Israel, and its neighbors

[Crafty_Dog]

The title of this piece suggests that the author thinks that sanctions against Iran can be/will be meaningful i.e. actually effective in getting Iran to change course on its mission to get nukes.

I think this a profoundly foolish notion.  I agree with an analysis that I read from Stratfor (probably posted here on the Iran thread or the Nuke War thread) that the purpose of sanctions is to pretend to do something and to leash Israel from actually acting.

That said, I think there is much intelligent commentary and analysis in this article:

================
By BRET STEPHENS
This article initially appeared in Foreign Affairs magazine.

When Joe Biden touched down in Tel Aviv on March 8, there was no indication that his visit would set off the most serious crisis in U.S.-Israeli relations in decades. The U.S. vice president arrived carrying the text of an effusively pro-Israel speech that was meant to assure skittish Israelis that the Obama administration would remain as committed as any of its predecessors to their security. Such an assurance, the administration evidently believed, was essential if the United States was to persuade the government of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to remove settlements from the West Bank in order to make way for a Palestinian state.

But Biden's plans were soon upended. On March 9, a mid-level official in Israel's Interior Ministry announced the approval of the fourth stage in a seven-part approval process for the construction of 1,600 residential units in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo. Geographically, Ramat Shlomo is in north Jerusalem, within the city's municipal boundaries, and successive Israeli governments have insisted that they would never relinquish these areas in any final settlement with the Palestinians. But because the neighborhood lies across the Green Line (which separates pre-1967 Israel from those territories captured in the Six-Day War), it is widely seen by non-Israelis as being part of East Jerusalem, the side of the city envisioned as the capital of a future Palestinian state. Biden wasted no time in condemning the announcement, although he was also quick to accept Netanyahu's apology for its timing.

Less forgiving, however, were Biden's principal counterparts in the administration. On March 12, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Netanyahu "to make clear the United States considered the announcement a deeply negative signal about Israel's approach to the bilateral relationship," according to Assistant Secretary of State P.J. Crowley. And the president himself reportedly gave Netanyahu the chilliest of receptions when they met in the White House the following week.

Sundry pundits and policy experts are cheering this turn of events, saying the administration's tough stance is good for America's interests in the region, good for its standing in the Muslim world, and good for Israel's long-term interests, too. But those now cheering may soon find themselves disappointed by what the Obama administration's approach actually achieves. Why? Because it flies in the face of three hard political realities: Israeli, Arab, and American.

The Israeli reality is that the maximum Israelis are prepared to offer is less than the minimum Palestinians are prepared to accept. The Arab reality (which goes far to account for the Israeli reality) is that Islamism has broadly supplanted secular and nationalist politics, at least at the level of public sentiment. The American reality is that there are limits to what Washington can or is likely to do to reshape Arab or Israeli views in a way that would favor a settlement of the conflict.

Consider each of these realities from the perspectives of the players themselves.

First, imagine yourself as a quintessential middle Israeli -- barely religious, by no means enthralled by visions of Greater Israel, a self-described pragmatist who is only keen to be nobody's fool. For 20 years, you have voted with the winner in every parliamentary election, from Yitzhak Rabin's Labor Party in 1992 to Netanyahu's Likud in 2009. You had high expectations for the Oslo accords and supported the withdrawal from Gaza, but you also cheered Ariel Sharon's invasion of the West Bank in 2002 and Ehud Olmert's wars with Hezbollah and Hamas.

If you are that Israeli -- which is to say, the constant plurality of the country's recent past -- what conclusions are you likely to draw about the country's peace-making efforts? The first conclusion is that peace with this generation of Palestinian leaders is unlikely. Correctly or not, Israelis overwhelmingly believe that Ehud Barak made a generous offer to Yasir Arafat at the 2000 Camp David talks and wasn't even met with a counteroffer. The same goes for Ehud Olmert's even more generous offer (again, in Israeli eyes) to Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas in 2008.

The second conclusion is that although separation from the Palestinians is desirable in theory, it is very risky in practice. Israel withdrew from its "security corridor" in south Lebanon in 2000 but wound up having to go to war against a well-armed Hezbollah a few years later. Ditto for what happened after Israel's withdrawal from the Gaza Strip in 2005. You have come to believe that even if Israel were to withdraw from the last millimeter of the West Bank, Palestinians would still find a reason to gin up claims against you, probably through continued insistence on the so-called right of return.

The third conclusion is that trends in Palestinian politics bode ill for a long-term settlement. Hamas handily won the 2006 parliamentary elections and easily evicted Fatah from power in Gaza the next year. Last year, the Fatah powerbroker Mohammed Dahlan insisted that the party would not urge Hamas to recognize Israel's right to exist and, moreover, that Fatah itself (as opposed to the PLO) had "never recognized Israel's right to exist."

The fourth conclusion is that the Obama administration's apparent hostility to Israel makes this a particularly inauspicious time to enter final-status negotiations. As the Israeli commentator Ehud Yaari -- a classic "middle Israeli," albeit a uniquely astute one -- told Foreign Affairs in a recent interview, "It is very difficult for any Israeli prime minister to sit [at] . . . the negotiating table with the Palestinians when he is not fully coordinated with the U.S. president."

Finally, although you are perfectly capable of seeing that Israel has a demographic time bomb on its hands if it continues to contain a growing Palestinian population within its borders, that danger seems remote and abstract for now. Israel, you think, relieved itself of much of the demographic problem when it withdrew from Gaza, which is now effectively a self-governing entity. Palestinians in the West Bank are also self-governing, even if their cities and towns lack geographic contiguity. And, thanks to the success of the separation fence in dramatically reducing the incidence of suicide terror, the people of Ramallah, Nablus, or Jenin rarely impinge on your daily life.

Besides, Israel has a more urgent time bomb to contend with: the centrifuges spinning in Iran. By contrast, the Palestinian problem can wait a few years.

Now turn to the Arab reality, this time by imagining yourself as Mahmoud Abbas.

In most personal respects, you are the opposite of your charismatic if erratic predecessor, which makes you popular in the West. In the Arab world, however, and particularly among Palestinians, you are mainly seen as a political placeholder living (or at least governing) on borrowed time. This hardly gives you the kind of personal authority needed to forge a peace with Israel over the objections of your more radical constituents.

You also lack democratic legitimacy. You have been ruling by decree since shortly after Hamas won parliamentary elections in 2006, and your term of elected office ended over a year ago. You have a competent and internationally respected prime minister in Salam Fayyad, but he competes for legitimacy with Hamas' Ismail Haniyeh, the man elected to the job. Your country has been divided into geographically distinct political camps for nearly three years, since Fatah was militarily trounced by Hamas in a civil war.

Then there is the issue of your persona. Put simply, you're an anachronism. You remain a believer in the Oslo accords while Palestinians are souring on the two-state solution. Your own negotiator, Saeb Erekat, recently urged that the accords be declared "null and void." You are a committed secularist and nationalist, a product of Soviet education, in an era in which Islamist movements -- which disdain secularism and suspect nationalism -- are on the march throughout the Arab world. You knew Anwar Sadat and always remember his assassination at the hands of Islamic radicals avenging Egypt's peace with Israel.

So you find yourself chasing the goal of a Palestinian state even as the idea of that state disintegrates all around you. Of course it helps that the Middle East Quartet has now offered March 2012 as a date certain for the end of "the occupation which began in 1967." But even if that comes to pass, what is the likelihood that you or your successor can guarantee what the Quartet also expects – namely, "the emergence of an independent, democratic, and viable Palestinian state living side by side in peace and security with Israel and its other neighbors"? Without the consent of Hamas, such a state will not be democratic or viable; with Hamas, it will not live for very long in peace and security with Israel.

Could Hamas change? As its leader Khaled Mashal flatly declared in 2006, "Anyone who thinks Hamas will change is wrong."

Finally, imagine yourself as the proverbial senior administration official.

The president has signaled a decidedly new tone toward Israel, and now it is up to you to give that tone its substance. But how far, really, can Obama lean on Israel? Consider your options. Military aid is guaranteed by the 1978 Camp David agreement: Is the president prepared to rescind it? Voting for one of the U.N.'s typically lopsided resolutions would be a domestic political debacle, and not just on account of the so-called Israel Lobby: America remains an instinctively pro-Israel country. And a unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood, in the absence of a final settlement agreement with Israel, would destroy the U.S.-Israel relationship.

One thing you could conceivably do is apply enough pressure on the Netanyahu government that it switches coalition partners or loses office altogether. But, as Yaari told Foreign Affairs, "It's impossible for any Israeli prime minister to say that he is going to forego Jerusalem before a final status negotiation with the Palestinians for end of conflict, end of claims."

Indeed, by turning up the heat as he did, the president may have accomplished the opposite of what he intended. Israelis are now increasingly convinced that the administration is hostile not just to Netanyahu but Israel itself. At the same time, Palestinians now have reason to hold out for concessions on Jerusalem that they never previously expected to get and which no Israeli government is ever likely to grant.

Perhaps, then, the experience of recent weeks leads you to conclude that it is unwise for the United States to seek the trust of one party to the conflict by playing it against the other. That was the lesson of the Egyptian-Israeli experience, which allowed both Israel and Egypt to claim victory and the United States to keep a friend and gain a strategic partner. A similar approach could work with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Instead of seeking a new balance between the two sides, the administration could find ways to bond with them.

Hectoring the parties about their "best interests" won't work, particularly for an administration that has promised to lecture less and listen more. Making unrealistic promises, like Palestinian statehood by 2012, is a recipe for Palestinian frustration and disenchantment. Nor will it help to threaten the loss of American friendship. As Obama is now learning with Afghan President Hamid Karzai -- who responded to a recent White House snub by inviting Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to Kabul -- even governments far more dependent on U.S. help than Israel can exercise options that contradict U.S. interests.

It is time for something different. The president is now considering putting forward his own peace plan, perhaps on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. But this approach poses considerable political and strategic risks to the administration. What happens, for example, if one of the parties just says no? How would that affect the president's prestige or limit his flexibility? Is the United States prepared to impose "consequences" on the naysayer? And what would those consequences be?

There is a more plausible option available to the administration. As much as the Israelis resist withdrawing from the West Bank, they care far more about stopping Iran's nuclear bid. Unlike even a relatively hostile Palestinian state, a nuclear Iran poses an existential threat to the Jewish state not only directly but also through its proxies on Israel's borders.

So why not make a deal? The United States pledges that it will not permit Iran to go nuclear, period. And Israel pledges that it will unilaterally dismantle its settlements on the West Bank, period. (Jerusalem would have to be dealt with separately, but the deal at least offers Palestinians the contiguity they have long claimed to seek.) There would, of course, be the question of who goes first. But the plan could just as easily be conceived as a step-by-step, confidence-building process of trading settlements for sanctions and other anti-Iranian steps.

Is this fantasy? Perhaps. It certainly demands nearly as much of the United States as Washington demands of Israel. But at least it reflects the only kind of approach that might spur progress between Israel and its neighbors. In sum, Washington needs to get off the pressure track and get on the inducement track. Otherwise, it can look forward to years of wasted diplomatic toil, along with rivers of Israeli and Palestinian tears.

[ccp]

Never Again Should We Be Silent

By Ed Koch

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | President Obama's abysmal attitude toward the State of Israel and his humiliating treatment of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is shocking. In the Washington Post on March 24th, Jackson Diehl wrote, "Obama has added more poison to a U.S.-Israeli relationship that already was at its lowest point in two decades. Tuesday night the White House refused to allow non-official photographers record the president's meeting with Netanyahu; no statement was issued afterward. Netanyahu is being treated as if he were an unsavory Third World dictator, needed for strategic reasons but conspicuously held at arms length. That is something the rest of the world will be quick to notice and respond to."

I have not heard or read statements criticizing the president by New York Senators Charles Schumer and Kirsten Gillibrand or many other supporters of Israel for his blatantly hostile attitude toward Israel and his discourtesy displayed at the White House. President Obama orchestrated the hostile statements of Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, voiced by Biden in Israel and by Clinton in a 43-minute telephone call to Bibi Netanyahu, and then invited the latter to the White House to further berate him. He then left Prime Minister Netanyahu to have dinner at the White House with his family, conveying he would only be available to meet again if Netanyahu had further information — read concessions — to impart.

It is unimaginable that the President would treat any of our NATO allies, large or small, in such a degrading fashion. That there are policy differences between the U.S. and the Netanyahu government is no excuse. Allies often disagree, but remain respectful.

