Group items tagged

First: to visit the area and make no effort to meet with Abbas or to visit Palestinian territory makes the statement that in the effort to ensure his support for Israel is unquestionable, he is ignoring the state and nature of the other population that makes up the complex equation of the area. The most crucial issues of the area are not Israeli issues, but Israeli and Palestinian issues, and can only be resolved by some form of collaborative diplomacy between the two.

Second, the statement that culture somehow has anything to do with the economic success of Israel versus the impoverished status of the Palestinians, is not only indicative of bigotry towards the Palestinians, but also towards Jews. The age-old trope that Jews are just good with money has been used against the Jewish people since time immemorial, it seems.

The greatest privilege of the powerful is to be ignorant of the dynamics of power that surround them, and Romney has just made it clear that he does not understand this. These are delicate times, with unrest on the rise in the West Bank and Gaza, the spectre of war with Iran looming, and the very immediate danger of spillover conflict from Syria.