Robert Wright writes:
But then I remembered a conversation I had a few years ago with a psychologist at Boston College named Liane Young. She and some colleagues had done research on how Palestinians and Israelis view their conflict and found that the two groups have something in common: Both believe that people on their side of the fight are motivated more by love for one another than by hatred of people on the other side, but that on the other side it’s the other way around: there, people are motivated more by hatred of the enemy than by love of one another.
The Palestine/Israel Pulse, an annual survey of Israelis and Palestinians, also found some disturbing commonalities:
As in previous surveys, levels of trust in the other side are very low: 86% of Palestinians and 85% of Israeli Jews believe the other side is not trustworthy.
Each side perceives itself as an exclusive victim (84% of Palestinians and 84% of Israeli Jews), while an overwhelming majority of Palestinians (90%) but only a smaller majority of Israeli Jews (63%) think this suffering grants them with a moral right to do anything they deem as necessary for survival. A vast majority among both groups (93%) see themselves as rightful owners of the land between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan river. While a third of Israeli Jews are willing to accept some ownership right of the Palestinians, only 7% of Palestinians are willing to accept such idea about the Jews.
* * *
No issue depresses me more than the Israel-Palestine conflict. October seventh made me feel physically ill, and I couldn’t write new cartoons for a month after, because nothing else seemed as urgent but writing a cartoon about Israel and Gaza felt impossible.
Eventually, I forced myself to write a few cartoons about Israel and Gaza. The best of the scripts – this one – is actually a remake of a cartoon I did ages ago (15 years? 20?), Such An Easy Mistake To Make.
What Hamas did on October 7th was incomprehensibly awful. What Israel has done since is also incomprehensively awful. It’s a hideous situation.
I don’t think peace is impossible. But to even begin diplomatic steps towards real peace would require new governments on both sides of the conflict. That’s a big ask, and even if it happens, it would be lead not to peace but to yet more big asks which would be required before peace could happen. I like to bring some optimism into these notes accompanying the cartoons, but regarding Israel and Palestine, I find it very hard to feel hope.
I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season.
TRANSCRIPT OF CARTOON
This cartoon has four panels. Each panel shows the same scene: Two women on a suburban or urban-but-not-the-core sidewalk. It looks like winter; the women are both wearing puffy jackets, and the trees are bare.
The woman on the left has black hair in a ponytail, is wearing a dark purple knit hat, a blue puffy coat, and dark pants. Let’s call her HAT.
The woman on the right has round glasses, reddish-brown hair, and is wearing a black puffy winter vest over a long-sleeve shirt, and a polka-dot skirt. Let’s call her SKIRT.
PANEL 1
Hat is holding her phone away from her face, as if she just finished a phone call. She’s got her back to Skirt, but is looking in skirt’s direction, and is slightly surprised to be addressed. Skirt is speaking to Hat with a sincere expression.
SKIRT: Excuse me… I overheard what you said on the phone, and I completely agree! This whole war comes down to the right to self-defense.
PANEL 2
Hat has turned towards Skirt. Both women have somewhat angry expressions, but the mood (I hope) isn’t yelling at each other, but a mutual griping session. Hat has lifted one hand in an “explaining my point” gesture, while Skirt has her arms akimbo.
HAT: Exactly! No other nation is expected to endure attack after attack without fighting back!
SKIRT: It’s unfortunate that some civilians die. But we’re not the ones who started it!
PANEL 3
They get more into their griping; hat is holding her hands in fists and leaning forward, and Skirt is waving her arms and leaning forward.
HAT: Right! They could end this anytime, but they don’t want to!
SKIRT: We’ve got no choice! We’re defending our right to exist!
PANEL 4
Hat turns a bit away as the conversation ends. Both of them look very pleased. The dialog this panel is all in thought balloons.
HAT (thought): So nice to meet another Israel supporter!
SKIRT (thought): So nice to meet another Hamas supporter!
CHICKEN FAT WATCH
In panel three, there’s a newspaper littering the ground. If you look super closely, the paper has the headline CARTOONIST LOSES PATRONS, and in smaller print, “Whoops! Says Drawing Man.” The newspaper’s photo shows a stickfigure man shrugging.
