CORRUPTION OVER NATIONALISM<\/b><\/p>\n
The Atlantic Monthly<\/a><\/strong> has a cover story ( subscription required) entitled “ In a Ruined Country: How Yasir Arafat Destroyed Palestine <\/a>“that describes an all too common paradigm for Gap states – personalized rule of a ” Big Man”, multiplying networks of corruption, lack of transparency, democracy and rule of law and the threat of anarchic violence as a countervailing force to official misrule.<\/p>\n I seldom write on Israeli-Palestinian conflicts because the problem is presently insoluble. There can be no peace without a Palestinian state and there can be no Palestinian state until Palestinians accept that such a state at peace with Israel is an end in itself and not a mere waystation en route to Israel’s discorporation. The almost sixty-year old fantasy of driving the Jews into the sea when all facts point to a power calculus that would make that impossible indicates that Palestinian nationalism is actually secondary or tertiary to anti-Zionism, anti-semitism, pan-Arabism, Islamism and material factional interests.<\/p>\n The PA does not possess a monopoly over the use of force required to deliver upon any agreement with the Israeli government and neither the gangsters who run the PA nor HAMAS nor pro-settler Israeli hawks see in any interest in seeing the PA become stronger and effectively accountable. It is a shame because a genuine peace would bring enormous economic benefits to Israelis and Arabs alike as capital and labor markets were allowed to normalize and joint regional development projects would become possible.<\/p>\n Arafat, who may have looted upwards of a billion dollars from his people is gone but in his place are would-be mini-Arafats, the East bloc trained, hard-eyed chieftains of Fatah and the religious extremists of HAMAS and Islamic Jihad. Peace requires moderates and ME politics has little room for them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" CORRUPTION OVER NATIONALISM The Atlantic Monthly has a cover story ( subscription required) entitled “ In a Ruined Country: How Yasir Arafat Destroyed Palestine “that describes an all too common paradigm for Gap states – personalized rule of a ” Big Man”, multiplying networks of corruption, lack of transparency, democracy and rule of law and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1340","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1340"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1340\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1340"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1340"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/zenpundit.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1340"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}