Israeli’s love to repeat a bon mot that Abba Eban coined: “The Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” But according to this article by Amos Elon, a well known Israeli historian, that expression actually applies to the Israelis.
Elon is hardly a flaming leftist. He is an ardent Zionist. While I don’t agree with everything he writes (I think his analysis of Camp David and Taba miss the mark), he still makes some startling assertions for someone deep in the Zionist camp:
“The vast settlement project after 1967, aside from being grossly unjust, has been self-defeating and politically ruinous. ‘We’ve fed the heart on fantasies,/the heart’s grown brutal on the fare,’ as William B. Yeats put it almost a century ago in a similar dead-end situation in Ireland. The settlement project has not provided more security but less. It may yet, I tremble at the thought, lead to results far more terrible than those we are now witnessing.”
