Giving Palestine statehood would further de-legitimize the violent elements within their people. Haaretz: The majority of Palestinians support a peace agreement with Israel and believe that the Palestinian Authority should use non-violent means to achieve their political goals, a new Fafo poll revealed. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/06/20/palestinians-isreal-peace-poll_n_618691.html There isn't just one poll that shows the peaceful intentions of Palestinians, google it, there are plenty out there. Giving them statehood is exactly the "short-cut" that would accelerate the peace process. Problem is the other side doesn't want peace and the US supports this position. Sad really, could have finally seen this thing come to an end. Rather leaders are more interested in staying in power than making this world a better place.
It's pretty ridiculous when something like 70% of Israelis support statehood. I played a show Thursday night in Ramallah and the turnout was very meager. I was told everyone was staying home because no one was quite sure what kind of "punishment" was waiting in store for them for pushing the vote on statehood at the UN. Abu Mazen and especially Salam Fayyad are not Yasser Arafat. An amazing amount of work has been accomplished in the West Bank and the emphasis has been on infrastructure and education. My experience in the West Bank stands in a very stark contrast with the fear mongering by Netanyahu and his amen corner in the US. Ramallah is a rather secular place (I play in bars there) and the PA has worked hard to get Palestinian artists and thinkers to move back to Palestine and build a better society. The Likud leadership want to continue building settlements until statehood is impossible for Palestinians. And despite what the US says, pretty much allows that to continue. The US have zero credibility as peace brokers and are seen by everyone other than the Israeli right as helping to perpetuate the occupation. Anyone who can try to justify the settlements and the continued occupation with a straight face is either poorly informed or way to the right of the average person who actually lives here. Part of the rules of the Occupation that I experience is that for the most part, Jewish Israelis are forbidden to go into the West Bank (like my band, meaning all my shows there are solo) and Arabs in the West Bank are unable to come across the Green Line. All this does is increase hostility and fear, and it allows the extremists of both sides to preach a fear of a mysterious enemy that doesn't really exist. The Palestinian Authority (which would mean not Hamas) has done everything they could to transform the movement into one of peaceful protest and build a nation. To say that they deserve a state is an understatement, and if Obama uses a Security Council veto, I will be ashamed as an American of the terrible hypocrisy of the decision.
Palestinians have been offered a state multiple times by the international community and Israel. They always reject it. They don't want a state unless it coincides with the elimination of Israel.
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Palestinians have been accepting Israel's right to exist since the late 80's. They've agreed to it in numerous accords. There are definitely extremists in the Palestinian lands that refuse to accept it. Israel should maintain it's security, but the extremists shouldn't be allowed to control how progress is made. Every offer of Palestinian statehood has been ridiculous and would only have resulted in a Palestine that wasn't feasible. No one who wants a sustainable Palestine should have accepted any of the offers that have been put forward so far.
Yup. Liars, the whole lot of them. This was JUNE 2011, just 3 months ago. The same Abbas declaring explicitly that they refuse to recognize the existence of an Israeli state, in consistency with the same position they have had for decades. And then he goes to the world and pretends that it is Israel that doesn't want a Palestinian state, when in fact Israel has offered them statehood many times over and they have flatly refused. There is only one viable endgame for these guys: genocide of the Jews. Period. I'm sure large numbers, maybe even a majority, of people on the street want peace. But we know for sure that Hamas, which controls the West Bank, does not, and that even the PA is nothing but a wolf in sheep's clothing that shares the same view.
I agree with most of what you are saying. Just to help you out though, the West Bank is controlled by the Faytah and Abbas. Hamas controls the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, one thing all leaders of Palestine have made clear is that they will not recognize Israel as a Jewish State. Therefore, their intentions for peace are not real and just like the rest of the world they use Israel as their scapegoat.However both Israel and Palestine are very skeptical that negotians will lead to anything.The end of the conflict means the end of their claims. Palestinians are not willing to put an end to their claims and demands that emerged from the conflict. Therefore they adopt a unilateral approach. They’re trying to get a free lunch. We need to avoid giving them a free lunch. Palestinians need to know that the only way to end the conflict is to accept Israel as a place, a homeland, for the Jewish people.
