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Good or Bad?: George Mitchell as US Middle East Envoy
national |
anti-war / imperialism |
other press
Thursday January 22, 2009 23:47 by redjade
Obama picks George Mitchell as Mideast envoy 'to make Gaza truce last' United States President Barack Obama on Thursday named former Sen. George Mitchell as his Middle East envoy, saying one of his key tasks would be ensuring that the cease-fire in Gaza lasts. |
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Jump To Comment: 1 2 3Sending Mitchell is simply throwing shapes. Until the US permit the EU to exercise serious sanctions on Israel and stop sending arms to the Israeli Army to enable the slaughter of Palestinians, nothing will change. If Mitchell were sent to head up a commission to investigate Israeli war crimes, that might be getting somewhere.
AMY GOODMAN: Obama’s new Middle East envoy, former senator George Mitchell. Noam Chomsky, your response?
NOAM CHOMSKY: In Ireland, Mitchell did quite a commendable job. But notice that in Ireland, there was an objective, and he helped realize that objective: peaceful reconciliation. Britain took into account for the first time the grievances of the population, and the terror stopped. OK? And the terror was quite real.
In Israel, again, you have to look at what he avoided. He says, “Yes, we want to have a Palestinian state.” Where? OK? He said not a word about—lots of pleasantries about everyone should live in peace, and so on, but where is the Palestinian state? Nothing said about the US-backed actions continuing every day, which are undermining any possibility for a viable Palestinian state: the takeover of the territory; the annexation wall, which is what it is; the takeover of the Jordan Valley; the salients that cut through the West Bank and effectively trisect it; the hundreds of mostly arbitrary checkpoints designed to make Palestinian life impossible—all going on, not a word about them.
So, OK, we can have—in fact, you know, the first Israeli government to talk about a Palestinian state, to even mention the words, was the ultra right-wing Netanyahu government that came in 1996. They were asked, “Could Palestinians have a state?” Peres, who had preceded them, said, “No, never.” And Netanyahu’s spokesman said, “Yeah, the fragments of territory that we leave to them, they can call it a state if they want. Or they can call it fried chicken.” Well, that’s basically the attitude.
And Mitchell had nothing to say about it. He carefully avoided what he knows for certain is the core problem: the illegal, totally illegal, the criminal US-backed actions, which are systematically taking over the West Bank, just as they did under Clinton, and are undermining the possibility for a viable state.
• more at http://www.democracynow.org/2009/1/23/noam_chomsky_obam..._gaza
Gershom Gorenberg writes: