Mick Hartley

Alex Ryvchin in Fathom, on Palestinian rejectionism:

The conflict is not a territorial dispute to be settled by delineating borders and agreeing land swaps. It is a clash between the Jewish national movement which desperately craved a scrap of land to call their own so that they and their contributions to humanity should not vanish from this Earth, and the ‘Palestinian cause,’ which seeks no precise outcome beyond thwarting its rival, and holding out, digging in, struggling on, resisting. What they are resisting, no one can quite articulate without descending into pseudo-political babble about fighting imperialism and Zionist greed. But so shameful to this ‘cause’ is the notion of compromise, so inconceivable is a life beyond conflict and grievance, that it is impossible to contemplate any offer (other than perhaps that of Al-Assad senior), that the Palestinian leadership and its boosters in the West, might actually consider. We hear how unbearable life is under ‘Israeli occupation,’ and yet the idea of reaching a fair bargain to change that condition is evidently more unbearable still.

Meanwhile, the Kurds, the Assyrians, the Tibetans, all stateless peoples with unimpeachable claims to their ancestral lands, whose emancipation movements have never quite taken off as a ‘cause’, and who don’t benefit from dedicated UN agencies or more than $31bn of foreign aid since 1993, would do anything for a single shot at statehood let alone a perpetual flow of White House peace proposals to scoff at.