Too late the peacemaker
Last night, in conversation with a couple of buddies, I said I wouldn't be shedding any tears for Ariel Sharon. Someone responded Sharon was odd in seeming to get more liberal as he got older. Then in today's Herald, Fran O'Sullivan (sub required) took Helen Clark to task for not sending a get-well-soon card to the ailing leader:
What is it about our Government that it cannot rouse itself to extend Ariel Sharon best wishes at a time when the Middle East is once again in turmoil?Christopher Hitchens has provided a few answers, cataloguing Sharon's brutal career for those with short memories.
posted by Rob O'Neill at 12:03 PM
3 Comments:
I must say -- as Ariel's poor old heart gets closer and closer to beating its last... my own eyes well up and I realise... that I haven't been this felt this sad and bereft since Joseph Mengele drowned.
He's a war criminal. Sorry.
And, as far as that 'latterday liberal' theory goes, Sharon giving away the Gaza could be compared to a hypothetical NZ situation in which the crown tries to settle all Maori grievances by saying: "Here, have Greymouth."
Gaza is a smokescreen. It's what Israeli leaders do in Jerusalem and the West Bank that matters.
Did you read all of the Hitchens piece? He finishes by observing that the possibilities for a Palestinian state have "been altered forever, and to a great extent by Sharon, and this seems to call for some recognition". Yes, he was a thug in the 50s and 60s, but he did shift the terms of the discussion - and in Israel the withdrawal from Gaza is not seen as the cynical move outsiders who don't have to live there present it as.
Just because Christopher Hitchens says it, don't make it so.
Gaza's a hellhole. Pretty much nobody lived there until 1948, when refugees kicked out of their homes by the benevolent new Israeli state needed somewhere to go.
It's no sort of 'prize' and, whatever the annoyance-level of latter-day Jewish settlers who had to move out, the Palestinians realise this...
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