Total number of comments: 88 (since 2011-09-07 08:06:50)
Remax
Born 1954 / publishing editor / widower / two sons / avid reader /
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You are right. I probably should have called it a category rather than a definition. Anyway it is very broad and I am sure I qualify. Perhaps one might turn the implied opprobrium on its head and designate hophmi et al as pro-Semitic, using phrases like ‘Another pro-Semitic comment’. Then they would be obliged to ask, ‘How is that pro-Semitic?’
I have just ploughed through all this and I would say that by hophmi’s definition I am pretty certain I must be anti-Semitic. So we can get that out of the way.
If Ross has managed to influence the administration, or anyone else for that matter, he cannot be said to have served US interests unless you believe US interests in the global forum, and specifically in the ME, would be worse now without his input. Using the same criteria a similar conclusion might be reached for Israel which is undoubtedly less positively regarded than it was a couple of years ago.
Yesterday afternoon I caught a fairly extended piece on France 24 about a Palestinian farmer who has lost 80 acres of olives, burned by settlers. Unfortunately I cannot find a link to it on their site, although using the search engine revealed that their coverage is quite extensive: link to france24.com
In any event it didn’t really say anything we had not heard before except that this guy has something like 200 acres and was clearly better educated than many Palestinian victim farmers. Israel is becoming increasingly exposed as an oppressor in reports like this and I don’t think it is bias because it would be hard to find anyone cogently to justify such destruction. One rabbi did say he doubted this was general as mostly the settlers just cut the tops of the trees (sic), which would grow back. This statement was made while the camera panned lines of trees so charred it would take a Lazarene miracle to bring them back to life.
This from Haaretz this morning
link to haaretz.com
That is a breathtaking lot of opposition to have aroused to balance a handful of individuals like Ross and the dreaded Tony Blair.
What baffles me is why there is no serious political opposition to this lemming like behaviour and I don’t mean specifically the I/P issue, obviously that is active, but the whole direction Israel is taking. One can understand Obama’s off the cuff response to Sarkozy but isn’t it time the Israeli public stood up.
Not quite the same thing…which is true?
link to haaretz.com
I wish Israel would get rid of the damn things, but if that’s not going to happen I would feel safer if Iran had a few, besides conjoint disarmament would seem more achievable than unilateral disarmament. Can anyone seriously imagine Israel disarming else?
This scares me. Would it be possible/practical to buy a small rectangular ad running regularly front page in journals like the online LA Times that just says GAZA UPDATE and links to this site? I know these things cost but I would certainly be prepared contribute seriously.
The strong menace the weak, there is no reason in it. It is, as Pabelmont, says above, the Scorpion story. Now here is a contradictory view:
link to haaretz.com
When the US confrontationists talk of changing the Iranian regime, their heads are in a dark place where they cannot see that there could well be a regime ‘worse’ than the tentative authority of Ahmadinejad, a man extensively circumscribed by the Ayatollah, and it would be more sensible to support him in his efforts to detach the Iranian legal system from the weight of Sharia law and boost elected rather than religious authority.
As for Israel, there is a blind mercilessness about their actions, a side to them that is truly terrible, almost pathological, like an inner turmoil of the soul that renders them deaf to reason. While I abhor the ad hominem arguments so many Zionists employ here, one does have to admit that the leaders of our world are a pretty unsavoury bunch and maybe that is just the way it is.
The misfortune for the rest of us is the symbiotic association between these two otherwise unrelated purposes.
Tangential
link to youtube.com
Iran is OPEC's second largest oil producer and the fourth largest crude oil exporter, exporting 2,400,000 barrels of crude oil a day, 56 percent to Asia and 29 percent to Europe. Japan and the China together buy over one third of Iran’s oil exports (China 400,000 barrels per day). The US and Israel buy no Iranian oil. Israel might not be too popular if she decided to interfere with all this, nor from another angle would the Egyptian populace be likely to sit idly by if Israel attacked Iran. Russia and China may yet indicate to the US and Israel that this is a 'No, No' just as they recently combined to veto the US supported UN resolution on Syria, which the Russian envoy categorised, somewhat disdainfully, as arising from 'a philosophy of confrontation'.
Theo, with such a name you should have some faith in prayer. Besides, when Apollo 13 was in dire trouble Nixon went on TV and invited the world to pray for the mission and it worked.
