Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas called on Barack Obama to jump-start the “peace process.” At LobeLog, I examine whether Obama is likely to heed that call and the grim position Abbas is in that prompted him to make it.
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Obama needs our help.
Abbas may ask for a restart of “talks” as a form of “help” for Palestinians, but talks are merely make-work for the negotiators. They have been non-productive for decades amd are not going anywhere. There is some help the USA could offer however.
A “cry for help” may be explicit, “Please help me!”, but it may also be in code, as people contemplating suicide are said sometimes to do.
Certain behavior is so destructive — even so self-destructive — that such behavior should be taken as a “cry for help” by friends of the bad-behavor even if “help” is the very last thing the bad-behavor would admit to requesting.
Israel’s settlement policy, its rapidly escalating settlement practice, its refusal to rein-in (investigate or punish) illicit violence by settlers (or illicit violence by IOF personnel) — and so much more — seems to me to demand that all friends of Israel REGARD and TREAT such behaviors as “cries for help”.
And the help that is called for — whether desired by the government of Israel and its people or not — is for its friends to demand an end to settlements, return of the settlers to residency inside (pre-1967) Israel, the removal/dismantlement of the wall and of the settlements buildings, and the full and complete end of the siege of Gaza (apart from an ambargo on arms). (The wall may be rebuilt on Israel’s “green line” inside Israeli sovereign territory where it will protect Israelis at home (where the settleres should return)).
Although of Jerwish ancestry, I regard myself as a friend of Palestine rather than a friend of Israel, and I have been suggesting this sort of “help” for many years. Now — and I should say, “clearly” — it is time for Israel’s friends to begin to offer the same help.
President Obama should go to Israel/Palestine with a petition in his pocket signed by millions of friends of Israel — Jews among them — giving him permission and requesting him to put pressure on Israel to conform its occupation to the requirements of international law. This means rolling back all the settlements ands repartriating all the settlers. Not easy for Israel to do, not easy for Obama to ask (or demand).
That’s why he needs the petition. Obama needs our help.