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first thing that would have to happen is for sharon to get booted from power.
he has been even better than the folk who stage manage the bushimage have been in exploiting peoples fear to his own political ends. and it seems obvious that so long as sharon is in power, nothing will happen that will reduce hostility.
btw, i do not think arafat a prize either.
the wall should be dismantled.
the settlements should be dismantled and the programs of encouraging them stopped.
i think the israelis have no long-run choice but to concede right of return.
i would support gibingus' suggestion concerning the status of jerusalem, but no-one will like it.
the only way around or out of this is for the palestinian population to be accorded dignity, which under present conditions is stripped from them every day. if there is to be a seperate state, it would have to be economically viable--something which the israelis seem to oppose. the outline of such a state, floated in the period around the oslo accords, did not seem to meet this criterion.
i have no illusions about the viability of these ideas---but they would seem to me to function as a baseline set of conditions for anything approaching a resolution of these conflicts.
aside:
diverting consideration of this onto religious grounds gets nowhere quick. it has been functional for both sides to revert to racist understandings of the other--each serves to obscure what is happening on the ground, to make any resolution even more difficult to reach. it is easier to kill people that you distance via such categories. it is the basic discourse of legitimating massacre. on both sides.
as to the gambit of trying to conflate critique of the policies of the israeli government to questioning the legitimacy of the state itself to antisemitism---the linkage is always possible, and is a problem that you have to be aware of. particularly given that sliding from one term to the next seems to not be a particular problem for many people.
the seperation of terms is also possible. it is perfectly possible and reasonable to criticize, and harshly, the repressive (often barbaric) policies of the sharon government, for example, without any of the other terms coming into play at all.
i am inclined to be far more critical of the israeli state in generating and maintaining conflict with the palestinans than the other way around simply because israel is a regional superpower--the sharon "solution" to the conflict seems to be to brutalize the palestinians in the hopes of making almost any coherent state building impossible.
i also think that any coherent understanding of this conflict requires that you jettison the discourse of "terrorism". but every politics that tries to look at conditions in real life and not content itself with war fantasies has to reject the discourse of "terrorism" as well.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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