March 21, 2007
FORCING THE CONTRADICTIONS:
For Gaza, a Question of Responsibility: Israel, at High Court, Argues That Strip Is No Longer Occupied (Scott Wilson, 3/21/07, Washington Post)
The Israeli government is arguing in domestic courts that it no longer occupies the Gaza Strip, a designation that under international law holds the Jewish state responsible for the welfare of Gaza's 1.4 million Palestinians.Israel declined to seek a change in Gaza's legal status with the United Nations following its September 2005 departure from the coastal territory, when it pulled out thousands of Jewish settlers and shut down its military government. The move was hailed internationally as a step toward peace.
But the government is making the case now in order to defend its restrictions on the ability of Gazans to trade and travel. If successful, the legal claim could also make it more difficult for the Israeli military to enter the 140-square-mile region, where Palestinian rocket attacks and arms smuggling have increased sharply since the army's departure.
And so does the fiction that there is not already a state of Palestine force them into incoherence.
Posted by Orrin Judd at March 21, 2007 7:53 AM
the fiction that....
Lots of fictions in this neighborhood....
One of them being that if one declares often enough that a Palestinian state exists, then...presto!
Posted by: Barry Meislin at March 21, 2007 9:51 AMSo, Barry, what did you think of OJ's book?
Posted by: Sandy P at March 21, 2007 10:07 AMThe Palestinian "state"---should such a "state" ever come into existence---will be the only "state" in the history of the world whose "existence" is founded firmly on the goal of destroying a neighboring country.
Redefining sovereignty, indeed....
However (and this is getting tiring and no doubt, tiresome), they don't really want that state they keep clamoring for. And the reason that they don't want a state is that in their view, the goal of Israel's destruction (that goal, to which everything else is subservient, for which any action can be justified, any lie proclaimed, any form of suffering borne) is more readily achievable by not accepting / obtaining / receiving / achieving "statehood"---even while insisting that yes, statehood is what they so very much want, while whining, moaning, groaning, accusing and complaining that they are prevented from having one by...oh, the usual suspects.
"Statehood", or more precisely, the claim that they want statehood, is merely a ruse---albeit one that has successfully fooled so many of the purportedly intelligent (and of course, the humanistic). But Palestinian "statehood" is not an end, It is a means to achieve an end: the end of Israel.
(Or more precisely, not "statehood," but "the claim for Palestinian statehood"; the insistence that a Palestinian state is what Palestinians desire---that is the means to the glorious, dreamed-for, dreamed-about end.)
And once that glorious end is achieved, the Palestinians---either with statehood or without---can resume slaughtering one another in more serious fashion than they've been doing up until now. And their Arab brethren (states all) can vie with one another to take over the territory between the Jordan and the sea, which they've been drooling over for the past 59 years.
Which will, finally, resolve the issue of Palestinian "statehood."
Thus the claim for Palestinian statehood, is, in short, a prolonged and involved cock tease whose purpose is ultimately Israel's erasure. But it seems that it's a sensation that the world dearly enjoys.
So yes, Palestinian statehood is a rather interesting form of "sovereignty." I don't believe it's in the book, though. Perhaps it ought to be put in an epilogue in the next edition....
Hardly. We were born with a Manifest Destiny too.
Posted by: oj at March 22, 2007 6:25 AMHeh....
Posted by: Barry Meislin at March 22, 2007 7:42 AM