Posted by middleeast on 26th March 2010
The Washington Times
Friday, March 26, 2010
The right to make a ‘row’ with Israel
Why shouldn’t there be a bit more of a row on the settlement expansion issue (“White House urged to end row on settlements,” Page 1, March 17)? If Israel does not reinvent itself as the separate and democratic Jewish state that it wants to be, the settlements and the occupation will gerrymander and disintegrate its borders as well as cement its rule over another, faster-growing people.
Both these things will make it harder to prevent the “one-state solution” that Israel, understandably, doesn’t want.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak himself recently pointed this out, even going so far as to say that Israel was on its way to becoming “an apartheid state” if it keeps up the occupation and settlement expansion.
It is to continue to assist Israel’s well-being that Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton have done nothing more than repeat the opposition of every single U.S. administration – equally Republican and Democratic – to Israel’s settlements and their ongoing expansion for more than 40 years.
Israel has ignored this consistent and implacable American opposition all that time, once again to the detriment of its own interests. That attitude also has been detrimental to America’s interests, as it has helped further the protraction of an increasingly dangerous conflict. It is harming America’s other alliances and other nations’ trust of and friendship with the United States, generating animosities toward America and fanning the flames of anti-American extremism.
At what point, after so many decades of settlement expansion and Israel’s indifference to patient expressions of concern from its close friend, America, is America finally permitted to get somewhat angry? Why isn’t America finally allowed to make a bit of a row about it?
The position of President Obama and Mr. Biden is just like that of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Only the establishment of two states, with ironclad Western and American security guarantees, can grant both Israelis and Palestinians the national rights and peace both equally deserve.
That also could help bring about a less dangerous and conflict-driven world for the United States and its other friends in the Middle East and Europe. It is through both Israeli and American national security lenses that the United States sees Israel’s four decades of ceaseless settlement expansion, which continues, even now, unabated.
JAMES ADLER
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Posted by middleeast on 26th March 2010
Jacobs’ tiny tent
Everyone is vulnerable if Charles Jacobs can sling personal hatreds and allegations of disloyalty. Brookline’s Temple Ohabei Shalom hosted the J Street kickoff and Harvard Hillel presented J Street’s Jeremy Ben-Ami.
Are these unfundworthy havens of treason?
The extremist Kahanists have a list of allegedly disloyal “self-hating” Jews, including Israeli President Shimon Peres. I hope Jacobs, by reenacting witch-hunter Joe McCarthy, isn’t traversing this dangerous-Saddamist, Inquisitionalist and Soviet “enemies of the people” road.
When The Jerusalem Post’s columnist David Kimche died, his paper reported that “Kimche wrote .. on encouraging Israel to make greater efforts to resolve the conflict with the Palestinians and the Arab world …and argued that a majority of Israelis and Palestinians firmly supported the notion of two states living side-by-side in peace.” The Post considered Kimche to have been “a valuable member of our mix of opinion writers.”
But Jacobs’ tent seems too small for Kimche – or Charles Radin or Michael Felsen. Jacobs seems not to want a “mix of opinion.” Arab regimes also don’t like Big Tents, and Jacobs agrees. He seems to disagree with the Jewish world, Israel, Europe, America and Boston, who do.
His is a McCarthyist-Soviet imprisoning tent. Don’t try to stand. You’ll bang your head.
JAMES ADLER
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Posted by middleeast on 9th March 2010
Monday, March 1, 2010 15 Adar, 5770 24:05 IST
Better ammunition
Sir, – The Post has recently run much news and comment on failed hasbara (public diplomacy) encounters with delegitimization efforts.
Is hasbara a serious attempt to engage the educated Western world? Any educated Westerner knows that putting half a million Israelis into the mere 20-percent residue of Mandatory Palestine left for the Palestinians has constituted for decades a standing rebuke to the two-state solution. How else could Palestinians have seen it, as actions continually speak louder than words? Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has only recently – and reluctantly – accepted the two-state solution.
More effective hasbara would say that settlements have badly hurt rather than helped Israel, but that this doesn’t affect Israel’s basic legitimacy as a state any more than other countries’ mistakes would.
And during Operation Cast Lead, Herb Keinon wrote in the Post: “Another problem facing Israel… is that while the world is being fed dramatic pictures from Gaza, there are few dramatic pictures from Israel, and gaping holes in apartment buildings hit by Grad rockets can’t compete with footage from Gaza of crying children splattered in blood” (“‘Shouldn’t Israel be ashamed of itself?,’” January 7, 2009).
It doesn’t lessen the unconditional tragedies of Kassam-killed and maimed Israelis to acknowledge that it was Israel that mainly incurred the “gaping holes in apartment buildings,” while Gaza mainly incurred those hundreds of dead. Honesty is the best policy; confessions of anguish, possibly bad mistakes and uncertainty about what should have been done, are much better for our souls – as well as for the credibility and persuasiveness of hasbara directed at the educated Western world.
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