“The Israeli prime minister came here today and said that Israel is surrounded by those who want to destroy it,” Safadi said at a Friday press conference shortly after Netanyahu finished his speech at the UN General Assembly.
“We’re here — members of the Muslim-Arab committee, mandated by 57 Arab and Muslim countries — and I can tell you very unequivocally, all of us are willing to guarantee the security of Israel in the context of Israel ending the occupation and allowing for the emergence of a Palestinian state,” Safadi passionately argued.
Netanyahu “is creating that danger because he simply does not want the two-state solution. If he does not want the two-state solution, can you ask Israeli officials what is their end-game — other than just wars and wars and wars?”
Also, video of the statement.
First off, like @[email protected] points out, Israel’s actions have been far from helpful to begin with.
Second, let’s be completely honest here, the rockets from Hamas and to an extent the rockets from Hezbollah: they are Israel’s problem. I don’t see why my Greek-Canadian ass needs to be solving the problems created by Israel when it completely killed off the Oslo accords. Israel has all the power here. It’s Israel that has been colonizing and besieging the Palestinians. It’s Israel that has been building illegal settlements on illegally occupied land. It’s Israel that was occupying Souther Lebanon for 20 years, etc. In the last decades, unequivocally, they are the aggressors. When Hamas did the October 7th atrocities, I really don’t get why the Israelis were surprised. Gazans have lived in a city-wide concentration camp for 20 years. Any young adult participating in the October 7th atrocities has never experienced anything else in their whole lives. Is it really surprising that some significant percentage of such a people would resort to this kind of utter atrocity? Norman Finkelstein has made a great parallel with the Nat Turner rebellion in the US, when slaves rebelled and did unspeakable crimes to whites, and the abolitionists at the time were right to just say “well, what the fuck did you expect?”.
Third, fuck yes, it’s easy to say. Israel itself in its own history has shown what it is capable. If instead of prepping terrorist attacks with pagers they had been spending their time doing to Haniyeh what they did to Eichmann, kidnap him, then bring him in Israel and give him a fair trial, I would be applauding them, I would be saluting them. When I say that Israel has gone rabid and needs to be deradicalized, I draw exactly this parallel. The generation of Israelis that were the perpetrators of the 1948 Nakba (so, not a bunch of boy scouts) had the moral spine to put Eichmann on the stand, give him an Israeli lawyer who defended him in good faith, and to give him a fair trial. Those bastards, they did that noble act. These petty criminals of today? Bah!
And fourth, if there is any good journalist out there, they should ask the Jordanian minister what he means by “guarantee”. Would an pan-Arab peacekeeping force be deployed in the hot spots to maintain the terms of the deal? It is almost certain that an independent Palestine would immediately fall into some kind of civil war, just like the newly independent Ireland. Is the minister saying for example that they would be willing to fight that war on behalf of the moderate Palestinians? Don’t ask me, ask him.