If it only took 11 minutes for President Truman to recognize the State of Israel, why it requires not 11 years but decades to give Palestinians their independence and to bring back the borders before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. Taking the unilateral role in this conflict U.S. should also be impartial.
In every pro-Palestinian effort, the right-of-return is always Number 1 on the agenda. You will never bear witness to a pro-Palestinian group that is divorced from this pipe-dream.
So virulent has been middle east peace talking that it seems only closed Facebook forums might qualify as “collegial and scholarly” in the area, an observation made when I started looking for a place to channel liberal Turkish interest in the conflict.
I didn’t want to hustle anyone into the rah-rah Zionist camp nor leave any to the wolves roaming the cyber corridors of any open proto-Nazi “hate-peace” peace groups.
As the group I found is a closed one, I won’t make mention of it here.
🙂
Still, it strikes me as remarkable how even persons of good intent may be misled into believing that Israel came into existence as compensation for the Holocaust, an event that in the twisted minds of some didn’t happen (oh yes it did) and in others for which there is no compensation although there has been that for a range of crimes — start with the theft of property — and it is good that apology, consideration, fairness, and forgiveness persist in this world and that some have yet the courage to prove it.
Of course, it may be less good that anti-Semitism provoked by ambitions related to religious succession and woven into the politics of the middle east also persist, and the poisoned politics coming of that have made the Arab refugees of 1948 first among its victims.
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Yet despite the uproar, Fox is already a popular brand in the Palestinian territories. Store owners stock Fox products even in Hamas-controlled Gaza, where the government is far more hostile to Israel.
‘‘People in Gaza know that these items are made in Israel, but they buy them because they’re good quality,’’ said shopkeeper Raji Isaac, who has offered Fox products in his Gaza City store for the past four years. ‘‘Customers always look for good products and reasonable prices, and Fox is offering that.’’
As conflicts go, problems with the one known as the “middle east conflict” — today, probably the most peaceful conflict extant in the region — include the intransigent anti-Zionist / anti-Semitic ambitions of those in political power in the West Bank and in Gaza and the fact that The Preoccupation with Israel includes Israeli services in such municipal basics as electricity and water, significant contributions in the transport of goods, encouragement of trade and employment, and provisions for refugees in the areas of advanced education and health.
You would think that living and working in close proximity would encourage peace but never so much so if one party or the other believes itself mistreated or robbed, and that even if through nothing more than repeated libels.
Additional Reference
Karsh, Efraim. Palestine Betrayed. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010.
Meir-levi, David. History Upside Down: The Roots of Palestinian Fascism and the Myth of Israeli Aggression. New York: Brief Encounters, 2007.
Morris, Benny. 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2008.
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