Count Arnaud de Borchgrave Altena is better known to old journalistic hands as simply Arnaud, the last of the great postwar foreign correspondents. No one has covered more wars or met more heads of
state than Arnaud, for Newsweek, the Washington Times and for U.P.I. He is now in his 81st year, healthy, thin, and as ambitious as an 18 year old for the odd scoop. Back in 1967, he was the man who convinced me that the reporting and writing life was what it was all about. (He’s had a lot to apologize for ever since). But this is not about my old mentor and great friend. It is about
his latest column on the Middle East, an area he knows more about than Bill Clinton knows about lying. If Olmert is indicted and forced to step down, fresh elections are sure to bring back superhawk Benjamin Netanyahu. End any thought, says Arnaud, of making a Palestinian state possible. So far so bad.
After eight years of a Bush presidency, Israel has continued its illegal expansion of Jewish settlements in Palestinian territory. Israel now controls 40 percent of the West Bank, and has a network of interconnecting roads banned to Palestinians. Which means that peace and a two-state solution is a pipe dream. Israel is so deeply dug in on the West Bank that peace is as likely to happen as John (four pizzas) Podhoretz is about to give up—well—pizzas. Just look at some of Arnaud’s stats: “Out of 10 million Palestinians in the Diaspora, 70 percent are refugees or their descendants; 2.5 million live in the West Bank under Israeli control; 1.5 million are in gaza, now a vast slum with no access to the outside world wher they are ruled by Hamas, a freely elected rejectionistVanish party…”
Israel insists that unless Hamas and the Palestinians renounce violence, there will be no peace talks. Terrified of AIPAC, American politicians repeat this mantra like monkeys reacting to their organ grinder. So kudos to the New York Times for running an op-ed piece by Elias Khoury, a prof at NYU, who wrote that Israel has depicted the problem as rooted in the Arab world’s refusal to recognize Israel’s right to exist. But to palestinians, the problem lies in Israel’s rejection of the Palestinian right to an independent state and Israeli refusal to admit that palestinians themselves were victims of forced expulsion from their lands. Just because jews were victims of the Germans does not give them the right to enslave, abuse, torture, evict and kill Palestinians. Victimhood, after all, only goes so far. The Israelis have played it to the hilt, and it’s now time for us in the West to say enough. But I won’t be holding my breath. AIPAC rules, Washington bows humbly.
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The Usual Suspects