Israel/Palestine
In reply to the discussion: New Israeli search method at West Bank checkpoint worries Palestinians [View all]Ken Burch
(50,254 posts)The "no partner for peace" meme was never about anything but making excuses for keeping the war going. Why on earth should I embrace something that disgusting?
And it's not true that the Palestinian leadership was never interested in peace...they made many proposals for it...
The PLO is secular. Hamas isn't. By itself, that should be enough for you to accept that no good came of the PLO being discredited and replaced by Hamas(especially since that was the only thing that could ever have come of trying to discredit the PLO-it was always clear that going after the PLO was NEVER, under any circumstance, going to create any leadership the Israelis would find more acceptable, and you always knew that it was clear).
And the PLO had been offering negotiations SINCE the 1970's. For almost two decades, the Israeli leadership had refused to negotiate with it. Then, when they finally did, even Rabin refused to say the words "Palestinian state" despite the fact that there was never any real alternative to letting the Palestinians have one)and the settlements kept getting built and/or "expanded", despite the fact
that more settlements were always going to make it harder to make peace and were always going to discredit, in the eyes of the Palestinian people, ANY Palestinian leadership that kept negotiating while the settlements were being built.
If you want peace, you HAVE to support removing the West Bank settlements. You can't be pro-settler AND pro-peace. Any decent human being would have to agree with that.