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Total number of comments: 121 (since 2009-10-02 13:05:06)

Diane Mason

Website: http://lawrenceofcyberia.blogs.com/

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  • 'Washington Post' cartoon mocking future Palestinian state signals crumbling of two-state paradigm
  • Another campus walkout, this one at Wayne State speech on Palestinian child suicide bombers
  • Netanyahu gives genocidal bible story to Obama
    • Diane Mason March 8, 2012 at 8:16 am with 2 replies

      There was no Mordechai and no Esther, and they had no enemy Haman. There was only Marduk and Ishtar and their rival 'Uman, gods in the ancient Babylonian pantheon whose myths were appropriated, Judaized and turn into "historical" legends by Babylonian Jews in the post exilic period, in a process of evolution and borrowing that is normal between different religious traditions. Anyone who thinks these stories are real, and justify launching a war on Iran, is insane and should not be trusted with a butter knife, never mind a nuclear arsenal.

  • Israel's national theater to bring 'Merchant' to World Shakespeare Fest in May
    • Diane Mason January 11, 2012 at 10:25 am with 1 replies

      I think it's missing something to say Shylock was just your "archetypal Jewish joke figure". Shylock's rant here about his lost treasure ends a few lines later with him saying he wouldn't have sold his turquoise ring (which his daughter and her Christian lover have swapped for a monkey) at any price, because sentimental value makes it priceless. And that suddenly and unexpectedly turns the image of the greedy Jew, who's spent the whole scene so far ranting about his money, upon its head.

  • Israel's myth of invincibility drives a dangerous idea-- attacking Iran
    • Diane Mason December 6, 2011 at 5:21 pm with 4 replies

      There was an article in Ha'aretz a few years back on a similar theme, but this time on the subject of Hizbullah, and why it is dangerous to Israel. It was based on an analysis by Daniel Sobelman of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies, who found that Hizbullah's firing missiles into Israel was neither random nor unprovoked nor unrestrained, but was carried out specifically in response to actions Israel carried out against sovereign Lebanese territory, like assassinations and overflights.

      [A] new study showed that the firing of the antiaircraft missiles was not random, but came as a response to the IAF's violation of Lebanese airspace. "A comparison of IAF flight data with the data on the firing of the antiaircraft missiles shows a direct relationship between the violations and the firing," wrote Daniel Sobelman of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

      Sobelman studied Hezbollah activities over the past four years and concluded that the Shi'ite organization actually wants to preserve the status quo created in the north after the IDF's departure from Lebanon. He found a clear contradiction between Hezbollah's declared ideology, which calls for the destruction of Israel, and the restrained policy that it actually implements, which is based on rules of behavior that have crystalized between it and Israel.

      These rules are the name of the game, according to Sobelman, and Hezbollah follows them. The most important rule is "action-reaction," that is, Hezbollah responds to Israel's "aggressive acts." Among these are overflights of Lebanese territory, border crossings into Lebanon by IDF troops or targeted killings of the organization's members in Beirut...

      Apparently, as difficult as it is, Israel's policy makers must come to terms with the creation of a balance of fear and deterrence with regard to Hezbollah. It is not easy to admit that an organization numbering only a few hundred fighters can deter the country with "the strongest army in the Middle East," but it should always be remembered that Hezbollah is Israel's creation, and the daily occurences (sic) in the north are, among other things, the result of myopia on the part of Israel's senior defense officials. This is especially important these days as we recall that Hamas was also established under Israel's aegis and with its encouragement.

      Hezbollah plays by the rules

      And that was why Hizbullah was so threatening to Israel: it wasn't a military danger to Israel in the sense it was going to invade and overrun it, but in the sense that it took away Israel's ability to do whatever it liked without having to worry about the consequences. For the first time ever, Israel found itself facing an enemy practicing deterrence against it. And a nuclear armed Iran will be able to do the same thing.

  • Revival of Geneva Initiative features divisive figure: Bernard-Henri Levy
    • Diane Mason November 22, 2011 at 5:22 pm

      Israel isn’t jumping through all these hoops to have people accept the “Jewish State” designation because it sounds cute or because it wants to match Iran’s “Islamic” designation in its name...

      If you think that's what I wrote, then you got it completely backwards. Of course Israel doesn't want the kind of recognition the Islamic Republic of Iran has got, that's the whole point - the PLO is offering Israel normal diplomatic recognition, such as the world gives the Islamic Republic of Iran, but Israel wants something different altogether i.e. not only recognition of its statehood, but recognition of its right to operate a sectarian regime that discriminates on the basis of ethnic-religious background.

      As for the PLO "going along" with the designation, what they are "going along" with is international convention on the naming of countries, and that's exactly what they should do. Whether it is diplomatic niceties or international law, the PLO should make sure they do go along with it - it's precisely because they base their positions on international norms and not the vicissitudes of one political trend or another that the Palestinians are still there 60 years plus after Nakba, with a greater degree of international support and near universal acceptance of their narrative, despite the overwhelming imbalance of power that the Zionists thought would sweep them away.

      On the specific issue of why Israel is currently pushing so hard for recognition of "the Jewish state", I don't attach overwhelming importance to that specific issue - I think this is simply the latest in a long line of impossible demands that Israel makes of the Palestinians in order to be sure they will be rejected and the Palestinians can be portrayed as the party that is obstructing peace. As their head of Army Intelligence said way back in 1973: We must define our position and lay down basic principles for a settlement. Our demands should be moderate and balanced, and appear to be reasonable. But in fact they must involve such conditions as to ensure that the enemy rejects them. Then we should manoeuvre and allow him to define his own position, and reject a settlement on the basis of a compromise position. We should then publish his demands as embodying unreasonable extremism. If it wasn't this, there would be some other issue to serve the same purpose.

      I do understand your wider point about Israel's weasel words designed to muddy the debate in its favor, but really, how far has that got Israel in trying to change the underlying parameters of the conflict? All Israel has managed to do is to convince friend after friend that it is a serial liar that is simply not interested in coexistence, till it has only one friend left (and only hangs on to that one thanks to a propagandized citizenry and a political class heavily dependent on pro-Israel donors). I think the main result of Israel constantly trying to change the terms of the debate is simply that fewer and fewer people listen to it.

    • Diane Mason November 22, 2011 at 3:12 pm with 13 replies

      that the Palestinians were willing to recognize Israel as a Jewish state

      That's not quite what he said. He said that Palestine would recognize the state of Israel on its 1967 borders, and - in line with diplomatic convention - call that state whatever it chooses for its name.

      Like in the Palestine Papers where the PLO invites Israel to go ahead and call itself the Republic of Milk and Honey for all we care...

      Rabbo's simply repeating the PLO long-standing position that in a two state solution they will recognize the state of Israel - and use whatever name it chooses for itself, because in international affairs countries get to be known by whatever name they choose for themselves. Just as the world community calls Iran "The Islamic Republic of..." purely in a nominal sense without endorsing any meaning the Iranian regime would like to apply to it. (Or in the way we called East Germany "the German Democratic Republic" without implying it was really a democracy).

      But the PLO won't recognize Israel as a "Jewish state" in the sense that Israel wants -- i.e. as a place where the full rights of citizenship are intended for people with the "right" ethnic religious background - because 1. that undermines the rights of the non-Jewish citizens of Israel 2. it undermines refugee rights 3. there's no precedent in diplo relations for requiring one country to recognize that a preferred demographic balance should exist in another country.

      You seem to be conflating the diplomatic nicety of calling Israel whatever it settles on as a name in the event of a 2 state solution - even if it calls itself "the Jewish state of..." - with acceptance that Israel has a right to be only for Jewish people. And Rabbo's not doing that.

  • South African apartheid didn't have a domestic constituency in the U.S.
    • Diane Mason November 17, 2011 at 9:14 am

      Fletcher’s statement ‘Palestinians are being made to pay the price for the Holocaust’ is also a common mistake. In fact, Zionists planned their project before the Holocaust.

      There's no contradiction between saying that Zionists planned their project before the Holocaust, but couldn't realize it until they had the weight of the Holocaust to bring doubtful members of the UN into line.

  • Reporters again turn State Dep't briefing into moshpit, scorning US 'impotence' in the conflict
    • Diane Mason November 3, 2011 at 2:57 pm

      I think the law that bans military assistance by the U.S. to any government that refuses to sign the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and to allow inspection of its nuclear facilities is called The Proxmire Amendment .

      FWIW, additionally the US Foreign Assistance Act prohibits military and economic aid to any country that engages in a “consistent pattern of gross violations of internationally recognized human rights.” Also the US Arms Export Control Act forbids the government from giving military assistance to any country that violates internationally recognized human rights.

      There are probably other examples.

  • UNESCO votes to admit Palestine as a full member
    • Diane Mason November 1, 2011 at 7:44 am

      I'm not sure why The Netherlands takes the position it does, but I think it's been doing this for a long time. I remember the Dutch govt offering support for Israel in the 1973 war (as a staging post for rushing war materiel to Israel from the US). Then in 1992 when an El Al plane crashed taking off from Amsterdam, the Dutch govt stonewalled the investigation for years even though hundreds of its own citizens in the area were falling ill. It took an expose by 2 investigative journalists to reveal that the plane was actually carried a load of sarin nerve gas precursors from the US to Israel, and was one of a series of regular Friday night flights that had been passing through Amsterdam to Israel without appearing on airport monitors or being required to go through any of the inspection by the Dutch authorities that normal air freight would. And the subsequent govt inquiry found that this had been going on since 1973.

      So The Netherlands has been offering support to Israel for years, well beyond its votes at the UN, up to and including facilitating proliferation of chemical weapons. It's a strange policy for an otherwise generally-progressive country, and I really don't know what the explanation is.

  • Burg, former Knesset speaker, endorses idea of one state from river to sea
    • Diane Mason October 13, 2011 at 10:13 am

      Edited to add: This is the 2003 article with collapsing wedding hall metaphor - A Failed Israeli Society Collapses While Its Leaders Remain Silent, link to forward.com

    • Diane Mason October 13, 2011 at 10:11 am

      You and I must be reading different articles.

      I like Burg's writing very much, and this article is no exception, but I don't read it as coming out of the colonialism closet and endorsing one democratic state from the river to the sea if Israel fails to take real steps toward two states, which of course, it will not... etc, etc.

      I think he is simply reiterating the thrust of what he said in his breakthrough article of 2003 - the one about Zionism collapsing like a cheap Jerusalem wedding hall. If I recall correctly, what he said then was that Zionists want three things - Greater Israel, Jewishness, and democracy - but they can have only two, and they need to make a decision. If they can't give up Greater Israel, then they can keep Hebron, but cease to be a Jewish-majority state. If their Jewish majority matters most, then evacuate the settlements. Because Zionism can't have all it wants, due to the fact that other people live there too.

      It seems to me he is reiterating the same points here, with practical ideas about what Palestinians can do to force the issue.

      What he's saying is common sense, and it certainly was groundbreaking in 2003 to hear such sentiments coming from the former speaker of the Knesset. But he's hardly coming out of the closet in making these points now, and I don't see him endorsing one state here. I see him repeating his call for Zionist Israelis to face reality and make up their minds.

      I don't think it does us any good to proclaim hyperbolic breakthroughs. We can have non-existent victory after non-existent victory, time after time, and the Palestinians will still be no better off.

  • Mondoweiss liveblogs the UN General Assembly speeches
    • Diane Mason September 23, 2011 at 2:37 pm

      If East Jerusalem is to be the capital, how do you explain the Palestine Papers revelations that showed "the PA’s willingness to concede areas of occupied East Jerusalem to the Israeli state,"

      Are you serious?

      The PLO seeks recognition of a Palestinian state on the 1967 borders (including East Jerusalem) but will agree to minor land swaps, as long as the land Palestine receives in return from Israel is equal in size and quality to what it cedes.

      In the Old City, this means the PLO would be willing to cede the Jewish Quarter and probably the Armenian Quarter. In Greater Jerusalem, it would be willing to consider ceding the settlements ringing East Jerusalem, except those that make meaningful territorial contiguity impossible, specifically Ras al-Amoud and Jabal Abu Ghneim. In return for giving up land to Israel in Greater East Jerusalem, the PLO wants land of comparable value in Greater West Jerusalem. Specifically, the Palestinian villages depopulated by Israel in 1948, but never subsequently redeveloped, which would offer the opportunity of a literal right of return for thousands of refugees.

      As realists, we might both consider it unlikely that Israel will ever agree to such a deal, and as a one-stater you might not like it even if they did. But that doesn't mean you should pretend the logic behind it is fallacious or difficult to understand, when it isn't.

  • 'I prefer to live with Jews': A liberal Zionist argument for the two-state solution
  • Who would be considered a citizen in a new state of Palestine?
    • Diane Mason September 19, 2011 at 9:36 am

      I think that if a PA representative said that the newly-recognized state of Palestine would automatically confer citizenship on the Palestinian refugees, there would be an outcry from exactly the same people who criticize them now for NOT automatically conferring citizenship on the refugees. The criticism in that case would be that giving them citizenship of a state recognized on the 1967 borders is undermining their right of return to their former homes inside Israel's 1967 borders.