In portraying Israel as the cause of the lack of progress in the peace process, President Obama ignores the numerous offers and concessions that Israel has made over the years for the sake of peace, and the Palestinians' repeated rejections of those offers. Not only have Israel's peace proposals, which include ceding virtually the entire West Bank and parts of Jerusalem to the Palestinians, been rejected, but each Israeli concession has been met with even greater demands, no reciprocity, and frequently horrific violence directed at Israeli civilians. Thus, Prime Minister Netanyahu's agreement to suspend construction on the West Bank — a move heralded by Secretary of State Clinton as unprecedented by an Israeli government — has now led to a demand that Israel also halt all construction in East Jerusalem, which is part of Israel's capital. Meanwhile, Palestinians are upping the ante, with violent protests in Jerusalem and elsewhere. And the Obama administration's request that our Arab allies make some conciliatory gesture towards Israel has fallen on deaf ears.

Prior American presidents, beginning with Truman who recognized the State of Israel in 1948, have valued Israel as a close ally and have often come to its rescue. For example, it was Richard Nixon during the 1973 war, who resupplied Israel with arms, making it possible for it to snatch victory from a potentially devastating defeat at the hands of a coalition of Arab countries including Egypt and Syria.

President George W. Bush made it a point of protecting Israel at the United Nations and the Security Council wielding the U.S. veto against the unfair actions and sanctions that Arab countries sought to impose to cripple and, if possible, destroy, the one Jewish nation in the world. Now, in my opinion, based on the actions and statements by President Obama and members of his administration, there is grave doubt among supporters of Israel that President Obama can be counted on to do what presidents before him did — protect our ally, Israel. The Arabs can lose countless wars and still come back because of their numbers. If Israel were to lose one, it would cease to exist.

To its credit, Congress, according to the Daily News, has acted differently towards Prime Minister Netanyahu than President Obama. Reporter Richard Sisk wrote on March 24th, "Congress put on a rare show of bipartisanship for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu yesterday — a sharp contrast to his chilly reception at the White House. 'We in Congress stand by Israel,' House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told a beaming Netanyahu, who has refused to budge on White House and State Department demands to freeze settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank."

But Congress does not make foreign policy. It can prevent military arms from going to Israel, but cannot send them. Congress has no role in determining U.S. policy at the U.N. Security Council. The President of the United States determines our foreign policy — nearly unilaterally — under our Constitution. So those Congressional bipartisan wishes of support, while welcome, will not protect Israel in these areas, only the President can do that. Based on his actions to date, I have serious doubts.

In the 1930s, the Jewish community and its leadership, with few exceptions, were silent when their coreligionists were being attacked, hunted down, incarcerated and slaughtered. Ultimately 6 million Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. The feeling in the U.S. apparently was that Jews who criticized our country's actions and inactions that endangered the lives of other Jews would be considered disloyal, unpatriotic and displaying dual loyalty, so many Jews stayed mute. Never again should we allow that to occur. We have every right to be concerned about the fate of the only Jewish nation in the world, which if it had existed during the 1930s and thereafter, would have given sanctuary to any Jew escaping the Nazi holocaust and taken whatever military action it could to save Jews not yet in the clutches of the Nazis. We who have learned the lessons of silence, Jews and Christians alike, must speak up now before it is too late.

So I ask again, where are our Senators, Schumer and Gillibrand? And, where are the voices, not only of the 31 members of the House and 14 Senators who are Jewish, but the Christian members of the House and Senate who support the State of Israel? Where are the peoples' voices? Remember the words of Pastor Niemoller, so familiar that I will not recite them, except for the last line, "Then they came for me, and by that time, there was no one left to speak up."

Supporters of Israel who gave their votes to candidate Obama — 78 percent of the Jewish community did — believing he would provide the same support as John McCain, this is the time to speak out and tell the President of your disappointment in him. It seems to me particularly appropriate to do so on the eve of the Passover. It is one thing to disagree with certain policies of the Israeli government. It is quite another to treat Israel and its prime minister as pariahs, which only emboldens Israel's enemies and makes the prospect of peace even more remote.

[rachelg]

Waiving the rules on the Syrian-Lebanese border


http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=173569
By JONATHAN SPYER
21/04/2010   
The West should use resolution 1701 to roll back Hizbullah's effective take-over of the Lebanese gov't.
 
The summoning by the United States of Syrian Deputy Chief of Mission Zouheir Jabbour for a review of Syrian arms transfers to Hizbullah is the latest evidence of the serious basis to the recent tensions in the north.

Syria has continued to deny recent reports suggesting that it permitted the transfer of Scud-D ballistic missiles to Hizbullah.

But the issue of the Scuds is only a significant detail within a larger picture, which has been emerging into clear view since August 2006. This is the reality in which UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the war between Israel and Hizbullah in 2006, has been turned into a dead letter by the “resistance bloc” of Iran, Syria and Hizbullah.

It is worth recalling that Resolution 1701 was hailed as a significant achievement for diplomacy at the time. The resolution was supposed to strengthen the basis for the renewed Lebanese sovereignty that seemed possible after Syrian withdrawal in 2005.

Its provisions are quite clear. The resolution calls for the disarmament of all armed groups in Lebanon, so that... there will be no weapons or authority in Lebanon other than that of the Lebanese state.” It also explicitly prohibits “sales or supply of arms and related materiel to Lebanon except as authorized by its government.”

Hizbullah and its backers calculated, correctly, that neither the government of Lebanon, nor the United Nations, nor the “international community” would be able or willing to enforce these clauses.

The UN has itself admitted the severe inadequacy of arrangements along the Syrian-Lebanese border. Two UN border assessments have been carried out since 2006 – in June 2007 and August 2008.

The second report found, in the dry language employed by such documents, that “even taking into account the difficult political situation in Lebanon during the past year,” progress toward achieving the goals laid out in Resolution 1701 had been “insufficient.”

The “difficult political situation” of 2008 is a reference to the fact that the elected Lebanese government’s single attempt at enforcing its sovereignty over the allies of Syria and Iran in the country ended in May 2008 with the violent rout of the government.

Hizbullah and its allies simply made clear that any attempt to interfere with their military arrangements would be met with blunt force, and no further attempt was made.

The result has been that over the past three-and-a-half years, under the indifferent eyes of the world, the roads between Syria and Lebanon have hummed to the sound of arms trucks and suppliers bringing Syrian and Iranian weaponry to Lebanon.

The response of Israel has been to observe the situation, and to make clear that the crossing of certain red lines in terms of the type and caliber of the weaponry being made available to Hizbullah would constitute a casus belli.

The recent heightening of tensions has come because of emerging evidence that these red lines are being flouted with impunity.

This did not begin with the reports of the Scuds. Evidence has emerged into the public sphere over the last months of weaponry suggesting a Syrian and Iranian desire to transform Hizbullah into a bona fide strategic threat to Israel.

The weaponry supplied to Hizbullah include M-600 surface-to-surface missiles, the man-portable Igla-S surface-to-air missile system, which would threaten Israeli fighter aircraft monitoring the skies of Lebanon, and now the Scud-D ballistic missile system.

If the reports regarding such weaponry are correct, they would make Hizbullah by far the best-armed non-state paramilitary group in the world.

These reports do not mean that war is necessarily imminent.

Israel appears in no hurry to punish Hizbullah and Syria for the flouting of red lines. Unlike its enemies, the Israeli government is publicly accountable, and would find it difficult to justify a preemptive strike – which might well result in renewed war – to the Israeli public.

Hizbullah and Syria also seem in no rush to initiate hostilities. They have merely internalized the fact that nothing serious appears to stand in the way of their activities across the eastern border of Lebanon, and are hence proceeding apace.

The clearest lesson of the latest events is the fictional status of international guarantees and resolutions if these are not backed by a real willingness to enforce them.

The Western failure to underwrite the elected government of Lebanon has led to the effective Hizbullah takeover of that country. The failure to insist on the implementation of Resolution 1701 has allowed the apparent strategic transformation of Hizbullah over the last three and a half years.

While the “resistance bloc” does not necessarily seek imminent conflict, there is also no sign whatsoever that its appetite has been satiated by its recent gains. Laws, elections and agreements do not stand in its way. It operates, rather, according to the dictum of a certain 20th-century German leader, who said, “You stand there with your law, and I’ll stand here with my bayonets, and we’ll see which one prevails.”

The real question, of course, being how long the intended victim of such an approach is prepared to allow it to continue.

The writer is a senior researcher at the Global Research in International Affairs Center, IDC, Herzl

[rachelg]

A Point of View: Israel's wow factor

Posted by Abraham Foxman
http://cgis.jpost.com/Blogs/foxman/entry/israel_s_wow_factor_posted

I recently met an old friend who had just returned from an extended stay in Israel. "How is the mood," I asked him, expecting the worst. "Fantastic," he exclaimed, "the cafes, the people, the exciting business opportunities. I even test drove the new electric car. Life in Israel is great."   

I was struck by my friend's exuberant and cheerful report. I had expected him to tell of a dark mood in Israel, of Israelis worried about US-Israel relations, Iran's nuclear weapons development, the stalled peace process, the campaign to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish State, and of the usual despair over crime, traffic, social problems, religious conflicts and the political crisis de jour.

As someone who is deeply engaged in Israeli affairs - professionally and personally - my focus is generally on day-to-day issues. On any given day at ADL, we grapple with countering resolutions presented at international bodies blaming Israel for the world's ills, educating the misinformed about Israeli policies, combating initiatives to promote university or church divestment from Israel or to boycott Israeli products at US or European supermarkets, even correcting maps in directories which mark every country in the Middle East but conveniently forget to label the State of Israel. Journalists call me for a perspective on what a breaking news event might portend for relations between Washington and Jerusalem. 

I am not alone. When I give speeches around the United States, the worry for Israel's present and future is often palpable. After all, pick up any major newspaper in the US or abroad and turn on any cable news broadcast, and the coverage of Israel is generally gloom and doom. Straight news pieces highlight the problems confronting Israel. More skewed commentary blames Israel's policies, approach and sometimes even being.  Has any other country in the world warranted such a magazine cover story: "Will Israel Live to 100"?   

But as my friend's enthusiasm reminds me, these (very legitimate) worries and concerns should never eclipse appreciation and celebration of what Israel is. For someone who has been visiting Israel regularly since the 1950s, just seeing the transformation of the country into what it is today makes me stop every trip to say, "Wow!" Israel's major metropolitan cities have transformed from proverbial dusty backwaters to world-class centers. In just over six short decades, Israelis have built a cutting-edge modern democratic state, with an exciting cultural and social scene, and whose innovations in science, medicine, agriculture, ecology and technology are the envy of the international community. And the people - diverse, divergent, complicated and never boring!

And so, on this Yom Haatzmaut, let all us pro-Israel advocates, news junkies and armchair analysts take a lesson from my friend. Let us commit to keeping active on Israel's challenges, but to never lose sight of all there is to cherish and enjoy about Israel. As we remember each Yom Hazikaron, Israel has sacrificed a lot to get to its 62nd year, but we also owe it to all who contributed to the building of this great state to ensure that Israel's assets, and not its problems, are what defines this fantastic country.

[G M]

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/04/24/abbas-to-obama-impose-your-will-on-us/

How's that hopey-changey thing working out for Israel?

[Rarick]

Good googly moogly, if he wants to impose something- he is going to need force.  Where is that gonna come from? I suspect a serious number of the currently serving armed forces will decline renewal of their contracts, without them where are you going to get the troops?  I thought we wanted the troops home a years ago?  This is not getting the troops home, does this guy bother to think things thru at all?  I snap decision reaction would to reinstitute the draft, and that would be political suicide...............

The situation in Korea is heating up too,  I wonder if some people have read Tom Clancy and are deliberately going for a thinning out of our resources?

[rachelg]

Editor's Notes: Look who’s (almost) talking
By DAVID HOROVITZ
30/04/2010 15:51
http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Columnists/Article.aspx?id=174344
The dispute over the modalities of peace negotiations was only the first, and the least, of the problems


With Mahmoud Abbas now seeking Arab League approval for the launch of indirect “proximity” talks with Israel, we are belatedly back to where things stood on the eve of Vice President Joe Biden’s unhappy visit to Israel seven weeks ago.

Biden’s was a long-planned trip intended to reassure Israel about the Obama administration’s oft-stated “unbreakable, unshakable” commitment to Israel. But it was also timed to coincide with the scheduled launch of the indirect talks.

While the Israeli announcement of planned new construction at Ramat Shlomo, a Jewish neighborhood in east Jerusalem that was mainly populated without controversy during Yitzhak Rabin’s premiership, has been universally understood to have torpedoed many of the positive aims of the Biden visit, and the intended launch of the proximity talks, too, the truth, as so often, is rather more complicated.

