Well spotted, Prof.

Nice catch, Prof. Even if my assessment of the ultimate prospects for peace in the Israel-Palestine conflict is, like yours, fairly grim (at best), it is heartwarming to see kindness and a sense of common humanity in international politics.

Kinda jams up the ancient sad meme that Little Satan is the source of Arab League's pitiful literacy rates, gender apartheid and remaining stuck and stagnant in an era where a wheelbarrow is still considered a great invention!

From The New Republic Online
February 24, 2011

The Peace Process Fallacy

How the Middle East uprisings conclusively disprove one of the dumbest myths in American foreign policy.

By Martin Peretz

For years, those obsessed with forcing Israel to make all kinds of concessions to the Palestinians—on territory, on settlements, on refugees, on Jerusalem, on security, on water, on air space, on everything, in fact—argued that the occupation was the powder keg on which the kings and colonels of the Arab world sat waiting for it to explode. This was and is a curiously Judeo-centric perspective on the world. Now, it seems that the insecurity of Al Aqsa and the plethora of other complaints about the Zionists had exactly zero to do with what occurred in Cairo, Tunis, Sanaa, Benghazi, Amman, Bahrain, Rabat, and God only knows in which other metropolis the anger of powerless people will strike next. If, indeed, the crowds had chanted curses at Netanyahu, one would have thought them nuts since, at last look, neither Colonel Qaddafi nor Ali Abdullah Saleh were in Israel’s corner. The most you could say about Mubarak—and the only good thing—was that his diplomacy kept the Sinai as part of Egypt and prevented the army from losing once again its troops, and its tanks and its advanced fighter aircraft, from being vanished and vanquished by the Israel Defense Forces. If I were an Egyptian general this would be the nightmare with which I could not sleep.

Israel was supposed to be the combustible element on which the entire region teetered. It now turns out that Israel actually had not the slightest allusive presence among the protestants of Tahrir Square. Nor in the successor outposts of the other rebellions. Some of us intuited this all along. Whatever popular conflict there was with the regimes—the kind of conflict that could and would actually undermine and overthrow them—it was not over Israel, because almost all of the regimes had no contact with Israel and hewed closely to the generalized Arab line against it, that even Mubarak and his regime also embraced. There was plenty of raw anti-Semitic claptrap coming from Egyptian official media, much of it comparable to Der Sturmer.

So what of the agenda of those earnest folk who said that the Zionists were endangering stability in the region? Did they really want the regimes to remain stable? Maybe some, like the reactionary Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose entire viewpoint about the Jewish state reeks of traditional Polish Catholic anti-Semitism but is somehow neutralized by his “realism.” My guess is, though, that the folk who signed (which Zbig did not) the oddly timed and strangely worded emergency appeal asking the president to vote in the Security Council to condemn Israeli building in the territories (and even in Jewish neighborhoods of Jerusalem) were exercising their reflexes, not making a logical appeal. (I’ve written about this before.) And, with Walt and Mearsheimer, Chas Freeman, John Esposito, James Zogby, and Juan Cole, plus two handfuls of clients of the Arab countries to which they were diplomatically posted (with a very few Jews added in, like Rabbi Leonard Beerman—whoever he is—and Jerome Segal of the Jewish Peace Lobby—whatever that is—and Peter Beinart now completing his journey from hawk—he initiated and wrote the TNR editorial endorsing Joseph Lieberman for president in 2004—to syrupy dove) signed on, we know their reflexes express contempt for Israel and its people who would truly make enormous sacrifices for a settlement if they could be persuaded that their immediate neighbors and those rim neighbors, as well, would only leave them alone. In any case, the United States vetoed the Security Council resolution about the very settlements issue that President Obama had puffed up in the first place. Indeed, it was primarily his issue since both the Palestinians and Israelis actually knew exactly (with perhaps two or three exceptions) which settlements would remain Israeli territory and which would not. That is not the difference which sunders Israel and the Palestinian Authority apart. In fact, the settlements are a relatively easy matter.

Still, let’s imagine that at long last Israel and Palestine had securely split the land between the river and the sea. And were living in cross-border comity—OK, relative comity—with Israeli investments in Palestine, Palestinian trade with Israel, tourism, cultural exchange, etc. (They already share many significant police functions and cooperate on environmental and economic policies.) What difference would that have meant for the stability of Egypt, of Tunisia, of Libya, of Bahrain? Would the stability of these countries have been good for their people, for the region, for the world? Of course, we don’t know what will ultimately by the finale in the states now in turmoil. But we know what we would like to see: these polities moving in the direction of democracy, tolerance, and comity.

