Israel is attempting to influence free speech in other countries, just because someone doesn't agree with them? What arrogance? The very idea that Israel thinks it can take away the rights of free speech all because they got their feelings hurt or lost out on making a buck!

The oppressed become the oppressors, and while I can understand the feelings, it's not an excuse to silence people of other countries!

Maybe New Zealand might want to take a look at the existing legal agreements between it and Israel!!!

If you make it impossible to boycott Israeli goods, that takes away any possible means of stopping Netanyahu from carrying out his essentially nationalist-fascist agenda, which is the reduction of the Zionist project to nothing but taking Palestinian land for the SAKE of taking Palestinian land.

Why should be the one country in the world that is made exempt from any form of protest, even a nonviolent protest like an economic boycott?

Israel simply one country among many countries-and it fails even at protecting the people it supposedly exists to protect, putting them in unnecessary danger through its repeated acts of aggression and provocation.

I support its right to exist-but that doesn't have to mean keeping coerced silence about everything its leaders do to the people of Palestine, and the arrogant efforts of those leaders to erase Palestinian territory from the map and Palestinian identity from human consciousness.

The question is what right do they have to enforce it? In the US this would be totally unconstitutional. So, Congress could pass such a law, but no court would ever enforce it. If this were to go in front of an Israeli court I don't know what would happen, but I hope that Israeli justices would reach the same conclusion. Even if they didn't, how would Israel enforce a judgment against the New Zealanders? The Israelis would have to go to New Zealand to get any money. There's a process in most countries for turning a foreign judgment into a local judgment, called domesticating. But, There's no way a New Zealand court would domesticate a judgment on this law, so there's no way the Israelis could enforce it outside of Israel, even if they could enforce it in Israel.

None of this means that Lorde or the New Zealanders have done something good. They haven't, but they have the right to be stupid and wrong.

If she played the concert, she would be giving unquestioning support to Netanyahu and everything he's doing to the Palestinians. She would be endorsing the settlement project, the land thefts, the collective harassment of all Palestinians for the violence of a few. She couldn't do that and retain any humanity.

There's no difference between playing a concert in Israel and endorsing Likud.

Boycotts are the ONLY way to make Netanyahu's regime stop opppressing the Palestinian people. Nothing short of that can lead to any change.

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It might be theoretically possible to play a concert in Moscow from a progressive anti-Putin standpoint. I don't know for sure. It is totally impossible to come in from outside and play a concert in Israel and still represent any progressive or humane viewpoint.

And Lorde hasn't PLAYED Moscow, yet. It's entirely possible she could be persuaded not to play there by human rights activists(I'd encourage them to try, for the record). It's not as though she has made a conscious decision that playing Israel is bad, but playing Moscow was no big deal. She originally agreed to play BOTH places, and it's plausible she could end up playing neither.

I'll give you an example closer to home:

it's not possible to play a concert in North Carolina without giving aid and comfort to the Republican legislature and its white supremacist, anti-LGBTQ, anti-woman agenda. It's not possible for a concert in that state to help the progressive opposition.

And are you really going to argue that people should be forced to play concerts in countries whose regimes they disapprove of?

I would say that if any performer cancels a concert on such grounds(as would be the case on any other grounds), the concert promoters and those who purchased tickets should be reimbursed.

Artists play concerts for their fans, politics should have nothing to do with it.

Using your logic, no progressive should ever do business in any red state. Pretty silly.

And there was one for years against South Africa.

Had you not heard of those?

In any case, why should people be punished for persuading an artist to honor a cultural boycott?

And how can it ever be legitimate to try and forbid people to boycott something?

They could push the Palestinians to accept Jewish nationhood, or at least stop teaching their people to deny it. They could push Palestinians to work with Israelis to achieve coexistence, instead of continuing to try and kill the Jewish state and achieve dominion over the Jews. Instead of merely using the stick to browbeat Israelis into giving away the store to their enemies, they could work for true reconciliation and compromise from both sides. But it's too emotionally easy to just blame the Jews for everything.

that the Israeli government is blameless, and that the only explanation for any of it is anti-Semitism(when actually what it is the natural bitterness any oppressed people feels towards the regime that oppresses them, and would be felt in exactly the same way by Palestinians if it were the Turks or the Romans treating them like this).

