Deciphering German foreign policy toward Israel and Iran

Benjamin Weinthal
JPost International
02/27/2011 03:43

http://www.jpost.com/International/Article.aspx?id=210017

Analysis: The so-called German-Israeli ‘special relationship’ is clouded by Berlin’s tight relations with Tehran.

BERLIN – In the span of 48 hours last week, the German Foreign Ministry supported a Lebanese sponsored UN Security Council resolution which condemned Israeli settlement construction as “illegal,” and its top diplomat, Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle, met with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Tehran at a time when the US and many EU countries are seeking to isolate Iran’s leaders as pariahs.

How to make sense of what many critics say is a flurry of German anti-Israel UN activity coupled with their claims of a callous posture from the country’s Foreign Ministry toward the Iranian regime’s violent repression of its country’s pro-democracy movement?

Let’s first dissect the UN vote. The Jerusalem Post learned from Israeli diplomatic sources before the UN vote that Yoram Ben-Zeev, Israel’s Ambassador to Berlin, was under the fairly certain impression that the Germans would join the Americans and prevent another diplomatic assault on the Jewish state at the UN. While Germany is not a permanent member of the Security Council, the Federal Republic, like Lebanon, is a non-standing member of the Council. There are currently 15 Security Council members, of which 14 voted against Israel.

Israeli diplomatic officials said they wish to remained unnamed because of the high sensitivity associated with the UN vote.

When asked about the German vote on Monday, an Israeli diplomat in Berlin declined to comment on the strong assurance that Germany would fall in line with the US veto. The diplomat, however, played down Germany’s backtracking, and chalked it up to EU policy conformity against the construction of Israeli housing in the disputed territories.

According to a Ha’aretz last week, Germany’s decision to join the UN diplomatic attack on Israel prompted Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to express his displeasure and disappointment with Germany’s vote during a Monday telephone conversation with German Chancellor Angela Merkel. An unnamed “senior German source” leaked the content of the conversation.

According to the German source, Merkel responded to Netanyahu, saying “How dare you,” and “You are the one who disappointed us. You haven’t made a single step to advance peace.”

Punishing Our Soldiers

.Paula R. Stern
A Soldier's Mother
24 February '11

(Very moving! Y.)

As parents, we know that discipline is necessary to build a child's sense of responsibility, of independence, of maturity. Sometimes, to make sure a child behaves correctly, punishment is needed. I won't get into the debate of what constitutes punishment and what goes beyond - but rather, I'll tell you a story I heard for the first time today.

As we were driving home from the doctor (confirming that Davidi has managed to break his big toe while playing basketball), Elie and I were discussing his younger sister. He feels she needs to be punished more, that I am spoiling her and letting her take advantage too much. This week, I did punish her for coming home late and not listening. She wasn't allowed to go to friends; though I did let her have friends come over. Elie feels this is too common a punishment and she isn't going to learn from it.

Soon, I began hearing Elie's understanding of what punishment is, what it is meant to accomplish, when it is effective, and when it is not. It is interesting as a parent, to listen to your child speak of punishing others. In a normal world, your children only reach the age where they punish others long after they have become parents themselves and here, at the age of 21 and 22, was my son, holding this responsibility in his hands.

Elie then began telling me a story I had never heard. He explained that at one point during his serving as a commander (of other commanders), there was a soldier who kept doing what he wanted and his commanding officers kept punishing him. K., Elie's battalion commander (Mem-Pay) was aware of the situation and told the commanding officers, "Stop punishing him. It isn't working." He then came up with his own punishment, which was effective because it was geared to the soldier and the situation. All the other punishments given by the commanding officers were standard, expected, and didn't really bother this soldier.

(Read full "Punishing Our Soldiers")

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From Israel: Insights

Arlene Kushner
Arlene from Israel
27 February '11

Bernard Lewis, dean of Islamic scholars, is something of a favorite of mine. At 94 he's still offering sharp analyses from an historical perspective -- with a tad of humor thrown in from time to time.

