Israel's Unwavering Guardsmen

Caroline Glick
Carolineglick.com
26 March '10

As the local and international press corps converged on Jerusalem's Old City to cover the Arab riots at the Temple Mount two weeks ago, little mention was made of the fact that Jerusalem was not the only flashpoint. In Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israeli Arab rioters supported by far-left protesters stoned buses. Israeli Arabs firebombed motorists on Highway 443 and on the roads to Beersheba. In the North, cars were stoned.

These little-reported attacks are the consequence of one of the most dangerous emerging threats to Israel's national survival: the rapidly escalating radicalization of Israel's Arab citizens.

Over the past decade and at a frenzied pace since the 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, acting at least partially at the direction of the Israeli Islamic Movement and with the active support of the far left, Israeli Arabs and Beduin have launched a massive assault on the state. The relevant national authorities including the courts, the state prosecution, the police, the IDF, the Jewish National Fund, the Israel Lands Authority and the Ministry of Interior have failed to defend against it.

Firebombing Jewish-owned vehicles is small potatoes in comparison to developments at the center of mass of the Israeli Arab onslaught: state land. Over the past decade, Israeli Arabs have seized millions of dunams of state land.

The dimensions of this phenomenon were spelled out in last year's State Comptroller's Report. While the local and international Left pillories Israel when the state tries to demolish a handful of the thousands of illegal Arab buildings in Jerusalem, what goes unmentioned is that by the end of 2007 there were more than 100,000 illegally built structures in Israel. The overwhelming majority were constructed on state land seized by Arab land thieves in the Negev and the Galilee. By the end of 2009, the number of illegal buildings grew to an estimated 150,000. The scope of the theft is so vast that the Comptroller's Report referred to it as a "national scourge."

(Read full article)

If you were inspired by the story of the New Israeli Guardsmen (Hashomer Hahadash) and would like to support their efforts, here is the information you need to contribute.
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Biden's knee-slapper

Soccer Dad
25 March '10

Stand up comedian: Vice President Biden (h/t The Muqata last week):

"I just got back from five days in the Middle East," Biden said. "I love to travel, but it's great to be back to a place where a boom in housing construction is actually a good thing," he said. Israel announced during Biden's visit that it had approved construction of 1,600 homes in East Jerusalem, a move which the U.S. called an "insult" due to its timing. (Haaretz)

Israelly Cool observed:

That's really funny, especially to those who have lost their homes and may stand to lose their homes in future thanks to the US pressure on Israel.

And then there's the larger issue of what the administration is trying to accomplish. Israel Matzav wrote two weeks ago:

Because Jerusalem rent is so expensive, young families are trying to move out of the city. But the places that are cheaper that would be attractive to ultra-Orthodox families who would like to be near Jerusalem - Kiryat Sefer and Beitar Ilit - are over the 'green line' where the government has implemented a 'settlement freeze.' So they are looking for solutions in Jerusalem.

People have to live somewhere. Unfortunately, most of the 'international community' would rather that we just leave.

(Read full post)
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Obama’s Humiliation of Israel May Only Be Getting Started

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
26 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

After days of a news blackout about the details of the meeting on Tuesday between President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Britain’s Telegraph has broken a story with details about what can only be described as an attempt to humiliate the Israeli.

According to the Telegraph’s account, the meeting began with the president presenting a list of 13 demands to Netanyahu. These included a complete freeze on Jewish building in eastern Jerusalem. When Netanyahu did not immediately accede to this diktat, Obama left him saying he was going to go eat dinner with his wife and daughters. Netanyahu and his party were left to wait for over an hour for Obama’s return. The paper claims that as Obama left, he told the prime minister to consider “the error of his ways.” Yediot Ahronot reported that Obama merely said, “I’m still around. Let me know if there is anything new.” A second brief meeting followed, which apparently consisted of the president restating his demands. As a punishment for Netanyahu’s failure to immediately bend to Obama’s ultimatum, there was no joint statement issued about the meeting and no press coverage of the visit. Friday’s Ma’ariv describes the scene thusly: “There is no humiliation exercise that the Americans did not try on the prime minister and his entourage. Bibi received in the White House the treatment reserved for the president of Equatorial Guinea.”

