Sunday, February 02, 2020

Timidity

There are many strange things about the Trump Israel - Palestine proposal. One strange thing is the writing style. Consider this passage:

The Arabs who were displaced have, in very significant numbers, been isolated and kept from living as citizens in the many Arab countries in the region. For example, after the Kuwaiti government returned, following liberation by the United States and its coalition, it began a systematic clearing of Palestinians from the country through violence and economic pressure. The population of Palestinians in Kuwait dropped from 400,000 before the invasion to about 25,000.

Missing in this account of the de facto expulsion of Palestinians from Kuwait are such details as a year or even a decade (it's the early 1990s), the invading country (Saddam's Iraq), or a context (the disastrous assessment of Yasser Arafat that Saddam would gain from the invasion, and King Hussein's initial hedging of bets on the outcome). Also missing is any sense that the USA had some leverage at the time to resist what was happening.

Anyway the point is that something weird happened to this paragraph. It has the advantage of a decent point -- the highly politicised treatment of Palestinians in the Gulf. But somewhere along the way, the document drafters decided that it was too awkward to give the full story, so the point stayed in, entirely devoid of explanation.

And that's what happened to a section of the document where they actually had a good point to make. As for the rest of it ... 

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