On Friday, JPost editor David Horovitz ran an interview with Lewis, and I would like to share some of what he said:

"The Arab masses certainly want change. And they want improvement. But when you say do they want democracy, that’s a more difficult question to answer. What does 'democracy' mean? It’s a word that’s used with very different meanings, even in different parts of the Western world. And it’s a political concept that has no history, no record whatever in the Arab, Islamic world. (Emphasis added)

"In the West, we tend to get excessively concerned with elections, regarding the holding of elections as the purest expression of democracy, as the climax of the process of democratization. Well, the second may be true – the climax of the process. But the process can be a long and difficult one. Consider, for example, that democracy was fairly new in Germany in the inter-war period and Hitler came to power in a free and fair election.

"We, in the Western world particularly, tend to think of democracy in our own terms...to mean periodic elections in our style. But I think it’s a great mistake to try and think of the Middle East in those terms and that can only lead to disastrous results, as you’ve already seen in various places. They are simply not ready for free and fair elections.

~~~~~~~~~~

"...I would view that [elections in September] with mistrust and apprehension. If there’s a genuinely free election – assuming that such a thing could happen – the religious parties have an immediate advantage. First, they have a network of communication through the preacher and the mosque which no other political tendency can hope to equal. Second, they use familiar language. The language of Western democracy is for the most part newly translated and not intelligible to the great masses. (Emphasis added)

"In genuinely fair and free elections, [the Muslim parties] are very likely to win and I think that would be a disaster. A much better course would be a gradual development of democracy, not through general elections, but rather through local self-governing institutions. For that, there is a real tradition in the region.

"If you look at the history of the Middle East in the Islamic period, and if you look at their own political literature, it is totally against authoritarian or absolutist rule. The word they always insist on is consultation.

~~~~~~~~~~

"...You have this traditional system of consultation with groups which are not democratic as we use that word in the Western world, but which have a source of authority other than the state – authority which derives from within the group, whether it be the landed gentry or the civil service, or the scribes or whatever. That’s very important. And that form of consultation could be a much better basis for the development of free and civilized government.

"...[The West] should not be pressing for elections...I think we should let them do it their way by consultative groups. There are various kinds. There are all sorts of possibilities.

"...To say that [the Muslim Brotherhood is] secular would show an astonishing ignorance of the English lexicon. I don’t think [the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt] is in any sense benign. I think it is a very dangerous, radical Islamic movement. If they obtain power, the consequences would be disastrous for Egypt.

"I’m an historian...But I can imagine a situation in which the Muslim Brotherhood and other organizations of the same kind obtain control of much of the Arab world...I wouldn’t say it’s likely, but it’s not unlikely.

"And if that happens, they would gradually sink back into medieval squalor...

~~~~~~~~~~

"...There’s a common theme [in the region] of anger and resentment. And the anger and resentment are universal and well-grounded. They come from a number of things. First of all, there’s the obvious one – the greater awareness that they have, thanks to modern media and modern communications, of the difference between their situation and the situation in other parts of the world. I mean, being abjectly poor is bad enough. But when everybody else around you is pretty far from abjectly poor, then it becomes pretty intolerable.

"Another thing is the sexual aspect of it. One has to remember that in the Muslim world, casual sex, Western-style, doesn’t exist. If a young man wants sex, there are only two possibilities – marriage and the brothel. You have these vast numbers of young men growing up without the money, either for the brothel or the brideprice, with raging sexual desire. On the one hand, it can lead to the suicide bomber, who is attracted by the virgins of paradise – the only ones available to him. On the other hand, sheer frustration.

~~~~~~~~~~

"...It’s not easy to define what they are for. It’s much easier to define what they are against. They are against the present tyrannies, which as they see it, not only oppress them, but dishonor their name, their religion, their nationality. They want to see something better in its place. Now what that something better would be is differently defined. They are not usually talking in terms of parliamentary democracy and free elections and so on. That’s not part of the common discourse. For different groups it means different things. But usually, it’s religiously defined. That doesn’t necessarily mean the Muslim Brothers’ type of religion. There is also an Islamic tradition which is not like that – as I referred to earlier, the tradition of consultation. It is a form of government.

~~~~~~~~~~

"There are other trends within the Islamic world which look back to their own glorious paths and think in other terms. There is a great deal of talk nowadays about consultation. That is very much part of the tradition.

"The sort of authoritarian, even dictatorial regimes, that rule most of the countries in the modern Islamic Middle East, are a modern creation. They are a result of modernization. The pre-modern regimes were much more open, much more tolerant. You can see this from a number of contemporary descriptions. And the memory of that is still living.

