Comment trail for the Monday:

Boycotted British Academic has an amusing story:

My comment:

It makes you wonder at how irony-challenged Palestinians are, if they found this painting offensive! I thought it was quite amusing and clear in its message that Israelis are paranoid bullies who would suspect even a hapless donkey. Subtlety of this kind does not quite cut it with the target audience. They need to see graphic gore and brutality that will re- inforce their sense of being the ultimate historical victims in the world.Funny story. Congratulations.

Solomon of Solomonia is trying to decide whether Sari Nusseiba is antisemitic.

Here are my two comments:

I. I disagree, Joanne. I think Solomon has the right measure of the man. He is saying pretty much what I've been saying: that Palestinians have a right to go back to Israel and that Jews have a right to live in Hebron. And that a solution will entail an exchange of rights, so to speak, or, one right cancelling the other. He is saying : No Jew will have the right to demand to live in Hebron, which is what the Arabs want to hear, but implied, though unsaid, is the counterpoint, that no Palestinian will have the right to demand to live in Israel proper.
He is challenging Palestinians: do you want a state or do you want to destroy Israel (by insisting on your right to live in Jaffa.. etc).

Nusseiba is not antisemitic. He is one of the few Palestinians who understands that the final settlement will have to be about trading off historical rights.

II. Joanne:
He is not saying anything explicit but if you read carefully, you can find it.
First, he says, Palestinians have rights and ROR is one of them. However, he goes on to say, we can’t have them all, so we must choose. And then he expands the context of the choice: a two state solution.

It is pretty clear that in the first paragraph, he is telling the Palestinians they have to choose between their ROR ( which means continued conflict) or a two state solution. If they choose the two-state solution, he says, then two things will happen:

1. ROR will be implemented, he says so as clearly as he dares to, “within the framework of the future Palestinian state “. In other words, the refugees will be settled in the future Palestinian state, not Israel proper. That’s something Palestinians DO NOT WANT TO HEAR! So he tries to provide some reward for giving up ROR, when he says:

2. “the agreement will ensure that “No Jew in the world, now or in the future, as a result of this document, will have the right to return, to live, or to demand to live in Hebron, in East Jerusalem, or anywhere in the Palestinian state.” That's the carrot.

He is talking about the final agreement in a way that both modifies ROR and panders to Palestinian loathing for Jews living amongst them. That’s what needs to be said in order to persuade the Palestinians to give up their ROR.

There is no doubt he could be more explicit and lay down the options more coherenly. But I have never yet seen any Palestinian (or Arab) daring to do that. For the obvious reasons that disagreement in the Arab world can take some pretty extreme form.

The sodden Trotsyites: Kurds triangulated … again

My comment:

“Remarkable that nothing much has been said about it by the “left” ”

There is probably a barely contained glee on the part of this so-called “Left” that the Kurds are getting nothing but their comeuppance. They should have known better than to take full advantage of their deliverance from Saddam.

Later:

“The difference between us and the Palestinians is that we learn from our mistakes.”

This is the encasulation of wisdom, by Jove!