VOA Report Is A Bit Misleading

VOA broadcast a story recently:

Obama Endorses Two-State Solution for Arab-Israeli Conflict

...President Barack Obama sent his Middle East envoy to the region to kick-start a process to end the decades-long Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The effort will focus on the so-called "two-state solution," which would establish a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip coexisting peacefully alongside the Jewish state.

...Obama sent his special envoy, former Senator George Mitchell, to the region...Mitchell said reaching a peace agreement will be tough.

...Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank constitute one of the toughest problems on the way to peace.

Some 200 thousand [actually much more. FMEP has 282,000 at end of 2007 (excluding Jerusalem I guess); the PCB counted 483,453 at end of 2007, including Jerusalem; & Peace Now claims 285,000 at end of 2008, again w/o Jerusalem and East Jerusalem Jews numbered 184,057 at the end of 2005 which means almost 200,000 at the growth rate FMEP recorded which means over one-half million Jews the Arabs consider "settlers"] Jewish settlers(*) live there. Most would have to be relocated in Israel proper, under the usual view of the two-state solution.

..."I think that rather than build peace exclusively from the top down with political agreements, we have to add to the political process building peace from the bottom up by making the lives of our Palestinian neighbors a lot better so they have a stake in peace," Netanyahu said.

James Zogby is president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. He says Obama must be tough with Israel on West Bank settlement and the continuing occupation if a solution is to be found. "Certainly, they [the Israelis] are not going to move unless they are moved, and they are not going to be moved unless the U.S. president says, 'This must end,'" Zogby said.

On the Palestinian side, there are also problems. Palestinians are divided between Fatah, the moderate faction running the West Bank, and Hamas, the militant group that rules in Gaza and refuses to renounce violence. Israel and the United States refuse to engage with Hamas.

Ali Abu Minnah is a Palestinian author living in Chicago. He advocates a one-state solution, in other words, a bi-national state. "The two-state solution is neither available nor stable nor just, and this is why we have opened the discussion," he said.

William Quandt worked in the Carter administration in the 1970s and was involved in negotiations that led to the Egyptian-Israeli Peace Treaty of 1979. He says the two-state solution is the only hope. "I think the two-state solution comes back into focus for us because there is no good alternative in terms of a negotiated solution," the University of Virginia professor said.

Zogby says Arab states should help with reconstruction in the Gaza Strip and with Palestinian nation building, and also offer Israel incentives for peace...

So, we had a non-interviewed quotation from Netanyahu and Obama and Mitchell and then Zogby, Abu Minnah and Quandt.

Another balanced media background report.

That the reporter's name is Mohamed Elshinnawi has nothing to do with this.

----------

(*)

Another reason not to use the word "settlers":

The Settlers (also known as Serf City, original German title Die Siedler) is a slow-paced Real Time Strategy computer game by German developer Blue Byte Software, first released in 1993 for Commodore Amiga and in 1994 for the PC. It was the first game of its type, blending together principles which had not been seen in a single game before, and defined the line of the later Settlers games. On the hardware available at the time, the game could control a maximum of 64,000 individuals, all behaving autonomously.

That's why I prefer "revenants".