Europe Bringing Peace To The Middle East? Not Really.

Elliott Abrams..
Pressure Points..
20 April '13..

Lady Catherine Ashton, the EU’s top foreign policy official, has received a remarkable letter from the “European Eminent Persons Group on the Middle East Peace Process.” This self-selected collectivity might more accurately be called the “Formerly Eminent Persons Group,” inasmuch as the first word describing each one of its members is “Former,” but I suppose that these Formerly Eminent Persons do indeed also represent the views of Currently Eminent European Persons. The letter and its list of signatories are copied below.

The letter is important in one way: it shows that European official and elite thinking continue to blame Israel for everything related to the so-called Peace Process. To take one example, the letter states that

We have watched with increasing disappointment over the past five years the failure of the parties to start any kind of productive discussion, and of the international community under American and/or European leadership to promote such discussion. We have also noted with frustration and deep concern the deteriorating standards of humanitarian and human rights care of the population in the Occupied Territories.

The failure of the parties? Five years? Five years ago, in the spring of 2008, the parties were negotiating, apparently seriously, as part of what was then called “the Annapolis process.” That failed when Mahmoud Abbas refused an extremely generous offer from Israeli Prime Minister Olmert. The Formerly Eminent Persons appear to have forgotten this, or far more likely to be seeking to avoid that truth. Equally inaccurate is their line about the “failure of the parties,” a phrase which refuses to acknowledge that only the Palestinians have refused to negotiate in the last four years, not “the parties.”

In any event, the Formerly Eminent Persons soon arrive at their key insight, which is “that the Peace Process as conceived in the Oslo Agreements has nothing more to offer.” What does this mean, actually? Turns out, rather unsurprisingly, that it means we must all get tougher now with Israel. We must all insist that Israel’s borders are the 1967 lines and everything beyond that is illegal and illegitimate. Everything– including, therefore, such things as Israel’s control of the Western Wall and the Jewish sector of the Old City of Jerusalem, from which Israelis had been kept away when Jordan controlled the Old City. The Formerly Eminent Persons wish above all to erase the letter to Prime Minister Sharon from President Bush in 2004, where he called the major settlement blocks “new realities on the ground” that all efforts at negotiation had acknowledged Israel would keep.

There is more in the letter that is wrong, such as the notion that human rights conditions in the West Bank are deteriorating due to the Israeli occupation. One can make a good argument that they are deteriorating, in Gaza due to Hamas and in the West Bank due to the growing pressure from the PA against journalists. The letter does not appear to consider the possibility that any problem in Palestinian areas might possibly be the fault of Palestinians.

Perhaps the new Secretary should get some new rhetoric.

Elliott Abrams..
Pressure Points..
19 March '13..



In remarks he made just before leaving for Israel yesterday, our new Secretary of State indulged in some “old-think” and some outdated language about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Speaking at the State Department, he said this in answer to a question:

With respect to the Middle East peace process, the President, as you know, is leaving – I’m leaving tonight. He is leaving tomorrow. He will be meeting with the new government. I think we both want to join in congratulating the people of Israel on their selection of a new government, the formation of that government. And the President is really going to listen to the members of this new government and to hear personally from Prime Minister Netanyahu what he thinks the road ahead is. We hope that those words of the Prime Minister and others become a reality. Nothing could be more important to the future of the Middle East, to stability, to the removal of a major recruitment tool and organizing argument for people throughout the region who are extremists, than the ongoing confrontation and absence of peace between Palestinians and Israelis.

So the President understands the importance of it. The question is: Are the parties to this conflict prepared – both of them – to come to the table and negotiate in good faith and with urgency in order to try to resolve this? And once those conversations have taken place, the President will be in a position to evaluate that road forward. We obviously, after all of these years, approach this with continued hopes, but also with a sense of the reality of the difficulties that lie in the way and the need to renew our efforts.

Now most of this is the usual fare, and not much worthy of note–except for one sentence:

Sharon - No Peace, No Peace Plans, No Price for Peace

(A Short Guide for Those Obsessed with Peace)

Prof. Moshe Sharon..
Nativ Online/Vol. 11..
January 2008/Shvat 5768

(While written some 4 years ago, the wisdom of these words remain. Y.)


Everybody says that his donkey is a horse.

There is no tax on words.

(Two Arab proverbs)

On December 25, 1977, at the very beginning of the negotiations between Israel and Egypt in Ismailia, I had the opportunity to have a short discussion with Muhammad Anwar Sadat the president of Egypt. “Tell your Prime Minister,” he said, “that this is a bazaar; the merchandize is expensive.” I told my Prime Minister but he failed to abide by the rules of the bazaar. The failure was not unique to him alone. It is the failure of all the Israeli governments and the media.

On March 4, 1994, I published an article in The Jerusalem Post called “Novices in Negotiations”. The occasion was the conclusion of the “Cairo Agreement”. A short time later, Yasser Arafat, proved yet again that his signature was not worth the ink of his pen let alone the paper to which it was attached, and his word was worth even less. Then, as in every subsequent agreement Israel was taken aback when her concessions had become the basis for fresh Arab demands.

In Middle Eastern bazaar diplomacy, agreements are kept not because they are signed but because they are imposed. Besides, in the bazaar of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the two sides are not discussing the same merchandize. The Israelis wish to acquire peace based on the Arab-Muslim acceptance of Israel as a Jewish state. The objective of the Arabs is to annihilate the Jewish state, replace it with an Arab state, and get rid of the Jews.

To achieve their goal, the Arabs took to the battlefield and to the bazaar diplomacy. The most important rule in the bazaar is that if the vendor knows that you desire to purchase a certain piece of merchandize, he will raise its price. The merchandize in question is “peace” and the Arabs give the impression that they actually have this merchandize and inflate its price, when in truth they do not have it at all.

This is the wisdom of the bazaar, if you are clever enough you can sell nothing at a price. The Arabs sell words, they sign agreements, and they trade with vague promises, but are sure to receive generous down payments from eager buyers. In the bazaar only a foolish buyer pays for something he has never seen.