The Jerusalem Post is reporting that Obama wants an answer to his demands by Saturday so he can then present them to a meeting of the Arab League going on in Libya so that ineffectual body can endorse the so-called proximity talks in which the Palestinian Authority refuses to directly negotiate with Israel.

(Read full post)
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Analysis: The Legacy of Mahmoud al-Mabhouh

Jonathan Spyer
GLORIA Center
26 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

Wherever departed Hamas official Mahmoud al-Mabhouh is now, he is presumably (I don't share this presumption. Y.) enjoying the considerable trouble the nature of his exit is causing his Israeli enemies.

The British decision to expel an unnamed Israeli diplomat following the conclusion of an investigation into the alleged use by Israel of cloned British passports in an assassination operation probably does not signal the onset of a general crisis in relations between London and Jerusalem. Still, it is not an everyday act, and the language used by the foreign secretary in announcing the expulsion was notably harsh.

This affair has so far traveled along similar lines to the last major set-to between the UK and Israel over the issue of Israeli intelligence activities overseas. In 1986, a number of forged British passports were discovered in an Israeli diplomatic pouch in West Germany. This incident was followed a year later by the apprehending of a Palestinian employed as a double agent by Israeli intelligence, together with a cache of weapons, in a northern English town. The result was the expulsion from Britain of Arie Regev, an official at the Israeli Embassy. Regev was widely regarded as the chief of the Mossad station in the UK.

Then, as now, the anger of senior British officials was real, not feigned. And the public revelations of the events meant that a response of a public nature was also inevitable. But the substantive response was a managed one. Cooperation between Israeli and British intelligence services suffered for a while. But channels of communication stayed open via Washington. Information of really crucial importance continued to be shared.

(Read full article)
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Novel on exodus from 1956 Egypt and Hungary

Jewish immigrants from Port Said arriving

in Israel in 1958 (Jewish Agency)

Bataween
Point of No Return
26 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

A new novel examines the parallel dislocation in two Jewish refugee stories of 1956, and their resettlement in Israel: one from Egypt and one from Hungary. Adam Kirsch reviews Haim Sabato's novel, 'From the Four Winds', in The Tablet:

It is billed as a work of fiction, but for its first few chapters, From the Four Winds, the new book by the Israeli rabbi and novelist Haim Sabato, reads like a memoir. Sabato begins conversationally, recounting his early memories as a young immigrant to Jerusalem in the late 1950s. In a kind of modern-day Exodus, the Jews of Egypt were expelled after the 1956 Sinai War, and they made their way to Israel by roundabout stages, passing through Italy and Greece along the way. When the Sabatos arrived, they were assigned to a housing project in a new neighborhood in West Jerusalem, which the novelist refers to by its traditional name of Beit Mazmil, though by the time he lived there it had already been renamed Kiryat HaYovel.

The hardships of the Mizrahi immigrants to Israel are more widely known today than they once were, though for American Jews, who are mostly of Ashkenazi descent, the early history of the Jewish state is still more often viewed through the eyes of Eastern European pioneers. Sabato introduces us to this hardscrabble immigrants’ world through the eyes of the child he then was, never certain that he really understood the folkways of his new country. For instance, he is bewildered by the enthusiasm of his fellow second-graders, mostly native Israelis, who are planning their Purim costumes:

(Read full article)
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UN propagates Israeli organ theft allegation

Just Journalism
26 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

The International Organization for the Elimination of all Forms of Racial Discrimination (EAFORD), a Libyan-founded non-governmental organization, has submitted a document to the Geneva-based United Nations Human Rights Council--the body that commissioned the Goldstone Report, which alleged Israel was guilty of war crimes in Gaza--to investigate allegations that 'Israeli physicians, Medical Centres, rabbis and the Israeli army' may be stealing the organs of 'dead, kidnapped and killed' Palestinians for sale on the black market. The document has been circulated by the Human Rights Council as Agenda item 7 for the body’s thirteenth session (A/HRC/13/NGO/23), and although it has been covered by the Jerusalem Post and Canada’s National Post, no British media outlet has so far reported on it.