Although it is a bit late now, I might have added that Khomeini made that comment when he had only recently returned from Paris where for years he had been patiently waiting for the Shah’s regime to pass from the page of time.
seafoid, I have long suspected that what you suggest about giving Israel rope has been Obama's underlying strategy from the beginning. If one overlooks who has done what, and considers instead the relative situation today with that of 2008, it is clear that Israel’s position has deteriorated both globally and domestically, and while Obama cannot be accused of having done one single thing to encourage that process he hasn’t done anything to arrest it either, not even drop in on them.
A lot of fuss is made about the infamous ‘wiping Israel off the map’ misquotation with little attention paid to what Ayatollah Khomeini actually did say, which was that the regime would vanish from the page of time (or something like that), with the implication that nothing need be done, the process being inevitable.
There is a danger of reducing this to an argument about words. Since the beginning of civilisation there has existed a concept of justice. It is irrelevant whether different regimes, individuals or groups adhered to it or to what degree. Nor has it anything to do with Laws which do not form the concept but arise from the it. It is about Right and Wrong and it shouldn’t be necessary to rummage through the Geneva Convention or reference human rights legislation to know that driving people from their land, torturing and humiliating them is just plain Wrong.
Racism/racist, are words too broad for any but circular debate. Many individuals are internally and selectively racist, like those who would not want members of this or that race living next to them, but there’s no reason why anyone else should bother or even know so long as they don’t do anything about it. Indeed, such antipathies are often broader than race, extending to those whose lifestyles jar their more refined sensitivities.
It doesn’t seem to me reasonable to use the word to describe a group antipathetic to the whole of the rest of humanity, even when their broad view hones in on a particular subsection that happens to be commanding their more immediate and proximate distaste. A better definition might be collective misanthropy.
Mooser
Here's one told me by a Jewish publisher.
Man struggling in lake: gevald! , gevald!
Man walking by: Yiddish you know, swimming you should have learned.
Thank you. It seems, the way you put it, that a Jewish State is indeed an abstraction and can’t become a territorial area unless all the people in it are united in their desire to live according to a fairly comprehensive, and many might think restrictive, code.
And, yes, you could have what is called an autonomous region within Palestine, functioning as the Vatican does in Italy, having a degree of internationally recognised independence and being the spiritual home and a place of pilgrimage for Jewish people, which I imagine it largely already is for most. Rephrasing the question again, Would the Palestinian people accept an autonomous Jewish region in part of a single state? And if not, why not?
I personally think two states is a recipe for disaster since it would surely leave both sides resentful and the Palestinians under the shadow of Jewish mythopeic convictions backed by military might. The Palestinians don’t seem to seek a state which excludes Jews or anyone else so they present no problem, but a solution needs surely to be found to accommodate those Jews who really do need something exclusive.
I see what you are saying, but doesn't a state have to have borders? If it is only an abstract concept, one including all Jewish people, then it doesn't need a lot of territorial space but could be something like The Vatican. Also, in the same piece, the Palestinians are castigated for only latterly introducing the settlement freeze as a condition for negotiation, but didn't the insistence on recognition of a Israel as Jewish state only come up last year?
Sorry if I appear naïve but I would be grateful for some elucidation of this ‘Jewish State’ business.
Am I right in thinking that their claim is that the definition of Israel’s borders and the independence of those otherwise living in Palestine depends upon the latter recognising Israel as a Jewish state?
If so, what exactly is a Jewish State? I understand what an Islamic state is with its socio-political evolution rooted in the Islamic code of conduct. But this doesn’t appear to be what a Jewish state means either in practice or in the context of negotiating borders and peace with the Palestinians. I see how Israel might reasonably define itself as a Jewish state within the 1948 borders since they were established under international law and presumably those living there can call themselves whatever they like. Is the Israeli position that wherever, and by whatever means, they extend their authority the area becomes ipso facto a Jewish state?
Also I do not understand how a Jewish state can have anything to do with the biblical account of the entry of the Hebrews into the area since the concept of statehood is a 19th century European notion and did not exist in the time of Joshua. In any event, surely borders have to be defined before any decision can be made as to what should go on within them.
Finally, if I have not exhausted your patience, would the Palestinians be prepared to accept a ‘Jewish State’ within the 1948 borders? And if not, why not?
justicewillprevail,
Oh what a tangled web we weave, When first we practise to deceive!
Riveting. Thanks.