Thought-provoking. You must have written it very carefully!
Is that a discarded olive branch on the ground?
Reminds me of this old comic:
https://leftycartoons.com/2008/10/09/such-an-easy-mistake-to-make/
And it’s still just as good.
Over 15 years ago, a transphobe overheard another transphobe talking on her “cell phone.” Now, you don’t have to specify that it’s a cellphone because cell phones are the default kind of phone.
Damn, I thought one of them was going to be a Russia or Republika Srbska supporter.
But I guess no one remembers that the whole Bosnian debacle started when an Orthodox wedding was attacked, and priests and guests massacred for daring to display Christian symbols openly in front of Muslims. This of course justified all the Serbian atrocities that followed. And it has NOTHING to do with the economic and ethnic problems of port-Tito Yugoslavia.
Gently… Because I understand people have a whole lot of feelings about this.
I don’t think the Israeli actions are incomprehensible or evil. I think that the actions and plight of Israelis can be understood if one is interested in understanding. Similarly, I think that the actions and plight of the average Palestinian can be understood if one is interested in understanding. I think there’s an argument that Hamas might be evil, but again… I think with a little effort, they can at least be understood.
The problem is that these plights are irreconcilable. If Israel agreed to a ceasefire today, it would only last as long as it took Hamas to gather the resources to break it. And I’m not sure what the trust building exercise involved in Israel allowing the West Bank or Gaza autonomy would even look like.
It’s a fundamentally sad situation, because for the most part they’re acting like self interested people according to their beliefs… And it’s devastating to the people in the region.
Sorry, you said awful, not evil… That’s on me. I think maybe I’m used to the language being charged on the topic. I’d concede awful.
This might say something weird about me, but, as someone with social anxiety, I liked this ending better than the ending in Such An Easy Mistake To Make.
They went away friends! Sure, it was on false pretenses, but still less stressful somehow.
ALSO, it’s interesting that the person is panel for says “another Hamas supporter,” rather than “another Palestine supporter.” Was this a conscious choice? I guess Hamas is who’s doing the fighting, but in my experience most supporters of Palestine in the United States (rightfully!) don’t support Hamas (which is among other things rightwing in important ways and theocratic).
@Corso:
I expect a Palestinian or someone supporting Gaza or even Hamas would say, “If Hamas agreed to a ceasefire today, it would only last as long as it took Israel to find an excuse to break it.” It’s the sort of belief that Barry was pointing out in the original post. I expect you know this already though.
I can’t find it in myself to support either government’s behavior. Netanyahu’s government has attacked civilian targets* and appears to have more or less stopped even trying to get any of the hostages back. To the point that IDF soldiers just shoot any hostages that do manage to get close to their lines. (They feared for their lives when three men approached them carrying a white flag? Who trained these guys, the Alabama police?) Hamas, of course, perpetrated a massacre and mass kidnapping. It’s notable to me that the head of Hamas was apparently quoted as noting that this action got Gaza back in the news. Clearly, the Gazan people were the eggs he was prepared to break to get his omelet. And he lives in (I think) Qatar or UAE, safe from any risk.
Note that my dislike for the government does not mean that I blame either people for what’s going on. Both governments have dubious right (at best) to claim that they represent their people. Palestinians voted Hamas in originally, but they quickly became dictators. Netanyahu only won 23% of the popular vote in Israel in 2022 and that was after US Republican style manipulation tactics. Both countries deserve better. I hope they can get it, but I don’t see how.
*Even if you have strong reason to believe that your enemy is hiding in a civilian hospital, shouldn’t you be concerned about the civilians that they’re hiding behind and try for something a little less mass murderous than bombing?
A family member in Israel posted, a while back, about how Israelis teach their kids that all people are to be respected but Palestinians teach their kids that all Jews must die.
I pointed out how in that very sentence they were teaching their kids that Palestinians want to kill them. I haven’t heard a word from them since.
The whole situation is maddeningly awful and, mostly due to the work of the far right in Israel, farther than ever from any kind of reasonable and peaceful resolution.
