Israeli mendacity long ago became a form of high art. Israeli propaganda long ago merited its own specialized synonym in the dictionary: hasbara, the hyper-sophisticated art of Zionist “explanation.” The messaging associated with sending aid to the Haitians, already the object of ridicule on Israeli television, now has passed parody to being purely pathetic. A couple score thousand dead? Good for the Jews, because it provides a prime opportunity for Israeli propaganda. So surreal and so blatant that the London Review was obliged to weigh in.
Hasbara is the noun form of the Hebrew verb ‘to explain’, in the sense of advocating a position. ‘Propaganda’ might seem the obvious translation but that might not do justice to the intensity of feeling that lies behind it. A Ministry of Hasbara was first created in 1974, with Shimon Peres in charge; in 1975 it was disbanded and hasbara became a multi-ministerial task. Since then, the importance of hasbara has come to the fore every time Israel has been involved in a major conflict – the 1982 war, the 1987 intifada, the 2000 intifada. In March 2009, two months after the invasion of Gaza, Israel re-established the Ministry of Hasbara; the current minister is Yuli Edelstein.
The hasbara aspect of the Gaza operation was put in train several months before the invasion. In May 2008 four French-speaking Israelis were selected by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in conjunction with the Jewish Agency and the World Zionist Organisation, to visit Switzerland, France and Belgium, where, as the Jewish Agency spokesperson put it, they were to ‘deliver the messages that our official diplomats cannot’. ‘Stick to your personal stories,’ they were told, ‘do not be drawn into political discussions. There will be people who irritate you and say that you are occupiers … do not go there.’ Similar, English-speaking delegations set out for Britain, Ireland, Holland, Denmark and the US. German speakers went to Germany. On arrival, they gave interviews to the local media; they met members of parliament, members of the Jewish community and local bigwigs and spoke, as instructed, of their own experience – the constant shelling, the effects on their families, their businesses, their daily lives.
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In February this year, the government’s Masbirim website (masbirim: ‘those who explain’) drew up a set of instructions for Israelis travelling abroad. The website, which according to the Ministry of Hasbara had 130,000 hits in its first week, aims to ‘provide information to counter criticism that might be experienced abroad’. It details Israel’s achievements in technology and agriculture, as well as suggesting ways to ‘encourage visits to Israel’, ‘to dispel myths about Israel’ and to deal with political criticism. Visitors to the website are advised, when arguing with ‘people of other cultures’, to ‘maintain eye contact … if you look away it might be seen as lack of attention and your argument will lose its force,’ and ‘to keep generally still … rapid movements can create nervousness and confuse.’ The same advice is being broadcast on Israeli television. Further afield, to ensure that the Israeli tourist is comprehensively brainwashed before landing in London or Rome, the Ministry of Hasbara distributes its brochures to passengers about to board El Al flights, and the TV campaign is beamed to aircrafts’ in-flight entertainment systems. There is no running away.
When Israel sent 200 soldiers to Haiti to set up a field hospital on a football pitch in Port-au-Prince, the Israeli media crowed. ‘What do you think about that, Goldstone?’ was one headline. ‘Israeli Delegation to Haiti Makes All Others Pale,’ said another. ‘Well Done Us,’ said a third. But the most disturbing was: ‘The Haiti Disaster: Bad for Them, Good for the Jews.’
While walking back to my apartment after leaving the coffee-house on Friday, my friends were telling me about their experiences during Cast Lead. Few supplies were passing through the tunnels. Israel munificently opened a few “humanitarian windows” to allow a trickle of goods to pass through, baruch hashem, with the bonus of being excellent hasbara. They waited on hours-long breadlines, for the few stores that were able to stock some food, while fuel was basically unavailable. Many Gazans cooked their food for those weeks in mud-brick ovens fired by wood. Nowadays, there is some cooking fuel-enough so that people who can afford to buy it on the black-market at grossly inflated prices can use it to cook. In the camps, it’s often a different story.
Concrete, though, is still in short supply. Israeli bans it. So people improvise. Via the excellent Gaza Gateway:
Building the “perfect home” is a dream shared by many people, especially if you are one of the tenants of the 3,500 homes that were destroyed or of the 56,000 homes that were damaged in last year’s military operation in the Gaza Strip. This week, we’ve pulled together some instructions to help you build your dream house in Gaza. Make sure to keep these useful tips handy!
