Good news: Obama-linked think tank publishes study on mechanics for 'Palestinian state'
A think tank that is closely linked to the Obama administration has published a 100-page study by seven authors entitled Security for Peace: Setting the Conditions for a Palestinian State. The study deals with issues like placing multinational forces between Israel and a 'Palestinian state.'It’s a long study, with seven authors, and I’ve barely made a crack in it, so I won’t try to summarize the specific recommendations. But CNAS, looking at recent cases of international peacekeeping forces in transitional states or autonomous provinces, examines what security conditions need to be met for a viable independent Palestine that doesn’t threaten Israel to come into being.What could go wrong?
Israel generally has balked over the years at the prospect of international peacekeeping forces patrolling the West Bank, as such a force would limit Israel’s freedom of military action in occupied Palestine. (Andrew Exum, one of the studies’ authors, lists a short host of reasons why Israel shouldn’t have a problem with such a force while — at least in the introduction — glossing over the fact that it does.) But less important than any specific recommendation is the fact that the think tank that has launched many an official into the Obama Pentagon and State Department, CNAS, is expending any intellectual heft on the issue at all, let along thinking through the modalities of interim internationalization of West Bank/Jordan River Valley security. Such a detailed study, coming in advance of a potential Obama peace plan — which the Israeli government of Benjamin Netanyahu definitely does not want — will most likely be read at the Israeli embassy and in Jerusalem as a sign that a real U.S. push on a two-state solution is gathering momentum.
And it reaffirms a linkage that some on the American Jewish right and the Israeli government don’t want to see made. “Although peace in the Middle East is hardly the exclusive responsibility of the United States,” Exum writes in the introduction, “it is a goal long sought by its political leaders and one inextricably linked to U.S. interests.” That viewpoint was roundly mocked as simplistic at the AIPAC conference this year, despite it being the stated policy of decades of American administrations.
posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 9:11 AM
4 Comments:
The stated necessity of peacekeeping forces in a peace deal between Israel and the "Palestinians" is an admission that the peace deal itself won't bring peace -- and it won't.
Overall, peace deals are only designed by the peacemakers as transition processes for Israel's national suicide (G-d forbid).
The only fighting that a peace deal is meant to stop is Israel's self-defense. Israel's fight for life (the right for Jews to fight for our lives) is the intolerable situation for the world in the Arab-Israeli conflict.
All this has never been a choice for Israel between peace and war. It's a choice between Israel's national suicide and Israel's fight to live.
Israel has to choose life.
Eliana is right. Such a "mechanism" is going to be the same mechanism the British used in Mandate Palestine. Its not going to bring about peace and in the end foreign forces would be driven out by the same factors, which haven't changed at all, that forced the British to depart.
Those who refuse to learn from history are condemned to repeat it.
If Israel and the Palestinians want peace there would be real movement towards that end, two states. It's too bad that Israel thwarts every dicussion of two states and refuses to consider Jerusalem as half Palestinian. America can do nothing for them at this point, and continuing to support them with billions has not made a difference. Obama is right, leave them to their own devices.
donna,
as jersualem was not, is not and never will be "half palestinian", you have no idea what you are talking about.
as for your assertion that israel has thwarted every discussion of two states....you dont know history very well...do you?
btw...what in the world brought you to this blog?
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