Navon - Israel's Valmy Battle

Emmanuel Navon..
For the Sake of Ziyon..
26 February '12..

In his book The New Middle East, Shimon Peres wrote that “In Western Europe, particularist nationalism is fading and the idea of ‘citizen of the world’ is taking hold” (The New Middle East, Henry Holt, 1993, p. 98). It is sadly ironical that Peres wrote those lines at the height of a savage nationalistic war in the former Yugoslavia, and shortly after the replacement of Czechoslovakia by two separate nation-states.

Today, ‘Western Europe’ is hardly a continent where people abandon their national identity to become ‘citizens of the world.’ The fact that Cyprus became an EU member in 2004 did not mend fences between Greeks and Turks –if anything it convinced Turkey that it could get away with its occupation of the island. As for Brussels, it might host the European Commission but it also happens to be the capital of a dysfunctional bi-national state that was left without an elected government for nearly two years (between June 2010 and December 2011) because of nationalistic dissentions between the Flemish and the Walloons.

If Peres’ diagnosis (or prognosis?) was wrong in 1993, it is even more wrong today. Far-right nationalistic parties are on the rise in many European countries: the National Front in France, the Freedom Party in Austria, the Northern League in Italy, the Flemish Block in Belgium, or the Hellenic Front in Greece. The list goes on, alongside another phenomenon that has been sweeping Western Europe recently, i.e. secessionist tendencies that challenge the European nation-state.

Fresnozionism - The best response to anti-Israel propaganda

Fresnozionism.org
05 October '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/10/the-best-response-to-anti-israel-propaganda/

A cornered beast speaks:

“If a crazy measure is taken against Damascus, I will need not more than 6 hours to transfer hundreds of rockets and missiles to the Golan Heights to fire them at Tel Aviv,” [Syrian President Bashar] Assad said after [Turkish FM] Davutoglu conveyed the United States’ warning message to him.

He also reiterated that Damascus will also call on Hezbollah in Lebanon to launch such an intensive rocket and missile attack on Israel that the Israeli spy agencies could never imagine.

“All these events will happen in three hours, but in the second three hours, Iran will attack the US warships in the Persian Gulf and the US and European interests will be targeted simultaneously,” Assad said. — FARS News Service, Iran

Israel is reported to have warned Assad earlier this year that if he attacked Israel, it would respond by personally targeting him. This is an appropriate response to a gangster. Israel certainly has no interest in killing (other) Syrians, who are not responsible for wild beast Assad’s actions.

I mention this threat to make a point that I’ve made before, but that bears repeating by everyone who tries to explain the Israeli-Arab conflict:

It is not primarily about the Palestinian Arabs, although they often represent the violent interface of it. The overall problem facing Israel is that the Arab world, plus Iran and now Turkey, wants to destroy Israel. One of their greatest weapons, in the war on the ground, in the information war and in the diplomatic war — all three are being waged simultaneously — is the Palestinian Arabs. But it isn’t about them, any more than what used to be called ‘the war on terrorism’ was about terrorism.

Arab Spring? Not quite

Yoram Ettinger
Israel Opinion/Ynet
29 April '11

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4062310,00.html


The 19th Century violence on the European street signaled the arrival of the Spring of Nations: National cohesion, liberty and rebellion against tyranny.

In contrast, the 2011 Middle East upheaval exposes the Arab Street: No “spring” and no “nations,” but the exacerbation of tribal-ethnic-religious-geographic loyalties, splits and power struggles, the intensification of domestic and intra-Arab fragmentation, the escalation of intolerance, violence and hate-culture, the absence of stability, the deepening of uncertainty, exposing the tenuous nature of Arab regimes, the ruthless submission of democracy-seeking elements and the perpetuation of ruthless tyrannies.

The 19th Century Spring of Nations was energized by waves of enthusiastic optimism. On the other hand, the 2011 delusion of the Spring of Nations is exposed by the impotence, despair and frustration of pro-democracy Arab activists, who are forced to emigrate as not to be persecuted.

The expectation for a near-term Arab Spring of Nations is detached from Middle East reality, could produce another victory of wishful-thinking over experience, already leads to a delusion-based policy and risks a lethal boomerang caused by delusional yearning.

In February, 2010 President Obama appointed a new ambassador to Damascus – following four years of diplomatic absence – "because Assad could play a constructive role in the Middle East." In July 2000, Western policy-makers and public opinion molders cheered the prospect of Spring in Damascus upon the succession of Hafez Assad by his son, Bashar.

They were not alarmed by his 97% victory in two elections. They assumed that as an eye doctor, who interned in London, who is fluent in English and French, who was the chairman of the Syria Internet Association, and married to a London-educated wife who advocates women rights, he must be a moderate. They sacrificed documented facts – about the Assad family, the ruling Alawite minority, the Damascus vision and the centrality of the strategic cooperation between Syria and Iran – on the altar of the yearning of peace with Syria. The current turmoil in Syria exposes Western oversimplification and the authentic merciless nature of this Syrian despot.

In February 2011, President Obama and Secretary Clinton hastily proclaimed the ushering of democracy into Arab lands and the reincarnation of the spirit of MLK and Gandhi in the streets of Tunisia and Egypt. However, their expectations are thwarted by the thousands of moderate Tunisians who are escaping to the Italian Mediterranean island of Lampedusa and by the horrific campaign of killings, murder, torture, hate and corruption, which has accompanied recent volcanic eruptions in Arab countries.

Silverberg: Next Steps in the Middle East

Mark Silverberg
Hudson New York
15 April '11

http://www.hudson-ny.org/2044/next-steps-in-the-middle-east

Hamas leader Mahmoud al-Zahar recently set out what Israel faces when he noted: "We do not recognize the State of Israel or its right to control any of the land of Palestine. Palestine is holy Islamic land. Our national problem is not related only to the West Bank, Gaza, and al-Quds (Jerusalem)...but to Palestine, all [the territory of] Palestine." By that he means Israel proper or what he terms "the Zionist entity." So far as Hamas is concerned, the battle will continue until Israel is destroyed, even if that takes decades. He must be taken at his word.

