Other voices: Palestinians shouldn't seek to fix an injustice with injustice

Sixty years ago ... the Palestinians refused partition and ended up stateless. If rejecting partition was a mistake then, it is a bigger one now that Israel's population has increased eightfold. To say that Israel should never have been created and must be dissolved is not only utterly unrealistic; it is also to propose correcting one injustice by perpetrating another.

And yet this remains Hamas' formal position. True, its leaders hint that if Israel gave up all the territory conquered in 1967 it would earn a long-term truce. ... But that hinted future possibility is not a wager Israelis are likely to take. Meanwhile, the longer Hamas claims to reject the very idea of Israel's permanence, the easier it is for Israel to dig into the West Bank and the harder it is for America to believe in, let alone press for, a breakthrough to peace. The Hamas retort is that Yasser Arafat's Oslo talks achieved little for the Palestinians. Wars got them less.

After generations as history's losers, the Palestinians deserve a better future. But they can help themselves by putting history behind them and coming to terms, as the Israelis say they already have, with the obvious. A peaceful future is possible only with two states, not just the one.

THE ECONOMIST, MAY 8

The American Cable News Network (CNN) is making news with China, again. ... This time, an amateur anchor blasted out Chinese people as "goons and thugs" and Chinese-made goods as "junk."

Sixty-six-year-old Jack Cafferty, in a TV program called Situation Room that aired on April 9, obviously unhappy with China "holding hundreds of billions of dollars" of U.S. paper deficits, more and more American consumers "buying from [inexpensive] Wal-Mart," and certainly the "changed relationship" with China, moaned: "The Chinese are basically the same bunch of goons and thugs they have been in the past 50 years." ...

The United States is known for "melting-pot" culture, and the dangling "American dream" which have inspired people of different colors to emigrate to it. However, the likes of Jack Cafferty, sitting before TV screens watched by tens of thousands of audiences ... is [showing] rudeness, arrogance, ignorance and hostility towards China.

LI HONG AND Gao Jin'an,

writing in China Daily