Even though none of that has anything to do with reality?
Even though the Israeli government is now led(and likely will be led for life) by a man who's written two entire books opposing the very idea of a Palestinian state and will never change his mind on that?
Even though, if you were a Palestinian, you would feel exactly the same helpless rage?

Even though the IDF spends its days making it impossible for Palestinians to live normal, functional lives?

The Palestinian people are not saints(just as the Israelis are not universally helpless innocent victims), but they are not olive-skinned Nazis, either-the issue here is subjugation and collective punishment, not the identity of the subjugators. And the moment the settlement project was started, the moment the lands on which the Palestinian state everyone knew was always going go have to be a component of any peace began to be seized and distributed to people who, at best, might have had an ancestor who set foot on them fourteen centuries before, any claim that what's being done to Palestinians was "security" and "self-defense" vanished.

Those who oppose anti-Semitism, and Lorde and everyone who posts regularly on this board, have NO obligation to defend anything the Israeli government is doing to Palestinians as part of proving we oppose anti-Semitism. Opposing anti-Semitism is simply about opposing discrimination against or persecution of people who are Jewish. It does not require anyone to hold any particular view about the State of Israel and it does not require anyone to insist that the Palestinian people be crushed.

If you believe, as I do, that the Jewish nation has a right to a state in some part of its ancient homeland, then the Palestinian rejection of that right has been and still is the root cause of the conflict. So it is their fault. Maybe not all, but mostly. And for people like Lorde and the New Zealanders to act as if it's all the fault of the Israelis is not merely false, foolish and unworkable; it's unfair and morally wrong.

The PLO recognized Israel in 1994-a recognition the Israeli government betrayed by mostly continuing to build settlements on the land it knew would HAVE to be part of a Palestinian state

After all these years, the Israeli government has refused to recognized the reality that Palestine is ALSO a nation, and has done everything it could to prevent other countries from doing so as well.

They had to know that MB-Hamas would never accept Israel, would never be interested in any sort of negotiation, and yet they put removing the PLO from the leadership above all other concerns. They put a pointless fixation with being able to say "we won, and they lost" over everything else.

The Palestinian side has at times made mistakes(and mistakes were made by those who claimed to act on their behalf-it was the Jordanians who expelled the indigenous Jewish community from the West Bank and closed off East Jerusalem between 1948 and 1967, NOT the Palestinians themselves. They had no power in those years and no way to control anything the Hashemites did) but no, it wasn't MAINLY their fault. For much of the time, the Israelis wouldn't even talk to them in any diplomatic matter and wouldn't give them any real options other than permanent exile or stateless powerlessness at home.

Some of that is to blame to, Aranthus. It's not going to work to expect to the community who's being treated worse, who are losing their land, who are seeing their olive and lemon groves stolen for no valid reason, whose solar panels are torn down just because the military authorities hadn't given the NGO permission to build them yet(as if solar energy can ever possibly be weaponized)who face perpetual surveillance, harassment, and violent retribution even for staging nonviolent protests, to say "you're right-YOUR side, the people who are grinding us into the dirt day after day, have it worse than us and are the REAL victims in this".

How likely was it that these methods were ever going to get the Palestinian side to say the exact words Netanyahu demands they say and say them in exactly the right tone?

It really doesn't matter whether they "recognize" Israel or not-the place isn't going away and they know that.

And ordinary Palestinians know that even if they do recognize Israel, as they clearly did in the Nineties, the Likudniks are NEVER EVER going to be satisfied with anything they do. Why should the say the exact words when saying those words won't lead to any positive change for them, when the army that is crushing them every day is never going to stop crushing them no matter what, will never ever leave?

It's not possible to humiliate and smash people into peace, Aranthus.

How about maybe treating them as human beings?

