There will be more

I will have something to say about the Israeli attack on Gaza tomorrow. For the moment, I am just going to quote a small part of something I said nearly five years ago, in January 2004:

I have been consistently critical of Israel in regard to its face-off with the Palestinians. I do that for several reasons. One is that the underlying principle is that I genuinely believe - and have believed for over 30 years - that the Palestinians have every bit as much right to a land of their own as the Israelis do and that mutual recognition between Israel and an independent Palestinian state is, barring a miraculous reconciliation, the best available, the most just, solution for long-term peace and stability.

I also believe that Israel has become less interested in a solution that does not involve maintaining its dominance over the West Bank, Gaza, and the Golan Heights.

And I believe now that Israel's actions in the years since, including this bloody attack, have only served to confirm that judgment. Israel is not engaged in defense, it is engaged in a form of colonialism.

I'll also note here for the sake of my ego that more than three and a-half years after I wrote that, Henry Siegman, the former director of the US/Middle East Project at the Council on Foreign Relations (1994-2006) and former head of the American Jewish Congress (1978-1994), which would seem safely establishment credentials, said this in the London Review of Books:

[A]ll previous peace initiatives have got nowhere for a reason that neither Bush nor the EU has had the political courage to acknowledge. That reason is the consensus reached long ago by Israel’s decision-making elites that Israel will never allow the emergence of a Palestinian state which denies it effective military and economic control of the West Bank.

I expect I will make further reference to that same article.