The Latest from the Prospect
 â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â â
Â
View this email in your browser
**NOVEMBER 2, 2023**
On the Prospect website
How Autoworkers' Democratic Tactics Reversed a Humiliating Loss
As part of the UAW's tentative agreement with Stellantis, an idled
factory in Belvidere, Illinois will restart production. BY LEE HARRIS
[link removed]
Salvaging Voting Rights Long After 'Shelby'
The Supreme Court's elimination of preclearance has come back to haunt
the courts in cases involving Southern states' attempts to dilute
Black voting power. BY GABRIELLE GURLEY
[link removed]
Biden's Nakba
The catastrophic effects of the president's indulgence of Netanyahu BY
ROBERT KUTTNER
Meyerson on TAP
****
****
****
****
****
****
****
**** The Co-Dependency of Bibi and Hamas
Both seek an ethnically homogenous nation from the river to the sea.
We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart's grown brutal from the fare.
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love ...
-Â Â Â Â Â Â W.B. Yeats, from his poem cycle "Meditations in Time of
Civil War
"
The fantasy now gruesomely playing out in Israel and Palestine is shared
by both Hamas and the Netanyahu government: a homogeneous state, devoid
of either Jews or Palestinians, depending. Each understands that to turn
its fantasy into actuality, it needs to bolster the other and undermine
any groups that might advance the prospects for some form of
co-existence.
Hence, Hamas' main attacks on Israelis have come at the very moments
when the prospect of co-existence loomed largest. Following the
assassination of Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, his
Foreign Minister Shimon Peres was favored to win the next election and
push strongly for a two-state settlement. To fend off that looming
horror, Hamas launched a wave of attacks against Israelis, setting off
four deadly bombings against civilian targets (buses, downtown Tel Aviv)
in a nine-day period, which had the desired effect of convincing just
enough Israelis that no two-state deal would work. Peres was sent down
to a stunning defeat at the hands of a newcomer to the PM's
office-Bibi Netanyahu.
On October 7th, to block some kind of deal by which the Saudis would
recognize Israel and do something, however inadequate, for Palestinians
on the West Bank, Hamas sunk to the occasion again.
Bibi clearly understands his debt to Hamas, absent whom it's likely he
never would have been elected. In his nearly decade-and-a-half in power,
he's consistently undermined and finally repudiated Israel's
commitment to a two-state solution, consistently pushing so many
settlers into the West Bank that Palestinians have been confined to ever
smaller Bantustans. He's also consistently refused to grant any
legitimacy to the Palestinian Authority, making sure it could never
effectively defend Palestinian interests, lest anyone consider it a
credible partner in a two-state solution.
The continued existence of Hamas, on the other hand, mocked those
Israelis who said that co-existence was possible, much less necessary.
In this week's
**New Yorker**, David Remnick writes
about a closed-door meeting with supporters in which Bibi reportedly
said, "Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian
state must support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas....
This is part of our strategy."
Thus, a historic co-dependency that has brought death and ruin to both
Palestinians and Israelis. Bibi's current avowedly racist government
and Hamas both seek homogenous states that extend from the river to the
sea-goals that can only be realized through cataclysmic violence. Each
needs the other's provocations to justify its own violence.Â
Any number of Israelis and Palestinians understand this, but in time of
war, as Yeats (writing in the time of the Irish civil war) understood,
hearts grow brutal. Nonetheless, many Israelis who live inside the
state's 1948 borders have no great love for the West Bank settlers
who've kept the region on the permanent edge of violence, who've
been a moving force behind the rise of anti-Israeli sentiment
internationally, who've been an electoral base of support for Bibi's
efforts to undermine Israeli democracy, and whose coddling by Bibi's
government has drained resources that could have been better used
elsewhere (like border defenses around Gaza).
If the Biden administration seriously wishes to help solve this
bloodiest of impasses (and begin to diminish a fast-growing rift within
its own Democratic Party ranks), it must get serious about the two-state
solution advanced under Bill Clinton's presidency. The only way to do
that is to condition all future aid to Israel on the withdrawal of its
settlements from the West Bank. As the great majority of American Jews
(as distinct from Christian evangelicals) do not believe that Israel has
a divine right to that ostensibly Biblically granted land, making the
case for that withdrawal to his Jewish constituents, (and to his fellow
Democrats and any stray realpolitikniks across the political spectrum)
shouldn't be beyond Joe Biden's capacity, particularly given the
pro-Israeli capital he's earned.Â
That would be capital well and strategically spent.
~ HAROLD MEYERSON
Follow Harold Meyerson on Twitter
[link removed]
To receive this newsletter directly in your inbox, click here to
subscribe.Â
Click to Share this Newsletter
[link removed]
Â
[link removed]
Â
[link removed]
Â
[link removed]
Â
[link removed]
YOUR TAX DEDUCTIBLE DONATION SUPPORTS INDEPENDENT JOURNALISM
The American Prospect, Inc., 1225 I Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC xxxxxx, United States
Copyright (c) 2023 The American Prospect. All rights reserved.
To opt out of American Prospect membership messaging, click here
.
To manage your newsletter preferences, click here
.
To unsubscribe from all American Prospect emails, including newsletters,
click here
.
