Kushner's Middle East peace plan is due in a month

GoldenBoy89 said:

To think in just one month there will finally be peace in the Middle East.

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dzheremi said:

Man...having to wait a whole month for peace in the Middle East...that's pretty brutal. I dunno if I can do it.

Since it was asked (sorta), I think it is inherently unfair to force the Palestinians to live in a series of disconnected modern day Bantustans all so that Israel can maintain its Jewish demographic majority and hence its identity as a "Jewish state", using its illegal settlements as a way of keeping its borders as amorphous as it can get away with. I don't believe it has a fundamental right to that quasi-religious identity (NB: Israel is a secular state, and was founded by secular Jews; Herzl himself was raised in a secular family) in the first place, in the same way that I don't think the Coptic people have some kind of inalienable right to a 'Coptic state', whatever that even means. For one thing, they already have that: it's called Egypt, and they wouldn't settle for just the parts of it in which they are a large percentage of the population, nor should they. (Not that anyone is seriously suggesting this; I just mean it as an example.)

So once the idea of Israel as a Jewish state is done away with, because it is illegitimate to begin with, what possible reason could there be to maintain its existence? Frankly, I'd like to see it gone, but by peaceful means. I don't know what those would be (certainly blowing up buses in suicide missions or going into Palestinian villages with tanks should be out of the question), but obviously there must be some change in the mindsets of the people, which...uh...as a member of a native MENA-region Church, I can say that this is very unlikely to happen.

Still...I am for a one-state solution, with all people living together as harmoniously as possible, like I would want for every other state in the world. It may be a dream, but then so is whatever Kushner is going to come up with, so what'dyya gonna do?

Here is a rather lengthy (51 minute) talk from a local Palestinian Christian leader (I believe at the time he was archbishop of Galilee and its environs for the Melkite Catholic Church, but I don't know if he is still in that role today or not; the video was published 12 years ago, and he was already finely aged then), if anyone wants to get a different perspective on the whole thing, from someone with "no dog in the fight" in the sense of wanting neither an Islamic society nor a Jewish one, but still being a proponent of peace:

The good archbishop's view is essentially my own, even though I am not myself a Palestinian Arab Israeli (or any other kind of Arab or Israeli, for that matter).

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Speedwell said:

At least he understands the significance of Ramadan, which is more than I would have given him credit for.

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USincognito said:

I'm sure it will be bigly successful and will have the best words and written by the best people with big brains and the Fake News media haters and losers won't give it any press covfefe.

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essentialsaltes said:

Previously, Kushner has indicated that the long awaited peace plan would be revealed soon "we’ll wait until after Ramadan and then we’ll put our plan out".

The month of Ramadan begins tonight-ish (depending on your ability to sight the new crescent moon).

What form will it take? What carrots and sticks will be on the table to bring both sides together? Obviously, we don't know, but that can't prevent us from speculating for a month.

Personally, I favor a two-state solution using the 1967 borders with landswaps. But given how the Trump Administration has lurched further toward Israel in its official actions, I have my doubts that that is what Kushner is going to propose. But what then will be offered to the other side to make it acceptable and ultimately successful?

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essentialsaltes said:

Previously, Kushner has indicated that the long awaited peace plan would be revealed soon "we’ll wait until after Ramadan and then we’ll put our plan out".

The month of Ramadan begins tonight-ish (depending on your ability to sight the new crescent moon).

What form will it take? What carrots and sticks will be on the table to bring both sides together? Obviously, we don't know, but that can't prevent us from speculating for a month.

Personally, I favor a two-state solution using the 1967 borders with landswaps. But given how the Trump Administration has lurched further toward Israel in its official actions, I have my doubts that that is what Kushner is going to propose. But what then will be offered to the other side to make it acceptable and ultimately successful?

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GoldenBoy89 said:

To think in just one month there will finally be peace in the Middle East.

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FireDragon76 said:

The UN mandate was a disaster waiting to happen, just looking at the geography they drew up, and especially given the violence that was already present in that region at the time. I am very much sympathetic to the secular Palestinian perspective that this was merely neo-colonialist actions. On the other hand, I cannot blame secular Jews for wanting a homeland.

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dzheremi said:

I don't blame them, either, I just don't think they're entitled to it based on antisemitism in Europe or the Holocaust or whatever. If that were the case, then surely the Assyrians/Syriacs, Western Armenians, and Pontic Greeks who were victims of genocide before them (Hitler supposedly having said in answer to the feasibility of his sick plan "Who today remembers what happened to the Armenians?") should be able to retake what is now Turkey with moral impeccability, as they were native to the area a lot more recently relative to their suffering the genocides than the Jews in Europe or around the world were to the land of Mandatory Palestine.

But that is not how things work. Turkey still exists, even if they are a moral blight upon humanity, officially in deep denial of their own quite recent genocidal past upon which rests the modern foundations of their nation-state (even as some citizens recognize it at great personal risk, such as the Nobel Prize-winning writer Orhan Pamuk who was put on trial in 2005 for factual statements he made concerning the Armenian genocide and the killing of the Kurds that were nonetheless deemed an insult to the honor of the country or whatever stupid statute was invoked by the ultra-nationalist lawyer who brought the charges against him).

So why should the Jews specifically get what others are denied despite these other peoples having equal or greater claims to the respective land? (I know you're not arguing that they should; I mean this rhetorically for those who support Israel as a Jewish homeland.)

And when does it ever end, then? Couldn't the various nationalist movements (e.g., the Basque autonomy movement, the Transnistrians, the South Ossetians, the Armenians of Artsakh/Nagorno-Karabagh/Nakhchivan, the Sahrawi Arabs/Polisario, etc.) also point to their own respective tragedies and roots to make similar claims to this or that piece of land, as in fact they already do? Maybe the nation-state is simply a poor model to reflect the reality of human organization on the ground, but then the question becomes what to replace it with. Palestine would after all be another nation-state, were they to gain independence.

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dzheremi said:

So why should the Jews specifically get what others are denied despite these other peoples having equal or greater claims to the respective land? (I know you're not arguing that they should; I mean this rhetorically for those who support Israel as a Jewish homeland.)

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Speedwell said:

I don't have a good answer to that. But many believe it is because they possess an infallible holy book which tells them that it is God's plan that the Jews be given a homeland and that their Temple be rebuilt in order to bring on the End Times.

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