EAFORD was accredited as an NGO by the UN in 1981, and its focus, judging by its website and publications, is on equating Zionism with racism and South African apartheid.

Its present submission had been screened for publication by the UN’s Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights, a post currently held by Navanethem Pillay, and granted the certified logo of the United Nations.

By way of introduction, EAFORD accuses Israel of 'ethnic cleansing and massacres' against the Palestinians, 'occupy[ing] the rest of Palestine,' creating 'largest open-air prison in the world,' whose 'consequences amount to an act of siege and economic genocide.'

EAFORD then proceeds to state the following:

(Read full article)
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Rachel Corrie Wasn’t the Only ISM Member Playing Chicken with a Bulldozer That Day

Lenny Ben-David
I*Consult
25 March '10

Posted before Shabbat

At least two of her colleagues had placed themselves under the tractor's maw on that day in 2003. Russian roulette was apparently the group's strategy.

G-d, sometimes we Israelis are idiots. Leave aside the colossal fashla (you call it a snafu) of the ill-timed announcement of the expansion of the Ramat Shlomo neighborhood that sent the Obama administration into a hissy fit. What we’re doing with the latest “lawfare” case against Israel, the trial brought by Rachel Corrie’s parents, is another beaut.

In March 2003, a young American woman named Rachel Corrie was crushed and killed by an IDF bulldozer in Gaza. And now her parents are in Israel, suing Israel. Last week, the Israeli newspaper Yediot portrayed her as a saintly martyr and featured a false photo of the incident, taken at a different time and with a different bulldozer. The anchor of Israel Radio’s morning commute show rebuked Israel’s actions, and the Israeli YES cable network presented Rachel, a two-hour paean to Corrie and an indictment of Israel.

We’re nuts.

We overlook the fact that Corrie’s death took place in the midst of the “intifada” terrorist onslaught against Israel and that she was working for a Palestinian-led organization as the first line of defense against Israel’s Operation Defensive Shield to stop terrorist suicide bombers. Just ten days before Corrie’s death, a Palestinian suicide bomber blew up a bus in Haifa, a few miles from the courthouse where the Corrie parents are suing Israel. Seventeen Israelis died in the attack, many of them teenagers.

Today, the parents of the dead are outraged by the attention Rachel Corrie is getting and by the chutzpah of the Corries embracing Israeli courts to rail against the country Rachel Corrie loathed.

(Read full article)
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Obama’s Disgraceful Conduct Toward Israel

P. David Hornik
Frontpagemag.com
26 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

On Wednesday night in Washington Israeli and American officials worked feverishly—but failed—to produce a document stating Israel’s commitments regarding proximity talks with the Palestinian Authority. The U.S. was reportedly supposed to take the document to the Palestinians and then to the Arab League meeting in Tripoli, Libya, this weekend.

Days earlier Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu had outlined such commitments in a letter to secretary of state Hillary Clinton. It was deemed insufficient and, in Washington, President Barack Obama sent Netanyahu and his accompanying officials back to the drawing board. According to one report, Israeli foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman advised Netanyahu not to sign any such document that night, and to wait to return home and discuss the matter with the Israeli inner cabinet.

The commitments Obama seeks are variously reported to be: some sort of Israeli undertaking about a construction moratorium in the West Bank (where one is already in place) and East Jerusalem; a promise to engage in such final-status issues as refugees, borders, and Jerusalem in the proximity talks; and “gestures” to the Palestinian Authority such as the removal of additional checkpoints and the freeing of Palestinian security prisoners.

The pressures Obama directed at Netanyahu were severe, in one account even inducing a “panic” reaction in the Israeli leader. The total media blackout that accompanied their meeting led the Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl to comment that “Netanyahu is being treated as if he were an unsavory Third World dictator, needed for strategic reasons but conspicuously held at arm’s length.” Obama was further riled by news about an approval to build 20 apartments for Jews in a compound in East Jerusalem owned by an American Jewish millionaire since 1985—situated in a mostly-Arab neighborhood.