He is not alone in this thinking. In a recent poll of Palestinians, when asked, "Do you support or oppose suicide bombings against Israeli civilians?" 56% said they supported it. This poll paralleled the results of an earlier survey conducted jointly by Public Opinion Research of Israel and the Palestinian Center for Public Opinion which found that only 13% of Palestinians agreed with the statement that "Hamas was a terrorist group"; 82% agreed that Hamas was a "freedom-fighting organization"; and a mere 10% believed that bombings targeting Israeli civilians in buses and restaurants could be classified as "acts of terrorism." The world may have been appalled when Israelis are murdered in their schools, cafes, discotheque, wedding halls or buses by Palestinian holy warriors, but the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research reports that 84% of Palestinians approved of these acts of terrorism.

Such attitudes suggest an enormous ethical and moral divide separating Palestinian and Israeli cultures. What the Obama Administration and the Europeans fail to understand -- or pretend not to understand -- is that Hamas was elected in 2006 because its very rationale for existence -- the destruction of Israel as a Jewish state - - reflects the prevailing attitude of mainstream Palestinian society. For the Palestinians, terrorism is not a weapon borne of desperation or poverty; it is a strategic choice.Supporters of both Hamas and the Palestinian Authority both seek the annihilation of Israel, as is openly stated in their charters.

As military historian Victor Davis Hanson writes: "Modern Western man is faced with an awful dilemma, from which he recoils: Real peace and successful reconstruction are in direct proportion to the degree to which an enemy is defeated and acknowledges it - the aim being that he will come to feel that he cannot go on being what he has been." That moment is reached when an enemy is rendered incapable of and unwilling to continue the conflict; only then can an enemy's terror apparatus be dismantled (as was the case of the Tamil Tigers in Sri Lanka and the FARC in Columbia); its leadership replaced, its capacity to wage further war eliminated; its weapons seized; its militias hunted down; its propaganda machine terminated; its educational system reformed; its human and financial resources channeled into massive social and economic reconstruction, its government and judiciary made transparent, its universities updated, and its population prepared for future of building rather than destroying.. If his historical analysis is correct, neither Israel nor the US will be able to accommodate -- or moderate -- an ideologically-driven enemy, be it Iran or any of its its Middle East proxies whose divinely-inspired mission is to conquer Israel (for starters) and compel its citizens to submit to Islam.

Faced with a choice between annihilation and survival, the Israelis will choose survival. For post-modern children of the Enlightenment, the idea that we would ever have to destroy our enemies to ensure our survival is disturbing. War is neither pleasant nor desirable, but in an environment where a society educates its population virtually from birth to hate Jews and to revere suicide bombers as "martyrs," where Palestinian mothers celebrate the "martyrdom" of their children, name town squares and tournaments after them, and where Palestinians are taught a culture of death in their kindergartens, children's TV programs, textbooks, schools, summer camps, mosques and marketplaces, video games and on the Internet [see www.palwatch.org], war may become necessary to respond to the culture that spawns such officially-sanctioned sadism, as well as violating of the human rights of the child -- about which putative human rights groups have been mystifyingly silent, perhaps from a bias that should merit examination.

US Mideast goals — what are they?

Fresnozionism.org
31 March '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/03/us-mideast-goals-what-are-they/

It’s fun to speculate on what drives our administration’s varied responses to unrest in the Middle East.

For Iran, whose regime is trying to develop nukes, take control of the region, push out US influence and eliminate Israel (supposedly a US ally); where political rallies often include chants of “death to America”: a stolen election and murderous violence against honestly pro-democracy protesters was met with mild verbal rebukes. After attempts to apply effective sanctions failed, the administration seems to have forgotten about the Iranian nuclear program.

For Syria, whose dictator helps insurgents kill our soldiers in Iraq, murders politicians in Lebanon, supplies Hizballah and Hamas, stockpiles chemical weapons and tries to develop nuclear ones, and orders security forces to shoot demonstrators: our government renews relations and tries to help it get possession of the strategic Golan Heights from Israel.

For Egypt, in which a mildly brutal dictator (in comparison to Syria’s Assad, for example) mostly supported American interests and opposed Iran: the US encouraged the dictator’s removal, despite clear warnings (that are beginning to come true) that the alternative was not democracy, but Islamism.

In Libya, we jumped head-first into a civil war and only afterward decided to figure out on whose behalf we are intervening. The first week or so has already cost us $600 million, and our guys (whoever they may be) seem to be losing.

For Israel, a truly democratic and friendly country which could be hugely helpful to the US in keeping a foothold in a region whose resources are essential to its economy, a country which has been under attack for years by forces that want to kill its people and take its land: the US applies pressure to give in to terrorist blackmail, cede territory and weaken security measures.

What’s happening in the Mideast is that authoritarian regimes are mostly weaker than they look. Their opponents — Islamists, ethnic groups other than the presently dominant one, opportunists and democrats — are trying to replace them. Whichever one can get the support of the most powerful armed groups or is the most ruthless will win. This will very rarely be the democrats! In Israel it’s a bit different since the government is democratic. But the groups that want to overthrow it — a segment of the ‘Israeli Arabs’ and the Palestinian Arab factions — are also made up of of Islamists and Arab nationalists.

The important question for US policy is “which of these groups is most likely to support US interests and oppose Iran?” But it doesn’t look like they are asking this question in Washington.

If I had just stepped out of an alien spaceship, I could be excused for thinking that the US is following the lead of countries like Turkey, and joining the Iranian bloc.

The stuff about trying to protect civilians looks good on TV, but doesn’t explain why we did nothing in the case of Iran and intend to do nothing about Syria. There has also been deadly violence in Yemen and Bahrain, but we’ve not intervened there (and a good thing, too). Of course there’s a lot of oil in Libya, but there is in Iran as well.

