I saw this Op-Ed piece in the NY Times this morning, from a prominent Jewish writer (and, presumably, Israeli supporter):
“The blatant cynicism of the present Israeli government should not blind us to the responsibility of its more respectable-looking predecessors. The settler population has grown consistently at a rate of 5 percent annually over the past two decades, three times the rate of increase of the Israeli population as a whole. Together with the Jewish population of East Jerusalem (itself illegally annexed to Israel), the settlers today number more than half a million people: just over 10 percent of the Jewish population of so-called Greater Israel. This is one reason why settlers count for so much in Israeli elections, where proportional representation gives undue political leverage to even the smallest constituency.”
He’s basically saying that just because hawkish, ultra-conservative, take-no-prisoners Benjamin Netanyahu is in power these days, doesn’t mean we ought to look kindly upon Israeli administrations past, who seemed at least to the world, to be committed to peace. They weren’t. As evidenced by the 5% annual growth he notes in the above quote.
What I’d like to know is, why do I have to keep pointing this inconvenient fact out to anyone who discovers my parents are Palestinian and decides they want to hash out the Middle East issue right then and there, and then proceed to look incredulously at me when I say something akin to the above?
People - it’s like debating the blueness of the sky. It’s blue, not tomato red. And Israeli settlements seem to grow and thrive, squeezing Palestinians of the West Bank onto ever-shrinking slivers of land, no matter who has been in power or what had been their stance on peace over the last 40 years.
Why can the NY Times say it, but I can’t without being looked upon as wacko?
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