Time, Then and Now
The headline to Time Magazine‘s online article about the results of Israel’s election yesterday is “Israel’s Election Dashes Hopes for Peace.”
That is, when a centrist party that seeks a two-state solution gets the most seats in the Israeli Knesset, but the center-right block — part of which seeks a two-state solution and part of which has called for Palestinian self-rule without an independent state — is larger than the center-left block, Israeli voters are cast as having “dashed” hopes for peace.
Now let’s flash back a couple of years. It wasn’t too long ago that Hamas won the Palestinian parliamentary elections. Hamas is sworn to the destruction of Israel, and it’s overtly antisemitic charter states that “There is no solution to the Palestinian problem except by jihad. Initiatives, proposals and international conferences are a waste of time and a farce.”
Surely, Palestinians “dashed” hope for peace when they elected Hamas, right? Not according to Time‘s not-very-consistent logic. The magazine’s headline after that election cast peace prospects as uncertain, as something to contemplate: “Can Militants Make Peace?”
Its answer, in the article itself, was “maybe”; and the difficulties in reaching peace was cast as being related to Israeli policy as well has Hamas’s.
Ah, how the times change.
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