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Javier E

Olmert, Ex-Premier of Israel, Assails Netanyahu on Iran - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...assails-netanyahu-on-iran.html

israel foreign policy US

shared by Javier E on 01 May 12 - Cached
  • “A nation has the right to determine what it should do to defend itself,” Mr. Olmert said at a conference held in a Manhattan hotel by The Jerusalem Post. “But when at the same time we ask the United States and other countries to provide us with the means to do it, no one is entirely independent to act, irrespective of the positions and attitudes and policies of other countries.”
  • Mr. Olmert said he was expressing legitimate concerns shared by most people in the Israeli security establishment, “present and past,” including many who have not spoken publicly.
  • Mr. Olmert warned that Mr. Netanyahu and his defense minister, Ehud Barak, having likened Iran to Nazi Germany, may find themselves unable to back down from military action. “They talk too much, they talk too loud,” he said in the interview. “They are creating an atmosphere and a momentum that may go out of their control.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Mr. Olmert said in the interview that Israel should quietly build American support behind the scenes, and not publicly declare that it will act with or without America, given its dependence on American military aid and hardware. “America is not a client state of Israel — maybe the opposite is true,” he said. “Why should we want America to be put in a situation where whatever they do will be interpreted as if they obeyed orders from Jerusalem?”
  • Ehud Olmert, the former prime minister of Israel, plunged on Sunday into the country’s growing debate over Iran policy with harsh criticism of his successor, Benjamin Netanyahu.
  • Drawing boos from a largely American audience in New York, he fired off a wide-ranging broadside against Mr. Netanyahu’s foreign policy, saying that the prime minister was unprepared to offer meaningful compromise to Palestinians, disrespectful to the United States and dismissive of the international community at a time when Israel particularly needs foreign support to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
Ellie McGinnis

How John Kerry Could End Up Outdoing Hillary Clinton - David Rohde - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...354688