Your post is so divorced from reality that I don't know where to begin. Perhaps you missed this from the leader of the PA.

https://www.timesofisrael.com/rewriting-history-abbas-calls-israel-a-colonial-project-unrelated-to-judaism/

Perhaps you are ignorant of the lengthy history of Palestinian rejectionism. However, saying that the Palestinians "made mistakes" is just too much. Would you call the Israeli expulsion of Palestinians in 1948 a mistake? Of course you wouldn't. You'd call it a war crime. Do you really think that starting a war is a "mistake?" The Palestinian cause for the destruction of Israel is no mistake. It is hatefulness. You ask that I treat the Palestinians as human beings. The thing is that you are not human because you have rights. You are a full member of the human community because you can bear obligations. And if you can't hold the Palestinians to the same obligations of decent conduct that every other person is held to, then it is you who does not treat them as human beings.

Last edited Tue Feb 6, 2018, 06:51 PM - Edit history (1)

There were valid reasons for Israel to exist in 1948(now, in an era in which Jewish people are fully welcome to immigrate to any English-speaking country and live there in absolute peace and safety, can we be sure those reasons still exist? The state is not going away, but is it really, at this stage, any more sanctified or righteous in its need to exist than any other?).

After 1967, everything forever changed.

There is no way to describe the West Bank settlement project as anything BUT colonialism. Israel had no practical or "security" needs to start taking any of that land. While it could have been justifiable to insist on the resettlement of the indigenous West Bank Jewish community who were driven out by the Hashemites in 1948, but there was no excuse for sending in people with no personal connection to the West Bank and, in some cases, only a tangential connection to Israel itself(such as the Russian immigrants).

It can't be anything but colonialism to say to the people who have lived on those lands, without interruption, for 14 going on 15 centuries "sorry, this is ours-it was never yours, and nothing you've done or been here in the whole time counts. You can either leave, or you can stay but as nothing but powerless outsiders".

It can't be anything but colonialism to forever have the IDF swaggering through the streets of every West Bank city acting as though everyone is a terrorist.

And those doing the rejecting in 1948 weren't the Palestinians-they were the OTHER Arab countries who had their own agenda-which was mainly about keeping the U.S. and "the West" out of the region, and which would have caused them to reject the creation of ANY non-Arab state in the area. The Palestinians had no real say or role in the Arab decisions of '48. They had no voice in any negotiating process and none of the parties who claimed to be acting on their behalf gave a damn about them.

BTW, at the time of 1948, had the Palestinians themselves had a real say in anything, what possible reason would they have had to trust the new state to actually ALLOW them to create a state on their own? Why should they have assumed that they could trust the people who were in the process of expelling those 800,000 people and in destroying hundreds of Arab villages? Would YOU have trusted the side that did that if you were a Palestinian? I'd refer you to some of the things Moshe Dayan(a man no one would call a dove) said about that.

It's not as simple as "if they' said 'yes' in 1948, everything would be fine now".

The problem of the Palestinians believing that from the beginning.

Ken: "There were valid reasons for Israel to exist in 1948(now, in an era in which Jewish people are fully welcome to immigrate to any English-speaking country and live there in absolute peace and safety, can we be sure those reasons still exist?"

Of course they still exist. In fact, there really is only one reason for Israel to exist. That the Jewish nation in Israel chooses to exercise their inherent right to have it. That's the same reason there needs to be any other state. That the Palestinians reject that right is the cause of the conflict. Full stop. If you don't understand that, and the consequences of that rejection for the Palestinians (refugees and no state of their own), then you seriously don't understand the issue.

Ken: "And those doing the rejecting in 1948 weren't the Palestinians"

Of course they were. They may not have been the only ones, but they were the initial instigators of the war. They also fomented the war in 1967 along with the Syrians.

Ken: "The Palestinians had no real say or role in the Arab decisions of '48. They had no voice in any negotiating process and none of the parties who claimed to be acting on their behalf gave a damn about them.

Perhaps not after they started the war, but if they hadn't; if they had tried to reach a compromise with the Jews, then would the Arab states have had the opening to ruin them? The truth is that if the Palestinians really wanted their own state (and that's a huge if as opposed to merely wanting to prevent a Jewish state), then the way to have done it would have been to compromise with the Jews and not give the surrounding Arab states a reason or opening to invade. In fact, the Palestinian leadership was counting on Arab state participation to win the war.

