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

[Ken Burch]

27. You should remember that "Israeli" actually lives in Israel.

She is on the fire and walking the walk in terms of living the Zionist idea.

As to Native Americans-no, Americans(settlers, to be more accurate, since Native Americans were the first Americans) would not need to be given the country back physically-but there does need to be a public admission that a massive injustice was done to them and that not only compensation but apologies are needed to heal that wound.

The Palestinian people know they can't defeat Israel militarily. Equally, the Israelis-whether Netanyahu acknowledges this or not-CAN'T go totally scorched-earth on the Palestinians because that would never BE a military victory. Doing so would have no other possible effect than creating a new and more extreme Palestinian armed struggle devoted to revenge.

So there is a stalemate. Israel needs to negotiate as much as the Palestinians do, because the status quo is unsustainable.

And the Israeli government needs to accept that, if collective immiseration of ordinary Palestinians hasn't caused those people to overthrow their existing leaders and replace them with leaders Neyanyahu likes better, it never will have that affect, anymore than the embargo on Cuba was ever going to cause the overthrow of Fidel.

The best things Netanyahu could do on a short-term basis would be to impose a permanent, absolutely permanent moratorium on settlement and to dial back day-to-day harassment of ordinary Palestinians in the West Bank-in other words, give people there some breathing room. Collective harassment and collective punishment have no other effect but to drive previously nonviolent people towards nonviolence-if you get in someone's face over and over and over, what else can happen but that that person will snap? And it's not bigotry when that person does snap, it's simply a breaking point.

And there was never a justification for the settlement project on the level at which it has been undertaken. Negotiating the repatriation of the indigenous Jewish communities in the West Bank would have been one thing-I suspect ordinary Palestinians would have been fine with that, so long as the lands those communities were on were not taken as Israeli territory. It was Jordan that expelled those communities, not the Palestinians.

The problem came in from importing hundreds of thousands of OTHER people to the West Bank, people with no personal connection to the land-I said personal connection, historical connections from two millennia earlier are not title to the property- while taking land, water and sometimes even the ancient olive trees Palestinians have raised for centuries as their livelihood and repurposing them for the exclusive use of these settlers.. Do you honestly think it was ever reasonable for Palestinians to be ok with that? To see the people brought in and given privilege over themselves as somehow the real victims in THIS situation?