      And certainly there would be an outcry that the PA is overstepping its bounds by conferring citizenship on the refugees at all, seeing as the refugees' rights are explicitly individual rights that can't be decided on their behalf by government. It's up to the refugees themselves whether they would want to be citizens of Palestine in its 1967 borders.

      Whether the PA did or did not confer citizenship, they would be criticized for it, and by the same people. Because the underlying argument isn't about citizenship but about one state or two state. The PA's campaign for international recognition of a Palestine formally limited to the 1967 borders is a moment of truth in that argument.

  • Derfner's next assignment
    • Diane Mason August 30, 2011 at 1:30 pm with 1 replies

      A liberal Zionist is a Zionist who likes the end goal of a sectarian Jewish state, but is too ashamed to embrace publicly the means that are necessary to bring it about in a place as overwhelmingly non-Jewish as Palestine.

  • Tent protests panic Netanyahu (and just might shake foundations of occupation)
    • Diane Mason August 1, 2011 at 8:28 pm

      I don't really follow the logic that says these protests will lead to a single state. That seems a bit of a leap. Why would a protest against the lack of affordable housing in Israel lead Jewish Israelis to stop being Zionists? I think the best we realistically can hope for is that something might click in the minds of those protesters, connecting the fact that successive Israeli governments have failed to provide affordable housing for Israelis in Israel because they have blown $20bn subsidizing cheap housing for Israelis colonizing land beyond Israel's recognized borders.

  • Why the 'Jewish State' now?
    • Diane Mason June 14, 2011 at 12:43 pm

      The UN called it "Jewish Palestine" because the borders they gave it were drawn up to gather the Jewish minority into a single polity, not because it was only for its Jewish residents. The partition resolution is quite explicit about equal rights for members of both communities in the partitioned states. Jewish Palestine = that part of Palestine with heaviest Jewish settlement, not that part of Palestine where Jews have special rights and non-Jews don't. It's a geographical partition, not an ideological one.

  • Why I fell so hard for 'A Gay Girl in Damascus' (and why the hoax makes me angry and conservative)
    • Diane Mason June 13, 2011 at 11:46 am

      I think the most useful thing I learned about stuff you find on the internet is that if you find something that seems too good to be true, then it probably is. The most successful fakes are the ones designed to fit most perfectly with what people are perceived to be looking for.

      There used to be a "Saudi" blogger who was very popular with U.S. liberal hawks, but who - in the opinion of Arabic speakers - didn't seem to know Arabic himself and seemed very heavily dependent on MEMRI for his news about Saudi Arabia. Which kind of left the impression that he sounded so much like an American liberal hawk with no direct experience of Saudi Arabia because that's what he really was. Gay Girl in Damascus sounds like a variant on the same theme.

      Some of the most popular phony quotes concerning the Mid East conflict got their popularity the same way: I want to tell you something very clear, don't worry about American pressure on Israel, we, the Jewish people control America, and the Americans know it (Ariel Sharon); If they [the Jews] all gather in Israel it will save us the trouble of going after them worldwide’ (Hassan Nasrallah); also MLK's speech about antizionism being antisemitism and Ahmedinejad's "wiping Israel off the map", and the Iran is going to make Jews wear yellow markers hoax.... all caught on with their target audience because they were manufactured precisely to appeal to them.

      Phony quotes are easier to spot, because they turn out never to be quite traceable to their claimed source. Phony people are more difficult, especially when there is a time pressure on bloggers to react immediately to every story.

  • Goldberg agonistes
  • Why Desmond Travers identifies with the people of Sderot
    • Diane Mason May 23, 2011 at 5:19 pm

      Only if Shimon Peres is the Queen of Israel.

      This blog needs a "like" button.

    • Diane Mason May 23, 2011 at 4:03 pm

      If the Queen is as irrelevant as you and I know she is

      Makes no sense at all coming from someone who recently claimed, absurdly, that “she has never and will never relinquish Northern Ireland and allow the country to be unified”. You’re the one who said she had the power to keep Northern Ireland British.

      Either she’s making a historical point by acknowledging those who died in the struggle… or she’s a useless figurehead

      False dichotomy. There are other more reasonable explanations than the two you present as being the only ones. Like the fact that she is head of state of a country whose governments, since the Good Friday agreement, have been promoting a policy of reconciliation rather than military confrontation in Northern Ireland, and acknowledging the cost of the conflict to all sides is an appropriate expression of the British government’s policy of reconciliation.

      The Queen has no political power except that she is the head of state, Supreme Governor of the Church of England, Commander-in-Chief of the British Armed Forces, Queen of Canada, Queen of Australia, Duke of Normandy, Defender of the Faith and Lord of Man.

      None of which endow her with any political power.

      If she cared at all about ending the occupation of Northern Ireland she could have mentioned it at any point in her privileged but meaningless life.

      Actually, she couldn’t, not and remain Queen. Constitutionally, it would be entirely unacceptable for the Queen to publicly express her own views about political issues. If she wishes to express her own political views, she is free to abdicate and express herself like any other British citizen. But she can’t do that and be Queen, because that goes beyond bounds of what is allowed to a constitutional monarch. The only politics she can espouse as Queen are those she expresses in speeches written for her by her government. The English felt strongly enough about who should hold political power to have a civil war over it, and Parliament won. For a monarch to challenge this by inserting himself into politics would be an enormous constitutional crisis.

    • Diane Mason May 23, 2011 at 2:48 pm with 5 replies

      You do understand that in a constitutional monarchy the monarch has no say at all in whether Ulster remains British or becomes part of a united Ireland, don't you? The Queen has no role in this or any other political issue except to rubber stamp whatever agreement the elected British government of the day enters into on behalf of the United Kingdom.

      I thought you once mentioned you were originally from Britain?

  • U.S. already affirmed '67 borders--only to have Obama backtrack
    • Diane Mason May 18, 2011 at 1:17 pm

      I think land "value" in this context is to some extent a subjective measure referring to the value that the respective sides attach to it. Two pieces of land are swappable when the value that one side attaches to one is equal to the value the other side attaches to the other, regardless of what is standing on them. For example, Israel wants the Jewish settlements in East Jerusalem. In return, it proposed in 2008 to make a land swap for them. The Israelis said it was making a fair offer because it was offering a swap on a 1:1 basis. The PLO said in principle it would entertain land swaps for all Israel's E. Jerusalem settlements (except for the ones that would make Palestine's contiguity impossible, ie Jabal Abu Ghneim & Ras al Amoud) but it wouldn't accept this particular swap, because the land that was being offered comprised a bunch of sand dunes abutting the Gaza Strip. Israel argued that all land is equal, but Condoleezza Rice - may God forgive me for putting her in a good light - agreed with the Palestinians that all land is not equal. In answer to the question of what is Jerusalem land equal to, she came up with the formula that Jerusalem is equal to Jerusalem. So for everything Israel wanted to keep of what it had seized in E Jerusalem, it would have had to give up something on the Western side, which is a different kettle of fish altogether from a bunch of sand dunes. What the PLO wanted if Israel had accepted that formula was the land in the W Jerusalem area which Zionists had depopulated in 1947/8 but not subsequently developed. Economically, it might not be a good deal for them to swap developed land for undeveloped, but to the PLO the "value" of that particular land lay in the fact that it gave thousands of refugees a literal right to return to their former homes, which made it prime real estate. So the "value" of a piece of land isn't necessarily about the price of land or the cost of buildings or infrastructure, but is also a more subjective thing to do with the significance one side or the other attaches to it.

    • Diane Mason May 18, 2011 at 12:03 pm with 1 replies

      I'm not sure I agree with the line of reasoning underlying this post. It suggests you can't believe what Obama says on the 1967 borders because he backtracked on earlier US Administrations' acceptance of them. There are plenty of reasons not to believe what Obama says on Palestine, but this isn't a good argument because the previous two administrations didn't really accept the 67 borders either. As long as the US has managed a peace process that continued regardless of Israel's settlement program beyond the 67 borders, it has been complicit in undermining them. Clinton also abandoned them behind closed doors at Camp David and Bush II did so explicitly in his "demographic realities" letter to Sharon. (The reference to 1967 in the Road Map was just a bone tossed to a dog, to placate Arab sentiment in the immediate run-up to the invasion of Iraq).

      So I think the underlying dynamic is wrong. The point is not that Obama is paying lip service to 1967 but you can't trust him because he's privately worse than his predecessors. The point is that Obama, like both his predecessors, was until at least 2009 an enabler of Israel's erasure of the Green Line, but is now being forced to publicly acknowledge the international consensus on that border, because the US has lost control of the process and is scrambling to get aboard a train it fears it is no longer driving.

  • Desmond Travers on Geo Mitchell: Irish-American Diaspora wanted an end to the troubles, Jewish-American Diaspora hasn't opened its eyes
    • Diane Mason May 19, 2011 at 10:57 am

      Or not.

      McDonald’s Confirms ‘No Arabic’ policy at its restaurants in Israel

      McBusted: Mounting evidence supports claim McDonald’s Israel fired worker for speaking Arabic

      McConfusion: McDonald’s Israel reportedly backs down, while McDonald’s HQ stonewalls

      Concerning Abeer Zinaty, whose grounds for firing were:

      “Abeer spoke Arabic to her Arabic co-workers while she was on duty, even though Abeer knows that Hebrew is the language for interpersonal communications at work.”

      Which is a reflection of MacDonald's Israel's policy that:

      “there is a directive known to all chain employees, that restaurant staff will speak, among themselves and with clients, only in the Hebrew language. This is in order to prevent discomfort felt by clients and staff, who mostly speak Hebrew.”

    • Diane Mason May 18, 2011 at 9:59 pm

      I wasn't suggesting it was difficult to travel between the Irish Republic and the British mainland, but talking about the local effects of the border within Ireland where Catholics in for example Fermanagh and South Tyrone - whose natural family and community links were with other Catholics in say, Cavan and Monaghan - found themselves bisected by a rather arbitrary border that didn't respect the reality on the ground.

    • Diane Mason May 17, 2011 at 5:36 pm with 3 replies

      I think one thing that really helped in Ireland was that both the U.K and the Republic of Ireland joined the EC/EU, which progressively made international borders less significant. When people are divided by concrete and barbed wire borders, the location of the border is a contentious issue. When borders are porous, and families both sides have easy access to each other, not so much.

    • Diane Mason May 17, 2011 at 5:34 pm with 3 replies

      full voting rights for its Arab minority

      You can't say that in all fairness without mentioning that Israel allows full voting rights for its Arab minority precisely because it ethnically cleansed seven-eighths of them in 1948, so that the remaining remnant was not large enough to change anything about its situation by voting.

      Let the refugees return home, and enjoy full voting rights, then Israel's democratic credentials will be something to boast about.

  • Palestinians are not 'human,' says CUNY trustee who rejected Kushner
    • Diane Mason May 6, 2011 at 1:28 pm with 2 replies

      I don't think saying you're a Zionist and you don't subscribe to what this other Zionist says in this instance is a good counter to what Phil is saying about the tendency of supporters of Israel to make Palestinians not quite human like us. Making a Jewish state in an overwhelmingly non-Jewish place like Palestine was always going to be a massive disaster for the preexisting non-Jewish population. One of the ways Zionists justified this to the rest of the world was by denying that such a people existed, another was by acknowledging they existed but implying they weren't really people like us so it didn't really matter. It's a tactic that is used over and over again ( blogwhore alert! ), and the fact that one particular Zionist can find individual instances he or she doesn't agree with, doesn't change that.

      Additionally, and this is moving beyond GF's specific point, I also think it's important not to cut off the second part of Phil's paragraph -

      And thus the European experience of Jewry, so scarring and, we like to believe, exceptional, is projected on to the next victim in the cycle.

      - because it's really a continuation of the same thought, about excusing what is being done to the Palestinians. Why is it so important for Zionists that the suffering of European Jewry be qualitatively unlike the genocide of any other people when, to paraphrase the example Avrum Burg suggested, none of the million or so Tutsis who were murdered over a ten day period by their Hutu neighbors can have gone to their death thinking: I'm about to be hacked to death with a machete but at least I'm not being shot in a ditch or gassed to death like European Jews were? And the reason why Jewish genocide must be exceptional even among genocides - which really are all exceptional in their own way - is because of the use that Zionism has for it. Zionists propose a quite remarkable remedy to Jewish suffering - i.e. that a people that was not responsible for it shall be made to cease to exist as a people in its own land, in order that Jewish nationalists might inherit that land. "Our entire existence in this Arab region was justified, and is still justified, by our suffering; by Jewish violinists in the camps", as Yoram Kaniuk put it. Denial of rights to Arab people in Palestine is a really exceptional response to the suffering of Jewish people in Europe, and requires that the suffering itself be correspondingly exceptional, even when compared to other genocides.

  • Arab spring: Fatah and Hamas reportedly reach deal for interim gov't, elections in a year
    • Diane Mason April 27, 2011 at 9:30 pm

      Up till now it was: "How can we deal with Abbas, when he can't bring along Hamas?".

      Now it's going to be: "How can we deal with Abbas, when he's reconciled with Hamas?"

  • Palestinian state is 'the most important issue for us in the region,' Qatari Emir tells Obama
    • Diane Mason April 16, 2011 at 1:30 pm

      The Emir of Qatar is right, but I think he's also a good example of why the democratization of the Arab regimes is so important for Palestine.

