Peoples Geography — Reclaiming space

Creating people's geographies

Kissinger’s role in recognising Israel demand

As reported by Ha’aretz, Henry Kissinger has been invited by the Jewish People Policy Planning Institute to be one of a group of leaders tasked with setting their strategic goals — last week’s discussion centered on the Iranian “threat” to Israel. Jeffrey Blankfort does well to remind us:

[Kissinger] reportedly is the one who came up with the idea that the Palestinians, in that case, the PLO, must recognize Israel’s “right to exist,” which was not demanded of either Egypt or Jordan before Israel signed treaties with those countries. No other country has ever made such a demand which is qualitatively different than simply recognizing the fact that a particular state exists at a given moment. Accepting such a demand, of course, means recognizing the legitimacy of their victimization by the Israelis which is equivalent to asking a rape victim to accept the right of the rapist to commit his vile act in order to get him to stop it.

Meanwhile, some soul-searching from Israeli journalist Eliahu Salpeter in Ha’aretz (The state we’re in today, 3 Nov), who wonders whether Israel is on a collision course and whether in fact it is serving to protect Jews:

The Jewish people’s existence is more important than that of the Jewish state. If Israel cannot ensure the Jewish people’s survival – sometimes it seems to even impair that survival – a giant question-mark hovers over the very justification of its existence.

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Timely Reminders

"Those who crusade, not for God in themselves, but against the devil in others, never succeed in making the world better, but leave it either as it was, or sometimes perceptibly worse than what it was, before the crusade began. By thinking primarily of evil we tend, however excellent our intentions, to create occasions for evil to manifest itself."
-- Aldous Huxley

"The only war that matters is the war against the imagination. All others are subsumed by it."
-- Diane DiPrima, "Rant", from Pieces of a Song.

"It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably every day
for lack
of what is found there"
-- William Carlos Williams, "Asphodel, That Greeny Flower"


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