It was not just Jews who had the dream. Nor, oddly enough, had the dream much to do with Jews as such; to many it was the dream of a brand new nation arising from the embers of the war as a beacon of humanity and an example to the world. A lot died with that dream, not least a big chunk of optimism.
Just to set one’s Sunday off with a good old pessimistic sigh
link to maannews.net
Is it not against some enforceable law to put up money to murder someone?
It is impossible to anticipate the future of Israel, there are simply too many factors that appear extraneous but cannot be expected to remain so. We could start first with Stein’s Law (If something cannot go on forever, it will stop). Taking a completely detached view of Israel, where would you say it is heading? Would you look at its geographical expansion? Since it cannot live in peace with any neighbours, it would seem it has to expand indefinitely. Well, it can’t. Is it developing a social model that will guarantee long-term survival in a world of diminishing resources? Hardly. Is it a nation completely united in the convictions of its mythopeic past? Of course not. It is a very young entity with a bizarrely flexible constitution, an entity increasingly controlled by a limited elite in a manner that is even now arousing popular social unrest. These are difficulties Israel faces quite apart from the issue of the dispossessed and subjugated Palestinians which daily arouses humanitarian enthusiasms in much of the Western world. Netanyahu, if you think about it, embodies the current Israeli predicament, all hat and no cattle, as I believe the Texans have it. Sure, Israel has an army, but it contains many young zealots more dedicated to local Zionist 'principles' than the interests of their state and besides, Israelis have a totally unrealistic abhorrence of the death or capture of even one of them. And they have nuclear weapons, but recently General Petraeus himself was questioning what use they are against diplomatic isolation. No one single factor is that important by itself, but there is nothing coming back from the other side. Western leaders pay lip service to Israel but only for pragmatic political reasons; there is today nothing like the bright dawn liberal intellectuals looked for when Israel was established, a nation to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of war torn Europe and set a socio/political example for a new post-war age. Nor is there anything like the bright beacon the US was for the world in the 50’s and early 60’s. The truth is that Israel has no future the way it is going. That is actually what Ayatollah Khomeini foresaw when he pronounced that mischievously misquoted prediction. Israel is sustained by the US, but it is the relationship of a ventriloquist and his puppet, their mutual dependence serves them both. However, the US has its own problems which grow more serious by the day, and Israel can do nothing to aid its puppet master. The writing is on the wall. No one will be allowed to destroy Israel, but Zionism is, surely, enjoying a swansong. There exists a kind of madness in US behaviour at this moment, but I detect signs that Russia and China may be prepared to combine to keep our world on an even keel.
James, you are so right. It is all and only about Power; Laws are for little nations, appearance is Reality, and Truth has become an abstract philosophical term.
I particularly like the Russian envoy's somewhat down putting reference to a philosophy of confrontation
The extraordinary ‘plot’ to blow up the Saudi ambassador in a Washington eatery also points in the direction of an Iranian adventure. It all feels a bit like early 2003 but I wonder about Russia and China this time; their getting together to veto the recent
USUN resolution on Syria may be relevant, at least obliquely. Such cooperation has to have been coordinated at the highest level and I don’t buy the suggestion that it arose simply out of mutual antipathy to US regime change activities or theUSNATO distortion of the UN resolution on Libya. Might it have been a shot across the US bows? If someone doesn’t back down, we could be in for the big one.I don’t know about Aspergers but I do believe the world is, as Shakespeare had it, a stage, and while most of the population spend most of their time on the stage, some are reluctant, if not unable, to move from their seats in the audience. This does not mean they are not affected by what happens on stage, but it is always at a controlled distance. It is the same as the difference between ‘team player’ and ‘loner’. I first became aware of this on LSD. Those who took such drugs could vanish into the worlds it opened up to them and do crazy things, go places and never really come back. Others, like me, always reserved a degree of consciousness that watched, fascinated by what the human mind could do. I do not believe that I could ever fully have crossed over but I met some and heard of others who couldn’t help themselves. Obama, I believe, is more a member of the audience rather than the cast. This is a simplistic notion, and takes no account of the duplicity which enables some in the audience to climb on stage and pretend to be members of the cast.
Heavens above! These are my symptoms too.
Why on earth did you say that?, she asks.
Well, it’s true.
But you can’t go around saying things like that to people.
Why not?
Because…because…Oh, you are hopeless!