(Read full article)
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European Politicians Are Living a Lie about Israel: An Interview with Fiamma Nirenstein

The Italian politician and author talks about the East Jerusalem flap and makes some startling statements about the similarity of views between the European left and jihadists.


Stefan Frank
Pajamasmedia.com
26 March '10
Posted before Shabbat

The Italian journalist Fiamma Nirenstein is the author of numerous books on anti-Semitism, Israel, and the Middle East conflict, including (in English) Israel is Us and Terror: the New Anti-Semitism and the War against the West.

In April 2008, she was elected to the Italian Chamber of Deputies as a member of Silvio Berlusconi’s People of Freedom (PDL) party. She is presently the vice-president of the chamber’s Committee on Foreign Affairs. In February, she accompanied Prime Minister Berlusconi on a three-day visit to Israel.

Stefan Frank spoke with Fiamma Nirenstein about Israeli construction in East Jerusalem, anti-Semitism on the left, European criticism of Israel, and the significance of Berlusconi’s recent visit.

********

Q: Jerusalem is presently the focus of a great deal of media attention. Some people say that by announcing the construction of new residential units in East Jerusalem, Israel has clouded the prospects for peace in the Middle East and angered the USA. Relations between the two countries are said to be in a deep crisis.

Fiamma Nirenstein: The 10-month freeze granted unilaterally by Netanyahu in December — which Obama welcomed enthusiastically — referred to West Bank settlements. East Jerusalem was never included. Jerusalem is an issue with which Israel and the Palestinians will deal only at the negotiating table. Most people are ignorant of the fact that what is commonly known as East Jerusalem was ruled by Jordan from 1948 to 1967. Before then, the town had a Jewish majority for centuries.

In previous negotiations, like those between Arafat and Barak in 2000 or between Olmert and Abu Mazen in 2007, even the Palestinian side considered that many of the neighborhoods being called “settlements” by the newspapers, like Ramat Shlomo, could possibly be annexed to the Jewish part of the town in a final agreement. This is because most of these neighborhoods have been built either in deserted areas or in areas that had already been inhabited by Jews, who could not, however, live there under Jordanian rule because of the threat to their lives.

In short, the decision to build 1600 units was taken a long time ago. The Americans have seized on the bad timing of the announcement during Biden’s visit in order to push the peace process in the way Obama wants.

Q: You write a lot about leftist anti-Semitism. When and how did you discover its existence?

Fiamma Nirenstein: I made this discovery in theory and in practice. In 1967, as a young girl, I was a communist like all the other people of my age. My parents sent me to a kibbutz in northern Israel called Neot Mordechai. It was a leftist kibbutz, every week it dedicated one working day to the Vietcong. During the Six-Day-War, which broke out during my stay, I took care of the kids and brought them to the shelter.

(Read full interview)
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A reality too terrible to admit

Jonathan Spyer
Haaretz
26 March '10

Jonathan Spyer is a senior research fellow at the Global Research in International Affairs Center at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya.

The Obama administration's approach to the Middle East is characterized by an apparent desire to revive the sunny illusions of the 1990s peace process - in an era that is far more uncertain and dangerous. This is particularly noticeable in the Israeli-Palestinian arena, in which the United States, the dominant world power, sets the parameters of debate. As a result, international discussion of the conflict is now more detached from reality than at any time in the past 40 years.

There are two layers to the edifice of unreality in which mainstream debate on the Israeli-Palestinian issue is now taking place. The first and most obvious one concerns the Hamas enclave in Gaza. It is now over four years since the movement's victory in elections to the Palestine Legislative Council, and nearly three years since the Hamas coup in Gaza. It is therefore past time to acknowledge that a single, united Palestinian national movement no longer exists.

Since this is, apparently, a reality too terrible to be admitted, the U.S. and the Europeans have chosen, in public at least, to ignore it. The fiction that the West Bank Palestinian Authority speaks in the name of all Palestinians is politely maintained. Behind the scenes, however, the reality is widely acknowledged. The intended means for coping with it constitutes the second layer of illusion.

