Parroting Anti-Israel Propaganda

PP happened to run across this post by John Robertson and feel compelled to point out some of the distortions and omissions.

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Is the two-state solution in Palestine dead?

[Remember, the term "two-state solution" really means "three-state solution," since there are already two states in the territory of the British Mandate over Palestine.]

In a word . . . yes. And anyone who's been following the growth of the settler movement in the West Bank knows that this is hardly "news."

[This is the key distortion. Whether or not the Palestinian Arabs establish a state in portions of the disputed territories has little to do with whether or not they are made judenrein; it has only to do with whether or not the Palestinian Arabs stop rejecting one.]

The New York Times runs a story today that spotlights first the apparent assassination attempt against Prof. Zeev Sternhell (a prominent Israeli academic and critic of the settlement movement), but then takes a more in-depth look at the messianic, violent, settler movement in the West Bank. (I've pasted the story below.) Although the Times as well as the Washington Post have published some informative (and occasionally incisive) pieces on this subject in recent years, the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan have pushed stories about the situation in the Palestinian territories

[By "Palestinian territories," the writer really means to refer to the disputed territories; there are no "Palestinian territories," although there is some territory which, under the Oslo Accords, are being maladministered by the Palestinian Authority.]

under the radar for most Americans. And that's a shame, because across the Middle East (and the larger Islamic world)), people have pointed to the US's acceptance of the ongoing Israeli occupation of the West Bank (which is now more than 40 years old) as one of the most blatant examples of how the US stands for prejudice and hypocrisy rather than for justice and fairness.

[As pointed out in a recent PRIMER blog entry, Between the Lines: The "Occupation" Ended Long Ago, even Maria Khoury, in an anti-Israel article Obsessed with Taybeh available on the propaganda site This Week in Palestine, tacitly admitted the so-called occupation ended long ago.

Most people forget that for two decades, until the outbreak of the "intifada" in the late 1980's, the Israeli administration of the territories brought about tremendous benefits to the people living there.]

But, at this point, to expect Israel to dismantle its huge settlements in the West Bank is supremely unrealistic. And to expect any Israeli government to truly go after the settler movement in the West Bank - to dismantle the illegal settlements and "outposts" - is just as unrealistic.

[There are "illegal settlements," but they are not to which the writer is referring. Like other governments, Israel has a proceedure under which construction is approved; some communities were built without obtaining proper approval and are thus, under Israeli law, illegal. Under international law, however, they are perfectly legal.]

Why? Remember that Kadima, the party that heads up the current governing coalition in Israel, cannot maintain its hold without the support (and Knesset votes) of Shas, an ultra-Orthodox religious party whose leader, the rabbi Ovadia Yosef, stands squarely behind the settlers. If she is to succeed to the prime ministership (now that the disgraced Ehud Olmert has resigned), new Kadima leader Tzipi Livni cannot risk alienating Shas.

Furthermore, any dismantling of the outposts will require the Israeli army's active participation. Once a bastion of the secularism that Israel's socialist-inclined founding fathers avowed, the IDF now includes a substantial cadre of religious officers and soldiers, many of whom would resist orders to tear down outposts and confront (perhaps violently) their occupants. (In fact, when they were required to do so at the West Bank outpost of Amona in 2005, many soldiers found themselves very "conflicted." That would only be worse by now.)

The religious settlers are both dug in and moving on to new "frontiers" in what they see as their "Promised Land." (And tens of thousands of American Christian fundamentalist evangelicals are cheering them on.) Put simply, any sustained move by the government against the religious settlers would threaten the unity and integrity of the Israeli army, and would quite possibly plunge Israel into a civil war.

[There has been virtually no new settlement in years.]

A growing number of Palestinians recognize that the two-state solution is no longer workable.

[It's interesting that the writer gives no justification to back up this assertion that a "two-state solution is no longer workable."

In reality, it remains as workable as it ever was, requiring only a willingness of the Palestinian Arabs to live in peace.]

That leaves, of course, only a few alternatives:

1. A truly binational state, in which all citizens (Arabs and Jews) have equal political and social rights and standing. That, of course, is the most just and fair solution. It would also mark, for too many, the end of the Zionist "dream."

[Arabs and Jews already have equal rights in Israel. They do not have equal rights in the Palestinian Arab state of Jordan and they don't have equal rights in the Palestinian Authority controlled territory.]

2. An even more apartheid state, with a fast-growing Palestinian population subsumed as an underclass under the domination of a Jewish minority.

[How easily the libel flows from the writer's keyboard.

Israel, of course, is the furthest thing from an apartheid state that exists in the Middle East.]

3. The forced transfer of Palestinians out of the West Bank (and Gaza?). A significant number of Israelis (and, for that matter, American Christian evangelicals) have been calling for this for years.

[The writer apparently considers a miniscule number of outliers to be significant.]

How this situation resolves itself - and how that resolution spills over into Middle Eastern and global geopolitics - are going to have huge impact for decades to come.

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[The writer actually has things backwards. What happens between Israel and its Arab neighbors, including the Palestinian Arabs, is basically impacted by what happens in the rest of the Middle East.

There was not a single word in the writer's blog about any of the real causes of the Arab-Israeli conflict and any of the steps needed to resolve the conflict.]