The Ramat Shlomo announcement did indeed blight the visit. But Biden accepted Israel’s explanations and apologies for the embarrassing timing of a decision in an area of policy – the question of Israeli building in Jewish east Jerusalem neighborhoods – where the US and Israel have a longstanding fundamental disagreement. What has not hitherto been made known is that the Biden visit exposed a second crisis, regarding the modalities of the proximity talks.

Broadly speaking, three separate sources have confirmed in the past few days, Israel understood that it was agreeing to enter the shortest-possible sequence of indirect contacts, mediated by special envoy George Mitchell and his team, between Jerusalem and Ramallah, and that these would quickly be superseded by a resumption of direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations on the core issues. By contrast, the Palestinian Authority understood that it was consenting to some four months of indirect talks, grappling substantively with core issues.

When each side realized that it had a very different impression of the “proximity” modalities, frustrations erupted among all three players, the scheduled launch of those talks was rendered impossible, and that intended crowning element of the Biden visit was scuppered.

The diplomacy of the past seven weeks has been concentrated on reconciling those conflicting impressions, to find parameters that both sides can live with, amid what the US delicately calls the two sides’ mutual doubts and suspicions. The guarded optimism of the last few days, including public comments by Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and PA President Mahmoud Abbas, indicates that a formula has been found.

My understanding is that, although Israel wanted direct talks as close to straight away as possible, the proximity talks may indeed last for several months, but that the US and Israel would certainly be pleased if it proves possible to move into the direct framework sooner. Moreover, while aspects of some final-status issues will be raised in the indirect framework, the knottiest matters of dispute will still necessarily be addressed in the direct-talk phase. As Jerusalem sees it, there’s not much point in debating matters of critical substance via a third party when Ramallah is a 20-minute drive away.

SO MUCH for the modalities.

As regards matters of substance, the plain, unfortunate fact remains that not only are Israel and the Palestinians deeply and predictably at odds, so too are Israel and the Obama administration.

The administration argues that since Israel regards an accommodation with the Palestinians as central to its capacity to exist as a Jewish and democratic state, the Netanyahu government should be doing whatever it can to create the climate for such an accommodation. It argues further that since the US is strategically committed to Israel’s Jewish and democratic well-being, its work to foster such an accommodation is emphatically an American strategic interest, and it wonders why it gets criticized for describing its efforts in those terms.

It may have accepted that Netanyahu’s publicly stated “red lines” mean he will not order a halt to building in Jewish east Jerusalem neighborhoods, it may have persuaded the Palestinians to enter proximity talks without such a declared halt, but it thinks Netanyahu’s position is unhelpful – unhelpful to Israel.

It claims, furthermore, not to quite understand what it is that Netanyahu is offering or planning to offer the Palestinians, and The Jerusalem Post’s report earlier this week that the government has no plans to dismantle so much as an unauthorized West Bank outpost in the foreseeable future won’t have helped. Noting that former prime minister Ehud Olmert failed to cut a deal with Abbas when, having left Gaza, Israel offered almost all of the West Bank, the division of Jerusalem and a readiness to resolve the Palestinian refugee issue without altering Israel’s demographic balance, the Americans wonder why Netanyahu thinks he might have more success when trying to drive what the prime minister has described as “a harder bargain.”

And where the latest ostensible bust-up between Netanyahu and Barack Obama in late March is concerned, some in the administration are asking why the prime minister so fervently sought the presidential ear when it turned out he had nothing particularly dramatic to convey.

The insistence from Washington is that the last thing this administration wants to do, contrary to certain reports, is to change the Israeli government. It believes Netanyahu has the ability and the credibility to achieve an agreement with Abbas. It just doesn’t know whether he wants to.

(In Jerusalem, incidentally, it is firmly asserted that Netanyahu did not seek that March White House meeting in the first place, but rather was invited by the president after it became clear that Obama was not going to be away in Indonesia as originally scheduled.)

Nonetheless, the administration does appreciate that Netanyahu was willing to sanction the 10-month settlement-home moratorium, and it has detected other shifts in his stance of late. One of these was his widely overlooked statement, in his Channel 2 interview last week, that the final status of Arab neighborhoods in Jerusalem such as Abu Dis and Shuafat would need to be addressed in the final-status talks – a stance that is more in keeping with the long-time Labor position about Jews not having prayed to Shuafat during their centuries of exile, and rather less in tune with the traditional Likud opposition to any territorial concessions within post-1967 Israeli-claimed sovereign Jerusalem.

A second, again largely overlooked change in stance was Netanyahu’s declared readiness, in his late March speech to AIPAC, to “review security arrangements” if a peace deal with the Palestinians were to “prove its durability over time.”

The prime minister made this unprecedented concession after stating that, because of the missile and other military threats that an independent Palestine might pose, “a peace agreement with the Palestinians must include an Israeli presence on the eastern border of a future Palestinian state.”

Essentially, therefore, Netanyahu was saying that Israeli security deployment in the Jordan Valley, and other Israeli security requirements, could be reconsidered, and need not be permanent, if peaceful reconciliation was palpably developing.

THE MOST profound difference between the Obama administration and the Netanyahu coalition, however, relates to the gauging of Abbas’s peacemaking intentions.

Although it concedes the possibility that Abbas is only entering the proximity talks in order to create a sense of momentum and then blame Israel for an inevitable breakdown, Washington believes Abbas is prepared to endorse viable terms for peace. Jerusalem does not.

In the Prime Minister’s Office, there is full awareness that the international community is growing ever more supportive of Palestinian statehood, with ever less empathy for Israel’s concerns and reservations.

Despite Abbas’s insistence this week that he was not seeking “unilateral solutions” and that his prime minister, Salam Fayyad, would not unilaterally declare statehood next year, the conviction among many in Netanyahu’s orbit is that the PA is aiming eventually to secure a new UN resolution for the establishment of a Palestinian state on the pre-1967 borders, with a fudging of the refugee issue. Aiming, that is, to establish a Palestinian state not at peace with Israel, but to continue the conflict with Israel. (It is noted in these circles that Fayyad’s published program for his government from last August, “Palestine: Ending the Occupation, Establishing the State,” mentions Israel overwhelmingly in negative contexts, and contains no direct, unambiguous reference to making peace with Israel.)

While the administration pays great heed to Abbas’s repeated restating of his support for a two-state solution, and gives serious weight to the representations of President Shimon Peres, no less, to the effect that Abbas does not intend to seek to flood Israel with refugees, those around Netanyahu do not share the sense that Abbas will make an historic reconciliation.

It is asserted, indeed, that not a single one of Israel’s key decision-makers consider that Abbas is ready for such a move. Different ministers might be prepared to offer more or less in the effort to change that rejectionist mindset, but their conclusion, for now, is unanimous and bleak. Netanyahu, incidentally, is said to sit in the relatively more optimistic camp – being given to wondering aloud in certain meetings whether the Palestinian leader might yet somehow rise to the occasion.

The word from within the coalition is that if Abbas is indeed prepared to take viable positions on the refugee issue, this welcome news has certainly not reached the government’s ear. If he stands by some of the demilitarization arrangements that Tzipi Livni and others have suggested he supports, again, this government has seen or heard nothing categorical to that effect.

And while it is acknowledged that making a speech abandoning the impossible demand for a “right of return” might be too much to ask from Abbas at the start of the new negotiating effort, then why can he not, it is asked in Jerusalem, at least publicly acknowledge the Jewish connection to this land?

The thinking around the prime minister is that the PA leader’s interview with The Washington Post’s Jackson Diehl last May, smartly headlined “Abbas’s waiting game,” still represents the best guide to his thinking. Abbas explained then that he had not acceded to Olmert’s offer because “the gaps were wide,” and time was on the Palestinians’ side: “In the West Bank we have a good reality,” Abbas said contentedly. “The people are living a normal life.”

Interestingly, it is noted in Jerusalem, the Palestinians are these days talking a little differently about the Olmert offer. In last year’s narrative, as exemplified by the Diehl interview, it was the substance that was problematic – those insufficient terms, those gaps. In the newer narrative, Olmert was spurned because of the issue of “delivery” – the concern that a lame duck PM might not be able to come through on the deal.

In the American read, Abbas’s rejection of Olmert is regarded both as a function of Olmert’s weakness, and, as noted above, as proof that Netanyahu is unlikely to attain a deal offering any less. In Jerusalem, the counterargument is that if Abbas balked because of the substance of the offer, then any Netanyahu gambit will indeed fail. Only if it was a matter of delivery is there some faint hope for progress now with Netanyahu’s less generous terms. “Faint” being the operative term.

No, it is stressed, without elaboration, Netanyahu will not be offering Abbas everything he wants. But if Abbas’s problem was with a soon-to-depart Olmert who might not be able to make good on a very generous deal, then maybe he can be enticed by a less generous deal from a more credible prime minister.

But the overall assessment stressed by those around the prime minister is of an uncompromising Abbas, leaping on any American pressure on Israel, giving nothing, and holding to his own “absurd” demands.

Netanyahu, it is said, was ready to announce the 10-month settlement freeze late last summer, as part of a package of expected mutual goodwill measures in the aftermath of Obama’s Cairo Muslim-outreach speech, but he held back because the US could not secure any reciprocal gestures from the Palestinian and wider Arab side.

The view in Jerusalem is that Abbas was stringing the international community along in the last few months until it became clear, only recently, that the US was no longer coddling the Palestinians, that Obama was growing impatient with him, and that the PA really needed to enter the proximity talks.

And it is noted that Abbas has lately abandoned the former insistent assertion of the Palestinians’ right to determine their own fate and instead handed to the Arab League decision-making rights as to whether and how negotiations might proceed. This might have had advantages if the Arab League were supportive of genuine steps forward. Far more probable, though, was that it would make constructive progress even less likely.

AS REGARDS the ongoing US-Israel tensions, there is sorrow in Jerusalem that the building disputes that have fueled the most controversy with Washington are precisely those that should have been the least problematic.

Gilo is a robust Jewish neighborhood in the capital that Israel would never contemplate relinquishing. Much the same can be said for Ramat Shlomo. Yet because of the deeply inauspicious timing of the announcement of new building in both those neighborhoods, they triggered more bitter public recriminations from the US than have much more potentially controversial projects elsewhere beyond the Green Line.

The firm hope in Jerusalem is that future such disputes can be avoided, but where there are differences, that the American response be better calibrated.


There is also, finally, a slightly shamefaced, very off-the-record, admission here that the “east” Jerusalem building crises were somewhat exacerbated by the fact that certain unnamed senior Israelis aren’t always as knowledgeable as they should be regarding what actually constitutes “east” Jerusalem. That is, they’re not as familiar as they ought to be about which neighborhoods are located beyond the Green Line and which are not. They don’t always know which areas, even if they may accurately be described geographically as situated in “south” or “north” Jerusalem, are nonetheless politically located in the ultra-sensitive “east” of the city.

Implausible? Impossible? You’d think so. But evidently not.

I’ll leave it at that. We’ve all seen the consequenc

[rachelg]

Israel- Defying the Odds.mp4

This is a few years old
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7MhrcxK2PvQ&feature=player_embedded[/
youtube]


Rare color footage of pre-State Israel and after
http://www.buildyourfilmsite.com/monosson/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7&Itemid=5

Marc -- Thank you for sending me this it was awesome.


It really does make a difference to be able to see history in color instead of black and white.

[ccp]

The polls don't follow through and ask that if Jews would consider voting for someone else would they consider a Republican.  It is a big leap to expect "someone" else to be from another party.  I doubt most liberal  Jews would even dream of this.  I wonder if the Kagan nomination is a bone for the Jews to placate them.

****Poll: Obama has Lost Almost Half of his US Jewish Support
 
by Gil Ronen
Follow Israel news on  and .


United States President Barack Obama has lost nearly half of his support among American Jews, a poll by the McLaughlin Group has shown.

The US Jews polled were asked whether they would: (a) vote to re-elect Obama, or (b) consider voting for someone else. 42% said they would vote for Obama and 46%, a plurality, preferred the second answer. 12% said they did not know or refused to answer.   

In the Presidential elections of 2008, 78% of Jewish voters, or close to 8 out of 10, chose Obama. The McLaughlin poll held nearly 18 months later, in April 2010, appears to show that support down to around 4 out of 10. 

The poll showed that key voter segments including Orthodox/Hassidic voters, Conservative voters, voters who have friends and family in Israel and those who have been to Israel, are all more likely to consider voting for someone other than Obama.

