The pattern of policymaking in the Middle East, as it was defined since President Bush's "axis if evil" speech of January 2002, is undergoing a momentous change of direction. Bush's foreign-policy paradigm of an alliance of "moderates" to defeat the "extremists" – a model too enthusiastically seconded by an unimaginative Israeli leadership and by those Arabs (led by Egypt and Saudi Arabia) who dread the forces of radical change – has collapsed.
Daoud Kuttab: Sixty Years of the Palestinian "Catastrophe"
As the state of Israel celebrates its 60th birthday, Palestinians remember the Nakbeh, or "catastrophe"- their story of dispossession, occupation, and statelessness. But, for both sides, as well as external powers, the events of 1948 and what has followed- the occupation since 1967 of the remaining lands of historic Palestine- represents a tragic failure.
Benny Morris: A prophet perplexed
Beholding Israel today, Theodor Herzl - Zionism's fin-de-siecle prophet and founding organiser - would have alternatively beamed and frowned.
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Perhaps the deeply secular, anti-theocratic Herzl would have been most flummoxed and incensed by the (burgeoning) numbers, and correlated political power of the orthodox and ultra-orthodox (some 20-25% of the country's Jews). He believed that God was dead, and religious Jews a dying breed.
Herzl's liberal sensibilities would have been shocked by the Israeli occupation of much of the West Bank and the displays of insensitivity and occasional brutality that are the common fare of most military occupations. More generally, he would certainly have been taken aback by the spectacle of Arab-Israeli conflict, of which the occupation is one of the byproducts.
Israeli film at Cannes explores 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre
A daring new animated documentary follows Israeli director Ari Folman as he tries to piece together memories of the 1982 massacre of Palestinians in Beirut's Sabra and Shatila camps.
One of the most surprising aspects of the film was the parallel a psychiatrist drew between the Sabra and Shatila massacre and the Holocaust, in which millions of Jews perished.
"The response [to the massacre] in Israel was so huge, in my point of view, because immediately after we had the press release of the first photos of the massacre," he said, when asked about the parallels. "For us Israelis, it was a direct connection to our Jewish history."
Jimmy Carter: A Human Rights Crime In Gaza
The world is witnessing a terrible human rights crime in Gaza, where a million and a half human beings are being imprisoned with almost no access to the outside world by sea, air, or land. An entire population is being brutally punished.Former US President Jimmy Carter joins an ever-growing list of academics and influential people who know that the Israeli Defense Forces' (IDF) abuses in the Occupied Territories must be called out.
This gross mistreatment of the Palestinians in Gaza was escalated dramatically by Israel, with United States backing, after political candidates representing Hamas won a majority of seats in the Palestinian Authority parliament in 2006.
For Palestinians to forgive Israel would be risky, irrational even, but it could be the only hope
In the first chapter of Amos Oz's novel My Michael, the protagonist Hannah recalls her childhood friends, Khalil and Aziz, two Palestinians who in 1948 disappeared along with 800,000 of their people. In the last chapter she imagines her two friends coming back to blow everything up. By then Hannah has descended into madness.A thoughtful article on the way Israeli society puts a mental block on its past atrocities.
Hannah, like Oz and his generation of Israelis, knows that before the war of 1948 there was another, older and larger society than her own, and that that society was destroyed and its traces erased; the population was forced to leave, villages were razed to the ground and cities, neighbourhoods and streets were renamed. She must also know that the destruction of the Palestinian society was necessary for the creation of Israel. Unlike her generation, however, Hannah is willing to admit what she knows; but that's only because she is mad.
Peres: Fight terror - reduce global dependence on oil
President Shimon Peres on Monday hailed Israel's new weapon against the threat of "terrorism" from its Middle East neighbors - the electric car.Okay, I confess, I kind of understand where Mr Shimon Peres is coming from, but if I extend his logic, then the Bush Administration itself would be a direct sponsor of terrorism by continuing to buy oil from the Middle East and refusing to cut down or ratify any treaty that threatens its use of oil.
Outlining Israel's development priorities in an address to foreign journalists to mark this week's 60th anniversary of statehood, Peres said reducing global dependence on oil would curb oil-producing states' ability to fund Israel's enemies.
"Oil ... is not only polluting the air, it is also promoting terror," said the 84-year-old Nobel Peace Prize winner, who has long promoted Israel's now powerful high-tech industries.
