Journalist and author Ali Abunimah was the guest on TrueTalk radio show with Ahmed Bedier and Samar Jarrah. Listen to the full audio here http://staging.wmnf.org/events/true-talk/ select show August 21, 2015.
Ali Abunimah is the author of One Country: A Bold Proposal to End the Israeli Palestinian Impasse, and co-founder and director of the widely acclaimed publication The Electronic Intifada. Based in the United States, he has written hundreds of articles and been an active part of the movement for justice in Palestine for 20 years. He is the recipient of a 2013 Lannan Cultural Freedom Fellowship.
One Response to “Ali Abunimah live on TrueTalk Radio show with Ahmed Bedier and Samar Jarrah”
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The conversation with Ali Abunimah betrays yet again his complete lack of judgement with respect to a realistic strategy for the Palestinians. Irrespective of one’s ultimate aim of a one or two party state, Abunimah highlights, yet again, the central weakness of his overall approach: a complete absence of any reference whatsoever to a sustainable high-powered Palestinian resistance movement on the ground.
The literature on resistance in asymmetric conflicts over the last 100 years shows that, for the weaker protagonist, up to 50% of such conflicts are successful, not so much in the classical Castro sense, but more with respect to a meaningful and substantive reconfiguration of the power between the parties. Then and only then can negotiations become “realistic”, as the stronger party, succumbing to the cost factor, inevitably becomes attuned to the reality of a robust protagonist. A classical paradigm is the Vietnam war, but Palestinian resistance, especially in the late 1980s, is even more pertinent, since it effectively drove Rabin to the negotiating table, as he himself admitted. The great pity was that Arafat threw away all the advantages of this initial success by disbanding the very resistance that prompted the Palestinian breakthrough in the first place.
In my view, a comprehensive, robust, nonviolent core resistance on the ground in Palestine, coupled with an international campaign akin to the boycott movement, in conjunction with an equally robust negotiating strategy will lead to an independent Palestinian state. All three components of the strategy are essential; individually they are ineffective. Such a state will at least constitute the first steps on the way back for the Palestinians. Palestinians can then concentrate on real issues, such as building up a social and economic base and tackling the enormity of the refugees’ plight, revisiting the notion of the one-state option when the likely Arab majority in Israel itself materialises at a later date. It is not a case of ‘either or’; its both.