William Arkin talks about the very practical ways the dynamics of ”both sides“ function in practice.
”The two sides hate each other. They did so before the current conflict and the current government and they will after it’s gone. Both sides. And they will now hate each other even more.“
The US after the Clinton Administration essentially gave up on trying to promote any kind of peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Today things have reached the point Jimmy Carter warned about in his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Or Apartheid. Both US parties are now committed in practice to a policy toward the occupied territories than has nothing
to do with democracy, the rule of law or the ”rules-based international order.“
And part of the gruesome irony of US policy is that the Republican Party and the Trump cult (if there is any meaningful difference between them now) follow the program demanded by anti-Semitic Christian nationalists based on a crackpot apocalyptic narrative in which all the Jews of the world will be ”gathered“ in Israel, then most of them will be slaughtered in the Battle of Armageddon, and the few surviving Jews will convert to Christianity. With the world finally rid of The Jews, Jesus can come again and dump all the Mean Libruls into Hail.
The authoritarian theocrats in Israel like Natanyahu have been successful in leveraging these American Christian nationalists to keep the US government backing even their most brutal and self-destructive policies. How policies based on this ideology furthers any legitimate US national interest is not at all clear.
How any ”two-state“ solution could work now is also very hard to imagine. Israel and Palestine seem to be in the place Carter described back then. They can be a multiethnic democracy or a Jewish apartheid state with chronically brutal and discriminatory policy towards the Palestinians. In the Democracy vs. Autocracy binary, Netanyahu and the theocratic hardliners can only go in the latter direction.
William Arkin talks about the very practical ways the dynamics of ”both sides“ function in practice.
”The two sides hate each other. They did so before the current conflict and the current government and they will after it’s gone. Both sides. And they will now hate each other even more.“
The US after the Clinton Administration essentially gave up on trying to promote any kind of peaceful solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict. Today things have reached the point Jimmy Carter warned about in his 2006 book Palestine: Peace Or Apartheid. Both US parties are now committed in practice to a policy toward the occupied territories than has nothing
to do with democracy, the rule of law or the ”rules-based international order.“
And part of the gruesome irony of US policy is that the Republican Party and the Trump cult (if there is any meaningful difference between them now) follow the program demanded by anti-Semitic Christian nationalists based on a crackpot apocalyptic narrative in which all the Jews of the world will be ”gathered“ in Israel, then most of them will be slaughtered in the Battle of Armageddon, and the few surviving Jews will convert to Christianity. With the world finally rid of The Jews, Jesus can come again and dump all the Mean Libruls into Hail.
The authoritarian theocrats in Israel like Natanyahu have been successful in leveraging these American Christian nationalists to keep the US government backing even their most brutal and self-destructive policies. How policies based on this ideology furthers any legitimate US national interest is not at all clear.
How any ”two-state“ solution could work now is also very hard to imagine. Israel and Palestine seem to be in the place Carter described back then. They can be a multiethnic democracy or a Jewish apartheid state with chronically brutal and discriminatory policy towards the Palestinians. In the Democracy vs. Autocracy binary, Netanyahu and the theocratic hardliners can only go in the latter direction.
https://governmentsecrets.substack.com/p/the-war-in-israel-is-already-lost