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Argos Media

After Gaza, Israel Grapples With Crisis of Isolation - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...19israel.html

Israel Branding Avigdor Lieberman Hosni Mubarak

shared by Argos Media on 19 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Israel, whose founding idea was branded as racism by the United Nations General Assembly in 1975 and which faced an Arab boycott for decades, is no stranger to isolation. But in the weeks since its Gaza war, and as it prepares to inaugurate a hawkish right-wing government, it is facing its worst diplomatic crisis in two decades.
  • The issue has not gone unnoticed here, but it has generated two distinct and somewhat contradictory reactions. On one hand, there is real concern. Global opinion surveys are being closely examined and the Foreign Ministry has been granted an extra $2 million to improve Israel’s image through cultural and information diplomacy.
  • But there is also a growing sense that outsiders do not understand Israel’s predicament, so criticism is dismissed.“People here feel that no matter what you do you are going to be blamed for all the problems in the Middle East,” said Eytan Gilboa, a professor of politics and international communication at Bar Ilan University. “Even suicide bombings by Palestinians are seen as our fault for not establishing a Palestinian state.”
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  • Javier Solana, foreign policy chief for the European Union, said in Brussels on Monday that the group would reconsider its relationship with Israel if it did not remain committed to establishing a Palestinian state.
  • Mr. Lieberman also has few fans in Egypt, which has acted as an intermediary for Israel in several matters. Some months ago Mr. Lieberman complained that President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt had not agreed to come to Israel. “If he doesn’t want to, he can go to hell,” he added.“Imagine that Hossein Mousavi wins the Iranian presidency this spring and he names Mohammad Khatami as his foreign minister,” said Meir Javedanfar, an Iran analyst in Israel, referring to two Iranian leaders widely viewed as in the pragmatist camp. “With Lieberman as foreign minister here, Israel will have a much harder time demonstrating to the world that Iran is the destabilizing factor in the region.”
  • Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton has already criticized Israeli plans to demolish Palestinian homes in East Jerusalem, and her department has criticized Israel’s banning of certain goods from Gaza.This represents a distinct shift in tone from the Bush era. An internal Israeli Foreign Ministry report during the Gaza war noted that compared with others in the United States, “liberals and Democrats show far less enthusiasm for Israel and its leadership.”
  • Some Israeli officials say they believe that what the country needs is to “rebrand” itself. They say Israel spends far too much time defending actions against its enemies. By doing so, they say, the narrative is always about conflict.“When we show Sderot, others also see Gaza,” said Ido Aharoni, manager of a rebranding team at the Foreign Ministry. “Everything is twinned when seen through the conflict. The country needs to position itself as an attractive personality, to make outsiders see it in all its reality. Instead, we are focusing on crisis management. And that is never going to get us where we need to go over the long term.” Mr. Gilboa, the political scientist, said branding was not enough. “We need to do much more to educate the world about our situation,” he said. Regarding the extra $2 million budgeted for this, he said: “We need 50 million. We need 100 million.”
Pedro Gonçalves

Shlomo Sand: the man that Zionists love to hate | Books interview | Books | The Observer - 0 views

www.guardian.co.uk/...omo-sand-judaism-israel-jewish

Israel Jews Shlomo Sand Identity National Identity Nation Branding

shared by Pedro Gonçalves on 17 Jan 10 - Cached
  • The Invention of the Jewish People.
  • Sand's hands are depicting how most Jews are descended from converts who never set foot in the Holy Land.
  • according to Sand there was no exile, and as he seeks to prove by dense forensic archaeological and historical analysis, it is meaningless to talk today about a "people of Israel". At least not if by that you mean the Jews.
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  • another mass conversion took place in the Black Sea kingdom of Khazaria towards the end of the eighth ­century. The Khazar elite acquired Judaism as a form of diplomatic neutrality in the surrounding clashes between Christianity and Islam. That conversion gradually scooped up people of mixed ethnic ­backgrounds who are, Sand believes, the main ancestors of Eastern European Jewry
  • The Khazar conversion is no revelation. It was the basis for a 1976 book by Arthur Koestler, The Thirteenth Tribe, which was reviled, then ignored, by mainstream Zionism. But the Jewish Khazars were recognised by early Zionist historians, albeit as a numerically insignificant curiosity. They were only dropped from the story in the 1960s. After the 1967 Six Day War, to be precise.
  • Sand notes that the disappearance of converts from Israeli history books coincides with increased occupation of Arab land. This is not a conspiracy theory. Zionism was a typical modern nation-building exercise. It followed the pattern by which most European national identities were forged in the 19th and 20th centuries. Intellectual elites propagated myths that met "the deep ideological needs of their culture and their society". In Israel's case that was the myth of ethnic origins in a biblical kingdom based around Jerusalem.
  • He is not anti-Zionist, he says, but post-Zionist: accepting modern Israel as a fait accompli.
  • "A lot of pro-Zionists in London and New York don't really understand what their great-grandparents felt about Zion," says Sand. "It was the most important place in the world in their imagination, as a religious, sacred land, not a place to emigrate." That "Israel" was a metaphysical destination to be reached at the End of Days. The modern Israeli state is a political enterprise, conceived in the late 19th century, made necessary by the Holocaust, founded in 1948.
  • It is a young country. Many Jews see that as a weakness. The more insecure they feel, the tighter they cling to the myth of an ancient mandate. But Israel's best hope is to acknowledge that its nationhood is invented, and modernise even more. It must, Sand argues, reform itself so the state belongs to all its citizens, whether Jew or Arab.
Argos Media

