polemic I

"Anyone who believes that the road map offers anything resembling a settlement, or that it tackles the basic issues, is wrong."

a road map to where? edward said

"Another chilling omission from the road map is the gigantic 'separation wall' now being built in the West Bank by Israel: 347 kilometres of concrete running north to south, of which 120 have already been erected. It is eight metres high and two metres thick; its cost is put at $1.6 million per kilometre. The wall does not simply divide Israel from a putative Palestinian state on the basis of the 1967 borders: it actually takes in new tracts of Palestinian land, sometimes five or six kilometres at a stretch. It is surrounded by trenches, electric wire and moats; there are watchtowers at regular intervals. Almost a decade after the end of South African apartheid, this ghastly racist wall is going up with scarcely a peep from the majority of Israelis, or from their American allies who, whether they like it or not, are going to pay for most of it."

pretty entertaining

"Is this anti-Semitism? Or is it a profound ignorance about European history? Gaza is bad, but in two days in September 1941 at Babi Yar near Kiev, 34,000 Jews were shot by the Einsatzgruppen. The problem is that, for Palestinians, this is the ace of trumps in the suffering stakes."