Good read. Palestine's losing battle for land The U.N. could soon recognize it as a state, but Israel is swallowing more and more of its territory It's the show that time and the world forgot. It's called the Occupation and it's now in its 45th year. Playing on a landscape about the size of Delaware, it remains largely hidden from view, while Middle Eastern headlines from elsewhere seize the day. Diplomats shuttle back and forth from Washington and Brussels to Middle Eastern capitals; the Israeli-Turkish alliance ruptures amid bold declarations from the Turkish prime minister; crowds storm the Israeli Embassy in Cairo, while Israeli ambassadors flee the Egyptian capital and Amman, the Jordanian one; and of course, there's the headliner, the show-stopper of the moment, the Palestinian Authority's campaign for statehood in the United Nations, which will prompt an Obama administration veto in the Security Council. But whatever the Turks, Egyptians or Americans do, whatever symbolic satisfaction the Palestinian Authority may get at the U.N., there's always the Occupation and there -- take it from someone just back from a summer living in the West Bank -- Israel isn't losing. It's winning the battle, at least the one that means the most to Palestinians and Israelis, the one for control over every square foot of ground. Inch by inch, meter by meter, Israel's expansion project in the West Bank and Jerusalem is, in fact, gaining momentum, ensuring that the "nation" that the U.N. might grant membership will be each day a little smaller, a little less viable, a little less there. How to Disappear a Land On my many drives from West Bank city to West Bank city, from Ramallah to Jenin, Abu Dis to Jericho, Bethlehem to Hebron, I'd play a little game: Could I travel for an entire minute without seeing physical evidence of the occupation? Occasionally -- say, when riding through a narrow passage between hills -- it was possible. But not often. Nearly every panoramic vista, every turn in the highway revealed a Jewish settlement, an Israeli army checkpoint, a military watchtower, a looming concrete wall, a barbed-wire fence with signs announcing another restricted area, or a cluster of army jeeps stopping cars and inspecting young men for their documents. The ill-fated Oslo "peace process" that emerged from the Oslo Accords of 1993 not only failed to prevent such expansion, it effectively sanctioned it. Since then, the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank has nearly tripled to more than 300,000 -- and that figure doesn't include the more than 200,000 Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem. The Oslo Accords, ratified by both the Palestinians and the Israelis, divided the West Bank into three zones -- A, B, and C. At the time, they were imagined by the Palestinian Authority as a temporary way station on the road to an independent state. They are, however, still in effect today. The de facto Israeli strategy has been and remains to give Palestinians relative freedom in Area A, around the West Bank's cities, while locking down "Area C" -- 60 percent of the West Bank -- for the use of the Jewish settlements and for what are called "restricted military areas." (Area B is essentially a kind of grey zone between the other two.) From this strategy come the thousands of demolitions of "illegal" housing and the regular arrests of villagers who simply try to build improvements to their homes. Restrictions are strictly enforced and violations dealt with harshly. When I visited the South Hebron Hills in late 2009, for example, villagers were not even allowed to smooth out a virtually impassable dirt road so that their children wouldn't have to walk two to three miles to school every day. Na'im al-Adarah, from the village of At-Tuwani, paid the price for transporting those kids to the school "illegally." A few weeks after my visit, he was arrested and his red Toyota pickup seized and destroyed by Israeli soldiers. He didn't bother complaining to the Palestinian Authority -- the same people now going to the U.N. to declare a Palestinian state -- because they have no control over what happens in Area C. The only time he'd seen a Palestinian official, al-Adarah told me, was when he and other villagers drove to Ramallah to bring one to the area. (The man from the Palestinian Authority refused to come on his own.) "He said this is the first time he knew that this land [in Area C] is ours. A minister like him is surprised that we have these areas? I told him, 'How can a minister like you not know this? You're the minister of local government!' "It was like he didn't know what was happening in his own country," added al-Adarah. "We're forgotten, unfortunately." The Israeli strategy of control also explains, strategically speaking, the "need" for the network of checkpoints; the looming separation barrier (known to Israelis as the "security fence" and to Palestinians as the "apartheid wall") that divides Israel from the West Bank (and sometimes West Bankers from each other); the repeated evictions of Palestinians from residential areas like Sheikh Jarrah in East Jerusalem; the systematic revoking of Jerusalem IDs once held by thousands of Palestinians who were born in the Holy City; and the labyrinthine travel restrictions which keep so many Palestinians locked in their West Bank enclaves. While Israel justifies most of these measures in terms of national security, it's clear enough that the larger goal behind them is to incrementally take and hold ever more of the land. The separation barrier, for example, has put 10 percent of the West Bank's land on the Israeli side -- a case of "annexation in the guise of security," according to the respected Israeli human rights group, B'tselem. Taken together, these measures amount to the solution that the Israeli government seeks, one revealed in a series of maps drawn up by Israeli politicians, cartographers, and military men over recent years that