On Trump’s bankruptcy lawyer and pick for ambassador to Israel, Friedman could be described as so ultra-right, he’s to the right of Netanyahu:
“There has never been a “two-state solution” – only a “two-state narrative.” The former never existed because a “solution” to the Israel-Palestinian dispute would have required, as a threshold matter, that Palestinians accept Israel as a Jewish state, renounce terrorism, discontinue anti-Israel incitement in their schools and abandon their desire to flood Israel with so-called “refugees” from other countries who never spent a day of their lives in Israel” –David Friedman
Like most people, to a greater or lesser degree, Friedman sees his world through a self-serving prism. The first sentence of his short paragraph is refreshingly straightforward. The remainder of the paragraph is notable for its stunning hypocrisy. Let’s examine the first sentence, first, and then have at the rest of the story.
The ‘two-state’ narrative has always been a lie. It’s not only a case of ‘actions speak louder than words’, but the driving idea of a ‘Greater Israel’ is behind the Israeli intransigence in negotiations (or better said, avoidance of negotiations) towards a so-called ‘two-state’ solution (which under Israeli diktat would be no solution at all.) It is combined social and cultural psychology demands (or drives) the Jewish state towards a ‘Greater Israel.’ This demand is embedded in the mythology of history where ‘Samaria’ and ‘Judea’ are, at one time or another in ancient past linked, aligned with, or integrated to the historical Kingdom of Israel, having little to do with the fact of modern Israel.
According to the Oxford:
Samaria |səˈme(ə)rēə|
1 an ancient city in central Palestine, founded in the 9th century bc as the capital of the northern Hebrew kingdom of Israel. The ancient site is situated in the modern West Bank, northwest of Nablus.
2 the region of ancient Palestine around Samaria, between Galilee in the north and Judaea in the south.
Judaea |jo͝oˈdēə, -ˈdāə|
the southern part of ancient Palestine that corresponds to the former kingdom of Judah.
This next pretty much nails it:
“The term Judea as a geographical term was revived by the Israeli government in the 20th century as part of the Israeli administrative district name Judea and Samaria Area for the territory generally referred to as the West Bank”
A state does not give the names of one’s historical mythology to an area except that state intends to assert sovereignty over the same. Prior to this, Judea had last been the name of the area under Hadrian’s rule, changed shortly after the era of Agrippa II, the last Roman approved ‘Herodian’, or ‘titular’ king of the Jews, who were NOT a sovereign people.
The so-called ‘two-state’ solution was, and always had been, a geopolitical lie. The purpose of that lie has been, and always had been, to satisfy political correctness relating to international law. The USA and it’s Christian Zionist cohorts never dared to support the annexation of the West Bank as a matter of stated policy, because to do so would be to openly support a rogue state in its transgressions (if a rogue state is to be defined as a state in persistent violation of international law.) This is the purpose the ‘two-state’ geopolitical lie has served, as a cover story that buys time towards implementing the inevitable ‘Greater Israel.’
Inevitable? The USA supported Friedman’s Israel is a nuclear armed state aggressively colonizing the West Bank (with Friedman’s staunch support.) There will be a Greater Israel or there will be mushroom clouds, or perhaps both. People who embrace myths of history are not particularly rational people and Israel is not a particularly rational state:
“For refugees, camps were shelters for the reconstruction of personal and social life, but were also seen as sites of great political significance, the material testimony of what was destroyed and ‘all that remains’ of more than four hundred cities, towns and villages forcefully cleansed throughout Palestine in the Nakba of 1947-9. This is the reason refugees sometimes refer to the destruction of camps as ‘the destruction of destruction.’ The camp is not a home, it is a temporary arrangement, and its destruction is but the last iteration in an ongoing process of destruction.
“This rhetoric of double negation – the negation of negation – tallies well with what Saree Makdisi, talking about the Israeli refusal to acknowledge the Nakba, has termed ‘the denial of denial’, which is, he says, ‘a form of foreclosure that produces the inability – the absolutely honest, sincere incapacity – to acknowledge that denial and erasure have themselves been erased in turn and purged from consciousness.’ What has been denied is continuously repeated: Israel keeps on inflicting destruction on refugees and keeps on denying that a wrong has been done” –Eyal Weizman: ‘The Least Of All Possible Evils’ (Humanitarian Violence From Arendt To Gaza)
Which brings us to the rank hypocrisy going to the conclusion of Friedman’s small paragraph. If there were Jews who were enslaved or fled Roman rule, there were many, many more who stayed in what was no longer ‘Judea’ but what became Roman ruled Palaestina, renamed by the Roman Emperor Hadrian. Where are those ancient Jewish people’s descendants today? They’re in Palestine and they’re called Palestinians. The inconvenience for the modern Ashkenazi is, most of these indigenous people had, with passing time, converted to Islam.
Imagine your rural family’s city dwelling uncle Mordecai’s entire neighborhood (Jerusalem) had been convicted of treason by the Roman state and their daughters were consequently enslaved and removed to Italy and surrounding area. Now, some 1,800 or so years later, Mordecai’s and his neighbors’ descendants show up and demand you give them your farm as their rightful inheritance because you are no longer Jewish. That’s what historical myths do to people.
This goes to the most crass aspect of Friedman’s hypocrisy when he had stated his conclusion to the Palestinians demand of a right to return:
“…their desire to flood Israel with so-called “refugees” from other countries who never spent a day of their lives in Israel”
So tell me, David Friedman (this is a rhetorical question), exactly what do your words describe better than Uncle Mordecai’s (put any European nationality here) neighborhood’s progeny descending on Palestine?
There is, after all, an experience shaping the Palestinian point of view.
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Ronald Thomas West 