This alleged Iranian plot looks like a piece of duct tape designed to patch US/Saudi relations following the fallout over the Palestinian UN bid. It is not supposed to be taken seriously, just to give the Saudis a face saving route back into the US bed.
Potsherd2
Is the release by Egypt of the Israeli spy verifiable or are you hypothesising?
Whether the movement can be successfully hijacked or not, attempts will certainly be made to do so. It is both the strength and weakness of such movements that they are born out of opposition to something rather in favour of something else. It is a strength initially because it unites disparate groups in a common purpose but it becomes a weakness as its successes begin to demand a definition of what should replace what is being rejected. It is at that point the movement becomes vulnerable to hijack. We observe this in Egypt where the idealistic uprising has replaced one tyrannical system with another, or Obama who seemed to embody an aspiration that achieved his election (and Nobel Peace prize), then vanished into thin air.
The level of power exercised by financial interests today is a consequence of recent exponential growth in the global labour force, particularly in the East. This has reduced the value of labour in the West and consequently its influence and authority, and it doesn’t really matter if there is a two party system like the US, or three like the UK, or many like Germany and Israel, or indeed none at all. The influence and authority of working people functions as a counterbalance to exploitation by the rich, and as it declines exploitation increases.
It is understandable that the OWS and its associate bodies have sympathy for Palestinians but, as Ahmed Moor suggests above, it has more to do with economics than human rights. It would serve Palestinian interests best to bring economic pressure on Israel by provoking grass-roots discontent over US aid. This wouldn’t directly enhance Israeli sympathy for Palestinians but it would make them more amenable to international law and global opinion by reducing the authority of their plutocrats while restoring that of their middle class. Israel, after all, started out as a socially egalitarian experiment. Remember the kibbutz?
I apologise if it offends, but isn’t going all that way to celebrate a Jewish festival in Cairo at this particular moment a bit like hiking on the Iranian border? Suppose it had led to trouble, hardly an inconceivable scenario, how would that have helped anything or anyone?
Because it is overwhelmingly important to Israelis that they be thought of as ‘Western’, an aspiration that doesn’t fit too well with citizens who herd goats and don’t wear trousers?
It is hard to imagine that burning mosques will outrage too many US citizens given their levels of Islamophobia and the fact that a not insignificant number would be happy to do it themselves. However, not so the rest of the world. All these acts, appalling as they are individually are collectively serving to isolate Israel and as that happens the population will tend increasingly to fragment enhancing potential for a change of leadership; it does seem that Netanyahu is no longer in complete command of all his senses. Petraeus was shaking his head the other day, saying how he couldn’t see that Israel’s military might was much use against diplomatic isolation. Is it really too late for a solution to be found entirely peacefully?
It has surely come to something when we need to consult the Geneva Convention to decide if an action is wrong.
Last para in the Haaretz piece:
Instead of a peaceful one?
There is an inevitability about these brutal scenes. The settlements may be viewed as buffers, obstacles against incursions by the dispossessed. The Romans created such colonies along their borders settling them with retired legionaries.
Here is another little gem link to tnr.com
Nation states are a fairly recent idea. On the ground, in that area, and all over Europe, the people in various groupings were subject to chiefs, princes, kings etc. who were themselves more often than not under the thumb of distant overlords. The areas under such local control were not thought of as ‘nations’ in today's sense of the word. There was, of course, religious identity, the same that sent groups of adventurers from all over on the Crusades and unifies the Islamic and Jewish worlds today but it had nothing directly to do with nationalism, which rather grew out of the cooperation and conflicts of local rulers, and their later unification under single charismatic leaders. This happened in England, France, Italy, Germany, the US, all over, mostly in the 19th century. It really only meaningfully happened with Jewish people when Israel was founded sixty odd years ago and any effort to make it appear otherwise is to impose a particular, and somewhat dubious, historical perspective on one group while denying it to others.
Palestine has always been where it is. The numerous instances listed above are all from historians and others making reference to some aspect or event in that area. That is the way the place was referred to, it was an area like ‘Europe’ or the ‘Far East’ with all sorts of people living in it including disparate groups of Jews with their common religious focus centred of Jerusalem, just like Roman Catholics or devotees of Islam. It is true that the Jews were in Jerusalem earlier than Christians or Muslims but to employ that as a justification for some kind of exclusivity is rather like claiming a particular section of a public beach on the grounds that your family occupied it yesterday.