~~~~~~~~~~

The malice of the BDS movement

Adam Levick
CiF Watch
27 February '11

It seems that the pro-BDS group, British Writers in Support of Palestine, is quite angry that their efforts to influence Ian McEwan into boycotting the Jerusalem Prize weren’t successful, and wasn’t the least comforted by McEwan’s soothing anti-Israel rhetoric delivered at his acceptance speech, in which the esteemed author opined that Israeli settlements offend his sophisticated moral sense as much as Hamas’ genocidal founding charter.

Signatories of the letter include CiF contributor, Ghada Karmi, Mona Baker (best known for freely acknowledged firing two Israeli Academics from a journal she ran in 2002 due merely to the fact they were Israeli), and Shir Hever (of the radical NGO Alternative Information Center, a group whose leaders have employed Nazi rhetoric against Israel, and whose policy director was the former editor of a journal published by the terrorist group, Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), to name just a few.

Their latest missive, the second such letter dutifully published as a full-page, stand alone, letter in the Guardian, lambasted McEwan for merely characterizing Israel’s policies as nihilistic, when he should have noted the Jewish states “colonialist zeal”.

But, by far, the worst passage in the letter, the one which shows the BDS movement’s malice and dishonesty, is the following:

(Read full "The malice of the BDS movement")

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Israel Moves to Limit Google Street View Risks

Omri Ceren
Commentary/Contentions
27 February '11

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2011/02/27/israel-moves-to-limit-google-street-view-risks/

My friend Dr. Andre Oboler has an exhaustive article up on the Jerusalem Post site about the potential risks and benefits of Google Street View coming to Israel. The service, as most people know, allows you to take “virtual tours” up and down streets mapped by Google Maps (and Google Maps itself goes way beyond public streets, into zoos, amusement parks, and so on).

The problem, of course, is that terrorists and militias use services like Google Maps and Google Earth to maximize their carnage. The Mumbai terrorists very famously mapped out their attacks beforehand using Google services. Google Earth images of British military bases were found in the homes of Iraqi insurgents. And the Iranian proxies surrounding Israel have been bragging for years that they use Google Earth to set rocket targets.

On the other hand, it’s a losing battle to fight the spread of information, especially when Google gets involved. The deep controversy is about the advance of technology outpacing our legal and ethical coping mechanisms, but that’s not really important for this context. Suffice to say that new communication technologies are being developed and deployed almost recklessly, and certainly in the absence of mass public deliberation. India expressed concerns about Google Maps and Google Earth as early as 2005, those concerns were largely ignored, and then Mumbai happened. Israel is afraid that something similar will occur.

But the Jewish state is small enough that at least some checks can potentially be enacted, and Israeli security services are calling for exactly that. Oboler suggests several obvious measures:

Any permission to proceed with Google Street View should be coupled with both specific and general obligations on Google; for example, an obligation to collect and use data only in a manner consistent with the public interest, and an obligation to respect the rights of individuals. Keeping the data in Israel is the only way to ensure the Israeli courts can order enforcement. … Israel also has a responsibility to act in the Interests of its people and of the Jewish people more generally. … Israel may also request further unrelated guarantees from Google, such as an undertaking to cooperate more fully with the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in the fight against Antisemitism.

This is a conversation that should be happening in the United States as well. Google and similar companies make billions by quite literally entering and mapping public spaces and then selling ads related to what they organize. They don’t really owe anyone anything if they’re only helping convey information, but new technologies do introduce new risks, and inevitably Google Maps will be exploited for a domestic terrorist attacks. It’s something that should be talked about more, and more explicitly and more publicly.

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Who Got Ha'aretz's Tongue on Libya?

TS
CAMERA/Snapshots
27 February '11

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2011/02/post_70.html

Have you noticed how Ha'aretz has published very few editorials or Op-Eds concerning events in Libya? In contrast to the revolution in Egypt, about which Ha'aretz published dozens of opinion pieces and analyses, including editorials, the vast majority in support of Egyptian citizens, Ha'aretz has been largely mum on Libya.

Why the reticence to speak out in this case?

Perhaps editors are embarrassed by last year's editorial in defense of the delegation of Israeli Arab Knesset members who traveled to Libya and paid homage to Muammar Gadhafi.In the wake of the torrent of criticism of the trip, Ha'aretz wrote (April 30, 2010):

Hysteria gripped the right wing in the Knesset after an Arab delegation of MKs and dignitaries visited Libya. . . .The tongues of Habayit Hayehudi and National Union, two parties that could unite under the name "the Racist Union," were abruptly unleashed as though they were dealing with an unparalleled act of treason. . .

