Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: Truths, facts and facts on the ground

Un articolo molto lungo, ma interessante.
 
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Truths, facts and facts on the ground
Much of the international support that Israel receives is based on 
several lies it tells and re-tells as "facts".
 
Joseph Massad Last Modified: 27 Oct 2011 11:03
 
In 1991, negotiations started officially and unofficially between the 
Palestine Liberation Organisation (and the Palestinians associated with 
it) and the Israeli government. At the time, Israel had occupied the 
West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip for the previous 
24 years.
 
Today, 20 years later, Israel and President Obama insist that the only 
way to bring about peace, and presumably end the Occupation, is to 
continue with negotiations. It is unclear if what Obama and Israel are 
claiming is that Israel needs 24 years of negotiations in order to end 
its 24-year occupation of Palestinian land, so that by the time the 
occupation ends, it will have lasted for 48 years.
 
This of course is the optimistic reading of the Israeli and US 
positions; the reality of the negotiations and what they aim to achieve, 
however, is far more insidious.
 
The negotiations have been based on specific goals to end certain 
aspects of the Israeli relationship to the Palestinians, namely some of 
the parts introduced since the 1967 war and the occupation, and the 
beginning of exclusive Jewish colonial settlement of these 
territories.But what always remains outside the purview of negotiations 
is the very core of the Palestinian-Israeli relationship, which the 
Palestinians are told cannot be part of any negotiations.
 
These off-limits core issues include what has happened since 1947-1948, 
including the expulsion of 760,000 Palestinians, the destruction of 
their cities and towns, the confiscation and destruction of their 
property, the introduction of discriminatory laws that legalise Jewish 
racial, colonial and religious privilege and deny Palestinian citizens 
of Israel equal rights and reject the right of the expelled refugees to 
return.
 
Yet, this core, which the Israelis summarise as Israel's right to be, 
and to be recognised as, a "Jewish" state, is what is always invoked by 
the Israelis themselves as central to beginning and ending the 
negotiations successfully and which the Palestinians, the Israelis 
insist, refuse to discuss.
 
But the core issues of the question of the relationship between 
Palestinians and Israelis have always been based on the agonistic 
historical, geographic and political claims of the Palestinian people 
and the Zionist movement.
 
While the Palestinians have always based their claims on verifiable 
facts and truths that the international community agreed upon and 
recognised, Israel has always based its claims on facts on the ground 
that it created by force and which parts of the international community 
would only recognise as "legitimate", retroactively.
 
How is one then to sift through these competing notions of truths and 
facts on the one hand, and facts on the ground, on the other?
 
The core issues of the US and Israeli agenda were best articulated in 
the speeches delivered by Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu at 
the United Nations (UN) last month in response to the PLO's bid for 
statehood at the UN. It is there where both Netanyahu and Obama invoked 
what they called "truths" and "facts" to assert Israeli facts on the 
ground. As I will show, their strategy is engineered to convert Israeli 
facts on the ground from antonyms of truths and facts to synonyms with them.
 
The first 'fact'
Even Netanyahu has no genealogical connection to the ancient Hebrews 
[GALLO/GETTY]
 
Let me begin with what Zionists and the US have defined as the first 
"fact", which is by definition not open to any doubt or question. Obama 
insists: "These facts cannot be denied. The Jewish people have forged a 
successful state in their historic homeland."
 
Netanyahu echoes Obama by listing this first "fact" as the first 
"truth," or rather by making sure that "the light of truth will shine" 
at the UN through his words: "It was here in 1975 that the age-old 
yearning of my people to restore our national life in our ancient 
biblical homeland ... was ... branded ... shamefully, as racism." He 
added later "and we will know that [the Palestinians are] ready for 
compromise and for peace ... when they stop denying our historical 
connection to our ancient homeland."
 