Ken: "BTW, at the time of 1948, had the Palestinians themselves had a real say in anything, what possible reason would they have had to trust the new state to actually ALLOW them to create a state on their own? Why should they have assumed that they could trust the people who were in the process of expelling those 800,000 people and in destroying hundreds of Arab villages?"

You have the year wrong. The relevant year was 1947. Had the Palestinians accepted the Partition Plan (or any compromise) instead of starting a war, then they would have had a state, and there wouldn't have been any refugees to talk about today.

Ken: "It's not as simple as 'if they' said 'yes' in 1948, everything would be fine now'."

But if they had said "yes" in 1947, then there would have been no war, no refugees, and the state of Palestine would be over seventy years old today. So it really is that simple.

We still have no reason to assume that Ben-Gurion, who had been operating on the assumption that there could be no possible relationship with any of the Arabs OTHER than that of perpetual war, would have permitted a viable Palestinian state to be established.

Ben-Gurion's entire organizing principle was the prevention of peace, of the maintenance of a permanent myth of "crisis". And he was constantly appeasing the territorial maximalists.

SO, again, how can you be so certain the Palestinians would have gained a state, or gained anything other than what they have now?

And even if, even IF you were right about 1947...can you truly say that what happened then, SEVENTY YEARS AGO, justifies EVERYTHING, or even anywhere close to the majority of things, that have been done to Palestinians since that date?

It certainly can't be cited to justify the freaking Occupation, since the Occupation of the West Bank does nothing but make the situation more and more unstable.

OR that there is any possible logic in the assumption that, if the problem was the Palestinians having an issue with Jews living there(they got on fairly well with the indigenous non-Zionist Jewish community)that an endless process of collectively punishing and humiliating all of them for the actions of those who might resist violently was EVER going to cause the Palestinian people to accept the notion that the whole thing was THEIR fault? Why stick with humiliation when insisting on humiliation is the ONE thing guaranteed to prevent these people from ever changing in the ways you would like them to change?

Also...really, when you come down to it...we all know Israel as a country is never going to be ended-we all know that-how much difference does it really make what words Palestinians say about it? Why is it not enough for them to simply say(as the PLO said in 1994) that the recognize "the State of Israel"? Why the bloody minded insistence that they recognize it using the EXACT words Netayanhu, Prime Minister-for-Life, the man whose party will never ever be replaced in government by any party with humane, democratic values, insists that they must say?

It's that you keep trying to mitigate and excuse Palestinian rejectionsim.


Ken: "We still have no reason to assume that Ben-Gurion, who had been operating on the assumption that there could be no possible relationship with any of the Arabs OTHER than that of perpetual war, would have permitted a viable Palestinian state to be established."

It wasn't an assumption that came out of nowhere. It came out of persistent Palestinian rejectionsim. Do you seriously think that the Israelis, if faced with a Palestinian people that accepted a Jewish state and wanted to make a territorial deal, that the Israelis would have found a way to start a war? That's preposterous speculation, that exists only to let the Palestinians off the moral hook. It won't wash.

Ken: "And even if, even IF you were right about 1947...can you truly say that what happened then, SEVENTY YEARS AGO, justifies EVERYTHING, or even anywhere close to the majority of things, that have been done to Palestinians since that date?"

Except that the Palestinians never stopped pushing the conflict. Palestinian terrorism led to the 1956 Sinai war, fomented the Six Day War, the Lebanon war, the Intifada and today. Does seventy years of Palestinian rejection of compromise and peace justify everything that the Israelis have done over the last seventy years? No, of course not. But it does justify most of it. And yes, Palestinian aggression justifies the Occupation just as the genocidal aggression of the Nazis justified the occupation of Germany.

Ken: "Also...really, when you come down to it...we all know Israel as a country is never going to be ended-we all know that-how much difference does it really make what words Palestinians say about it? Why is it not enough for them to simply say(as the PLO said in 1994) that the recognize "the State of Israel"? Why the bloody minded insistence that they recognize it using the EXACT words Netayanhu, Prime Minister-for-Life, the man whose party will never ever be replaced in government by any party with humane, democratic values, insists that they must say?"