Libya is not on the list of enemy states. . . Libya signed the Arab League's peace initiative, holds the League's rotating presidency, and its ruler Muammar Gadhafi maintains excellent relations with the U.S. administration.

At the time, Snapshots noted that Ha'aretz's apologist editorial stood in stark contrast to criticism by Israeli Arabs including Salman Masalha and Ahmed Feead Mahameed, who wrote, among other things:

This week's visit to Libya by an Israeli Arab delegation signifies a loss of both political and moral orientation. . .

The visit did nothing to gain respect for either the delegation members or their constituency. . . .

Not only are such trips by Arab representatives to kowtow before Arab despots an insult to the intelligence, they also harm the just struggle of this country's Arab minority. . . .

[W]hat is the logic behind the Arab MK's trip to Libya?

Indeed, Ha'aretz's embarrassing flattery of Libya's insane leader who is now massacring his own people is surpassed only by the paper's support for the grovelling delegation of Arab MKs. Ha'aretz is now in no position to excoriate Gadhafi after having vilified "the Racist Union" for saying things a year ago which today the whole world understands.

So Ha'aretz faces a tricky dilemma, which it chose finally today to address with a single Op-Ed by Salman Masalha ("Arab MKs must beg for forgiveness for Libya visit"), in which he writes:

All the Arab public figures who went to Libya were as political mercenaries in the service of Gadhafi the tyrant. They should now publicly express remorse and beg forgiveness, first from the Libyan people and next from the Arab citizens they purport to represent.

A public accounting is not only necessary but would also show that they have learned their lesson and intend to mend their ways. If not, Israel's Arab citizens should turn their backs on them and toss them in the garbage, just as Arab nations are rising up against their corrupt leaders. And the sooner, the better.

-- By Yishai Goldflam. For the Hebrew version of this blog entry, visit CAMERA's Israeli site.

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They're firing rockets into Israel again this morning

Arnold/Frimet Roth
This Ongoing War
27 February '11

http://thisongoingwar.blogspot.com/2011/02/27-feb-11-theyre-firing-rockets-into.html

With no strategic target in mind, as usual, other than to hit anything Jewish or Israeli, the terrorists of Gaza are back in action this morning.

AFP reports that yet another of their seemingly-endless supply of rockets struck and un-named Israeli site in the past few hours. It caused no damage or casualties, according to Israel's military and police. But it's always been the case that this was not for lack of trying or of the desire to cause damage, pain and death.

Ynet, an Israeli news source, says today's rocket was a Qassam; it struck somewhere in the Eshkol region. The Color Red alert system which is intended to give residents of the south of Israel some modicum of advance warning when the jihadists fire was not activated "for a reason yet unknown".

Ynet also notes that there was Friday attack on the southern Israeli city of Netivot. Another jihadist rocket fired from the Gaza Strip evidently landed on the Hamas-controlled side of the Israel/Gaza boundary. Damage and loss caused to Gazan Arabs arising from the terror attacks of their own jihadists are rarely reported in the general new media, though they are far from being a rare occurrence.

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Cameron doesn’t get it

Melanie Phillips
melaniephillips.com
27 February '11

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=801

David Cameron’s claim that failure to arrive at a ‘two-state solution’ to the Arab-Israel impasse has caused terrorism and instability and helped excuse authoritarianism is surely a first for a British Prime Minister in its perversity and ignorance.

First, the current unrest convulsing the Arab and Muslim world demonstrates that the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians is actually irrelevant to the protesters’ concerns, which are about the enslavement imposed upon them by their own regimes.

And then he gets the relationship between the ‘peace process’ and terrorism the wrong way round. The failure of the two-state solution is not the cause of terrorism and tyranny; it is terrorism and tyranny that have caused the failure of the two-state solution.

A state of Palestine has been repeatedly offered - in 1936, 1947, 2000 and lastly under Ehud Olmert’s Israeli premiership. Every time, the Arabs refused and merely ratcheted up their terrorism, mass murder and war.

One might say it is that very proposal which is the most important reason for the unending nature of this conflict. This is because, instead of condemning and isolating those conducting the terror war against Israel, it rewards and thus incentivises them.

