An op-ed by Shlomo Avineri, whom many would call a member of Israel's left wing society, succinctly addresses the bottom line of the Palestinian's position regarding Israel. He writes
Oslo’s sponsors saw the conflict as one between two national movements and believed – as did I – that direct negotiations between Israel and the PLO could find a solution to the territorial and strategic issues that were the cornerstones of the dispute. It wasn’t easy to convince Israelis, even those in the Labor Party, that the other side was a national movement – one that admittedly had terrorist facets but was fundamentally entitled, just like the Zionist movement, to exercise national self-determination.
We were wrong.
The Palestinians don’t think this is a conflict between two national movements. From their perspective, this is a conflict between a single national movement – the Palestinian one – and a colonialist, imperialist entity that is destined to vanish from the world. Therefore, the analogy that appears in Palestinian textbooks is Algeria: not the West Bank as Algeria, but all of Israel as Algeria. And the Israelis will disappear one way or another, just as the French settlers in Algeria did.
Well, that's all good, but his column then veers towards the bogeyman of Israel's politics--the settlements. He has a proposal for his left wing colleagues, pay people to leave the West Bank, but he then fails to address his own realization that the Palestinians want all of Israel.
Nice try Mr. Aveneri
Read the full column here.
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