On 6/8/06, Marvin Gandall <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Yoshie wrote:
> ...what we have is Israel from the river to the sea; and
> Palestinians should develop a strategy based on this fact: pursue one
> man, one vote in the already existing one state.
>
> But Palestinians, always fractious, have never been good at developing
> and sticking to one message.
================================
There was a small but growing current of thought within Palestine a couple
of years ago along the lines you suggest: abandon the idea of an
"independent" Palestinian state as a chimera, accept the reality of a
Greater Israel, mount an "anti-apartheid" struggle for citizenship rights
and transform it into a secular, democratic binational state.
Yes, Edward Said above all. He advocated moving from a "national
liberation" strategy to a "human rights" one.
One notable development is that the rhetoric of fighting against
apartheid has taken roots, among grassroots Palestinians and their
Jewish and other supporters. That's hopeful, a sign that recognition
of reality is dawning on them.
But that rhetoric is completely divorced from the Palestinian
leadership's strategy, to the extent that any faction -- Hamas, Abbas,
etc. -- of them can be said to have anything worth the name of
strategy at all.
Well, the Zionists obviously. This potential demographic and democratic
threat is why Sharon and Olmert decided to retreat from the thinly-populated
settlements in Gaza and the West Bank and to fortify and thicken the larger
settlements along Israel's new and expanded de facto border.
Zionists will never accept the human rights solution either, but the
human rights strategy will deny them an ability to pretend to have
accepted a two state solution and to make the actually existing Jewish
state from the sea to the river invisible. Denying Zionists that
ability is the first step in the Palestinian war of position if
Palestinians hope to win at all (it's clear that Palestinians, always
at military disadvantage and lacking in the Arab power elite's
support, cannot win in a war of maneuver, unless Arab streets
overthrow the existing Arab elite and remake the Middle East from the
bottom up, beginning in Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States).
--
Yoshie
<http://montages.blogspot.com/>
<http://mrzine.org>
<http://monthlyreview.org/>