Now, this insistence that the first fact, nay the first truth, that 
Palestine is the historic homeland of modern European Jews who resided 
in Europe and not of the Palestinian people who lived in it for 
millennia, turns out to be neither factual nor truthful, though it 
indeed remains the primary and first claim made by Zionism and 
anti-Semitism.
 
The claim relies on anti-Semitic notions propagated initially by the 
Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century and later by secular 
anti-Semitism, both of which insisted that modern European Jews were 
blood and genetic descendants of the ancient Hebrews respectively, which 
is precisely how eighteenth century European philology's reference to 
Jews as "Semites" would soon be transformed in the hand of political and 
racial anti-Semitism by the late nineteenth century from a "linguistic" 
category into a "racial" and biological one.
 
It is based on these anti-Semitic claims - that millenarian Protestants, 
secular anti-Semites, and Zionists called for the "restoration" of 
European Jews to the alleged homeland of their alleged ancestors.
 
The uncontroversial academic and historical facts that European Jews are 
descendants of European converts to Judaism from the centuries before 
Christianity was adopted as the religion of the Roman Empire in the 
fourth century are unquestionable axioms in academic scholarship, 
including by Zionist historians.
 
No respected historian of European Jewry has ever argued that European 
Jews, or for that matter Moroccan, or Iraqi, or Yemeni Jews, were 
descendants of the ancient Hebrews. All respected scholars recognise 
them as descendants of converts to Judaism.
 
But even if the wildest genetic fantasies of anti-Semites and Zionists 
of Jews as a "race" were "proven", would this make ancient Palestine, 
where the ancient Hebrews cohabited with other ancient peoples, the 
historic land of modern European Jews?
 
And even if one were to commit oneself to the science-fiction of 
Christian biblical archaeology which accompanied European colonialism in 
the nineteenth century and on which Israeli archaeology continues to be 
based, would that mean that modern Jews, now posited as direct genetic 
and biological descendants of the ancient Hebrews could claim the land 
where the ancient Hebrews lived with the Canaanites among other myriad 
groups as their own exclusive national domain and take it from its 
inhabitants who lived in it for millennia?
 
Could anyone today, except genocidal racists, link Germanic populations 
to an Aryan origin that started in northern India and based on that 
link, argue that northern India is the ancient homeland of all 
German-speaking people to which they must return and evict the current 
inhabitants of the land as nothing but recent interlopers in the land of 
the White Aryans?
 
These fantastical scenarios are precisely what Obama and Netanyahu tell 
us are undeniable facts and truths.
 
Indeed they both insist on them being the first fact, the very first 
indubitable principle of Zionism, which they want to impose on the 
international community and on the Palestinians!
 
The second "fact"
 
Obama's second fact is asserted with a rhetorical flourish: "Let's be 
honest: Israel is surrounded by neighbours that have waged repeated wars 
against it ... These facts cannot be denied."
 
But these also are not facts at all. Not even Israeli historians of 
Israel's wars agree with them. But Israeli politicians and ideologues of 
course do. In his UN speech, Netanyahu himself echoes Obama's words by 
telling us that Israel is threatened by its neighbours, that it is 
"surrounded by people sworn to its destruction and armed to the teeth by 
Iran" and enjoins presumably the American part of his audience at least 
not to "forget that the people who live in Brooklyn and New Jersey are 
considerably nicer than some of Israel's neighbours."
 
These racist overtones aside, the academic and historic record shows us 
however that it was Zionist forces who have waged war against the 
Palestinians in the wake of the 1947 Partition Plan starting on November 
30, 1947.
 
By May 14, 1948, when Israel declared itself a state, it had expelled 
400,000 Palestinians from their homes and was capturing their lands and 
territories, which were assigned to the Arab state. When three (not 
five!) Arab armies invaded Zionist-held Palestine on May 15, 1948, they 
were intervening to stop the expulsion of the Palestinian people and to 
protect their lands from being taken over by Zionist forces. At the end 
of the war, they failed miserably at their task. Israel was able to 
expel another 360,000 Palestinians and to capture half the territories 
of the Arab state adding them to the Jewish state.
 