In the case of Israel, the establishment of a Hamas-Fatah terror state in Judea and Samaria will produce more terrorism and even war, just as the withdrawal from Gaza did. The best way to protect civilians there would be to prevent this from happening, not encourage it.

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Democratic State

Lee Smith
Tablet Magazine
02 March '11

http://www.tabletmag.com/news-and-politics/60298/democratic-state/

While protests rage across the Arab Middle East, Israel stands as a regional model of resiliency, relevance, and democratic adaptability. And the Arab states will have to be more like it to survive.

Last week I argued that Israel is finished, given the current state of the Middle East. The fall of Hosni Mubarak in Egypt is only the latest setback in a decade of extraordinary strategic debacles for Israel, I contended, including the failure of peace negotiations with the Palestinians, the 2006 war in Lebanon, the 2009 war in Gaza, the rise of Iran as a regional hegemon, the radicalization of Turkey, the ebbing of American military power and influence, and the accompanying de-legitimization of the Jewish State. Together, they have left this tiny Westernized nation adrift in a sea of enmity that it is unlikely to survive.

This week I’ll argue the other side—not just that Israel will be fine but rather that it is the rest of the Middle East that is in big trouble. Recent history and statistics show that in order to survive Arab and Muslim societies are going to have to forget about the notion of an Islamic alternative to modernity and will instead have to adopt what they have typically described as Western values but are in reality the universal values of political modernity. Learning to live like the West is not going to come through buying more Western goods—from cell-phones to tanks—or even earning more Western diplomas but by embracing those values as embodied by the one country in the region that lives them. The Arab model for success is not Iran, or Turkey, but Israel.

In its essence, Israel is the West—a culmination of its successes and a symbol of its failures, a reminder of a millennia-old madness, anti-Semitism, and the failure of the Enlightenment. Criticism of Israel is very often a reflection of the bad faith of a Western intelligentsia and political class uncomfortable with its history and unsure of its moral bearings. That Europeans frequently hold negative attitudes toward Israel while the vast majority of Americans are favorable to it can be explained in part by how each society came out of World War II.

Europe’s war, and the mass slaughter of its Jews, revealed that the continent’s great cathedrals were built upon a bedrock of pagan barbarism celebrated in different ways by Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin. It was left to the United States to pick up the banner of Western civilization and lead the West to victory during the Cold War after the Europeans had trashed it.

Unlike their European cousins, contemporary Americans still read the Bible and understand that the Jewish nation is a historical reality connected to a living narrative that shapes the present in a constructive and desirable way. Americans abandoned replacement theology (or the notion that Jesus’ resurrection superseded God’s covenant with the Jews) after the Holocaust in order to embrace their elder brothers—as did Pope John Paul II, who lent his moral authority to President Ronald Reagan’s conviction that America’s victory in the Cold War was a historical necessity.

That is to say, pro-Israel Americans have also tended to misunderstand Israel’s place in the world. Yes, the point of Jewish self-determination is that the Jews can protect themselves. Yet the West needs Israel to succeed, because its success is a marker of our ability and determination to defend our values and our interests, in the Middle East and elsewhere.

No Matter Who Rules in Cairo or Tripoli, Israelis Are Living in the Same Middle East

Jonathan S. Tobin
Commentary/Contentions
02 March '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/03/02/no-matter-who-rules-in-cairo-or-tripoli-israelis-are-living-in-the-same-middle-east/

Evelyn is quite right that Israelis have good reason to be fearful about the future. This is not the first time that they have been promised a “New Middle East,” and given the entrenched anti-Semitism that has become an integral part of Arab political culture, worries about new governments that might seek to curry favor with their populations by inflating hostility toward Israel are based on more than unthinking fear or cynicism.

That said, as many of us, including Evelyn, have written, the only real hope for long-term peace in the region would be an Arab world whose governments were neither Islamist nor authoritarian, since if those are the only choices, then there really is no hope. Arab governments that, even if they weren’t fully functioning Jeffersonian democracies, were sufficiently stable and focused on internal development and the creation of responsible institutions and the rule of law would not need to whip up hatred against Jews and Israel in order to survive the way even a relatively friendly dictator such as Mubarak did.

But the debate about whether or not Israelis and friends of Israel should support the principle of Arab democracy is largely pointless. No one in the Arab world is asking Israel’s permission to democratize, just as they didn’t — and don’t — care about the Jewish view of any other form of Arab government. It cannot be stated often enough that the current ferment in the Middle East has nothing to do with Israel or its policies.

That is a lesson that even generally fair-minded observers can’t seem to grasp. One example is the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen, who wrote a column yesterday that admirably highlighted the problem of Arab Jew-hatred and poured cold water on the notion that Islamists like Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood are changing for the better simply because their authoritarian antagonist has been deposed.

But as much as his analysis of this unfortunate reality was on target, Cohen concluded that all this made it a propitious time for Israel to make peace with the Palestinians, as the creation of a Palestinian state would undermine the Islamists. To which one can only reply, well, yes, if Israel could persuade the Palestinians to accept a peace, even on the terms that they claim they want (such as the Israeli offers of statehood in territory that roughly approximated the 1967 borders, which were made in 2000 and 2008), then that would be something most Israelis would welcome. But the problem is, we already know that they won’t, and merely saying that it should be done won’t make it so. Cohen accurately portrayed the hold of anti-Semitism on Arab culture in general, but he failed to connect the dots that link a historic tradition of Jew-hatred to contemporary Palestinian intransigence, not to mention the nuclear threat from Iran.

The problem today for Israelis is not so much that it is foolish for them to publicly lament the fall of Mubarak and oppose the revolutionary fervor sweeping the Arab world. They should not do that; but no matter what they say about these events, most Israelis understand that, for all the changes in the air, they are living in the same Middle East that they have inhabited for the past 63 years. The rest of us should realize this too and resist the temptation to indulge in magical thinking about Israel’s ability to appease either the Palestinians or the rest of the Arab world.

