Israel: Siege Mentality + Solutions: Israel/Palestine

Program #BLUM001-PAPI001.

2 CDs

First program: Max Blumenthal - Israel: Siege Mentality

From Kissinger to Kerry, U.S. Secretaries of State engage in endless rounds of shuttle diplomacy. They issue rosy statements about progress and breakthroughs. But little changes. Israeli policy has created concrete facts on the ground. Settlement building on Palestinian land, illegal under international law, has expanded over decades. Some 500,000 Israelis live in settlements from Ariel to Ma’ale Adumim. Jeffrey Goldberg writing in Bloomberg.com calls them “self-destructive.” New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman says they constitute “tacit annexation of the West Bank” and “is not winning Israel friends in Europe or America.” The West Bank, supposedly the home of a future Palestinian state has been sliced and diced into pieces. Israeli-only roads and so-called security barriers and walls are turning Palestinian areas into isolated enclaves. Thus the fabric of a just and lasting peace is tattered and becomes more remote. 

Second program: Ilan Pappe - Solutions: Israel/Palestine

The winds of change are sweeping across the Middle East. Decrepit and sclerotic regimes are crumbling. A constant however is the uneresolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Will the broader political upheavals in the region help bring about a solution? Perhaps. But round after round of U.S.-led failed peace talks and a simultaneous huge increase in illegal Israeli settlements have left Palestinians desperate. Maybe Ariel Sharon's prediction of some years back has come true. He said, "We'll make a pastrami sandwich out of them. We'll insert a strip of Jewish settlements in between the Palestinians, and then another strip of Jewish settlements right across the West Bank, so that in twenty-five years' time, neither the United Nations nor the United States, nobody, will be able to tear it apart."

Speaker(s):

Max Blumenthal

Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel and The 51-Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza. He is a senior writer for Alternet, and his articles have appeared in The Guardian, The Nation, The New York Times, and other newspapers and journals.