At DailyKos, "Rbguy" is providing excellent coverage of a post-Gaza hearing conducted by the House subcommittee on Middle East and South Asia (under the Foreign Affairs committee). Here's part of his report on David Makovsky, the cheerful guy from WINEP, the belly of the Israel lobby, who testified on February 12 that the peace process should just try to make little improvements in people's lives:
Bank to ease tensions and end the mistrust on the settlements, sealing
shipping containers in order to facilitate Palestinian exports, upgrade
Israeli crossing points with appropriate biometrics to shorten the
lines, and increase Arab-state funding of major construction projects
to kick-start the Palestinian economy.
I went to Makovsky's actual testimony. Makovsky is the director of WINEP's Project on the Middle East Peace Process, whatever that is. This is from the paragraph about improving "the quality of Palestinian life."
(Last night in Brooklyn, I saw a B'tselem video from last year of an Israeli soldier in the occupied territories, at the orders of a commanding officer, shooting a handcuffed, blindfolded Palestinian demonstrator at point-blank range with a rifle, doing god know's what to his leg. Maya Sabatello said that because of the video, the incident has been investigated and two Israelis were charged with "unbecoming" behavior, a light charge.
(I can only imagine what such people would regard as "appropriate biometrics."
(PS. From "Rbguy"'s excellent report diary at DailyKos
Yesterday he
filed a report on the testimony by Safa Rifka of the American-Arab
Anti-Discrimination Committee, including this:
