Posted by middleeast on 26th May 2010
Saturday, May 8, 2010 24 Iyar, 5770
Reply to Arab ‘peace’
Sir, – Thanks to Barry Eisenberg, who is correct that the Arab League Peace plan would need some renegotiation first (“The Arab ‘peace’ plan…,” Letters, May 3). I apologize for not having reiterated this. But Israel did not actively try, either in 2002 or 2007, proactively to engage with the peace offer.
Consider the threats Israel faces – from Iran and Ahmadinejad and nuclear weapons; Hamas and Hizbullah and other even more extremist radicals; from the BDS (boycott-divestment-sanctions) movement, worldwide anti-Israelism and Israel’s world isolation; from the new anti-Semitism; and internally from the occupation demographics and settlement movement blurring political boundaries and pushing us toward an unwanted binationalism.
Most of these overwhelming problems– which rightly deeply worry us and preoccupy the Post’s news pages – would probably have disappeared by now if Israel had proactively and positively engaged the offer. They still could, if we haven’t already missed the opportunity, which we may have.
Just as one example, a comprehensive Arab League Peace (Syria included) would have served as a counterweight to Iran and given them little choice but to go along with the achieved consensus, and peace and sea change in the regional and worldwide climate this would have generated.
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Posted by middleeast on 26th May 2010
Sunday, May 2, 2010 18 Iyar, 5770
…to spite one’s face?
Sir, – Thanks for publishing Israeli philosopher Avishai Margalit’s hopes that we will go “back to the little Israel that we knew and loved” (“Avishai Margalit: Lift the siege!,” Independence Day Supplement, April 20).
“Ending the occupation is a moral and Zionist imperative,” he says. And that’s just what the Arab League Peace proposal of 2002 (re-endorsed in 2007) proposes for comprehensive security and peace.
And yet a recent Jerusalem Post editorial, “62, under a US cloud” (April 19) says that we are “rejected by most of the Arab world because of the very fact of our existence here.” Why such denial about the Arab world’s peace offer, as it does indeed accept our existence here? It’s been on the table for nearly eight years, and we’re the ones who have been the “rejectionists.” It is rightly said that we cannot afford to lose even one war. And we worry about annihilation.
Meanwhile our defense minister warns us that the continued settlement-building is turning us slowly into an irreversible binational state. But then why do we reject the Arab League offer of complete and total peace and security, as well as demographicallyJewish permanent borders?
How could it fail to look to the world that we prefer our conquests and settlements over comprehensive peace and security? And how can it fail to look that way even to us in our honest moments?
Larry Derfner courageously tells us truths about ourselves that it would make us more comfortable not to see (“Wanna buy a bridge, Mr. Mitchell?,” April 29).
Why does the Post soft-peddle the settlement-building and say that Israel’s mistake with the Biden visit was only over timing of the expansion announcement – rather than with the 40-year policy itself? The Right, ironically, has become Zionism’s worst enemy.
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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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Posted by middleeast on 18th February 2010
nbsp;www.jpost.com
Thursday, February 18, 2010 4 Adar, 5770 27:47
Sir, – Like Judy Telman, I was just about “finished off” by Caroline Glick’s column praising Sarah Palin, but then felt good about the redemptive ending of her letter, that there are “people who volunteer to help others… people who don’t care how or if you practice your religion, or where you come from or what language you speak” (“Daily news,” Letters, February 15). But after reading the next letter, I was back to nearly being finished off (“Language barriers,” Letters, February 15).
The writer asks about the article “J’lem rape crisis center fails to help Arabic-speakers” (February 10), “Why is the onus upon the English-speaking professionals to help Arab youths in crisis who do not speak Hebrew?” In other words, rape victims should not be helped if they speak Arabic?
No wonder the initial letter-writer wondered if she had “moved to the pre-Civil War United States.” And that she was struck by the irony that in the same issue, a piece could “wonder how to improve Israel’s image abroad.”