Jews are not people from Israel, only Israelis are people from Israel, but Palestinians decidedly are people from Palestine and it scarcely matters what name you give them, there they have ever been and there they are.
Blair performs a useful role for people like Bush and Obama by undertaking tasks beyond the conscience of even the most depraved. A few years back I told my mother he had become a Roman Catholic, ‘Well,’ she said, ‘his Confessor will be on overtime’.
They also have this on the loss of revenues due to occupation rules. link to guardian.co.uk
What is being constructed is a human shield, the kind of thing they accuse the Palestinians of doing with their kids. They imagine, probably quite rightly, that filmed and broadcast attempts to overwhelm such shield(s) will prove unacceptable to global humanitarian sensitivities. The illegal settlements are surely just that and many have been deliberately bolstered with those whom one might imagine they would not be overwhelmingly sorry to lose for such a cause.
Not only Abbas but all those capable of thought should ignore the quartet as one would the anal expulsion of intestinal gas in polite society. The solution to this intractable problem will be brought about in time by internal dissensions provoked and fed by BDS.
Another snippet from my current reading
“Jerusalem was originally founded by a Canaanite chieftain called in the vernacular ‘King of Righteousness’ for such he was. He was the first to build the Temple and in its honour to give the name of Jerusalem to the City, previously called Salem... The Canaanite inhabitants were driven out by the Jewish king David, who settled his own people there”.
The Jewish War by Joseph ben Mathias (AD 37 – AD 100), known as Josephus, by birthright a priest, and on his mother’s side the descendant of kings.
I agree, there is a palpable sense of urgency and it feels dangerous. Might it be something to do with a planned attack on Iran’s nuclear enrichment facilities? There was a somewhat tantalising piece about China not stopping Israel if it decides to attack Iran, which was dated May but Haaretz brought out again (?) four days ago.
link to haaretz.com
Obama has provided Netanyahu with Bunker Busting Bombs which cannot really have any other purpose.
link to nytimes.com
All this UN stuff may be casting too bright a light for such a plan?
There is a danger in seeking too much from an account of past events strung out along a time-line while failing to take account what was going on in people’s minds. Europe was only just out of war, everything was scarce and rationed. While people in the UK, for instance, were as shocked as anyone when the concentration camps were opened, one needs remember that they too had just been through years of horror and loss and there was a degree of relativity in their response because the Jews were not the only victims of Hitler’s deranged policies although today a younger person might well think they were because they have so actively kept that part before the world. Sympathy was not restricted to Jews, it encompassed all victims, Jews included, whose lives and families had been torn apart. The persistence of the Jews for their state came to be regarded as a nuisance, the ‘Jewish problem’ it was called, and setting up a home for them seemed to many a good way to get them out of one’s hair. It had nothing whatsoever to do with Zionism, an ideology about which most people knew nothing and cared less. It wasn’t even an issue among the new socialist intellectuals who viewed the Israel experiment in idealistic terms as an opportunity for an oppressed people to show the world how a modern state should operate, those idealists are dead now but their disappointment as that dream began to fade from around 1970 was palpable.
If we are to find accord in our lifetime, we must put aside selective events from the past and deal with each day as it comes. Leave the past to historians to write and rewrite, and rewrite.
It will all end in tears, mamma.
I don’t believe the US saw the Arab spring coming when it did, but their intelligence must have anticipated that things would not continue unchanged when Mubarak died, not least because he had been trying to groom his son and despite draconian police controls the Egyptian people were clearly not happy with that. Furthermore the Brookings 2010 Arab Public Opinion Report showed that while almost all the Arab public wished for a nuclear free ME, a substantial majority saw a nuclear-armed Iran as being better for them while Israel kept its arsenal, and among those who believed Iran did have a nuclear weapons program, 70% overall, with a staggering 81% of Egyptians, still thought Iran had a right to its nuclear program. See pages 47/49 of the PDF report (URL at the top of this link).
link to brookings.edu
Leaving aside the issue of Iran’s nuclear program, those figures can be read as profound distrust of the US.
It seems to me likely that on top of these and other global developments, the Arab Spring changed the game dramatically for the US, and from that point the Palestinians moved to the bottom of the list while Israel's development as a vast US military base equipped with a human shield in the form of settlement populations was accelerated.