Peres argued that manifold increases in oil prices in recent years had contributed to a rise in financing for terrorism in the Middle East
Israeli tactics collide with peace process
Suicide bombings in Israel have dropped off so significantly that the nation's security officials now dare to speak openly of success. But the very steps they are taking to thwart bombers appear to collide head on with the government's agenda of achieving peace with the Palestinians.Peace reigns in the cities of Israel, where suicide bombings have dropped off dramatically. Whatever the criticism, Israeli tactics of collective punishment, including the withholding of tax revenues, cutting off diesel supply for power stations and obstructing medical aid to sick Palestinians have worked.
It is a classic military-political dilemma. The progress in stopping suicide bombers, the vast majority of whom cross into Israel from the West Bank, has brought enough quiet for Israel to resume peace talks with the Palestinian leadership there.
But the current calm is fragile, and to maintain it Israeli security officials say they must continue their nightly arrests and sometimes deadly raids in the heart of the West Bank - tactics at odds with a peace process that envisions a separate Palestinian state, an eventual Israeli withdrawal from much of the West Bank and, in the meantime, a gradual handover of authority to the Palestinian police.
For Israel's Arabs, 60 years of regret
As Israel toasts its 60th anniversary in the coming weeks, rejoicing in Jewish national rebirth and democratic values, the Arabs who make up 20 percent of its citizens will not be celebrating. Better off and better integrated than ever in their history, freer than the vast majority of other Arabs, Israel's 1.3 million Arab citizens are still far less well off than Israeli Jews and feel increasingly unwanted.What Israel's leaders are quietly doing is creating an apartheid regime...and it always begins with, of all things, roads.
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Across Israel, especially in the north, the remains of dozens of Palestinian villages sit partly unused, scars on the landscape from the conflict that gave birth to the state in 1948.
Yet some of the original Arab inhabitants and their descendants, all Israeli citizens, live in packed towns and villages often next door and remain barred from resettling the vacant areas, while Jewish communities around them are urged to expand.
Rice seeks Mid-East breakthrough
It is crunch time for the Bush administration as it continues to hold out hope for a peace agreement between the Palestinians and the Israelis.Once again, the indomitable US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice visits the world's most intractable conflict. Once again, nothing is going to come out of it. Rice's optimism that a solution could be found by year's end is another promise that belongs to the trash bin of history. More than anything else, it is a signal of tired retreat. US President George Bush's time in the Oval Office is fast coming to an end, and this is undoubtedly his Administration's farewell to the Promised Land- kind of like a "no-hard-feelings" handshake that has been two presidential terms in the making.
But even US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice let out a sign of her frustration at the lack of progress on the ground, particularly on the part of the Israelis.
Baghdad Jews must run for their lives
Eight Baghdad Jews who represent the remnants of that city's Jewish community are facing security threats so grave that they need to flee the country, the community's caretaker, Canon Andrew White, told The Jerusalem Post from London on Tuesday.
According to White, who himself has fled from Baghdad due to terrorist threats, the situation has become dire for the 2,600-year-old community, which only 100 years ago made up a third of Baghdad's population.
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...an unspecified few have expressed their desire to leave. But despite efforts by Jewish organizations abroad and some Knesset members to bring them to Israel, the eight rejected the idea of the Jewish state as a possible point of refuge. The problem, White said, was that due to the umbrella of anti-Israel and anti-Zionist sentiments they have lived under in Iraq, they are fearful of Israel and what it represents.
"They have been fed anti-Israel propaganda all their lives," he said. "They do not trust Israel to be a good place. If some of them do want to go to Israel, they are scared of what the repercussions might be for the ones that stay."
I freely admit that it is always hard to be absolutely objective in commenting on the Israeli-Palestinian issue, but I am relieved that a debate on the matter is finally picking up. For too long has the pro-Israel camp attempted to hijack discussions when things don't go their way. The charge of anti-Semite is always in the background, waiting to pounce on anyone who levels an atom of criticism on Israel. The world is expected never to forget the Holocaust of six million Jews. But to recall that at the total expense of the present oppression of Palestinian civilians surely goes beyond all boundaries of morality.
I don't deny that Jews have historically received the short end of the stick. They've spent most of their entire existence at the mercy of other powers who have typically found in Jews a convenient scapegoat. Yet, the creation of Israel was not the result of a religious awakening, but a combination of an inherent Christian hatred of Jews and the rise of a rabid nationalism amongst Jews. The latter took its name from the Biblical Zion, much as modern-day Salafis take their names from the salaf-al-salih (the Pious Predecessors). Both tap into profound religious imagery for legitimacy. And like Salafism, Zionism is also an extremely selective, absolutist and volatile discipline. Contempt for an "other" is almost always a given.
