Well it is not too bad really, you can understand the issues from both sides(the Israeli and Palestinian) in the way it is presented, and ultimately you are left feeling if only both sides could drop their fanaticism for a while, they would actually realise we are all ‘brothers and sisters’ of humanity. Loius Theroux does quite good documentaries and this is another good one.
It will probably turn up on you tube at some point, as most good bbc documentaries do. Luckily there are a bunch of british bbc license payers who are happy to share for free what we all pay for over here.
Whoops, the UN made a mistake by railroading Israel yet again.
We know a lot more today about what happened in the Gaza war of 2008-09 than we did when I chaired the fact-finding mission appointed by the U.N. Human Rights Council that produced what has come to be known as the Goldstone Report. If I had known then what I know now, the Goldstone Report would have been a different document.
From what I read on this story (http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/03/goldstone-regrets-report-into-gaza-war) the reason he didn’t know more at the time is because his team was blocked from investigating by the Israeli army. Now that the army run reports have come in he knows more. I’m not sure how reliable the Israeli army run reports are when it comes to investigating their own conduct but even if they are perfectly reliable it is surely partly Israel’s own fault that the report was critical at the time since they refused to cooperate. Meanwhile poor old Goldstone has been demonized by the Israeli press and politicians as a traitor to Judaism. I’m not surprised at all that he might want to step back a bit from his original report.
The problem is that UN HRC as whole is far too politicised to be investigating war crimes involving Israel, which is a shame as a more even handed group might carry more weight and perhaps somehow help to bring about some improvement in the situation.
Right now Israel has to be worried that they perhaps missed their moment to make peace sometime in the past decade. The Arab spring has thrown all the usual middle east political calculations into the dustbin of history and the demographic realities aren’t exactly on their side either.
Given the UN’s track record with Israel, would you really expect them to cooperate with any investigation? “You’re evil, you have no right to exist, you’re racist, you’re a bunch of murderers…oh, mind if we conduct an investigation on your territory?”
And on making peace…that takes two sides to negotiate fairly. Was there a legitimate chance for peace in the last decade? I’d say there wasn’t - most of the leaders on both sides were far too weak to ram through the kind of concessions necessary to a lasting peace.
Kalle
1867
The Palestine Papers made a pretty strong case arguing that the Israelis never negotiated in good faith, even when the Palestinians were prepared to make concessions for a permanent peace treaty. Instead Israel got the PA to act as their stand-in occupation force while building settlements like mad.
It takes two sides to negotiate fairly, and the side negotiating from a position of strength never even tried.
Goldstone has a distinguished history as a jurist and his approach from the beginning showed that he wanted the terms of reference to be fair and even-handed. If you wanted an objective investigation, co-operating with him would seem like a reasonable way to start.
Lum
1869
The Israeli right wing (which includes the current government) doesn’t even bother with the pretense of wanting objective investigations. Recent actions by the Knesset include making it a crime for Palestinians to commemorate their losing the War of Independence and investigating the funding of “anti-Israeli” NGOs that perform the above-mentioned objective investigations. The Christian Science Monitor (which has really stellar analysis of the region, btw) asked recently if the current Israeli direction is demolishing its pretense of being a democracy.
The UN is also about to give Israel some more headaches when the general assembly votes to grant the state of Palestine official UN member status:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/world/middleeast/03mideast.html
Kalle
1871
If that NY Times article is to be believed Israel seems well and truly fucked, diplomatically speaking. And I have to say they have worked very, very hard to deserve every moment of it.
Sadly I have little hope that it will actually bring about a Palestinian state. There just doesn’t seem to be any political support for that in Israel.
Are you reading the same Palestine Papers that I am? You know, the ones that the Palestinians claim are a “pack of lies”? Because those don’t make the Palestinians look good at all (nor the Israelis).
Frankly, I don’t think either side is negotiating from a position of strength. That’s been the problem all along.
No, there’s really not much support in Israel for it…at least not under the terms the Palestinians demand.
Whether or not the UN wants to recognize Palestine really doesn’t matter all that much. Many of the countries that would approve such a vote don’t have any diplomatic relations to Israel anyway. They’re still not going to be able to push through a UN peacekeeper solution, so it’s a pretty empty gesture.
Well the medium-term problem for Israel is that if it doesn’t recognise some sort of Palestinian state then Jewish citizens will be a minority in Israel (when including the occupied territories) in the next twenty to thirty years. A one state solution just won’t work without Israel performing some kind of dramatic ethnic cleansing. The slowly, slowly land grab of settlements is ultimately a doomed path if you don’t have the population to hold it longer term. So Israel has to come to some kind of two state solution, or maintain the current indefinite occupation and it’s accompanying injustice and terrorism forever.
