The cookie today is pronounced "Real-Politik." The confection'll have a many-layered, Middle Eastern flavor to it.Palestine at this moment is nothing less than a political petry dish for "post-modern" colonialism. Israel it seems will never cease to try to expel Arabs from what it deems its "natural' territorial sphere. Assimilation seems a dubious proposition at best. Arabs, for their part, probably will NEVER cease to resent and resist.
Palestinian Arab leader Mahmoud Abbas reiterated Monday that they will try this Friday to win a vote in the UN for "Statehood." If successful--which the US and the ISraelis will move heaven and earth to prevent--Palestinian statehood would be a real game-changer.
It is NOT a 'religious' issue. It's about the land, and the resources...(see map, attached)...The same tensions, and hostilities, and the same stratagems for contesting them, would be used by any two groups in a similar conflict. Anywhere, anytime.
It may be a small irony that it is in fact immaterial that this situation pits "Jews" against their 'semitic' cousins who shifted their spiritual allegiance from Yhwh to Allah, some 1500 years ago. That's just an excuse, masking--in the real politik sense--comprehensible, territorial ambitions: namely to consolidate all the land between the Jordan and the Sea, between Lebanon and Suez under Israeli hegemonic control.
The State of Israel, by any 'rational' (real-Politik) standard (and by long-understood definitions of 'Sovereignty', cannot countenance the existence of a separate, sovereign State within its borders. That would be anathema to ANY state. So Israel is extremely unlikely to enter--willingly--into any agreement which provides for anything like a co-equal Arab state in Palestine. The US wouldn't let the Navajo have their own Air Force, "sovereign" though the tribe might be, in law. Hell, we barely let 'em have their own police.
The real rub is that the Israelis would actually have to negotiate--BINDING, and IN GOOD FAITH, cuz that's how States negotiate with each other. Absent Palestinian statehood,' the Israelis could do, and pretty much have done, pretty much anything they would. As a "State', the Palestinians would have the standing to DEMAND to be treated as equals. I don't think "real-politik" Israel, as a State, can tolerate that.
On the more applied, local level, there is absolutely NO WAY that any Israeli politician could face the Israeli electorate having handed back to a Palestinian State water which the kibbutzim needed to 'make the desert bloom.' Can you see Bibi Netanyahu or Avigdor Lieberman telling a bunch of settlers to pull back from an Arab village they covet? Or explaining to a bunch of kibbutzim why they have to share precious water with the people commonly referred to as "filthy Arabs?"
Me neither....So that's the dilemma.
Obama is just the latest Murkin Prez to ignore or miss or misunderestimate Israeli "real-Politik."
In a way analogous way Upton Sinclair's cynical declaration that "It is hard to get a man to see what his job depends on him ignoring," neither Obama nor any other US leader "can" see-can't acknowledge--that Israel has those territorial ambitions. Still, they are undeniable. Netanyahu advisor and former Israeli Cabinet member Dori Gold has said repeatedly that settlements must continue to provide "a future" for some "300,000 settlers." That is about as clear a statement of "manifest destiny' as you'd ever want to hear, outside the 19th Century USofA..
In 'reality,' there is no way Israel, the State, can tolerate any arrangement for the Palestinians in Israel which is NOT basically an apartheid-like assortment of bantustans such as those the white South Africans set up for their pesky blacks; or, at best, reservations like those on which USers isolate and disempower those from whom WE stole "our" country.
Real Politik: It just means "How things really are, shorn of spin and pretense." Kinda like how the cookie crumbles, hippies...
PS: (and way off topic) I'll start to believe Corporations are people only when Rick Perry executes a couple of 'em.
Oh yeah, and go by the store and stock up on Worldwide Hippies paraphernalia, including bumper stickers, which we have aplenty. That way I'll know where you parked when I see you at the beach...
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