Among Orthodox/Hassidic voters, 69% marked 'someone else' vs. 17% who marked 're-elect.' Among Conservative-affiliated voters the proportion was 50% to 38%. Among Reform Jews, a slim majority of 52% still supported Obama while 36% indicated they would consider someone else. Among Jews with family in Israel and those who had been to Israel, about 50% said they would consider someone else, while 41%-42% supported Obama.

Fifty percent of the Jewish voters polled said they approved of the job Obama is doing handling US relations with Israel. Thirty-nine percent said they disapproved. “This rating is not good for a group of voters who are 59% Democratic to only 16% Republican,” the poll's analysis noted.

A majority of 52% said they disapproved of the idea of the Obama Administration supporting a plan to recognize a Palestinian state within two years. 62% said that if given a state, “the Palestinians would continue their campaign of terror to destroy Israel.” Only 19% thought they would live peacefully with Israel.     

As Obama loses support among members of the influential Jewish voter bloc, possible Republican candidate Sarah Palin seems to be doing her best to woo them to her****

[rachelg]

http://www.jpost.com/Magazine/Features/Article.aspx?id=174876

Airing ‘dirty’ laundry
By DAVID BRINN
07/05/2010   
American stand-up comedian Joel Chasnoff on his year in the IDF and the tricky minefield of Jewish identity.
 
Joel Chasnoff jokes in his humor-filled memoir – The 188th Crybaby Brigade – about how scrawny he was when, at 24, he decided to leave Chicago and spend a year in an IDF combat unit.

But when the first-time author and full-time stand-up comedian walks into a Jerusalem coffee shop for our meeting, it’s clear he wasn’t joking. A decade later and Chasnoff’s still a little guy – almost see-through – and one can’t help wonder how he weathered the rigors of IDF basic training in the heralded 188th Armored Brigade specializing in Merkava tanks, never mind how he was named the outstanding soldier in his platoon.

But if his physical stature is less than daunting, his verbal and writing skills more than make up for it. A comic, Zionist, coming of age chronicle, The 188th Crybaby Brigade has been called “a great tale, a Jewish Jarhead... a funny, thoughtful, and poignant story.” But, as Chasnoff explains, the final manuscript – which encompasses issues of Jewish identity, the Ashkenazi-Sephardi cultural gap and the Orthodox stranglehold on issues of religion – wasn’t anything like the original narrative he had in mind.

“My initial concept was to just chronicle my year in the army for people who are interested in the IDF. But as I was writing and getting deeper into it, I realized it was about so much more,” says Chasnoff, who after his year in the IDF, married his Israeli girlfriend, moved to Chicago and eventually landed in Riverdale, New York, which serves as a base for his thriving stand-up career.

“The Jewish identity issue became so much more a part of it. And my editor, who’s not Jewish and has never been to Israel, forced me to ask myself these questions.

“‘You need to give the back story, explain why a kid who had been to Israel for a total of 14 months in his life, would up and join a foreign country’s army.’ Hearing her say it like that really did make it sound absurd,” adds Chasnoff with a laugh. “So it made me rethink, and go back to my experiences in day school and summer camp, and out of that came the idea of myth [of Israel and of the Israeli soldier] and how much that’s a part of it. Those were really not part of the original concept of the story, they came after. But I’m glad they’re in there, I think they make the story fuller.”

Fuller and unflinching, as Chasnoff takes a deep hard look at his own upbringing – where Israel and the IDF were put on idyllic pedestals – and at his experiences in the IDF, where those pedestals were swiftly slipped out from under him for a hard landing on the reality of kitchen duty, illogical commands and the maturity levels of the 18-year-old boys from all walks of Israeli life he found himself thrown in with.

And boys they are, swearing, bickering and complaining every step of the way as they’re dragged through basic training by boys only slightly older than they are – dealing with everything from feeble attempts to stand in shloshot to the more chilling army mentality fashlot of being sent to work in the kitchen during the lesson on how to throw a grenade, and then being told to throw a live one without any training.

A sublime passage in the book finds Chasnoff expressing his own maturity-challenged feelings about receiving his first leave in Tel Aviv and, for a brief moment, morphing into the mythical Adonis-like soldier that he longingly revered on his visits to Israel as a teen.

“Look at me. Do you see me? Do you see me in my olive-green uniform, beret and shiny black boots? Do you see the assault rifle slung across my chest? Finally! I am the badass Israeli soldier at the side of the road, in sunglasses, forearms like bricks. And honestly – have you ever seen anything quite like me?”

But as Chasnoff spends more time in the army, that superhero myth begins to strip away, revealing the contradictions, conflicts and humor of a bunch of confused, scared boys being groomed to defend their country. For Chasnoff, it created a bundle of different emotions that took years to unravel.

“I think the irony is I served in the army for a year, and it took three years to write the book,” says Chasnoff, who decided to join the army due to a combination of reasons ranging from childhood ambition to wanting to be closer to his Israeli girlfriend to frustrations over his inability to jump-start his comedy career in the US.

“There was a long gestation period. I think stories are always like that – it takes longer to really make sense of what the story is, and what the meaning is, and find the nuances.

“I kept a journal the whole time I was in the army, it’s something I’d done since high school. So I had these notes, and I made it a point to write at least one sentence every night, which I succeeded in doing. So I had that as a foundation, but in terms of seeing it as a story with meaning, it took a few years.”

That was partly due to the fact that his army experience was so intense, that he had no desire to immediately revisit it and relive all the minute details.

“I mean, when I first got out, it just felt good to be free from the army. There was no way I wanted to immerse myself in it again,” says Chasnoff. “Then a few years later, when I moved to New York from Chicago, I began to rethink it as sort of this central piece of identity in my own life. Between the conversion issue and the Israel identity, and I saw there was actually an arc to it.”

CHASNOFF’S CONVERSION issue turns out to play a prominent role in the book, and revolves around the Chief Rabbinate’s refusal to accept his application for a marriage license due to his mother having been converted in an Orthodox ceremony by a Conservative rabbi in the US decades before. At the end of the book, the reader is not sure if Chasnoff has given up on the country where he volunteered and fought Hizbullah in Lebanon, only to be told he wasn’t Jewish enough to get married there.

“I did leave Israel a little bitter. But I’ve been back many times since then, and I no longer harbor bad feelings,” says Chasnoff. “I think that whole issue and having to write about it later forced me to think about how I feel about Israel and about how complicated those feelings are.

“What does it mean to love the country, which I absolutely do, and at the same time, have deep reservations about some of the ways the country is run? In America, I struggle with this too, but because I don’t love America on the same level, it doesn’t bother me so much. I can live with a place where I don’t always adore the government and I don’t feel an attachment to the land like I do here. So, the book forced me to confront how complicated it was.”

Equally perplexing, especially for Chasnoff’s publisher, has been how to position the book for marketing purposes. Because the book slices across the spectrum of memoir, politics and humor, it hasn’t really fit into any of those categories. But Chasnoff is confident of who his target audience is – American Jews.

“I think it appeals to Jews with an attachment to Israel, Jews who have questions of their own about what it means to be identified,” he says. “It’s funny, in some book stores, it’s in Current Events, in other book stores it’s in Biography/Memoir. I think that for Biography, you need to be kind of famous of a certain level. It could be in the humor section – I haven’t seen it there yet, but that would be legit.”

Legit, perhaps, but while humor is Chasnoff’s natural reset button, he’s most proud of reactions he’s received from readers who told him they found something more in the book.

“The best reaction, that I’ve received consistently, is when people said, ‘I read it because I thought it might be funny, but I didn’t realize it would be so deep.’ That means a lot to me,” he says.


CHASNOFF HIMSELF is most proud of three chapters, which he says best exemplify the story he was trying to tell.

“In ‘Our Fathers,’ I try to give a portrait of the melting pot concept of the army, but I try to do it by mixing descriptions of who our fathers are and all our different fathers’ backgrounds, their jobs, ethnicity, and I mix it with a typical day of basic training, schedule-wise, and I really like how that turned out.

“The second is the chapter called ‘Buttons and Snaps’ – about camaraderie. There’s a very special camaraderie in the platoon and a love-hate relationship we had with each other. But the fighting would immediately stop when the pressure was off and become best friends again.

“The other section is ‘House of Mirrors,’ where I describe Lebanon and the strange ways that soldiers died there. So many times, I remember reading about soldiers who just got engaged and then they died the next weekend in Lebanon. It feels like this country, story after story, is like that. Maybe it’s because in America we don’t hear the personal stories behind the soldiers. But I like the fact that when a soldier dies, his story is in the newspaper and the country knows about it and values it.”

Because Chasnoff took off the kid gloves and portrayed the IDF and Israeli society with blemishes intact, he was ready for a backlash of criticism from idealistic Zionists who flinch when anything not exemplary is mentioned about Israel. But he says he’s been pleasantly surprised.

“Nobody’s called the book anti-Israel, but at some book readings I have been approached by people who engage me in a discussion on the issue,” says Chasnoff.

“There was one guy in particular in Minneapolis, whose theory was, ‘I’m not saying we don’t have issues, but we should keep them in the family.’ It’s our dirty laundry and we shouldn’t air it in public. And my response was I think the only way to make Israel stronger is to take these issues and be honest about them. I’m not lying or telling anything that isn’t true just to get a reaction. But I think that for many years, one of the problems is that Israel has kept too many of its issues only to itself. What does that do for us?”

Privy to inside IDF information, Chasnoff engaged in some self-censorship when making the final edits of the book, and was sensitive to not exposing any state secrets, even though he bypassed official military circles when publishing the book.

“I always kept in mind that I don’t want to write anything that’s going to hurt an Israeli soldier now, by putting them in danger. But there’s nothing in the book that Hizbullah doesn’t already know,” he says.

“Oddly enough, I never bothered to contact the IDF censor. I never bothered to ask. There haven’t been any repercussions – I’m sure this article will change that,” he laughs. “But at the very end, after all the proofs were done, and in the last draft before it went to print, there were a couple things I took out about Lebanon, about weapons that Israel uses that may or may not according to UN regulations be the most ideal weapons to use. And I just decided they didn’t add to the story.”


THE ODDEST responses to book that Chasnoff has received have been a handful of e-mails from young American males looking for direction in their lives and asking for advice about whether they too should join the IDF.

“Suddenly I’m in a position to help them?” he laughs. “I haven’t written them back yet, but when I do, it will be very careful advice, something like, ‘Think about this carefully. If you think you’ll go your whole life regretting not doing the army, then you should do it. But don’t think it will solve the riddle of who you are by any means.’”

If those seekers do follow through on their idea to join the IDF, Chasnoff has some concrete suggestions that he garnered during his service that may help ease their time in uniform.

“Give yourself completely over to the experience, and most importantly, don’t complain. There’s going to be a lot of stuff you’re going to find bothersome, the way the guard schedule is made. Your commander is going to have you do things that don’t make sense to you, but when you start complaining, you stand out in a platoon, you become a sore thumb. Go with the flow,” he says.

“Of course, if it’s dangerous, or if you’re getting orders you really feel are immoral, then you should speak up. But to be bitching about how little sleep you get or who’s guarding more, just go with it and don’t stick out. Because I think that’s what’s most resented in a platoon is the nudniks.”

Speaking of nudniks, Chasnoff excitedly recounts getting together with the main subjects of his book – his old friends from his IDF unit – earlier in the week in Tel Aviv. And instead of beating him to a pulp over what he wrote, they embraced him.

“Thanks to Facebook, we’ve been able to find each other – maybe 15 or 20 of us are in touch,” he says. “That’s been really nice and I’ve been able to watch them grow up, which has been very cool. Because they’re all five years younger than me. So they’re all getting married and having kids. It’s been fun to see them come of age.”

And what did they think about The 188th Crybaby Brigade?

“The one I called Dror Boy Genius read it and liked it a lot. Two other guys said they liked it too, and one said to me that he could see things the same way as me 95 percent, and 5% different. And I think being native Israelis, they must see their experiences differently,” says Chasnoff.

Chasnoff’s own experiences in the army, his natural-born humor and his insight into both the American Jewish and Israeli psyche have enabled him to enjoy a successful stand-up career. After returning to Chicago following his IDF stint, he took classes at the fabled Second City improv group and eventually began performing on his own with a stand-up routine.

“Between combination of luck and circumstances, I started performing for Jewish audiences. And thank God, Jews talk and the word started spreading,” he says.