The inability of even mainstream Fatah-style Palestinian nationalism to accept partition as the final outcome of the conflict has prevented its resolution twice - in 2000 and 2008. This type of nationalism understands the conflict as one that pits a colonial project against a native, authentic nationalism.

From such a perspective, partition of the land means admitting defeat. But Palestinian nationalism does not feel defeated. It is characterized, rather, by a deep strategic optimism. From its point of view, it is therefore not imperative to immediately conclude the struggle - but it is forbidden to end it. Hence the endless reasons why the partition deal somehow can never be inked.

(Read full article)
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Practical Zionism

Fresnozionism.org
25 March '10

In the early days of the Zionist enterprise, a group of Jewish Palestinians — in those days, the word ‘Palestinian’ referred to Jews — organized a group called hashomer, ‘guardians’ who defended Jewish farms and towns against marauding Arab bandits. Not everyone who applied to join was accepted, including David Ben-Gurion.

Today, despite the existence of a Jewish state with police, an army and numerous other security-related institutions, it’s become necessary to recreate this paramilitary organization.

In recent years, it has become harder and harder for Jewish farmers in the Galilee and Negev to survive, because they are assailed on a daily (or nightly) basis by Bedouins or Palestinian Arabs who steal everything that isn’t nailed down, destroy fences, set fire to crops, build squatter dwellings on farmers’ land, slaughter their animals in their fields, and threaten, beat or even try to kill anyone who tries to prevent them.

These aren’t ’settlements’, by the way (not that it matters), this is happening inside the Green Line.

(Read full post)
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CENTCOM, Gen. Petraeus and Israel

JINSA Report #: 975
25 March '10

Sometimes it takes a while for a story to come full circle. Last week, we reported (JINSA Report #973) on a ForeignPolicy.com blog that said American military officers in CENTCOM blamed U.S. relations with Israel for American weakness in the region. The ForeignPolicy blog went viral on the web, attracting other "authoritative" statements blaming Israel for American casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan-and attributing negative comments about Israel to CENTCOM Commander Gen. David Petraeus.

Our take was that American weakness in the region is attributable in some measure to the Saudi and Gulf State belief that the United States will not prevent Iran, their nemesis as well as Israel's, from acquiring nuclear weapons. Although the Saudis do frequently complain about what they call "the Israel problem," it is a way of deflecting their own inability to be strong partners. The rest, we said, was a lie, an opportunity to shred the U.S.-Israel security relationship and label Israel a liability rather than an asset to American military planners.

Speaking in New Hampshire this week, Gen. Petraeus addressed the controversy, beginning with the point that some statements attributed to him personally were, in fact, sentences lifted out of context from a 56-page CENTCOM Strategy Document.

"There's... a statement in [the document] that describes various factors that influence the strategic context in which we operate and among those we listed the Mideast peace process. We noted in there that there was a perception at times that America sides with Israel and so forth. And I mean that is a perception; it is there, I don't think that's disputable. But I think people inferred from what that said and then repeated it a couple of times and bloggers picked it up and spun it. And I think that has been unhelpful, frankly." He noted other factors listed in the same section of the report, including "a whole bunch of extremist organizations, some of which, by the way, deny Israel's right to exist. There's a country that has a nuclear program who denies that the Holocaust took place...So we have all the factors in there, but this is just one, and it was pulled out of this 56-page document, which was not what I read to the Senate at all."

In response to a question, Gen. Petraeus said he had called Gen. Ashkenazi, the IDF Chief of Staff, and assured him that the web reports were inaccurate.

(Read full report)
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No Denying White House Animus Toward Israel

Jonathan Tobin
Contentions/Commentary
25 March '10

This White House likes symbolism. After Barack Obama moved in, one of the first things his staff did was to unceremoniously remove the bronze bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the Oval Office and return it to Great Britain, thus signaling that this president no longer valued the special relationship with the UK, which had been a cornerstone of American diplomacy from the days of FDR to those of George W. Bush. And when Obama finally met with the Dalai Lama last month, the visit was kept low key, with no official welcome and no media allowed to witness the event for fear of offending China. The one picture that was released of the meeting appeared to show the president lecturing the exiled Tibetan so no one might think that a former editor of the Harvard Law Review had anything to learn from a legendary spiritual leader.