show Palestine broken into isolated islands (often compared to South African apartheid-era "bantustans") on only about 40 percent of the West Bank. At the outset of Oslo, Palestinians believed they had made a historic compromise, agreeing to a state on 22% of historic Palestine -- that is, the West Bank and Gaza. The reality now is a kind of "ten percent solution," a rump statelet without sovereignty, freedom of movement, or control of its own land, air, or water. Palestinians cannot even drill a well to tap into the vast aquifer beneath their feet. Living Amid Checkpoints, Roadblocks, and Night Raids Almost always overlooked in assessments of this ruinous "no-state solution" is the human toll it takes on the occupied. More than on any of my dozen previous journeys there, I came away from this trip to Palestine with a sense of the psychic damage the military occupation has inflicted on every Palestinian. None, no matter how warm-hearted or resilient, escape its effects. "The soldier pointed to my violin case. He said, 'What's that?'" 13-year-old Alá Shelaldeh, who lives in old Ramallah, told me. She is a student at Al Kamandjati (Arabic for "the violinist"), a music school in her neighborhood (which will be a focus of my next book). She was recalling a time three years earlier when a van she was in, full of young musicians, was stopped at an Israeli checkpoint near Nablus. They were coming back from a concert. "I told him, 'It's a violin.' He told me to get out of the van and show him." Alá stepped onto the roadside, unzipped her case, and displayed the instrument for the soldier. "Play something," he insisted. Alá played "Hilwadeen" (Beautiful Girl), the song made famous by the Lebanese star Fayrouz. It was a typical moment in Palestine, and one she has yet to, and may never, forget. It is impossible, of course, to calculate the long-term emotional damage of such encounters on children and adults alike, including on the Israeli soldiers, who are not immune to their own actions. Humiliation at checkpoints is a basic fact of West Bank Palestinian life. Everyone, even children, has his or her story to tell of helplessness, fear, and rage while waiting for a teenaged soldier to decide whether or not they can pass. It has become so normal that some kids have no idea the rest of the world doesn't live like this. "I thought the whole world was like us -- they are occupied, they have soldiers," remembered Alá's older brother, Shehade, now 20. At 15, he was invited to Italy. "It was a shock for me to see this life. You can go very, very far, and no checkpoint. You see the land very, very far, and no wall. I was so happy, and at the same time sad, you know? Because we don't have this freedom in my country." At age 12, Shehade had seen his cousin shot dead by soldiers during the second intifada, which erupted in late 2001 after Israel's then-opposition leader Ariel Sharon paid a provocative visit to holy sites in the Old City of Jerusalem. Clashes erupted as youths hurled stones at soldiers. Israeli troops responded with live fire, killing some 250 Palestinians (compared to 29 Israeli deaths) in the first two months of the intifada. The next year, Palestinian factions launched waves of suicide bombings in Israel. One day in 2002, Shehade recalled, with Ramallah again fully occupied by the Israeli army, the young cousins broke a military curfew in order to buy bread. A shot rang out near a corner market; Shehade watched his cousin fall. This summer Shehada showed me the gruesome pictures -- blood flowing from a 12-year-old's mouth and ears -- taken moments after the shooting in 2002. Nine years later, Ramallah, a supposedly sovereign enclave, is often considered an oasis in a desert of occupation. Its streets and markets are choked with shoppers, and its many trendy restaurants rival fine European eateries. The vibrancy and upscale feel of many parts of the city give you a sense that -- much as Palestinians are loathe to admit it – this, and not East Jerusalem, is the emerging Palestinian capital. Many Ramallah streets are indeed lined with government ministries and foreign consulates. (Just don't call them embassies!) But much of this apparent freedom and quasi-sovereignty is illusory. In the West Bank, travel without hard-to-get permits is often limited to narrow corridors of land, like the one between Ramallah and Nablus, where the Israeli military has, for now, abandoned its checkpoints and roadblocks. Even in Ramallah -- part of the theoretically sovereign Area A -- night incursions by Israeli soldiers are common. "It was December 2009, the 16th I think, at 2:15, 2:30 in the morning," recalled Celine Dagher, a French citizen of Lebanese descent. Her Palestinian husband, Ramzi Aburedwan, founder of Al Kamandjati, where both of them work, was then abroad. "I was awakened by a sound," she told me. She emerged to find the front door of their flat jammed partway open and kept that way by a small security bar of the sort you find in hotel rooms. Celine thought burglars were trying to break in and so yelled at them in Arabic to go away. Then she peered through the six-inch opening and spotted 10 Israeli soldiers in the hallway. They told her to stand back, and within seconds had blown the door off its hinges. Entering the apartment, they pointed their automatic rifles at her. A Palestinian informant stood near them silently, a black woolen mask pulled over his face to ensure his anonymity. The commander began to interrogate her. "My name, with whom I live, starting to ask me about the neighbors." Celine flashed her French passport and pleaded with them not to wake up her six-month-old, Hussein, sleeping in the next room. "I was praying that he would just stay asleep." She told the commander, "I just go from my house to my work, from work to my house." She didn't really know her neighbors, she said. As it happened, the soldiers had blown off the door of the wrong flat. They would remove four more