     * In 1956, Israel invaded Egypt along with Britain and France. This 
was in addition to intermittent but continuous cross border raids into 
the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egyptian-held Gaza over the 
decades to come.
     * In 1967, Israel invaded Egypt, Syria, and Jordan and occupied 
their territories and all of the remaining lands of Palestine.
     * In 1973, Egypt and Syria invaded their own territories (Sinai 
Peninsula and the Golan Heights), which Israel had earlier occupied, in 
an attempt to reclaim them but failed. They did not invade Israel itself.
     * In 1978, in 1982, and in 2006, Israel invaded Lebanon killing 
tens of thousands of people.
     * In 2008-2009, Israel invaded Gaza.
 
These are the undeniable facts that the international community and 
historians and the actual documentary record proves. As such, Israel was 
never invaded by its neighbours, except in 1948 - which was an attempt 
to stop Israel's invasion of Palestinian territory and the expulsion of 
Palestinians.
 
That Israel won the majority of these wars cannot change the facts that 
it initiated them and that it has been the aggressor on its neighbours 
since even before its establishment in 1947. Indeed, Israel would launch 
raids on Iraq in 1981 and on Tunisia in 1985, neither of which was an 
immediate neighbour and without the slightest military provocation from 
either.
 
That Israel and the Zionist movement have been the aggressor in the 
region for the past century are the undeniable facts.
 
That Obama wants to assert that Israelis were victims of their 
neighbours is nothing short of imposing a fact on the ground by sheer 
American rhetorical and political power unrelated to real events. 
Obama's invocation of honesty here turns out to be nothing short of a 
call for outright dishonesty.
 
But this "fact" for Obama derives from the "first fact", namely, if 
European Jews have the right to colonise Palestine, expel the 
Palestinians, confiscate their lands, occupy them and discriminate 
against them by virtue of the first fact of their bogus historic claim, 
then any Palestinian or Arab resistance to the Zionists' murderous 
campaigns is nothing short of aggression on Jews.
 
Obama proceeds to tell us other "facts", including that "Israel's 
citizens have been killed by rockets fired at their houses and suicide 
bombs on their buses. Israel's children come of age knowing that 
throughout the region, other children are taught to hate them."
 
While a handful of Israelis have been killed over the years by rocket 
fire, tens of thousands of Palestinians, Lebanese, Egyptians, Jordanians 
and Syrians, have been killed by Israeli rocket fire during times of war 
and peace. Perhaps the most recent example can shed some light on this.
 
During Israel's invasion of Gaza, Israeli rockets killed over 1,400 
Palestinians while Hamas rockets against Israel did not kill a single 
Israeli, though several Israelis were shell-shocked and required 
psychological counselling. As for the murder of thousands of Arab 
children since 1948 and through the invasion of Gaza, Israel has killed 
at a rate of thousands of Arab children to one Jewish child in 
retaliatory attacks on Israel.
 
So, while Obama is indeed not lying that rockets have been fired on 
Israel and that historically Israeli Jewish children have been killed by 
attacks, he takes it out of the context of the much larger destruction 
and killings Israel engaged in against its neighbours since it was 
established, which is after all based on the first fact!
 
Obama's half-facts, like his alleged full facts, end up being again 
engineered to impose Israeli facts on the ground. For these claims are 
being made to assert Israel's need for "security", which is of paramount 
importance, and which is the reason both Obama and Netanyahu claim that 
the negotiations have failed.
 
Let me quote several of Obama's references to Israel's security in his 
UN speech: "America's commitment to Israel's security is unshakeable"; 
"Israelis must know that any agreement provides assurances for their 
security"; "any lasting peace must acknowledge the very real security 
concerns that Israel faces every single day."
 
