i'd like to add the similarities of apartheid israel and the 'unoccupied north american continent (the indigenous first inhabitants know as turtle island).

for most jews israel was an unoccupied land, and jews were meant to 'make the desert bloom', much as on turtle island the europeans were ordained by god and the king to 'tame the wilderness and eradicate the godless savage indians who god had told them were in the way of western expansionism'.

we had that discussion to greater and lesser effect, on my recent post: 'Let Them Eat Cake: a Journey into Edward Said’s Humanism', based on an essay by Ted Steinberg published on September 6, 2019 at counterpunch.

a few excerpts:

We had learned in Hebrew school that Israel was a land without people for a people without land. Perfect, I thought. People gave me bar mitzvah gifts including certificates for trees planted there in my honor. A land without people suggested barrenness to me. Trees seemed like a sensible idea.

In 1976 I visited Israel and was escorted around by a fellow named Alex who understandably enough called me by my Hebrew name. We visited a number of the places marked off with hatching on the cake including Hebron, located in the West Bank, and the Golan Heights.

When we arrived in the Golan Heights I stepped out of the car and threw up, though I was not making any kind of political statement. Alex had a heavy foot. I saw trees on our journey but none planted in my name as we sped toward a kibbutz named Kfar Giladi located near the border with Lebanon. The next day we drove south to Jerusalem through what Alex called a “liberated area.” I am sure I had no idea what that meant. I only wanted to get to Jerusalem without throwing up again.

I learned that when the Zionists arrived they found an empty land, a wasteland in desperate need of improvement. And improvement is precisely what the industrious Jews did, making the desert bloom. Everywhere we went, Alex told the same story: Before the Jews came, there was nothing here. Now look at it. A beautiful, domesticated landscape humming along to the tune of modern life.

In college I figured out that there were these people. Call them the Palestinians. Golda Meir, the prime minister at the time of my bar mitzvah, famously said that as for the Palestinian people, “they did not exist.” No one ever spoke about Palestinians in temple or on the trip to Israel. It was always Arabs that I heard about, never Palestinian Arabs.
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A few years later, I ran across “Blaming the Victims: Spurious Scholarship and the Palestinian Question” (1988). One of the co-editors was someone named Edward Said.

Born in West Jerusalem in 1935, Said had left Palestine for Cairo in 1947. Four years later, he moved to the United States, where his parents had connections. (Said’s father studied at Case Western Reserve University, where I currently teach.) A transgressive child who took his share of beatings, Said attended a boarding school in the Connecticut River Valley, a natural environment that—given his upbringing in a desert—only seemed to add to his sense of alienation (“snow signified a kind of death,” he would later write). Moving on to study at Princeton and Harvard and then joining the Columbia University faculty in English and Comparative Literature in 1963, Said, who met Chomsky during the height of the protests over Vietnam, emerged as one of the most prominent dissident intellectuals of the twentieth century.

An immensely learned man who saw the intellectual as humanity’s best defense against an “ahistorical, forgetting world,” Said took a hard left turn after the Six-Day War. He recalled finding Martin Luther King’s warmth toward Israel’s triumph in the battle vexing, presumably because it was based on the assumption that the Palestinians simply did not exist. As Said wrote in 1968, “Palestine is imagined as an empty desert waiting to burst into bloom, its inhabitants inconsequential nomads possessing no stable claim to the land and therefore no cultural permanence.” For this and similar attempts to overturn establishment views, Said was vilified as an anti-Semite and a “professor of terror.”

Said was living proof that my Hebrew school education wasn’t an education at all. A land without people? Empty? Palestinians don’t exist? Israel’s public relations onslaught, designed to overturn the fact that the founding of the country entailed the dispossession of the indigenous peoples, worked brilliantly.

yoy get the gist, but it's a brilliant piece of time-travel epiphanies over his life and said's in aid of demonstrating what minds are able to believe in the face of contradictory evidence, as in: ignore it all, and keep the faith, as with the creation of a jewish homeland in 1948.

we see it every day in every 'true believer' cavalier recklessness and amorality, don't we?
is there any hope at all that if the arab joint list is part of the eventual governing coalition that conditions might change for the palestinians? perhaps not, as many were killed and wounded last week in the right to return marches, but perhaps. and yes, globally, but especially on turtle island and the historical palestinian homeland: so many stolen lands. (thanks, bruce; you're one hella humanist.)