Obama offers Iran 'a new beginning' - Middle East, World - The Independent - 0 views

www.independent.co.uk/...n-a-new-beginning-1649988.html

Iran Obama Ali Akbar Javanfekr

shared by Argos Media on 20 Mar 09 - Cached
  • "The Iranian nation has shown that it can forget hasty behaviour but we are awaiting practical steps by the United States," Aliakbar Javanfekr, an aide to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told Reuters.
  • "The Iranian nation has shown that it can forget hasty behaviour but we are awaiting practical steps by the United States," Aliakbar Javanfekr, an aide to President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, told Reuters. "The Obama administation so far has just talked," he added, calling for Obama to make "fundamental changes in his policy towards Iran".
  • In an unusually swift reaction to Obama's overture, presidential aide Javanfekr said Iran welcomed "the interest of the American government to settle differences". But he said the Obama administration "should realise its previous mistakes and make an effort to amend them." "By fundamentally changing its behaviour America can offer us a friendly hand," he told Reuters."Unlimited sanctions which still continue and have been renewed by the United States are wrong and need to be reviewed." Javanfekr singled out US backing for Israel, Iran's main enemy in the region, saying that: "Supporting Israel is not a friendly gesture."
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  • Obama has already expressed a readiness to have face-to-face diplomatic contacts with Tehran, a major shift from former President George W. Bush's policy of trying to isolate a country he once branded part of an "axis of evil".
  • Mohammad Hassan Khani, assistant professor of international relations at Tehran's Imam Sadiq University, described Obama's appeal as a positive gesture but noted it came only a week after the extension of US economic sanctions. "This is somehow conflicting and making people here confused," he said. President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has demanded Washington say sorry for decades of "crimes" against the Islamic Republic. Tehran also says it cannot let down its guard as long as US troops are posted on its borders in Iraq and Afghanistan. Analysts have said that Iran is setting tough conditions for dialogue with the United States to buy time for its ponderous and opaque decision-making process, which is facing a dilemma on whether or not to open up.
  • European Union foreign policy chief Javier Solana said he hoped Iran would pay close attention to Obama's appeal. "I hope that that will open a new chapter in relations with Iran," he told reporters before going into an EU summit. To stress the seriousness of Obama's overture, the White House distributed the videotape with Farsi subtitles and posted it on its website to coincide with Iranian observance of the ancient festival of Nowruz, celebrating the arrival of spring. But his appeal was not shown nor mentioned on Iran's main 2pm state television news, although it was reported by Iranian news agencies including the official agency IRNA.
Argos Media

Barack Obama's New World Order - TIME - 0 views

www.time.com/...0,8599,1889512,00.html

Obama US Brand America

shared by Argos Media on 04 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Most of the hallmarks of the foreign policy of George W. Bush are gone. The old conservative idea of "American exceptionalism," which placed the U.S. on a plane above the rest of the world as a unique beacon of democracy and financial might, has been rejected. At almost every stop, Obama has made clear that the U.S. is but one actor in a global community. Talk of American economic supremacy has been replaced by a call from Obama for more growth in developing countries. Claims of American military supremacy have been replaced with heavy emphasis on cooperation and diplomatic hard labor.
  • The tone was set from Obama's first public remarks in London on Wednesday, at a press conference with Prime Minister Gordon Brown, where the American President said he had come "to listen, not to lecture." At a joint appearance with German Chancellor Angela Merkel in Baden-Baden on Friday, a German reporter asked Obama about his "grand designs" for NATO. "I don't come bearing grand designs," Obama said, scrapping the leadership role the U.S. maintained through the Cold War. "I'm here to listen, to share ideas and to jointly, as one of many NATO allies, help shape our vision for the future."
  • At a town hall in Strasbourg, France, Obama stood before an audience of mostly French and German youth and admitted that the U.S. should have a greater respect for Europe. "In America, there's a failure to appreciate Europe's leading role in the world," he said before offering other European critical views of his country. "There have been times where America has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive."
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  • The contrast is striking. Only four years ago, George W. Bush, in his second Inaugural Address, described what he called America's "considerable" influence, saying, "We will use it confidently in freedom's cause." Bush's vision of American power was combative and aggressive. He said the U.S. would "seek and support the growth of democratic movements and institutions in every nation and culture." He continued, "We go forward with complete confidence in the eventual triumph of freedom."
  • Obama, by contrast, is looking for collaboration. He is looking to build a collective vision, not to impose an American one.
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