Israel's reasonable response.

This is no about Obama's speech that he delivered yesterday, I may do a post collecting different people's analysis but I'm not sure, so often Obama has said a lot of pretty things and then done pretty much none of it. With a year and a half to go in his first term actions are more of an issue than slogans.

No instead we're looking at an OP-ED piece in the NYT that Jonny linked me to last night. This one. He framed it saying something along the lines of he was astounded at how audacious it was. As per my usual world weary act and a general numbness to Israel's free wheeling evil I dismissed this assertion and pointed out it was in the NYT afterall.

On reflection though I was wrong and Jonny was right, this is shocking and it is audacious. In writing, deliberately released just the day before Obama's big speech we have a senior member of Israel's ruling party openly advocating ethnic cleansing. To wit:

[following annexation of all remaining Palestinian territory] These Palestinians would not have the option to become Israeli citizens, therefore averting the threat to the Jewish and democratic status of Israel by a growing Palestinian population.

Now the Nazi comparisons are easy and unarguably apt but I'd instead like to compare this assertion to a hypothetical one made by a Serb, a member of Milosevic's party in the mid to late 90s. First with the Bosnians and then with Albanians in Kosovo you had a situation where Muslim ethnic groups were trying to break away from a violent and repressive regime. When they did violence and, in the case of the Bosnians, genocide occurred. But lets backtrack to when Bosnian and Kosovan independence was more talk than action, can one really imagine a Serb politician being given a platform in a major American and International Newspaper to threaten violent mass expulsion from what was then Yugoslavia?

One of course cannot. Yet Israel, useful tool of the Energy and Arms industries is allowed to have its' politicians issue outrageous threats against a repressed minority that is trying to assert its' statehood in a peaceful and democratic manner in line with international law and the UN charter. While the NYT editors temper circulation boosting Wikileaks revelations with descriptions of why Julian Assange is a poopy head they seem totally willing to print statements of intent regard massive breaches of international law that would bring misery to millions. Though to be fair to the NYT it is not like any of her rivals either domestic or foreign have thought it worthy of mention. Nor is there any political reaction, HAMAS is a dismissed as a negotiating partner because it refuses to recognise Israel as a nation state, yet Israel is being hailed as an ardent pursuer of peace in the aftermath of Obama's speech, and this unmentioned piece.

There is, I think, some hope to be drawn from this though. I am fairly sure if Israel actively pursued this policy they could annex all Palestinian land and drive them out. At the same time I think the US could win in Afghanistan if they used a few nukes. The fact is though that some victories are simply too costly to be pursued, in a world where Israel's image is consistently becoming murkier and European popular support for Palestine is growing rapidly and even in the US questions are starting to be asked Israel will suffer a great deal if they do this. Similar economic sanctions to those suffered by South Africa would likely be imposed by the EU.

Plus Israel is not a monolithic bloc, there is a sizeable minority of Israelis who would not stand for such an action, likely leading to considerable internal unrest.

Thus if the Israeli establishment is feeling forced to shift from a position of ever claiming to be the innocent victim to issuing threats such as this perhaps the plan to push for the recognition of Palestine as a sovereign state has some potential for the Palestinian cause.