doors in the building that night, Celine recalled, before finding their suspect: her 17-year-old next door neighbor. "They stood questioning him for maybe 20 minutes, and then they took him. And I think he's still in jail. His father is already in jail." According to Israeli Prison Services statistics cited by B'tselem, more than 5,300 Palestinians were in Israeli prisons in July 2011. Since the beginning of the occupation in 1967, an estimated 650,000 to 700,000 Palestinians have reportedly been jailed by Israel. By one calculation, that represents 40 percent of the adult-male Palestinian population. Almost no family has been untouched by the Israeli prison system. Celine stared through the blinds at the street below, where some 15 jeeps and other military vehicles were parked. Finally, they left with their lights out and so quietly that she couldn't even hear their engines. When the flat was silent again, she couldn't sleep. "I was very afraid." A neighbor came upstairs to sit with her until the morning. Stories like these -- and they are legion -- accumulate, creating the outlines of what could be called a culture of occupation. They give context to a remark by Saleh Abdel-Jawad, dean of the law school at Birzeit University near Ramallah: "I don't remember a happy day since 1967," he told me. Stunned, I asked him why specifically that was so. "Because," he replied, "you can't go to Jerusalem to pray. And it's only 15 kilometers away. And you have your memories there." He added, "Since 17 years I was unable to go to the sea. We are not allowed to go. And my daughter married five years ago and we were unable to do a marriage ceremony for her." Israel would not grant a visa to Saleh's Egyptian son-in-law so that he could enter the West Bank. "How to do a marriage without the groom?" A Musical Intifada An old schoolmate of mine and now a Middle East scholar living in Paris points out that Palestinians are not just victims, but actors in their own narrative. In other words, he insists, they, too, bear responsibility for their circumstances -- not all of this rests on the shoulders of the occupiers. True enough. As an apt example, consider the morally and strategically bankrupt tactic of suicide bombings, carried out from 2001 to 2004 by several Palestinian factions as a response to Israeli attacks during the second intifada. That disastrous strategy gave cover to all manner of Israeli retaliation, including the building of the separation barrier. (The near disappearance of the suicide attacks has been due far less to the wall -- after all, it isn't even finished yet -- than to a decision on the part of all the Palestinian factions to reject the tactic itself.) So, yes, Palestinians are also "actors" in creating their own circumstances, but Israel remains the sole regional nuclear power, the state with one of the strongest armies in the world, and the occupying force -- and that is the determining fact in the West Bank. Today, for some Palestinians living under the 44-year occupation simply remaining on the land is a kind of moral victory. This summer, I started hearing a new slogan: "Existence is resistance." If you remain on the land, then the game isn't over. And if you can bring attention to the occupation, while you remain in place, so much the better. In June, Alá Shelaldeh, the 13-year-old violinist, brought her instrument to the wall at Qalandia, once a mere checkpoint separating Ramallah and Jerusalem, and now essentially an international border crossing with its mass of concrete, steel bars, and gun turrets. The transformation of Qalandia -- and its long, cage-like corridors and multiple seven-foot-high turnstiles through which only the lucky few with permits may cross to Jerusalem -- is perhaps the most powerful symbol of Israel's determination not to share the Holy City. Alá and her fellow musicians in the Al Kamandjati Youth Orchestra came to play Mozart and Bizet in front of the Israeli soldiers, on the other side of Qalandia's steel bars. Their purpose was to confront the occupation through music, essentially to assert: we're here. The children and their teachers emerged from their bus, quickly set up their music stands, and began to play. Within moments, the sound of Mozart's Symphony No. 6 in F Major filled the terminal. Palestinians stopped and stared. Smiles broke out. People came closer, pulling out cell phones and snapping photos, or just stood there, surrounding the youth orchestra, transfixed by this musical intifada. The musicians and soldiers were separated by a long row of blue horizontal bars. As the music played on, a grim barrier of confinement was momentarily transformed into a space of assertive joy. "It was," Alá would say later, "the greatest concert of my life." As the Mozart symphony built -- Allegro, Andante, Minuet and the Allegro last movement -- some of the soldiers started to take notice. By the time the orchestra launched into Georges Bizet's Dance Boheme from Carmen #2, several soldiers appeared, looking out through the bars. For the briefest of moments, it was hard to tell who was on the inside, looking out, and who was on the outside, looking in. If existence is resistance, if children can confront their occupiers with a musical intifada, then there's still space, in the year of the Arab Spring, for something unexpected and transformative to happen. After all, South African apartheid collapsed, and without a bloody revolution. The Berlin Wall fell quickly, completely, unexpectedly. And with China, India, Turkey and Brazil on the rise, the United States, its power waning, will not be able to remain Israel's protector forever. Eventually, perhaps, the world will assert the obvious: the status quo is unacceptable. For the moment, whatever happens in the coming weeks at the U.N., and in the West Bank in the aftermath, isn't it time for the world's focus to shift to what is actually happening on the ground? After all, it's the occupation, stupid.
