The residue of eventhink

Saul Singer writes in JPost about eventhink -- the notion that being evenhanded is more important than siding with right and justice.

It is time we junked eventhink, because it blinds us from seeing, let alone addressing, the root causes of the conflict.

To return to cops and robbers, an anti-crime policy that did not distinguish between criminals and their victims would obviously fail. Yet making such distinctions requires taking sides, and taking sides detracts from mediating, which makes agreements, and therefore peace, harder to reach, right?

Wrong. The disconnect is this: Peace does not come from agreements; lasting agreements come from changing the conditions that cause war.
In our case, war does not come from the lack of a Palestinian state, even if creating such a state were advisable. War comes from the Arab dream of destroying Israel. Anything that helps crush that dream advances peace; anything that encourages it drives peace further away.

We must be honest and recognize that what the current titular head of the PLO, Farouq Qaddumi, said openly on Iranian TV just four months ago is what much of the Arab world still believes: 'At this stage there will be two states. Many years from now there will be only one' (www.memri.org).

According to eventhink, this is not something to talk about in polite company, because it harms the prospects for agreement. But if peace, not just agreements, is the goal, the more the US exposes, condemns and rejects the Arab destructionist dream, the better.