by Juan Cole, Informed Comment, May 11, 2024 https://www.juancole.com/2024/05/palestine-history-macklemore.html
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton delivered herself of some ahistorical and distorted remarks about Palestine on Morning Joe, maintaining that the young people protesting the Gaza atrocities do not know history. Ms. Clinton’s self-serving description of the 2000 Camp David process has been debunked by many historians. In fact, her husband Bill Clinton promised in the Oslo Accords in 1993 that Israel would withdraw from Gaza and the West Bank by 1997. He then allowed Benjamin Netanyahu to sabotage that process and allowed the Israelis to double the number of squatters they sent in to the Palestinian West Bank to steal property and terrorize people. When Netanyahu went out and Ehud Barak came in, Clinton sponsored negotiations, but Barak was maddeningly vague about what he would offer and never produced a text that Yasser Arafat could sign. It is not clear why Arafat needed to sign anything more; he already signed the Oslo treaty, which should have resulted in an Israeli withdrawal that never came. Soon thereafter Barak lost to Ariel Sharon, who was as determined to sabotage any land for peace deal as Netanyahu had been, and he wrecked the whole process. . . . I have also never understood the trope that Israel made generous offers to the Palestinians (it never did) but that the Palestinians rejected them, and therefore the Palestinians should be deprived of all their basic rights forever. What is this, an Original Sin doctrine? If the negotiations of 2000 fell through, why couldn’t they have been picked back up in 2001? It is because the Israelis wouldn’t pick them back up, and went on to steal vast swathes of private Palestinian property and to brutalize the occupied population. That is, in understanding these events, values as well as historical understanding are important, and I fear the Clintons have never had much of either. In contrast, Irish American rapper Macklemore (Benjamin Hammond Haggerty, b. 1983) dropped his single, “Hind’s Hall,” on May 10. He is donating the proceeds to United Nations relief work in Gaza. It may be the most powerful anti-war statement in music since Bob Dylan’s protest songs in the early 1960s against the nuclear arms race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union. And the song displays a firm knowledge of what exactly has been done in history to the Palestinians. . . . MACKLEMORE - HIND'S HALL https://youtu.be/fgDQyFeBBIo?si=f1hRyCr60B1YTuDF -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=- Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group. View/Reply Online (#30310): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/30310 Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/106065994/21656 -=-=- POSTING RULES & NOTES #1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. #2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived. #3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern. #4 Do not exceed five posts a day. -=-=- Group Owner: [email protected] Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/21656/1316126222/xyzzy [[email protected]] -=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