Which Cameron continued to do last week by supporting the Hizbollah-inspired UN resolution which falsely condemned as illegal Israeli building in the disputed territories.

Thus, while lecturing the Arab world on the importance of democracy and the rule of law, the Prime Minister actually hung the one democracy in the region out to dry while lining up behind the terrorist regime pledged to destroy it.

The list of grievances that supposedly fuels Islamist terrorism around the world is long. The Middle East conflict is certainly on that list - but what inspires those murderous instincts is not the absence of a state of Palestine but the continued existence of Israel.

Cameron has shown he fails to understand not just the dynamics of the region but the threat to the free world.

Jewish Chronicle, 24 February 2011

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A New Day in Our Israel

Paula R. Stern
A Soldier's Mother
25 February '11

It's Friday morning in Israel. I need to get moving to finish cleaning the house and preparing for the Sabbath, which begins tonight. My oldest daughter is sleeping a short distance away in the home she makes with her husband. My youngest daughter got up this morning, I made her lunch, and she caught the bus to school a few minutes ago. My daughters amaze me. I look at them and understand that it is through the strength of the Jewish woman that our nation survived. They are grace and beauty and sensitivity...and since I'm completely impartial, it must be true, right?

That leaves my sons.

My oldest is upstairs, asleep. Elie. I couldn't even begin to find the words for what I feel for him. He's at a hard point in his life; harder even than the army. The army was a part of the road he had to take. I knew, growing up, that I would go to university in America. It was inevitable. Elementary school, junior high school, high school, university. Here in Israel, it is a bit different, in that last place, they have army. So going to the army is as inevitable as university was for me.

There is no choice, no wondering if there is a different path. It is accepted, expected, inevitable. Elie flew through the army in so many ways. It wasn't easy for him, but he simply took each challenge and truly made the best of it. He let the army shape him because he liked what was being formed. Now, as they warned him would happen, he doesn't have the structure, the routine, and so he is struggling to find the path, to know that he has taken the correct road. I keep wondering if he will go back into the army, if that would be best for him. He keeps saying no and yet the army remains a vibrant part of him.

(Read full "A New Day in Our Israel")

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Is the White House as anti-Zionist as J Street?

Fresnozionism.org
25 February '11

http://fresnozionism.org/2011/02/is-the-white-house-as-anti-zionist-as-j-street/

The annual J Street national conference begins this weekend. Some have suggested that the phony ‘pro-Israel’ group will soon be breathing its last, crushed by the weight of its persistent dishonesty, and by the fact that you just can’t claim to be pro-Israel while calling for the US to not veto an anti-Israel resolution in the UN Security Council for the first time in history.

Recently a milestone was passed when one of J Street’s congressional supporters, Rep. Gary Ackerman (D. NY) loudly defected, saying in part,

After learning of J Street’s current public call for the Obama Administration to not veto a prospective UN Security Council resolution that, under the rubric of concern about settlement activity, would effectively and unjustly place the whole responsibility for the current impasse in the peace process on Israel, and–critically–would give fresh and powerful impetus to the effort to internationally isolate and delegitimize Israel, I’ve come to the conclusion that J-Street is not an organization with which I wish to be associated…

America really does need a smart, credible, politically active organization that is as aggressively pro-peace as it is pro-Israel. Unfortunately, J-Street ain’t it.”

Unfortunately, although J Street may be losing the respectable pro-Israel Left, it is gaining support from the anti-Israel fringe, including supporters of Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions (BDS) which J Street has (so far) claimed to oppose.

In an open letter to US diplomat, administration adviser and Camp David negotiator Dennis Ross, who is listed as one of the speakers at the J Street conference, Noah Pollak asks if Ross wishes to be associated with the other scheduled speakers, who include

Maen Areikat of the PLO, who denies there was a Jewish Temple in Jerusalem and accuses Israel of “state terrorism.”


Mustafa Barghouti, a Palestinian leader who said that Israel has “a full-fledged Apartheid system” that is “much worse than what prevailed in South Africa,” and that Israel has been “ethnically cleansing” Palestinians since 1948.


Nadia Bilbassy-Charters, a correspondent for MBC TV, who says that Hamas should not be “lumped in” with other terrorist groups because “once Palestine is liberated then [Hamas] will cease to use violence.”