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Three Middle East Myths Exploded

David Harris
JPost /In the Trenches
Sunday Feb 13, 2011
H/T Daled Amos

http://blogs.jpost.com/content/three-middle-east-myths-exploded

First it was the myth about linkage between Iran and Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking.

According to the logic, without progress on the Palestinian front, it would be impossible to mobilize Arab countries to face the Iranian nuclear threat.

The notion had shelf life, sustained by some diplomats and the commentariat until it was blown out of the water by the WikiLeaks revelations.

Of course, it was no secret that Arab leaders feared Iran’s growing power and made not the slightest connection between the two issues. Anyone who met with an Arab official from Riyadh to Rabat heard the same dread about the looming prospect of a nuclear-armed Shiite theocracy in Tehran.

But in today’s world, facts don’t necessarily have any claim on fiction, until they become so incontrovertible that there’s no easy way around them.

And that’s just what WikiLeaks proved.

Lo and behold, the cables revealed that from Saudi Arabia to Bahrain, from the United Arab Emirates to Egypt, Arab leaders were imploring the United States to stiffen its spine and confront the Iranians. Linkage to the Palestinian question? Not even close. No mention whatsoever.

To the contrary, several Arab countries have looked to Israel, with or without a peace agreement, as a stealth ally in the face-off with Iran.

Another myth was about settlement-building in eastern Jerusalem.

According to that one, the peace process was going to wither on the vine and die because Israel indicated its intention to continue construction within Jewish neighborhoods.

Israel was criticized, pilloried, and pummeled for its actions, accused not only of being an obstacle to peace, but the obstacle. The reality on the ground seemed not to matter. The world was led to believe that the very future of the Middle East hinged on Israel’s alleged misbehavior.

Israel attempted to explain that both sides understood there would be border adjustments in a peace accord reflecting demographic realities on the ground, but this mattered not a whit. And it had even less success when it reminded the world that settlements, certainly an issue for negotiations, was by no means the only one – and certainly not a sufficient explanation for more than six decades of overwhelming Arab refusal to come to terms with Israel’s very right to exist.

Then came PaliLeaks, and the myth was blown out of the water.

The documents showed there was indeed tacit agreement on certain land swaps, including, yes, Jewish areas of eastern Jerusalem. The papers showed that the gap between the two sides was less than imagined, but, sadly, the uproar over the leaked documents proved that the Palestinian Authority has failed even to attempt to prepare its population for the concessions needed for an end of conflict and lasting peace.

And last it was the myth loudly stated by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan that the root of all problems in the Middle East lies with Israel’s intransigence.

To accept the Turkish leader’s premise means throwing truth to the wind. Even a cursory study of the Arab world reveals deep-rooted problems having nothing to do with Israel and everything to do with political, economic, and social stasis. But that would have spoiled the appealing narrative.

After all, it is much more reassuring for the Erdogans of the world to lift responsibility from Arab shoulders and place it squarely on Israel’s! And for the Israel-bashers, of whom there is no shortage, anything suggesting Israeli culpability is greeted with endless expressions of glee and gratitude.

Who needs critical-thinking skills when criticism of Israel is so much more effortless and satisfying?

Yet this myth, too, has been exposed in recent weeks for all the world to see.

The streets of Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen filled with crowds rising up against domestic repression, the absence of opportunity, and the culture of cronyism and corruption.

Though none of the “after-the-fact experts” foresaw it, why, Erdogan aside, should that have come as a surprise?

Our absurd obsession with Israel is laid bare

Nick Cohen
Guardian/The Observor
27 February '11

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/feb/27/nick-cohen-arab-middle-east-conflict

The Middle East meant only Israel to many. Now the lives of millions of Arabs have been brought to Europe's attention

The Arab revolution is consigning skip-loads of articles, books and speeches about the Middle East to the dustbin of history. In a few months, readers will go through libraries or newspaper archives and wonder how so many who claimed expert knowledge could have turned their eyes from tyranny and its consequences.

To a generation of politically active if not morally consistent campaigners, the Middle East has meant Israel and only Israel. In theory, they should have been able to stick by universal principles and support a just settlement for the Palestinians while opposing the dictators who kept Arabs subjugated. Few, however, have been able to oppose oppression in all its forms consistently. The right has been no better than the liberal-left in its Jew obsessions. The briefest reading of Conservative newspapers shows that at all times their first concern about political changes in the Middle East is how they affect Israel. For both sides, the lives of hundreds of millions of Arabs, Berbers and Kurds who were not involved in the conflict could be forgotten.

If you doubt me, consider the stories that the Middle Eastern bureau chiefs missed until revolutions that had nothing to do with Palestine forced them to take notice.

• Gaddafi was so frightened of a coup that he kept the Libyan army small and ill-equipped and hired mercenaries and paramilitary "special forces" he could count on to slaughter the civilian population when required.

• Leila Ben Ali, the wife of the Tunisian president, was a preposterously extravagant figure, who all but begged foreign correspondents to write about her rapacious pursuit of wealth. Only when Tunisians rose up did journalists stir themselves to tell their readers how she had pushed the populace to revolt by combining the least appealing traits of Imelda Marcos and Marie-Antoinette.

• Hearteningly, for those of us who retain a nostalgia for the best traditions of the old left, Tunisia and Egypt had independent trade unionists, who could play "a leading role", as we used to say, in organising and executing uprisings.

Far from being a cause of the revolution, antagonism to Israel everywhere served the interests of oppressors. Europeans have no right to be surprised. Of all people, we ought to know from our experience of Nazism that antisemitism is a conspiracy theory about power, rather than a standard racist hatred of poor immigrants. Fascistic regimes reached for it when they sought to deny their own people liberty. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the forgery the far-right wing of the decaying tsarist regime issued in 1903 to convince Russians they should continue to obey the tsar's every command, denounces human rights and democracy as facades behind which the secret Jewish rulers of the world manipulated gullible gentiles.