“I sort of built up a nice following in the Jewish world doing Hillel houses at first, then moving onto federation events and shuls. The fact that I had a clean act that was smart and about Judaism, but not a Borscht Belt style, was a good selling point,” says Chasnoff, adding that he also performs a set at universities that’s without Jewish content.

“In the Jewish act, a good block of it is about Israel – some army experiences, but also being married to an Israeli and the challenges. And a lot of it goes back to the myth that we grow up with in the US that all Israelis are just like us. Then when you get to know an Israeli or marry one, you get know how different the Israeli mentality is. And, of course, humor ensues from the conflict.”

That’s why, with three children and an Israeli wife, Chasnoff is constantly laughing. And regularly thinking about possibly moving to Israel. “There is still a plan to come back here, and for that reason I’m glad I did the army because I wouldn’t want to live here without having done it,” he says. “But certain things have be done in my American life first, closing the book on that before I can come. It will require me developing a different attitude toward success, and I still have some of those old-school American ambitions.”

He’s not at all opposed to his three daughters (the oldest being eight-year-old twins) following in his footsteps and joining the IDF.

“It’s a long way off, but when we talk about life after high school, I always mention you can go to college, take a year off or go into the IDF,” says Chasnoff. “Those are my three options for them. I would love it if they serve in the army; I love the idea of people contributing. I think America is missing out on the idea of the people giving to the country.”

And would Chasnoff revisit his own IDF experience by joining the ranks for annual reserve duty?

“Sure, I like to go camping. What more could you want?”


Here is an example of Joel's stand up  there are more on Youtube

Bar Mitzvah

 [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gijh14j3X-g&NR=1[/youtube]

[G M]

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/05/16/rahm-we-screwed-up-the-messaging-on-israel/

Chickens come home to roost.

[Crafty_Dog]

A Potential Turkish-Israeli Crisis and Its International Implications
AMINOR DEVELOPMENT WITH FAR-REACHING implications occurred Tuesday. Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu called on Israel to lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip and allow a flotilla belonging to Insani Yardim Vakfi (Humanitarian Aid Association), a Turkish, religious non-governmental organization (NGO), to fulfill its mission of providing supplies to Palestinians. Earlier, the organization, which possibly has ties to Turkey’s ruling Justice & Development Party (AKP), had rejected Israel’s offer to have the supplies delivered via Israeli territory.

Turkey is in the process of trying to stage a comeback as a great power — a pursuit that has tremendous implications for the alliance it has had with Israel for more than six decades. In fact, Turkey on the path of resurgence means it has to take a critical stance toward Israel, because Ankara needs to re-establish itself as the hegemon in the Middle East and the leader of the wider Islamic world. This would explain Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s scathing and loud criticism of Israel at Davos after the last Israeli military offensive in the Gaza Strip, which led to a significant deterioration in Turkish-Israeli relations.

The Turks are apparently sensing an opportunity to try and push Israel into a difficult situation. At the same time, they are trying to take advantage of the Israeli offensive in Gaza. While the NGO may have ties to the ruling AKP, there is no evidence to suggest that the move to run the blockade is being organized by the government. The emerging scenario, however, makes for a potentially serious international scene with an outcome — whatever way — that could benefit Turkey.

If Israeli forces interdict the ship, Turkey can go on the diplomatic offensive against Israel and rally widespread condemnation against the nation. The rising tensions could get the United States involved. Given the United States’ dependence on Turkey, the Turks could force Washington to take sides, placing the United States in the difficult position of opposing Ankara. Alternatively, forcing the Israelis to allow the flotilla to complete its mission would be a major victory for the Turks. It would enhance Turkey’s international standing as a leader and a rising power.

“The Turks are apparently sensing an opportunity to try and push Israel into a difficult situation.”
While the emerging situation presents itself as a win-win situation for Turkey, it places Israel in an extremely difficult situation, regardless of how it deals with the flotilla. Should the Israelis decide to prevent the ship from making its delivery, they risk global criticism and further deterioration of relations with Turkey. They also risk further complicating matters with the United States at a time when U.S.-Israeli relations are going through a rough period, and when Washington needs Ankara to resolve multiple regional issues. On the other hand, if the Israelis decide to avoid the diplomatic fallout and allow the ship to sail to its destination, that is tantamount to going on the defensive vis-a-vis the nation’s security — something that Israel has never done.

At a time when Israel’s relations with the United States are already uneasy because of diverging regional interests between Iran and the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government does not want to have to engage in any further action that exacerbates its tensions with U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration. This desire notwithstanding, the Turkish ship, which has already set sail for the Gaza coast, is creating a situation where the Israelis don’t have the option of not doing anything. This scenario has taken on a life of its own — far beyond the original intent of the players involved.

[rachelg]

‘Strike may halt Iran's nuke program’
By YAAKOV KATZ

http://www.jpost.com/MiddleEast/Article.aspx?id=176835
A military strike on Iranian military bases, airports, bridges, railroad stations and other key infrastructure could lead Iran to suspend its nuclear arms program, according to a paper that came out last week in a US Army publication.

Titled “Can a Nuclear-Armed Iran Be Deterred?” the article, which appeared in the current edition of Military Review, was written by American-Israeli sociologist and George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni.

Attacking Iran’s nuclear facilities might not be effective, the Palmach veteran and Hebrew University alumnus writes, since, as opponents of such a strike argue, the location of key facilities may not be known, the facilities are well protected, and some are in heavily populated areas and bombing them would cause a great number of civilian casualties.

As a result, he calls for a “different military option.”

“The basic approach seeks not to degrade Iran’s nuclear capacities (the aim of bombing) but to compel the regime to change its behavior, by causing ever-higher levels of ‘pain,’” Etzioni writes.

Neither Israel nor the United States has ever publicly spoken about the targets that they would bomb if they decide to attack Iran. Most military thinkers have spoken about only targeting nuclear facilities and military sites that could be used by Teheran to retaliate.


Such a strike would come after Iran fails to live
up to its international obligations and open up its nuclear facilities to inspections. The next step, Etzioni recommends, would be to bomb non-nuclear military assets such as the headquarters and encampments of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, as well as air defense installations, radar sites, missile sites and navy vessels that could be used to stop the flow of oil to the West.

If this campaign fails, Etzioni recommends bombing dual-use assets such as bridges and railroad stations. If a further tightening of screws is needed, then the attacker could declare Iran a no-fly zone like part of Iraq was even before Operation Iraqi Freedom was launched in 2003.

“This kind of military action is akin to sanctions – causing ‘pain’ in order to change behavior, albeit by much more powerful means,” the sociologist writes.

Etzioni shoots down those who say that any military action against Iran will help the regime in Iran suppress opposition and solidify its rule. “A weakening of the regime, following the military strikes, may provide an opening for the opposition,” he wrote.

Etzioni warns that time is running out and that “we cannot delay action much longer if we are to prevent Iran from crossing a threshold after which a military option will become much more dangerous to implement – for us and for them.”

[JDN]

A Potential Turkish-Israeli Crisis and Its International Implications

At a time when Israel’s relations with the United States are already uneasy because of diverging regional interests between Iran and the Palestinians, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government does not want to have to engage in any further action that exacerbates its tensions with U.S. President Barack Obama’s administration. This desire notwithstanding, the Turkish ship, which has already set sail for the Gaza coast, is creating a situation where the Israelis don’t have the option of not doing anything. This scenario has taken on a life of its own — far beyond the original intent of the players involved.

Jerusalem - Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided to cut short his visit to Canada and the United States and return to Israel, following the Israel Navy's storming Monday morning of an aid flotilla bound for the Gaza Strip.
The Israeli leader will meet his Canadian counterpart, Stephen Harper, as planned, and will then leave for to Israel, Netanyahu's office said.
The premier's early return means he will not be meeting US President Barack Obama on Tuesday, as planned.
Some 10 people were killed when Israeli naval commandos stormed a six-ship flotilla bound for Gaza before dawn Monday, after the ships rejected a demand to either turn back, or make for the Israeli port of Ashdod, where their aid cargo would be unloaded and inspected before being transferred to the salient by land.
The Israeli assault set off waves of condemnation and protests around the world.

[G M]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3L7OV414Kk&feature=player_embedded

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3L7OV414Kk&feature=player_embedded[/youtube]

[rachelg]

GM,

Thanks for posting the footage.
http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=177019
The IDF released footage of the Monday raid on the "Free Gaza" flotilla, which depicted passengers upon the ship attacking soldiers with various weapons, including a large metal pole and other metal objects.

In a brief interview with soldiers aboard the ships, one  soldier said that the attack "looked like the Ramallah lynch."




Earlier Monday armed Navy ships escorted boats from the Gaza protest flotilla to Ashdod, hours after IDF soldiers and activists clashed in a fatal raid.

International activists aboard the ships opened fire on IDF soldiers who boarded the ships to prevent them from breaking the Israeli-imposed sea blockade, the IDF said Monday.

According to the IDF, the international activists “prepared a lynch” for the soldiers who boarded the ships at about 2 a.m. Monday morning after the soldiers called on them to stop, or follow them to the Ashdod Port several hours earlier.

[G M]

http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/05/gaza-jihad-flotilla-participants-chanted-islamic-battle-cry-invoking-muhammads-massacre-of-jews.html

In islamic theology, being martyred at sea is even more rewarding than being a shaheed on land.

[rachelg]

You must be signed into youtube to view the first video

Demonstrators Use Violence Against Israeli Navy Soldiers Attempting to Board Ship

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bU12KW-XyZE&feature=player_embedded&has_verified=1[/youtube]
Footage from the Mavi Marmara Including Injured Soldiers and Items Found On Board

[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XAMFnu8ZBwk[/youtube]

[JDN]

The United Nations Security Council will hold talks at 1 p.m. ET Monday on the incident.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said Monday he was "shocked by reports of killing of people in boats carrying supplies to Gaza. I condemn the violence and Israel must explain."
The Spanish and French governments called the action "disproportionate." The Italian foreign minister asked the European Union to investigate, and several nations, including Greece and Sweden, were summoning their Israeli ambassadors.

While the video indicates the protestors on boat may have used a metal pole, a large metal object, a stun grenade, a slingshot, marbles, etc. Israeli soldiers did shoot and kill 10 protestors and wound others leading to the accusations of disproportionate force.  I think this is why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has decided not to visit Washington and immediately return home from Canada.  The fallout is just beginning.

And as posted earlier (Crafty_) "The rising tensions could get the United States involved. Given the United States’ dependence on Turkey, the Turks could force Washington to take sides, placing the United States in the difficult position of opposing Ankara."

[G M]

The jihadists and the United Criminals want to condemn Israel? **Yawn**

[JDN]

I agree; "yawn" accurately sums it up.

However, what do you think the impact will be on US Turkish relations....

[G M]

Turkey is slowly cutting it's ties to the west/NATO and realigning with the global jihad. I'm sure Obama will apologize some more with the same ineffectiveness.

[JDN]

However, for various reasons, aren't we dependent somewhat on Turkey?

[G M]

For what ?

[JDN]

Turkey does/will have an impact on Iraq...

More important, the US wants a stable, secular, democratic Turkey as a base and a role model for the region.

We don't have many (any?) friends in the Muslim world; it would be nice....

According to Dr Sedat Laciner, director of the Ankara-based International Strategic Research Organization, "We hope that Turkey will be a real strategic partner in the Obama term. There is no country like Turkey. It is Muslim, a NATO [North Atlantic Treaty Organization] member and an EU [European Union] candidate ... It is an antidote to al-Qaeda extremism [and] the best place to make a call to the Muslim world for cooperation with the US."

[Crafty_Dog]

There is a thread dedicated to Turkey on this forum which has some Stratfor articles discussing what it perceives as changes in Turkey's geopolitics.

Rachel, GM:  Good finds and one's that I will put to good use.

[Crafty_Dog]

Flotillas and the Wars of Public Opinion
May 31, 2010




By George Friedman

On Sunday, Israeli naval forces intercepted the ships of a Turkish nongovernmental organization (NGO) delivering humanitarian supplies to Gaza. Israel had demanded that the vessels not go directly to Gaza but instead dock in Israeli ports, where the supplies would be offloaded and delivered to Gaza. The Turkish NGO refused, insisting on going directly to Gaza. Gunfire ensued when Israeli naval personnel boarded one of the vessels, and a significant number of the passengers and crew on the ship were killed or wounded.

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon charged that the mission was simply an attempt to provoke the Israelis. That was certainly the case. The mission was designed to demonstrate that the Israelis were unreasonable and brutal. The hope was that Israel would be provoked to extreme action, further alienating Israel from the global community and possibly driving a wedge between Israel and the United States. The operation’s planners also hoped this would trigger a political crisis in Israel.