JAMES ADLER
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Posted by middleeast on 18th February 2010
February 12, 2010
Living in the past
Critics of J Street seem to be living in the past. Israel’s army, rightly our pride and always indispensable, will become still less effective in today’s world of guerrillas, missiles and nuclear arms. It was not decisive in Lebanon and Gaza.
Especially for tiny countries like Israel, security is less about borders and more about accepting neighborhoods. This is why in The Saturday Review in 1971, David Ben-Gurion said: “As for security, militarily defensible borders, while desirable, cannot by themselves guarantee our future. Real peace with our Arab neighbors – mutual trust and friendship – that is the only true security.”
Israel has had decades of peace with Egypt and Jordan. And there is even general agreement on what an Israeli-Palestinian settlement will look like.
Those opposed to J Street and to the peace process, even in principle, need to propose a credible alternative for Israel’s long-term survival.
JAMES ADLER
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Posted by middleeast on 11th February 2010
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 19 Shevat, 5770 24:28 IST
Avoiding an ‘apartheid state’
Sir, – Thanks for your prominent reporting of the fact that “in addressing the ramifications of a continued stalemate in negotiations, [Defense Minister Ehud] Barak said, “It must be understood that if between the Jordan [River] and the [Mediterranean Sea] there is only one political entity called ‘Israel’, it will by necessity either be not Jewish or not democratic, and we will turn into an apartheid state” (“Defense Minister preaches two states for two peoples on eve of Mubarak meeting,” January 27).
But this should not be news to anyone. It is impossible to see why the Right does not understand, when every single elected government, from that of Yitzhak Rabin onward, has recognized it.
I worry that Israel has become so deeply polarized among haredim, Israeli Arabs, the settlement movement and Tel Aviv liberals, that it is too paralyzed to create and seize serious opportunities and take serious actions, even if the time were ever ripe. David Horovitz has himself expressed similar concerns in his columns.
I wish more people could be conservative on terrorism, but equally liberal on two viable states and territorial final status terms, which would grant reasonable Palestinian aspirations and, above all, settle an increasingly dangerous conflict and avoid Barak’s demographic “apartheid state” in order to save Israel.
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Posted by middleeast on 27th January 2010
The New York Times
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
State of the Union, and of the President
To the Editor:
Re “Obama Summons Team From 2008 for Races in Fall” (front page, Jan. 24):
Some recommendations to President Obama about the midterms:
Read less about “Team of Rivals” and Abraham Lincoln, and more about Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan, whose common touches with “forgotten Americans” gave both of them the popularity and ability to act decisively.
Look straight at the television cameras — that is, at the American people.
Unite the country, as both Roosevelt and Reagan did, on the issue all of us Americans agree on: economic growth and jobs. Reagan didn’t try to advance the divisive social agenda of his “base,” but instead common national goals.
Cultivate a common touch. It is not the more remote Democrats (like Walter F. Mondale, Michael S. Dukakis, John Kerry and Al Gore) who win, but populists like Harry S. Truman, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.
And it is leaders with the common touch, who celebrate America’s common civic and religious heritage, and focus like Roosevelt and Reagan on economic growth and jobs, who will win elections and successfully establish the agenda for the nation.
President Obama was elected to focus on jobs and the economy, and it is still early enough before the midterm elections — if they can get all this right, the common touch, above all — for the president and the Democrats to re-establish their initiative and momentum.
James Adler
Cambridge, Mass.
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Posted by middleeast on 15th January 2010
The Washington Post
Friday, January 15, 2010
Regarding the Jan. 14 front-page article “Catastrophe in Haiti“:
I am reminded of the words of The Post’s great writer Marjorie Williams, who died in 2005, in a 2002 column about trying to explain to her son about the Washington sniper and her own cancer. This week she might have been inclined to use similar words all over again:
“What we really labor to keep from our children is the same bitter knowledge that their elders avoid: not that people get killed by strangers, or that there are too many guns in our world, or that madness never sleeps, but that there is no logic at all to some of the worst blows that life metes out. Time and chance happen to us all, darling boy, and even grown-ups can bear it only a little bit at a time.”
James Adler
Cambridge, Mass.
Haiti needs our help in myriad ways
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