      The Arab autocracies pay lip service to the Palestinian cause, because it is an issue that resonates with their own populations. The Emir of Qatar is sometimes particularly strongly-worded and uncompromising in talking about Palestine. And yet, none of them will go beyond lip service, as their primary concern is not fulfilling the wishes of their own populations, but retaining the U.S. support - or at least the benign indifference - that allows them to stay in power. In the case of the Emir of Qatar, this translates to stirring words about liberating Jerusalem, at the same time as he offers basing for the USAF's operations against Iraq and a greater degree of normalization with Israel than even those countries that made a peace treaty with it. He could make some of that goodwill dependent on the U.S. reciprocating with goodwill towards Palestine, but we wouldn't want to upset the Americans would we....

      It doesn't matter whether the slogans of the autocracy in question lean toward Fatah (like Egypt) or to Hamas (like Qatar). They will never get beyond mouthing slogans in support of Palestine because to actually take independent action for Palestine's independence would make them potential targets for regime change. Arab autocrats love talking about Palestine, but they love staying in power more.

  • 'Washington Post' admits lobby has Obama by short 'n curlies
  • Reut: Israel is a normal country struggling to survive in 'impossible reality'
    • Diane Mason April 15, 2011 at 11:20 am with 2 replies

      I am sure it will show that Israel is first and foremost a normal country, a democracy that is struggling for its survival in an impossible reality

      It's not really accurate to describe Israel as first and foremost a normal democracy struggling in an impossible reality. It's a "Jewish democracy" struggling to preserve privilege for one ethnic-religious group in a land where that privilege could be established - and can be maintained - only through massive force against the non-privileged majority. The impossibility of the reality in which it finds itself is a function of that abnormal basis for its "normality" and "democracy".

  • UN recognition of Palestine won't necessarily lead to UN action against Israel
    • Diane Mason April 14, 2011 at 7:20 am

      the Law of Return would be nullified in a one-state solution.

      Abunimah is a big proponent of the single state, but also argues that there is no reason why a single state cannot continue to offer the Law of Return to Jews worldwide, if they need that for reassurance that they will always have somewhere to go should they need it.

      Edited to add: I do think there is merit in your initial point though. It would have been quicker if he'd just written: "I'm for a single state, so of course I don't favor UN recognition of Israel on the 1967 borders".

  • Even the pretense of supporting 'peace' is now gone...
    • Diane Mason April 12, 2011 at 10:48 pm with 1 replies

      The U.S. will not allow the Quartet to meet, because it fears the proposed text would outline a two state solution explicitly based on the 1967 borders, with land swaps.

      But by closing down the chance for a return to negotiations under the Quartet's terms of reference, the U.S. ensures that the PLO will proceed with its push for recognition this fall in the UN, where recognition will also be explicitly based on the 1967 borders, but without the land swaps.

      This does not seem a well thought out strategy on the part of the U.S.

  • Benjamin Netanyahu's heart of darkness
    • Diane Mason March 31, 2011 at 2:52 pm with 2 replies

      You are right about the impact Netanyahu's settlement building, especially at Jabal Abu Ghneim, had on the peace negotiations when Netanyahu was having his first stint as P.M. Perhaps, technically, the Palestinians didn't make ceasing settlements a precondition for continuing talks back them - I think it would have been very difficult for them to have posed any preconditions at all, seeing as they had only been allowed to have a seat at negotiations on their own future since as recently as 1991, and the "privilege" of representing themselves must have still felt very tenuous when Netanyahu came to power. Nevertheless, if Netanyahu is suggesting that the fact that the Palestinians never refused to talk before in the absence of a settlement freeze indicates that settlements were never previously that big a deal, it's just not true. I've just retrieved an archive article from the LA Times in April 1997 called "Palestinians Lose Faith in U.S. as a Force for Peace", and the basis of the article is that there is a major crisis brewing in the peace talks precisely because of Netanyahu's massive settlement building in East Jerusalem, and the US' unwillingness to do anything about it (and their use of the UNSC veto to protect Israeli settlements, plus ca change etc etc).

      Extract: Palestinian negotiator Saeb Erekat often plays the contrarian in Middle East peace efforts--glum, even after signing a hard-fought agreement on the withdrawal of Israeli troops from the West Bank city of Hebron, and generally apt to see a gray lining in a silver cloud.

      Now, however, Erekat is in tune with the rest of the Palestinian leadership as he sounds increasingly ominous warnings about the collapse of the peace process and the Palestinians' lack of faith in the United States as peace broker.

      This gloom is pervasive too in the streets of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, where Palestinian support for the 4-year-old peace process is dropping and the possibility of armed conflict between Israelis and Palestinians is openly discussed.

      Erekat, after a recent meeting with Secretary of State Madeleine Albright in Washington, said he has become convinced of two things: that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is determined to do away with the 1993 Oslo peace accords the previous, Labor government signed with the Palestinians and that the United States will protect him while he does it.

      Palestinian Higher Education Minister Hanan Mikhail-Ashrawi, who met separately with Albright, concurred in a telephone interview from her home in Ramallah. "This is the conclusion we all have reached," Ashrawi said.

      Erekat said the Palestinians do not expect the United States to end its strategic alliance with Israel. "That's not realistic," he said. But anger edged into his voice as he addressed what he called American "impotence" in failing to prevent Netanyahu from building a new Jewish neighborhood in historically Arab East Jerusalem.

      "We had an agreement that was witnessed and signed by President Clinton. The question is: 'Did you, Mr. Clinton, sign this agreement as a photo op? Or was your signature there to guarantee the precise and accurate implementation of this agreement?' "

      The Israeli government says it has the right to build anywhere in Jerusalem.

      But Palestinians view the 6,500-unit housing development in East Jerusalem as Israel's attempt to create "facts on the ground" and preempt negotiations on the status of the holy city. The peace agreements say the fates of Jerusalem and Jewish settlements in the West Bank are to be decided in a final phase of talks, along with the future of Palestinian refugees, borders and the possibility of Palestinian statehood.

      Foreign diplomats say Palestinian disillusionment with the U.S. mediation role has been growing since the United States vetoed two U.N. Security Council resolutions last month criticizing the Israeli construction on a hill called Har Homa in Hebrew and Jabal Abu Ghneim in Arabic. The Palestinians expected the United States to wrest concessions from the Israelis after the vetoes but have not seen any.

      A sense of betrayal has been apparent among Palestinian demonstrators who in recent weeks have burned mock U.S. flags with the word "veto" scrawled across them. Protesters complained that the U.S. would not rein in Israel and was blocking efforts by Arab and European countries to intervene.

      A recent poll by the Nablus-based Center for Palestine Research and Studies found that Palestinian support for the peace process has fallen by 13 percentage points in the month since Israel began cutting down trees and carving roads for the housing project in East Jerusalem...

      Plus, if I remember correctly, before there even was an Oslo process there was the Washington talks, which were the first I-P negotiations arising out of the Madrid Conference. And they collapsed into nothing after Israel resumed its previously suspended settlement building, and the Palestinian delegation chief, Haidar Abdel-Shafi withdrew from the talks, specifically because it was impossible to negotiate with Israel over the disposition of land at the same time that Israel was swallowing it up. This was how he put it in May 1993:

      From the beginning when we started negotiations in Washington, we insisted that Israel should stop the settlement process, because it is a contradiction with the terms of reference. When Israel refused to stop, and the American sponsor did not compel Israel to abide by the terms of reference, the negotiation process then lost its credibility.

      So if Netanyahu is implying that the demand to end settlement is some newly-invented Palestinian ploy to avoid talks, he's lying.

  • False choice: Netanyahu says Abbas must choose peace w/ Hamas or Israel
    • Diane Mason March 29, 2011 at 7:28 am

      Done it: "The choice before us is not between Hamas and the Israelis, as Netanyahu puts it; the choice lies with Netanyahu, he must choose between settlements and peace."

  • What is your question for Benjamin Netanyahu?
    • Diane Mason March 26, 2011 at 7:32 pm

      Reuven - The Palestinian leadership doesn't deny those papers from the Negotiations Support Unit are real (apart from literally a handful out of the 1200 documents); they do dispute that the way al-Jazeera presented its scoop gave an accurate representation of what was in them.

  • Flying blind, with Wolfowitz, Power and Avnery
    • Diane Mason March 21, 2011 at 9:22 am with 2 replies

      I'm doubt whether the rebels in Libya are all one thing, but I don't think it's Orientalist to suggest that rebellion in eastern Libya will be partly Islamist in motivation. I'm pretty sure there was a survey a couple of years ago that found that, per capita, eastern Libya produced more suicide bombers in Iraq than anywhere else in the world.

      Edited to add - I can't find the survey I thought I remembered, but this from 2008 would seem to be based on the same thing:

      Late last year American soldiers raided an insurgent headquarters in the northern Iraqi town of Sinjar. Inside they found a document—perhaps an application form that Abd al-Salam had filled out on his way into the country—on the letterhead of the "Mujahedin Shura Council." The document listed little beyond Abd al-Salam's birthday, his brother's phone number and his hometown. Yet as they analyzed the papers, American investigators were struck by one thing. Of the 606 militants cataloged in the Sinjar records, almost 19 percent had come to Iraq from Libya. Previous intelligence estimates had always held that the bulk of Iraq's foreign fighters come from Saudi Arabia. Indeed, the largest number of militants in the Sinjar records—244 of them—were Saudi nationals. But in per capita terms, Libyans represented a much higher percentage. Perhaps the most startling detail: of 112 Libyan fighters named in the papers, an astoundingly large number—52—had come from a single town of 50,000 people along the Mediterranean coast, called Darnah....

      Despite the Sinjar revelations, few U.S. officials believe that Kaddafi is sending fighters to Iraq. A wave of jihadists returning to Libya from Iraq with new skills would be at least as big a nightmare for him as it is for Americans. The territory around Darnah has long been a locus of Islamist opposition to Kaddafi's regime. In the mid-1990s his security services cracked down hard on militants in Darnah, calling in helicopter gunships to suppress local rebels calling themselves the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group (LIFG). The town seems calm enough now, but there are still plenty of checkpoints manned by uniformed police. When asked about the LIFG, most residents fall silent—even those who are happy to endorse sending local recruits to Iraq.

      The Sinjar documents indicate that the Iraq insurgents had several local coordinators working in Darnah. There are few clues to how the young men were recruited, but after they signed up they were often sent to Iraq in small groups rather than singly. The Darnah pipeline passed through Egypt and Syria, where local coordinators arranged to have the enlistees smuggled across the border into Iraq. But the most recent records date only to last August, and it's an open question whether the pipeline is still flowing. Some analysts say the local Islamists disagree among themselves about whether the real jihad is in Iraq or at home in Libya.

      But the old network may be renewing its strength. Late last month a prominent member of the regime's domestic spy agency was assassinated in Darnah, according to a Western diplomat in Tripoli. The diplomat says the murdered Libyan was a notoriously cruel interrogator and had made many enemies, so he wasn't necessarily killed by Islamists. "He was widely known and disliked because he was such an a––hole," says the diplomat....

  • Libya/Gaza
    • Diane Mason March 20, 2011 at 5:11 pm

      Why has Hamas refused to allow red cross personnel to visit Shalit?

      Not a violation of international law? Of course it is.

      Richard, saying "of course it is" doesn't make it so.

      You are mistaken about what international law requires of Hamas. In general, captors are required to allow the Red Cross to visit military prisoners, but that is not an unconditional requirement. International law makes one caveat, and it is that Shalit's captors are required to allow Red Cross visits, so long as a Red Cross visit would not threaten the security of the captors themselves.

      In a place like Gaza, which is under close and continuous surveillance by Israel, it is highly likely that the Israelis would detect the hiding place where Shalit is being held if a Red Cross delegation is permitted to go there.

      Regardless of your "Not a violation of international law? Of course it is", it seems to me that Shalit's situation is one that clearly meets the conditions under which a captor might refuse Red Cross visits to a prisoner without violating international law.

      Edited to add: As Hamas is not officially a state, I don't think it is obliged at all to allow Red Cross visits in the first place. But if we give your point of view the benefit of the doubt, and attribute the responsibilities of a state to Hamas by virtue of it being the de facto government in Gaza, then you run into the argument I outlined above.

  • 'Jerusalem is our petrol' --Abu Alaa
    • Diane Mason February 24, 2011 at 10:02 pm with 2 replies

      1. On FGM - "Diversity" does not mean "anything goes". Diverse societies can outlaw abhorrent individual practices, and still remain diverse.

      2. One benefit of the Haredim and other sub groups in a diverse society is that by their very presence they require the individual members of society to encounter and learn to tolerant - or at least coexist with - people not like them.

      Hell, it even bothers me when some obscure frog species in the Amazon goes extinct, because we've all collectively lost a unique form of existence. I could hardly feel less for the Haredim than I could for some frog.

      No man is an island entire of itself; every man
      is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
      if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe
      is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as
      well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
      own were; any man's death diminishes me,
      because I am involved in mankind.
      And therefore never send to know for whom
      the bell tolls; it tolls for thee,

      so to speak.