But the cold reception of the Dalai Lama now seems like a wild party compared to the way Obama received Benjamin Netanyahu at the White House this week. Oh, I know, Bibi is in the doghouse because we’re all supposed to think that Israel gravely insulted Vice President Joe Biden by allowing the announcement of a housing-project start in an existing Jewish neighborhood of Jerusalem to coincide with his recent visit there. But the reason this is such a “big f@!%ing deal,” as the vice president might put it, is not because it was a real insult but because it was an excuse for the administration to renew its war on Netanyahu.

This is not the first president to dislike an Israeli prime minister or even Israel itself. The elder George Bush and his secretary of state, James “f@!% the Jews” Baker despised Yitzhak Shamir. But never has the leader of America’s ally Israel been treated with such open contempt as shown by Obama to Netanyahu. The Israeli’s visit to the White House was closed to the press — with not even one photo released of their encounter. The fact is that Obama didn’t even want his picture taken with Netanyahu. That’s particularly strange since the president has never any qualms about getting snapped next to a wide variety of international leaders on his travels.

In yesterday’s press briefing, spokesman Robert Gibbs was quizzed on this startling behavior by Jake Tapper. In response to repeated questions as to why the White House chose to treat a democratically elected head of the government of a close U.S. ally in this manner, Gibbs did not try very hard to pretend that it was anything but an indication of Obama’s dislike for the Israeli and the country he represents. Coming from a president that has spent his time in office making non-stop efforts to reach out to and engage America’s enemies around the world, this open hostility to Israel is breathtaking in its brazenness.

(Read full post)
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Israel Policy Makers Should Assume a Two Term Obama Presidency

Dr. Aaron Lerner
IMRA
Weekly Commentary
25 March '10

When Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu sits with his "seven ministers' forum" tomorrow (this) afternoon they should analyze Israel options based on the working assumption that U.S. President Obama will ultimately serve two terms rather than that President Obama will already find himself seriously weakened as we approach the November congressional elections and perhaps even essentially relegated to lame duck status for the balance of his term after those elections give expression to a massive shift against Mr. Obama.

The second scenario might justify a policy of concessions to buy time with the expectation that they can be contained as Israel finds itself in a much stronger position vis-à-vis Obama in a few months. That was part of the logic for the housing construction freeze in Judea and Samaria that was set to expire just as the congressional campaigns will be heating up in the U.S..

But there's no guaranty that this is how it will play out. And it could turn out to be a devastating mistake to rely on it.

Assuming a two term Obama presidency radically changes the ramifications and consequences of the concessions Israel makes today.

Let's not kid ourselves.

(Read full post)
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Obama Foreign Policy: One-Third of Its Term Done; Not A Hundreth of the Lesson Learned

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
25 March '10

Thinking about the Obama administration’s foreign policy makes me keep coming back to the following joke:

Three men are on a small plane, the pilot, a very important person (various names are used when people tell this joke), and a young hiker. The plane’s motor goes out and it is going to crash. The pilot tells the two passengers: Sorry but we only have one extra parachute.

The celebrity sneers, “I should get it because I’m the smartest person in the world.” He grabs a pack and jumps out of the plane.

“Sorry, son,” says the pilot. “We don’t have any more parachutes.”

“Oh, yes we do,” answers the teenager, “the smartest man in the world just jumped out of the plane with my backpack.”

If I were a cartoonist illustrating the joke in this case, I’d show a smug Obama jumping out of the plane with the backpack labeled, “U.S. national interests.”

This reflection is prompted today by a very predictable story—predicted by me repeatedly—that the administration is now further, and futilely, watering down projected sanctions on Iran in hope of getting Russian and Chinese support. Spring 2010 has arrived and after fifteen months higher sanctions, or indeed any credible U.S. deterrent, on Iran hasn’t. Even now it isn't clear if the Obama administration can get the nine votes needed in the UN Security Council to do anything.