Which is why when the Iraq Study Group (ISG) led by former Secretary of State James Baker directly pointed the finger at the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as being one of the causes of violent extremism in the Middle East, the Israeli government emphatically rejected it.
While I also do not believe that the resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will instantly push back the tide of extremism, a viable Palestinian state will at least alleviate the livelihoods of millions of homeless refugees. It is all too easy to discard the Palestinian issue on the basis of the faulty logic of others, but to also discard the tangible suffering of millions of people is completely perverse.
To Zionism, the "other" isn't even worth speaking about. The "other" does not and should not exist, yet ammunition must be constantly expended on them. Their women and children must not be regarded as civilians, but cohorts of the militarism that has infected the whole of Palestinian society.
Not surprisingly, Palestinian militants, the real ones who blow up school buses and restaurants, use just the same kind of logic, only with less public-relations savvy and political-correctness.
I might go as far as to say that the positions taken by the ISG are bold, but only in rehashing the obvious steps in resolving the conflict. One of the recommendations, for example, suggests that the elements of a negotiated peace between Israel and Palestinians should include:
- Adherence to UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 and to the principle of land for peace, which are the only bases for achieving peace.All the elements, though unoriginal, merely require a will to back them up. Furthermore, the ISG implies that it is willing to accept Hamas if it operates within the framework of a coalition government representing different Palestinian factions. To date, the Israeli government and the Bush Administration has categorically rejected Hamas, even though it remains a democratically-elected force in Palestinian society. It is hence not too difficult to translate this rejection into a total rejection of the Palestinian people themselves; a fact that no doubt benefits the ultra-nationalists of Israel.
- A major effort to move from the current hostilities by consolidating the cease-fire reached between the Palestinians and the Israelis in November 2006.
- Support for a Palestinian national unity government.
"Israel does occupy this territory deep within the West Bank, and connects 200-or-so settlements...with a road, and then prohibits the Palestinians from using that road, or in many cases even crossing the road.Again, he echoes the ISG's suggestion that Israel would never have peace until it withdrew from the territories which it has occupied since the 1967 Arab-Israeli war. And again, the pro-Israel camp unleashed the most unimaginative weapon in their arsenal, the charge that Jimmy Carter is in reality a closet anti-Semite.
This perpetrates even worse instances of apartness, or apartheid, than we witnessed even in South Africa..."
Once again, America is barking up the wrong tree. US Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice has stated that one of the main aims of her tour of the Middle East is to fire up moderate Muslims in the region.
"We are taking a different course. We are supporting the democratic aspirations of all the people."Her words are ironic, considering that two of her more significant pitstops are Egypt and Saudi Arabia. I may be wrong, but that's probably why the democratic line is being liberally coated in fluff and spin. Instead, she emphasizes more on forces of moderation, a label into which Saudi Arabia and Egypt might be dropped into without uncomfortable questions being asked.
Of course, everybody has lost sight of why this war started in the first place. The three Israeli soldiers are still languishing somewhere and even if the Israeli Defense Force (IDF) stumbles upon some intelligence on their whereabouts, they aren't in a hurry to retrieve them.
That's because time is running out on the Israeli offensive, with US Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice promising a ceasefire within days, not weeks. Commentators speculate that the US cannot afford
to pay the high moral price of letting the war go on for too long. Just last week, the US State Department described as "outrageous" a claim by Israeli Justice Minister Haim Ramon that Israel had received permission to keep bombing Lebanon.
Obviously, the photographs of children being pulled out of bombed-out ruins does
not sit well with policymakers who had played an active part in resisting the UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's call for an immediate ceasefire to be imposed in the initial stages of the conflict.
Hezbollah's tenacity was totally unexpected and its arsenal of missiles is far from being depleted. Israel's objective in all this
is hardly set in stone and has oscillated from rescuing her captured soldiers to eradicating Hezbollah
completely to merely unseating Hezbollah's hold over Southern Lebanon. Shifting
priorities in the heat of battle is not a sign of weakness as some people
allege, but the mark of a frighteningly efficient and adaptive war machine.
One thing is clear, though, the facts on the ground must change. So confident
are the Israelis over this goal that even the normally dovish Shimon Peres vehemently disagrees with Rice that the ceasefire should come sooner rather than later. The fear is that Hezbollah escapes unscathed. However, it is hard to fathom Israel's strategy. Does it think that mimicking Hezbollah's crime of targeting civilian populations would reap results? Isn't Israel's own outrage and subsequent retaliation a good barometer of what it would provoke not only in the Lebanese side, but also in the whole Middle East?
