Obama and Israel

In his new book, "One State, Two States: Resolving The Israel/Palestine Conflict," historian Benny Morris recounts the lugubrious history of Palestinian refusal to actually accept Israel as a Jewish state in the heart of the uniformly Muslim Middle East. Morris examines the widespread rejection by Palestinians in particular and Arabs in general of a two-state solution...at once a dirty little secret and the 800 pound gorilla in the room when it comes to the debate over the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.

For over 80 years, as Morris notes, Palestinians have "persuasively demonstrated" that they do not want any Jewish state in the region...rejection of any Jewish state has not merely been the recurring theme of the conflict, but the dominant one....in the 1930s rejected a proposed two-state solution that would have created a Jewish state in less than 20 percent of Palestine...1940s, rejected the UN partition plan...1948 to 1967, when Israel had no presence in Gaza, the West Bank or East Jerusalem, the Arabs created no Palestinian state....1967 Israel accepted the land-for-peace formulation in UN Resolution 242, the Arab world, including rejected it...2000, Israel supported a plan put forth by President Clinton...the Palestinians rejected this too...2006, when Israel unilaterally and forcibly removed thousands of settlers from the Gaza Strip...Palestinians responded by rocketing Israeli civilian centers

Former Prime Minister Olmert, Abbas told the Post, had recently offered an independent Palestinian state comprising all of Gaza, a capital in East Jerusalem and 97 percent of the West Bank...Abbas refused to recognize Israel as a Jewish state

The problem with these facts is that they get in the way of an increasingly fashionable orthodoxy: that it is Israeli settlements on the West Bank that are the obstacle to peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

To: dennisw; Cachelot; Nix 2; veronica; Catspaw; knighthawk; Alouette; Optimist; weikel; Lent; GregB; ..

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2 posted on 07/07/2009 7:41:17 AM PDT by SJackson (the number-one job facing the middle class...a three-letter word: jobs. J-O-B-S. Jobs)

For Democrats who voted for Barack Obama, but who regard the encirclement of Israel by well-armed fanatics pledged to its destruction with some alarm, the President's treatment of Prime Minister Netanyahu on the occasion of their first meeting has provoked a certain unease.

I keep hearing this, but I'm curious just how many dems really care.

3 posted on 07/07/2009 7:44:09 AM PDT by Cinnamon Girl (G-d Bless President Bush. He kept us safe.)

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