Thanks for the great summary Pieter. I appreciated the perspective (and the change of medium to a podcast! It was nice to hear your voice :) ).
To oversimplify, this is what i understood:
1. Palestine does not want a two state solution as their leadership's (and their backers) prevailing position is there should not be any Jews in the middle east
2. Israel does not want a two state solution because it feels it is likely that a Palestinian state would be hostile towards it and push an aggressive policy to harm/eliminate it.
Here's an added complexity that makes peace an even more difficult prospect. Palestinians have a similar level of distrust in the intentions of the Israeli leadership. They will point towards the ongoing expansion of settlements and the extreme comments/intentions of right-wing Israeli leaders (such as those cited in South Africa's petition) as a justification of their distrust.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, that there is little prospect of peace without the elimination of extremist ideologies. From what we have seen of Hamas, they are not the ones to lead the Palestinians towards peace and their extremist positions will not help the peace process. The Israelis have a legitimate concern as it pertains to them.
On the flip side, I'm not sure the current Israeli leadership are the ones to take their people to peace. I fear there are significant extremist ideologies with a lot of influence there. The concept of "From the River to the Sea" seems to be just as prevalent in Likud's charter as it is in Hamas's.
Thank you for explaining the situation as I found it very informative and I really liked the map that you supplied. Living in Toronto years ago I had a current affairs teacher, Erica Biro, a university of Toronto professor that explained what was going on in the world and you are just as knowledgable, if not more…. Bev
Thanks for the great summary Pieter. I appreciated the perspective (and the change of medium to a podcast! It was nice to hear your voice :) ).
To oversimplify, this is what i understood:
1. Palestine does not want a two state solution as their leadership's (and their backers) prevailing position is there should not be any Jews in the middle east
2. Israel does not want a two state solution because it feels it is likely that a Palestinian state would be hostile towards it and push an aggressive policy to harm/eliminate it.
Here's an added complexity that makes peace an even more difficult prospect. Palestinians have a similar level of distrust in the intentions of the Israeli leadership. They will point towards the ongoing expansion of settlements and the extreme comments/intentions of right-wing Israeli leaders (such as those cited in South Africa's petition) as a justification of their distrust.
I agree with you wholeheartedly, that there is little prospect of peace without the elimination of extremist ideologies. From what we have seen of Hamas, they are not the ones to lead the Palestinians towards peace and their extremist positions will not help the peace process. The Israelis have a legitimate concern as it pertains to them.
On the flip side, I'm not sure the current Israeli leadership are the ones to take their people to peace. I fear there are significant extremist ideologies with a lot of influence there. The concept of "From the River to the Sea" seems to be just as prevalent in Likud's charter as it is in Hamas's.
Thank you for explaining the situation as I found it very informative and I really liked the map that you supplied. Living in Toronto years ago I had a current affairs teacher, Erica Biro, a university of Toronto professor that explained what was going on in the world and you are just as knowledgable, if not more…. Bev