The Israel-Palestine Conflict

 

The Israel-Palestine Conflict

My posts are usually about national identity, populism and racial politics in the United States. But I studied national security and defense policy in graduate school in the late Cold War period. Here is what I wrote to an old friend who asks what we should be thinking after the Hamas attacks on Israel beginning last Saturday.

Your analysis is spot on! Biden has made a meek call for the resumption of attempts to realize a two state solution. But the continuous encroachment of Israeli settlers on the West Bank seems to have foreclosed that option. The international left has been calling for a one state solution for many years. But that would place Jews in the minority and is thus, a non-starter for Israel.

Netanyahu has already declared that this is a war that Israel will win. Indeed they will. And the optics may looked disturbingly like genocide for those observing closely. I’ve been running errands all day and don’t know what the flashpoint was. But I have often thought that at some point Palestinians might rush Israelli security points, fortifications, etc., en masse, without concern for their own lives to demonstrate to the world just how desperate they are. This might finally invoke moral outrage in the North Atlantic world in ways that might force the US’s hand in pressuring the Israelis to some kind of equitable settlement ... Or, the world might simply sit idly by and watch the genocide take place.

We watch from the edge of our seats!

We are daily treated to a barrage of coverage in the corporate media overwhelmingly from the Israeli perspective. Read open these links as an addendum to what I wrote above. 

 Amjad Iraqi, "Get Out of There Now."

https://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2023/october/get-out-of-there-now

https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/12/amjad_iraqi

 For the deep historical dive read ...

 Edward Said, The Question of Palestine. New York: Vintage Books, 1979.