CNN daily news regularly reports events in that area as if Israel was the only effected turf. Here I'm not talking about time given to spokesfolk but simple news reporting. There are, of course, as always a few events which run counter to that but the general run of things is what I have in mind.
Have we been watching the same station? CNN has a number of reporters stationed in Palestinian areas; at least half the Israeli/Pal on the ground reports were from PA territory and revolved about conditions there. My main complaint about CNN was that they swept all intifada reporting into one mindless "cycle of violence" format, never distinguishing between terror attacks on random civilians and attacks on terrorists -- whom, by the way, they never called terrorists, but "activists" or "militants". For example, after Hamas "activists" invaded a settlement, shot two teenagers they happened upon, holed up in a house after shooting at everbody in sight, then were killed by Israeli police, the CNN headline was something like "2 Israelis, 2 Palestinians killed in settlement gunplay."
I don't watch Lehrer that often so I can't say. It sounds like you're describing what I think of the as the CNN political spectrum: center left to center right, with the center of gravity slight to the left of dead center. Republicans complain continually and rather effectively about the leftward tilt. If, however, you belong to a part of the spectrum to the left of the approved section (it sounds to me like you do), you are simply shut out.
I don't see anything in the history of the Palestinians, to be a bit more concrete, that suggests they are "incapable of democratic government."
I don't know what they are or are not capable of. The political leadership that they have come up with this century has been almost uniformly dismal. I was not really speaking of the Palestinians per se, but of the other Arab nations, who insist that Israel support a pure enlightenment secular state -- something that they themselves neither have nor want. Where do non-Muslims have equal rights? In Egypt? In Lebanon? In Syria? In Iraq? In Saudi Arabia? Are you kidding me? More of the pure double standard that the Arabs apply to Israel.
But I do have convictions about the relative advantages of a secular state as opposed to a religious one. The first wins hands down.
Israel is not a theocracy. It is an exercise in democratic Jewish nationalism. Other religions are freely practiced and Christians and Muslims have equal rights under law (though I will admit Arab Israelis face de facto discrimination). Much of the anti-Zionist argument imo boils down to the proposition that nationalism is okay for other people, but not for the Jews. My take is that nationalism, like democracy, may be a rotten system but it's better than all others that have been tried.
And I would guess there are moments in the Israeli/Palestine past when such might have been possible.
Maybe if the Arab inhabitants of Palestine had been all Christian instead of only a minority. The early Zionists did try to find a modus vivendi, in spite of the early Palestinian political resort to banditry and terrorism (starting about 1920). They lived in the midst of a huge Arab immigration attracted by the economic development they brought. The absolute rejection of the Zionist enterprise is religious at its root: any land that has once become Arabic and Muslim may NOT become again non-Arabic and non-Muslim; it is contrary to the will of Allah. (Did you notice how upset bin Laden is about Andalusia? That's 500 years ago, but the principle is the same) Any Palestinian leader has a sure-fire winner in pushing these identity, honor, and religious buttons; emphasizing compromise, citizenship, and prosperity, is an uphill battle. |
