It’s like the Bantustans in South Africa, except that—as Norman
Finkelstein has pointed out—the South African government gave
much more support to the Bantustans than Israel is giving to those
scattered regions.
In the epilogue to the latest edition of your book World Orders, Old
and New, you say that Israel w ill eventually give some kind of state
status to the Palestinians.
Israel and the U S w ould be really stupid if they don’t call
w hatever they decide to leave to Palestinian jurisdiction a state, just
as South Africa insisted on calling the Bantustans “states,” even
though virtually no other country w ould do so. T his new Palestinian
“state” w ill get international recognition, how ever, because the U S
makes the rules.
W hat about the issue of Hebron and the agreement of January 1997?
It left the settlers in place, w hich is exactly w hat everyone
should have expected them to do. T here’s no w ay for Israel to
maintain control of the overw helmingly Arab areas; they’d much
rather have Palestinian police and joint Israeli-Palestinian patrols do
that.
In the Israeli press, Clinton has been called “the last Zionist.”
T hat w as several years ago, in response to positions he took that
w ere more extreme than almost anyone in mainstream Israeli
politics.
Netanyahu got a five-minute ovation w hen he told the U S Congress
that Jerusalem w ill be the eternal, united capital of Israel, prompting
him to remark, “If only I could get the Knesset [Israel’s parliament]
to vote like this.”
Since 1967, U S opinion—including liberal opinion—has pretty
much been aligned w ith the more extremist elements in Israel. For
example, the takeover of Arab East Jerusalem has been really ugly (I