
The third point to raise is that those responsible for a huge, flagrant, persistent injustice,
like some people having a dick when many people don't have a dick
which they could remedy without grave detriment to their own society’s security, and which terrorists claim to be protesting, deserve some blame for the terrorists’ crimes (an allocation that does not diminish the terrorists’ responsibility).
Only in the sense that victims of rape deserve some blame for the rapist's crime. Why didn't they kill themselves immediately after being born?
The left’s critics deplore its lack of moral complexity, but their own understanding of terrorism is a virtual flight from complexity.
No. Our understanding of terrorism is such that we run the fuck away from it, not virtually, but in reality. Complexity can go fuck itself.
Another simplicity to which Western (particularly American) intellectuals are prone is “rejectionism”. According to the conventional wisdom, Israel has made many generous peace offers over the years,
No. It has made some realistic, feasible, offers of a mutually beneficial sort. However, many Israelis may never have believed that Palestinians- unlike Egyptians or Jordanians- were capable of keeping their side of any bargain. But this is because Palestine can neither have a viable economy nor a cohesive polity. This was not always evident to supporters of their cause. My own impression was that a Palestinian entity would soon rise in wealth. But for Reagan's 'tough love', the Israeli economy would have continued to be shitty and socialistic.
which Palestinians have refused, demonstrating their – and other Arabs’ – fundamental unwillingness to live peacefully alongside Israel and absolving Israel of its prima facie obligations to somehow make whole the refugees of 1948 and relinquish Palestinian lands annexed since 1967.
There is no such obligation in law or morality.
In the New York Times, under its executive editor AM Rosenthal, and the New Republic under Martin Peretz, probably the two most influential American vehicles of political opinion in the late 20th century, this view was unquestioned.
Neither mattered. Nixon's 'Operation Nickel Grass' soldered the US and Israel together at the hip. Biden was a young senator then. He will continue to uphold that position now- five decades later.
It was, nonetheless, false. The Egyptian Peace Plan of 1971,
This fool means Sadat's response to the Roger's plan. Israel insisted Egypt recognize its sovereignty and negotiate face to face. That was the ultimate outcome. Sadat paid with his life for it but then the Muslim Brotherhood got it in the neck. Hamas is an Ikhwan offshoot. Egypt's army has no great love for it.
the PLO Peace Plan of 1988,
The PLO unilaterally declared independence. The US thought it might strike a deal with Israel the way Egypt had done but became disillusioned with the Palestinians within a couple of years. The demise of the Soviet Union weakened the PLO which, in any case, now faced Islamist opposition. The intifada was collapsing and Saddam's invasion of Kuwait, which Arafat foolishly supported, was the last nail in its coffin though this did not become clear till later.
and the Arab Peace Plan of 2002
which was useless. What was the point of demanding land from Israel when Bush was preparing to invade Iraq?
all envisaged full diplomatic recognition of Israel.
Iraq had recognized Kuwait. Did that stop it trying to invade it?
Israel rejected or ignored all of them.
Just as America ignored the Saudi's plea not to topple Saddam and occupy Iraq
The reason, as with the Madrid, Oslo and Camp David negotiations, is that Israel has never been willing to withdraw from all the occupied territories and allow a Palestinian state there.
The bigger reason is that nobody gives a fuck about the Palestinians- more particularly their brother Arabs. Currently, it is because Uncle Sam paved the way for Iranian hegemony in Iraq and much of Syria and Yemen and Lebanon. Who knows? Maybe Hamas will turn from Iranian cat's paw into the Arab cat's whiskers. Stranger things have happened. Husseini and Arafar were towering figures at certain periods. Why should Hamas not have its moment in the Sun?
The history of the Byzantine manoeuvres with which Israeli negotiators managed to portray various schemes for partial withdrawal but continued control as generous peace offers is told in two books by Israeli writers: Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations (2009) by the Oxford-based historian Avi Shlaim and Israel/Palestine (2002) by the academic Tanya Reinhart, as well as in Noam Chomsky’s monumental and indispensable Fateful Triangle (1983).
