American Exceptionalism as magical thinking
JVL Introduction
State Department spokesman Ned Price was asked why Joe Biden’s government is opposed to the ICC investigating Israel.
His answer sounded, says Beinart, “like a Soviet commissar delivering statistics on the wheat harvest.”
Why are people like Price and Biden so unable to answer the simplest of questions as to what the Palestinians should do to get accountability?
For Beinart the answer lies in American exceptionalism: the belief that “the United States possesses a virtue so intrinsic that it cannot be falsified by events.”
They simply cannot see the gulf between what American says it is and stands for, and what America does. Beinart calls it magical thinking.
Yet he finds hope.
Ronald Reagan, the hawk, to the dismay of conservatives became in his second term the most dovish president of the cold war. His shift to a willingness to negotiate was the key that unlocked the forces for change within the Soviet Union.
May it be so with Biden…
This article was originally published by The Beinart Notebook on Mon 8 Mar 2021. Read the original here.
American Exceptionalism as Magical Thinking
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In the introduction to this article JVL stated that Reagan unlocked the key to change in the USSR. That is one way to put it! By Gorbachev talking about “glasnost” and openness he allowed Western financial interests to influence or erode the Russian economy. So the soviet union was undermined, a goal fought for by the west since WW2. Good for Russia? Highly debatable, but for those who engineered this “change” they got what they wanted and whether or not this was good for Russian people who cared. It was a victory for the sycophants of capitalism
The two state solution – rendered unworkable by the atomization of the West Bank to create privileged settler communities within Palestinian territory – is all too often used to provide cover for those who want Israel to be able to continue denying Palestinian rights. By saying ‘we agree with the two state solution’ they are effectively ruling out the possibility of implementing any solution the Palestinians could possibly agree to.
The question then arises, why shouldn’t there be an accord that allows both sides to live together in peace and with equal democratic rights? The answer is, of course, that the Israeli government fears that in such a state the Palestinians would come to outnumber the Jewish population and consequently take possession of the instruments of government. Israel would then cease to be a Jewish state, free to govern in the interests of Jewish Israelis and to offer automatic citizenship to Jews elsewhere in the world. For Israeli Jews this is a very real danger, and is one reason why the problem remains so intractable. For Palestinians this situation only adds to their feelings of despair — their sense of being gradually but implacably erased by a power that cannot afford to offer them the least concession in case it starts it on the slippery slope to its own demise.