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

[Ken Burch]

29. What I'm saying is that BOTH groups have real ties to this land.

That it was never "a land without people".

That it was unacceptable for the settlers to show up in the West Bank and argue that the land was theirs and that people who had been their for at least fourteen centuries were intruders and should either live in submission or just leave.

Something along the lines of "parity of esteem", the concept they used to make peace in Northern Ireland, is needed.

Also, there needs to be a clear recognition that it's demagogic and inflammatory to use the terms "Israel" and "the Jews&quot as Netanyahu repeatedly does)as synonyms. Israel is a country. Jewish people are a variety of related ethnic and religious communities both within Israel and throughout the world. Israel is NOT the world's Jewish communities OR Judaism as a religion, and the communities are neither unquestioning supporters of everything the Israeli government does nor responsible for that government's actions.

I have never defended Hamas. I wish that organization didn't exist. But it has the strength it does in significant measure because in the Eighties, the Likud and national unity governments of the era encouraged its growth-they were obsessed above all else with weakening the PLO, despite the fact that there was never any possibility that the fall of the PLO could have led to a Palestinian leadership more to the Israeli government's liking, and none that would ever have had the credibility among Palestinians to make any agreement it signed stick.

In the Nineties, when the PLO WAS working with the Israeli government of the day for peace, that government kept sabotaging the PLO by building more and more settlements and effectively taking more and more land. The humiliation of the PLO, culminating in the useless tactic of putting Arafat himself under siege in Ramallah, discredited that organization and led to the rise of Hamas.

What else could ever possibly have happened?

It's not about "do-overs". It's about actually ending the war. The only war for this conflict to end is for their to be no winner and no loser-for their to be an honorable draw. This is why the Palestinians should get the whole West Bank. Israel loses nothing in that(the country never needed the West Bank in any practical sense, and certainly doesn't need it if a true peace is actually achieved), and it allows the Palestinian leaders that do sign an agreement to say "we weren't humiliated, we weren't shamed".

Military victory, as we used to know it, is useless in the Israel/Palestine context, because it can never be permanent.

BTW....nobody who defends the West Bank settlement project wants peace. The people who defend that want conquest, and the taking of land for the SAKE of taking the land, as an ideological end in itself. They don't CARE if taking the West Bank means the war never, ever ends.