They all miss the woods for the trees. Nothing has changed since 1946 when the Brits realized a Palestinian state would not be viable. Egypt would have to take Gaza and Jordon the West Bank and East Jerusalem. But Egypt now wants nothing to do with Gaza and Jordan too passed the buck to Arafat. But, he turned out to be useless- save when compared to his successor.
Many have called the Hamas massacre Israel’s 9/11. If so, we must not repeat that event’s sequel. The response of American intellectuals to 9/11 was shameful.
It was useless. Still, maybe some neo-cons made money out of the Iraqi quagmire. The crook, Chalabi, was considered a neo-con.
Only one explanation was allowed: the terrorists hated American values: democracy, progress, science, freedom.
Nonsense! The explanations I heard tended to focus on the deleterious effects of prolonged sexual intercourse with camels. Admittedly, my interlocutors weren't 'intellectuals'. But they did know a lot- maybe a little too much?- about camels.
The notion that they had grievances, legitimate or fanciful, about American foreign policy was derided as “apologetics for terrorism” or “reflexive anti-Americanism”, even though the George W Bush White House’s chief counterterrorism expert, Richard Clarke, said the same thing, citing publications by al-Qaeda.
Why not tell the truth and shame the devil? We thought we'd get out hands on all that lovely petroleum them A-rabs had. Also our McMansions would keep rising in value and so we'd all be able to retire at 40 and get ourselves a beautiful Ukrainian mail-order bride. Sadly, A-rabs turned out to be way smarter than our ex-Trotskyite neo-cons. Iran was the big beneficiary of a two trillion dollar waste of blood and treasure.
Eventually, after a period of national mobilisation aided by these left-bashing intellectuals – Christopher Hitchens, Charles Krauthammer, the drum-beating Project for a New American Century, the New Republic‘s mean-spirited “Idiocy Watch”, which jeered at reservations about the war on terror – America marched off to two ruinous wars, one criminal and one of tenuous legality.
Then Obama came. Things got worse. Look at Libya or Syria now.
Let us hope Israel is wiser and more law-abiding.
It can't afford to be quite so profligate in doing stupid shit. The point about abiding by laws is that people begin to trust you. You can do mutually beneficial deals. This is where the Palestinians (or rather their various leaders) have fallen down.
Apart from a few student revolutionaries, no one has actually welcomed the Hamas attack and called for more of the same.
The author is blissfully unaware of the many Islamists who think more such attacks are pleasing to God.
What, then, should Western intellectuals say to Israelis and Palestinians?
'I am stupid and senile. Please ignore me'.
We should remind the Palestinians of their own professed belief: “And the retribution for an evil act is an evil one like it, but whoever pardons and makes reconciliation – his reward is [due] from Allah. Indeed, He does not like wrongdoers” (Koran 42:40).
An early Meccan verse. The breach with the Jews came later. Islamists may not be 'intellectuals' in the eyes of this author, but they know the Scripture and Hadith very well. The problem here is that most Hanafis (as Gazans are generally Hanafi) believe that no non-Islamic rule is permissible in the 'peninsula'. This was the position adopted by the Congress-Khilafat combine and the reason Gandhi was so anti-Zionist.
I am pretty sure “wrongdoers” includes “terrorists”.
In March, an Ayatollah in Najaf, Iraq, did issue a fatwa against Hamas. It was possible that the Saudis would be on side. One effect of the Hamas strike is that this fatwa has evaporated.
Islam, Judaism and Christianity all teach that it is better to suffer an evil than to commit one.
Whereas Buddhism insists that you should gouge out the eyes of anybody you don't like the look of- right?
Beyond that, we should advise them to appeal to the conscience of Israelis – and Americans, who have steadfastly enabled Israeli policy since 1967.