Note that this is probably the last material effort the West will make to stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Even if it takes Tehran a couple of years to do so, it's unlikely--given how long and hard it is to get even some symbollic sanctions adopted--that low administration will-power and international support will lead to anything else being done.

(Incidentally, the administration was supposed to be ready for this step, according to its own statements) in September and then December 2009. That it still hasn't worked out a broadly based plan is a sign of its incompetence. And remember this was a presidency which supposedly enjoyed strong international support.)

(Read full article)
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Ashton in Gaza: When the "experts" are clueless

Elder of Ziyon
22 March '10

One of the more frustrating parts of watching the Middle East is when one sees that people who should have some basic knowledge, who present themselves as experts, and who urge actions based on their experience and expertise, are completely clueless.

Meet Catherine Ashton.

Lady Ashton is the high representative of the European Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy and vice president of the European Commission. She visited Gaza last week, and, armed with the latest on-the-ground intelligence, wrote an op-ed for the New York Times describing exactly what needs to be done to make the Middle East a happy place again.

Here is her first paragraph:

It is the process of entering the Gaza Strip that strikes you most. At the Erez checkpoint you go into what looks like a modern airport terminal. Leaving it you move through a winding maze of gates and walls and emerge, like a time-traveler transported backwards, on a dirt track. This is where the industrial center of Gaza used to be, before the shelling just over a year ago. Now, people with donkeys and carts carry stones from the rubble.

Ashton is stating as fact that the heartless Israelis, for no discernible reason, reduced the Erez area to rubble during Operation Cast Lead and bombed the formerly prosperous industrial area to the stone age.

Not the White Response

The Guardian Associate Editor's weak excuses and justifications for outrageous comments against Israel.



Honest Reporting
Media Critiques
25 March '10

Frosty US-Israeli relations and a very public and direct rebuke by Britain for alleged cloning of UK passports by Israel's Mossad have created a storm of negative headlines in recent days.

Some (but not all) British media took particular glee in reporting the expulsion of a diplomat from Israel's embassy in London. The Guardian even liveblogged the event as it unfolded while an editorial referred to Israel as "an arrogant nation that has overreached itself", thus smearing more than just Israel's government but also its entire population.

Some took advantage of Israel being hauled over the coals to justify their own failings. In December 2009, The Guardian's Associate Editor Michael White made the following comment during a discussion on BBC Radio London's Breakfast Show concerning the physical vulnerability of political leaders:

In Israel they murder each other a great deal. The Israeli Defense Forces murder people because they don't like their political style and what they've got to say and it only means that people more extreme come in and take their place.

The BBC responded by arguing that White's comments were his own while The Guardian declined to comment at all, judging that White had made these remarks on the BBC and not in his newspaper. From White himself we heard nothing. Until now.

(Read full article)
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From the Horse’s Mouth: Petraeus on Israel

Max Boot
Contentions/Commentary
24 March '10

(One has to be careful to always look around before running with a claim. This was a classic, with Max Boot being one of the few with the proper understanding of what was said from the start. The Biden quotes behind closed doors, may also not have been any better, and have been challenged)

Back on March 13, terrorist groupie Mark Perry — a former Arafat aide who now pals around with Hamas and Hezbollah — posted an article on Foreign Policy’s website, claiming that General David Petraeus was behind the administration’s policy of getting tough with Israel. He attributed to Petraeus the view that “Israel’s intransigence” — meaning its unwillingness to give up every inch of the West Bank and East Jerusalem tomorrow — “could cost American lives.” His item received wide circulation though it may be doubted whether, as he now says, “It changed the way people think about the conflict.”

I tried to set the record straight with two Commentary items (see here and here) in which I suggested, based on talking to an officer familiar with Petraeus’s thinking, that Perry’s item was a gross distortion —in fact a fraud. I noted that in Petraeus’s view, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process was only one factor among many affecting U.S. interests in the region and that Israeli settlements were far from the only, or even the main, obstacle to peace. I even suggested — again, based on inside information — that the 56-page posture statement that Central Command had submitted to Congress, which stated that the Arab-Israeli conflict “foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of U.S. favoritism for Israel,” was not the best indicator of his thinking. Better to look at what he actually told Congress — in a hearing he barely mentioned Israel (until prompted to do so) and never talked about settlements at all.