Dianne @ 6
It’s interesting, because I said “it would only last as long as it took Hamas to gather the resources to break it.” and you said “it would only last as long as it took Israel to find an excuse to break it”.
I don’t know. I suspect that they might say it, but what if the excuse never came? This conflict has been brewing for generations, and while there are atrocities enough to go around, my impression is that there’s a difference in kind and scale here and throughout history. Israel has always struck me as a nation constantly looking for an excuse, and being given one. I don’t know that we know Israel would in fact violate a real, lasting peace, because I don’t think they’ve ever been offered one.
But really… It’s irrelevant. One of the themes I’ve noticed around this conflict is a tendency, both on the part of Israeli and Palestinian proponents, is that they’ll dig into history, but only so far back as to make their point. And then their opponent says; “Yeah, but if we just go back a few years earlier, my case would be stronger” to which the reply is “Yeah, but what if we went a few years further back then that?” And then, perhaps if they get to a point where they’ve both exhausted their temporal mastery, they’ll bounce around through history in a perpetual argument machine.
This fails to get anywhere because it is an entirely semantic argument. I don’t think that the people having these arguments really care about the details they’re fighting about – There is no magic datapoint, no detail, that is going to convince someone deeply entrenched in an Israeli or Palestinian position that would convince them that they are wrong.
But reality asserts. People are dying. Lots of them. And I don’t see a way out of it.
Because I get it, the conditions that the Palestinians live in are awful. No one wants them. Their leaders are corrupt, but at least they’re theirs. If you remove all the hope from an entire generation of young people and instill them with fear and hate, what we see is understandable.
And yet, understandable or not, what do you do with it?
I think, if a solution that doesn’t involve an mass migration out of the area is ever going to be possible, that the solution is going to involve the Israeli government finding a way to weather a certain amount of terrorism without much reprisal. Maybe a couple of years of bridge building.
I honestly don’t know…. I don’t think that’s likely. We wouldn’t ask that of anyone else. When a terrorist organization blew up a half dozen buildings in America and killed 5000 people, America occupied Afghanistan for 20 years after the last attack on American soil happened. Rocket attacks are still being fired daily. Those rockets have a range that could hit anywhere in 90% of Israel. If the elected government of Mexico started launched an attack into Texas from Mexico City with similar fact patterns to October 7th, Mexico would cease to exist.
It’s just… sad. The whole thing is fundamentally sad.
” Netanyahu only won 23% of the popular vote in Israel in 2022 ”
True, but his coalition got a much larger % of the vote. Do you think coalition governments are illegitimate? Olaf Scholzs party got 26% of the vote, but is Chancellor – is he similarly illegitimate?
I would say using “Hamas” instead of “Palestine” is as biased as presenting what’s happening in the West Bank as “Palestine vs. Kach.”
[For the record, Kach is a Kahanist terrorist organization, and many, if not most, of the settlers committing violence in the West Bank are Kahanists.]
Yes, exactly.
Let’s review the tape:
So you were responding to a sentence fragment, not a sentence; it’s possible that Diane considers the rest of her sentence part of what she was saying. Also, she never said “illegitimate.”
A government can be “legitimate” – in the sense of being legally elected and in charge – without having a strong claim to “represent their people.” For instance, a US President who doesn’t win the popular vote but did win the electoral college can’t really be said to have a popular mandate. Or someone who is elected with shenanigans that are nonetheless legal, like if many ballots that would have favored their opponent are thrown out on a technicality.
It’s a good point that in a coalition government system, it’s more common for the executive to win
morewith less than 50% of the popular vote. (Or, anyway, I assume it’s more common – I don’t really know for sure.) As an American, I didn’t consider that, so thanks.Netanyahu’s party got only 23% of the vote, but his government, including the other parties that form it, got 42%, which is pretty respectable and compares with most other Israeli governments of recent times. (The previous anti-Netanyahu government ruled with a similar %).
