How a Pro-Palestinian American Reporter Changed His Views on Israel and the Conflict

[Ken Burch]

18. Nothing has constrained Netanyahu from doing anything he wanted.

Nothing is stopping him from going even more scorched-earth on Gaza and the West Bank, nothing is stopping him from bombing Iran for that matter(if he's so sure that's going to make a difference, why doesn't he just do it? Why is he so fixated with getting the US to do it? And why does he insist the entire West owes him unquestioning support on such a thing?). The only thing that has ever been occasionally withheld is outside approval. Why is he OWED outside approval for hardline tactics? The conflict with the Palestinians has nothing whatsoever to do with the betrayal of European Jews by Europe, the UK and the North American countries in the Thirties and Forties.

I have never said the Palestinian leaders were infallible. They've made some incredible mistakes.

But it has never been fair to punish ordinary Palestinians for the choices of their leaders.

And there has never been any possibility that doing so could ever cause the emergence of a better Palestinian leadership.

It's been sixteen uninterrupted years of immiseration that Netanyahu has inflicted on Palestine.

If that hasn't worked yet, it's never going to work.

Nothing can be changed by preserving the status quo. Nothing.

BTW...no Palestinian or other Arab leader EVER used the phrase "drive the Jews into the sea". Not one. Not ever.

So stop using it as if it's a term of art, as if it's what EVERY Palestinian thinks.

Yes, there are Arab bigots. There are an equal number of anti-Arab bigots in Israel and a much larger number in THIS country.

The fact that there are bigots doesn't mean that the Palestinians don't have a hell of a lot of legitimate grievances about what's been done to them, especially what's been done to them since 1967.

As Ben-Gurion recognized, it was madness to start the mass settler movement.

It should have been left at returning the people deported by Jordan(NOT the Palestinians)in 1948. Since Palestinians didn't deport those people, they'd have probably been glad to let them come back and welcomed them as neighbors-provided the IDF went home and stopped perpetually harassing them).