A logical Israeli response would have been avoiding falling into the provocation trap and suffering the political repercussions the Turkish NGO was trying to trigger. Instead, the Israelis decided to make a show of force. The Israelis appear to have reasoned that backing down would demonstrate weakness and encourage further flotillas to Gaza, unraveling the Israeli position vis-à-vis Hamas. In this thinking, a violent interception was a superior strategy to accommodation regardless of political consequences. Thus, the Israelis accepted the bait and were provoked.

The ‘Exodus’ Scenario
In the 1950s, an author named Leon Uris published a book called “Exodus.” Later made into a major motion picture, Exodus told the story of a Zionist provocation against the British. In the wake of World War II, the British — who controlled Palestine, as it was then known — maintained limits on Jewish immigration there. Would-be immigrants captured trying to run the blockade were detained in camps in Cyprus. In the book and movie, Zionists planned a propaganda exercise involving a breakout of Jews — mostly children — from the camp, who would then board a ship renamed the Exodus. When the Royal Navy intercepted the ship, the passengers would mount a hunger strike. The goal was to portray the British as brutes finishing the work of the Nazis. The image of children potentially dying of hunger would force the British to permit the ship to go to Palestine, to reconsider British policy on immigration, and ultimately to decide to abandon Palestine and turn the matter over to the United Nations.

There was in fact a ship called Exodus, but the affair did not play out precisely as portrayed by Uris, who used an amalgam of incidents to display the propaganda war waged by the Jews. Those carrying out this war had two goals. The first was to create sympathy in Britain and throughout the world for Jews who, just a couple of years after German concentration camps, were now being held in British camps. Second, they sought to portray their struggle as being against the British. The British were portrayed as continuing Nazi policies toward the Jews in order to maintain their empire. The Jews were portrayed as anti-imperialists, fighting the British much as the Americans had.

It was a brilliant strategy. By focusing on Jewish victimhood and on the British, the Zionists defined the battle as being against the British, with the Arabs playing the role of people trying to create the second phase of the Holocaust. The British were portrayed as pro-Arab for economic and imperial reasons, indifferent at best to the survivors of the Holocaust. Rather than restraining the Arabs, the British were arming them. The goal was not to vilify the Arabs but to villify the British, and to position the Jews with other nationalist groups whether in India or Egypt rising against the British.

The precise truth or falsehood of this portrayal didn’t particularly matter. For most of the world, the Palestine issue was poorly understood and not a matter of immediate concern. The Zionists intended to shape the perceptions of a global public with limited interest in or understanding of the issues, filling in the blanks with their own narrative. And they succeeded.

The success was rooted in a political reality. Where knowledge is limited, and the desire to learn the complex reality doesn’t exist, public opinion can be shaped by whoever generates the most powerful symbols. And on a matter of only tangential interest, governments tend to follow their publics’ wishes, however they originate. There is little to be gained for governments in resisting public opinion and much to be gained by giving in. By shaping the battlefield of public perception, it is thus possible to get governments to change positions.

In this way, the Zionists’ ability to shape global public perceptions of what was happening in Palestine — to demonize the British and turn the question of Palestine into a Jewish-British issue — shaped the political decisions of a range of governments. It was not the truth or falsehood of the narrative that mattered. What mattered was the ability to identify the victim and victimizer such that global opinion caused both London and governments not directly involved in the issue to adopt political stances advantageous to the Zionists. It is in this context that we need to view the Turkish flotilla.

The Turkish Flotilla to Gaza
The Palestinians have long argued that they are the victims of Israel, an invention of British and American imperialism. Since 1967, they have focused not so much on the existence of the state of Israel (at least in messages geared toward the West) as on the oppression of Palestinians in the occupied territories. Since the split between Hamas and Fatah and the Gaza War, the focus has been on the plight of the citizens of Gaza, who have been portrayed as the dispossessed victims of Israeli violence.

The bid to shape global perceptions by portraying the Palestinians as victims of Israel was the first prong of a longtime two-part campaign. The second part of this campaign involved armed resistance against the Israelis. The way this resistance was carried out, from airplane hijackings to stone-throwing children to suicide bombers, interfered with the first part of the campaign, however. The Israelis could point to suicide bombings or the use of children against soldiers as symbols of Palestinian inhumanity. This in turn was used to justify conditions in Gaza. While the Palestinians had made significant inroads in placing Israel on the defensive in global public opinion, they thus consistently gave the Israelis the opportunity to turn the tables. And this is where the flotilla comes in.

The Turkish flotilla aimed to replicate the Exodus story or, more precisely, to define the global image of Israel in the same way the Zionists defined the image that they wanted to project. As with the Zionist portrayal of the situation in 1947, the Gaza situation is far more complicated than as portrayed by the Palestinians. The moral question is also far more ambiguous. But as in 1947, when the Zionist portrayal was not intended to be a scholarly analysis of the situation but a political weapon designed to define perceptions, the Turkish flotilla was not designed to carry out a moral inquest.

Instead, the flotilla was designed to achieve two ends. The first is to divide Israel and Western governments by shifting public opinion against Israel. The second is to create a political crisis inside Israel between those who feel that Israel’s increasing isolation over the Gaza issue is dangerous versus those who think any weakening of resolve is dangerous.

The Geopolitical Fallout for Israel
It is vital that the Israelis succeed in portraying the flotilla as an extremist plot. Whether extremist or not, the plot has generated an image of Israel quite damaging to Israeli political interests. Israel is increasingly isolated internationally, with heavy pressure on its relationship with Europe and the United States.

In all of these countries, politicians are extremely sensitive to public opinion. It is difficult to imagine circumstances under which public opinion will see Israel as the victim. The general response in the Western public is likely to be that the Israelis probably should have allowed the ships to go to Gaza and offload rather than to precipitate bloodshed. Israel’s enemies will fan these flames by arguing that the Israelis prefer bloodshed to reasonable accommodation. And as Western public opinion shifts against Israel, Western political leaders will track with this shift.

The incident also wrecks Israeli relations with Turkey, historically an Israeli ally in the Muslim world with longstanding military cooperation with Israel. The Turkish government undoubtedly has wanted to move away from this relationship, but it faced resistance within the Turkish military and among secularists. The new Israeli action makes a break with Israel easy, and indeed almost necessary for Ankara.

With roughly the population of Houston, Texas, Israel is just not large enough to withstand extended isolation, meaning this event has profound geopolitical implications.

Public opinion matters where issues are not of fundamental interest to a nation. Israel is not a fundamental interest to other nations. The ability to generate public antipathy to Israel can therefore reshape Israeli relations with countries critical to Israel. For example, a redefinition of U.S.-Israeli relations will have much less effect on the United States than on Israel. The Obama administration, already irritated by the Israelis, might now see a shift in U.S. public opinion that will open the way to a new U.S.-Israeli relationship disadvantageous to Israel.

The Israelis will argue that this is all unfair, as they were provoked. Like the British, they seem to think that the issue is whose logic is correct. But the issue actually is, whose logic will be heard? As with a tank battle or an airstrike, this sort of warfare has nothing to do with fairness. It has to do with controlling public perception and using that public perception to shape foreign policy around the world. In this case, the issue will be whether the deaths were necessary. The Israeli argument of provocation will have limited traction.

Internationally, there is little doubt that the incident will generate a firestorm. Certainly, Turkey will break cooperation with Israel. Opinion in Europe will likely harden. And public opinion in the United States — by far the most important in the equation — might shift to a “plague-on-both-your-houses” position.

While the international reaction is predictable, the interesting question is whether this evolution will cause a political crisis in Israel. Those in Israel who feel that international isolation is preferable to accommodation with the Palestinians are in control now. Many in the opposition see Israel’s isolation as a strategic threat. Economically and militarily, they argue, Israel cannot survive in isolation. The current regime will respond that there will be no isolation. The flotilla aimed to generate what the government has said would not happen.

The tougher Israel is, the more the flotilla’s narrative takes hold. As the Zionists knew in 1947 and the Palestinians are learning, controlling public opinion requires subtlety, a selective narrative and cynicism. As they also knew, losing the battle can be catastrophic. It cost Britain the Mandate and allowed Israel to survive. Israel’s enemies are now turning the tables. This maneuver was far more effective than suicide bombings or the Intifada in challenging Israel’s public perception and therefore its geopolitical position (though if the Palestinians return to some of their more distasteful tactics like suicide bombing, the Turkish strategy of portraying Israel as the instigator of violence will be undermined).

Israel is now in uncharted waters. It does not know how to respond. It is not clear that the Palestinians know how to take full advantage of the situation, either. But even so, this places the battle on a new field, far more fluid and uncontrollable than what went before. The next steps will involve calls for sanctions against Israel. The Israeli threats against Iran will be seen in a different context, and Israeli portrayal of Iran will hold less sway over the world.

And this will cause a political crisis in Israel. If this government survives, then Israel is locked into a course that gives it freedom of action but international isolation. If the government falls, then Israel enters a period of domestic uncertainty. In either case, the flotilla achieved its strategic mission. It got Israel to take violent action against it. In doing so, Israel ran into its own fist.

[G M]

I suggest Israel rename itself North Koranistan. It can then sink ships at will and suffer no consequences.

[G M]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/terror-finance-flotilla

The Turkish organizers of the Gaza Strip-bound flotilla that was boarded this morning by Israeli commandos knew well in advance that their vessels would never reach Israeli waters. That's because the organizers belong to a nonprofit that was banned by the Israeli government in July 2008 for its ties to terrorism finance.

The Turkish IHH (Islan Haklary Ve Hurriyetleri Vakfi in Turkish) was founded in 1992, and reportedly popped up on the CIA's radar in 1996 for its radical Islamist leanings.  Like many other Islamist charities, the IHH has a record of providing relief to areas where disaster has struck in the Muslim world.

However, the organization is not a force for good. The Turkish nonprofit belongs to a Saudi-based umbrella organization known to finance terrorism called the Union of Good (Ittilaf al-Kheir in Arabic). Notably, the Union is chaired by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, who is known best for his religious ruling that encourages suicide attacks against Israeli civilians.  According to one report, Qardawi personally transferred millions of dollars to the Union in an effort to provide financial support to Hamas.

In 2008, the Israelis banned IHH, along with 35 other Islamist charities worldwide, for its ties to the Union of Good.  This was a follow-on designation; Israelis first blocked the Union of Good from operating in the West Bank and Gaza in 2002. 

Interestingly, the Union of Good may not only be tied to Hamas. Included in the Israeli list of 36 designees was the International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO).  In 2006, both the U.S. government and the United Nations designated the IIRO branch offices in Indonesia and the Philippines for financing al Qaeda.  French magistrate Jean-Louis Brougiere also testified that IHH had an "important role" in Ahmed Ressam's failed "millennium plot" to bomb the Los Angeles airport in late 1999.

[ccp]

Isn't interesting how we hear that the new leadership of Turkey has dreams of a new Ottoman Empire.  It is the same as their other big competitor for dominance in of the Arab world - Iran with their dreams of a new Persian Empire.  Both want to be the central power broker in the Middle East.

And of course their *unifying theme - strategy* (as always seems to be with Arabs) is - kill all the F* Jews.  I think they wouldn't mind killing all Americans too and probably all Christians but since their are far fewer Jews they make for the age old easier target.

This strategy always seems to work too.  Now we have Egypt rallying to the cause and opening up "aid" to Gaza.

And the rest of the world too, as always, seems to be happy to get the F* Jews.

Bamster's heart is with the Arabs too.  Anyone who denies this, and those who love him are liars, denyers, or fools.
It will be interesting to see him try to weasel this one without offending Jews whom he has used for political support.  As I have pointed out on this board before this guy would NEVER have been President if it wasn't for the many Jews who helped him.  That is not to say he isn't smart or talented.  But all people getting to the Presidency have help.  And it is historical fact that there were/are many Jews around him who gave him much support, advise, money and the rest.

[Crafty_Dog]

Turkish (blood)bath

By RALPH PETERS

Last Updated: 12:43 AM, June 1, 2010

Posted: 12:21 AM, June 1, 2010

Yesterday's "aid convoy" incident off the coast of Gaza wasn't about bringing humanitarian supplies to the terrorist-ruled territory. It wasn't even about Israel.  It was about Turkey's determination to position itself as the leading Muslim state in the Middle East.

