tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6844367946876032905.post8851509394061159209..comments2023-10-03T23:58:17.279+11:00Comments on Middle East Reality Check: Israel is a Democracy & Other Fairy TalesMERChttp://www.blogger.com/profile/14500573372528287733noreply@blogger.comBlogger4125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6844367946876032905.post-62767155736456237672016-12-03T08:45:54.416+11:002016-12-03T08:45:54.416+11:00Great Said quote, thanks MERC.. here's another...Great Said quote, thanks MERC.. here's another To its discredit, Oslo did little to change the situation. Arafat and his dwindling number of supporters were turned into enforcers of Israeli security, while Palestinians were made to endure the humiliation of dreadful and noncontiguous ''homelands'' that make up about 10 percent of the West Bank and 60 percent of Gaza. Oslo required us to forget and renounce our history of loss, dispossessed by the very people who taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. Thus we are the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees.<br /><br /><br />Arafat, backed by Washington, is daily more repressive. Improbably citing the 1936 British Emergency Defense Regulations against Palestinians, he has recently decreed, for example, that it is a crime not only to incite violence, racial and religious strife but also to criticize the peace process. There is no Palestinian constitution or basic law: Arafat simply refuses to accept limitations on his power in light of American and Israeli support for him. Who actually thinks all this can bring Israel security and permanent Palestinian submission?<br /><br />http://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/10/magazine/the-one-state-solution.html?pagewanted=2<br />Vacynoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6844367946876032905.post-81813870299026811522016-12-02T09:09:53.014+11:002016-12-02T09:09:53.014+11:00Or, as Edward Said put it at the time of the Oslo ...Or, as Edward Said put it at the time of the Oslo Accords: <br /><br />"Clearly the PLO has transformed itself from a national liberation movement into a kind of small-town government, with the same handful of people still in command. PLO offices abroad - all of them the result of years of costly struggle whereby the Palestinian people earned the right to represent themselves - are being deliberately neglected, closed, or sold off. For the over 50% of the Palestinian people who do not live in the Occupied Territories - 350,000 stateless refugees in Lebanon, nearly twice that number in Syria, many more elsewhere - the plan may be the final dispossession. Their national rights as a people made refugees in 1948, solemnly confirmed and reconfirmed for years by the UN, the PLO, the Arab governments, indeed most of the world, now seem to have been annulled." (Peace & Its Discontents: Essays on Palestine in the Middle East Peace Process, 1993, p 4)MERCnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6844367946876032905.post-60680150694337762102016-12-01T17:52:30.800+11:002016-12-01T17:52:30.800+11:00I may have posted this before here MERC, if so apo...I may have posted this before here MERC, if so apologies but it bears repeating:<br /><br />http://www.economist.com/news/briefing/21606286-failures-arab-spring-were-long-time-making-tethered-history<br /><br />Israel is classified as a "democratic facade". This was in 2014 and it certainly has not improved. According to the Economist the only democracy in the Middle East and North Africa is/was Tunisia. Grapplerhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/14967100340986309879noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6844367946876032905.post-10457329464434565362016-12-01T15:40:25.467+11:002016-12-01T15:40:25.467+11:00International Law also explicitly gives the occupi...International Law also explicitly gives the occupied the right "to take the fight to the territory of the occupiers".Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com