    • Diane Mason February 24, 2011 at 5:47 pm with 1 replies

      Q: But can't you envisage a Palestinian state that embraces minorities, not just as a mechanism for dealing with the settlers, but because diversity is a good thing in itself and benefits the society that embraces it?

      A: No. Jews must be Israelis.

      Starkly depressing way of looking at the world.

  • 'NYT' beats a dead horse
    • Diane Mason February 15, 2011 at 12:20 pm with 5 replies

      Richard, I think what you correctly see as the key to Avishai's article - i.e. the active mediation of the U.S. to bridge the divide - is also the weak spot of Avishai's article.

      Avishai says everything is possible if Obama truly engages. But Obama is not going to engage on this issue in the second half of a first term in office, because he wants a second term. Nothing we have seen of Obama so far suggests that he would give up the chance of re-election on a point of principle. Right now, he is so scared of losing the "pro-Israel" crowd in our internal politics that doesn't even dare withhold his veto on a UNSC resolution that has specifically been written to reflect US stated policy on the settlements! He's certainly not going to dirty his hands on really controversial stuff like dividing Jerusalem.

      He is not going to bridge this gap. So all the good outcomes that Avishai sees from his bridging the gap, are moot. It is no good saying that X Y & Z will result from Obama doing A B & C, when there is no prospect of Obama doing A B & C. At that point, X Y & Z are just hot air.

      Obama will not consider doing A B & C until he has a second term in his pocket, at which point X Y & Z will be a distant memory. The rest of the world is moving on, certainly the Middle East is. The situation is not going to stay still and wait for Obama to arrive at a place where he can present a bridging proposal without fear of what the Friends of Israel can do to his re-election prospects.

  • Liberals say now is time to get two-state solution
    • Diane Mason February 14, 2011 at 2:56 pm with 2 replies

      Obama has a narrow window of time in which to achieve a two state solution. He also has a narrow window of time in which to try and get elected to a second term.

      Judging by the fact that he can't bring himself even to abstain on a UNSC resolution that reflects US stated policy on the settlements, which of those narrow windows would Bernard say is much more important to Obama?

      By the time Obama is ready to make the deal, the window will be well and truly shut.

  • Should the Palestinians unilaterally declare a state?
    • Diane Mason January 13, 2011 at 10:58 am with 1 replies

      But I don't think Fayyad believes state-building alone leads to independence. Why would Fayyad be the most prominent member of the PA to participate in the civil disobedience at places like Bilin if he thought that institution building was all that mattered?

      I think it's a mistake to see different approaches to ending the occupation as intrinsically an either-or thing. Let everybody shake the tree by doing what they can from where they can - without spending so much of our energy criticizing other people who are doing something different - and see what shakes loose. Let the diplomats pursue recognition at the UN, while supporters worldwide push BDS, and civil society pursues civil disobedience, and Fayyad does his institution-building thing, etc etc etc.

      Sometimes different approaches will conflict with others - eg institution building in isolation runs the risk of normalizing the occupation and so undermining everyone else's efforts to end it; or, using violence against a military occupier might be a legal right under international law, but it might also make it more difficult to mobilize civil international support for BDS or diplomatic support for pro-Palestinian initiatives at the UN - but most times I don't think it's necessary to think in terms of either-or.

  • Goldberg's next war sure sounds a lot like his last one
    • Diane Mason January 3, 2011 at 12:05 pm with 2 replies

      He is misusing that quote from the Koran.

      It is from vv 60-61 of the eighth chapter, which describes how Muslims should respond to the pagan armies threatening to wipe out the nascent Muslim community in Medina. These two verses are generally interpreted today not as a call for Muslims to make war on anyone, but as an exhortation for them to remain strong under difficult circumstances.

      What those verses actually say is that in the face of the pagan armies, the Muslims are to muster whatever defenses they can, in the hope of frightening off the attackers. And if that works, and the enemy sues for peace, the Muslims must make peace with them.

      So the verses Goldberg quotes as an incitement to war, are actually intended to deter it. He could have used other translations of the Koran that make this point explicit, like the Muhammad Asad translation:

      "Hence, make ready against them whatever force and war mounts you are able to muster, so that you might deter thereby the enemies of God, who are your enemies as well, and others besides them of whom you may be unaware, [but] of whom God is aware; and whatever you may expend in God's cause shall be repaid to you in full, and you shall not be wronged.

      But if they incline to peace, incline thou to it as well, and place thy trust in God: verily, He alone is all-hearing, all-knowing!"

      Or Muhammad Sarwar:

      "Mobilize your (defensive) force as much as you can to frighten the enemies of God and your own enemies. This also will frighten those who are behind them whom you do not know but God knows well. Whatever you spend for the cause of God, He will give you sufficient recompense with due justice.

      If they (the unbelievers) propose peace, accept it and trust in God. God is All-hearing and All-knowing."

      Presumably he uses the Yusuf Ali translation of 1934 because that is the only one of the major translations that uses the word "terror", and so sounds scarier and fits a GWoT meme.

  • I been thru the desert with the JNF, it felt good to make it bloom
  • The world will be a much safer place when American Jews stop believing these 4 bad ideas
    • Diane Mason December 23, 2010 at 2:39 pm

      Thanks yourstruly, and of course this was a response to your comment at 10:11 am, which I put in the wrong place.

    • Diane Mason December 23, 2010 at 11:46 am with 15 replies

      I’m not sure about that "always siding with the slave" argument.
       
      I remember as a kid seeing a documentary called “Jews of Alabama”, and it was an eye-opener because I’d been brought up on the narrative of Jews being on the side of the Good Guys in the civil rights era, while these southern Jews were quite open about the fact that they hadn’t been. I mean, they weren't bragging about it - you could see it was an awkward acknowledgment for them to make - but they said that's just how it was. And they said the reason was that although they were not entirely at home in Christian Alabama – “a bit too much emphasis on Jesus in the pregame prayers at the Friday night football game” as they put it in the show – when it came to conflict between southern whites and southern blacks they were white, benefited from all the associated privileges, and so didn’t buck it.
       
      Then on the other hand you had Jewish-Americans being active and prominent in the civil rights movement. But why are people like Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner regarded as emblematic of Jewish Americans and civil rights, while those southern Jews who shut up and enjoyed the privilege are not? If you have such differing responses to the civil rights movement among Jewish Americans, then there is something other than Jewishness shaping their views on civil rights.
       
      Likewise apartheid South Africa. Everybody knows the role South African Jews like Joe Slovo, Ruth First, Albie Sachs, Ronnie Kasrils and Helen Suzman played in the anti-apartheid movement. But there were a lot more than five people in the South African Jewish community. There were about 100,000 South African Jews in the apartheid era, and overwhelmingly they cooperated with the apartheid government, because in the black-white divide they were white, and enjoyed the privileges of white supremacy.
       
      And look at Israel today. Jewish Israelis are not, generally, up in arms over their own privilege and the lack of civil rights for Palestinians and other non-Jews are they? There doesn't seem to be anything in their Jewishness that is compelling them to stand up for the oppressed Other.

      So I think the Jewish tradition of "always siding with the slave" only works if by "always" we mean "not including those times when siding with the oppressor".

      I think a better theory is that Jewish people are like any other community when it comes to taking a stand against oppression, and that the primary motivation is self-interest rather than altruistic identification with oppressed people. That means most people in a community do nothing when oppression doesn't touch them personally. When they benefit by being part of the privileged elite in an unjust system, they shut up and enjoy it because it's not in their interest to buck the system.

      Then you get people who do buck the system, like northern Jews who fought for civil rights in the south, or liberal or communist Jews who fought against apartheid. What they did can also be seen as a form of self-interest, by Jewish people who did not self-identify primarily as honorary members of a white supremacist elite, but as members of a minority group in a country that discriminated between minorities, and who understood that ethnic privilege could be turned against them just as easily as it could work in their favor. It is in the self-interest of a minority in a multicultural society to strive for a color-blind society that does not privilege or discriminate against its minorities.

      Then you have those courageous people who buck an unjust system for truly altruistic reasons, just because it is the right thing to do regardless of the cost.

      I'm not sure there's a clear dividing line between these groups, certainly not between groups two and three. But I think group one would be the largest group; group two much smaller, and group three much smaller again. And I suspect that breakdown might be true of most groups' response in the face of oppression, rather than a specifically Jewish thing.

  • A jolt? More on Brazil's decision to recognize Palestine
    • Diane Mason December 6, 2010 at 10:13 pm

      The USA IS on the decline – no two ways about it.

      I think this is exactly the message of the South Americans' actions. If Obama's inability to move Netanyahu has a positive aspect, it is that it has made clear to everyone that the U.S. is unable to achieve anything with Israel, that the U.S. monopoly on Mid East peace is useless, and that if the U.S. can't do it, then other countries will have to.

    • Diane Mason December 6, 2010 at 9:55 pm with 1 replies

      I wouldn't be surprised if France goes before Germany. Germany can't say boo to a goose without having the Holocaust flung in its face, while France is chomping at the bit for the EU to have a more proactive role in the Mid East, with itself in the lead. Just as Brazil sees itself as an emerging major economic power, and by recognizing Palestine is setting down a marker for an expanded diplomatic influence to match its new economic clout. I think its all about other countries finally giving up on the possibility of US diplomacy achieving anything in the Mid East, and stepping in to fill the vacuum.

    • Diane Mason December 6, 2010 at 5:43 pm with 8 replies

      China and Russia already recognize Palestine. Here's the map of who does and who doesn't: link to tinyurl.com
      . It's amazing really to see how much of the world recognizes Palestine, while here in the U.S. it is treated like some kind of aberration.

      Before the last few days, the two blocs that were the big holdouts were the U.S.' two Cold War spheres of influence, South America and Western Europe. Abbas has been doing a big diplomatic push for the last 18 months to get those two areas on board. I bet he is hoping one of the big European countries will do what Brazil did, with the same sort of ripple effect.

  • Slater says Jewish state is warranted by likelihood of recurrence of anti-Semitism
    • Diane Mason November 16, 2010 at 4:45 pm with 3 replies

      the argument for a Jewish state is not racist by its very nature

      Perhaps not, if we're theorizing about a Jewish state being established somewhere where it didn't affect the rights of non-Jews. But the Jewish state wasn't built in theory, it was built in Palestine, where the overwhelmingly (96%) non-Jewish preexisting population meant that the only way to create and maintain a Jewish state was - and is - by expelling and disenfranchising the majority population who happen to have the "wrong" ethnic-religious background. So what does his argument boil down to? "Zionism: not racist if you can imagine it existing in some way other than it exists in real life!". What kind of argument is that?

  • Memo to NYT: fix your boilerplate
    • Diane Mason November 9, 2010 at 8:50 pm

      Even the BBC version is four words too long. The settlements are all illegal under the Fourth Geneva Convention, as confirmed by the International Court of Justice's opinion of 9 July 2004**, regardless of whether Israel wants to dispute it or not.

      ** Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem, are illegal and an obstacle to peace and to economic and social development [... and] have been established in breach of international law.

  • De Gaulle/Arafat
    • Diane Mason November 9, 2010 at 9:05 pm

      De Gaulle in Nov 1967: Israel, having attacked first, took all its objectives in six days of fighting. Now in the territories it captured it is organizing an occupation that cannot proceed without oppression, repression, expulsions; and if there is resistance to this, Israel calls it terrorism...

    • Diane Mason November 9, 2010 at 8:41 pm

      I've collected a few excerpts below that had me thinking about the analogy to the Palestinian resistance, Palestinian nationalism, and the leader of that struggle, Yasser Arafat....

      When you read this piece and then hear Palestinians dismiss the P.A. as Vichy or Collaborationist, you understand that they are not just rejectionist, they are operating in a strong historical framework....

      How to reconcile those comments with the fact that the PA was Arafat's baby?

  • Schumer: settlements are meaningless, only a strong Israel lobby will bring peace
    • Diane Mason November 8, 2010 at 4:28 pm

      If Israel is full of moderates who want to give back the Occupied Territories, let just one government of Israel offer to get out - with no tricks, no Israeli troops left behind, no settlements left behind in places that just happen to control the West Bank water supply, no permanent "leasing" to Israel of the Jordan Valley which would leave Palestine entirely surrounded by Israel, no ring of settlements cutting off the West Bank from East Jerusalem, which is the engine for the Palestinian economy - just offer to get out, no strings attached. In fact, just have them say one sentence: "The state of Israel has no territorial claims in the Occupied Territories beyond those that will be reached through negotiation with the PLO". In short, disprove the "extremists" who have gained so much support in Palestinian society precisely because they see perfectly well that Israel's words about being willing to get out of the Occupied Territories don't match Israel's actions which, for the entire life of the peace process, have involved frenetically swallowing up the Occupied Territories. Go ahead and prove those skeptical "extremists" wrong, and see how popular the PA moderates will become.

      You (collectively) say you're the only democracy in the Middle East, and you (individually) say that most Israelis want to give back the Occupied Territories. So go on and have your democratically-elected government offer to get out of the Occupied Territories in return for a final, definitive end to all Palestinian claims against Israel.