Edina Lekovic, of the Muslim Public Affairs Council, who was a managing editor of a magazine that praised Osama bin Laden as a “freedom fighter.”


Imam Feisal Rauf, the Ground Zero Mosque leader, who refuses to call Hamas and Hezbollah terrorist groups.

The death of ‘linkage’

Danny Ayalon
The Washington Times
24 February '11

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/feb/24/the-death-of-linkage/

Palestinian issue was never the key to stability

The last few weeks and months have finally proven the fallacy of one of the most mistaken theories about development and peace in the Middle East. For a number of years, foreign officials, experts and commentators have claimed that if the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was solved, then there would be peace in the Middle East. This was coined “linkage.”

Former President Jimmy Carter was once asked, “Is the linkage policy right?” He replied, “I don’t think it’s about a linkage policy, but a linkage fact. … Without doubt, the path to peace in the Middle East goes through Jerusalem.” Another enthusiast of linkage is former U.S. National Security Adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, who said, “The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the single most combustible and galvanizing issue in the Arab world.”

The WikiLeaks revelations proved that among Arab decision makers and policy-shapers, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict was fairly low on the list of urgent priorities in the region. These private conversations reveal that Arab leaders are preoccupied with the looming threat of Iran and only make perfunctory statements on the “Palestinian question,” as one senior American diplomat who has spent his career in the Middle East told the New York Times recently.

These revelations shook the linkage argument to its very foundations, but recent events in our region have dealt it the mortal blow.

Last year, the United Nations Development Program released its Human Development Report for Arab states with the assistance of Arab scholars and researchers. This report stated that the Arab world is lacking in all areas of human development, such as freedom, empowerment of women and education. In addition, nearly 50 percent of the Arab world lives below the international poverty line. For the Arab world to merely maintain its current position, which is at the lowest rung on the development ladder, it will need to create 51 million jobs in the next 10 years.

Food insecurity, rising desertification and vanishing water resources have all contributed to placing parts of the Arab world on a precipice. The recent chaos on the streets of capitals in the Arab world demonstrates this volatility.

Furthermore, the linkage argument has allowed a dereliction of responsibility for anything that happens outside of Israel‘s few square kilometers, which is equivalent to less than one seven-hundredth of the Arab world. Even the term “Middle East conflict” is negligent in that it stresses the singularity and uniqueness of our conflict, perhaps even one of the least bloody and destructive, in a region that has seen dozens of recent and ongoing conflicts.

In fact, of the 11 million Muslims that have been killed in violent conflicts since the middle of the last century when the state of Israel was created, less than one-tenth of 1 percent of Muslims were killed in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab conflict. However, more than 90 percent of all Muslims killed during the same time period were killed by fellow Muslims.

While I am sure that the majority of the residents of the Middle East, including Israelis, would desperately like to see peace between Israel and the Palestinians, unfairly overloading the pressure to sign a peace agreement makes it that much harder.

Precisely those who feel that a utopian Middle East will exist after Israeli and Palestinian leader sign their name on a piece of paper demonstrate a lack of understanding of the issues at stake and make it harder for the conflict to be resolved.

Unfortunately, radical elements in our region will remain long after the ink on any agreement has dried. To fully grasp this, we just need to listen to the radical elements themselves. In 1996, al Qaeda rose to prominence with Osama bin Laden’s fatwa or “declaration of war.” The long, rambling fatwa stood at more than 11,000 words, railing against everything deemed unacceptable to his brand of militant Islam. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict barely appeared and was nothing more than a footnote to all the general grievances laid out by bin Laden.

While Israelis, including this Israeli government, desire a peace agreement with all of our neighbors, it cannot come at the cost of our existence. Recent events have only confirmed to Israel that we live in a tough neighborhood with constantly shifting sands. If Israel signs a peace agreement, it needs to know that it is permanent, stable and secure, and not subject to changing circumstances.

Israel, with a narrow waist of only a few kilometers, can afford to take few chances with the security of its population, the majority of which reside a mere RPG launcher away from the Green Line.

Those espousing linkage ignore the reality beyond Israel‘s borders. Recent events have brought the true nature of challenges facing the Middle East to international attention. Let us hope that this wider view will at least prove constructive to meeting those challenges, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict can return to its proper perspective to improve the possibility of its resolution.

