Never mind the stuff he’s spewing on TV about the Middle East (and I’ve been meaning to make this point ever since I read one of those vacuous evasions he wrote about Israel and the apartheid question), but I couldn’t help wonder how he can say things like this priceless line from his Newsweek encomium to the Clintons:
“If Obama decides to deploy him properly, Bill Clinton will be a terrific troubleshooter, perhaps in tandem once again with his old rival, George H.W. Bush. He could pick up in the Middle East where he left off in 2000, except this time the main obstacle to peace—Yasir Arafat—is dead.”
Uh, dude, you need to recycle your propaganda lines sometimes. That may have been the Israeli spin dutifully put out by Clinton after Camp David in a craven (but vain) attempt to bolster the electoral credentials of the clownish Ehud Barak, but don’t you think that, eight years later, a war raging, that you sound more than a little stupid saying that the main obstacle to peace is a man who died years ago? Or have they just forgotten to give you the new spin talking points?
Big fan Tony. To throw in my 2 cents and trying to sound like an expert (every middle eastren is when discussing politics), peace in the middle east cant be achieve via negotiaitions. The history is too complex, the religious zeal too strong and the longer it burns , the less likely conventional methods will work. At the end od the day, i believe demography will trumpt other factors and one state solution will prevail by necessity but it will take few more decades (God, i sound like an oracle instead).
One more comment: If anyone could have sold a peace deal to the Palestenians, it was Arafat ( the one who actually killed and jailed Hamas leaders). One History lesson: Toothless leaders never deliver.
The first step to peace: have Israel actually institute a secular constitution. It has no constitution.
It was postponed eons ago in order to win influence on the political stage from the religious stage.
Israeli politics have more to do with Middle East struggles than the Palestinian obstinacy on annihilation.
One more thing could help, a call for debt repayment.
The history is too complex, the religious zeal too strong and the longer it burns , the less likely conventional methods will work.