The problem is not that Netanyahu has somehow seized control of an Israel that doesn’t want him through legal technicalities and plunged it down a bellicose path against the will of its people. It is that a very large number of Israelis are willing, knowingly exactly what they will get, to vote for Netanyahu – or to vote for people who are even worse than him.
Avvaaaa @ 14
This is exactly right… before 2000, there was an appetite for peace. It’s how you got leaders like Ehud Barak, who basically staked his political career on peace and a Palestinian state. But Yasser Arafat walked away from the Clinton deal in 2000 so he could LARP in the second intifada and the tastes of the nation changed – In 2001 Ariel Sharon was elected, then Ehud Olmert, and then Benjamin Netanyahu. Even when Netanyahu lost control of the Knesset, Naftali Bennett wasn’t exactly a moderating breath of fresh air.
They know what they’re voting for, and they’re getting who they voted for.
“Yasser Arafat walked away from the Clinton deal in 2000 so he could LARP in the second intifada…”
Unsurprisingly, real life is more complicated than this popular story.
The Sharm el-Sheikh Fact-Finding Committee Report – more popularly known as The Mitchell Report – found no evidence for the claim that Arafat was deliberately trying to start the 2nd intifada. They did find – unsurprisingly – that both sides were at fault in different ways.
“before 2000, there was an appetite for peace.”
I am starting to think that the pro-peace period of the 90s was actually very short and never as strong on the Israeli side as it seemed.
The most pro-peace leader was not Barak, it was Yitzhak Rabin, and he was assassinated by an anti-peace religious fundamentalist. I think that about says it all.
The backsliding on Oslo began in 1996 with the first Netanyahu government. Its true Netanyahu was more moderate back then, but he was still the Oslo-sceptic candidate, if not necessarily completely anti-Oslo. Barak was an attempt to recover it but even under Barak Israeli was starting to demand more and more control. Barak was trying to straddle the divide between the pro-peace and anti-peace (or, if you prefer less loaded language, pro-security) factions, and ultimately he was not successful.
Amp @ 16
My take is even a little more nuanced than this.
When you look at the records of what was being negotiated, it seems obvious, at least to me, that Barak was offering the Palestinians a real deal. We can quibble on the details, and there’s points that I’ll grant, but the deal was 1) an opening offer and 2) not facially absurd. Something between 94-96% of the West Bank and Gaza, 3% land swaps. That was more than the Palestinians had been asking for in recent history. I really do believe that Barak was looking to get the statehood question settled. Instead of accepting that deal, or making a counteroffer, Arafat walked away from negotiations. A month later the violence started.
Arafat’s problem, in my opinion, is that he didn’t have a general mandate from a majority of Palestinians and that the second intifada was being planned, regardless of the outcome of his negotiation. I don’t think that you get as organized as the Palestinians were in 40 days. It wasn’t that Arafat or the PA were trying to start the second intifada, it’s that it was happening one way or the other. I believe that he had some amount of intelligence saying so, I believe that he couldn’t accept the deal while knowing that the intifada was imminent because it would undermine what little legitimacy he had, and he couldn’t sit out the intifada, because someone else would step up and replace him from an already tenuous perch.
Avvaaa @ 17
“Its true Netanyahu was more moderate back then”
For the record, I agree with most of your thoughts, but this might not be quite right…. I think that Netanyahu, at least back then, was something of a political weathervane, able to point wherever the political winds were blowing. It’s still obvious that he had opinions, but he wasn’t willing to express them if it meant political suicide, and I really do believe that in the 90’s, there was a big push from the Israelis to get the question of Palestinian Statehood settled, and I think that the Palestinians walking away from Camp David was a blow to that, and I think the second intifada was seen as something of a betrayal.
Imagine from the perspective of the Israelis… They think they tried. In fact, they think they gave their best effort: They weren’t willing to give up entirely on East Jerusalem, and they weren’t willing to give Palestinians a universal right to return, but they were willing to give up to 99% of the acreage asked for, they were willing to bulldoze settlements, they were willing to vacate Gaza, they were willing to normalize relations…. All as an opening offer. And in return for that offer, the Palestinians walked away and attempted yet another doomed to fail genocide. If you talk to Israelis who were politically active around the time, they always sound betrayed.