      But you can't, because no party that ran on a platform of getting out of the Occupied Territories would ever be elected. Because there is no Israeli majority that really favors giving them back. There is an Israeli majority that watches the continuing colonization of the Occupied Territories, continues to vote for parties who they know will continue it, but likes to pretend that the policies of the governments they elect aren't really their responsibility, just the work of some "extremist" settlers.

    • Diane Mason November 8, 2010 at 4:04 pm

      1. Israel certainly doesn't have to recognize Palestine as an Islamic state, but this is a red herring seeing as nobody is asking it to. The Palestinians recognized the State of Israel in 1993 and, just like every other entity in the world that recognizes Israel, it leaves the question of how the state of Israel defines itself as to the government of Israel. The corresponding requirement on the part of Israel would be for Israel to recognize the State of Palestine, and leave it to Palestine to decide how it wants to define itself.

      2. The Palestinians already accepted the counter party in recognizing the State of Israel. The counter-party to "Palestine" is "Israel", not "Jewish". You are conflating "Jewish" with "Israeli", as you also do in your final aside when you suggest that the "reverse" of Palestinian is a Jewish state. It isn't, the counter-party to a Palestinian state is an Israeli state.

    • Diane Mason November 8, 2010 at 3:02 pm with 6 replies

      "The first depicts a smiling Abbas that shows the map of “greater Palestine” to the photographers"

      Well yes, it's a picture of Abbas with an embroidered map. But what's it a map of? Is it a map called "Historic Palestine"? Well then it would show all of Mandate Palestine wouldn't it? Or is it meant to be a map of the Palestine that Abbas claims to be President of, as you seem to suggest? Do you really think that Abbas is presenting this piece of framed embroidery as some sort of formal claim to political jurisdiction over the whole territory?

      Who is he presenting the map to, and what's it meant to convey to them? If you read Arabic, and the text is relevant to the map, tell us so we can know what the map is meant to say. Can you not conceive of any legitimate reason why Palestinians would depict historic Palestine? Can they not record their own history existence without it being a hostile act to you? Abbas was born in what is now Israel and was expelled when he was 12 years old - must he never refer in any way to the Palestine he comes from, for fear of sounding hateful to the people who live there now?

      You do understand don't you that just as Israelis can talk about "the state of Israel" and "the land of Israel" and (generally) understand the difference between the two, Palestinians too make distinctions in conversation between "geographic"/ "historic" Palestine (the entire territory) versus “political” Palestine i.e. the 22% of the OPT they claim for the prospective Palestinian state? And that a framed embroidery is rather more likely to be a commemoration of the historical than a political claim?

      As for how "geography and civics should be (and actually is) in Palestinian schools", I doubt whether you have any idea what is taught in Palestinian schools, other than the distorted, twisted, decontextualized fragments that get cherry picked by propagandists like CMEP and presented as fact: link to tinyurl.com
      .

  • 'New Yorker' connects Elvis Costello's use of the word 'nigger' 30 years ago to his recent participation in boycott of Israel
    • Diane Mason November 8, 2010 at 3:09 pm

      I hope nobody drags up stuff from my past to smear me. I'd be mortified to be confronted with some of the things I said and believed back then, and have them displayed as if they contained some eternal defect in my character. Especially because I was a Zionist then.

  • 'Let us out of the box'
    • Diane Mason November 6, 2010 at 5:40 pm

      I don't think there was anything said in the substance of the talk that hasn't been heard before ad nauseaum. But a couple of impressions:

      1. You could hear Erekat pulling his punches when he was constrained by the need not be too critical of the Americans, because the Americans are currently the only game in town. Brought home how much better off the Palestinians would be if the mediator were the UN and the parameters were international law.

      2. Sometimes Aaron David Miller used "we" to refer to Americans, but occasionally to Israelis (maybe Jews at one point?). Weird to imagine how that worked when he was supposed to be mediating I/P talks. Maybe he was just mis-speaking; it was all rather conversational. In fact the whole thing was very chummy.

      3. Erekat was absolutely convinced that Netanyahu has no solution, except to have no solution and keep the status quo. Erekat didn't explicitly say the PA should disband, but hinted strongly that the choices were to end the occupation or dump responsibility for it back on Israel, which kind of implies it.

      4. Miller thought a U.S. President determined on a peace deal could impose his will despite the Lobby, Erekat seemed dubious/incredulous.

      5. Recognizing Israel as a "Jewish state" was a non-starter: "No, that would be Zionism, and I'm not a Zionist" (paraphrasing Erekat). The point seemed well-understood in the audience; in fact, answered that way, the demand sounded stupid.

      6. Would the swing to the GOP in the mid-terms negatively affect the peace talks? "Yes of course, because the Democrats are just so pro-Palestine..... Hahahahahaha!" (paraphrasing Erekat again).

  • The crisis of the liberal Zionist
    • Diane Mason November 3, 2010 at 11:42 am with 5 replies

      About the progressive Jew who sees nothing wrong with the many Muslim nations in the world, but who cannot allow the Jews to have a single state of their own anywhere in the world....

      What a red herring. Nobody is protesting because the Jews have "a single state of their own anywhere in the world", they're protesting because it wasn't established "anywhere in the world", but in Palestine, which was already somebody else's home, and where it could not be established and cannot be maintained except by the violent destruction of that somebody else. It really isn't all about you Bradley, it's about the fact that other people have rights too.

      And he's the liberal end of the Zionist spectrum.....

  • They up and died!
    • Diane Mason October 14, 2010 at 9:31 am

      It reminds me of a Haaretz article about Mahmoud Halfalla, a seventy year man who was killed in 2004 when the IDF demolished his house with him inside. Haaretz headlined it: "Man crushed to death after IDF destroys home". They made it sound like the two things weren't connected - like he'd had his house demolished and then, right after that, just to complete the really really crappy day he was having, he'd had the misfortune to be crushed to death in some unrelated mystery incident - rather than just come out and say that The Most Moral Army In The World crushed a wheelchair-bound man to death by demolishing his house on top of him.

  • PA's challenge to Israel: Set your borders
    • Diane Mason October 14, 2010 at 11:44 am

      I think this "sell out!!" response to Rabbo is misplaced. He's not saying the PLO will recognize Israel as a "Jewish state", ie a state where it's ok to privilege Jews over Palestinians. He says "If this map is based on the 1967 borders and provides for the end of the Israeli occupation over all Palestinian lands... then we recognise Israel by whatever name it applies to itself in accordance with international law." I think that's just restating the established PLO position ie we recognize the state of Israel and, as is normal diplomatic protocol, we will call it by whatever name it chooses for itself. When Olmert raised the "Jewish state" demand, the PLO told him the same thing - you can define yourself however you like, but if you choose to call yourself "the Jewish state of Israel" we will call you that in exactly the same sense that we call Iran "the Islamic Republic of Iran".

      When countries call Iran "The Islamic Republic of Iran", they don't mean they recognize that it embodies Islamic values, they simply mean they recognize the state of Iran, and part of recognition is allowing a state to be known by whatever name it likes. Like when Germany was divided, we called the Eastern part "the German Democratic Republic". It didn't mean we thought East Germany was a democracy, it means that we recognized the country and called it by the name it chose to go by. I think Rabbo here, and Erekat in Olmert's time, were being very careful to say the PLO is willing to recognize Israel in exactly the same way that every country with full diplomatic relations recognizes Israel - ie they will recognize the state of Israel and use the name it chooses for itself. But they're not going to go beyond that and recognize it as a Jewish state in the way Olmert and Livni and Netanyahu mean - ie acknowledge it's a place where its ok for Jewish people to be collectively privileged over non-Jews.

  • Benny Morris, former historian
    • Diane Mason October 12, 2010 at 12:24 pm with 2 replies

      Hitchens approvingly cites (and expands) a metaphor coined (I think) by Jeffrey Goldberg, a correspondent for The Atlantic: A man (the Zionist Jew), to save himself, leaps from a burning building (anti-Semitic and Holocaust Europe) and lands on an innocent bystander (a Palestinian), crushing him.

      The metaphor is a famous one, and was coined by Isaac Deutscher in a collection of his short works - The non-Jewish Jew and other essays - published posthumously in 1968.

      I'm not sure what exactly it says about Benny Morris the historian, that he doesn't know a rather famous Polish leftist historian from Jeffrey Goldberg.

  • Scientific paper shows that Israeli attacks merely perpetuate violence
    • Diane Mason October 7, 2010 at 12:23 pm with 1 replies

      There have suggestions from time to time in the Israeli press that not only do Israeli attacks perpetuate violence, but that some Israeli govts know this very well and have intended for this to be the outcome when authorizing some IDF operations. (I suppose the underlying logic would be that escalating violence is a good bet when you are the militarily-dominant party). Off the top of my head, I remember Ha'aretz hinting at the possibility that maybe the real purpose of Israel's assassination policy was to provoke retaliatory Palestinian bombings that could be used to justify IDF operations in the West Bank, right after Raed Carmi was assassinated while his faction and the IDF were supposed to be observing a reciprocal ceasefire. And a guy called Motti Morel, who was an advisor to Amram Mitzna, caused a stink during Mitzna's election campaign when he talked openly about how difficult it was to campaign on issues that were good for the Labor Party, seeing as whenever Sharon wanted to distract attention away from social/economic subjects he could just launch an assassination, knowing that Hamas would respond with Qassems from Gaza, and hey presto the debate would immediately turn back to the Likud's favorite topic, i.e. security. And there's that much-cited Haaretz story, "More than a million bullets", that came out early in the second intifada, about how Israel's own actions escalated mass protests into a military confrontation.

      Prof Steve Niva of Evergreen Univ looked at this in a systematic way, in an article maybe four(?) years ago on the timing of Palestinian suicide bombings in Israel. He found that the single most reliable predictor of when there would be a suicide bombing was for the Israeli govt to assassinate the leader of a Palestinian faction while it was maintaining a ceasefire with regard to Israel. The pattern of Faction Declares Ceasefire... Faction's Leader is Assassinated .... Faction Declares Ceasefire Off and Launches Suicide Mission was so repetitive that Niva's conclusion was that it seemed the only thing more threatening for Ariel Sharon's government than Palestinian terrorism was a Palestinian cease-fire.

  • It's not about cultural merit
  • What is Hamas thinking?
  • Israeli soldier mocks Palestinian prisoners in Facebook photos
    • Diane Mason August 16, 2010 at 8:15 pm

      The EDL is a natural ally for Zionism. They share a militant ideology that says national identity is a preexisting reality deriving from biological descent from a founding "tribe", rather than a changeable thing that is created and re-created as different peoples become part of a nation; and that consequently people who don't have the right ethnic Stuff can't be equal participants in the nation. With a common underlying ideology and a common Muslim scapegoat to attack, the fact that the English far right has been historically anti-semitic becomes an inconvenience that is easily jettisoned.

  • The borders of the Palestinian 'state' come into focus
  • Zionachronism
    • Diane Mason August 12, 2010 at 8:21 am

      The very nature of Israel ensures it will never be a safe haven. It is a self-proclaimed "Jewish state" in a land where most people are not Jewish, and have to be expelled or disenfranchised to safeguard an artificial Jewish majority. Seeing as the expelled and disenfranchised have 200 million fellow Arabs in the immediate area and one billion Muslims in the wider neighborhood, none of whom think it is acceptable for Arabs or Muslims to be dispossessed for their failure to be Jewish, this is a project that will never be a refuge from anti-semitism but is more likely a cause of it.

  • BBC buries the bitter
    • Diane Mason July 7, 2010 at 11:19 am with 1 replies

      "homes for Jews in the Occupied Palestinian Territories" are "illegal under international law".

      NO THEY'RE NOT. Homes for ISRAELIS in the Occupied Palestinian Territories are illegal under international law, because the Occupied Palestinian Territories are not Israel they're, well, the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

      "Palestinian" is not an ethnic-religious identity, it's a nationality, and one that historically - before Zionism introduced the idea of religion the basis of nationality in Palestine - includes Muslims, Christians & Jews.

      So the illegality of the settlements doesn't lie in the fact that they house Jews (although that happens to be true). It lies in the fact that they are built by the state of Israel, on land that does not belong to the state of Israel, to house Israeli citizens, with the intention of annexing that occupied Palestinian land to Israel - all in contravention of the Fourth Geneva Convention.

      It's the Israeli-ness, not the Jewishness. That's an important distinction, one that goes to the heart of the conflict, and it's not that difficult to understand. But too difficult for the BBC apparently. Making the Israel-Palestine conflict into the Jews v The Rest conflict is just lazily adopting the blood and soil terminology of Zionist nationalism instead of using the diplomatically correct terms of Israelis and Palestinians.

  • Makdisi in Houston Chronicle: Americans must confront the dispossession of Arabs in '48
    • Diane Mason July 6, 2010 at 11:09 am with 1 replies

      I agree with Ken. Any Jewish Israeli who was made a refugee has the right to return home if he or she wishes, and to receive compensation for their loss from the country that made them refugees. Those who freely choose not to return should still receive compensation. International law and natural justice demand it.

      They deserve no less than the Palestinians who were made refugees in order to establish a Jewish state in a land where the preexisting majority was not Jewish, and who of course have the same rights outlined above.