First of all, because of Israel’s prohibition on the entry of building materials to the Strip since the June 2007 start of the closure, we will need to use locally available materials. Mud will be used to build the foundation and the walls of the house, easily found during the wintertime in Gaza’s natural surroundings. Make sure to avoid collecting mud from areas where raw sewage flows. Have patience, once the ban on the entry of spare parts, equipment and fuel is lifted, the water and sewage systems will operate at better capacity.
We’ll need to mix the mud with gravel. Due to Israel’s ban on the entry of this material, we will use limestone instead. To the limestone-mud mixture, add rocks found scattered around the area and mix for a long time until a thick mass is formed. In order to hasten the hardening of the mud, approach the nearest wheat field, cut off some shafts of wheat, and add them to the mixture. Place the mud into a baking dish, wait until it dries and presto — you now have material to make bricks and begin construction!
One of the mud houses recently built in Gaza, which serves as an example of the way the Strip’s residents are coping with the ban on the transfer of raw materials.
Now, to build the house. For the support structures we will need iron. However, as you can already guess, since June 2007, Israel has prevented the entry of iron to the Gaza Strip. If you can afford to pay for the iron available in Gaza coming in via the tunnels at 4000 shekels ($1,060) a ton compared to only 2600 ($690) before the closure, fantastic! If not, you will need to mix sand, straw and glue and then roll the mixture into long beams.
Next, we will use the most basic building material, which we have avoided using so far: cement. Cement, the entry of which is also banned by Israel, will be purchased from the tunnel operators. Due to the fact that cement is extremely expensive — 900 shekels ($238) a ton, compared with about 450 shekels ($119) before the closure — we will only use it to build the bathroom, though we’re itching to use it for the rest of the house!
We’re almost finished. All that’s left to build is the roof and for this we will use plates of glass. Finally, something that is found in Gaza! Despite the prohibition on the transfer of glass to Gaza for two and a half years, since the end of December 2009, glass is no longer considered a security threat, and so far about 100 trucks of glass have entered the Strip.
Now, after all your hard work, turn on the light switch that you’ve just installed and look around at the fruits of your labor. Oh, is there a blackout in the area again? At least you can enjoy the magnificent view of the sky and the light of the stars shining through the glass ceiling of your cozy, little house.
Gisha reiterates its call on Israel to lift the ban on the entry of building materials so that people in Gaza may rebuild their homes with dignity.
I’m still settling into Gaza, setting up Arabic lessons, making contacts with farmer’s groups. Some scatter-shot observations. Within Gaza City, the siege is obviously not invisible. But the stores are full of goods from the tunnels. The stores are full but the overwhelming majority of the population, perhaps 80 or 90 percent, can’t possibly afford to buy the stuff in the stores. What the stores stock is mediated by the siege, too. Yesterday, I bought yogurt. I grabbed the Israeli yogurt because it was conveniently large. A friend suggested I not buy the Israeli yogurt. I looked around for another option, but all of the yogurt is Israeli. “No satisfactory substitute,” said the store-owner, in response to a query as to why they stocked the occupier’s goods. Israeli yogurt producers do well off the siege. This was predicted, and is a a long-standing trend vis-a-vis the Israeli relationship to the economy of the Gaza Strip.
Gaza is also subject to rolling blackouts. Most sectors are without electricity for at least 8 hours a day. People plan their lives syncopated by when they’ll have electricity with which to work. Walking home last night at mid-night, it was pitch-black. Back-up generators don’t supply energy to the street-lamps. The petrol supply is particularly low right now because it’s Purim, and Israeli soldiers are apparently not available to bring the weekly ration of fuel to the Gazans. Everyone knows that if a farmer were to wander into a buffer zone, the occupation forces wouldn’t have much trouble finding a sniper to shoot him dead for attempting to tend his field.
On my way to the Israeli Apartheid Week kick-off, emceed by Haidar Eid, the Gaza Freedom March’s main contact in Gaza and someone I’ve been corresponding with while stuck in Cairo, we passed a huge city-block size zone piled with rubble and full of torqued metal, its metal-reinforced concrete walls sometimes bulging grotesquely, where they were still there. What were still recognizable as former structures were collapsed upon themselves. This was a Hamas security zone, a former jail. The Israeli Occupation Forces leveled it during Cast Lead. [See par. 367 Goldstone Report]
On the way over a Palestinian woman with 8 children came over to Majed and explained that her children had some sort of bone-wasting disease, and asked him what he could do about it. The third person we were with, a young Italian lawyer, is interning at the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, and said they’d try to send over a case-worker.
