Saudi Arabian King Abdullah warned on Monday that a 2002 Arab initiative offering peace with Israel would not remain on the table forever.
Israel must understand that the choice between war and peace would not always stay open, Abdullah told delegates in Kuwait City at a summit focused on boosting economic growth and development in the Arab world.
And now Israel wants to control the reconstruction in Gaza, after spending billions destroying the vast majority of its infrastructure.
How to respond to such Orwellian realities?
I agree with Ali Abunimah, founder of Electronic Intifada, who explains why “Israel won’t survive“:
If there was ever a moment when the peoples of the region would accept Israel as a Zionist state in their midst, that has passed forever.
But anyone surveying the catastrophe in Gaza — the mass destruction, the death toll of more than 100 Palestinians for every Israeli, the thousands of sadistic injuries — would surely conclude that Palestinians could never overcome Israel and resistance is a delusion at best.
True, in terms of ability to murder and destroy, Israel is unmatched. But Israel’s problem is not, as its propaganda insists, “terrorism” to be defeated by sufficient application of high explosives. Its problem is legitimacy, or rather a profound and irreversible lack of it. Israel simply cannot bomb its way to legitimacy.
Israel was founded as a “Jewish state” through the ethnic cleansing of Palestine’s non-Jewish majority Arab population. It has been maintained in existence only through Western support and constant use of violence to prevent the surviving indigenous population from exercising political rights within the country, or returning from forced exile.