Thursday, May 9, 2013

Another Liberal Peace Hopeful Mugged By Reality

Doodad

It's got to be awful to attend an Israeli/Palestinian "dialogue," only to find out that the Palestinians are no where near the same page. That's what happened to Lital Shemesh; a young, liberal Israeli journalist recently.  (h/t Elder of Ziyon)

.....The Israeli side, which included representatives from right and left, tried to understand the Palestinians’ vision of the end of the strife– “Let’s talk business.” The Israelis delved to understand how we can end the age-old, painful conflict. What red lines are they willing to be flexible on? What resolution will satisfy their aspirations? Where do they envision the future borders of the Palestinian State which they so crave?

We were shocked to discover that not a single one of them spoke of a Palestinian State, or to be more precise, of a two-state solution.

They spoke of one state – their state. They spoke of ruling Jaffa, Tel Aviv, Akko, Haifa, and the pain of the Nakba [lit. the tragedy – the establishment of the State of Israel]. There was no future for them. Only the past. “There is no legitimacy for Jews to live next to us” – this was their main message. “First, let them pay for what they perpetrated.”

In the course of a dialogue which escalated to shouts, the Palestinians asked us not to refer to suicide bombers as “terrorists” because they don’t consider them so. “So how do you call someone who dons a vest and blows himself up in a Tel Aviv shopping mall with the stated purpose of killing innocent civilians,” I asked one of the participants.

“I have a 4-year-old at home,” answered Samach from Abu Dis (near Jerusalem). “If God forbid something should happen to him, I will go and burn an entire Israeli city, if I can.” All the other Palestinian participants nodded their heads in agreement to his harsh words.

“Three weeks ago, we gave birth to a son,” answered Amichai, a religious, Jewish student from Jerusalem. “If God forbid something should happen to him, I would find no comfort whatsoever in deaths of more people.”

Israelis from the full gamut of political parties participated in the seminar: Likud, Labor, Kadima, Meretz, and Hadash (combined Jewish/Arab socialist party). All of them reached the understanding that the beautiful scenarios of Israeli-Palestinian peace that they had formulated for themselves simply don’t correspond with reality. It’s just that most Israelis don’t have the opportunity to sit and really converse with Palestinians, to hear what they really think.

Our feed of information comes from Abu Mazen’s declarations to the international press, which he consistently contradicts when he is interviewed by Al Jazeera, where he paints a completely different picture.

I arrived at the seminar with high hopes, and I return home with difficult feelings and despair. Something about the narrative of the two sides is different from the core. How can we return to the negotiating table when the Israeli side speaks of two states and the Palestinian side speaks of liberating Palestine from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea? How can peace ever take root in a platform which grants legitimacy to terrorism?

Reality....a terrible thing for young naive minds. Or old tired worn out Progressive leftist minds.

6 comments:

  1. Palestinian terrorist lovers speak:

    'If we had a nuke, we'd have used it this very morning,'" by Itamar Marcus and Nan Jacques Zilberdik for Palestinian Media Watch, May 8:"

    http://www.jihadwatch.org/2013/05/palestinian-official-i-swear-that-if-we-had-a-nuke-wed-have-used-it-this-very-morning.html

    LISTEN to what they say; then you won't be naive.

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    1. Obviously a mere mistranslation, Doodad. What he really meant to say was that if he had roses he'd send them to his Israeli neighbors as a message of peace, love and understanding.

      Step into his shoes!

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    2. Would that be his Nukes, er ah, Nikes?

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    3. The 'n' is silent in the original translation, actually, and it meant 'ukes.'

      He swears that if he had ukeleles, he would right now be serenading millions of Israelis with sweet, sweet love songs. Our old buddy The Troubador would, of course, be on vocals...

      See? Another peace-loving bunny rabbit maligned by the Zionists!

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  2. In "Journey into the Whirlwind" Evgenia Gizburg tells the story of her 18 year imprisonment in Stalin's Gulags (In reality she covers the first two years in prison then 2 years in the Gulag then it skips to the end). It is a pretty brutal story as you can imagine. But she approaches it unflinchingly. The thing though, is that not only did she remain a loyal communist to the end, she loved, and you can use that word, loved Stalin. Many of the prisoners went to their deaths singing the praises of the CCCP and Comrade Secretary Stalin. Not just the informers and flunkies, but people who fully realized they had done nothing wrong and didn't deserve what happened to them. They rationalized it by thinking "Stalin doesn't know what's going on" or "The Party leadership is being lied to by spies". And worse, a denouncer one day would be denounced the next and the very same people who sang their praises the day before screamed for their punishment the next.

    This is what ideology is. It's not rational. It's not logical. It makes no sense and contradicts itself all the time. It IS a lie and so anything ideology says or does is perfectly fine.

    I suspect this freshly scrubbed Israeli will eventually marry a Palestinian go to work for one of the more media savvy Hamas functions.

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