The Guardian Wants Its Two-State Solution Back. Beware.

Emanuele Ottolenghi
Commentary/Contentions
26 January '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/ottolenghi/388062#more-388062

When the Guardian launched its “Palestine Papers” on Sunday, the sensational leak was accompanied by an editorial, which was sensationally titled “Pleading for a fig leaf” and just as sensationally subtitled “The secret notes suggest one requires Panglossian optimism to believe that these negotiations can one day be resurrected.”

The editorial went on to accuse the Palestinian leadership of being a bunch of collaborators — it described them as “weak” and “craven” — a mixture of poodles and quislings. It decried their humiliating readiness “to flog the family silver” in order to get “a puppet state.” It then proclaimed: “The Palestinian Authority may continue as an employer but, as of today, its legitimacy as negotiators will have all but ended on the Palestinian street.”

So, on January 23, the peace process is dead, unless you are a “Panglossian optimist.”

This was not just an isolated 0pinion piece — this was an opening salvo from the editor. Somehow, it looks like someone may have regretted going so far, because just two days later, a new editorial with a contrary headline appeared — “Despair. But we still need a deal” — with a subtitle that was also the opposite of that of the January 23 editorial: “A two-state solution remains the only show in town.”

The Guardian now says it wants the two-state solution back — two days after it inaugurated the latest effort to sabotage it and a day before the head of Hamas’s international-relations department was given a prominent platform in the paper.

Nice try, but this does not in any way match the impact of the avalanche of op-eds, news coverage, and profiles the Guardian provided and continues to provide in order to support the perception that the Palestinian leadership betrayed their people.

In other words, the Guardian believes in the two-state solution, just not the one that could be realistically negotiated, because that constitutes a betrayal of the Palestinian cause; and not one under U.S. auspices, because the Americans are not honest brokers; and not one where Israel gets its way on settlements, Jerusalem, or refugees, because that is “craven.”

In short, the Guardian is for a two-state solution where Israel, not the Palestinians, surrenders.

The Guardian has always taken the Palestinian narrative as the truth. The leaks, accompanied by an accusing finger pointed at the Palestinian negotiators, is a cry of “betrayal” of the Palestinian cause. They are more Palestinian than the Palestinians themselves.

Just consider the Guardian’s wise counsel on how successfully negotiate:

[T]alks succeed only when each side can put itself in the shoes of the other. To imagine that Abu Mazen could put to a referendum a deal in which Israel got its way on all the core issues – settlements, Jerusalem, the return of refugees – and to imagine that such a deal would be durable, is the ultimate failure of a negotiator’s imagination.

There. The Guardian can only put itself in the shoes of the Palestinians — but no word of Israeli and Jewish pain, when Israel’s leaders would have to relinquish Hebron, the second holiest place for Judaism; or Bethlehem, where one of four matriarchs of Israel, Rachel, is buried; or Nablus, where Jacob’s son Joseph is buried; or the entire biblical heartland, which, more than Tel Aviv and the entire coastline of Israel, is filled with longing and memories of Jewish identity.

No pain is registered, because the Guardian, in its cravenness, sees Israel as the Palestinians see it — a colonialist, European implant, based on a racist and imperialist ideology that crafted an imagined past fed by religious superstition and devoid of the authenticity of the indigenous culture.

Their leaks may be a treasure trove for the impatient historian who won’t need to wait 30 years to access classified material. It may be a golden opportunity to undermine the Palestinian Authority and poke Israel in the eye in the process. And it is no doubt great for Internet traffic. But it has no value whatsoever in terms of advancing the cause the Guardian pretends to support.

That plea for a two-state solution is just their fig leaf — a convenient cover before they charge ahead.

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