  • Chomsky in Lebanon
    • Diane Mason June 17, 2010 at 4:16 pm

      If somebody said to you, "I just want to point to you that the swastika was an ancient good luck symbol, so surely that tells you something about the nature of people who would use it on their flag", would you say :

      a. Gosh you're right, I guess we shouldn't be too hard on those Nazis after all.
      b. I think the actions of a country say rather more than the symbols on their flag.

  • New footage of flotilla attack contradicts Israeli account
    • Diane Mason June 10, 2010 at 3:48 pm with 1 replies

      Yes, even as I was writing that comment I was thinking that there would be people who would look at those pictures and crow "See they hate us more than they love life!" etc etc.

      I think you can see from the glimpse of her in the video just how she really feels about the loss of her husband.

    • Diane Mason June 10, 2010 at 3:24 pm

      fix typo: "She did it very matter of factly, because she said she would never give the Israelis the satisfaction of making her cry"

    • Diane Mason June 10, 2010 at 3:18 pm with 6 replies

      I spent quite a lot of time sifting through machine translations of Turkish press in the days after the raid, trying to find out who these Turkish victims were. And even that minimal degree of familiarity with them makes these images difficult to watch.

      The man being carried below decks, barely alive and bleeding heavily, at 37:51 thru 38:04 (repeated at 43:08), is Çetin Topçuoglu, the former Turkish taekwondo champion and coach of Turkey's national team. The distressed looking lady following him as he is carried below is his wife, Çigdem. This is them with their gold medals at the World Taekwondo Expo in 2008.

      Look how they adore each other.

      In her first interview after she was repatriated, Çigdem Topçuoglu described how her husband was shot and eventually bled to death as she sat with him trying to comfort him. She did it very matter of factly, because she would never give the Israelis the satisfaction of making her cry.

      Two days ago, she was mentioned peripherally by a translator who was interviewed in Haaretz by Amira Hass, and who described the experience of translating between the ship's passengers and IDF interviewers. The translator described one woman, something to do with taekwondo, who was being questioned about why she was trying to conceal a cellphone. And it turned out the cellphone was her husband's, and she wanted to keep it as a souvenir of him, because he was one of the dead on the ship. And everyone had been surprised, because till she hadn't let on that they had killed her husband.

      At her husband's funeral, she and their son, Aytek, gave a speech that nobody is to cry, but must be happy because her husband is home, and at least his death is making people wake up to what is going on in Palestine. And the pictures of the funeral are of them smiling for the guests. They've already both volunteered to be on the next Turkish ship to Gaza.

      She has shown enormous dignity, but in our discourse she just an "al qaeda terrorist", because Israel knows it can get away with smearing people like that when it is lying to an American audience about dead Muslims.

  • Ads promoting one democratic state pop up in Ramallah
    • Diane Mason June 10, 2010 at 4:53 pm

      Yes, thinking of Israel's Jewishness in terms of Jewish values instead of how many Jewish grandparents you have to have in order to become a citizen would be a big leap forward.

      Though I would add that if Israel is going to be a state of all its citizens, then surely it shouldn't formally define itself as a state that expresses Jewish values, but as a state that expresses the values of its Jewish and non-Jewish peoples alike.

      Gotta run. Kids screaming to be fed....

    • Diane Mason June 10, 2010 at 4:17 pm

      But first of all, before you find mechanisms to make everyone feel like they're part of the country, don't you have to have some kind of basic agreement about what kind of country it actually is?

      It's as if we're saying that step 1 is "Israel becomes a binational democratic state of all its citizens", and step 2 is "Everybody in that binational state performs some kind of national service as a way of integrating everyone". But the issue that really matters isn't whether step 2 follows step 1 (and personally I don't think there's anything wrong with national service in general so long as it isn't necessarily military), but how on earth do we get to step 1 from where we are now?

      I'm just not seeing how we jump from Israel now - as a country that exists precisely to reserve the full benefits of citizenship only to Jews - to Israel as a country where everyone is equal and integrated through a shared experience of national service.

      Do you see what I'm getting at?

    • Diane Mason June 10, 2010 at 3:44 pm with 7 replies

      If Israel gave equal citizenship to all, the majority of citizens would soon be Palestinian (if they're not already a majority). So, in a true democracy of equal rights for everyone, national service is not going to be in the army of a "Jewish state" but in the army of a binational state with an Arab majority.

      How would that ease the "demographic shock" for Jewish Israelis? You seem to be postulating national service as a way of easing Palestinians into citizenship of a Jewish state. But if they're truly equal citizens then they must also have an equal vote, and the Palestinian majority is hardly likely to vote to keep Israel a Jewish-preferential state.

      Israel's whole problem with the Palestinians is not that they are a disloyal minority, but that unless you keep expelling them or disenfranchising them in order to gerrymander a fake Jewish majority, they are actually the majority, and given equal rights would simply vote themselves free of the Zionist experiment.

  • Yglesias's views have changed dramatically since college
    • Diane Mason June 10, 2010 at 11:12 am

      Well, I'm glad Matt disavows that comment, and agree that we shouldn't be held accountable forever for what we might have said in our college days. Personally, I was a Zionist in my college days, and I'd really be embarrassed to have anyone remind me of that now, 25 years on.

      Having said that, Matt might not be for ethnic cleansing anymore, but he still looks at the Mid East solely through the prism of Zionism, to the point of being unable to engage at all with the idea that Palestinian Arabs might just have every right to reject having a Zionist state dumped on their heads. Sean Lee's recent post on Accepting Partition - and the comments the post attracted, including from Matt - laid out very well the absurdity of blaming the Palestinians for not accepting partition when partition so obviously trampled the rights of the large Arab majority in Palestine. But all Matt Yglesias had to say in response was, basically, "well fine, that's all true, but they should have accepted having their rights trampled on anyway, because if they didn't they'd get trampled on even worse". What kind of a position is that? Because Palestinians live on land that Zionism covets they should just accept the fact they have no rights of their own, only the right to choose between eating shit or being killed/expelled? You couldn't ask for a better example of why there's no such thing as "Liberal Zionism".

  • Remembering the dead and the Rachel Corrie’s mission
    • Diane Mason June 4, 2010 at 10:20 pm

      Bulent Yildirim said today that the Israelis were looking for 16 people, and he was one of them, and that Bengi and Kiliçlar both resemble him.

  • Were Israeli photos of flotilla 'weapons' faked?
    • Diane Mason June 2, 2010 at 6:25 pm

      Well if they were trying to achieve widespread ridicule and hilarity, mission accomplished.

    • Diane Mason June 2, 2010 at 6:20 pm

      "Those alleged 'roses' in the background are in fact poppies that were being smuggled into Gaza by cunning Turkish jihadis. Hamas was going to process them into drugs that they would flood Israel with, so that they could tunnel into the Only Democracy In The Middle East© and Drive The Jews Into The Sea© while The Most Moral Army In The World© would be too high to stop them."

      -- Mark Regev.

    • Diane Mason June 2, 2010 at 6:05 pm with 2 replies

      If the photos were fakes, wouldn't they be of something more incriminating than an assortment of everyday stuff that loads of people have lying around in their garage or basement? I mean, presumably the Israelis want us to look at these photos and sympathize with their poor outgunned commandos, but most people's reaction is just going to be to burst out laughing when you tell them that this is the "weaponry" that scared Israel's special forces to death.

      It's not as if the IDF hasn't got a whole bunch of guns lying around that it could have taken a few snapshots of and passed of as something they found on the ship, if they were looking to fake photos.

  • 'American Jewish Committee' says flotilla activists used 'automatic weapons' on Israelis
    • Diane Mason May 31, 2010 at 6:37 pm with 3 replies

      If the passengers were armed with automatic weapons, why do the photos of their "weapons" - courtesy of the IDF (link to ht.ly
      - show kitchen knives and household tools? If they really had guns, wouldn't it be a better propaganda coup for the Israelis to display those guns, instead of a bunch of screwdrivers and wrenches?

  • 'Americans for Peace Now' characterizes flotilla as a 'threat'
    • Diane Mason May 31, 2010 at 4:53 pm with 1 replies

      At least nine people on board the ship died.

      Goodness me, how very unfortunate it all sounds. Did they all eat the same undercooked chicken at dinner?

      Obviously it was nothing to do with the Israeli commandos, because the correct words for that would be "were killed", not "died".

  • Chomsky has blown cold and hot on P.A.
  • Under his breath, Richard Cohen whispers, 'Israel, beware'
    • Diane Mason May 18, 2010 at 11:22 am

      I think that article is fascinating because it illustrates the conflict between what Richard Cohen knows to be true, and what he wants to be true. And the impossibility of reconciling the two things leaves him incoherent. His brain understands it is impossible to establish a state for Zionist Jews in a place where the vast majority of people are not Jewish, where exclusive self-determination for Jews can only be maintained through the denial of equal rights to everyone else, and to expect that the disenfranchised majority is going to be just fine with that. But in his heart, he wants to hold on to Zionism as well-meaning, as nothing worse than a "mistake". So he can't bring himself to link the "mistake" to its outcome. He sources the violence in Palestine to some inexplicable zealotry on the part of Hamas and Hizbullah, rather than to the "mistake" that required the majority of Palestine's people to be excluded from equality because of their failure to have a Jewish mom.

    • Diane Mason May 18, 2010 at 10:37 am with 7 replies

      He said: "The greatest mistake Israel could make at the moment is to forget that Israel itself is a mistake. It is an honest mistake, a well-intentioned mistake, a mistake for which no one is culpable, but the idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now. Israel fights Hezbollah in the north and Hamas in the south, but its most formidable enemy is history itself."

      in "Hunker Down With History", WaPo, 18 Jul 2006.

  • Elvis Costello cancels Israel concerts: sometimes it's 'impossible to simply look the other way'
  • RoR + J&S = 1SS
    • Diane Mason April 3, 2010 at 8:12 pm

      No, I don't think that in practice there is any way that the recognition of the RoR results in Israel's "demographic balance" being overturned, because I'm talking about recognition and implementation of the RoR taking place within the context of a negotiated final status deal and there is no way that Israel is going to sign on to a final status deal that commits it to recognizing the right in theory and also to its unlimited implementation in practice.

      The balancing act comes between Israel acknowledging the right of return, and then having the individual refugees freely choose to implement that right in ways that do not invite the Israeli veto. Yasir Abed Rabbo, who was one of the Palestinian negotiators at Camp David and Taba (and who is also a refugee from 1948) said: "We asked [at Taba] for the principle of the right of return, but the implementation of it, should be discussed in a very practical and even pragmatic way, without affecting or without -- yes, without affecting -- the Jewish nature of the state of Israel... You want, as a Palestinian who was born in Jaffa, to forget my personal thing, my attachment as a person to the place of my birth? I will not do that. But you want me, as a serious politician responsible for the future of my people, and as a person who wants, really, to put an end to these agonies, to take a position which hurts me -- I should take it. I will do that. This is the difference...". And that is the position that the individual refugees would have to be willing to take if there is to be a negotiated 2 state solution - Israel finally acknowledges and expresses regret that the refugees were dispossessed by its creation, and recognizes they have the right to return but, recognizing that mass implementation of their own individual rights is going to scupper the entire agreement that finally brings about an independent Palestinian state, maybe the individual refugees can agree to implement their rights in ways other than returning to Israel.

      The actual wording that Israel came up with in the Taba talks for recognizing the RoR said in part: "The issue of the Palestinian refugees is central to Israeli-Palestinian relations. Its comprehensive and just resolution is essential to creating a lasting and morally scrupulous peace. … The State of Israel solemnly expresses its sorrow for the tragedy of the Palestinian refugees, their suffering and losses, and will be an active partner in ending this terrible chapter that was opened 53 years ago.... A just settlement of the refugee problem in accordance with United Nations Security Council Resolution 242 must lead to the implementation of United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194."

      That would give some wiggle room for a compromise because Resolution 194 says that every Palestinian refugee who wants to can return home, and every one who chooses not to return has the right to be compensated for what they lost. So the key to a negotiated agreement would be putting together a package of options for the refugees that includes all the possible options that satisfy 194 - return to what is now Israel; compensation and resettlement in the country of refuge (primarily for those in Syria and Jordan); compensation and return to the new state of Palestine in the formerly Occupied Territories (primarily for those in Lebanon who can't be permanently settled there because Lebanon is as obsessed with its sectarian demographics as Israel and will never naturalize hundreds of thousands of Sunni Muslim refugees); compensation and resettlement in third countries that can offer refugee families a decent quality of life (Canada was one country that offered to resettle refugees within the context of a final status deal) - but with the options weighted so that although everybody is acknowledged to have the right to go to Israel, in practice the other choices will be made attractive enough that most refugees would be willing to opt for one of them.

      I'm not saying this is the most just outcome, or the most likely; just that within the context of negotiations for a two state solution mechanisms have already being discussed that would allow for the right of return to be recognized without Israel suddenly having 6 million returnees knocking on its door.

    • Diane Mason April 3, 2010 at 2:18 pm with 2 replies

      I think there is a superficial appeal to this idea, inasmuch as it attaches a price to planting settlers in the Occupied Territories, but I think the cons are much bigger than the pros.