It's the difference between being able to defend yourself and having the other guy not want to kill you. No matter how capable you are of defending yourself, you want the other guy to stop wanting and stop trying to kill you. Why is that unreasonable?

...how about not continually harassing, repressing and immiserating the OTHER guy...you know, the other guy who, in this case, lives totally at your mercy. How about ceasing to try to KILL the other guy? How about no longer acting like "the other guy" has less right to be where he is than you do?

OH, and no, the Palestinians weren't continually rejecting Israel.

Arafat made offer after offer after offer to negotiate.

Those offers would have led to the PLO(and, if these offers were accepted when the PLO was at the height of its influence, rather than being only partially accepted in the Nineties when the PLO, in part as a result of years of Israeli efforts to try and discredit and remove it as the negotiating voice of Palestinians, was no longer in a position to fully enforce compliance on the Palestinian side, would have stuck), recognizing Israel in exchange for Israeli acceptance of a Palestinian state.

Israeli government after Israeli government refused to take him up on it, refused to accept the reality that there was no way any Palestinian leadership could ever agree to anything short of a real state for THEIR people(for most of the time from 1967 to 1994, all the Israeli side was willing to offer was Begin's "autonomy" proposal-a proposal every Palestinian knew would never give them any real say in their lives and could be revoked at a moment's notice, as Begin demonstrated when he arrested democratically-elected West Bank mayors and which Netanyahu permanently discredited by his arrogant insistence on sending the IDF in to retake the ENTIRE area and reduce the PA to a meaningless shadow government with no power to do anything), and refused to accept that there was never going to be any alternate Palestinian leadership which would ever be MORE flexible than the PLO. They also refused to accept the reality that a peace agreement without the PLO, or any other armed factions, would be intrinsically meaningless, since any side not included in the agreement would simply go on fighting and nobody would be able to do anything to stop them-and I think you'd have to concede the point, that it would never realistic or even remotely reasonable to expect a non-PLO Palestinian government to launch a military campaign to liquidate any Palestinian factions not party to an agreement-you can't ask a new state, as part of an independence agreement, to immediately start a civil war, for God's sakes. A new country can't come into existence with its leaders pledged to kill large groups of people living within its bounds.

And sometimes, the Israeli side had the most pointless, trivial grounds for refusing to negotiate imaginable...for example, what DIFFERENCE did it make if the PLO recognized Israel as soon as talks began(which was what Arafat usually proposed) rather than recognizing it BEFORE negotiating? It was recognition either way, and it meant the same thing either way.

And there were also the decades when the Israeli side refused to admit that Palestinian national identity was a thing or that Palestinians themselves had any real roots in the lands, insulting these people by pretending that they basically all came in on the night bus from Cairo in late 1946 or something just to be nasty, as well as pretending that their issues with the Israeli state were based on prejudice against Jews when it was clear that, while there were always some Palestinian anti-Semites, the anger Palestinians expressed was not mainly bigotry it was the anger any oppressed people would naturally people towards anyone who oppressed it.

It was never bigotry, for example, to be angry that Israeli soldiers destroyed your home, stole your olive or lemon trees, or caused your grandfather to die of a heart attack at a checkpoint in the name of maintaining their authority for no other reason than the sake of displaying "authority".

And it's not bigotry for Palestinians to refuse to accept a phraseology for recognizing Israel that would require them to recognize it as a state where some of their own relatives would effectively be treated as an inferior race-which is what the words Netanyahu demands would do. It would be impossible for Israeli Arabs to ever again be treated equally with other Israeli citizens under the law if Netanyahu's phraseology-words NO previous Israeli government ever demanded that Palestinians say-were imposed.

It never was. Arab rejectionism is not based on anger, and never was. It's based on chauvinism and antisemitism. Granted there is benefit in not mistreating people (which is not justified in any case), but holding the Palestinians morally accountable isn't about wanting them to get over their anger. It's about expecting them to do the right thing and to accept the consequences of their actions.

Ken: "OH, and no, the Palestinians weren't continually rejecting Israel."

That's so obviously false even you must realize it.