It appears that we may all have been conned again. The NYT reports that at the same time Obama was publicly urging Netanyahu to abandon settlement activity, he was quietly shipping him Bunker-Busting Bombs!
link to nytimes.com
There are selective but well documented evidences of that here:
link to robat.scl.net
Thank you, and kalithea! It is only obliquely relevant to this issue, but Tony Blair is in my view one of the most despicable people to walk this earth and anything he is part of either already is or will inevitably become contaminated. No peaceful outcome can possibly emerge from anything he touches. The Palestinians would do better without the quartet.
I watched both UN speeches live on Al Jazeera and I was deeply impressed by Abbas and much moved by his reception. He is not young and he looked very tired, it seemed grotesquely unsympathetic of Netanyahu to throw out his rabble rousing challenge for a meeting here and now when all he had to do was announce a simple cessation of settlement expansion and he could have earned an ovation to rival that given Abbas.
I still find it difficult to imagine how Obama’s idealism which once ignited the world can have melted away into such onanistic self-interest, and I wonder what his daughters who are now at an idealistic age make of it all.
Robert Fisk today. What a darkness despair is.
link to independent.co.uk
Annie, I found this
link to debatepedia.idebate.org
Can someone explain to me why the quartet regards negotiations as an alternative to the UN statehood bid. Abbas said he was ready for negotiations, so did Netanyahu, so why are the bid and the talks mutually exclusive.
Also what has the quartet got to do with it anyway? What status does it have and who appointed (?) it. I thought the whole idea of going to the UN was to put the matter in their hands.
While waiting:
link to english.aljazeera.net
Zionism is not cerebral and there is a danger in being too cerebral about it. The standing ovations Abbas received a few hours ago were expressions of pure emotion and as the delegates surged to their feet six billion of us whom they represent could share a glimpse of twig in the beak of the dove. I doubt such an emotion has ever swept across our planet before. Dialectical exchanges are fine but one needs also to factor in the human element, it is after all what gave rise to the 'Arab Spring'.
This thought occurred to me during last night.
Circumstances over which the US had little control have awakened the Arab world to the indignities of decades of subservience and exploitation. US Islamophobia and deadly military incursions into Islamic lands have forged deep seated anti-American attitudes among significant numbers, which economic irresponsibility and moral depravity have confirmed. Events during the last year have forced the veil from Obama’s eyes and he sees there is no longer hope of fundamental rapprochement between the West and the Arab world for the foreseeable future because it would call for seismic changes in far too many areas of US life and attitudes. Israelis have been accepted on the Western team and thus the Palestine statehood issue is no longer about Palestinians and their lives and land but about taking up position for a far greater conflict the US sees ahead. And indeed may well intend to provoke.
No one in recorded history has hitherto succeeded in disappointing so many to favour so few.
I watch a number of English language TV programs. What does not come over in a simple account of an exchange such as the one above is the ‘body language’ of the participants. All here will be familiar with the relentless robotic manner Israeli spokespersons adopt, but the self-consciously patient attention of the interviewers is also revealing. I would characterise it as ultra polite while not entirely concealing incredulity. Unless the viewer is passionate one way or the other, the interviewer’s is the attitude they are likely unconsciously to adopt. I mention this because official Israeli spokespersons' contributions to debate are actually so counter-productive, it is astonishing they agree to send them.
Well, what Hartman writes is sense. It may not be acceptable sense but at least it is not all that 4000 years of history stuff Netanyahu was on about again just the other day. If Netanyahu launches into that at the UN no one will miss Gaddafi.
Just been watching an Israeli spokesman interviewed on France24. He says the Palestinian UN bid a waste of time as they don’t have nine votes and even if they did they would face a US veto, and they should sit down and start negotiating now in New York. But negotiations have got nowhere, the interviewer pointed out. That is because the Palestinians are divided, the spokesman said, and anyway there is Hamas involved.
At that point time ran out, but one was left with the impression the Israelis want the Palestinians to drop Hamas and then unite and then start negotiations before Friday.
Sorry, I thought it was a start. ‘In particular’ he wrote. I didn’t imagine it would be the final line but at least he seemed to have accepted the principle. Leave that contentious bit out and you are left with: “Not only must we have no desire to expand settlements but we must recognize and declare that many of those settlements….have no future and that Israel’s political, moral and Jewish interests lie in dismantling them”. I may have misread it but it seemed to me a start where those connected to Jerusalem or located in one of the three settlement blocs could be dealt with next He didn’t after all say ‘so long as we keep…’. At least it is a step back from the whole area belongs, etc. plus he proposes settlement expansion cease and dismantlement begin. Were Netanyahu to have got that far, agreement would be under-way by now. No?