This brought hoots of derision from commentators on both the Left and the Right, who claimed that I was putting words into Petraeus’s mouth — that I was, in Joe Klein’s phrase, taking a “flying leap.” Predictably piling on were Andrew Sullivan, who said I was “glossing over” what Petraeus said, and Robert Wright, who claimed that, “by Boot’s lights, Petraeus is anti-Israel.” Diana West added a truly inventive spin, by suggesting that Petraeus was a protégé of Stephen Walt, who was his faculty adviser many years ago at Princeton before the good professor won renown as a leading basher of the “Israel Lobby” and the state of Israel itself. It was from Walt, Ms. West claims, that Petraeus imbibed his “Arabist, anti-Israel attitudes.”

So who was off-base here: those of us who tried to explain the nuances of General Petraeus’s thinking or those bloggers and commentators who tried to suggest that he is a strident critic of Israel?

(Read full article)
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"Sanctions with bite," Said Hillary. But There Are No Teeth In The Bite. Just Mushy Old Gums. Go To A Periodontist.

Marty Peretz
The New Republic
25 March '10

Hillary Clinton told the AIPAC conference this past Monday that, after fifteen months of his presidency, President Obama was about to launch, with our allies, "sanctions with bite." I commented on this earlier in the week. But a top front-page dispatch in this morning's Wall Street Journal tells us just how little pain Iran would incur when the political psychodrama finally unfolds at the Security Council. The fact is that the Obami have been courting Russia and China all this time unsuccessfully while, in the meantime, Tehran is make steady advances in the acquisition of nuclear weapons and even steadier advances in destabilizing SP the Middle East.

Now, you have to understand that the president needed to make a choice. He couldn't push Iran too hard while he was relentlessly bludgeoning the State of Israel. And, by the way, he was already bludgeoning the Jewish state even before Jerusalem had foolishly stumbled further into two neighborhoods, one already Jewish and the other on the road to the Hebrew University, Hadassah Hospital, and the Mount of Olives. Why shouldn't Jews live on this road?

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Netanyahu Can Say "No"

Ephraim Inbar
BESA
Perspectives 103
25 March '10

EXECUTIVE SUMMERY: The Obama administration’s attempt to force Israel to accept the division of Jerusalem as a prerequisite for peace talks is astonishing. Despite the obvious reluctance to confront an American president, Prime Minister Netanyahu can effectively resist such American pressure on Jerusalem. In fact, Jerusalem is the issue on which Netanyahu can best make a stand against Obama.

President Barack Obama capitalized on a minor Israeli glitch – the announcement of Israel's plans to build in Ramat Shlomo – to fabricate a crisis in US-Israeli relations. Obama seeks to renegotiate the agreement reached for starting proximity talks with the Palestinians and to extract additional concessions from Israel. Most striking and central is the administration's effort to force Israel into accepting the division of Jerusalem even before the talks start.

The White House expects that the Israeli prime minister will bend under pressure to its wishes. While in the past Netanyahu has proven susceptible to such pressure, the administration may be overplaying its hand on the issue of Jerusalem. Despite the obvious reluctance to confront an American president, Prime Minister Netanyahu can effectively resist American pressure. In fact, this is the issue on which Netanyahu can best take a stand against Obama.

The division of the city is opposed by the current democratically-elected Israeli government and (according to polls that I have directed) by over 70 percent of the Jews in Israel. Few issues in Israel command such a large and clear majority.

The timing of the crisis also serves Israel well. A few days before Passover when Jews repeat a 2,000-year-old text pledging, “Next year in Jerusalem,” Netanyahu can say no to American demands for concessions in Jerusalem. Rejection of the division of Jerusalem expresses the deepest wishes of an overwhelming number of Jews living both in Israel and the Diaspora.

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