The Farce of Israeli-Palestinian “Negotiations”

The apologists whose only concern is to keep everything flowing in obedience to the dictates of the Israeli hawks, are fond of calling for the Palestinians to come to “the peace table.”  That sounds so moderate and reasonable, and also it is such a safe thing to say.

Years ago someone named Francis Fukuyama made himself famous by claiming that the “End of History” had arrived.   As ridiculous as this idea was, boatloads of supposed thinkers nevertheless readily jumped aboard this contention, without ever giving a clear explanation of how history could possibly end, and in our times to boot.   The idea of the U.S. being able to play any role in negotiating peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis falls right into this area of total nonsense, and yet few people boo such proposals right out of the room.

Negotiators are supposed to have at least a few grains of impartiality.  Yet, do the Samantha Powers of the world really expect the Palestinians not to have noticed whose side the U.S. has consistently taken throughout and that it’s never been their side?  Despite its 450,000 churches and even despite the statue in the New York City harbor celebrating it as being the eternal haven for the downtrodden, throughout this conflict in the Holy Land the U.S. has consistently favored the Israelis, the elephantine side that uses F-16’s and powerful artillery pieces, over against the Palestinians, who are restricted to throwing stones as in Biblical times and to modern equivalents thereof that are used in the U.S. mainly to color the night skies on the 4th of July.

Isn't it strange, how, when it comes to negotiating for “peace,” all of a sudden the Palestinians become equals with the Israelis, and as such, with nothing to concede except to shut up and keep baring their breasts to the IDF bullets, the Palestinians are expected to match the Israelis in concessions, point for point.  Yet when it comes to preparing for war, the Palestinians, recognized by many as being a national state in their own right, are denied all possession of the armaments and munitions that the Netanyahus receive in huge quantities, so that in the recent Gazan massacres we saw how the U.S. could hardly open its legs fast enough to keep the Israelis supplied with all they needed to keep up the killings and the demolitions in Gaza, while sending the Palestinians no anti-aircraft batteries, no anti-tank weapons, and other implements that they could’ve used to defend themselves, and also not much if anything in the way of food, doctors, medicines, or even caskets.

It never seems to occur to those apologists, or to anyone else, who would urge the Palestinians to the peace table, that if peace was really the goal, in negotiations like these, much, much more should be asked from the Israelis than from the Palestinians, simply because the Israelis are bristling with so much more of everything than the Palestinians, by factors of hundreds and thousands, and they have been the aggressors by the same heavily disproportionate amount.  Or maybe these disparities mean nothing to the apologists, because they are fully aware of what has often been pointed out -- the Yahus are quite happy with the way things are, complete with the blood sport afforded by being able to keep in operation their Gaza killing fields.

So how can Hamas, stymied by being unable to accomplish anything else meaningful in the way of resistance except to keep the Israelis scurrying to their bunkers, be faulted for firing rockets that hurt almost no one and as far as I know haven’t yet so much as scratched even one corner of any Israeli hospitals, power plants, synagogues, or schools?

Hamas's purpose seems to be to remind the Israelis that the Palestinians are still there, and to testify that they still have faith that the rest of the world will yet not forsake the Palestinians and let them go down the drain, as it did with a group in Europe that once numbered upwards of six million who were confident that civilized people, including Germans, would not let such a thing happen, only to find themselves being shoveled, along with many others, into gas chambers and execution trenches wholesale and being almost completely obliterated.

But the news services never report anything that indicates that any outcome other than complete expulsion of the Palestinians from their homelands, under threat of complete obliteration a la the European Jews of the 1940’s, is envisioned by most Israeli politicians and the majority of carefully oblivious American politicians, pundits, and journalists.  And everything that the dominant Israeli “leaders” contemplate and set into motion will be in the name of bringing about that outcome.   Everything! -- no matter how much these moves are presented in various guises of being something else.

It is amazing how much of this “negotiation” trickery continues to be offered up for general consumption, along with notions of “the end of history” and other concepts that are actually nothing but other forms of intellectual horse poop, as if the simple ability to reason accurately really is in very short supply throughout the world, and nowhere is that more true than among so-called “world leaders.”  

The late, great historian, Barbara W. Tuchman, would deeply resent having an elderly Kneegrow of no distinction whatsoever using her book length revelation of the missteps of world leaders from the times of the ancient Greeks right up through Lyndon Baines Johnson and the Vietnam War, as support for my contention here, in her very eye-opening volume "The March of Folly."   But I still think she left herself in a box with one of her earlier books, "Bible and Sword," in which she supported earlier Israeli actions, though one has to wonder what she would think of them all told through today's times.