Posted it before I could highlights the areas I found most interesting. http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2011/09/22/palestine_israel_occupation
You say this after a video is posted of Abbas saying 'We don't recognize a Jewish state'...............
The PA has rejected anything that isn't the 1967 borders. Israel always tries to keep most of it's settlement blocs, which are a no-go for Palestinians. Olmert probably got further than anyone - at one point the PA had pretty much even gave up on Jerusalem, but even that deal required the Israel adjust a border that included some settlements that were way inside of the West Bank, which carved out a border that would be nearly impossible to maintain. Bibi has a thing about making the PA recognize Israel as a "Jewish state" as a pre-condition. That's been explained pretty well. The PA recognized Israel and cooperates with them in matters of security as part of the Oslo agreement. It's not the same as Hamas refusing to recognize Israel as a state or to agree to any kind of lasting peace. Hamas don't recognize the PA as an authority either, and part of the tough job Abbas has is in trying to keep them in a fragile coalition to make the bid for statehood. You can read about it here: http://972mag.com/notes-from-un-say-were-jewish-say-it-say-it-and-well-stop/23810/ I've heard all these arguments before and used to believe them, but most of them are hasbara. The Likud have never supported giving the land back and continue to build and make excuses about why they can't until it simply won't be possible to create a state at all. That's all by design. Bibi was always against making peace, and always against Oslo from the beginning and has done nothing to support it , other than to say what he thinks he can get away with to avoid making the US too irritated. But he does what he does because he knows the US won't ever enforce what it says. As things stand, more than half a million Israelis live in a land that is still under military occupation. Most of them weren't there during the Rabin administration and the Oslo negotiations. Settlement construction is accelerating at breakneck speed and the people who live there do so at taxpayer expense to subsidize them and with unpaid conscripted soldiers to protect them. [Edit: The number is over 300,000 settlers, and was around 100,000 before Oslo. My numbers were off, but the point is the same]. This stands in contrast to territory such as the Golan Heights, for which a valid argument can be made for security considerations. At least there, the area has officially been annexed and the people have full voting rights as citizens. And there, it can be argued that Syria is hardly a partner in peace that the Palestinians are. Both sides are unwilling to budge and the situation remains a stalemate, but again, even most Israelis have a positive opinion about Abbas and the PA leadership and support the bid to statehood. The occupation is very expensive for Israel and they receive little benefit from it...unless they live there.
He's stated numerous times about the willingness to recognize Israel's right to exist, he just won't recognize a "Jewish" state. The reasons for this are quite obvious....
