''The Best Settlement Argument'': Really ?

The Israel Project, with an advisory board that includes 20 members of Congress from both parties, issued the confidential document to its supporters at about the time Obama came to power in January.

The report, marked as "not for distribution or publication" but since widely disseminated outside of the organisation, says that those who back the removal of the settlements should be told they are supporting ethnic cleansing and antisemitism. The guide offers what it describes as "the best settlement argument".

"The idea that anywhere that you have Palestinians there can't be Jews, that some areas have to be Jew-free, is a racist idea. We don't say that we have to cleanse out Arabs from Israel. They are citizens of Israel. They enjoy equal rights. We cannot see why it is that peace requires that any Palestinian area would require a kind of ethnic cleansing to remove all Jews," the guide says.

I am all for it. But when proponents of a one state solution advance the idea of one state for Jews and Palestinians, the defenders of Zionism, the same ones who label settlement freezing activity as ethnic cleansing, suggest that Palestinians may outnumber Jews and threaten the idea of Israel as a Jewish state.

I want a clear answer from zionists who often visit this blog as to what to do with population growth for Israeli Arabs; what to do with Palestinians living in Gaza and the West Bank, and what to do with Palestinian refugees ? They really have no viable solution, neither a viable answer. Zionism is short on arguments because it does not want to choose between the Jewish identity of Israel and its expansionnist policies. It is a great cognitive dissonance that will lead to greater catastrophes as all cognitive dissonances, which are per essence irrational, do

Israeli settlers preparing for war

"They [the settlers] don't think like us. Their thought is messianic, mystic, satanic and irrational," Infrastructure Minister Benjamin Ben-Eliezer said, warning of another political assassination.

"What we are seeing today is the result of a deep rift with the faith-based community, and not only in the West Bank," Diskin said. "Their approach began with the slogan 'through love, we will win' during the [Gaza] disengagement, but has now reached 'through war, we will win."

Do Americans Believe Palestinians Have The Right to Exist?

From Timothy Gatto in Talking Points Memo.

At every attempt to pressure Israel into peace, Israel responds by more provocation which it knows will be followed by more violence. And the first of these provocations for stateless, houseless Palestinians is the Israeli settlements.

Israel has been able to expand, since 1967, by creating unlawful facts on the ground, facts that do not attract condemnation, or when they attract it at the UN, it is vetoed by the US. These facts have two goals, delay and eliminate the possibility of any peace process, and then create a provocation resulting in acts of violence from the Palestinians. These acts of violence become an a posteriori justification for the unlawful facts created by Israel on the ground in total contempt for international law and Human rights.

You have for example many stories like this one.

And this one: Israel announces 750-unit West Bank expansion.

And this: Rogue Israeli settlements in West Bank continue...(not 'rogue' to Israel)

Attitudes in the US toward Israeli settlements (2003).

Timothy Gatto cites money and electablility issues as reasons for US politicians to side always with Israel. But this is not actually the attitude of the majority in the US. The only logical conclusion that can be drawn from this discordance is that US politicians are not elected by the people but by the money and the lobbies that operate in Washington.

Israel working to prevent any viability for a future Palestinian state

Much has been said about Israel's right to exist. Nothing has been said about Israel's right to co-exist either with a Palestinian state or in a binational state with Palestinians. In other words, while Israel is enjoying the status of an internationally recognized state built on a stolen land, nobody is preoccupied with the future of the Palestinians who live as refugees or prisoners in an apartheid like pieces in what remains of their land.

Two recent reports highlight the uncertainty, if not the impossibility, of a future Palestinian state, following facts created on the ground by the state of Israel which accelerated since 2000; the settlements in the west bank cutting Palestinian villages and communities from each other, and sometimes villagers form their own orchards, and the network of roads reserved only for the Israelis. Now that the international community is showing, a bit late, some worry about the continuity of the west bank itself which became totally compliant and dependant on Israel (let's not mention the continuity between the West Bank and Gaza and what to make of Gaza ?), and therefore the viability of a future Palestinian state, Israel, following the Sharon doctrine of 'continuity through transportation', is planning some future roads for those compliant Palestinians. The future viability of a Palestinian state will depend for example in some cases on a 16 meters road between Betlehem and Ramallah, controlled by Israel...

French philosopher Régis Debray who went on an official mission to Israel and Palestine lately wrote a pessimistic report about the viability of a future Palestinian state to the French government. You can find excerpts from his report in the August French edition of Le Monde Diplomatique: "Palestine, a policy of deliberate blindness or how the world backed itself into a corner." Debray sometimes resort to irony and sarcasm to describe the state of neglect and the contempt in which the prospects for peace and existence for Palestine and the Palestinians are held by the international community and Israel.

The main question therefore is not Israel's right to exist, not even Israel's right to co-exist, because obviously Israel decided not to coexist. The main question is: what does Israel intend to make of the Palestinians ?