Why not appeal to the conscience of beautiful women to come and do my washing up. Who knows? I might reward them with sex. I'm kidding. At my age, sex is just too much bother.
Whether or not that advice turns out to be a cruel joke depends at least in part on
whether we have thrust a radish up our bum and are running around naked
us intellectuals, whose vocation it is to inform the conscience of our societies.
I prefer to inform the conscience of societies in distant galaxies.
We should tell the Israelis that they must refuse to pretend they are blameless, whatever their politicians and their foreign cheerleaders tell them;
In which case, they will turn around and tell us the same thing. The descendants of immigrants should just hand over their real estate to indigenous people and fuck off back where they came from. Rishi Sunak, this means you.
that having suffered even the greatest of evils does not license doing evil in return,
Defending yourself is not the infliction of an evil.
much less to those who had not done them evil in the first place;
In which case any type of war is evil. Zelensky really is an evil Nazi just as Putin says.
and that they have some substantial injustices to redress, and though doing so will probably not gravely threaten their security, they must do so whether or not – though of course as prudently as possible.
I advise this author to be nice. He should avoid being naughty. Also, please don't rape the Environment. It has low self-esteem because Greta Thunberg refused to like its twerking TikTok video
Finally, because power entails responsibility
No it doesn't. Some may wield it in an ethical and responsible manner. But some may not.
and preponderant power entails preponderant responsibility,
The pages of History suggest otherwise. Counter-vailing power may entail responsibilities of a mutual type. Preponderant power does not.
Western intellectuals should not fail to address America’s leaders and citizens.
Who, quite sensibly, will ignore them.
For the sake of a reliable and powerful ally in the region containing “one of the greatest material prizes in world history”, as an American statesman described Middle Eastern oil in the 1940s, and secondly because of a ferocious domestic lobby, the US has virtually conceded Israel carte blanche in its dealings with the Palestinians.
It did so after finding Israel's enemies were useless as interlocutors though, no doubt, leaders in the regions could do profitable deals with Uncle Sam in their own mercenary interests. Support for Palestine was merely gestural. Also, Palestinian leaders have created a lot of headaches for their hosts. More Palestinians have been killed by fellow Arabs than by Jews.
The policy has been a success in its own terms: no serious threat to American dominance in the region has arisen in many decades.
Nonsense! Iran is a serious threat more particularly now it is part of a powerful Eurasian power headed by Beijing. Let us see if anything good comes out of the Biden-Xi summit.
But it is realpolitik at its ugliest. The US cannot dictate peace, of course, but its influence is immense: Israel has no other source of military and diplomatic support.
That can change very quickly. If America becomes isolationist, Israel won't disappear. It will simply have some very strange bed-fellows. However bad Islamic terrorism is, Jewish terrorism is potentially much much worse.
Unfortunately, no one in American politics now has the moral or intellectual stature to propose a just settlement.
There can't be a settlement with an entity which is not politically or economically viable.
Israel’s current political leadership is the most fanatical and bloody-minded in that country’s history.
Hamas's leadership is sweet and nice- right?
And Palestinian politics have never recovered from the Israeli-American overturning of their election in 2006.
There was no such overturning. The PLO kept its territory but failed to keep Gaza out of the hands of Hamas. About 600 people were killed. Neither side was interested in honouring the Mecca agreement.
In Israel/Palestine, it is midnight in the century.
The reference is to Viktor Serge- a Marxist nutter during Stalin's evil reign. God alone knows why this 'intellectual' uses this phrase. I suppose, the truth is the fellow is senile. Perhaps, he will be interested in a post at the Institute of Socioproctology. Currently, my membership has been suspended pending investigations of my allegations of sexual self-abuse and so the only other member is the neighbour's cat. But Chairman Miaow is showing dictatorial tendencies. Western intellectuals must step forward to take over the administration and funding of the Institute otherwise it truly will be 'midnight in the century' or cemetery or whatever
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