Ken: "Arafat made offer after offer after offer to negotiate."

Even if that were not a misrepresentation of history, so what? Offering to negotiate with Israel is not nearly the same thing as accepting the right to exist of a Jewish state. That the Palestinians still don't accept, and it's the core issue driving the conflict.

Ken: "And sometimes, the Israeli side had the most pointless, trivial grounds for refusing to negotiate imaginable...for example, what DIFFERENCE did it make if the PLO recognized Israel as soon as talks began(which was what Arafat usually proposed) rather than recognizing it BEFORE negotiating? It was recognition either way, and it meant the same thing either way."

Several reasons. First, because Israel's right to exist isn't negotiable. It's a right that the Palestinians need to accept before there can be negotiations to resolve those other issues. Otherwise, it looks like the Arabs aren't really accepting Israel's existence as a right. Second, since it's the major issue, if the Arabs won't give on that, then there isn't much point in talking about anything else.

Ken: "And there were also the decades when the Israeli side refused to admit that Palestinian national identity was a thing or that Palestinians themselves had any real roots in the lands, insulting these people by pretending that they basically all came in on the night bus from Cairo in late 1946 or something just to be nasty, as well as pretending that their issues with the Israeli state were based on prejudice against Jews when it was clear that, while there were always some Palestinian anti-Semites, the anger Palestinians expressed was not mainly bigotry it was the anger any oppressed people would naturally people towards anyone who oppressed it."

The Israelis de jure accepted the right of a Palestinian state when they accepted the Partition Resolution. They don't have to do it again because that's already a done deal even though the Arabs rejected Partition.

The bottom line is that you continually blame the Israelis, while asserting that Palestinian actions are merely "mistakes." You may do in different ways, but you are dehumanizing both sides.

Last edited Wed Feb 7, 2018, 02:42 AM - Edit history (5)

And it proves the Palestinians were not refusing to recognize and that the rationale for Israeli refusal to negotiate with them was bogus. It was simply never reasonable to expect Palestinians to recognize Israel BEFORE negotiations were even considered.

If recognition is what's important to you, than recognition should be worth the trivial compromise of waiting until the moment the talks started. Recognition is recognition is recognition.

Placing the concept of a "right to recognition" BEFORE the actual gaining of recognition is somewhere between pointless and perverse. It makes the assertion of the right to be recognized into an impediment to the actual achievement of recognition. And in what war, or what UNIVERSE, does that ever end up even making sense?

And it has ONLY been the Palestinians who were expected to accept the RIGHT of Israel to be recognized as a precondition. Why them and ONLY them?

If Sadat and King Hussein(you remember them-the heads of state of the countries who STARTED the Six-Day War? ) didn't have to recognize Israel's "right to be recognized" at the outset, if it was enough that they recognized when the negotiated agreements were signed, it should have been enough for the Palestinians to do the same. And what you either forget or refuse to acknowledge recognition was the ONLY bargaining chip the Palestinians had. If they recognized before negotiations, that would have guaranteed that the Israeli government would never, under any circumstances, have accepted a Palestinian state.



If they recognized a "right of Israel to be recognized" before there were any negotiations, Israel wouldn't bother negotiating with them. Whatever the Israeli government of the day happened to be would simply proclaim that it had won and would simply fill the rest of the West Bank settlements, while offering the Palestinians nothing at all, would do nothing but humiliate them, would forever deny Palestinians any right to vote in Israeli elections(the only elections in which voting rights would have mattered-local elections in that scenario would have been meaningless).

And the end result of all of that(since it was never possible that Palestinians would have accepted that state of affairs as their natural station in life and since it would have been utterly unreasonable to expect them to leave their homeland) would inevitably have been the emergence of a newer, more extreme, more desperate Palestinian armed resistance-a resistance the IDF could never have defeated militarily.

And that resistance would immediately UNDO any recognition of any right to be recognized.

All of that would be the unavoidable consequences of the useless assertion of a "RIGHT to be recognized".

