is perilous and unbecoming to argue with and contradict
the icons of our global society. Those who struggle courageously for the rights
of others and speak eloquently with word and deed against war and tyranny
deserve praise and comfort. They are beautiful people.
Uri Avnery,
journalist, soldier, politician, Knesset member, peace activist, writer, wordsmith,
master of the quip and Zionist is one of the nobles who warrant special
consideration. Being human, Avnery can be faulted, and his fault is a rigid
attachment to Zionism, which strays his thoughts from lofty objectives and
guides him to instruct others toward confusion -- Isms and harmony don't go
together; Zionism and peaceful relations are separated phenomena.
The failures that Uri
Avnery commits in proposing what he calls
"the only solution to the Middle East conflict" are
similar to those from other individuals and organizations whose thinking is misdirected
due to a conviction that the solution must consider Zionism and Zionism leads
the solution. His article, The Donkey of the Messiah, published on May
11, 2013, and circulated throughout the Internet, solicits examination and
rebuttal, and for more reason than because his arguments don't add up to his conclusions;
the positions reflect a perspective from a broad spectrum of peace thinkers, peace movements, and peace
institutions whose thoughts and actions have been salutary but have failed to
steer the Middle East crisis to a proper course. Confined outlooks have only
reinforced Israel's
occupation of Palestinian lands, perpetuated oppression of the Palestinian
people and threatened the existence of the Jewish community. Spurious
strategies that continually lead to cataclysm deserve careful evaluation.
The journalist turned politician turned peace activist
starts his article with:
"THE
TWO-STATE solution is dead!" This mantra has been repeated so often lately, by
so many authoritative commentators, that it must be true.
Well,
it ain"t.
Did not the 1947 United Nations (UN) Partition Plan,
Resolution 181, establish a two-state solution for solving the bitter conflict
between Zionist settlers and native Palestinians? What happened with that
two-state solution? It resulted in decades of turmoil, wars, deaths, injuries,
displaced persons and magnitudes more acrimony than existed before Resolution
181. Why would a new partition plan be different? True that the next two-state
solution will consider the realities of the situation and be engineered by the involved
parties, but by what parties and toward what two states?
Avnery is not talking THE TWO STATES; he is
talking A TWO STATES. The displaced Palestinians, who considered
that a non-elected agency had no legal right to partition their lands and award
parts of them to foreigners, would probably be glad to restore the original
Partition plan into THE TWO STATES. The jury is still out on who
was responsible for rejection of the Partition Plan -- was it confused
Palestinians who had no central leadership or the unified Israelis, who formed
a government without any Arabs, although their territory contained a 40 percent
Arab population, and then proceeded to systematically threaten the Arab populations
who did not leave?
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Dan Lieberman is the editor of Alternative Insight, a monthly web based newsletter. His website articles have been read in more than 150 nations, while articles written for other websites have appeared in online journals throughout the world(B 92, (
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