So, basically Israel gets to invade the Palestinians and all its 
sovereign neighbours, some repeatedly, over the last six decades, and it 
continues to occupy their territories and invade their airspace and 
oppress the occupied populations and colonise their lands. However, for 
negotiations to be successful, Israel wants to ensure that its security 
be safeguarded from any resistance to Israeli attacks, colonisation, and 
occupation by those it continues to attack, colonise, and occupy. And 
this it can demand based on the first fact.
Obama, it should be noted, never mentioned the security concerns of 
Israel's neighbours who have been the target of Israel's attacks for 
over six decades. He did however mention the security of Palestinian 
children once alongside his several mentions of Israeli children despite 
the one-to-several-thousands victimisation ratio between them: "The 
measure of our actions must always be whether they advance the right of 
Israeli and Palestinian children to live in peace and security, with 
dignity and opportunity."
 
Netanyahu picks up where Obama left off: "Our major international 
airport is a few kilometres away from the West Bank. Without peace, will 
our planes become targets for anti-aircraft missiles placed in the 
adjacent Palestinian state?"
 
What is most interesting about this statement is the fact that Israel's 
airport has never been attacked by rockets, which is not to say that 
Israel has not attacked the airports of its neighbours. That, it has 
done with aplomb. In 1968, Israel bombed the Beirut international 
airport destroying 13 civilian airliners on the tarmac. It would attack 
Beirut airport again in 2006 - bombing runways.
 
As for plane hijackings, Israel was a pioneer in the Middle East, when 
its first hijacking took place in 1954. The Israeli air force would 
often seize flying civilian airliners in international skies and divert 
them to Israel, subject the passengers to inspection, interrogation as 
well as incarceration.
 
Indeed, Israel remains the only Middle East country that blew up a 
civilian airliner when it shot down a Libyan civilian plane in 1973, 
killing 108 passengers on board.
 
Negotiations and more negotiations
 
This takes us back to what Obama believes, the negotiations are and 
should be about, namely: "It is Israelis and Palestinians - not us - who 
must reach agreement on the issues that divide them: On borders and 
security; on refugees and Jerusalem."
 
The negotiations which started in 1991 in Madrid and continued in 
earnest after the 1993 Oslo agreement, however, were based on UN 
resolutions that stipulate that Israel must withdraw from the occupied 
territories (Resolutions 242 and 338), which would settle the borders 
question if it were not for Israel's refusal to abide by the resolutions.
 
Moreover, the main issue that has terminated the negotiations and which 
both sides do not agree on has been Israeli Jewish colonisation of the 
West Bank and East Jerusalem.
 
As luck would have it, the international community and international law 
both condemn Israeli colonial settlement in the 1967 territories, which 
are categorically considered illegal and have been declared as such 
myriad times by UN resolutions and policy statements.
 
It is curious that Obama never mentioned the colonial settlements in his 
speech, even though he had attempted a number of times in the last two 
years without success to intervene with the Israeli government to stop, 
or at least slow down, building them.
 
As for the issues of borders, the 1947 Partition Plan had already 
specified the borders of the two states, and Resolution 242, on which 
the negotiations are based, specified where Israel should be withdrawing 
to after the 1967 war, Israeli casuistry in that matter notwithstanding.
 
The Palestinian negotiating position echoes that of international law 
and UN resolutions while the Israeli position violates them. This also 
relates to the matter of the refugees which has also been settled by UN 
resolutions and international law while Israel remains adamant in its 
refusal to implement these resolutions by refusing to repatriate, 
compensate and return the property of the 760,000 Palestinians it 
expelled. Neither will it agree to compensate and return the property of 
the quarter of a million Palestinians (internal refugees and their 
descendants) who are Israeli citizens whom it expelled from one part of 
the country to another part of it.
 
But the so-called historical truths and the first "fact" that Netanyahu 
marshals to assert facts on the ground are endless.
 
