Not something from the back of a cereal box. A real country. Or some neutered and coiffed Bantustan experiment with nifty uniforms and fan-far parades. Real borders and a real economy. Or a box within a box and the welfare cheque is in the mail-box. A low cost property on the global monopoly board. Well you have to start somewhere though were a generation or two from ’67 and this is really in the late innings. It smells kind of stage managed and socially engineered. Abbas is something out of a Herman Melville’s confidence man, a bluffy, second-tier huckster reporting to higher-ups with a branch-plant mentality. Man, great to be able to grab a refreshing coke out here and support the local bottler! All this within an arm’s length of desire. Still, the effort is worth supporting:…
in 1947 the u.n. voted for the partition of palestine leading to the establishment of a jewish state without a prior negotiated accord with its neighbors. but israel took it anyway. in september 2011, the u.n. is poised to vote for a palestinian state without a prior negotiated accord with its principal neighbor, israel. i think both palestine and israel should take it, and use this as an opportunity to negotiate peace as equal recognized members of the international community.( Hune at Martin Buber Institute )
Chomsky:The Palestinians could be in very serious economic trouble, financial trouble, if the U.S. and Israel, acting jointly, react to any kind of statehood bid by simply cutting off the funding on which they rely. Israel, for decades, has prevented any independent development, serious economic development, in the territories. There is—you know, the numbers show economic growth. It’s highly reliant on outside aid. It’s very artificial. And that could be a very serious blow to the Palestinians. The role that Egypt plays will also be significant, especially with regard to Gaza. My guess is that some kind of compromise position will be worked out, which will provide enhanced observer status to the Palestinians at the United Nations, maybe short of what would trigger U.S. and Israel from simply pulling out the rug from under their survival. It could be worse than that, in fact. Read More:http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/13/noam_chomsky_us_to_veto_palestiniana
But, it should be remembered that the treatment of Arabs in Israel is not that much worse than their treatment in France, Germany or America and the Occident in general. Again, Bantustan style ghettos on the periphery where dealing in dope, petty theft and weapons is one of the few avenues of advancement. So, they vegetate in ghettos, quite literally, with no real work or job prospects. Psychologically, the tony sections of Tel-Aviv are more remote for them than the the moon. Remember, Golda Meir once said, ” there is no such thing as the Palestinian people.” which as usual, implied Arab blood was cheap, and Israel, really a proficient killing machine, has taken a nation hostage and put at risk the lives of millions.
ADDENDUM:
And what should be the appropriate attitude of Christianity…
Sallie Mcfague:Christianity should wage a major critique of the subject-obj
model that underlies the arrogant gaze of Western culture. It should do so because at the heart of its own spirituality lies a very different model, the subject-subjects one. The simplest definition of Christian spirituality is contained in the great commandment: we should love God with our whole heart and mind and our neighbour as ourselves….
…In other words, we should love God and neighbour as subjects, as worthy of our love just because of who they are and not as means to our ends. But most contemporary Western Christians place two restrictions on the subject-subjects model of their tradition. The first is forgetfulness of Jesus’ radicalizing of the subject-subjects model: it pertains especially to the poor, the outcast, the oppressed. The poor woman, whether living in the first or third world, epitomizes the recipient of Christian spirituality as it refers to humanity. As the representative human being of the 21st century, she is the neighbour who most deserves our attention and love….
…The second restriction that most Christians (and not just Western ones) place on their spirituality is the exclusion of the natural world. Most Christians draw the line at nature: while God and other people are subjects, nature is not. Most of us either do not know how to relate to nature or we relate to it as Western culture does, as an object for our use. My suggestion is that we should relate to nature in the same basic way we are supposed to relate to God and other people — as ends, not means, as subjects valuable in themselves, for themselves. Read More:http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2065/is_n2_v49/ai_19496271/…
Denis Goldberg: Yes, but the point is it’s been going on and on and on. They mouth off against Israel as the oppressor, but they don’t actually want a secular Palestinian State, a modern State that will challenge the feudal aristocracy, and that for me is a very serious problem. Now I’m not blaming the oppressed for their oppression, I’m simply saying that Arafat’s creation of Palestinian nationalism out of pan-Arabism is very significant but it held within it a serious contradiction, because it was challenging the pillars of pan-Arabism, namely a religious feudal system, and Palestinians are the workers and the intellectuals throughout the Middle East and a threat, in the end, to the feudal overlords. To support the Palestinian people against all that is not terrorism. Read More:http://www.liberationafrica.se/intervstories/interviews/goldberg/
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