Friday 10 December 2010

Bibi? Get ready for the 'Brazilian way'.....

Bibi? Get ready for the 'Brazilian way'.....

"... Now all you have to worry about is…Argentina. You see, Argentina just recognized a Palestinian state on 1967 borders. Brazil did so days earlier. Uruguay and Paraguay are expected to follow suit, and then Bolivia and Ecuador. Oh, and you have a small problem with rock stars: last year Elvis Costello and Carlos Santana cancelled Israel gigs because of the occupation, and more seem poised to follow. Dock workers are another worry: from Sweden to South Africa, they keep protesting the occupation and the Gaza blockade by refusing to offload Israeli goods. And then there's Hanna King, the 17-year-old Swarthmore freshmen who along with four other young American Jews disrupted your speech last month in New Orleans because, as she told Haaretz, "settlements…are contrary to the Jewish values that we learnt in Jewish day school." You should probably expect young Jews like her to protest all your big American speeches from now on.
I know, I know. You consider all this unfair, and in some ways it is. But when you've been occupying another people for 43 years, confiscating more and more of their land and denying them citizenship while providing it to your own settlers, it doesn't do much good to insist that things are worse in Burma....
Rest assured, the Obama administration won't go along with these efforts to punish and isolate you. It may even denounce them. But as you may have noticed, the world doesn't listen to America like it used to. Non-Americans have grown tired of hearing that only the U.S. can broker a deal, especially because you've now shown that to be false. And so the dam preventing countries and institutions from legitimizing Palestine and delegitimizing Israel may soon break. You didn't like the American way? Get ready for the Brazilian way....
And how can the Brazilians and dock workers and Elvis Costellos harm you? Ask my 4-year-old son. At times, you see, he thinks we live in Israel. The reason is because at his Jewish school and synagogue on the Upper West Side—heck, even walking down Broadway anywhere between Zabar's and Columbia—he's constantly hearing Israeli Hebrew. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the number of Israelis applying annually for permanent residence in the United States doubled between 2000 and 2009. Former Prime Ministers Ehud Olmert and Ehud Barak both have adult children living here. And it's not just the U.S. An Israeli friend recently told me that there are so many young Israelis in Berlin (Berlin!)....
The dam preventing countries and institutions from legitimizing Palestine and delegitimizing Israel may soon break. You didn't like the American way? Get ready for the Brazilian way.
So take a bow. You sure put Barack Obama in his place. And don't worry if the Brazilians and South Africans and Swedes and Swarthmoreans think your policies are immoral and insane. Ovadiah Yosef thinks they make all the sense in the world...."

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian

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