Like bitterly betrayed. It reminds me in kind, if not in severity, of the bitterness of the failure of the Charlottetown and Meech Lake Accords in Canada. There wasn’t even bloodshed over that and yet, 36 years later, and there’s still separatist parties in Quebec.
Which is a long way of saying: Now Netanyahu can be Netanyahu.
“Imagine from the perspective of the Israelis… ”
Yes, that does sound reasonable.
But do you realize that one can construct just as reasonable sounding a point about Camp David from the perspective of the PA?
Arafat and the PA thought that it was too soon to begin in-person negotiations; they didn’t think enough ground had been laid, and that six months wasn’t enough time. The PA (correctly) thought that Clinton and Barak were rushing in part because they were hoping to show results in time for their respective election schedules. Arafat was only willing to come because Clinton promised that if things didn’t work out (as Arafat thought they wouldn’t) the US wouldn’t blame Arafat and the PA.* Israel was refusing to abide by some of their Oslo commitments, refused to made the withdrawals they agreed to in the Wye River Agreement, and was rapidly expanding the settlements – even though the Palestinians believed they had made enormous concessions to Israel (including recognizing Israel as a state) at Oslo.
And the deal that Israel offered at Camp David, from the Palestinian point of view, was terrible. Israel offered to give up about 1% of the West Bank in return for Israel taking 9% (according to Robert Malloy, a US negotiator at Camp David).** The west bank would be divided into cantons.
In the context of Oslo – in which, from the Palestinian perspective, they made huge concessions and Israel responded by breaking commitments and stealing land – the offer at Camp David just seemed like a set-up for further betrayal. Arafat would have been committing political suicide if he had brought that agreement back; he would have been accused of taking bribes from Israel. It was basically politically impossible for Arafat to sell any agreement at home until Israel began showing good faith by fulfilling at least their Wye River commitments.
Now, you may not agree with all of that. Any one-sided summary of views – the one you presented, or the one I presented just now – is by definition incomplete, and there are always details that can be picked at.
But my point is that, from the Palestinian perspective, they had very good reasons to not trust Israel, to think they were being offered a terrible deal, and to feel that they were screwed over by the way things turned out.
The second intifada took place two months after Camp David ended, and it probably never would have gotten as violent as it did if Israel had responded to protestors proportionately. And contrary to mythology, the Palestinians at Camp David made concessions and offers; for instance, they offered to give up Jewish neighborhoods in East Jerusalem, and parts of the West Bank, and to guarantee that the “right of return” would not happen in a way that threatened Israel’s interest in remaining demographically a Jewish majority.
The idea that Arafat knew for certain that the second intifada was coming, blah blah blah, sounds like a conspiracy theory; there’s no reason to think that The Mitchell Report would have completely missed all that.
*Clinton broke his promise, to put it mildly.
** One difficulty of talking about what was offered at Camp David is that Barak never made a written offer, so all we have are differing accounts and investigations, which is why some people refer to Camp David as a Rashomon summit. Malloy’s version of what Israel offered is actually MORE generous than what some others have claimed Israel offered, but is of course less generous than what Barak claims he offered.
Amp @ 19
Most of this is right. I could quibble, but it’s mostly subjective. It goes to the wider point of the comic… Everyone feels justified. They have positions that are defensible.
One thing:
I’m not sure that the Mitchell Report was equipped to look at that… As far as I can tell, it didn’t make any determination about any causation, planning, or timelines, except to say that they were not presented with any information that made the intifada seem planned from either the Israeli or Palestinian side.
As to that, you have to remember that the Mitchell Report came out in 2001, before the intifada was even finished. There’s been a lot of subsequent information released; statements from Hamas leadership, Arafat’s widow, and correspondence. It seems obvious, at least, that Arafat started planning his part of the uprising from, at latest, the moment of his departure from Camp David, which included funneling arms around before Sharon’s visit to Al Aqsa.
And yes, the Mitchell Report missed that.
I feel for both sides a lot, and also kind of feel like both sides are at their very least appealing right now. It looks like both governments are very dug into the position of wanting lots of support for killing the other side.
