Excellent piece, as always. This specific bit here is some otherwise tough news that I think that everyone center left and left needs to read up on and understand themselves. I just recently learned exactly how bad, and, yes!, how deeply antisemitic the BDS guidelines are.
The cultural & artistic guidelines put my jaw on the floor. As read, they effectively declare that all Jewish students, teachers, & artists must be vetted wrt whether they've ever specifically condemned Israel in a way that complies by BDS's own guidelines, or else they must be boycotted themselves.
Like, I should not have to explain to ANYONE why the hell that's plainly unacceptable. Could you imagine the outcry if anyone asked the same of Iranian or Saudi or other Arab students, teachers, & artists? *Nobody* would accept that!
I read a “50 points you should know” article that basically said get real Palestinian boys and Israeli girls are not going to become friends and screw and make little ethnically magnanimous babies any time in the foreseeable future and you know what screw that! That is liberalism! That is freedom!
People compare this to apartheid and the US civil rights struggle and you know what if someone wrote an article in 1965 saying interracial dating and mixed communities are just off the table as a partial cause and effect of a real peace, we’d call them what they are! Illiberal and racist!
Agree w/the premise. Depressing to think how far away real hope of peace is given that premise. One thing you might have played up more is the moral responsibility of existing liberal democracies to take in refugees from such conflicts, esp. given e.g. US refusal to take in German Jews in the 30s.
i agree absolutely with increased refugee acceptance across the board, and especially for palestinians--but sadly this article couldn't cover everything!
Ireland and South Africa are also instructive as countries cited by the left for the idea of decolonization but which actually achieved reconciliation through a liberal peace process
For a specific comment- I've generally been of the opinion that a two or three state solution is slightly likely to be the most practical/pragmatic, but the third paragraph really gave me a lot to re-think about that idea.
yeah i mean it's not exactly an answer. one thing i do think that's worth distinguishing is the terms of some immediate peace deal and the long term outcome for the region
This is really great! The only bit I would dispute is the idea that the ideal outcome would be a multi-ethnic single state combining both cultures. I think it's good for there to be refuges for specific vulnerable populations and that there's nothing wrong with a state providing that.
"One of the core goals of this project is to kill, expel, or reduce to a condition of servitude all the Jews in the land between the river and the sea. This is its own one-state solution—"One state: Palestine."
This is Zionist propaganda. have you read any Palestinian authors on this?
Do you or do you not believe that that is what Hamas (not Palestinians in general, not pro-Palestinians westerners, but Hamas specifically) wants, do you or do you not believe that Hamas has a social base of support (not support from the total population or an electoral majority, *a* social base)?
No and yes.
I do believe that Hamas is a part of Palestinian resistance, and that the "West" should not dictate what a possible Palestinian future should look like, as stated by Abdaljawad Omar and Steven Salaita, among others.
On Hamas' Charter, I recommend Khaled Hroub's 2017 article.
To put it kindly, that view seems quite naive. You do realize it was only that recently that the charter stopped outright specifying that victory entailed killing the Jews, yes? Their lip service in the 2017 charter is no more valid than Israeli officials playing lip service to a two-state solution
Hamas is very obviously a theocratic enthonationalist terror organization that relies on antisemitism as part of its basic recruitment pitch. That's just the facts. Israel is clearly an ethnonationalist project itself, to the detriment of even citizens of it that aren't Jewish. Another fact.
No one here is dictating anything, we're just people having a discussion. The jumping point for that discussion is that consolidated liberal democracy is the only regime type capable of producing lasting peace among all other nations of that regime type.
It’s also the case that near zero people actually believe in this standing-esque “we should not dictate” argument except maybe pure isolationists. If you think the US should sanction Israel or recognize Palestinian statehood you believe the US should be dictating influential events in Palestine.
Israel ethnically cleansing Palestine is one possible ending to the events that happen in Palestine. Personally it’s very much our business if that happens because we’re human beings and not monsters, presumably. People just deny that we should do anything when they don’t want what we’re doing *now*
This is a great piece. Other good examples of how development itself is insufficient are Turkey, India, and even Israel: all places where vast economic expansion over the last 20 years has actl ERODED peace, security, and prosperity because the parties presiding over it are anti-democratic.