Three ships of that six-ship pro-terror convoy flew Turkish flags and were crowded with Turkish citizens. The Ankara government -- led by Islamists these days -- sponsored the "aid" operation in a move to position itself as the new champion of the Palestinians.  And Turkish decision-makers knew Israel would have to react -- and were waiting to exploit the inevitable clash. The provocation was as cynical as it was carefully orchestrated.  The lead vessel, the Mavi Marmara, just happened to have an al-Jazeera TV crew on board to film Israel's response. Ironically, the early videos would've been counterproductive, had world leaders and journalists not been programmed to blame everything on Israel.

Those videos showed Israeli commandos rappelling onto the ship with both hands on the rope (making it rather hard to use a weapon), yet activists claimed the Israelis opened fire as they descended.  Purely by coincidence, dozens of "peace activists" waited with sharpened iron bars, clubs, slingshots -- and rifles. Of course, the nine dead in the melee were all Israel's victims.

The first wave of Israeli commandos reportedly were armed only with paintball rounds for crowd control. Inspect those videos of maddened peaceniks assaulting the soldiers as they landed on deck. You don't see any Israelis pointing rifles -- they're fending off blows.

But the claims of pro-terrorist "peace advocates" are given instant credence.

The US government's initial response was restrained, but Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu understandably canceled his meeting with President Obama, scheduled for today. Bibi's got an emergency on his hands back home, as well-organized protests sweep the Middle East.

Meanwhile, the Europeans and UN bonzes rage at Israel with unseemly relish, but ignore the luxury lifestyles of Gaza's insider elite and the fact that no Palestinian's going hungry. The Israelis had even offered to transfer the aid aboard those ships to the Palestinians -- as long as they could inspect it.  But neither the activists nor the Turkish government wanted a negotiated outcome. This was a stunt from the start.

Now, as we wait to see if Hamas and Hezbollah up the ante, the world ignores Turkey's decisive role in this fiasco.

The US and the European Union cling to the fiction that Turkey's a "westernized Muslim democracy." But Turkey's moving to the east as fast as the Islamist leaders of the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) can drag it there.  Turkish leaders visit the West and sing, "Democracy, democracy, democracy!" We coo and clap. Then they go east and cry, "Islam, Islam, Islam!" And we insist they don't mean it.

Then there's Turkey's unfortunate NATO membership. Since the rise of its Islamists, Turkey has been a Trojan horse, not an ally. What happens now if Ankara provokes a military confrontation? How would we respond, given NATO's mutual-defense agreements?

The madcap agenda of Turkey's current rulers is to create a 21st-century version of the Ottoman Empire. Turks even mutter about the caliphate -- headed for centuries by the Turkish sultan. This is explosive stuff. And the Turks are playing with matches.

But we've obstinately ignored every warning sign. First, our "ally" stabbed us in the back on the eve of Operation Iraqi Freedom, denying our troops their planned routes into Iraq. Then the Turkish media intensified its anti-American fantasies.  Headscarves became de rigeur for the wives of top officials in Ankara as the Turks made mischief in Iraq. Emulating the history-obliterating Saudis, the Turks began work on the vast Ilisu Dam -- which will permanently submerge pre-Islamic and Kurdish archaeological sites of incalculable value. (The Bamiyan Buddhas destroyed by the Taliban were of comparatively minor interest to researchers.)

Then, just last month, the Turks moved to provide the Iranian regime with cover for its nuclear program. And we still didn't get it.

The most dramatic transformation in the Middle East since the fall of the shah is playing out before us. And we can't see behind the mask of the "plight of the Palestinians" (a key Obama administration concern).

In yesterday's confrontation, Israel behaved clumsily. The peace activists behaved savagely. The Turks behaved cynically. The world reacted predictably.

And Washington scratched its head.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "Endless War."

[JDN]

And the rest of the world too, as always, seems to be happy to get the F* Jews.

I'm not sure...  I know I am walking into a minefield but I don't understand why one cannot differentiate and disagree with Israel's Foreign
Policy and "Jews".  I happen to have many Jewish friends, some acquaintances and some business contacts.  No different I guess than Christians
(which for purposes of disclosure I happen to be).

But I think even as CCP has pointed out before, America's foreign policy needs to do what is best for America, not necessarily what is best for Israel.
We are and have been a friend to Israel for many years and I hope many more.  But we also have other concerns, other friends, and other
responsibilities.  Those issues may conflict with Israel's position.  Why is it wrong to disagree with Israel?  Why do I "hate Jews" if I simply think
that Israel's foreign policy conflicts with America's interests?

[ccp]

JDN,
Thanks for your repsonse. No one says you or anyone hates Jews if you disagree.
I was talking about Obama.  I believe he cynically uses Jews for his own power.  He had no problem sitting in a church of an obvious anti-semite for decades.

Maybe for the US it *would* simply be easier if it lets the Jews in Israel get wiped out.  Then the US would not have to take flak from the rest of the world for being an "ally" of the despised Jews.

There are well over a billion Muslims.  They have many huge countries.  The Jews have (till they are murdered - and it is coming - thanks to Iran) a small piece of Earth the size of NJ.  All they want is to live in peace and security.  And even that is too much for the Arab world.  And apparently much of the rest of the world too!

I too have also questioned out loud on this board if it is reasonable to ask US citizens to die for Jews.  My heart says yes.  But logically it may not be in the best interests of this country to do so. 

But make NO MISTAKE ABOUT IT.  If the US abandons Israel all Jews there will be murdered or driven abroad.  Israel cannot defend itself against a billion Muslims forever.

JDN, please feel free to express your thoughts.  I am sure many Americans rightly question US support of Israel.  You are not an anti-semite and I am not offended.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Flotillas and Falsehoods
Don’t members of the press ever resent being so used?
 
The effort to destroy the Jewish state has many fronts. One front is in Iran, where the maniacal regime that has repeatedly promised to “wipe Israel off the map” marches inexorably toward a nuclear bomb. Another is in Gaza, from which Hamas has lobbed 10,000 missiles into Israeli cities. Yet another front, the most insidious, is comprised of the propaganda arm of the Palestinian movement. And this front thrives for only one reason — the complicity of the world press and the so-called “international community.”

It was the propaganda arm that staged the “Freedom Flotilla.” But there have been many previous productions: The propaganda arm was responsible for the photo-shopped images of damage to Lebanon during the 2006 war, the staged “death” of twelve-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah, the “massacre” at Jenin, and the “war crimes” in Gaza.

In each and every case, the “news” of Israeli atrocities was broadcast far and wide by organizations such as Reuters, AP, CNN, and AFP. The United Nations has offered its imprimatur to every libel. The truth seemed always to have a case of laryngitis.

Today, in the wake of the confrontation between Israeli soldiers and the provocateurs aboard the Gaza flotilla, the remarkably incurious world press is providing exactly the sort of headlines on which the organizers knew they could count. “Flotilla Attack Is Israel’s Kent State” screamed the Huffington Post. Agence France Presse carried a banner quoting the Turkish foreign minister to the effect that “Israel has lost all legitimacy.” Every news outlet I checked docilely described the flotilla as “humanitarian.”

Don’t members of the press ever resent being so used?

Fact: Israel imposed a blockade of Gaza to prevent weapons from reaching the radical Islamic regime there that continues to make war on Israeli civilians. Egypt too has blockaded the strip, hoping to choke off weapons to Hamas, which it views as a threat.

Fact: Humanitarian relief is delivered to Gaza from Israel on a daily basis. During the first three months of this year, 94,500 tons of supplies were transferred to Gaza from Israel, including 48,000 tons of food products; 40,000 tons of wheat; 2,760 tons of rice; 1,987 tons of clothes and footwear; and 553 tons of milk powder and baby food for the strip’s 1.5 million inhabitants. Representatives of international aid groups and the United Nations move freely to and from the Gaza Strip.

Fact: Upon learning of the intentions of the Gaza flotilla, the Israeli government asked the organizers to deliver their humanitarian aid first to an Israeli port where it would be inspected (for weapons) before being forwarded to Gaza. The organizers refused. “There are two possible happy endings,” a Muslim activist on board explained, “either we will reach Gaza or we will achieve martyrdom.”

Fact: The flotilla ignored multiple instructions from Israeli navy ships to change course and follow them to the Israeli port of Ashdod.

Fact: On board one of the ships, according to al-Jazeera, the “humanitarian” Palestinians sang “Khaybar, Khaybar, oh Jews, the army of Muhammad will return” — a reference to the 628 massacre of Jews in Arabia at the hands of Muhammad.

Fact: The flotilla’s participants included the IHH, a “humanitarian relief fund” based in Turkey that has close ties to Hamas and to global jihadi groups in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Chechnya, and elsewhere, and which has also organized relief to anti-U.S. Islamic radicals in Fallujah, Iraq. A French intelligence report suggests that IHH has provided documents to terrorists, permitting them to pose as relief workers. Among the other cheerleaders — former British MP and Saddam Hussein pal George Galloway, all-purpose America and Israel hater Noam Chomsky, and John Ging, head of UNRWA, the U.N.’s agency for Palestinian support.

Fact: When the family of Gilad Shalit, the Israeli soldier who was kidnapped during a cross-border raid by Hamas in 2006, offered to support the flotilla if, in exchange, they would agree to ask Hamas to permit international agencies to visit their son, they were rebuffed.

Fact: When Israeli commandos rappelled down ropes to the deck of the Mavi Marmara, they were assaulted and beaten with metal poles and baseball bats by the Palestinians on board. (It’s available on theisraelproject.org).

Some commentators sympathetic to Israel complain that the Israelis were late getting their explanation of events to the press. That’s probably true, but almost irrelevant. There is a jerking of knees around the world whenever and wherever Israel is forced to defend itself. This eagerness to repeat the Palestinian version of events, to assume the very worst about Israel, and to ignore the history of blatant and outrageous lies by Israel’s enemies — amounts to joining them.

http://article.nationalreview.com/435253/flotillas-and-falsehoods/mona-charen

[DougMacG]

Just curious, who in the world has been a better ally to the United States than Israel?  Who in the Middle East has been equal to Israel as a friend to the United States?  What foreign policy interest of the United States does it serve to turn our back on our best friends and appease out worst enemies?

We don't help Israel because Israelis are Jewish.  Our enemies want them annihilated because they are Jewish and they want us annihilated because we are American, so the Jewish state and the American state work together in certain ways where we share a common interest.  That common interest is not religion.  It is survival against war-mongering enemies.

[Body-by-Guinness]

Indeed, Doug. I saw an earlier comment in this thread about something to the effect that our support of Israel prevents us from developing allies in the area. We already have an ally, its name is Israel, and they've stood up to the assembled might of all we are supposedly alienating. Why would we want to align ourselves with third tier despots instead?

[G M]

http://www.jpost.com/Israel/Article.aspx?id=177169

This should turn out well. Good thing Tukey is such a great ally and of course Israel has such a strong supporter in the white house, so no worries.

[G M]

http://bigjournalism.com/pgeller/2010/05/31/the-jihad-flotilla-and-the-media-war-against-israel/

http://michellemalkin.com/2010/06/01/all-aboard-the-peace-thug-flotilla-the-army-of-muhammad-will-return/

Well worth reading.

[G M]

http://hotair.com/archives/2010/06/01/israeli-probe-majority-of-people-on-flotilla-have-jihadist-links/

Be sure to watch all the links.

[JDN]

JDN,
Thanks for your repsonse. No one says you or anyone hates Jews if you disagree.
I was talking about Obama.  I believe he cynically uses Jews for his own power.  He had no problem sitting in a church of an obvious anti-semite for decades.

Maybe for the US it *would* simply be easier if it lets the Jews in Israel get wiped out.  Then the US would not have to take flak from the rest of the world for being an "ally" of the despised Jews.

I too have also questioned out loud on this board if it is reasonable to ask US citizens to die for Jews.  My heart says yes.  But logically it may not be in the best interests of this country to do so. 

JDN, please feel free to express your thoughts.  I am sure many Americans rightly question US support of Israel.  You are not an anti-semite and I am not offended.

First, Thank you CCP; I am glad you understand the inherit conflict.  To be honest, no offense meant, but I have no interest to have Americans "die for Jews".  However, I have no interest in American's dying for Christians, or Hindus, etc. either.  BUT, I think America should, if necessary, die and defend our close friends, Israel being one.  Israel has been a great friend of America, a wonderful ally, and has earned our loyalty.

That said as a given in the equation, I do think there are issues that Israel and America may disagree on.  And as you succinctly point out, the US pays a serious price for this loyalty and does take flak and frankly,
in my opinion, many American lives have been lost and billions of dollars spent because of our strong support for Israel.  Obviously, many of our problems with Muslims stem from our unwavering support for Israel.  Yet, as you also point out, I too know without America, Israel would cease to exist.   Therefore we do have a responsibility, an obligation to defend a dear friend, but like a parent who takes care of and knows they are responsible for their child, I think it is only reasonable to expect some loyalty, and frankly obedience.  Israel cannot have their cake and eat it too. 

