Tornado Alley (PROG)

[sortagreen]

I thought the points about the intransigence of Palestinian leaders to take what was on the table, 95% of the West Bank, was pertinent.

The 95% was a reservation. No borders, no ports... An Abu Dhabi? Bullshit, a Bantustan by any other name.

I understand (second hand I admit) from someone that was in the room, that it was the Israelis that kept moving the goalposts. But neither here nor there, if the 95% was really an offer, Israelis wouldn't have gobbled up nearly the entire West Bank at this point. How do you negotiate over a pizza while people on one side of the table are eating it. Again, look up Sharon's Pastrami Sandwich plan

Former Prime Minister of Israel Ariel Sharon said in 1973: “We’ll make a pastrami sandwich of them. We’ll insert a strip of Jewish settlement in between the Palestinians and another strip of Jewish settlement right across the West Bank so that in 25 years’ time neither the U.N. nor the U.S., nobody will be able to tear it apart.” Again, in 1998 shortly before being elected prime minister, Sharon wrote: “Everyone has to move, run and grab as many hilltops as they can to enlarge the settlements because everything we take now will stay ours … Everything we don’t grab will go to them.”

Since that time, innumerable illegal Israeli settlements have fragmented the land in the West Bank while creating a concentration camp of Palestinian Gaza, thus making the creation of a viable Palestinian state increasingly more difficult.

https://www.bangordailynews.com/2010/06/13/opinion/israels-pastrami-sandwich-policy/

If Israel wanted peace, that policy wouldn't exist, and clearly it does.

If Israel wanted peace, there wouldn't be a law allowing any random Jew from New Jersey to file suit to evict a Palestinian family in East Jerusalem.

If Israel wanted peace, an American Congresswoman named Tlaib would be allowed to visit her fucking grandmother outside of Jerusalem, without kissing Netanyahu's fascist ass.

Bill is very funny... He's clever, dry... good timing; he's got great chops, but he gets his facts wrong. The Palestinians didn't go to war with Israel. Their Arab neighbors did, and while it can sometimes be disputed as to who attacked whom, we should be able to agree the Palestinians have never had an army.

Bill's point seems to be, "you lost; get over it", but Israel isn't done, and Bill doesn't explain what sort of accommodation 5 million plus Palestinians are supposed to come to with the voracious beast that's currently feasting on them.

Let's talk about Israeli apartheid in the "law".

Israeli law permits Jews to reclaim property that they or their families owned in Jerusalem prior to the division of the city after Israel’s establishment in 1948, provided that they can prove ownership of the land. For their part, Palestinians cannot claim rights to property they once owned in Jerusalem or other parts of Israel.

https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/how-evictions-jerusalem-led-israeli-palestinian-violence


After 1967, the Absentees’ Property Law was applied to the eastern part of the city. Properties of Palestinians who were outside East Jerusalem at the time – including many Palestinians in the rest of the West Bank that held property in East Jerusalem – were transferred to the Israeli Custodian for Absentees’ Property and the Palestinian owners lost their rights to use them.

In Um Haroun, a different statute, the 1970 Legal and Administrative Law, has also become a way of forcing Palestinians from their homes.

The law gave Israelis the right to claim properties believed to have been owned by Jews in East Jerusalem before 1948, a right not extended to Palestinians who owned property inside Israel before 1948.

https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2022/12/30/israeli-land-registration-threatens-palestinian-mass-expulsion

There is an extremely large population of formerly Mexican nationals in the American Southwest. America seized that territory, but the people there were still there.

The War ended with the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which gave Mexican citizens one year to choose U.S. or Mexican citizenship. Approximately 115,000 people chose to remain in the U.S. and become citizens by conquest.

https://www.nps.gov/articles/latinothemestudylaw.htm

Palestinians were given no such options. Hundreds of thousands were simply expelled from the partitioned Israel and their legal right of return denied. It's a huge sticking point, and there's no question or even suggestion that the conquered people in the territories, many of them the same people, will ever be offered citizenship. Ask yourself then, what's the plan here?

And there's one last inconsistency with fact... This was the UN partition map, not the one Bill Maher shows. Bill appears to be showing the 1967 borders. The territories are considerably smaller, and Israel isn't even satisfied with that. From the river to the sea? More like from the sea to the river. Israel has the might to exist. Right has nothing to do with this.