Just when you thought Darfur couldn’t get more grotesque, it does: the invaluable Eric Reeves points out that both the Arab League and the African Union have decided to hold their summit meetings in Khartoum, the capital of the genocidal Sudanese regime. No doubt these meetings will be quite a feather in the regime’s cap, and show potential other mass killers how little retribution they will face. This is one of those events when words almost fail you.
Almost. In fact, the Arab League has unwittingly given critical support to the Zionist idea.
One of the most seductive ideas going around in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that of the “one-state solution”. Never mind all the talk about where the borders of a Palestinian state will be, say its advocates: why don’t we just have one binational state? Anytime you see the phrase “Israel/Palestine,” that’s a pretty good indication that the author is headed in this direction.
While some supporters of this idea may have the best motives at heart, it’s hardly surprising that the idea took off in Palestinian circles as soon as it became clear that if the descendants of the 1948 Palestinian refugees actually came back to live inside Israel proper, Israel would then have an Arab majority. No matter, they insist: what we want is a state free of “racism”, where all peoples can live in harmony.
They might want to tell that to the residents of Darfur, who are being slaughtered essentially because they are not Arab. If an Arab government will do this to Muslims–and receive the support of every other Arab country while doing so–what would an Arab government do to the Jews? We don’t need to look very far. Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Al-Aqsa Martyrs’ Brigades are in fact the incipient Palestinian janjahweed.
No less an authority than Edward Said knew as much. He told Ha’aretz in a 2000 interview that the fate of the Jews in a post-Zionist Palestine “worries me a great deal. The question of what is going to be the fate of the Jews is very difficult for me. I really don’t know. It worries me.” That didn’t stop him from advocating a one-state “solution” to the conflict. It’s funny how such “solutions” tend to replicate themselves.