An Alternate Witness

The Continuity of Obama's Change by Mouin Rabbani and Chris Toensing is a more pragmatic analysis than anything I've seen on the BBC or CNN of the prospects of Israeli-Palestinian peace in the Obama Administration. (Thanks, Chris, for pointing it out to me.) I want to believe in Obama and Mitchell, and I want to believe that the world is reaching a tipping-point at which we will no longer tolerate the continued maltreatment of Palstinians. However, Rabbani and Toensing make compelling arguments as to why my optimism is a little over-zealous. I found this argument most compelling:

The Mitchell report shared the structural flaw of all US interventions on the Israeli-Palestinian front subsequent to the collapse of talks at Camp David in July 2000. Whether through a stoppage of Palestinian resistance, constitutional and security reform, or institution building, it placed the onus for progress toward peace and Palestinian statehood upon the occupied people, and deferred the duties of the occupying power until later. And it spoke not at all of the foremost of those obligations, the duty to end the occupation.

This is precisely the problem with, for example, the resolution the U.S. Senate passed on the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. If Hamas is going to be blamed for firing rockets into Israeli after the end of the ceasefire with Israel, then Israel must also be blamed for failing to fulfill their obligations under the ceasefire agreement, namely, to open the borders and allow food, medicines, water, currency, electricity and other basic necessities to enter the Gaza Strip on a regular basis, in sufficient quantities to maintain a decent standard of living for Palestinians trapped inside the Gaza Strip.