[G M]

"in my opinion, many American lives have been lost and billions of dollars spent because of our strong support for Israel."

When and where was this?

[JDN]

Directly, each year we give Israel billions of dollars. 
Israel is the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign assistance since World War II. From 1976-2004, Israel was the largest annual recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, having been supplanted by Iraq. Since 1985, the United States has provided nearly $3 billion in grants annually to Israel.

Indirectly, our unwavering support for Israel is a large reason for Muslim animosity thereby causing America to spend additional billions and be held "accountable" by Muslims.  Yet, as I pointed out, money well spent...

[G M]

We pump billions into Egypt and other muslim nations as well.


"Indirectly, our unwavering support for Israel is a large reason for Muslim animosity thereby causing America to spend additional billions and be held "accountable" by Muslims."

Muslims hate Israel for the same reason they hate us, we don't live under sharia law. They are commanded by islamic theology to wage jihad until islam rules over all of humanity.

[Crafty_Dog]

By RONEN BERGMAN
Tel Aviv

Monday's botched commando raid on the Gaza-bound flotilla has proven disastrous for Israel. World public opinion has united in condemning the Jewish state and the U.N. Security Council has already demanded an inquiry. Closer to home, the strategic alliance that Israel had painstakingly forged with Turkey is in tatters.

The horrific outcome—so far nine killed and dozens wounded—has caused irreparable damage to Israel's image. Even if the video evidence proves beyond doubt that the activists on board the ships were armed and that they were the first to attack, the battle for public opinion (which, after all, is what the flotilla exercise was really about) was lost the moment the first Israeli soldier set foot on the deck of the Mavi Marmara—the Turkish ferry that served as the flagship.

What makes the flotilla fiasco all the more astounding is that Israel has been preparing for this confrontation for months. It has had time to run various scenarios, and even to review strategies it has previously employed for similar events.

In 1988, 131 members of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) who had been deported from the Palestinian Territories following the outbreak of the first intifada intended to set sail to Gaza from Limassol, Cyprus. Their boat, called Al Awda or the Ship of the Return, was accompanied by 200 journalists.

View Full Image

Associated Press
 
The Mavi Marmara, lead boat of a flotilla headed to the Gaza Strip, which was stormed by Israeli naval commandos.
.Publicly, Israel announced that it would use any force necessary to prevent the vessel from reaching Gaza. But behind the scenes the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) general staff, including then Deputy Chief of Staff Ehud Barak, recognized that while seizing control of the ship or blowing it out of the water were not operationally complicated, the international repercussions of such plans would be grim if the Israelis were met with resistance and a battle ensued.

For this reason, the idea of a direct confrontation was abandoned, and the IDF decided to implement a covert operation instead. On Feb. 15, hours before it was due to set sail, the empty ship was blown up in Limassol harbor by a team of Mossad agents and frogmen from Flotilla 13 (the Israeli equivalent of Navy Seals). The team was led by Yoav Galant, then a young officer and today a major general in the IDF. The operation was a success. There were no casualties on either side and the PLO gave up on the idea of sailing to Gaza.

More recently, in August 2006 two ships carrying peace activists and food aid set out to Gaza, again from Cyprus. Under instructions from then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, the vessels were boarded at sea without resistance. After a search uncovered no weapons, the ships were permitted to continue on toward the Strip. The Israeli naval forces went home, Hamas declared victory, and that was that.

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Pressure Rises on Israel Over Raid
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.But unlike 2006, the rhetoric from both sides—as well as the fact that the Insani Yardim Vakfi, a front group for the Turkish Muslim Brotherhood, organized the flotilla—made it clear that any attempt to take control of the vessels would almost certainly result in violent confrontation. This is what makes inexplicable the IDF's decision to have members of the Flotilla 13 commando unit board the Marmara. These men are not trained to deal with civilian protestors. And there were other options available to the IDF, such as disabling the ships at sea and towing them to an Israeli port.

While the instinct of many is no doubt to lay the blame at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's door, it should not be forgotten that the current minister of defense is Ehud Barak, a calmer head whose wealth of military experience includes, as mentioned above, firsthand familiarity with the arguments for and against employing potentially violent methods in similar situations.

What, then, are we to make of the decision-making that led to this tragedy?

Many observers, myself included, often resort to the concept of siege mentality when attempting to make sense of Jerusalem's approach to international relations. It is also true that the memory of the Holocaust still looms large in Israel, especially when existential threats—in which category I emphatically do not include a grab-bag collection of Turkish boats—emerge on Israel's horizon. But until recently, even with its siege mentality, the Israeli government always made an attempt—half-hearted, or ill-conceived, or badly executed, but an attempt nonetheless—to act in a way that would minimize possible harm to the state's international image.

What we witnessed in the early hours of Monday morning was symptomatic of a new degree of fatigue in Israeli governing circles. The fact that both the political and the military authorities could sign off on such an irresponsible operation suggests that the leadership of the country has given up what it has concluded is ultimately a Sisyphean attempt to accommodate world opinion. Isolation is no longer a threat to be fought, their thinking seems to go, because Israel is terminally isolated. What remains is to concentrate exclusively on what is best for Israel's survival, shedding any regard for the opinion of others.

"It makes no difference what we do, or how careful we are, or how we tackle the matter of the flotilla," I was told by a very senior military source two days before the operation. "Whatever we do, they'll all be against us, they'll condemn us at the U.N., and we'll be scolded. We might as well at least preserve our national dignity and maintain the blockade of Gaza." In other words, the war over world opinion is over—and Israel has lost.

Everything that has happened in the past year—the Goldstone Report condemning Israel's war in Gaza, the international furor after the assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai, even the statement singling out Israel at the recent Nuclear Nonproliferation Conference—is taken as an indication that any attempt to do the "right thing" is pointless and perhaps counterproductive. One might as well simply give up.

This feeling is shared by a large section of the Israeli population—not merely the right wing of Israeli society. While many are condemning the IDF's operation on Monday, it is probably fair to say that the majority of the country instinctively understands why these events were permitted to occur.

Israel's fatigue and deep sense of ostracism is, to say the least, unhealthy. It would be unhealthy for any country at the best of times. But it is particularly troubling when the country in question is at perpetual war, and when it is repeatedly threatened with annihilation by the leader of a country who is actively pursuing nuclear weapons. And, of course, it is profoundly disturbing when the fatigued and isolated country itself has the means to strike pre-emptively and punishingly at its enemies, including in ways from which, realistically, there may be no return.

Mr. Bergman, a senior military and political analyst for the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth, is the author of "The Secret War With Iran" (Free Press, 2008).

[G M]

And if the ships blew up in Turkey, then what? It was a no win situation. Israel hasn't the luxury to appease the world's assholes, like our president or the United CrimiNals. The hajis will always hate Israel, so Israel has to teach them fear.

[JDN]

Israel naval raid a folly foretold

How confused and panicky a country must be to act as Israel did.

David Grossman

June 2, 2010


No explanation can justify or whitewash the crime that was committed off the coast here early Monday morning, and no excuse can explain away the stupid actions of the Israeli government and the army. Israel did not send its soldiers to kill civilians in cold blood; indeed, this is the last thing it wanted. And yet, a small Turkish organization, fanatical in its religious views and radically hostile to Israel, recruited to its cause several hundred seekers of peace and justice and managed to lure Israel into a trap, precisely because it knew how Israel would react — knew how Israel is destined and compelled, like a puppet on a string, to react the way it did.

How insecure, confused and panicky a country must be to act as Israel acted. With a combination of excessive military force and a fatal failure to anticipate the intensity of the reaction of those aboard the ship, it killed and wounded civilians, and did so — as if it were a band of pirates — outside Israel's territorial waters. Clearly, this assessment does not imply agreement with the motives — overt or hidden, and often malicious — of some participants in the Gaza flotilla. Not all are peace-loving humanitarians, and the declarations of some of them regarding the destruction of the state of Israel are criminal. But these facts are simply not relevant at the moment; such opinions, so far as we know, do not deserve the death penalty.

Israel's actions are but the natural continuation of the shameful, ongoing closure of Gaza, which in turn is the perpetuation of the heavy-handed and condescending approach of the Israeli government. It is prepared to embitter a million and a half innocent people in the Gaza Strip to obtain the release of one imprisoned soldier, precious and beloved though he may be. And this closure is the all-too-natural consequence of a clumsy and calcified policy, which again and again resorts by default to the use of massive and exaggerated force, at every decisive juncture, where wisdom and sensitivity and creative thinking are called for instead.

And somehow, all these calamities — including the latest deadly events — seem to be part of a larger corruptive process afflicting Israel. One has the sense that a sullied and bloated political system, fearfully aware of the mess produced over the years by its own actions and malfunctions, and despairing of the possibility of undoing the endless tangle it has wrought, becomes ever more inflexible in the face of pressing and complicated challenges, losing in the process the qualities that once typified Israel and its leadership — freshness, originality, creativity.

The closure of Gaza has failed. It has failed for years now. What this means is that it is not merely immoral but also impractical, and indeed worsens the entire situation and harms the vital interests of Israel. The crimes of the leaders of Hamas, who have held Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit captive for four years without once allowing the Red Cross to visit him, and who fired thousands of rockets from the Gaza Strip at Israeli towns and villages, are acts that must be firmly dealt with, using the legal means available to a sovereign state. The ongoing siege of a civilian population is not one of them.

I would like to believe that the shock of Monday's frantic actions will lead to a reevaluation of the whole idea of the closure, at last freeing the Palestinians from their suffering, and cleansing Israel of its moral stain. But our experience in this tragic region teaches that the opposite probably will occur. The mechanisms of violent response, the cycles of vengeance and hatred have begun a new round, whose magnitude cannot yet be foreseen.

Above all, this insane operation shows how far Israel has declined. There is no need to overstate this claim. Anyone with eyes to see understands and feels it. Already there are those here who seek to spin the natural and justified sense of Israeli guilt into a strident assertion that the whole world is to blame. Our shame, however, will be harder to live with.

Israeli writer David Grossman is the author of, most recently, "To the End of the Land," to be published in October. This article was translated from the Hebrew by Stuart Schoffman.

[G M]

Congrats, JDN, you found a useful idiot for those that would kill every jew on the planet, given the chance. 

[G M]

http://www.memri.org/report/en/0/0/0/0/0/0/4265.htm

Should have just sunk every boat.

[G M]

"We need to always remember that we aren't North America or Western Europe, we live in the Middle East, in a place where there is no mercy for the weak and there aren't second chances for those who don't defend themselves."-Ehud Barak

[JDN]

Congrats, JDN, you found a useful idiot for those that would kill every jew on the planet, given the chance. 

It seems Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair also falls into the category of "useful idiot"....



Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair has expressed concern over Israel's policy towards Gaza following Monday's commando raid on an international flotilla carrying aid to the blockaded Palestinian territory.
Blair, an envoy for the Middle East Quartet -- the U.S., Russia, the European Union and the United Nations -- working toward peace in the region, said Israel's blockade of the region since 2007 wasn't working.
"At the moment the difficulty with the current policy, apart from the events from the last few days is that we're not helping the people and isolating the extremists," Blair told CNN. "We're in danger of doing it the wrong way round."
Blair also backed the U.N. Security Council's call for a "prompt, impartial, credible and transparent" investigation into the raid which led to the deaths of at least nine people.
"I think the important thing is people want to know the facts," he told CNN. "So there's got to be a proper investigation. I think Hillary Clinton set out the criteria very well and very sensibly earlier and we've got to get that under way."
Blair, who has publicly stated that he opposes the economic blockade of Gaza, said that one of the main issues facing the Palestinian territory was a lack of proper access.
"I've been saying that for the best part of two years that this (the blockade) is a policy that doesn't work," Blair said.
"At the present time it's very hard to get materials into Gaza. We need to get not just humanitarian materials but materials that can rebuild the infrastructure."
Blair said that while "illegitimate" business interests were using tunnels to get goods into the territory, "what we're not doing is allowing the sector that is legitimate, the proper business sector, to conduct its business and of course this is what we've got to change."
Blair also praised U.S. President Barack Obama for his government's involvement in the region.
"Well, the most important thing for the Americans is that President Obama's gripped this from the very beginning of his time as president; I mean, that's the single most important thing," Blair said.
"The important thing for America is that they continue to be engaged in this."