Very briefly, because I’m exhausted. Made it to Gaza today after 6 hours traveling, 5 hours waiting at the border and getting yelled at by Egyptian police and low-level mukhabarat, and a couple more hours of Hamas questioning, culminating in a well-spoken Hamas guy explaining to me that that Hamas and the Palestinians had no problems with Christians or Jews (along with many points about Christian and Jewish and Muslim co-habitation in the Middle East for centuries) but had problems with occupation and murder and killing of their people and families, and that was the message he hoped I’d bring back to the US with me.
The building housing the Egyptian Journalists’ Syndicate is not beautiful. Its beige concrete is filthy with Cairene grit. Towering meter-square concrete columns stand in rows in front of a cobalt-blue mirrored-glass façade, a jarring mix of faux-Greek architecture and modernist conceit. It has a large set of steps in front of it, rising for 5 or 6 meters. On Saturday, on those steps, over 200 Egyptian activists for Palestinian rights, alongside 20 or more international sympathizers, condemned the underground metal wall the Mubarak government is now building on the Gaza-Egypt border.
The event was filled with energy. One participant clambered atop the riot barriers, holding on to two fellow demonstrators for support, leading the protesters in a call-and-response chant: “Hosni Mubarak? False!” and so illegitimate; “Gamal Mubarak? False!” “Imprisonments? False!” while he precariously balanced on the barrier, nearly jumping off it with name that he uttered.
Many of the demonstrators carried Palestinian flags and had keffiyehs wrapped around their necks. One of the organizers, Mohamed Abu Sharkh, explained that the “demonstration was organized by civil society,” that it wasn’t directly affiliated with any political party but was instead a more general expression of dismay—or fury—with the wall.
Participants hoisted placards in Arabic and English, reading, “Down with Mubarak, Down with the Wall!” and “Stop Mubarak’s Wall of Shame!” One was peppered with As, for Anarchism, written in red and the black, the traditional colors of the worldwide anarchist movement. Militants from Egypt’s tiny socialist movement were there too, selling papers, as were members of the April 6 Movement, a pro-democracy movement less than two years old.
The ubiquitous black-clad riot-shield bearing security forces looked on behind the steel barricades they erect around every protest in Egypt, to prevent them from spilling out onto the street, and also to remind protesters and onlookers alike who is in control.
The wall’s construction is entering its final stages. It is made of tremendous plates of steel and is reportedly bombproof and cannot be cut through. It extends some 20 meters deep. The deepest tunnels are deeper than that, and smugglers think that the wall alone will be insufficient to cut them off. But the wall won’t be acting alone.
It has been built in concert with a series of 30-meter deep pipes, apparently connected to the sea. The plan is probably to pump seawater from the Mediterranean through the pipes, inundating the land and making it too soft and sodden to tunnel through.
The tunnels would not be the only casualty of the flooding. Pumping saltwater into the land, only a couple dozen meters underground, would almost certainly precipitate an environmental disaster. The Rafah area is scattered with olive and citrus farms. Furthermore, the area draws its fresh water from an underground canal that runs from a town, Sheikh Zuyawid, to Rafah in the northern part of the Egyptian Sinai. Dumping salt water into that water source will make it unfit for human consumption. The Egyptian Embassy’s Consul General in Beirut, Ahmad Hilmi, has said, “There have been no studies on the effects of the plan.”
Water experts in Gaza say simply that the Wall will destroy Gaza’s aquifer. Already, 90 to 95 percent of the water in Gaza is unfit for human consumption and the aquifer is about to collapse, according to the United Nations Environment Program.
Arab Contractors, an Egyptian government-owned firm, is assembling the wall, while the slates are being manufactured in the United States and then shipped to Egypt. Arab Contractors has denied its involvement, but sources on the ground in Rafah as well as Egyptian activists strongly believe that it is involved. Staff at the American Embassy have confirmed that the United States government is providing technical assistance to the Egyptian engineers who are assembling the wall.
