Obviously, the United States and Israel do not recognise Palestine or renounce violence. Nor do they accept past agreements. While Israel formally accepted the Road Map, it attached 14 reservations that eviscerate it. To take just the first, Israel demanded that for the process to commence and continue, the Palestinians must ensure full quiet, education for peace, cessation of incitement, dismantling of Hamas and other organisations, and other conditions; and even if they were to satisfy this virtually impossible demand, the Israeli cabinet proclaimed that ‘the Roadmap will not state that Israel must cease violence and incitement against the Palestinians.’
Israel’s rejection of the Road Map, with US support, is unacceptable to the Western self-image, so it has been suppressed. The facts finally broke into the mainstream with Jimmy Carter’s book, ‘Palestine: Peace not Apartheid,’ which elicited a torrent of abuse and desperate efforts to discredit it.
prof chomsky is generally on the side of the angels, but doesn’t have nearly the impact his knowledge and analysis deserves, due to a tendency to lapse into dense academic style. many of his single pages would power a whole michael moore doco. too bad, but fortunately we do have a michael moore as well.
those who approach modern history with an open mind should include him as a central figure in the ‘case against us imperialism’. you may have restrict your reading to one page per day, out of exhaustion, but sooner or later you’ll know a lot.
In this case Prof Chomsky is also talking crap.
Israel expressed fourteen reservations prior to accepting the Road Map. It did not make demands as Chomsky claims. A reservation is not a demand; surely a professor of linguistics would understand that?
The requirements about quiet, education for peace, dismantling of armed terrorist groups were the product of the quartet’s road map - not Israel’s and what’s more all of these things were accepted without reservations and with much fanfare by the Palestine Authority and then they were repudiated by Arafat before the ink on the agreement was dry.
What’s wrong by the way with a road map for peace that requires education for peace?