Zvi Barel discusses Israeli Obama bashers in Ha’aretz
Obama did not invent a new American policy. The United States has long held that the settlements are illegal; the same is true for the status of East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The Americans are sticking to the same road map drawn up seven years ago, it’s just that Israel apparently didn’t notice that the Palestinians have fulfilled the first article in the document almost completely. Military action against Israel has stopped, even from the Gaza Strip, and an increasingly effective Palestinian force in the West Bank is taking action against terror organizations. Israel, in contrast, has not met its road map obligations and continues to argue over the terms of the agreement – as if it never adopted it. Nor can Israel rely on its demand that the Arab states normalize relations with Jerusalem: The obligation of normalization is conditioned on Israel’s withdrawal from all occupied territory.
Tags: Israeli Politics, US Politics
Uri Avnery deconstructs all the arguments defending Israel’s war crimes in Gaza. Normally I bring a key quote, but in this case i would end up just copy and pasting the entire article. Here is my own recent personal commentary on serving in the Israeli army and fighting a civilian population,
Gideon Levy on Yoav Gallant:
From the “neighbor procedure” of using people as human shields, which is a gross violation of a High Court ruling, a public scandal in itself; to the spirit of words uttered by a commander who is quoted by a number of the soldiers as saying that was preferable to harm bystanders than to hesitate in hurting the enemy. “If you are not sure, shoot,” one of the soldiers quoted him as saying. The soldier added, “The firepower was insane … In urban warfare, everyone is an enemy. There is no difference between innocent civilians and enemies.”
It is for this that Gallant is responsible. He orchestrated a war in which there were almost no instances of combat, all the while inculcating an awful attitude within the IDF, one that says it is permissible for us to do anything: to drop thousands of bombs, shells, and missiles in addition to phosphorus shells and flechettes; to kill whole families and to sow destruction on a horrific scale while considering it all a success.
“They didn’t set a goal for us,” one of the combat soldiers said in the report, which recounts the destruction the soldiers wreaked just for its own sake. “I don’t know what the objective of the war was.”
Tags: Israeli Army, War Crimes
Most who from the beginning oppossed the so-called “security fence” argued it was a sham and had nothing to do with security. The Shin Bet itself admitted as much a couple years ago. It’s main intent, like the settlements, is to annex as much of the West Bank as possible before an agreement with the Palestinians. An article by Amos Harel in today’s Ha’aretz, basically concedes these points:
Seven years after construction work began on the West Bank separation fence, the project seems to have run aground. Work has slowed significantly since September 2007, and today, after the state has spent about NIS 9.5 billion, only about 60 percent of the more limited, revised route has been completed.
Tags: Israeli Army, Propaganda
Uri Avnery on Bibi Yahoo’s wonder government:
Some weeks ago, Netanyahu appointed Hadas to one of the most sensitive positions in the security establishment: to coordinate all the efforts to free the “kidnapped” soldier Gilad Shalit.
If we do not want to assume that this man, a confidante of the Prime Minister and a former senior officer of the Mossad, who has been responsible for life-and-death decisions, was an accomplice to a vile fraud, there is no escape from the conclusion that his judgment is grievously impaired and that he fell into a trap that any person with common sense could have spotted a mile off.
How can such a person possibly be entrusted with such a sensitive task as the negotiation for a prisoner exchange with Hamas, in which sophisticated Egyptian mediators are involved?
And what does this say about the judgment of Netanyahu, who appointed him to this task, especially assuming that his wife had demanded it?
Tags: Corruption, Israeli Army
Tags: Settlers
Ha’aretz discusses Bibi Yahoo’s paranoia:
Netanyahu appears to be suffering from confusion and paranoia. He is convinced that the media are after him, that his aides are leaking information against him and that the American administration wants him out of office. Two months after his visit to Washington, he is still finding it difficult to communication normally with the White House. To appreciate the depth of his paranoia, it is enough to hear how he refers to Rahm Emanuel and David Axelrod, Obama’s senior aides: as “self-hating Jews.”
Tags: Israeli Politics
I can’t remember when the first time I heard this chant at a protest. But it struck me as a powerful and true statement. I thought it came from the early union struggles here in the US. Only recently I learned that the chant is the title of a Chilean song ¡El pueblo unido jamás será vencido! which was written as a sort of unoffical anthem for Allende’s political movement. The song and chant became even more popular and widely used by protest movements around the world, after Pinochet’s bloody coup. You can read the lyrics and listen to it here. (I can’t say I love the lyrics or the music – it sounds more like a turn-of-the-20th-century Russian socialist “workers” song than an indigenous Chilean melody).
As quoted on the link above, the composer of the song himself notes how he heard the chant at a rally and it inspired him to write the song. I have been unable to trace the history of the chant any further back. Whatever its origins, it came to mind this week as I watched events unfold in Iran.
Tags: Iran
Yesterday’s post cited an article from the WSJ entitled Iran’s Web Spying Aided by Western Technology. I added some commentary which I decided to pull out since the article has broad implications about government use of the Internet to spy on its citizenry.
Tags: Propaganda
The situation is so fluid on the ground, that I hesitate to comment, This post is a collection of news articles and commentary I personally found educational and enlightening. I start with a quote which expresses my own feelings about what is going on. It seems exceedingly strange to me that I quote a sitting President as the person who most eloquently expresses my own feelings. But Barack Obama does have a gift with words, and he is an exceptionally kind and intelligent man:
The Iranian government must understand that the world is watching. We mourn each and every innocent life that is lost. We call on the Iranian government to stop all violent and unjust actions against its own people. The universal rights to assembly and free speech must be respected, and the United States stands with all who seek to exercise those rights.
As I said in Cairo, suppressing ideas never succeeds in making them go away. The Iranian people will ultimately judge the actions of their own government. If the Iranian government seeks the respect of the international community, it must respect the dignity of its own people and govern through consent, not coercion.
Martin Luther King once said – “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” I believe that. The international community believes that. And right now, we are bearing witness to the Iranian peoples’ belief in that truth, and we will continue to bear witness.
Tags: Iran