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.
Speaker
Max Blumenthal
Max Blumenthal is an award-winning journalist and editor-in-chief of The Grayzone. He is the author of Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel, The 51-Day War: Ruin and Resistance in Gaza and The Management of Savagery.
Lesley Deacon. –
To hear a man speak the truth about the horrors of Gaza ,I hope your message is heard every where.,
by as many people as possible,particularly Americans,who do not see the coverage we get in Europe.
Israel has kepted the Palestinians imprisioned , robbing them of their soil, their freedom,it is a disgrace,
that must be stopped..
Lesley Deacon
Joe Rich –
In my earlier years, I believe that Israel wanted peace, however, as I have become older and more knowledgeable, I became aware that Israel was not interested in peace with their neighbors, they wanted the lands and water of their neighbors. I have researched on my own recent history in this part of the world, and I can affirm that from the facts I know, Max Blumenthal is speaking the truth. I just do not understand how the U. S. can continue to support the Israelis, for if they were any other country, they would be sanctioned.
Mike Donow –
Since I became aware of geopolitics as a preteen, I have been taught that Israel is this bastion of civilization/democracy in the bronze-age middle-east. As I grew older and met Palestinians in classes at college, I started to learn of massacres, forcing people off family lands held for centuries, the beginnings of settlements that perforate the Muslim lands with check points that stymy the flow of indigenous Arabs from moving north/south. I learned of linkage between the Mosad and Hammas. I have watched this land turn into a methodical genocide zone….a legal apartheid….a grand experiment that could set standards of segregation and ethno-delegitamization. And What Max Blumenthal says, I totally agree….”Democracy is THE enemy of the State of Israel.” This is a must hear story. Now prepare to watch the demagogues dissemble him piece by piece…just to prevent Peace.
Don Cashman –
Heard a bit of this program while driving. He dismissed the Balfour Declaration as coming from a minor if not renegade colonial office. My understand is that Lord Balfour, a former Prime Minister, was Foreign Secretary.
He also dismissed UN Resolution 181, the November 29, 1947 partition of Palestine, as being null because it wasn’t accepted by everyone there. I guess the question is if the League of Nations created the Mandate, did the UN have the legal right under to modify the situation. I’m sure some anti-Semite will let me know.