Syrian Ba'athists, Hamas, the Saudi monarchy and Gaddafi eagerly promoted the Protocols, for why wouldn't vicious elites welcome a fantasy that dismissed democracy as a fraud and justified their domination? Just before the Libyan revolt, Gaddafi tried a desperate move his European predecessors would have understood. He tried to deflect Libyan anger by calling for a popular Palestinian revolution against Israel. That may or may not have been justified, but it assuredly would have done nothing to help the wretched Libyans.

In his Epitaph on a Tyrant, Auden wrote:

"When he laughed, respectable senators burst with laughter
And when he cried, the little children died in the streets."

Until the Very Last Grain of Sand

Moshe Feiglin
Manhigut Yehudit
25 Shvat, 5771
(Jan. 30, '11)

Translated from the NRG website

When the Hezbollah kidnapped and murdered IDF soldiers Goldwasser and Regev, may G-d avenge their blood, it used – among other weapons – mortars and machine guns made in Israel. No, these weapons were not stolen from the IDF. Israel had sold them to the Shah of Iran back in the 70s and they easily made their way from Iran to the Hezbollah.

What should concern us here is not this specific case. Let us assume that nobody could have anticipated the Islamic revolution in Iran. But we should be mightily concerned by the fact that nobody seems to have learned the lesson of that revolution. Those people who witnessed the rise of the Ayatollahs and nevertheless sent the IDF to train in Turkey are captive to pre-conceptions that do not allow them to learn the lesson of reality. They will step on the same landmines time and again, and will always be surprised.

Even when the peace accords were signed with Egypt, experts explained that in non-democratic countries, you do not sign an agreement with the country, but rather, with the regime. While a dictatorship lasts longer than a democratically elected government, when it is overthrown, there is no guarantee at all that the new regime will honor the agreements of its predecessor.

It is quite obvious that the days of Mubarak's regime are numbered. We can reasonably assume that the Islamic undercurrents in Egypt will surface now, as they are surfacing throughout the Moslem world. Those undercurrents will flood the islands of true liberty in Egypt that are vastly outnumbered by the Islamic Brotherhood and other religious factions. Ultimately, we will be facing an Iran-like Egypt.

In the intra-Arab battle in the Moslem world there is only one thing that unites the Shiites and the Sunnis and overcomes all the disputes between the factions; the desire to be rid of the Zionist thorn that is stuck in the heart of Dir-El-Islam. For the Moslem – any Moslem – the existence of a sovereign Jewish state on the Moslem expanse is strictly temporary.

On the basis of those desires, a "secular" Egyptian leader embarked on the Six Day War and attempted to become the official leader of the Arab Nation. Achmadinijad and Erdogan are motivated by those very same desires today. They both strive to unite the Moslem world under their hegemony. Israel-bashing is the ultimate tool for any aspiring Moslem leader. We can safely guess how the new Egyptian ruler – not secular, but religious – will act as the leader of the largest Arab state situated on our southern border, just a two hour drive from Tel Aviv.

In light of these developments, it is worthy to give some thought to the wisdom of our peace accords with Egypt. As part of those accords, Israel surrendered a huge strategic expanse in the Sinai Peninsula – an expanse that saved us in the surprise attack on Yom Kippur 1973.

It is easy to see what we lost in those accords. We lost parts of our Homeland, flourishing towns, abundant oil wells and a vastly important strategic expanse. We also showed our enemies that they can only gain by attacking us. Even if they lose the war, they will get all their land back by making "peace."

Since our peace deal with Egypt, Israel's international standing has steadily deteriorated. The US was presented with an additional ally in the Middle East. Sophisticated Western weaponry, including AIWAC planes, F-16s and Abrams tanks began flowing into Egypt. Since Israel's peace treaty with Egypt, policy makers in the US began to claim that Israel was a strategic burden - not a strategic asset as had been the case when we securely held the Sinai. And true to form, American aid to Israel steadily decreased since those accords and now amounts to less than half the amount that it was on the eve of the signing of the Camp David Accords.

And what did we gain? Some people will claim that we gained peace with Egypt. True, the brave among us can still go for a hike in the Sinai (not beyond). But if by 'peace' we mean quiet and security, then 'peace' with Egypt has not supplied the wares. Weapons and infiltrators enter Israel almost freely over the Egyptian border. Does anyone really think that the Hamas arsenal gets to Gaza without the silent agreement and initiative of the Egyptian government?

It looks like we are now going to eat the rotten fruit that the leaders of the past planted for us when they surrendered the Sinai to Egypt. Will we learn from this lesson and spare our children? Or will we also leave them a similar legacy in the form of a "peace" agreement – this time, not two hours away from Tel Aviv but two minutes from Kfar Saba and ten minutes from the Ben Gurion airport.

Another important point: Even if Syria and Egypt were the middle-eastern duplicates of Switzerland and Norway, I would also oppose giving one grain of our Holy Land to a foreign nation. But as you know, talk of holy land is only acceptable for Saadat, who told Begin, "I am willing to sacrifice one million soldiers and not to surrender one grain of sand of the holy Sinai." In the end, Saadat got all of Sinai, until the very last grain of sand, without sacrificing even one soldier. The pragmatic Begin got a piece of paper.

That's how it works in the Middle East. Holiness is part of the rules of the game. If you do not take it into account, you lose the most significant player on the chessboard - even before the game has begun.

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A new Middle East arrives, sooner than expected

Fresnozionism.org
26 January '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/01/a-new-middle-east-arrives-sooner-than-expected/


Whew. Reality is outstripping the media’s ability to deal with it at all, not to mention interpret it accurately. Several major events in the Middle East that will have serious consequences are all happening at once:

First and worst: Hizballah now controls Lebanon. Jonathan Spyer manages to find one positive thing to say:

From an Israeli point of view, Hizbullah’s move into plain view may also bring advantages. For a long period, the non-Hizbullah “government” of Lebanon functioned for the Shi’ite Islamists as part cloak, part human shield.