Once cut off, it is not clear what the effects on Gaza’s economy will be. One cartoon, popular in the Middle East, depicts a steel arm with riveted panels and inscribed with a six-pointed star holding a metal container over Gaza, while a Palestinian breathes through an oxygen tube that runs under border, through the desert. An Egyptian holds a spike that has severed the oxygen line.
Others demur. Some NGOs have claimed that the wall will only go 18 feet into the ground, and that is primarily intended to placate an American government that funnels billions of dollars in military aid to Egypt every year, and which does not approve of uncontrolled commerce through the tunnels.
The Israeli government is even less happy with the smugglers’ tunnels, through which the goods pass on which Gaza’s people subsist, and which the Hamas government taxes heavily—350 million dollars a year, according to some estimates. The tunnels make the siege considerably less hermetic, probably the reason why senior Israeli military analysts are discussing the prospect of a new attack on Gaza, this one meant to reoccupy the Philadelphi Corridor, in the Gaza Strip’s south, the border region that the tunnels have warrened.
As Major-General (Reserve) Yom-Tov Samia, the former head of the Southern Command, has said, “We need to create a situation which reduces [Hamas’s] oxygen supply.” The reference is to the arms-supply tunnels.
The demonstration in Cairo did not take place in isolation. On the same day, in Beirut, a group of students marched from the cemetery in Shatila refugee camp to the Egyptian Embassy, protesting Arab governments’ complicity and the involvement of Arab Contractors, with operates in 29 countries, including Lebanon. The newly formed Falastine Horra (Free Palestine) group organized the march.
This was not the first demonstration in Lebanon. On January 24, a protest in front of the Egyptian Embassy, organized by the Union of Lebanese Democratic Youth, descended to violence, with three protesters injured by security forces.
At the Egyptian protest, slogans and complaints extended beyond merely the wall. The Egyptian government is selling gas at subsidized prices to Israel. There is an ongoing lawsuit against this arrangement moving through the courts. While Egyptians suffer from the effects ongoing poverty, the fact the government sells hydrocarbons at a discount rate to a government most of the population despises is not a popular move.
The wall, meanwhile, draws near to completion, as winches and heavy machinery have arrived to pull from the ground the boulders that block the construction company from lowering the final slats into place. And then speculation will turn to observation, and if indeed the wall is as impermeable as some fear, it is difficult to imagine what will happen to Gaza’s imprisoned inhabitants. But it will not be pleasant.
Don’t get me wrong. The Nation has been deteriorating for years. When Obama appeared, seemingly cast from a mold meant to confuse gullible, reverse-racist, elitist liberals not so much aghast at Bush policies as at his studied inarticulateness, you knew we were in for accelerated decline. But since Obama’s coronation, we’ve borne witness to a total breakdown of intellectual standards.
Exhibit A were Melissa Harris-Lacewell’s blog entries at the notion. I read a handful, baffled. She seemed like a human fog machine pumping out banalities while southwest Asia was bombed to smithereens. Even when she bothered to point out Obama has erred from grace a time or two, she was certainly not “faltering [in her] support.” Who was this blathering dip-shit who could adoringly write that Obama was groping towards “better and fairer solutions for our nation”? A professor at Princeton, KVH’s alma mater. Check, favoritism. Black, and thus fulfilling the Nation’s editorial mandate for the utter aestheticization of politics? Check, because progressive change can be achieved with a paintbrush.
Anyway, here is Melissa Harris-Lacewell’s opening column:
Although I was shaken and distressed by the scale of human suffering, I forced myself to watch hours of Haitian earthquake coverage. I remembered how many turned away from the televised abandonment of black people in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. I did not want to commit that same betrayal by turning off the television. I wanted to bear witness to this tragedy, which affected so many black people.
I finally had to stop watching when I saw dozens of dead schoolchildren. One little face looked too much like my own daughter’s.
From thousands of miles away, ensconced in New Jersey, imagine Melissa with a thick sheen of tears coating her cheeks, imagining that somewhere, children are suffering. Then imagine the scholar of “race” (we pretend for a moment that Barbara Jean Fields hasn’t highlighted the non-sensicality of the whole field of study) solemnly tuning in to CNN, a little voyeuristic moment of shared suffering. But then one of the school-children looked like her own daughter. Sympathy transitioned to projection, and suddenly bearing witness actually costs Harris-Lacewell something and fuck it. Guilt politics are not supposed to actually make us feel bad. They’re supposed to be cathartic for us and therapeutic for those with whom we share them.