‘No’, said the cock, ‘and curses on us both,
And first on me if I were such a dunce
As let you fool me oftener than once’
Chaucer, The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’
Donniel Hartman talking sense.
link to hartman.org.il
This seems to be par for the course. After all, the US handed Iraq to Iran, more than a bit messed up, it is true, but nevertheless. Meanwhile, as if she hasn’t enough on her plate this week, Mrs Clinton is waving her wooden sword at Pakistan.
This NYT piece today stops one in one’s tracks. Even if Americans are unstintingly supportive of Israel, they surely cannot long tolerate their policies so transparently being set from Tel Aviv, and hearing a Congressman say he considers Netanyahu more credible than the President they elected?
link to nytimes.com
The cumulative pressures are gathering like a storm. As the days slip away we will find many journals reasoning more coherently.
link to spiegel.de
Interesting analysis.
By coincidence, I am rereading Josephus right now, and on the very page I just turned I find this:
A setback, which with sensible people is an inducement to caution and the avoiding of similar occurrences, with them was a spur to new calamities; and the end of one misery was invariably the beginning of another.
and HaroldRaynolds just wrote
The Washington Post is disgusting. This diminishes the credibility of anyone associated with it.
Our village had an annual fair with fiercely contested prizes for fruit and vegetables. Each year the same man won first prize with his rhubarb, strong, succulent, perfectly shaped and coloured. When asked how he did it, he would smile and tap the side of his nose with his finger. He was a man of advanced age, with recollections of two world wars, and in time he passed away. At the wake, they talked of his legendary rhubarb, the pride of the village and the envy of his neighbours, and speculated, as they had for years, on his secret. No secret, his daughter told them, at least once a day he would go into the garden a piss on them.
link to newyorker.com
I do not see the Palestinian issue meaningfully connected to the Egyptian revolution or the protests in Tel Aviv, and circuitous efforts to suggest they may be are, to my mind, a shade Palinesque. In the end, of course, everything is connected to everything but that is best expressed in meditative silence.
link to zawya.com
Ah, I see, they don’t want all their dirty linen aired in public. Makes sense. Thanks, jh.
link to haaretz.com
Then we apparently have his wife announcing that the US supports the Two-State Solution and therefore opposes any UN vote recognizing a Palestinian state.
link to avnery-news.co.il
Leaving aside for a moment the merits of the UN bid, I cannot understand in what way the UN vote by itself threatens Israel’s security.
The only way these positions make sense is if recognition would provoke something negative to Israel’s security. But what? Whatever it is must be more important than the damage the veto will do the US with the Arab world, or the good that would arise from an abstention. Is it possible that these statements reveal that to the US hierarchies the occupied territories are actually Israel?
I am indebted to a comment on Foreign Policy for this from link to avnery-news.co.il
Fascinating, thanks.
Whether it is what they want or not, it is what they are allowing happen. I have long suspected the only way to defeat this ‘enemy’ is to stand back and let it defeat itself, courteously opening a door here and there and providing damp towels when perspiration breaks out. The point is that like a tidal wave, Israeli activities in Palestine are simply not sustainable. Recall Stein’s Law: if something cannot go on forever, it will stop…(i.e. there is no necessity to intervene).
It is actually what Ayatollah Khomeini said in Ahmadinejad’s famously misquoted quote: Imam (Khomeini) ghoft (said) een (this) rezhim-e (regime) ishghalgar-e (occupying) qods (Jerusalem) bayad (must) az safheh-ye ruzgar (from page of time) mahv shavad (vanish from)
It is not necessary to be loved to be wise.
There is correspondence in the NYT today following the Op-Ed by Turki al-Faisal, cracking off with the ADL needless to say.
link to nytimes.com
Mr Witty, Are saying Israel wants to be a home for all Jews except those who question its policies and actions?
Chaos, There were no pogroms but I am old enough to remember when swathes of middle class Americans actively disliked Jews, wouldn’t admit them to social clubs and resisted their acquisition of apartments and housing in certain ‘classy’ blocks and residential areas.
One state with an autonomous region for those Jews who want to live alone ?
