Drs. Jan and Cornelia Flora are rural sociologists and Professors Emeriti at Iowa State University. The Floras visited Israel and the West Bank in 2015, relying on friends and acquaintances in both places as guides and sources for contacts; this was not a group tour. During their two-week visit, they spent about equal amounts of time in Israel and Palestine but did not visit Gaza. Later, they took an intensive week-long course with a Cornell University professor on U.S. policy toward Israel. Jan Flora relies mainly on newspapers, such as Ha’aretz (online English language newspaper from Israel) and the New York Times, for contemporary news on Israel and Palestine.
President Joe Biden gave a heartfelt speech on October 10 in support of Israel and against Hamas’ terrorism. He recalled his memorable first meeting with Prime Minister Golda Meir, when he was a first-term U.S. senator. She told him, “We (Israelis) have a secret weapon: We have nowhere else to go.”
But, President Biden, isn’t the fundamental issue that there are two peoples—Jewish Israelis and Palestinians—in the same territory with “nowhere else to go”? In 2007, former President Jimmy Carter called the control that Israel exercises over Palestinians an apartheid system.
The policies of Biden and Donald Trump fail to consider that simple truth.
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