I wish Harris-Lacewell were more obnoxious, or stupider, or had literary ambitions, or actually did anything that rendered her vaguely open to pillory, but she’s pretty boring, and aside from that sublimely idiotic opening gambit, correct in a boring way. Yes, Melissa, we know that there is a class structure in this country. No, Melissa, the point is not to allay its ravages but to tear it down. Yes, Melissa, creating better opportunities would be cool. No, Melissa, black people are not screwed in this country due to “government and corporate choices” but because they’re the underclass in this verboten–to-utter abstraction called capitalism.
This is by way of livid introduction to Melissa’s new monthly column at the Nation. Nation columns are clearly under quota. New column for Melissa means minus one column for someone else. Not Alterman. He’s popular with the funders and an insipid dimwit, thus, perfect. Not Patricia Williams, who applauds Obama for “steer[ing] our huge ship of state back from the brink of ‘preventive war’” a week after announcing homicidal escalation in Afghanistan, a week before signing a death warrant for humanity at Copenhagen. Not Klein. She’s an anti-theoretical radical and thus vaguely harnessed and anyway, young, popular, effervescent. And she behaves. So who can you do in? Cockburn.
This is an outrage. Cockburn is the best stylist regularly writing for the Nation, as he transitions from Shlomo Sand to the Bible to a punchy plug for Avatar:
Thirty-five years later, James Cameron gives us Avatar and the planet Pandora, which is Gaia brought to life in the most savage denunciation of imperial exploitation—explicitly American—ever brought to screen. Now a huge hit, Avatar is the most expensive antiwar film ever made (at $200 million, about half the cost of a single F-22). “It is nature which today no longer exists anywhere,” a peppery German called Marx wrote in 1845. But Rousseau is having his revenge on Karl. The night I went to Avatar the audience cheered when Pandora, as a single Gaian organism, puts Earth’s predatory onslaught to flight and man’s war machines are crushed by natural forces. Against Genesis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, pagan mysticism is carrying the day, at the level of fantasy as it is in those astrological manuals down in the Bible belt.
Is Cockburn’s stance on global warming reasonable? Not remotely. Does he sometimes get a little gleeful and inattentive when he’s pissing on liberals and not notice that the stream is getting mis-directed? Maybe. Has he ripped into Obama with more incisive savagery per sentence than a dithering Nation editorial is able to compress into 900 meandering words? No question. Clam up, Alex. You should know what kind of outfit they’re running.
This is a response to Phil Weiss’s and Anees’s comments about the use of the word “genocide” to describe events in Palestine.
The question about Kramer’s insane burblings is not whether use of the word “genocide” is analytically appropriate to describe what has been going on in Palestine for the last 60+ years. The question is if Kramer’s suggestion met the legal definition of genocide, a different matter. Here’s why. For decades, “Genocide scholars” and international lawyers have been scurrying around the library and poring through their law books and social-science textbooks trying to muster up a coherent understanding of genocide. For now, we use the 1948 Convention, and Electronic Intifada referred to it (I assume) because it has cachet in academic and legal liberal circles, where unearthing instances of “genocide” is very important business, especially when they’re committed by enemy states or Africans. They isolate “Genocide” as a unique evil, because of its tacit referent: the Holocaust, when a state consciously chose to destroy (several) other peoples or groups. Nazism and the Holocaust occupy a special place in our moral imaginary, and leaving aside the instrumentalization of the phenomenon and these events, referring to them, and deploying the concept “genocide” is meant to provoke a very specific reaction and a very specific judgment: here is one more apologist for Israeli atrocity who has crossed the line by advocating genocide, and should be censured. I’m with it. We should keep pushing back the line of what the academy will tolerate or let pass without criticism or rebuke.
On “genocide” more generally, here are the lines from the Convention that are directly in front of the portion that Electronic Intifada quoted: “committed with the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group: killing members of the group; causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group.” Quickly looking over this definition—international lawyers and genocide scholars have refined it endlessly—the problems are obvious. No one is dumb enough to declare “intent” anymore, and what could “causing serious…mental harm” with the “intent to destroy…a national [etc.] group” possibly mean? No matter the protestations of people working on creating a usable definition, definitions of genocide tend to founder on their legal incoherence.