Why put the assertion of such a "right" above everythign else? Above ACTUAL recognition? Above repeated chances to end the fighting? Above any possibility of Israelis getting to live in a country that is not sliding(as it now irrevocably is)towards reaction, ethnic supremacism and authoritarianism? Above even the preservation of the somewhat domestically progressive character of that country's past(a character now almost totally lost)?

How is "a right to be recognized" more important than life itself?

Do you actually WANT this conflict to come to an end?

Recognition and right to exist are not the same thing. You can recognize a government and still work to conquer the country, which is exactly what Arafat was doing. But even that is beside the point of the conversation. What I find truly troubling is your persistence in blaming Israel and letting the Arabs off the hook. To you Israel is an "oppressor" but the hateful actions of the Arabs, some of which you would surely call ethnic cleansing if done by Israel, are in your words, just a "mistake."

and still work to conquer that country(which is not necessarily what Arafat was doing, but was what the U.S. government did to every Native American nation in the path of Manifest Destiny). Recognizing a "right to exist" wouldn't prevent any duplicity in practice any more than recognizing a state does.

I blame the aggressiveness of the Israeli government mainly(the Palestinian leadership have made some mistakes, especially in the forms of resistance they've used) because it has been too sweeping in its willingness to punish and because it was always stupid of that government to spend decades trying to remove the PLO as the negotiating voice of the Palestinian people-we know, as we always all did, that there was never any possibility of replacing the PLO with a leadership that both have actual credibility with the Palestinian people(and especially the armed factions whose willingness to voluntarily stop fighting would be crucial)AND be willing to do and say everything exactly the way Netanyahu, Prime-Minister-For-Life, WANTS it said. The PLO was always the best partner there'd ever be, and it was always obvious that any weakening of the PLO could only lead to making an end to the conflict far less likely. You'd pretty much have to concede the point, given what's played out since 1996.

You've got me wrong on one major point.

I don't blame "Israel". I don't hate the country, and I personally think it does have a right to be there. The government is not the country, the actions of the state are not the fault of the people. I hold the Israeli government MORE responsible than the Palestinians because it has all the real power in the Israel/Palestine dynamic and because its leaders don't seem to care about actually ending the fighting-if they did, they'd have negotiated with Arafat as soon as he started offering to negotiate(it was never possible to militarily defeat the Palestinian side and impose an agreement as surrender terms). Instead, it has simply added condition on condition on condition, and still acts as if it has the right to EXPECT the Palestinian side to make peace without getting a state, that somehow there could be some resolution that denies them a state but could still be just or humane.

And it's not as simple as saying that Palestinians are driven by "hate". In calling it hate(in implying that it's just bigotry, that somehow Palestinians would be fine with anybody ELSE treating them the way the Israeli state treats them), you make it sound as though they have no truly legitimate grievances as to how they've been treated, as though they're all, in effect, making a big deal over nothing It would be helpful if you'd admit that they have a right to consider the West Bank settlements an injustice(it would have been one thing to insist on the return of the indigenous Jewish residents of the West Bank to their homes-it should never have been about importing hundreds of thousands of people with no personal connection to that area just to make a statement about who holds "the upper hand"; if you'd admit that it was wrong to steal the olive and lemon groves Palestinians have tended for 15 centuries; if you'd admit that it was wrong to subject ALL of those people to constant military harassment over the actions of the fairly small number who are violent; and, if nothing else, if you'd accept that a teenage girl should not be facing a 20 year prison sentence for slapping the soldiers who'd just shot her cousin in the head five minutes earlier.

None of that has any connection to "security", none of that makes the Israeli people any safer at all, and there's no way any of it is ever going to lead to the Palestinian people going where you'd like them to go and accepting Israel's right to exist. If you want them to accept that right, it is necessary to accept the fact that they have good reasons to be angry about how the Israeli government has treated them, and in particular how it has treated them since 1967.

And it would be helpful if you'd admit that it's not anti-Semitism to point out that collective punishment policy towards Palestinians is wrong-no one should be expected to defend repression in the present to atone for their great-grandparents having overlooked persecution in the past. There was massive historic persecution of Jews; that persecution, loathesome and indefensible as it was, does not obligate anyone to give unquestioning public support to what the Israeli government does to Palestinians-a people who have no connection to any of that sorry history.