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Title: The Obstruction of Peace: The United States, Israel, and the Palestinians by Naseer H. Aruri ISBN: 1-56751-055-8 Publisher: Common Courage Press Pub. Date: 01 March, 1995 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $29.95

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Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)

Rating: 5
Summary: This is what the future Palestinian "state" is going to be
Comment: In this book apparently published in early 1995 Naseer Aruri gives a compelling outline of America's support for Israeli apartheid and imperialism and how the Palestinians have been affected by it.

He describes American support for Israel as more or less based on helping enforce the status quo in the Middle East of brutal dictatorships and exorbitant oil wealth transfered to the West. Israel, of course, became a first rank asset of the United States after its smashing victory in the June 1967 war. It came to the rescue of King Hussein in 1970 and kept made sure that forces not inimical to American imperialism gained control in Lebanon. It has, most of all, repressed the Palestinians whose revolutionary nationalism has scared and still scares the U.S. supported reactionary middle eastern regimes out of their wits and who threaten Israel's purely "Jewish" character and are not completely willing to give up their land, resources and dignity to the Jews.

Unlike many persons of the Arab race who have ventured opinions on the "peace process," including it seems the Palestinians' so-called leaders, Professor Aruri has actually thoroughly read the "peace" treaties, at least those which were signed before this book was published, and finds them to be a repackaging of Israel's occupation by other means. Meaning the Palestinian authority has "autonomy" though by no means absolute control over education, local police, garbage pick up and so on. At the border crossings they could wear nice uniforms and hand out forms while Israeli's did the actual stamping of documents and approval of passage for persons, and so on. Israel retains absolute control over the settlments and puts the degrading chore on the Palestinian authority of ensuring the "security" of the settlers. For decades of course the international consensus, apart from the U.S. and Israel, was that the settlements are completely illegal and must be disbanded.

Meanwhile Israeli settlement building and exproprations of Palestinian land and killing of Palestinian civillians accelerated after Rabin's last government came to power. Particularly this is the case with Jerusalem which now includes "Greater Jerusalem" which makes up a substantial portion of the central West Bank though Israel does not count it as the West Bank. Labor and Likud have continued to build "Greater Jerusalem" which builds a big circle of Jewish settlement around Jerusalem. The status of Jerusalem along with water, the refugees, the settlements, borders, and everything else important is supposed to be decided in "final staus" talks. Of course Israel is one of the strongest countries in the world supported heavily by the greatest superpower the world has ever seen. They are up against a bunch of petty gangsters, the Palestinian authority, whose constituents are in large part dependent on sweatshop jobs in Israel and exporting to Israel. The expected utter disaster of this arrangment (from the Palestinian point of view) of course has been confirmed in the past year beyond the expectations of those who knew the truth about the "peace process" from the beginning. Arafat at Camp David in July 2000 was offered ninety percent of the West Bank, that is to say ninety percent excluding the settlements and the Jew only bypass roads which isolate and break up the contiguity of the Palestinian enclaves, Greater Jerusalem, and so on.

I liked his discussion of Israel in American domestic life. The U.S. government has always prefered the Labor party over the crude tactics and reckless settlement building of Likud. This of course sometimes leads to conflict as during the Bush administration which hinted to Israel that it would have to give up its version of Greater Israel (the Likud version not the labor one) and witheld the loan gaurantees for the Soviet Jews in order to induce the old rat Shamir to stop trying to build settlements on every square inch of the territories. These feuds over tactics alwasy lead to politicians of both parties trying to outflank each other and the admnistration from the right,leading to such spectacles as Newt Gingrich calling Bob Dole "anti-Israel" and half-witted tirades from William Safire.