But that’s a false issue, too. Elevating “genocide” is a direct result of elevating the Holocaust and placing Nazi evil and Jewish suffering on a pedestal. This elevation counterposes Nazi evil with justified things like terror-bombing Tokyo or incinerating Hiroshima, not to “destroy…a national…group,” but to win a war or intimidate the Soviets, or in the case of the mass murder of the American Indians, to clear the frontier and create a country.
In this construction, the lunatics are those who kill to destroy an ethnic group. To reach some “reasonable” goal by utterly insane means is fine. That this ideology has the effect of sanitizing American and, arguably, Israeli mayhem is another part of it. At the end of the day, genocide is a way of labeling mass-death with a word that evokes Auschwitz, and is an exercise in demonization rather than analysis or conceptualization. This is a problem insofar as it demonizes Nazis, rather than placing their crimes on a human spectrum of atrocity, that our own crimes may and have approached, even if bereft of certain particularly disgusting features of Nazi industrial massacre. Still, I don’t find the word very helpful. It’s descriptive and evocative rather than analytical. But insofar as using what Anees calls a “strong word” to rouse the emotions of people who will respond to it, let’s use what we have.
“Economically superfluous young men.” So let’s kill them or starve them into a lower birth-rate, rather than offering development aid [Real aid, reparations, not the usual crap we give out] and ending the occupation. Martin Kramer here adopts the rhetoric of a Nazi. Not because the Nazis were evil without equal. But because this is sickening on a precisely similar level. “Pro-natal subsidies” means food and medical aid. I have read that babies are being born with conditions that are unknown in the West due to the poisoning of the water. The sustained astronomical nitrate exposure that causes these conditions will have totally unpredictable effects because no one has ever subjected a population to them before. Darryl Li calls the Gaza Strip a “laboratory.” Laboratories are where you mess around with chemistry and biology, giving a little bit to one test subject, a little more to another. Who would have thought that the analogy would veer so close to truth?
Kramer, meanwhile, seems to think he said nothing wrong: “I made a memorable argument for the role of population growth in radicalization, a clip of which is embedded below.” Memorable, Martin, for sure.
The following piece by Sara Roy–read the whole thing, seriously–is encyclopedic, covering every facet of the ongoing ruination of Gaza due to the Israeli/Egyptian/American blockade. I don’t know what’s going on in Gaza, I have not gotten in yet, and that’s part of the point of the blockade: by physically walling off writers from entering the territory you also wall off information. Roy is refreshing for not sugar-coating the consequences of these pathetic policies:
I was last in Gaza in August, my first trip since Israel’s war on the territory one year ago. I was overwhelmed by what I saw in a place I have known intimately for nearly a quarter of a century: a land ripped apart and scarred, the lives of its people blighted. Gaza is decaying under the weight of continued devastation, unable to function normally. The resulting void is filled with vacancy and despair that subdues even those acts of resilience and optimism that still find some expression. What struck me most was the innocence of these people, over half of them children, and the indecency and criminality of their continued punishment.
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The people of Gaza know they have been abandoned. Some told me the only time they felt hope was when they were being bombed, because at least then the world was paying attention. Gaza is now a place where poverty masquerades as livelihood and charity as business. Yet, despite attempts by Israel and the West to caricature Gaza as a terrorist haven, Gazans still resist. Perhaps what they resist most is surrender: not to Israel, not to Hamas, but to hate. So many people still speak of peace, of wanting to resolve the conflict and live a normal life. Yet, in Gaza today, this is not a reason for optimism but despair.
What happens when Palestinians in Gaza “surrender to hate”? They join extremist organizations that make Hamas look like a troop of Eagle Scouts. As Fawaz Gerges notes, “Compared with these puritanical and nihilistic groups, Hamas is well within the mainstream of Islamist politics.” Do Israeli leaders really want the Palestinian population to start joining such groups? The ideological blindness is amazing, and its own tragedy, and makes the J Street line even more surreally self-defeating–what J Street policies will lead to will eventually be a one-state solution (hopefully), because the two-state “solution” is done.