The deal offered to Arafat at Camp David 2 was NOT 92% of Gaza and 100% of the West Bank-- it was more like the other way around, with the Israelis reserving large swathes of land in and around Jerusalem.----------Helena CobbanShe/her/they | Honoring the lives & legacies of the Piscataways in whose lands I liveMore about me in my Linktree
On Wed, May 15, 2024 at 8:27 AM Chas Freeman via Salon <salon@listserve.com> wrote:--https://strategic-culture.su/news/2024/05/14/just-how-confused-us-foreign-policy-right-now/
Just how confused is U.S. foreign policy right now?
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Well over 30 years since the Oslo Accords were paraded as a huge shift in the Middle East, there is even more reason to distrust both the Americans and the Israelis
Arafat was right. He knew at the Camp David Summit of 2000 that if he signed the deal offered to him – 92 percent of Gaza and 100 percent of West Bank – of a new Palestinian state, that in a matter of only hours the Israelis would have cheated him and invaded, given that the most controversial point of the deal was that they would both have to be demilitarized.
Today the case to distrust America and Israel is even stronger. Our parents who witnessed the Camp David Summit and before that the Oslo Accords of 1993 – both Bill Clinton’s failed attempt at creating a two-state solution within Israel for the Palestinians – would not believe what we are witnessing now, since the massacre of October 7th. Israel has been not only allowed but goaded into what is clearly becoming obviously a policy of ethnic cleansing in Gaza and western media are asking us to believe that there is reason to this madness which lets Israel bomb innocent civilians while sending food aid. Israel successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of around half a million Gazans to move to Rafah which was supposed to be a ‘safe zone’ only to take the genocide to the next level and murder them en masse while they are there – all under the eyes of the so-called international community which witnesses the failure of international law which should have prevented the IDF from even making it to the border crossing itself with Egypt, incidentally part of the Camp David agreement in the 70s.
Is Biden really running the U.S.? The only inkling which might indicate that he is, would be the incoherent decisions and actions by him and his administration, not to mention the State Department which concluded in a report recently that probably Israel was breaking international law by almost certainly using U.S. weapons to bomb Gazans in Rafah. But the report seemed to be a self-lancing boil. While it pointed the finger, it also pardoned Israel for its war crimes, thus encouraging the government to continue, led by Netanyahu who, in the late 90s when he became prime minister in Israel delivered an award-winning performance for Clinton whereby he and his government showed it was committed to the ethos of Oslo and Camp David accords. In reality it was a bluff as he cheated even a naïve U.S. president leaving the Palestinians to exercise their only tool they had in the coming years: terrorism.
Biden, when he is lucid, is less naïve about the game of cat and mouse which Netanyahu is playing and winning. The move by him to temporarily block arms deliveries to the IDF is of course a bluff as he knows very well that for at least a couple of months Israel has enough stocks. The truth of the ruse is that the U.S. itself is very low indeed on ammo and that Biden is actually giving the manufacturers some time to replenish their own stocks while he attempts to beguile a gullible U.S. public that he actually cares about Palestinian lives. The reality is that he has no real problem with them being mowed down like rats in a pen. He simply can’t state that though so pretends to be disturbed about the genocide which, according to the Palestinian health authority has reached 37,000 deaths. Nothing compared to the Holocaust of WWII right?
Jews around the world, even Zionists fret over whether the world will forget their own massacre which left 6 million exterminated. But how can we when the IDF remind us each day in Gaza and Rafah what a real Holocaust looks like in modern times? Only this time it has the blessing of the U.S. and the kangaroo court it created at the end of WWII aimed, ironically, at preventing other Holocausts from happening. Now the Palestinians will be wiped off the face of Gaza as Israel’s elites and those who control them want to seize Gaza’s offshore gas. And still Netanyahu keeps lying to the world as does the President in office as to the true nature of the war. UN assembly voting to allow Palestine to have its own state? It’ll never get past UN security council’s final vote, not while Biden is president. But Trump? Now there’s a thought.
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