He adds: "In my office in Jerusalem, there's a ... an ancient seal. It's 
a signet ring of a Jewish official from the time of the Bible. The seal 
was found right next to the Western Wall, and it dates back 2,700 years, 
to the time of King Hezekiah. Now, there's a name of the Jewish official 
inscribed on the ring in Hebrew. His name was Netanyahu. That's my last 
name ..."
 
"... My first name, Benjamin, dates back a thousand years earlier to 
Benjamin - Binyamin - the son of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. 
Jacob and his 12 sons roamed these same hills of Judea and Samaria 4,000 
years ago, and there's been a continuous Jewish presence in the land 
ever since."
 
Netanyahu (a name which Benjamin Netanyahu changed when he lived in the 
United States to Ben Nitay allegedly because it was easier for Americans 
to pronounce) is itself an invented Zionist name, which, like all other 
Zionist names, began to bestow on European Jews an ancient Hebrew lineage.
 
Indeed Netanyahu's father Benzion Mileikowsky was the son of Polish Jews 
converted to Zionism, who named their son Benzion based on their 
ideological commitments and changed their name to "Netanyahu" after they 
immigrated to colonise Palestine in 1920.
 
The names of Benzion's father and mother (and Benjamin Netanyahu's 
grandparents) were Nathan Mileikowsky and Sarah Lurie, common European 
Jewish pre-Zionist names.
 
For Benjamin Mileikowsky (Netanyahu), a descendant of Polish Jewish 
colonists, to claim ancient Jerusalem as his ancestral origin, would be 
seen as a curious ideological and mythical fabrication during a dinner 
conversation, but to assert it as a fact-based political and territorial 
claim to the land of the Palestinians at the United Nations, makes a 
mockery of international law, which is the basis of UN resolutions that 
condemn Israel's occupation and colonisation of the city.
 
While Israel today maintains at least 30 laws that grant Jews racial, 
religious and colonising privileges over Palestinian citizens of Israel 
- including the 2002 temporary law banning marriage between Israelis and 
Palestinians of the Occupied Territories - and more so against the 
Palestinian non-citizens living under Israeli occupation; Netanyahu 
claims, against these documented facts, that "The Jewish state of Israel 
will always protect the rights of all its minorities, including the more 
than one million Arab citizens of Israel."
 
He adds a curious statement with regard to illegal Jewish colonial 
settlers in the Occupied Palestinian territories stating that "I wish I 
could say the same thing about a future Palestinian state, for as 
Palestinian officials made clear the other day - in fact, I think they 
made it right here in New York - they said the Palestinian state won't 
allow any Jews in it. They'll be Jew-free - Judenrein. That's ethnic 
cleansing. There are laws today in Ramallah that make the selling of 
land to Jews punishable by death. That's racism. And you know which laws 
this evokes."
While no Palestinian official since the negotiations started has ever 
dared to state unequivocally that Jewish colonial settlers must be 
returned to Israel in line with international law, this unverifiable 
claim by Netanyahu, even if proven true, would not be racist or 
discriminatory, but rather anti-colonial, refusing to allow Israeli Jews 
to colonise Palestinian lands against international law by virtue of 
some Jewish privilege that invokes the "first fact".
 
It is Israeli laws that restrict access to Israel's lands to its 
non-Jewish Palestinian citizens, even though 90 per cent of that land 
was confiscated from the Palestinian people. It is also Israeli cities 
that remain Araberrein; indeed, as many observers have noted, Tel Aviv 
is the only Western city that does not have any Arab or Muslim inhabitants.
 
If any racist laws are being evoked here, they are evoked by Israel's 
own racist laws and practices, not by Palestinian anti-colonial resistance.
 
But this statement clarifies where Netanyahu stands on the question of 
Jewish colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem. It is not 
Jewish colonisation of the land of the Palestinians that is racist as 
the UN defined it in 1975, but rather the application of international 
law by preventing Jews from colonising the land of the Palestinians that 
is racist.
 