[video:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fx9fiP-iM1I&list=RDfx9fiP-iM1I&start_rad...

and gets confusing as hell esp. vis a vis Rivlin:

'Joint List endorses Gantz without Balad, giving Netanyahu majority
Blue and White decides to forego first shot to form government
By Gil Hoffman, Lahav Harkov, jerusalem post, September 22, 2019

President Reuven Rivlin began his consultations toward forming a new government on Sunday, amid a historic move by most of the Joint List to recommend a candidate for prime minister and a controversial decision by Blue and White to not seek the first chance at building a coalition.

Blue and White had decided on Thursday that the party preferred to get the mandate from Rivlin first, but politicians and strategists in the party changed their minds after realizing that neither Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, nor Blue and White leader Benny Gantz would succeed in forming a government if given the first shot. Hints from Attorney-General Avichai Mandelblit’s office that the pace of Netanyahu’s criminal cases would be picked up also influenced the decision.

Rivlin told representatives of Likud and Blue and White that he would demand the formation of a unity government of both parties, but he did not indicate which party would go first. The earliest he could present his mandate is Wednesday evening, after the results of the September 17 election become official.

It became clear following the first day of consultations that barring a change in the final results of the race, Netanyahu would have the recommendation of 55 MKs from Likud, Shas, United Torah Judaism and Yamina. Gantz’s 54 recommendations are from Blue and White, Labor-Gesher, the Democratic Union and most of the Joint List.
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When asked by Rivlin if their decision to recommend Gantz is conditional on demands, Odeh said all 13 Joint List MKs were obligated by it and that “We are recommending him, period.”

Joint List faction head Ahmad Tibi told Rivlin that Gantz is “not our cup of tea,” adding about Netanyahu that “our voters wanted this historic moment after a leader systematically incited against us as if we are an enemy.” Speaking in English, Tibi said the decision was also for diplomatic reasons.

“Our choice is a slap in the face to [US President Donald] Trump and his ultimate deal,” Tibi said. “Mr. Trump, keep your deal. The Palestinians deserve a state of their own. Do you understand this?”
.............................
Rivlin told Blue and White MKs that the people of Israel were “disgusted” by prospects of a third election. When the Blue and White MKs said they want a unity government but have been ruling out Netanyahu because of his pending criminal charges, Rivlin reminded them that Netanyahu has not been indicted.

“The people of Israel want a government that will be stable,” Rivlin said. “A stable government cannot be a government without both of the two largest parties.”

holy hell, rivlin's power is terrifyingly epic!

i tried to get into haaretz to see if the coverage were the same, but it's behind a paywall for me again, and on all browsers.

on edit: odeh and tibi must have seen the leaked text of the I/P 'deal of the century' in may, and would have loved 'New Palestine'.

government in which (arrrg) bibi and gantz rotate as PMs, although he doesn't specify the duration of each one's rule.

avigdor liberman doesn't want anything to do with the joint block arabs, of course, but lots of sleight-of-hand moves are in play.

two headlines this a.m., the first an op-ed were intriguing though, second one 'news' of a sort:

Mark Lavie
'Let Arab parties into the ruling coalition'; One day we’ll look back on the old days when Arab parties were automatically excluded from government and wonder why

'PA security said to disrupt Islamic Jihad effort to build rockets in West Bank'
By TOI staff

Ramallah officials say they uncovered Iran-backed terror group’s attempts to expand southern rocket fire to central Israel

no explanation given for what this meant, but it used to be that arabs and palestinians, while 20% of israel's population, had to 'meet a threshold of 3.4%...now it's 2% (of some threshold or other).

sounds a bit like the democrats and debate thresholds for gabbard, but maybe not. but like USian democracy, another catch-22.

but this stuff's gonna drag on for a couple months, although gantz and bib have agreed to meet with the powerful rivlin this evening.