“and to guarantee that the “right of return” would not happen in a way that threatened Israel’s interest in remaining demographically a Jewish majority.”
I’ve never seen anything very convincing about this. Almost any right of return was going to demographically threaten a Jewish majority. And like the settlements that was going to only get worse over time which argued for as early as possible Palestinian regularization. One key insight I’ve seen is that this is an area where quests for historical/cosmic justice directly interfere with the ability of Palestinians to have thriving current/future lives.
The problem–or at least a problem–at this point is that neither side is actually wrong when they say that the other wants their destruction. Not every Israeli wants to overrun the Palestinian territories, take the land, and commit cultural and/or physical genocide. But that appears to be what their government is after. Not every Palestinian wants to drive the Israelis into the sea. But that’s what their government seems to want.
As Corso pointed out, there are layers on layers of historical conflicts and wrongs. As far as I know, there’s never been a time when either side was really committed to peace and certainly hasn’t ever been a time when the US has been committed to facilitating a just peace between the two. Maybe Carter would have done it in 1981 if he’d been re-elected, but anyone since then, not even a chance.
Nothing’s going to change until they can reconcile with the past or even forget the past. And I don’t know how that happens.
Actually, I said that a supporter of Gaza or possibly just Hamas might say that. I would say that it is more complex than either statement. There’s a lot of history, not all of it occurring in the Middle East, a lot of exploiters taking advantage of the situation (also not all and possibly not even most in the Middle East), a lot of desperate people doing things that are not in their long term best interest but may feel like what they need to do to survive now. So, yeah, something bad will happen. Whether it’s Israeli settlers killing a Palestinian teen while the IDF looks on or Palestinian teens throwing stones or WMDs being tossed about, it’s going to happen. Who’s to blame? Yes.
One possibility is to acknowledge the right of return with limited annual quotas for returnees, combined with an option for people to choose to give up their right to return in exchange for reparation payments. It’s not a perfect solution, to put it mildly, but it would at least acknowledge that Palestinians were wrongfully evicted and deserve some compensation, which is better than nothing.
But my point was, right of return wasn’t a significant sticking point in the negotiations at Camp David, as far as we know. And agreeing on maintaining a Jewish demographic advantage in Israel was a concession made by the PA, contrary to claims that no concessions were made.
But that’s not even really reflective of what happened. The vast, vast majority of the Palestinian diaspora were not evicted and are not descended from people who were, even if you wanted to consider the people who sold their land under less than ideal (read: arguably predatory) conditions.
Most of the people in the Palestinian diaspora are the children of people who left the area to join the armies that attacked Israel in one of the half dozen major conflicts. They left because they thought they would win and preferred an Arab government.
So just to be crystal clear: Are you suggesting that Israel should pay reparations to traitors who waged literal war against the country, and their descendants, because their parents weren’t allowed back in after they committed treason?
The problem with this, past that it’s never going to happen, is that even if you consider that some kind of acceptable compromise of a settlement, this seems like a special hardship designed only to effect Israel. No other nation in history has been asked to even consider something like this. Americans descended from British traitors don’t get to claim British citizenship, their historical homestead, or a lump of cash.
Depending on who you ask, there were either four or five main sticking points. The first mentioned is always where the specific borders will be, and then the second and third wobble between the right of return and the status of Jerusalem. I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone put forward an analysis that did not consider the right of return as a pain point during the Camp David negotiations.
“So just to be crystal clear: Are you suggesting that Israel should pay reparations to traitors who waged literal war against the country, and their descendants, because their parents weren’t allowed back in after they committed treason?”
To be crystal clear – yes.
I mean… Ok, thanks for being honest.
I have serious doubts that that is ever going to happen. Not only because of the questionable morality surrounding the idea, but because the Palestinians aren’t looking for reparations.
I feel like the positions of some of the people viewing this conflict through a secular, Western lens just can’t grapple with the reality of Palestinian beliefs. Poll after poll shows that while maybe there are some Palestinians willing to accept peace, most of them just don’t want it. They believe that if they continue to struggle, that their situation will improve. They think they can overthrow Israel. And they’re not going to be bought off those beliefs with 1967 borders and some amount of cash.
