Israel/Palestine

I bring this dialogue up now as necessary commentary on the video just released by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The clip is slickly produced, strangely mistargeted and absurd in its argument: that Palestinian demands to remove Israeli settlements as part of a two-state agreement amounts to “ethnic cleansing.” Nonetheless, the clip has value. It suggests a valuable strategy for promoting the agreement that Netanyahu wants to prevent: Offer an option for letting settlers stay put, as citizens of the new State of Palestine.

The number of settlers who would stay under those conditions could meet in a small cafe in Ramallah, perhaps at one table. All the rest would do the Zionist thing and move to the state of Israel.

Still, it's an idea for a future American mediator to keep in her arsenal. And just playing out the scenario now, in theory, shows that the argument in Netanyahu's video is not worth buying.