For Zionism and Obama, any attempt to reject the Zionist "first fact" is 
immediate proof of anti-Semitism. This is yet another example of how 
facts on the ground are transformed by Israel and its US backers into 
"truths" and "facts".
 
Indeed, Netanyahu (or is it Mileikowsky, or Nitay?) asserts: "I came 
here to speak the truth. The truth is ... that Israel wants peace. The 
truth is that I want peace. The truth is that in the Middle East at all 
times, but especially during these turbulent days, peace must be 
anchored in security. The truth is that we cannot achieve peace through 
UN resolutions, but only through direct negotiations between the 
parties. The truth is that so far the Palestinians have refused to 
negotiate. The truth is that Israel wants peace with a Palestinian 
state, but the Palestinians want a state without peace. And the truth is 
you shouldn't let that happen."
 
For Netanyahu and the Israelis, however, peace can only be achieved if 
the Palestinians recognise the rights of Jews to occupy their land, to 
colonise their lands, and to discriminate against them.
 
To do so, the Israelis offer a simple formula, which Obama has also 
endorsed and insists on, namely that the Palestinians must recognise 
Israel's right to be a Jewish state.
 
Netanyahu does not mince words when he asserts that: "this year in the 
Knesset and in the US Congress, I laid out my vision for peace in which 
a demilitarised Palestinian state recognises the Jewish state. Yes, the 
Jewish state. After all, this is the body that recognised the Jewish 
state 64 years ago. Now, don't you think it's about time that 
Palestinians did the same? ... Israel has no intention whatsoever to 
change the democratic character of our state. We just don't want the 
Palestinians to try to change the Jewish character of our state. We want 
... them to give up the fantasy of flooding Israel with millions of 
Palestinians."
 
Challenging the UN and international law, which has called on Israel to 
allow the Palestinians it expelled to come back to their homes, is 
identified as a "flood" that will undermine Israel's raison d'être as a 
state that extends racial and colonial privileges to Jews, which indeed 
it would be.
 
Where Netanyahu is wrong is when he asserts that when the UN General 
Assembly called for the establishment of a Jewish State in 1947, it, by 
default, recognised the Jewish State's right to expel the Palestinian 
people, colonise their lands, and confiscate their property for the 
exclusive use of Jews and to discriminate against them by law.
 
Not only did the UN Partition Plan grant no such rights to the Jewish 
state, it explicitly stated that the establishment of such a Jewish 
state means that this state cannot expel its non-Jewish population, and 
that "no discrimination of any kind shall be made between the 
inhabitants on the ground of race, religion, language or sex" (Chapter 
2, Article 2) and that "no expropriation of land owned by an Arab in the 
Jewish State ... shall be allowed except for public purposes. In all 
cases of expropriation full compensation as fixed by the Supreme Court 
shall be said previous to dispossession." (Chapter 2, Article 8).
 
The fabrications and lies about UN recognition are being asserted by 
Netanyahu to the very international body that issued the Partition Plan, 
and are addressed to their face, as truths, when all they are is nothing 
less than facts on the ground established by Israel, condemned by the 
UN, and defended by the United States.
 
While the negotiations that the Palestinian Authority and the Israelis 
have engaged in have prevented the Palestinians from raising the 
1947/1948 crimes of the Israeli state (and those committed in the 
decades to come) because they would render the "first fact" dubitable 
indeed, Netanyahu and Obama raise these crimes as a sacrosanct principle 
of the Jewishness of the state, indeed of the very "first fact" that 
they affirmed.
 
Indeed Netanyahu does the same with Israeli crimes post 1967, including 
the colonisation of the West Bank and East Jerusalem.
 
Finally, Netanyahu concludes with a call to expel the 1.6 million 
Palestinians who are Israeli citizens. He instructs PA President Abbas 
to: "Recognise the Jewish state, and make peace with us. In such a 
genuine peace, Israel is prepared to make painful compromises. We 
believe that the Palestinians should be neither the citizens of Israel 
nor its subjects. They should live in a free state of their own. But 
they should be ready, like us, for compromise."
 