And again… I don’t blame the Palestinians for thinking this, surrounding governments have been gassing up the Palestinians for generations, using them as a cat’s-paw to indirectly act against Israel. It’s a relatively recent development that most of those governments have since moderated and have discarded the Palestinians like a childhood toy, leaving them more and more desperate, and with more and more radical allies. Who’s really in their corner anymore? Iran?
My point being that This is a legitimately difficult situation, and while I don’t question the motivations of people with easy answers, because I think they genuinely would like for the conflict to end, I do question how familiar they are with the conflict. Before 10/7, If Israel thought it could pay $100,000 per Palestinian and bring peace to the middle east, I think they would have, questionable morality be damned. Post 10/7… I’m not sure how much goodwill they could muster. But even that’s a wishful thought experiment because Israel doesn’t think that the Palestinians can be bought.
Nope, I wasn’t suggesting that, nor do I agree with your framing here, but I also don’t feel like diving into that rabbit hole today.
My point is that the Palestinian negotiators were open to finding some sort of symbolic right of return that would preserve Israel’s Jewish majority, and I think the Israeli negotiators were open to that as well. What the exact details of that might have been weren’t discussed, but it doesn’t appear that people at the negotiations thought that it was an impossible needle to thread.
Me:
Corso:
Robert Malloy, one of the U.S. negotiators at Camp David:
Yes, such as the poll I linked to and quoted in the original post.
Although the Israelis are much more accepting of Palestinians right to have a nation than vice versa, the large majority of Israelis – in a survey from before October 7th, I imagine things have gotten worse since – are a mirror image of the Palestinians on this question. You phrased it in a way that implies there’s something non-Western that people viewing “through a Western lens” about “Palestinian beliefs” can’t understand. But I think a lot of Westerners, including but not limited to Israelis, have similar views in some ways.
I’d be more worried about how Palestinian society will develop going forward. I don’t know how prevalent this is, or will become, but I’ve already heard people referring to what’s happened to Gaza since October as the “second Nakba.” Of course, this isn’t the only time that’s happened – there have been several times when people have talked about second Nakbas about an event that almost no one talks about a few years after – but I suspect that this time the name will stick; this catastrophe and (arguably, but I’d say it is) genocide will leave a scar on Palestinian identity that will last decades.
Finally, could you start including links to support some of your claims, or when you say “polls and polls” say something?
” some of the people viewing this conflict through a secular, Western lens just can’t grapple with the reality of Palestinian beliefs.”
Thank god we’ve got you here to provide the authentic Palestinian perspective.
“nor do I agree with your framing here,”
Usually when somebody is trying to use weasel words and aggressive framing to try to force people to either recant their beliefs or say “Yes I agree with traitors/murderers/nazis” I prefer to just go with the latter, to expose how ridiculous their concern trolling is.
But that’s me.
Amp @ 28
From your own source:
And again, what I said was:
I stand by that. Even if they were able to figure out what the drawn borders would look like, there was a 0% chance of reaching an agreement without also coming to a solution on the right of return, and the Palestinians didn’t seem to have a plan that was realistic. I think that to this day, Palestinian leadership would struggle with trying to enunciate what their position actually is.
@29
I’m sorry, but I’m not quite sure what this was supposed to say. To be clear: I believe that it’s harder for people who live and grew up in relatively secular societies to really understand what religious fundamentalism feels like. The incentive structures and motivations are very different, and I think that it’s a common mistake for people to insert themselves into the shoes of people like the Palestinians and ask questions like “What would I do?” or “What would I want?”.
I mean… bluntly… Do you really think the Palestinians would generally give up on the right of return for some amount of money? It’s great to have optimism about the situation (I really do mean that), but I don’t think this is the kind of thing you could throw money, or even land at. There are going to be people for which no amount of land, save “all of it”, is enough. Whatever a long term solution looks like, it’s almost certainly going to have to involve a multi-generational cultural shift and deradicalization effort.
I’ll try.