With the Arab spring promising a range of democratic neighbouring regimes that are more responsive to demands for Palestinian statehood; the Palestinian’s seem likely to continue to improve their position from here onwards. There will be no viable ‘starve the Palestinians out of Palestine’ strategy. So Israel either chooses the sensible path and moves in the short-term to maximise it’s bargaining position or it decides to go down the right wing rabbit hole and bunker down for the super-long term in the hope that the geo-political outlook somehow, miraculously changes in their favour. Do the Chinese and Indians like Israel as much as the US?
Kalle
1874
Oh, don’t think I don’t consider the Palestinian leadership to be complicit in the current situation. They’ve benefitted from the status quo.
Frankly, I don’t think either side is negotiating from a position of strength. That’s been the problem all along.
One side occupies the other side’s territory. One side has an army. Israeli domestic political concerns don’t change those facts and trying to make it into some kind of false equivalence is just rhetorical bullshit.
No, there’s really not much support in Israel for it…at least not under the terms the Palestinians demand.
Whether or not the UN wants to recognize Palestine really doesn’t matter all that much. Many of the countries that would approve such a vote don’t have any diplomatic relations to Israel anyway. They’re still not going to be able to push through a UN peacekeeper solution, so it’s a pretty empty gesture.
I’d say that it does matter in the sense that it’s going to isolate Israel even more. There’s a limit to what can be achieved by leaning on the US security council veto all the time. If Palestine gets a UN member seat then that could very well turn into leverage for, say, imposing economic sanctions on Israel down the road.
According to the New York Times article 100+ members out of the 192 member general assembly are currently planning to vote for Palestinian statehood recognition, so I imagine quite a few of those voting for it will have diplomatic relations with Israel since they have diplomatic relations with 154 of the 192 members.
The Palestinian Papers made the Palestinian leadership look bad from a Palestinian perspective. They came across as craven beggars desperately giving in to every demand. It’s no surprise they denied the truth of them. Surely you aren’t naive enough to believe their denials?
Israel, on the other hand, came out looking bad on an international level. Refusing to agree to a treaty when even their most unreasonable demands were conceded.
Lum
1877
Actually, the right-wing Israeli position is almost literally apartheid - establish autonomous ‘cantonments’ under effective Israeli military control where the great majority of Palestinians hold citizenship, transfer Israeli Arab citizenship to those bantustans, and for good measure give Jewish communities the right to forbid Arabs to move in (this law just passed this past week). Walla, a Jewish majority ‘democracy’!
The truly sad part of all this is that while the left wing globally has been calling Israel an apartheid state for decades, it’s only in the past few years that Israel has been truly living down to the term. It’s been very painful to watch from the outside - some of the rhetoric from right wing Israelis is truly, truly rancid, with rabbis saying that racism is a holy blessing, people in high government positions saying that Israeli Arabs can never be truly citizens, and more and more laws being passed to back this. The Israeli left has been demoralized and decapitated, and the center of gravity has moved very, very far right indeed - to the point where Avigdor Lieberman, who is literally a no-shit goosestepping fascist, is in a good position to be the next Prime Minister.
Add to that the US right wing supporting Israel in a Forever War against the terrorist-Arab-Muslim hordes, and it’s not going to be a happy place until something major happens, and that ‘something major’ is probably going to be very, very ugly.
marxeil
1878
The last Israeli leader who had the balls to do anything is lying comatose for a few years now. Ironically, after taking an ultra right wing stance for most of his life, once he got into power he moved to the withdrawal from Gaza - free of charge too!
Unfortunately that didn’t end so well, so whatever support to be had for more concessions was gone.
I’m still hopeful that some in Israel don’t want to go down that apartheid path.
The Guardian has another story today about some ex-heads of the army and security services looking to try and revive the two state solution. Not sure how much sway they have with the politicians but at least some prominent people in Israel can see which way the wind is blowing:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/apr/05/israelis-push-two-state-solution
Of course, it could all be just grandstanding for the international community with no real intent to actually negotiate the terms seriously & stop settlement building.
Lum
1880
The actual doc: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/packages/pdf/world/IPI-English.pdf
The kicker is that it accepts the Arab Peace Initiative, which the Israeli government has rejected. That’s going to be a difficult square to circle. There’s a number of key aspects that Likud will never agree to (ceding any part of Jerusalem, accepting responsibility for the refugee crisis resulting from Israel’s war of independence, general acceptance of 1967 borders, etc…) and those are the same things that have torpedoed any attempt to make any progress on peace.
Other Israelis have put forth similar proposals that were studiously ignored by the government. The Israeli right honestly believes they can keep most of the West Bank and doesn’t believe peace with the Arabs is even possible. (The fact that one results in the other is ignored.)