http://972mag.com/notes-from-un-say-were-jewish-say-it-say-it-and-well-stop/23810/ Friday, September 23 2011|Roee Ruttenberg Notes from UN: Say we’re Jewish! Say it! Say it and we’ll stop! Abbas and Netanyahu are speaking about the same thing, but refusing to understand one another’s narrative When I sat down and interviewed the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in Amman, Jordan earlier this year, one of the questions I asked him was if he would ever consider recognizing Israel as a Jewish State. He answered in two parts. First, he argued that such considerations go beyond the four principles agreed upon in Oslo, and he accused Netanyahu of adding more qualifications for negotiations. Second, he said that the Palestinians already recognized the State of Israel in Oslo, and that if that State wants to refer to itself as the Jewish State or the Hebrew State of the Zionist State, it was none of his business. He said Israel was free to go to the United Nations and change its name, without Abbas’ approval. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas interviewed by Roee Ruttenberg for CCTV (photo: CCTV) It’s true, for example, that Tehran did not wait for approval from anyone before it officially became the Islamic Republic of Iran. It simply did so. Yet on Friday afternoon in New York, speaking before world leaders gathered at the UN General Assembly, Netanyahu again stressed the need for the Palestinians to recognize Israel’s Jewish character. It was so important to Netanyahu that he made reference to it on a number of occasions. Abbas remains unmoved. Here’s why? For one, he fears that recognizing Israel’s Jewish character is essentially selling out the Palestinians living in Israel (i.e. Israeli-Arabs or Palestinian-Israelis, or however you wish to describe the Arabs living inside Israel-proper and holding Israeli citizenship.) He is also afraid of alienating those Palestinians living outside of Israel (whose families fled what is now present-day Israel) who still have deeds and keys from their former residences handing on their walls. Remember, Abbas is not just the President of the Palestinian Authority (the body that governs the West Bank and, technically though not practically, the Gaza Strip). Arguably more importantly, as head of Fatah, he is also the chairman of the Palestine Liberation Organization. (And indeed, he spoke at the UN wearing the latter hat, not the former.) Netanyahu should realize that he is asking for the impossible from Abbas. Perhaps, some have argued, he does realize it, which is why he keeps asking. Netanyahu and Sharansky, February 2010 (photo: Jewish Agency/flickr cc) But ultimately, Abbas also fails to understand why such a validation of the State’s Jewish character is so important to the Israelis. Israel has a uniquely Jewish character not found anywhere else in the world, and the significance of that uniqueness should not be overlooked. It is not just the kosher food, the limited public transport on Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath), and the Hebrew spoken in the street. For amid all the domestic tensions at home , many feel Israel’s Jewish institutions are eroding, its Jewishness essentially fizzling out. (This fear is further strengthened by campaigns against intermarriage both in Israel and in the Jewish Diaspora.) So reaffirmations like the one asked of Abbas, which are sold as costing Israel nothing, can help calm the nerves of soothsayers predicting the demise of the country’s Jewish character. I arrived back in Tel Aviv just hours before the two leaders spoke at the UN podium. Boarding the El Al flight in Madrid, I noticed the big blue Star of David emblazed on the plane. It was clearly advertising itself not just as the national carrier of a state, but as the national carrier of a Jewish State. And it bears the burden – both financially and in terms of security – for doing so. First, the ground crew (the guys loading the planes) appeared to be imported Israelis. That’s a lot of added costs that a non-Jewish identified airline does not have. The flight’s departure was delayed, so naturally so too was its arrival. There was a concern onboard that the flight would arrive after the start of Shabbat (the Jewish Sabbath), religiously timed to coincide on Friday with sundown. I asked an attendant, were the flight to arrive late, what would happen. I was told that in the past when it did occur, religious Jews who were thus unable to get home stayed at the airport and were welcomed (with Shabbat meals) by members of the airport-adjacent Orthodox village, Kfar Chabad. If this doesn’t define a country’s unique Jewish character, I’m not sure what does. El Al wingtip at airport (photo: seraphya/flickr cc) Actually, that’s not true – I know what does. We finally landed and everyone rushed off the plane into the airport terminal and towards the baggage claim. Approaching immigration, I noticed a massive sign that read in English and in Hebrew, “Happy New Year” and “Shana Tova.” Beneath the sign to the right was posted a large mezuzah (an affixed encasing with an inscribed parchment inside). I am not sure what other country in the world would welcome its people in that way, in that uniquely Jewish way. Ben Gurion airport "Shana Tova" greeting (photo: Roee Ruttenberg) That feeling of being “home”, of being part of a nation like other nations but Jewish in nature, of having a leader on the stage with other world leaders but Jewish in his dedication to his people and loyalties to their culture, is not something that should easily be given up. And perhaps upon his return, walking through the “Shana tova” archway, Netanyahu will realize it’s something no one else can take from him, give to him, or validate for him.
Read the link Dei posted above, it states some of the reasons there, I have some others I can think of as well, but I think the article covers enough to explain the stance. It's really just childish bickering.... kind of shows us why there will never be peace through negotiations (with the current parties involved), taking the "short-cut" to peace just makes too much sense.
My numbers were off... 84% of Israelis support the statehood bid, not 70%. And the settler population went from 100k to 300k since Oslo, not 500k.