Netanyahu offers his call for a new expulsion of Palestinian citizens of 
Israel as a compromise that the Palestinians should accept. In doing so, 
his logic is impeccable. If Palestinians recognise the "first fact", 
namely, Israel's right to be a Jewish state based on fabricated 
historical claims, and that it should guarantee Jewish racial and 
colonial privilege, then it follows that they must accept another 
expulsion of Palestinians from that state to ensure that Jewish 
privilege continues to operate.
 
It is this formula of peace that the Israelis offer the Palestinians and 
which the Palestinians, even the collaborating PA, cannot accept.
 
When Obama asserts that "peace depends upon compromise among peoples who 
must live together long after our speeches are over, and our votes have 
been counted," he is being at best coy, for the peace that Israel seeks, 
as Netanyahu's call for the expulsion of Palestinian citizens, rendering 
Israel finally Araberrein, clarify, will result in Palestinians and 
Israelis not living together at all.
 
The Pale of Palestinian settlement
 
The peace that Israel is proposing for Palestinians in fact evokes 
another memory, of how another country dealt with Jewish settlement, 
namely the Russian Empire under Catherine the Great and the creation of 
the Pale of Settlement in the late eighteenth century for Jews to be 
confined to, which they were for the most part till the early part of 
the twentieth century.
 
The Pale, like the Palestinian Bantustans, was the only territory where 
Russian Jews were allowed to live by the anti-Jewish czars, though 
Russian Christians also lived in it to ensure that there was no 
territorial contiguity for Jews. The Palestinian Bantustans would serve 
a similar function.
 
While Israel will become Araberrein, the Palestinian Bantustans carved 
out of West Bank and East Jerusalem territories would be criss-crossed 
by Jews-only roads and Jewish-only colonial settlements and cities, and 
by the Israeli army, which, as Netanyahu himself has proposed, will be 
stationed indefinitely in the Jordan Valley.
 
The Pale of Palestinian Settlement will be then called a "Palestinian 
State" which the Israelis and the Americans will immediately recognise 
as "sovereign", though it would not even have the formal accoutrements 
of sovereignty. It is thus that the Palestinian State, whose existence 
would neither be a fact nor the truth, will be recognised as a fact on 
the ground, indeed the very last fact that Israel and the US will be 
asserting.
 
For the Palestinians to survive the more than a century-long Zionist 
assault on their society and country, their only option is to resist 
this Israeli- and American- imposed "peace", and all the so-called facts 
they impose on them, from the very first "fact" to the very last one.
 
Joseph Massad is Associate Professor of Modern Arab Politics and 
Intellectual History at Columbia University. His most recent books are 
The Persistence of the Palestinian Question and Desiring Arabs.
 
The views expressed in this article are the author's own and do not 
necessarily reflect Al Jazeera's editorial policy.
 
http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/opinion/2011/10/2011102583358314280.html
 
-- 
Sostieni Rete ECO
 
http://rete-eco.it/it/sostienici.html
 
 

 Joseph Massad
 
quel cacciapalle
http://www.camera.org/index.asp?x_context=22&x_article=876
 

 been counted,"
 
 Come si ricordera', nei giorni scorsi, Persio ha provato a raccontare
ai lettori che non esiste un equivalente del discorso obamiano del
Cairo. E invece qui abbiamo il presidente USA che si rivolge al mondo
ebraico e alla popolazione di Israele, nientemeno che dall'ONU, con a
fianco il presidente Netanyahu - come segnala, furente e sdegnato, lo
stesso Massad.
Ma Persio continua a sostenere che questo discorso non esiste. Forse
perche' qui Obama non dice le cose che lui immagina dovrebbe dire. E
allora che fa? Cerca un articolo che le contesti. Peraltro, un
articolo pieno di palle.
E poi si meraviglia se gli danno del pirla