a hundred years of fiction

Daniel Levy:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/opinion/israel-hamas-cease-fire.html

Israel cannot provide security for its citizens by controlling millions of Palestinians, who are denied their rights and freedoms and live under a system of permanent structural violence and inequality. The “no cease-fire” crowd must desist from encouraging Israel to hang on to the historically discredited fiction that armed resistance rooted in an oppressed people can be eliminated by the deployment of even more ferocious military methods.

The resistance dates from the 1920s, when the implications of the Balfour Declaration started to be recognized.

Israel’s current course only ensures its perpetual instability.

Much of the world knows that the US is failing to help.

* * * *

I assume what Israel wants now is a buffer zone comprised of the northern half of Gaza. The issues are:

a) will Arab-state governments accede to such?

b) what will become of the two million? they already were compressed in the small space of Gaza … would Israel expect them to become further compressed within just the southern portion of Gaza?

c) will anyone (Arab-state governments, European governments, the US) now insist that the logjam of irresolution of the situation be addressed?

The article by Daniel Levy indicates the pathway forward. It might take a miracle for the antagonists to embark upon that pathway. Mearsheimer says he can’t even fathom a resolution.

Israel has a 2,000-year perspective on the situation and seems to feel that as generations pass (it’s five generations already of the Zionist project) time is on its side. Israel takes more territory with each flare-up of hostilities. On the other hand, time may be on the side of the Palestinians in terms of demographics. That’s a thorny problem for those who want to achieve the Greater Israel vision and I can’t imagine what they have in mind to solve it. I can’t imagine the world would allow genocide or further dispersal of the Palestinian population.

Global warming, with its desertification, might eventually “resolve” the situation . . . in another hundred years.