2-25-2014 Israel-Palestine Peace:A Hostage to History - GERSHOM GORENBERG The American Prospect

http://prospect.org/article/israel-palestine-peace-hostage-history 

One of Benjamin Netanyahu's best known preconditions for a two-state peace accord is that the Palestinians recognize Israel as a Jewish nation-state. That's actually the short version of the Israeli prime minister's demand, it turns out. The long version, as he laid out last week before the most amenable audience he could find, is that the Palestinians must sign off on the entire Jewish narrative of the history of the land between the Mediterranean and the Jordan….

 

The easiest guess about Netanyahu's motivation is that he has raised the demand precisely to foil an agreement. Perhaps. …  Overtly, though, he has made hopes for the future hostage to history.

A workable peace accord must be written so as to avoid direct denial of either side's narrative. But it cannot be conditioned on an agreed-upon account of the past….

 

Posted by Judith Ferster, AIME member

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