Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Obama or Bush? Doesn't make a difference for Israel-Palestine

It's been a while yet again, but I felt I needed to post a few words about Israel-Palestine, since it's in the news again, and as always for unfortunate reasons.

American President Barack Obama had a letter published in one of Israel's two major newspapers, Haaretz, about the need for peace in Israel-Palestine. The newspaper hosted a "Peace Conference" today and had a number of articles written specifically for that topic (they can be found here).


It's incredible that such a letter can be written without any mention of Israel's occupation of Palestinian lands, including not a word about Israeli settlements in the West Bank or the Israeli blockade of Gaza's land and sea borders. And although Obama states that "any Palestinian government must uphold these long-standing principles: a commitment to non-violence, adherence to past agreements, and the recognition of Israel", he makes no such call for any Israeli government to reciprocate on any of those things to Palestine. The same letter could have been written by George W. Bush at any time during his presidency, once again showing that neither American political party is truly in favour of peace or justice in Israel-Palestine.


Those are my brief thoughts now. I've been thinking a lot about this issue in relation to Canada's political parties and will likely write a longer piece about that soon. Stay tuned.

1 comment:

  1. The difference between repug and Democrat foreign policy is merely rhetorical.

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