The emerging situation looks set to have the virtue, by contrast, of clarity. This would raise the possibility of the next clash between Israel and Hizbullah taking on the unfamiliar dimensions of a state to-state conflict. — Jerusalem Post

Well, he may have a point there, but consider that Lebanon, once a democracy, is now a full-fledged client state of Iran, ruled by an extremist Islamist party. Lebanese Sunnis and Christians are disenfranchised. The West loses one (of course, it’s been ‘losing’ Lebanon for a long time, but now it’s final).

Second, and probably-going-to-be-bad: Egypt. Whether the violent protests there will turn into a true revolution is unclear. But if they do, the history of revolutions (viz. 1789, 1917, 1979) indicates that rarely do they bring better government (the American revolution wasn’t really a revolution, it was a secession) — usually the most ruthless party carries the day. In Egypt, that probably means the Muslim Brotherhood, yet another extremist Islamist party.

Even if this blows over, Hosni Mubarak is 82. How long will he continue to control Egypt, a country of 80 million, with the world’s 10th largest military — one which is armed with high-quality American equipment?

Protests have also been occurring in Jordan. The King has announced moves to improve the economy, but of course that will not help insofar as his opponents are Muslim-Brotherhood Islamist types, who don’t care a fig about the economy. There have been demonstrations in Algeria and Yemen as well.

The Tunisian revolution which first inspired the unrest hasn’t run its course. It remains to be seen what kind of regime will replace the corrupt dictatorship of former President Ben Ali. Most commentators think it won’t be Islamist. Don’t bet on it.

Third, consequences still unclear: The Palestinian Authority (PA). The PA has been buffeted by an attack launched by Aljazeera, probably orchestrated by the Iranian bloc. The so-called ‘Palestine papers’ will not have much effect on the image of Israel in the West — partisans on both sides are already interpreting them in accordance with their own positions — but they have wrecked the position of the PA in the Arab world and boosted Hamas.

Here are some interesting facts about the ‘papers’ from Barry Rubin:

1. Most of the routine material comes from actual documents but not the “interesting” parts that everyone is talking about.

2. That still does not mean that these documents accurately reflect what happened since they are the version of PA officials

3. On a number of specific points and on all the points being publicized the claims made are so ridculous that these [documents] must have been altered. The texts read almost like a satire themselves in which someone set out to write a narrative in which the PA gave everything and got nothing in return. Indeed, the picture is so exaggerated that it should be obvious these claims are phony. But of course that assumes that people were going to use logic and know something about the issues…

4. In addition, the Guardian and al-Jazira often distort what is in the documents to exaggerate it even more. Some of the specifics are really absurd like the legalistic-minded Tsipi Livni saying she is against international law and even saying she planned to expel Palestinians from Israel after an agreement.

5. Yet almost all of the media uncritically quote these distortions.

6. Some even add new items that were neither in the documents nor in the original coverage. The most notorious example is the claim that the PA recognized Israel as a Jewish state. — Rubin Report

It will be interesting to see if the US will be able to continue supporting the PA. Of course, keep in mind that the ‘papers’ discredit the PA in Arab eyes by purporting to show that they are not an extremist organization, and are willing to compromise!

These three events represent the dawning of a new Middle East — unfortunately one in which both democratic and conservative non-Islamic forces have lost ground to radical Islamism. And one which isolates Israel even more.

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Ideology counts, too

Fresnozionism.org
11 January '11
http://fresnozionism.org/2011/01/5892/

George Friedman runs “Stratfor,” which has been called a “private CIA”. For $349/year, he’ll send you predictions about the next military coup or bankrupt European country, and apparently there are enough “individuals, Fortune 100 companies, government agencies, and other organizations” to provide for him and several employees. His about-to-be-released book The Next Decade will therefore probably be influential (the introduction is here).

Which is too bad.

And here’s an example of why. He writes,

Recovering from the depletions and distractions of this effort [the attempt to end terrorism, the Iraq and Afghan wars] will consume the United States over the next ten years. The first step—returning to a policy of maintaining regional balances of power—must begin in the main area of current U.S. military engagement, a theater stretching from the Mediterranean to the Hindu Kush. For most of the past half century there have been three native balances of power here: the Arab-Israeli, the Indo-Pakistani, and the Iranian-Iraqi. Owing largely to recent U.S. policy, those balances are unstable or no longer exist. The Israelis are no longer constrained by their neighbors and are now trying to create a new reality on the ground. The Pakistanis have been badly weakened by the war in Afghanistan, and they are no longer an effective counterbalance to India. And, most important, the Iraqi state has collapsed, leaving the Iranians as the most powerful military force in the Persian Gulf area.

Restoring balance to that region, and then to U.S. policy more generally, will require steps during the next decade that will be seen as controversial, to say the least. As I argue in the chapters that follow, the United States must quietly distance itself from Israel. It must strengthen (or at least put an end to weakening) Pakistan. And in the spirit of Roosevelt’s entente with the USSR during World War II, as well as Nixon’s entente with China in the 1970s, the United States will be required to make a distasteful accommodation with Iran, regardless of whether it attacks Iran’s nuclear facilities. These steps will demand a more subtle exercise of power than we have seen on the part of recent presidents. The nature of that subtlety is a second major theme of the decade to come, and one that I will address further along. [my emphasis]

The first thing I noticed is that he doesn’t mention radical Islamism except in connection with al-Qaeda. Apparently he understands the behavior of regimes purely in terms of power relationships, and so he doesn’t view the tectonic shift in ideology toward radical Islamism that characterizes the Muslim world today as relevant.

This makes it possible for him to think that an accommodation between the US and Iran — the nexus of the Shia version of expansionist Islamism — can provide an advantage for the US. But Iran will exploit any concessions to advance its ideologically driven agenda, even if it is disadvantageous in traditional terms (economics, etc.).

Sometimes ideology counts. Not every diplomat, especially an Iranian, is Henry Kissinger.

If One Extremist Gunmen Can Do So Much Damage in America, How About Ten Million Such People In The Middle East?

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
10 January '11

When one crazed or ideologically obsessed gunman starts shooting in Arizona, people condemn him and start bemoaning their society. How about a place with ten million people like that who are treated as heroes?

