The World of Edward Said | Hacker News Reader

The World of Edward Said

bostonreview.net

22 pointstintinnabula6 comments

This thread / video got me pretty worked up the other day; regardless of your views on who should own the land, can't we just agree that Palestinians are real, live humans deserving of respect and a home where they are not constantly mistreated?

At the same time, the Jewish people, whether you like it or not, are there in Israel right now. You can't get rid of them. They shouldn't have neighbors that talk about killing them due to ethnic hatred.

You have to do something so that both sets of people can live. Right now it feels like Israel is really in control and has the means to make life better for the Palestinians... and that that would be in their best interest as it should decrease the reliance of Palestinians on Hamas and other extremists...

In the meantime, stop terrorizing a trapped people:

"I felt like I am the terrorist...

For the first time in my life, the boundaries between good and bad that I learned as a kid - and obviously I learned that I am on the good side - was broken."

- Israeli soldier

Full Thread: https://twitter.com/ButWhatForBlog/status/139590382285003572... Video by Empire Files

Simply put, there is no humane way to occupy a people.

Great intellectual. It must be noted that he and a number of Palestinian nationalists criticised the Oslo agreement as a sell-out, which it essentially was. It legalized the occcupation and promised nothing for the Palestinians, benefiting mainly the corrupt leadership.

In the article I see Arafat compared to Ben-Gurion. One of the best books on the Israel/Palestine conflict is Noam Chomsky's book "The Fateful Triangle: Israel, the USA and the Palestinians. (Intro by Edward Said)".

At one point he compares the struggle of the Palestinians for their state to the struggle of the early Zionists for their state, and notes they had a lot of similarities, including the use of terrorism.

> benefiting mainly the corrupt leadership.

Do not the corrupt leadership benefit from the violent status quo?

Not to say that Oslo was perfect, or that I would not have rejected that arrangement as well, but the idea of taking half a loaf is worth discussing, because the rank-and-file who bear the weight of the rejection might be further along.

The current status quo is the Oslo accords. They are currently binding treaties. They benefit the Palestinian leadership because they get VIP status, and all kinds of perks, secure cushy jobs and so-on. They are obviously loathe to give that up, even though every now and then they threaten to leave the Oslo accords.

Ironically they also can't pursue this complaint against the ICC in the framework of the Oslo accords, which stipulate that crimes committed by Israelis are not answerable to Palestinians.

Wikipedia does not agree:

The Oslo process is the "peace process" that started in 1993 with secret talks between Israel and the PLO. It became a cycle of negotiations, suspension, mediation, restart of negotiations and suspension again. A number of agreements were reached, until the Oslo process ended after the failure of the Camp David Summit in 2000 and the outbreak of the Second Intifada.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oslo_Accords

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