Dear America,
In the interest of full disclosure, let me begin with the acknowledgment that my father was Jewish and some of my relatives were killed and displaced by the Nazis. With that said, Benjamin Netanyahu speaks to congress today, and except for the din of the political acrimony it has generated, it is probably of little consequence. Netanyahu, whose nickname "Bibi" is how he is disparagingly referred to in many of the corridors of power in the world, will say nothing new, and his enmity toward Iran, whether more or less justified than Iran's enmity toward Israel, is a well known commodity. Bibi is widely regarded as a liar and a politician with unlimited ambition that he will serve in any way he can, and his views on Iran are tainted by the things he has done in the way of service to his constituency without regard for their more global consequences. His claim that the majority of Jews, even in the United States, agree with him that Iran is such a threat to Israel's existence that any deal with them is a death warrant for Israeli Jews is an exaggerated endorsement of his claim to be the leader-in-fact of worldwide Jewry. As he has puffed himself on the stage of American journalism, other Jews, even Israelis, have been heard to castigate him for making himself the issue with regard to this speech he is giving at the invitation of John Boehner. Boehner's own ulterior motive is political as is every word he utters whether intellectually honest...as it seldom is...or not, so he and Bibi are appropriate bedfellows in this dubious endeavor. But the criticism of Netanyahu is broader than the observation that this speech is a contretemps that will further impair Israeli-American relations than his intransigence already has. While many Jews both within Israel and without see Iran as the "existential threat" that Netanyahu does, they also see the weight of Israeli policy toward Palestinians as an existential hazard for which Netanyahu and his political coalition have not acknowledged, much less accepted, the moral hazard.
The Palestinians are attempting to build a new city, Rawabi, in the West Bank, the territory that comprises land to the west of the Jordan river that has been occupied by Israel since the 1967 war and is the home of millions of Palestinians. But its location in the middle of the desert requires that it be serviced by electricity and water infrastructure that is under the control of Israel. As to the electricity, it comes from the Israel Electric Corporation, a state owned utility that provides power to the area including both the Jewish settlements in the West Bank and the Palestinian population. The utility has been interrupting power in the Palestinian areas every day in lieu of Palestinian settlement of a claim relating to millions of dollars worth of the taxes that Israel collects for the Palestinian Authority each month. Similarly, the water supply, which Israel doles out to Jewish settlers at a rate estimated at six times that with which it provides water to Palestinians in the region, has been withheld from the new city's developer because of a lack of accord on a joint Israeli-Palestinian authority that is required under a prior treaty, the Oslo Accords, to approve all water projects. That authority hasn't met in five years because the Palestinians have been opposed to projects advocated by the Israelis for the service solely of Jewish settlements, which the Palestinians oppose in accord with their objection to the further colonization of the West Bank under the aegis of the occupying Israelis. That process of colonization has been the crux of the animosity between Israel and the Palestinians since 1967, and the international community largely subscribes to the principles of international law that ban settlement of occupied territory such has been undertaken by the Israelis for half a century. In spite of that political impasse, however, Israel's administrators of the West Bank have finally approved the pipeline necessary to supply Rawabi with potable water and the project will now continue sale of residential property on the premise that the Israelis will allow the pipeline in the end to carry water to the community.
The significance of this imbroglio regarding water and electricity is that it is emblematic of the relationship between occupied and occupier, which has spawned actual warfare in the formerly occupied Gaza portion of the erstwhile Israeli occupied territories, and assassinations and unrest in the West Bank. And all of this tumult is a function of the Israeli intention to control the West Bank in perpetuity even though an indigenous population opposes even the mere existence of Israel on the premise that Israel is an artificial entity created at the expense of the Palestinian population of the region. Both sides are irreconcilably wrong given the history of the world and the region in particular. After World War II, there was no question about the need for a Jewish state, and it was established in an area where there already were many Jews...more to come. As to the Palestinians, the Israeli obtuseness on the subject of their feelings of dispossession by the Jews of Israel--especially in light of the four millennium old, virtually tribal enmity between Jews and the other residents of what used to be known as the Levant--is not only myopic, it is self-destructive. Though reconciliation between Jews of Israel and Palestinians as well as other Arab and Persian peoples is a far off dream, coexistence should be the contemporary goal, and even that will require enormous restraint on the parts of both Israelis and Palestinians, not to mention others tangentially involved in the battle of ideas that has plagued the middle-east for thousands of years. The problem that has to be overcome is the intransigents on both sides...starting with Bibi Netanyahu.
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