      The obvious problem is the equation of the rights of refugees, who under the international law have every right to return to their homes in what is now Israel, with the rights of Israeli settlers whose implantation in the Territories is illegal and who have no legal right in international law to do anything except go back to Israel. Also, there are many more refugees than settlers; why should Israel’s illegal policy of settlement be rewarded by being allowed to place a ceiling on the number of refugees who get the chance to return?

      Even if you think that there is going to be a two state solution with a limited right of return, in which a mechanism like this might play a role, this plan still puts the cart before the horse. The great (only) strength of the Palestinians’ negotiating position is that it is based on international law. They don’t have military or economic parity or anything like that, but on the core issues it is the Palestinians who are demanding the implementation of international law and the Israelis who are trying to circumvent the law by brute force. When you are the weaker party, holding to red lines based on law does strengthen your position.

      But then a proposition like this comes along, that outlines a mechanism to “solve” the settler and refugee issues without ever having to go through that awkward stage of actually acknowledging the rights of the refugees. This is getting things backwards: first, you recognize the legal rights of the refugees; perhaps you then go on to put together a comprehensive resettlement package that might encourage refugees to choose to settle permanently in situ, or in the new Palestine, or in third countries rather than Israel, but that comes after the recognition of their right to return, not instead of it.

      Israel’s supporters are always whining about how much Israel is being asked to “give up”, when in fact the things Israel is being asked to “give up” are things that don’t belong to it in the first place, but have simply been seized by force in contravention of international law. The Palestinians are not supplicants begging for favors out of the goodness of Israel’s heart, but are an injured party demanding its rights under international law. Plans like this, that look for ways to get round inconvenient Palestinian rights without having to acknowledge they exist, just reinforce that mistaken image of Israel is magnanimously “giving up” something for peace with those pesky unreasonable Arabs.

      If you want a mechanism that makes it costly for Israel to add to the number of settlers, reduce the amount of aid to Israel by a certain amount for every settler beyond the Green Line, or come up with a formula that limits Israeli access to EU markets in accordance with how many settlers there are in the Occupied Territories. Let Israel pay the penalty for its settlements, not the Palestinian refugees.

  • In the Jewish democracy, Arab parties aren't ever considered for the governing coalition
    • Diane Mason March 30, 2010 at 9:37 am with 7 replies

      This post is about the exclusion of the Arab parties from government, not about the one single Arab who has reached the Cabinet in the last 60 years by aligning himself with a Zionist party. That's why it's called "In the Jewish democracy, Arab parties aren’t ever considered for the governing coalition".

    • Diane Mason March 30, 2010 at 9:18 am with 15 replies

      Except that the world doesn't recognize the religious character of "the Islamic states". Using Iran as an example, the world recognizes the regime in Tehran as the return address for international relations with Iran - that's what diplomatic recognition means - but we don't "recognize" their claim to be an Islamic republic. We call their country the Islamic Republic of Iran solely because we recognize the Tehran regime as the government of Iran, and as such they get to name the country whatever they want. It's just a name, not an endorsement of one religion over another, which diplomatic recognition has nothing to do with. If they call themselves The Blue Cheese Republic of Iran we would call them that too, because choosing their own name is their prerogative; it doesn't mean we really think they're made of blue cheese. By the same token, we called East Germany the German Democratic Republic, regardless of whether or not we really thought it was a democracy.

      The Palestinians have already said that if Israel wishes to be known as "the Jewish state of Israel" they will call it that, just as they call Iran "the Islamic Republic of Iran". But Israel isn't asking for the same kind of recognition as a Jewish state that Iran has as an Islamic state. In fact, the argument that "Israel just wants the same recognition that Iran has" is a good indicator that the person making the argument either doesn't know what Israel is asking for in demanding recognition as a "Jewish state" or doesn't know how little we are actually recognizing when we call Iran as "Islamic republic".

      Israel wants recognition as a Jewish state not only in name, which is what we give the Islamic Republic. Israel wants recognition not only as "the Jewish state of Israel" but also wants international approval for its claim that it is really only a state for all Jewish people everywhere, and is therefore entitled to a pass on discriminating against (and killing and disfranchising and dispossessing) its citizens and subjects who are not Jewish. This is quite different from the purely nominal recognition we give to Iran as an Islamic republic, or any other country whose full names we use purely as a diplomatic courtesy, not because we are commenting one way or another on what we think of their ideology.

  • The next 'special relationship'?
    • Diane Mason March 26, 2010 at 3:10 pm

      Having seen how dysfunctional the special relationship has made US internal politics and foreign policy, why would the Chinese ever want to replicate it?

    • Diane Mason March 26, 2010 at 3:05 pm with 1 replies

      1. How badly does China need Arab and Iranian oil?
      2. How big is the Israel Lobby in the PRC, and how many Party officials owe their positions to its donations?
      3. How much are the Chinese moved by Holocaust guilt?

      No, China will not be a new special relationship. Only in America was everything in place for this lunatic relationship to happen.

  • Oren's historical fiction about Lebanon war has long tradition in MSM hasbara
    • Diane Mason March 19, 2010 at 10:36 am with 3 replies

      Israel's problem with the northern border is not that Hezbollah is raining rockets over the border, but that Hezbollah has rockets that it can potentially fire over the border when Israel aggresses against Lebanese sovereignty. So the rockets are not so much a threat to Israel, as a deterrent against Israel's acting with impunity against its neighbors. That is what Israel finds unbearable.

      "[A] new study showed that the firing of the antiaircraft missiles was not random, but came as a response to the IAF's violation of Lebanese airspace. "A comparison of IAF flight data with the data on the firing of the antiaircraft missiles shows a direct relationship between the violations and the firing," wrote Daniel Sobelman of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

      Sobelman studied Hezbollah activities over the past four years and concluded that the Shi'ite organization actually wants to preserve the status quo created in the north after the IDF's departure from Lebanon. He found a clear contradiction between Hezbollah's declared ideology, which calls for the destruction of Israel, and the restrained policy that it actually implements, which is based on rules of behavior that have crystalized between it and Israel.

      These rules are the name of the game, according to Sobelman, and Hezbollah follows them. The most important rule is "action-reaction," that is, Hezbollah responds to Israel's "aggressive acts." Among these are overflights of Lebanese territory, border crossings into Lebanon by IDF troops or targeted killings of the organization's members in Beirut. Thus, the firing last month at the two IDF soldiers who climbed the antenna of a fortification in the north came as a response to the killing of Hezbollah operative Ghaleb Awali. Two other incidents in which IDF soldiers were killed by Hezbollah occurred after IDF soldiers crossed the border fence..."

      - Hezbollah plays by the rules; By Reuven Pedatzur, Ha'aretz, 16 Aug 2004.

      link - link to tinyurl.com

  • Yglesias and Goldberg sittin around talking
    • Diane Mason March 19, 2010 at 1:46 pm

      I've always said that in the US the idea of a "balanced" debate on Israel is Michael Lerner v Dore Gold, moderated by Wolf Blitzer.

      In this case, it's Jeffrey Goldberg v Matt Yglesias, but it's the same principle: the acceptable limits of mainstream discourse are the limits of left- and right- Zionism. The idea that there might be a large chunk of the world out there that isn't Zionist at all, and doesn't see the Middle East through the distorting lens of Zionism, just doesn't get a look-in.

    • Diane Mason March 19, 2010 at 1:37 pm with 1 replies

      I hope everyone clicks through to read Sean Lee's article, and the exchange with Matt Yglesias in the comments. Sean Lee really describes with wonderful clarity the issue of how Palestinians might be expected to react to what Zionism requires of them.

  • Sullivan has been freed by Wieseltier's smear to say what he really thinks and take on all comers
    • Diane Mason March 14, 2010 at 12:56 pm

      This was supposed to be a reply to potsherd at 12:46. oh well

    • Diane Mason March 14, 2010 at 12:54 pm with 1 replies

      Yes. The fact that the ethnic cleansing and the denial of Palestinian rights continue both when Israel faces violence from some Palestinians and when it doesn't is a good indicator that the repression and ethnic cleansing are not tactical responses that arise out of anything the Palestinian might do, but are an inherent requirement of Zionism that will go on regardless.

    • Diane Mason March 14, 2010 at 12:33 pm with 2 replies

      Sullivan is going to really tick off lot of people because 1. he has a big audience and 2. in his epiphany on Israel-Palestine he has cut right to the central issue: endless ethnic cleansing as the prerequisite of a Jewish state in Palestine.

      We're supposed to think that Zionism was/is essentially benign and the Palestinians would have done just fine if they hadn't been so "irrational" about it all; Sullivan's emphasis on the preexisting population of Palestine is going to lead readers to ask themselves whether it really is so irrational for Palestinians to reject an ideology that requires their own non-existence, and why exactly should Americans be supporting such a program.

      The purpose of all the other diversionary crap about whether Palestine was an independent country, or the intricacies of "the Arab mind", or how many times Jerusalem is mentioned in the Quran, or why the Mufti was photographed with Hitler, or who invented the cherry farking tomato etc etc, is simply to ensure we never get to the central issue which is what does it mean to create a state for one group of people in a land where another, majority people already lives. And Sullivan is declining to be diverted from it.

  • Elephant admits it is in the room
  • Tail wags the Turkey
    • Diane Mason March 5, 2010 at 4:32 pm

      "The Israelis are trying to teach the Turks a lesson".

      The Turks are Israel's prized "Muslim ally". Strategically, that alliance has always been important to Israel, as Israel saw an encircling alliance of non-Arab states (Israel-Turkey-Iran) as an important counter-weight to its hostile Arab neighbors. Worked pretty well too, until the Iranian Revolution, and even after that Israel and Iran proved perfectly able to work together against mutual Arab enemies when it suited them (Iran-Contra).

      And now Israel wants to "teach a lesson" to an ally that doesn't need Israel as much as Israel needs it. Has anybody in the Israeli government really thought this through?

  • Nobody here but us chickens
    • Diane Mason March 2, 2010 at 4:39 pm

      It's not unexpected that a supporter of Israel would be arguing against trials for Serbian leaders. Ha'aretz explained this sort of thing at the time of the breakup of Yugoslavia in terms of Israel having an old affinity for the Serbs due to Serbian resistance to the Nazis. I think the more likely reason is that Serbian leaders were accused of trying to create ethnic uniformity by expelling the "wrong" sorts of people - Muslims, Kosovars, Croats - and denying them the right to return to their homes. Having war crimes trials for that kind of crime is a bad precedent from an Israeli perspective.

  • Siegman: the world will stop the 'relegation of Palestinians to apartheid existence'
    • Diane Mason February 25, 2010 at 7:20 am with 1 replies

      I get what you're saying, but there is a limit to the ethnic cleansing comparison between Israel and the US.

      1. Timing does matter. Ethnic cleansing was internationally acceptable centuries ago, as was slavery, or hanging people for stealing a loaf of bread. Today they’re rejected as barbaric. The US did its ethnic cleansing centuries ago, Israel still does it as we speak. It might not be different in theoretical, moral terms, but in practical terms it is.

      2. You say what if Israel wiped out all resistance, as the US did. But Israel didn’t, and won’t, because the demographic reality is different. White settlers to the US outnumbered native Americans 20-to-1 and had an almost inexhaustible flow of immigrants entering the US. Israel on the other hand has never been able to get the majority of the world’s Jews to immigrate, and even if it somehow did it still has a relatively small pool of 14 million world Jews to draw immigrants from. Even after expelling seven-eighths of the Palestinians in “Jewish Palestine” between 1947 and 1953 to temporarily dissipate the “demographic threat”, Israel is again today facing an Arab majority, because of its determination to expand into those areas with an overwhelming Arab majority. So the US belongs to that group of settler states that through sheer force of numbers overwhelmed the indigenous population in the initial phase of settlement and went on to become a liberal democracy with full citizen for settler and indigenous (like Canada, Australia, New Zealand). Israel on the other hand belongs to the group of settler states that never had the numbers to reduce the native population to irrelevance, and which managed to initially secure a state through military means but spent their entire existence in an increasing violent but ultimately futile war to turn back the tide (like white South Africa, Rhodesia, French Algeria).

      3. I’m not sure how much Israel’s 1967 borders are a fait accompli any more. I think we’re moving on from that, and it’s entirely Israel’s doing. Those borders might have become a fait accompli if Israel had been willing to settle for a two state solution on the 1967 which as you say has international consensus, but Israel’s determination to erase the 1967 lines and settle the West Bank is having the effect turning the I-P debate back from 1967 to 1948. Not in the US, but certainly in Europe, and it will come here too. And beyond Europe and the US – certainly in the Muslim world and in the large part of the world that was colonized and knows what its like to have foreigners with guns draw your borders and claim sovereignty – I think to some extent the issue has always been 1948 and not 1967. Everything Israel does beyond the 1967 borders undermines its acceptance within those borders. So there’s a limited value in saying the world recognizes Israel in the 1967 borders, if those borders remain virtual and the party that needs to accept them is intent on not doing so and in fact might actually already have made them defunct. The 1967 borders lose their importance if they can no longer be practically enforced.

  • Who would teargas 'Avatar'?
  • 50 years after North Carolina lunchcounter sit-in, Times calls West Bank protests 'theatrical... spectacle'
    • Diane Mason February 2, 2010 at 7:22 pm with 4 replies

      Surely the truly theatrical part would be when the IDF ensures such protests turn violent by sending in undercover Israeli Arab troops to throw stones at the army when the Palestinians fail to oblige?

