Well, he finally just said it:
We are here to stay forever. There will be no more uprooting of settlements in the land of Israel. This is the inheritance of our ancestors. This is our land.
But the irony in this, is that this stance is actually exceedingly detrimental to Israel (which of course is the exact opposite of his intention…)
As is clearly evident from the following map (courtesy of this diary by subir)
it’s not as through the settlements are confined to a narrow band near the Israeli border… they’re scattered throughout the territory (some even are all the way out near the Jordanian border). And so, if the settlements remain under Israeli sovereignty, then how can there eventually be a contiguous, viable Palestinian state? And if there is not to be a Palestinian state, then what’s the alternative? Well what becomes more likely, as the two state solution becomes less likely, is one state… However, one state would not be “Israel”, because all of the Palestinians would have to be made full citizens of the single state (in order for the country to be democratic, obviously), and so being roughly half Arab, the country will effectively no longer be Israel (and for that matter, being half Jewish, it wouldn’t be Palestine either…) But the upshot is that the route that Netanyahu has chosen, leads to Israel’s eventual demise.
But then this may beg the question of why there needs to be a Jewish state, to begin with… And this leads to a second irony that’s on the page that I linked to in the opening sentence- which is that there is nothing that I could possibly say that could be more convincing of the need for Israel, than the words of one of the commenters on this story, who is rather decidedly anti-Israel. I chose to link to Yahoo (of all sources) because the comments there are unmoderated. So absent the threat of the “banhammer”, they let loose, and provide a mind-numbing glimpse into what people may really be thinking. And now- ranking #1 out of 83 comments, with 47 upvotes (& only 25 downvotes), Joseph…
But, is this circular? After all, this comment was made in response to some rather unfavorable news regarding Israel… So are Israel’s misdeeds causing the very anti-Semitism that I point to for justifying its existence?
Certainly, not all criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic (such as, for instance, what I have just written in the first part of this diary). However, a lot of it is, and the reason a lot of criticism of Israel is anti-Semitic is NOT because of Israel, but because of anti-Semitism, PERIOD. The only thing that is directly attributable to Israel’s bad actions, is the fair, legitimate faulting of Israel for those particular bad actions. But Israel’s bad actions don’t cause people to tell hateful lies- only hate causes this... Hate is not based on reason and reality. For haters, the hate comes first and foremost, and the reasons are manufactured afterwards, to prop up the hate- which is precisely why they don’t stick to the truth when condemning Israel, but instead lie, distort, exaggerate, etc. And of course, the ultimate rebuttal to the claim that Israel is responsible for the anti-Semitism, is that anti-Semitism existed well before Israel… And so back when there wasn’t even any kernel of truth for the haters to exaggerate upon, they then just made up the most absurd lies, out of whole cloth.
But then… is it right for one group of people to be harmed, in the process of protecting another group from harm?
No, of course not.
That’s why I keep writing all these diaries, advocating for the creation of a sovereign & independent Palestinian state.
They have not been met with all that much approval, though (my last I/P diary, for example, received zero recs). I don’t really mean to complain… I have received a lot of great comments, which I truly appreciate. But in a curious inconsistency, none of the comments have really been particularly negative, and so they offered no clue as to what people may be finding disagreeable about what I’m saying. And so, since I was having a hard time trying to figure this out on my own, I thought… why not just ask?