Danny Ayalon is Israel‘s deputy minister of foreign affairs.


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Egypt's Revolution: The More They Reassure Us, The More We Worry

Barry Rubin
The Rubin Report
24 February '11

I think I was the first person to warn that the Egyptian revolution wasn't all roses but also had a dangerous amount of thorns. And the more Western governments and media reassure us, the more we worry. Why? Because it shows they have no idea what they are facing and no idea of what they are doing.

Well, there is a welcome exception, Michael Slackman, writing from the Gulf, has obviously been talking to some Arabs there trying to make the Americans see reality. His article is entitled, "Arab Unrest Propels Iran as Saudi Influence Declines" and here's the lead:

"The popular revolts shaking the Arab world have begun to shift the balance of power in the region, bolstering Iran’s position while weakening and unnerving its rival, Saudi Arabia, regional experts said....Iran has already benefited from the ouster or undermining of Arab leaders who were its strong adversaries and has begun to project its growing influence, the analysts said."

Unfortunately, this is not affecting coverage further west, where the "loco weed" (see note) of Israel makes observers insane.

Here are some of the things we've seen so far:

--Well over a million people chanting, "To Jerusalem we are heading! Martyrs in the millions!" Might this entail some future deterioration of Egypt's relations not only with Israel but also with the Palestinian Authority?

(Read full "Egypt's Revolution: The More They Reassure Us, The More We Worry ")

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ACLU Leaders Are Supporting Censorship of Israeli Speakers

Alan M. Dershowitz
Hudson New York
25 February '11

http://www.hudson-ny.org/1917/aclu-leaders-are-supporting-censorship-of-israeli

The international campaign to prevent speakers from delivering pro-Israel talks at universities has been assisted by leaders of the American Civil Liberties Union—an organization that is supposed to protect freedom of speech for all. The method used to silence these speakers and preclude their audiences from hearing their message is exemplified by a now infamous event at the University of California at Irvine.

Michael Oren—a distinguished scholar and writer, a moderate supporter of the two-state solution, and now Israel's Ambassador to the United States—was invited to speak. The Muslim Student Union set out to prevent him from delivering his talk Here is the way Erwin Chemerinksy, Dean of the law school, described what the students did:

"The Muslim Student Union orchestrated a concerted effort to disrupt the speech. One student after another stood and shouted so that the ambassador could not be heard. Each student was taken away only to be replaced by another doing the same thing."

Chemerinsky understates what happened, as anyone can see by watching a video of the event, available online (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AfLs_ptJzQA).



This was more than a "concerted effort to disrupt the speech." It was a concerted effort to stop it completely—to censor Oren's right to speak and his audience's right to hear him. The efforts to disrupt succeeded; the effort to stop ultimately failed. Moreover, Chemerinsky fails to mention what happened both before and after the concerted effort. There is undisputed evidence that there was a well-planned conspiracy to censor Oren's talk, and then to lie about it, which the students did after the event.

The students were disciplined by the university for their actions, though the nature and degree of the discipline has been kept confidential. Campus sources have characterized it as a "slap on the wrist." Since the students were arrested, the District Attorney, quite understandably, commenced a criminal investigation. After learning of the careful planning that went into the concerted effort to prevent Oren from speaking and the subsequent cover-up, the DA filed misdemeanor charges against those who were involved.

The Tribal Update brings you the Arab democracy anthem

Caroline Glick
carolineglick.com
25 February '11

This week on The Tribal Update, the television-on-Internet show produced by Latma - the Hebrew-language media satire website I run, we bring you the world premiere broadcast of the Arab democracy anthem.

It is sung by the Egyptian MInister of Conspiracy Theories Halil Majnoun, the Palestinian Minister of Uncontrollable Rage Tawil Fadiha and Tunisian revolutionary Daoud Shufuni. We also bring you a report from the UN Security Council where the world powers are springing into action to save Libya and New Zealand.

Here's the entire program.



I hope you enjoy the show and post and send it out far and wide.

Latma is funded through contributions to the Center for Security Policy in Washington. If you would like to support our efforts, you can contribute by clicking here. It takes you to the online contribution page to the Center for Security Policy through Network for Good. To earmark your donation to Latma, please write "Latma" in the box marked "designation."

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Thanks again for your support for Latma and its important work in developing a public discourse in Israel that is relevant to the challenges facing our country.

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