I'm posting because NO ONE ELSE IS! (Hint hint)
2008-03-25, 7:31 p.m.

"The world has betrayed the Israelis and Palestinians who want peace
By The Daily Star

Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Editorial

The Palestinian-Israeli peace process has been unmasked, not as failed diplomacy, but as poor fiction. As a commentary in Israel's Haaretz newspaper noted earlier this week, a parade of high-profile visitors continues to wend its way through the region, all prostrating themselves in Israel in this 60th year since its foundation, some flitting through the Occupied West Bank, but few so much as casting a glance at the eyesore in the Gaza Strip. They fall over themselves in an effort to congratulate the Jewish state on its imagined good fortunes and its supposed good deeds. In so doing, they are ignoring the Palestinians, lying to themselves, and betraying those Israelis for whom they claim to have so much respect.

They all have their reasons, but none of these is worth the damage being done to all concerned. Some are rightly ridden with a sense of national guilt at the appalling crimes committed against European Jews during World War II. Others are almost as fully consumed by regret at the sickening failure of their predecessors to even acknowledge that the Holocaust was taking place, let alone to take the necessary measures to obstruct it. But these are not valid reasons to either abandon today's Palestinians or condemn tomorrow's Israelis. Then there are those with motivations so base and craven - bigotry, career, convenience, cowardice, religious fanaticism etc. - as to not merit dissection.

What all of them have in common is a failure - no, a refusal - to help the majorities of both Israelis and Palestinians who want peace but no longer have confidence that it can be achieved. US Vice President Dick Cheney marked his passage through the region by identifying Hamas and Iran as obstacles to peace. He is partly right, but how can that matter if he fails to mention why these actors have taken the positions they have? And how can his argument carry any weight when he fails to mention other impediments like the illegal colonization of occupied land by Jewish "settlers" and the overtly obstructionist designs of the cynical racists who put them there?

United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon implored all sides on Tuesday to get serious about making peace, pledging that he would do everything in his power to help. The man he needs most to convince is Cheney's boss, George W. Bush MBA-Presidents Sep-07 , who is scheduled to return to Israel in May to help mark the 60th anniversary "celebrations." Just a few kilometers away, Palestinians will be mourning the Nakba, or Catastrophe, that befell them as a result of the creation of the modern state of Israel. Unless and until Bush can be made to appreciate the link between the two and the urgency with which the consequences must be reversed, there will be little real cause for merriment in any part of the Holy Land. This, then, is Ban's challenge: to shake the president of the United States out of his blissful indolence or to hope that the next occupant of the White House proves his friendship to Israelis instead of simply - and fallaciously - pronouncing it.
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