Central to all this is Israel not being used to facing an effective opponent. The David and Goliath myths attached to Israel's confrontation with four Arab armies in the Six Day War has solidified how Israel views itself. To be hurt, even by pinpricks caused by a ragtag guerilla group like Hezbollah, is an offense of epic proportions. More, Israel believes that if it does not respond in the most overwhelming manner, her Arab opponents might nurture plans to revisit the Six Day War. This time, it will not be just four poorly-organized armies, but a project that would be enthusiastically joined by Iran itself.
Bloodying Hezbollah's nose is thus tantamount to bloodying Iran's nose. Israel fears that Iran might tip the region's balance of power by acquiring the same nuclear deterrence that it holds over the heads of her Arab neighbors. Hezbollah's
annihilation would serve as a useful warning to Iran.
But Israel is not alone it her goal to paralyze Hezbollah. Help arrives from the unexpected quarter of a certain brand of Islam. In a curt fatwa labeled 4174, Shaykh Abdullah bin Abdul Rahman bin Jibrin totally overturns the notion that Hezbollah should be assisted or even praised in any way.
Q. Is it permissible to support the Rafidi Hizbullah?The term, Rafidi, of course, is a pejorative word used to refer to Shia Muslims in general. It's a term liberally used by the websites listed here, and also by individuals like Musab al-Zarqawi (recently killed) whose zeal in slaughtering Shia Muslims earned even a rebuke from al-Qaida.
A. It is not permissible to support this Rafidi party and it is not permissible to join under its leadership, and it is not permissible to wish them (from God) victory and empowerment. And our advise to the people of Sunnah is to distance themselves from them, and to denounce those who join them, and to show their hostility to Islam and Muslims, and their harm, in the past and in modern times. The Rafidah always harbored hostility to Sunnis, and how they always try to show faults in Sunnis, and to betray them and undermine them.
...we should never lose sight of the fact that the Jewish people have also paid heavily for that triumph. The growing number of Jewish victims of the deepening cycles of violence plaguing the region, evidenced most recently in the indiscriminant Hizbollah rocket attacks on northern Israeli cities, is part of that price. However, in my opinion, the greater price lies in how the triumph of Zionism threatens to transform mainstream Judaism from a religion characterized by the loftiest of moral codes, to one that is willing to sacrifice its morality on the altar of political expediency.On other fronts, a recent interview by Jon Stewart of Dr Alon Ben-Meir, a Middle East expert, threw up an interesting mis-fact. Both men erroneously conclude that since Syria predominantly consists of Sunni Muslims, her relationship with Hezbollah is thus purely one of political convenience. The mis-fact might not have been so important if they had not extended it by claiming that the Lebanese conflict signals a convergence of both Sunni and Shia militancy.
The tireless Jon Stewart breaks down Israel's strategy in Lebanon for the unwashed masses.
View the video clip.
Israeli children allowed to scribble taunts on artillery shells bound for Lebanon. (courtesy of AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner) |
"The irony is, what they really need to do is to get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this shit, and it's over..."By targeting major byways, Israel seeks to stifle the import of weapons and ammunition from outside. But since the Israeli withdrawal from a 22-year occupation of Lebanon in 2000, Hezbollah has never relinquished its state of battle-readiness. Crude watchtowers built along the border between South Lebanon and Israel speak of a group that knows all too well the value of closely monitoring its enemy. Even before the deadly ambush that killed eight Israeli soldiers and captured two, Katyusha launchpads had been carefully spread out across Hezbollah strongholds.
Ghana apologized to the Arab League on Wednesday for one of its football players waving an Israeli flag after his country's 2-0 World Cup win against the Czech Republic, the Arab League secretary-general said.I doubt John Pentsil was taking sides in the Palestinian-Israel conflict. He was being provocative, but toward an entirely different audience. This is Germany after all, ground zero of the Holocaust which wiped out six million Jews.
Defender John Pentsil plays for Hapoel Tel Aviv, and waved a small Israeli flag after Ghana's win in Saturday's match to acknowledge Israeli fans in Germany.
Amr Moussa said the league had received an official apology from the Ghanaian government expressing regret at the incident.
The memo said Pentsil's action had no official support and Ghana hoped the incident would not affect Ghana's relations with friendly countries.
The Ghanaian Football Association apologised on Monday for Paintsil's conduct and said the Ghanaian FA was not trying to take sides in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict.