      Riyad Muhammad Yassin Barnat, a 28-year-old construction worker and farmer, father of four, and ‘Alian Ibrahim Ahmad Abu Rahmeh, a 29-year-old school-bus driver, father of two, have been detained by the Israeli army following a peaceful demonstration in their West Bank village of Bil’in on 28 April 2005.

      The demonstration was organized by Bil’in villagers and Israeli peace activists to protest at the ongoing construction of the fence/wall, which the Israeli army is building through the West Bank, in violation of international law. The fence/wall cuts the village off from much of its agricultural land, depriving the farmers of their source of livelihood.

      Some 500 Palestinian villagers and around 200 Israeli peace activists participated in the demonstration. They informed the Israeli troops present at the scene, through loudspeakers and in Hebrew, that the march was strictly peaceful. But as the demonstrators gathered on the outskirts of the village and began marching in the direction of the fence/wall, Israeli forces shot tear gas at them, pushed and shoved some of them, and fired rock salt projectiles, injuring several of the demonstrators.

      Several masked mistaravim (a Hebrew term meaning ‘those who pretend to be Arabs’), undercover agents belonging to the Israeli Prison Service started to behave aggressively and threw stones at the soldiers. When the Palestinian villagers called on them to stop using violence and to leave the demonstration, they revealed their identity, pulled out their weapons, and arrested two Palestinian and four Israeli demonstrators.

      The four Israelis were subsequently released and the Israeli army commander promised that Riyad and ‘Alian would be released as soon as the demonstration ended. However, they instead took them to a police station in the nearby Israeli settlement of Pisgat Ze’ev and later transferred them to the detention centre at ‘Ofer military base. They continue to be detained there and are accused of assaulting members of the security forces. To date the army has provided no evidence to substantiate these allegations.

      On 19 May 2005, three weeks after their arrest, the military judge ordered the release on bail of Riyad Muhammad Yassin Barnat and ‘Alian Ibrahim Ahmad Abu Rahmeh, but as the military prosecution announced its intention to appeal the judge’s decision, they remain in detention.

      According to the information available to Amnesty International, including video footage of the demonstration and testimonies of Israeli and Palestinians peace activists present at the demonstration, the demonstrators did not use violence against the Israeli forces, whereas Israeli members of the security forces did use unwarranted force against the demonstrators.

      Amnesty International believes that Riyad Muhammad Yassin Barnat and ‘Alian Ibrahim Ahmad Abu Rahmeh are being detained to discourage others from organizing and participating in peaceful demonstrations. It considers them to be prisoners of conscience and calls for their immediate and unconditional release.

      Amnesty International press release.
      20/05/05

  • 'Exodus' was published in 1958
    • Diane Mason January 30, 2010 at 4:57 pm

      The Haj doesn't tell anything from a Palestinian point of view. It's entirely of a type with Exodus - except Exodus is a story primarily about Zionists in Palestine, written from a Zionist point of view, whereas Haj is more about the Arab population in Palestine, also written from the Zionist point of view. Its Arab characters are a caricature of what Zionists pretend them to be, in order to justify treating them as Zionism does - they are bestial, dirty, backwards, superstitious, and too dumb even to let their new well-meaning Jewish neighbors help them learn basic hygiene and healthcare and farming and other benefits of the 20th century.

      "Cringeworthy" might be a better word for it, rather than "powerful". It's the kind of book that is so clumsy and embarrassing in its stereotypes that you'd like to think it wouldn't get published today by any serious publisher.

  • a new reality is dawning on world leaders
    • Diane Mason November 5, 2009 at 4:08 pm

      You know perfectly well that in the absence of an Israeli De Klerk and an effective modern-day equivalent to the international anti-apartheid movement, potential Palestinian Mandelas simply sit (largely anonymously) in Israeli jails.

      Are you sure you’re looking for a Mandela anyway, seeing as Mandela was not an advocate of non-violence, but defended the right of black South Africans to resist violently an apartheid regime that remained in power only by using violence against them? Mandela didn’t renounce violence until after he had a “partner for peace” in the form of De Klerk, who had already recognized that minority rule was inviable and was looking for an interlocutor to cooperate in dismantling it. I’m pretty sure that as soon as any Israeli leader acknowledges the futility of minority rule and seeks to dismantle it, he or she will be faced with more Palestinian Mandelas that they know what to do with. It’s the De Klerk character that’s proving harder to find.

      And even if Mandela were the Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi that you apparently imagine him to be, that you should repeat this pathetic “oh if only Israel had a Mandela to deal with” hand-wringing on a thread about Saeb Erekat is pure irony. Do you know how Saeb Erekat first got into national politics?

      He wrote a column in a university newsletter in 1986, recommending that Palestinians should resist the occupation non-violently - by simply withdrawing their cooperation from all its manifestations, and having the patience and fortitude to endure whatever repercussions this brought down on them from the Israeli authorities.

      For that, he was arrested and convicted of inciting sedition by an Israeli military court, which acknowledged that he was an advocate of non-violence, but announced that regardless of that he was “a respected opinion leader and should be made an object lesson”. His appeal, in which he argued that he had a right to peacefully express his belief in passive resistance to military occupation, was thrown out of Israeli appellate court on the grounds that "There is no freedom of speech in the Territories”.

      So Israel chooses to practice a policy under which Palestinian advocates of non-violence are not welcomed as interlocutors, but singled out for special punishment as an “object lesson” precisely because they are respected in their community. And then “liberal Zionists” wring their hands and wonder why oh why don’t the Palestinians produce leaders we can deal with. Pathetic.

  • Israel to Palestinians: 'If you want a normal life, forget the Goldstone report'
    • Diane Mason October 11, 2009 at 10:46 am with 1 replies

      Thank you Mr Kital for explaining so clearly what Israel really means when it says there is no peace because of Palestinian "incitement".

      Next time Israel repeats the claim that the problem between Israelis and Palestinians isn't about land or dispossession or ethnic-religious favoritism, but is simply mindless Jew-hatred based on "incitement" by intrinsically hateful Muslims, remember what "incitement" consists of in the mind of that Israeli spokesperson: not Palestinians lying about Jews, but Palestinians telling embarassing truths about Israeli soldiers.

  • The collaboration between the P.A. and Israel is unprecedented...
    • Diane Mason October 10, 2009 at 11:20 am with 6 replies

      @Chaos4700 October 10, 2009 at 10:11 am:

      Is there really no other possible explanation for Abbas’ deferring the Goldstone report, except that he's a "puppet"?

      How about this scenario.

      Israel REALLY wants the US to make the Goldstone Report to go away, because Netanyahu fears that if it goes to the UNSC this might finally be the issue that brings about sanctions against Israel like those South Africa once faced.

      The US really wants an early resumption of I-P negotiations, but the PLO has been down that road before with Oslo, and won’t go into open-ended negotiations without a settlement freeze because it knows this is simply a means for Israel to buy time to steal more Palestinian land.

      Abbas really wants both a settlement freeze, and for the HRC to refer the Goldstone Report to the UNSC, with a view to sanctions.

      So, the US tells Netanyahu the price of US support for stopping the Goldstone Report is a complete settlement freeze, and gives him 6 months to put together a domestic political configuration that will allow him to freeze settlements without being toppled as PM.

      The US tells Abbas he can pursue Goldstone now if he wants, but the US will veto it when it reaches the UNSC. OR he can agree to defer until Mar 2010, at which time either a settlement freeze will be in place, or Netanyahu will have failed to deliver and Abbas can ask the HCR to refer the Goldstone Report to the UNSC, where the US will not use its veto to protect Israel from sanctions...

      I just lifted that scenario from a report at Israel’s NANA news agency, and I have no idea whether its details of the alleged quid pro quo are correct. My point is simply that suggesting there could be no other reason for deferring the Goldstone Report other than Abbas is a "puppet" isn’t very convincing.

  • Will the real people of the West Bank please stand up, please stand up
    • Diane Mason October 7, 2009 at 12:31 pm

      God help me, but I actually agree with Richard Witty. Looks like I picked the wrong week to give up sniffing glue....

  • The soul is also occupied
    • Diane Mason October 7, 2009 at 12:37 pm with 1 replies

      I'm sorry, but if you as a sympathetic foreigner go into the West Bank, and harangue the Palestinians there for not demonstrating how *you* want on the subjects *you* think they should be demonstrating over, you're not acting "in solidarity" with them. Solidarity is you going there and standing alongside them where *they* are, rather than berating them because they're not standing where you think they should be.

  • a third intifadah?
    • Diane Mason October 7, 2009 at 11:43 am

      Thanks, all.

      update - Apparently, "thanks all" is too short a message to be accepted by this ludicrous commenting system, so here's a bit of filler: blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah.

    • Diane Mason October 6, 2009 at 12:47 pm with 4 replies

      Thanks tree. I had an accident in the early part of this year (spinal cord injury) which has put me out of circulation somewhat. I'm making a lot of progress, but it does take over your life. I feel like I don't do anything except rehab at the moment. Hopefully by the end of the year I'll get back into doing other things.

      Anyway, it's nice to be missed!

      Best wishes,
      Diane

    • Diane Mason October 6, 2009 at 12:20 pm with 3 replies

      The Netanyahu govt has to be concerned about what is the quid pro quo for Abbas' deferring the Goldstone report for 6 months. The US PLO bilateral talks last week were about the terms of reference for I-P negotiations, and the PLO was apparently looking for a settlement freeze, a timetable by which negots must be completed and formal US acknowledgement that the basis of the two states is the 1967 borders.

      I don't know what they got, but it was apparently big enough for Abbas to take all this flak over Goldstone, which can't make Netanyahu very happy about what kind of talks he is getting manoeuvred into. Nothing like an eruption of violence over the holy sites to dispel the threat of talks you don't want to be in anyway.

      It worked for Sharon.

  • Disagreement over Iran's threat
    • Diane Mason October 2, 2009 at 8:42 pm

      Richard, the Iranian Press Service/IRIB does not produce scholarly translations of Persian-language texts on complicated policy issues. It is a news site that produces quick, short, précis-length articles intended to give a brief summary of the major Iranian news events of the day, not deep analysis or explanation or exegesis. Unfortunately, its English-language stories give those quick summaries in very poor English. The level of English proficiency at IRIB is perhaps freshman level for a speaker of English as a second language. The quality of IRIB’s paragraphs in English ranges from A. containing grammatical errors yet still basically comprehensible down to B. a sequence of words that individually exist in English, but not necessarily coherent in the order IRIB prints them.

      Here are the top stories currently on IRIB’s English-language front page:

      1. Spokesman of opposition (sic) in the IRI parliament emphasized on (sic) the right of Iranians in (sic) having nuclear technology.

      2. IRI Ambassador in Damascus said Iran would not yield to the western countries (sic) threats. Answering a Tishrin question about recent accusation on IRI's nuclear programs Ahmad Mousavi said, "(sic) Islamic Republic of Iran acts in complete accordance with the Islamic codes. Producing nuclear weapons is banned by Islam and the Leader of Revolution's decree".

      3. IRI Majlis Speaker Ali Larijani said the time is ripe for the United Nations to bring the Zionist regime's heads (sic) to war tribunals for committing war crimes during the 22-day Gaza war in 2008. Addressing an open session of Majlis on Wednesday, Larijani referred to the recent report of the U.N. fact-finding mission which said the Zionist regime had committed barbaric acts and war crimes against the innocent Palestinians during their war on Gaza.

      Larijani said although the report revealed little parts (sic) of the inhuman acts, it clearly said that the Zionist regime has used phosphorus bombs against the innocent people of Gaza and attacked mosques, hospitals and homes in the city.

      Lrijani (sic) said the Zionist regime was not entitled to commit the sacriligous (sic) act (sic) against Islam's first qibla, adding the savage action was in fact incited by the new American plans which opened the way for the Zionist regime to take such measures.

      4. Secretary of IRI Supreme National Security Council (SNSC) Saeed Jalili left Tehran for Geneva to attend the Group 5+1 meeting slated for Thursday. Prior to his departure on Wednesday, Jalili told reporters that the Islamic Republic of Iran will approach the talks with a positive and good resolve. He stated that IRI considers the talks as strategic, long-term and based on cooperation, adding however that the the (sic) look (sic) is related to the 5+1 Group's interaction and that Tehran hopes it would be an opportunity for further cooperation.

      (sic) Secretary of SNSC stated that IRI's cooperation with the world is based on peace, justice and in line with development of all nations. He said Iran's potentials (sic) in national, regional and international arena and its capabilities for cooperation in all fields including the world security and economic issues are good opportunities for talks.

      Your confidence that the IRIB story you repeatedly link to is some kind of definitive insight into the meaning of Ahmadinejad’s original words in Persian is simply misplaced. As with all IRIB articles, that article is simply a brief overview by a news organization that doesn’t offer detailed analysis, doesn’t do English particularly well, and had no idea that its quick summary was going to be seized upon by Western Zionists as some kind of etymologically-definitive account of Ahmadinejad’s speech. IRIB does not claim to provide that kind of news analysis, and its limited English translation skills would simply not be up to it anyway.

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