It’s as well Obama wears his hair so short or he might be tearing it out by the handful right now.
link to nytimes.com
Obama seems to have said that he would oppose the Palestinian bid but that is not the same as saying he would use the veto because ‘oppose’ means to confront, to put objections or hard questions to (OED). Perhaps that is splitting hairs but one grabs at straws, to mx a metaphorical cocktail.
Ah, yes, moral relativity, otherwise known as Realpolitik. Just watched an interesting discussion apropos Turkey’s Gaza blockade pitch to the ICC on Al Jazeera’ s Inside Story. Israel seems to have a new (?) spokesperson, Gregg Roman; definitely easier on the eye than Mark Regev but spouting the same convoluted stuff.
...according to Haaretz which does not supply a link. Wish they wouldn’t do that! I can find no mention of this in El País. He is wasting his time with the Spanish anyway as they are all for it. His use of the 1st person plural, however, is revealing.
Like the Zen bamboo Abdulla will bend not break.
All artists were kids once. Mozart was composing and even performed before royalty scarcely past the age of five. Minor royalty, of course, but nonetheless!
Der Spiegel yesterday.
Does anyone have any plausible suggestion as to why there has been no leak of any kind pointing to an alternative scenario?
Forgive me for coming back to this but I have been brooding the night about that moment when the aide bent over Bush’s shoulder, and I realise I may have fallen into one of those traps I try hard to avoid. The only reason I took that to be the moment Bush was informed of 9/11 was because that is what the TV commentator voiced over the clip. Well, he wasn’t there and the cameraman wasn’t in the studio. The scene was being aired in the middle of all those other harrowing scenes which may have challenged one’s credulity but not their veracity. It seems to me this morning that it could have been a later scene when the aide was simply bringing Bush up to date on some detail and the TV commentator had labelled it as ‘the moment’. If that is true then it all falls into place. I mention this because it demonstrates, to me at any rate, the extraordinary dangers inherent in simply accepting what the media puts out even when there is no consciously nefarious purpose.
I have watched and read many persuasive arguments pointing to ulterior truths behind 9/11 and my own most nagging memory is the reaction of Bush as an aide leaned over his right shoulder in that school for young kids, ostensibly informing him what had happened. I write ‘ostensibly’ because I still find his unchanging expression inexplicable for anyone just given that information, he didn’t even turn to the aide and ask him to repeat himself. On the other hand, how is it that with the complex web of people it would surely take to perpetrate a deception of that magnitude, not a single one has leaked a single thing over a leak infested period of ten years.
Gershon Baskin’s role is primarily reconciliatory, no one wants to witness these uncivilized scenes, they are distasteful to say the least. However, the Israeli ambassador has suffered de facto expulsion, and it is not easy to imagine the interim military authority to have been unable to avert this outcome had they really wished to do so, particularly if the 'Cairo Street' was on their side as you suggest. I imagine the real reason Tantawi could not be located for two critical hours was because had he been, he would have been compelled to protect the embassy and the Ambassador would still be there, a little shaken perhaps but not stirred. The fact that the Secretary of Defence couldn’t reach him can scarcely have been because Tantawi was out shooting ibex in the Sinai. No, he will have been watching events just as closely as Netanyahu, and carefully chose the precise moment to reach out and pick up the ‘phone, which is doubtless also why the Washington Post sat on that bit of their story.
Curious that the Washington Post does not consider it important to tell its readers that it took their Secretary of Defence two whole hours of effort to reach Tantawi while the Israeli embassy in Cairo was under attack and in danger of being trashed. Here is the Washington Post and here Haaretz>. Apparently he 'couldn't be reached'. Come on!
I came on this story of the IDF arming and training settlers a couple of days back but have just gotten an account here activated so I am a bit late on it. Anyway, Hi. This really worries me though. Those settlers include some of the most extreme Zionists and arming them like this is a recipe for disaster since they will be itching to use their weapons, and out there scanning the horizon like guns on a pheasant shoot. Israel must surely be seeking to provoke confrontation there, presumably to undermine the integrity of the UN bid. It’s bad enough to contemplate the harm to unarmed Palestinians but with the antagonism Netanyahu and Lieberman have managed to stir up in Ankara and Cairo, we could well be looking at the endgame. Even if I am overly pessimistic, no one surely can imagine everything passing peacefully and the settlers then checking their weapons back to the IDF armoury.