Nobel Prize-winning author Elie Wiesel has called on Israel to take in refugees from Darfur. In an interview in the upcoming issue of Haaretz Magazine, Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor, says,
"We as Jews are obliged to help not only Jews. I was a refugee and therefore I am in favor of admitting refugees. I thought it was very laudable when Israel became the first country to admit the Vietnamese boat people. History constantly chooses a capital of human suffering, and Darfur is today the capital of human suffering. Israel should absorb refugees from Darfur..."I cannot help but wonder: what about the tens of thousands of refugees in Israel's own backyard?
I was listening to a BBC reporter interview a Hamas official, and wondered why the first feeling I got was that of incredulity. I must be honest here; for some reason, I always cringe when I hear a Middle Eastern accent on the news. It's not the accent, really, but the manner in which a message is delivered, a speech is read out or a question is answered. There just isn't any organization I can relate to, and I am often left feeling a little frustrated.
Part of the feeling might be blamed on an unconscious stereotype I must have of Arabs. There is little need to hide the pernicious influence of Western media in this respect. But I don't believe that it plays such a large part because I feel the same way whenever Israeli officials are interviewed. Benjamin Netanyahu and Dory Gold are exceptions, though. Both are accomplished orators with nice American, news-friendly accents.
In contrast, people like the Hamas official are partial toward:
1. Repetitive emphasis
People from that part of the world seem to believe that an argument can be made stronger if certain demonstrative pronouns (most notably, that) are repeated, ad infinitum. For example, the sentence:
What Israel is doing in the occupied territories is criminal, unjust and oppressive.The Hamas official renders it thus:
What Israel is doing in occupation. That is criminal. That is unjust. That is oppressive.It's butchery of the language, plain and simple. Then, there is always the syndrome of...
What Israel is doing in occupation. That is criminal, and unjust, and oppressive.Replacing a perfectly-usable comma (pause in speech) with mulitple ANDs smacks of being ill-prepared, as if the person being interviewed is ad-libbing things right off his head. The official is not putting forth a case. He is ranting. It weakens authority and legitimacy.
You should talk about Israeli targetted killings, and demolishing of homes, and preventing pregnant women from reaching the hospital, and shooting at little boys and girls.Though the comparison is, in my personal opinion, justified, the question remains unanswered. What is so damaging is that most listeners will discard the comparison and gleefully focus on the clumsy manner in which the question was evaded.
Dear Sir,Because such incapacity should never go unrequited, I present SaveTheHijaz's blistering retort here.
What rubbish.
But then what would you expect if you use two completely unreliable sources: Ali Al-Ahmed, a disgruntled one man 'organisation', whose modus operandi is to spew out anti Saudi material of any kind (its basis on fact being fairly irrelevant) and Sami Angawi, the equally disgruntled former director of the Pilgrimage Research Centre who was fired for the mismanagement of affairs and wants to attack all those that now have responsibility for the Two Holy Places.
Perhaps your readers would be interested in what is really happening. Every artefact discovered has been preserved and protected and will be displayed in new museums in Makkah and Madinah - indeed some artefacts are already on display. In all, more than $19 billion has been spent on preserving and maintaining these two Holy sites.
We are proud of our rich Islamic heritage. A pride reflected in the title of Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques, a title taken by our King. We are also aware of how precious this Islamic heritage is and how important the preservation of this heritage is, not just to us but to the millions of Muslims from around the world who visit the Two Holy Mosques every year, it is hardly something we are going to allow to be destroyed.
Turki Al-Faisal
[source: Center for Islamic Pluralism (CIP)]
The struggles over the Temple Mount/Haram al-Sharif...are fundamental, with fanatics of both faiths wanting to expunge the other.Continue reading...
Yet this is one of my favorite places in Jerusalem - grassy, shaded by trees and deceptively calm.
While I sit on a stone wall and look at the intricate tiles of the Dome of the Rock, some Jews are plotting to destroy it and Al Aksa mosque and build a third temple. Some evangelical Christians hope they'll do it, thinking that only then will Jesus return. Some Muslims are convinced that the Jews are burrowing underground to create a new synagogue. Jews are upset that the Muslims dug into the hill at the site of Solomon's Stables in 1996 to create a new underground mosque, the Marwani. It's here, on the ground revered by both Judaism and Islam, where Jerusalem is most divided - and most volatile.
And it's here that Sharon made a controversial visit in September 2000, which many Muslims say set off the second intifada...
