Partners for Progressive Israel deplores the outbreak of recent violence in Israel and the occupied territories. It condemns attacks on innocent civilians and deplores the use of excessive force in response to such attacks. The cycle of violence is unlikely to cease unless the Palestinian population can see an eventual end to the occupation and oppression that have characterized their daily lives since 1967.
Poverty, unemployment and statelessness have continued to produce violence, as they have done continuously for the last 48 years. The violence is a testimony for the failure of the existing, de facto “one-state” situation in Israel and the occupied territories and the lack of progress toward the promised two-state solution of the conflict.
We call upon the leaders of both Israel and the Palestinians to condemn violence in all of its forms and to recommit to the resumption of negotiations toward a two-state settlement of the conflict. The two nations who reside in the land deserve sovereign and independent existence, real self-determination, and full civil and human rights as individuals and within separate political bodies. The continuation of the occupation is incompatible with these ideals, which are accepted now as immutable human rights by all peoples around the world.
The current cycle of violence, which many describe as the Third Intifada, is in fact spontaneous and inchoate aggression by individuals reacting to an impossible, protracted, and seemingly unchangeable reality, and a harsh response by Israel that refuses to recognize the situation that gives rise to the violence. This new crisis in Israel only serves to reemphasize the need for a political solution based on a negotiated settlement. The international community as a whole should call for and if necessary impose the resumption of serious negotiations between Israel and the Palestinian Authority based on the 1967 borders. The contours of a settlement are known and were twice almost agreed upon by the two sides in 2001 and 2008, and should be based on the Clinton Parameters and the Arab Peace Initiative of 2002, as since amended.
“Abbas: Blood of ‘martyrs’ spilled on Temple Mount is ‘pure’PA president praises rioters, says Jews have ‘no right to desecrate the mosque with their dirty feet’”
So reads the news. But to the good folks of PPI, there is no such vicious anti=Semitism on the part of the Palestinian leadership. There is no incitement to violence. Basically, in this very “official” PPI statement, the fault lies with the Jews; the Jews have been the oppressors. The Palestinian terrorists ? They have no agency. They are the innocent victims.
PPI — sitting in the safety of Manhattan — has now gone as crazy as it gets. Who can have respect for this out-of-this-world ranting ?
Mr. Cohn has what Ha’aretz has called “occupation denial,” for him there is no relationship between the daily violence against Palestinians the occupation represents, their rage and despair, and the current violence. Perhaps one needs the perspective provided by the absence of occupation in Manhattan to see the horror of it in Israel.