You don’t need to be coy, Roy
Just get yourself free
Paul Simon, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover
The Initiative for Inclusive Security (formerly known as Women Waging Peace) – working with Equality Now – co-sponsored with the Woodrow Wilson Center the event, Israeli-Palestinian Dialogue Led By Women (video). The forum promised “fresh ideas” and “new perspectives”!
“But the attempt to transform the Hamas reminds us of falling in love with a man who has lots of faults and really believing that you’re going to change him. And we know the result of that kind of thinking. It is also, by the way, extraordinarily patronising.” – Naomi Chazan [17:04]
This remark offends me not only on an individual level but as someone who is suddenly a gender with a peculiar peace gene encoded into my DNA that is presumptuously represented by this panel. Chazan obviously holds a blinkered view of what it is to be “extraordinarily patronising.”
I continue to be stunned whenever allegedly peace-seeking Israelis brandish an attitude that no matter what crimes their state has committed against the Palestinians the acts have not and do not diminish them as a people, or when all else fails, flash the Holocaust card with its infinite line of credit rather than address the inhumanity and injustices of their actions. Only under the influence of perpetual victimhood could someone like Chazan believe that Israel, an exceedingly cruel and contemptible occupier, is really a scorned lover, the misunderstood patriarch of an ungrateful, unruly brood, the “victim” of an arranged marriage with lesser beings, and that it has an inalienable right to be loved by the Palestinians.
Consider Israeli love affairs with macho leaders who order extrajudicial assassinations and bombing campaigns on civilian populations to compel interest in elections that welcome fire-breathing racists into its folds. Chazan brings new meaning to extraordinarily ludicrous.
Palestine is long overdue a divorce. Israel, the stalker, will never allow it. Just as an abused spouse never gets anything right, neither will Palestinians ever perform perfectly.
Chazan’s unintelligible blathering continues, promoting Abu Mazen as the only true partner for peace, pretending that the road map is a commitment from which the State Department and the Quartet have not wavered. When someone in the audience asked if women from Hamas would be welcomed on the panel she said only if they are leaders!
I have a suggestion for Ms. Chazan, a woman stuck on Fantasy Island with a busted paddle and no boat.
Just drop off the key, Lee
And get yourself free