A couple of great articles today on Israel-Palestine. First up is on Salon, translated from Der Spiegel. Well worth the watch-the-ad thing.
Suddenly a 1980s song by Queen begins blaring from loudspeakers in the room: "Another one bites the dust." In this place, however, the rock music isn't for entertainment. It's an alarm signal indicating that someone or something has touched the fence. Highly sensitive sensors are activated by even the most innocent contact: Palestinian school children throwing stones at the hated wall on their way home, stray dogs coming too close to the barrier...
My favorite Reagan moment - did I just say that?!? - was "Mister Gorbachev, tear down this wall." And to Gorbachev's credit, he did.
If Bush were truly serious about stopping the "war on terror" he would go to the West Bank and say "Mister Sharon, tear down this wall." Then he'd cut off every dime to Israel till it happened. binLaden would be completely impotent against that.
And I thought I was the only one with the fantasy of a South Africa solution, a one person one vote unitary state. Maybe not:
Thousands of Palestinian guest workers still cross the green line to Israel illegally every night. For them, an independent Palestine can only fulfill their dreams temporarily. Many secretly hope for a state shared with the Israelis, one in which everyone has the same rights and that could guarantee their survival.
The other item is a diary on MyDD that looks at the potential for the Palestinian movement to shift toward nonviolence:
Blocking roads and bridges, holding general strikes, boycotts of Israeli products: These are just some of the tactics that Abbas should be advocating. If he fails, the Palestinian people will have no choice but to follow the lead of Hamas. Bad leadership is better than no leadership.
If Palestine had had a Gandhi or a Martin Luther King, they would have a country by now. Too often the Palestinian cause had been diminished by violence - it was too easy to dismiss the legitimate grievances because of the terrorist tactics (tactics the Israeli founding fathers used against the British, such as the bombing of the King David Hotel).
A nonviolent movement would force the world to look at the issue rather than the methods.
At some time I need to write and publish my longer thoughts on this, what my firends and family know as "the Israel Rant." The tricky part is discussing the domestic U.S. politics of it without being accused of anti-Semitism. That may be impossible simply because in our political culture criticism of Israel, no matter how justified or well-documented, is always equated with anti-Semitism...
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