America this week is awash in a huge and passionate debate over whether angry political disagreements and harsh criticisms of certain views or groups inspired the attack on an American congresswoman (Jewish and a strong supporter of Israel, by the way). I’m not going to enter into that argument right now but I want to point out the Middle Eastern ramifications of what's going on here.

Every day for more than a half century, Arabs and Muslims have been inundated every day with hatred for Israel, America, the West, Jews, and often Christians. You can read transcripts of Syrian broadcasts or Palestinian speeches from 50 years ago that sound just like what was said in the same places yesterday by powerful and/or respectable figures and institutions.

Let’s say that the proportion of lies, slanders, and incitement in the American discourse is one-tenth of one percent of all the words spoken on controversial issues. The equivalent figure for the Middle East is well over 95 percent.

In addition to that tone, there is not only a total lack of balance but an absence of the other side altogether.

And in addition to those two points, the level of factual accuracy has a huge gap separating it from reality. (Though, admittedly, that gap has been narrowing in recent years as Western standards decline).

And in addition to those three points, whil extremists tend to be marginal in the United States, they are in control--either politically or at least rheteorically--throughout most of the Arabic-speaking and Muslim-majority worlds.

Thus, the level of incitement, imbalance, lies, and the hegemony of hatred in that part of the world towers above that in the West like the World Trade Center towers over an anthill.

Oh, the World Trade Center doesn't exist any more. Well, that has something to do with this situation, too, doesn't it?

(Read full "If One Extremist Gunmen Can Do So Much Damage in America...")

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Israel IQ at UCLA

standwithus
28 December '10


What do UCLA Students Know about Israel and the Middle-East? Find out more at www.Standwithus.com



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How Israel Can Win the Coming Diplomatic Offensive

Caroline Glick
bigpeace.com
30 December '10

On Sunday thousands of Israel haters gathered in Istanbul to welcome the Turkish-Hamas terror ship Mavi Marmara to the harbor. Festooned with Palestinian flags, the crowd chanted “Death to Israel,” “Down with Israel” and “Allah akbar” with Hizbullah-like enthusiasm.

The Turkish protesters promised to stand on the side of Hamas when it next goes to war with Israel. They may not have to wait long to keep their promise. Over the past two weeks Hamas has steeply escalated its missile war, launching over 30 missiles at Israel. Last week, a missile that narrowly missed a nursery school wounded a young girl.

Since Operation Cast Lead two years ago, Iran has helped Hamas massively increase its missile and other military capabilities. Today the terror group that rules Gaza has missiles capable of reaching Tel Aviv. It has advanced antitank missiles. As Hamas spokesman Abu Obeida said Saturday, “We are now stronger than before and during the war, and our silence over the past two years was only for evaluating the situation.”

That evaluation has not tempered Hamas’s aim of annihilating the Jews of Israel. As Obeida’s colleague Ahmed Jaabari said Saturday, Israel’s Jews have two choices, “death or departing Palestinian lands.”

(Read full "How Israel Can Win the Coming Diplomatic Offensive")

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Things You Need To Know About the Middle East, December 2010

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
29 December '10

(A regional roundup. Y.)

The Egyptian government so arranged the parliamentary elections that the share of seats held by the opposition declined from 20 percent for Muslim Brotherhood supporters alone to only 3 percent for all of the half-dozen opposition parties put together. In other words, the regime didn't just steal the election--which it does regularly--it over-stole the balloting. One can sympathize with the idea of the current government of President Husni Mubarak not wanting the revolutionary Islamists from taking power, and one can understand how the regime wants a nice stable situation for the succession next year presumably to Husni's son Gamal.

But they overdid it.

What is worrisome here is that by showing the Muslim Brotherhood that even if it bows its head to repression (with 1,000 members arrested in the days leading up to the election) it won't even get the tiniest crumbs from the government. And that seems to mean--judging from Supreme Guide Muhammad Badi's hardline statements even earlier (see here and here)--that the group may step up efforts to overthrow the regime. There's no question of violence in the near-term, but what about four or six or eight years down the road, especially if Gamal falters as president or the ruling elite splits in factional disputes.

Meanwhile, despite the fact that we've been told by some that the Brotherhoods are really moderate and deserve to be engaged in dialogue, the Jordanian branch has now called on Arab governments to send their armies to Afghanistan in a Jihad to kill Americans and other NATO forces there . When one actually looks at the materials in Arabic of the Egyptian or Jordanian Brotherhoods or their sister organization Hamas, one finds an extremist rhetoric not that much different from al-Qaida's ideology, though not that group's tactics...yet.

(Read full "Things You Need To Know About the Middle East, December 2010")

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Understanding the Middle East: One Day’s Survey

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
05 November '10

--The UN annual Human Development Report for 2010 ranks Israel at number 15 of 169 countries in the world in terms of the health, education, freedom, and income of its citizens.

--Well worth reading, Steven J. Rosen, "The Arab Lobby: The European Component." Despite the title, it also includes new information on the history of U.S.-Israel relations and on Arab lobbies in the United States.

--Danny Seaman, director of the Foreign Press Office, discusses the Western media and Israel in a long interview. But the article also includes what might be the best succinct statement I've ever seen on the development of Israeli worldview and perceptions:

"There were certain `truths' that we were told: That if we adopt UN resolutions, there’ll be peace. If we recognize the Palestinian right to self-determination, there’ll be peace. If we remove settlements, there’ll be peace. And over the past 25 years, there’s been a progression in the Israeli position: Israel recognized the PLO as the only legitimate representative of the Palestinian people; relinquished territory; removed settlements.Regarding Lebanon, Israel fulfilled all the UN resolutions.

"Yet the end result was not the peace that we were promised. In no way am I criticizing the efforts for peace. Peace is a strategic necessity for the State of Israel. But here, in this case, these `truths' that we were promised never came about. On the contrary, it only increased violence, increased extremism. Yet there was a failure by a lot of the media to be intellectually honest, to say `maybe we need to reevaluate....'"

(Read full article)

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