Cancelled Israel Lorde gig sparks anti-boycott lawsuit

[Ken Burch]

23. If I could play devil's advocate...you could recognize a country's "right to exist"

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.