Obama's Peace Plan

It seems like forever since we wrote about something that actually has to do with university. Last Saturday there was something called Open Day where each department stages a show or fundraising event just for the fun of it all. Yeah we didn't attend. Now we're on Easter break, which is supposed to feel good but the papers and research projects our professors love to cram in last minute are entrenched in our minds, especially since we have no particular desire to work on them. Oh and next Wednesday there might be a strike from the faculty, who are demanding an increase in their wages since they receive their salaries in Jordanian dinars and its currency rate dropped. Other than that, we're having a hard time finding some new Fashion Fugs. Seriously, why has everyone started to dress normally? How are we going to keep ourselves entertained? What are we supposed to snark about now?

Why, Obama's peace plan of course. When it comes to Palestine, there should be a new term for peace since that word has been dragged through the mud for so long now to the point where it has lost all value and sense. Everyone wants to see peace between Israel and Palestine, even the Zionists. And peace, according to some mainstream urbanized folklore dictionary, is defined as thus:

• Peace /pi:s/; noun: a conceptualization designated by close collaboration of one outside power and one domestic power to bring about the total legitimization of a militarily and financially backed said domestic power/racial group's subjugation, control, and authority (i.e. one that calls all the shots) over a weakened, dispossessed. and fragmented-usually indigenous- racial group, for the purpose of normalizing the state of oppression the latter group lives under, under the pretense of two states, one viable the other a mere bantustan, to end all hostilities on one side and furthering the right to security for the other, at whatever cost.

Just call it apartheid. No, that's not quite right...the concept fits but not the context. Ah, yes. American foreign policy.

This peace plan is yet another regurgitation of Western foreign policy. Forgive us for asking, but shouldn't the population suffering under the Middle East's oldest dictatorship be included in the calls for peace? Shouldn't the BDS' (which represent more than 170 Palestinian civil society groups) three edicts be taken into consideration? If it weren't for politics then the three demands shouldn't have to be taken into consideration but rather be implemented at once, since it is a matter of human rights and justice.

Anyhoo, just to put off our term papers and projects even more, let's see what Obama's conditions are.

• No Right of Return 
• Maybe a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders
• Israel must maintain its security
• Negotiations back on the table, for another 20 years at least

We like our current position better actually. Change is so god damned hard. We can't imagine a state with half of its people, refugees all over the world, forbidden from entering. We can't imagine living under a corrupt authority that has been engaging with the enemy in negotiations for decades. We can't imagine Israel maintaining its security in a trigger-happy way whereas Palestinians are offered no such security. We can't imagine a "viable" state on the '67 borders with settlements riddling the area like slabs of litter. So we're opting to live under our present conditions, which are drastically different from Obama's offers, until we grow up a little and take control of a true Palestinian representative to engage in plans for peace in Palestine. Because we won't accept someone else dictating our own destinies. Because we can't keep on waiting for a true Palestinian leadership. Because our grandparents' generations lost the land, our parents' generation fucked the land over, and now our generation is transitioning to take matters into our own hands. (Apart from the hunger strikers, God knows what they're still doing in that measly tent of theirs.)