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by Peter A. Belmont / 2011-05-11
© 2011 Peter Belmont
From the economist we learn that J-Street’s Ben-Ami wants to be able to love his mother, Israel, drunk or sober. He wants dear old Mom to make “concessions” to the Palestinians before—Oh! hateful thought—the Palestinians take the law in their own hands and declare statehood unilaterally.
That is to say, he wants his Mom to be in charge, not anyone else, and despite his Mom’s erratic behavior over the las 44 years!
Parenthetically, isn’t that funny? Didn’t Israel declare statehood unilaterally, after years of terrorism directed at Britain, the Mandatory, and the Palestinians, in 1948? And hasn’t Israel taken the law in its own hands, violating international law right and left, top and bottom, front and back, since 1967? To say nothing of its refusal, from 1948, to allow the return of the exiled refugees of the 1948 war?
Well, yes, but—for J-Street’s Ben-Ami—Israel is dear old Mom, and nice people don’t criticize their dear old Mom, do they? Isn’t the slogan, “My country, right or wrong, my mother, drunk or sober”? What a fine thing is love! And where dear old Mom is concerned, double standards are not merely allowable, they are mandatory. (“Mandatory”? Sorry, bad choice of words, let’s just say “required”.)
But Drunk? Mom!
Yes, dears, you gotta love my Mom even when she’s drunk (drunk on power, drunk on her ability to command the USA’s Congress, as Israel is, drunk on her ability to inflict any pains on the Palestinians that she may choose, all in loving memory of the Holocaust which was all about inflicting pains. Never say Israel didn’t have the best teachers!).
OKaaaaaaaaaay. J-Street’s Ben-Ami gotta love his Mom.
But hold it!
Don’t we make our aging parents give up their driver’s licenses when they get so old they cannot see? Or stay so drunk they cannot function at all?
Even though—or because --we love them?
So, Ben-Ami wants lovely old Mom to “make concessions”—concessions of her dreams, or her hopes, of her aspirations, but hardly concessions of anything she owns, because she does not and never did “own” the West Bank or East Jerusalem (whatever “law” she may have purported to impose at gunpoint). International law has been clearly stated by the UNSC over the years and by the ICJ in 2004. Israel is a belligerent occupier of the Occupied Palestinian Territories (and Syria’s Golan Heights), not the owner.
(And not a mere administrator, either, for an occupier has duties of care for the population that an administrator might not have.)
True, the international law has never been enforced. The wild west is still wild. The bad guys (Ma Israel and her “boys”) are still running rampant and there is no sheriff (the USA’s veto seeing to that). The fix has been in. The thumb has been on the scale. But the nations have not forgotten international law, however much Israel and the USA might desire them to. Turkey and Egypt show some signs of remembering the law, and actively!
So here’s dear old Mom, holding on for dear life to the West Bank (including, as it does, East Jerusalem) where for some stupid reason probably arising from the drunken stupor she’s been in since 1967, she’s invested quite a bit of her savings and managed to talk herself into the idea that she owns it and is entitled to keep it. That crazy idea that she owns the West Bank explains why she thinks of leaving any part of it as a “concession”.
And J-Street’s Ben-Ami wants her to make “concessions” to the Palestinians and to do so before they strike first, before they declare statehood in September. I guess Ben-Ami wants it to appear that any “agency” (any ability to act, any power to move the world) belongs to Ma Israel and not to the Palestinians, those pesky folk whose house Ma invaded in 1948 and is slowly taking over—let international law look after its own Mom, says she. (Well said, Mom!)
By the way, to return to a bit of reality for a moment, though levity sure beats gravity, a Palestinian declaration of a state in the post-1967 territory (West Bank with East Jerusalem and Gaza) is a very large concession to Israel: it concedes the entire territory of pre-1967 Israel, even though that territory was always (in principle) negotiable since its boundaries were merely temporary truce lines from the war of 1948-50 and had never been declared as Israel’s boundaries by Israel, although so understood by the world, even today.
So Ben-Ami wants the Palestinians to be prevented from making this concession?
I think he doesn’t love his Mom enough. He should tell her (and tell the world) that her driving license should be taken away. She is a menace on the highways, a danger to herself and others.
And she doesn’t know where she is going.
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