I am convinced that, aside from the internal ramifications of the dispute between Zion and the Arabs of Palestine, nothing that has occurred in the Maghreb or the Levant or Mesopotamia has ever been affected by Jenin or Hebron or Al Quds with its Noble Sanctuary and its tens of thousands of Friday worshippers. It is, moreover, a brazen confection to argue otherwise. There is no evidence of it and there is no logic to it. As it happens, it is those peddling this fantasy who share culpability in the diplomatic disaster which is now the consequence and circumstance of the longtime American suck-up policy in the Middle East. Those, like myself, identified as props of the “Israel lobby,” at least took the side of a humanistic democracy fighting for its life. All those former ambassadors to Riyadh and Tunis, Cairo and Sanaa and other Arab capitals, all those deputy secretaries and assistant secretaries of state for the region were so intensely committed to Palestine because they were pimping for regimes that had the survivors’ instinct to fix scrutiny on another altogether alien matter, the matter of the Jews and their poor Palestinian victims.

Not a one of these states is other than an absolutist dominion. Not a one. This is true even of Morocco—excitedly experienced by fashionable visitors (W. Somerset Maugham, Jane and Paul Bowles, Jack Kerouac, for example) and a tourist favorite generally—which in essence is little different from Egypt, save that it is a monarchy like Bahrain. I’ve been reading about up-to-date events in Rabat. Only 5,000 people were in the streets of the capital in a demonstration that ostensibly began as a protest against high utility prices. But the protest moved to other locales and metamorphosed into one against the king. In the last days it has taken on the more general character of a revolt for reform. Maybe it will be contained, and we will once again visit Marrakesh with an untroubled, even empty conscience.

But the rest of the Arab world will give us no solace. And, I am afraid, its leaders—some softer, some more brutal—will grant no solace to their own people. These leaders may again take up the Palestinian cause as a lightening rod to inflame their subjects with the irrelevancies of the Holy Land. It is a trick they’ve used for more than half a century.

http://www.tnr.com/article/world/84087/middle-east-peace-fallacy-us-foreign-policy?page=0,0

To view Israel's permission for Palestinians in Libya to return to their own homeland as humanitarian is laughable. This is just the kind of hair-trigger type of 'analysis' -- no, interpretation -- of events that distorts reality rather than illuminate it.

Who's behind their statelessness to begin with? What does international humanitarian law say about a person's right to return to live in his/her homeland no matter what the circumstances? Is it up to Israel?

To say that Israel's 'gesture' is humanitarian is to submit to its status as legitimate overlord rather than an illegal occupier. It is to ignore that it acts as an oppressive overlord who controls a non-people's entry and departure from their cantons. This control is not kindness just because it's now exercised for the benefit of people fleeing Libya. This control is the the core of the problem of Israel.

Just watch Israel's defenders use this 'humanitarian gesture' as another talking point (the list is so long, so convincing!) of how good Israel acts toward those ungrateful Palestinians-- and that occasion will be when they're defending the next crime, when they're excusing a past one.

1. For the first time, Israel and the Palestinians co-sponsored a resolution, in this case condemning Qaddafi's brutal treatment of the Libyan people.

Big deal. That will be of no consequences to future developments between Palestine and Israel. Instead, that only does Israel a favour by making it appear that it really cares about Muslim people's right to integrity and self-determination (Israel's very history disproves that). It shouldn't be forgotten that it was not even a week ago that, in "analyzing" the geopolitical impact of Egypt's revolts, Israeli pundits were raving about the goods of colonialism and pro-west dictatorships. Israel's changed attitudes toward the Libyan upheaval is based on nothing but Qaddafi's enmity toward Israel.

2. In a worthy humanitarian gesture, the government of Israel said it would allow 300 Palestinians fleeing the Libyan violence to enter the West Bank. Among other things, this admirable act reminds us that stateless peoples are vulnerable precisely because they lack any sort of safe homeland.

Israel already looks petty enough, it doesn't need to be seen as unnecessarily mean-spirited toward some few Palestinians caught in the midst of a widely publicized and violent political crisis. Allowing them to return home doesn't hurt Israel's expansionist agenda in any way.

Dear Professor Walt,

I have been a long time reader and admirer, but I wouldn't call Netanyahu's approach "worthy humanitarian gesture" but rather a sign of how bad things really are: when a group of citizens want to flee violence and go back to their own country (Palestine), a PM of an occupying power needs to "permit" them to do so.

Worse, he gets to brag about it.