kerry clinton politics policy obama US

shared by Ellie McGinnis on 21 Nov 13 - No Cached
  • Kerry’s first foreign-policy speech as secretary, an hour-long defense of diplomacy and foreign aid, was a flop.
  • The nearly universal expectation was that Kerry’s tenure would be overshadowed by his predecessor’s, for a long list of reasons.
  • arriving in Foggy Bottom when the country seemed to be withdrawing from the world. Exhausted by two long wars, Americans were wary of ambitious new foreign engagements—certainly of military ones, but of entangling diplomatic ones, too
  • ...89 more annotations...
  • Barack Obama’s administration, accelerating a process that had begun in the early 1960s under President Kennedy, was centralizing foreign-policy decision making in the White House’s National Security Council, marginalizing the State Department.
  • Finally, Kerry, a defeated presidential candidate, was devoid of the sexiness that automatically attaches to a figure, like Hillary Clinton, who remains a legitimate presidential prospect
  • The consensus in Washington was that Kerry was a boring if not irrelevant man stepping into what was becoming a boring, irrelevant job.
  • Nearly a year into his tenure, Kerry is the driving force behind a flurry of Mideast diplomacy the scope of which has not been seen in years. In the face of widespread skepticism, he has revived the Israeli-Palestinian peace process; brokered a deal with Russia to remove chemical weapons from Syria; embarked on a new round of nuclear talks with Iran, holding the highest-level face-to-face talks with Iranian diplomats in years; and started hammering out a new post-withdrawal security agreement with Afghan President Hamid Karzai.
  • it will be Kerry who is credited with making the State Department relevant again.
  • “He’s front and center on all these issues. That clearly represents a very ambitious first year for any secretary of state.”
  • Kerry has a bad habit of wandering off script. On a trip to Pakistan in August, he created two diplomatic incidents in a single interview. First he said that the Egyptian army was “restoring democracy” when it toppled the country’s democratically elected president.
  • President Obama had “a timeline” for ending U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan.
  • he overshot in the opposite direction, promising that any American strike against Syria would be “unbelievably small”—a bit of impressively self-defeating rhetoric that undermined days of administration efforts to argue that a few dozen Tomahawk cruise-missile strikes would be more than what hawkish critics were calling a pointless “pinprick.”
  • a word that comes up frequently in conversations about Kerry is gasbag. He had few close friends in the Senate, where he served for nearly 30 years. A former diplomat says Kerry’s recent foreign-policy successes have made him more insufferable than ever.
  • his gaffes are caused by arrogance and indiscipline. They say that even in a city swollen with egotism and pomposity, Kerry stands out.
  • “Nobody would challenge the notion that he’s been very much a team player and willing to take on really hard assignments from the president and go to the toughest places.”
  • (In one late-night press conference in Moscow last May, he uttered a staggering 95-word sentence.
  • “Even as a junior or senior, he was a pompous blowhard,” says someone who attended Yale with Kerry in the 1960s and asked not to be named.
  • he is not so much arrogant as awkward.
  • Liberal Democrats call his hawkish views on Syria a betrayal of his antiwar past. Republicans say he is a perennial flip-flopper: he fought in the Vietnam War and then protested against it; he supported the 2003 invasion of Iraq and then opposed it; he tried to negotiate with Bashar al‑Assad in 2009, then compared him to Adolf Hitler—and then reopened the door to negotiating with him again.
  • Kerry “just can’t dance.”
  • Washington mandarins dismiss Kerry’s foreign-policy ambitions as grandiose and overweening, especially relative to what America’s diminishing power can achieve after Iraq and Afghanistan
  • old foreign-policy hands say that instead of acknowledging the limits of American power in the post–Arab Spring Middle East, Kerry looks for misguided ways to apply power the country no longer has.
  • Current aides argue that Kerry’s recent successes belie the caricatures of him. “Show me where he hasn’t done this job well,” one demanded when I interviewed him in mid-October.
  • “I would ask John Kerry, ‘How can you ask a man to be the first one to die for a mistake?’ ”
  • Kerry seem “pompous” is that “oftentimes he tries too hard.” According to Manley and others, Kerry had a knack for walking up to fellow members on the Senate floor at precisely the wrong time.
  • His enormous ambition motivates him to aim for major breakthroughs despite daunting odds. And his healthy self-confidence allows him to believe that he can convince anyone of virtually anything.
  • Kerry also has bottomless reserves of patience that allow him to engage for hours in seemingly fruitless negotiations; he persists long past the time others would have given up in exhaustion.
  • The amount of time he’s spent negotiating with Afghanistan’s Hamid Karzai and Russia’s Sergey Lavrov alone should qualify him for some kind of diplomatic medal of honor.
  • an indifference to his own political standing.
  • Political calculations may have constrained the risks Hillary Clinton was willing to take. Kerry, in contrast, no longer needs to heed political consultants. Nor does he need to worry too much about what his detractors say.
  • “I don’t care at all,” he said. “I could care less about it. You know, David, I ran for president, so I’m not scared of failure.”
  • secretary of state is the job for which Kerry was born and bred
  • “I’m not worried about the politics,” Lowenstein recalls Kerry telling him. “I want to get things done.”
  • Obama, too, no longer has to worry about reelection; concerns about the 2012 election may have limited the president’s own appetite for diplomatic risk taking in the Mideast during his first term.
  • But his enthusiasm for his current job is unquestionable; one aide told me that he will have to be dragged from the office—fingernails scraping against the floor—at the end of his term.
  • As a presidential candidate, he had to downplay his obsession with foreign policy and his fluency in foreign languages, for fear that such things would play badly with voters; as secretary of state, he can freely leverage those qualities.
  • if there is no breakthrough with Iran, or if his efforts to broker peace in Syria fall short, or if the Israeli-Palestinian peace talks founder, history will likely view Kerry as the tragicomic figure his detractors already judge him to be.
  • “After you lose the presidency, you don’t have much else to lose.”
  • Following stints as an assistant district attorney and the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Kerry would, after his election to the Senate in 1984, go on to serve for 28 years on the same committee he had stood before in 1971, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee
  • (But for Ohio, where he lost to Bush by 119,000 votes, Kerry would have been president.
  • But Kerry stepped into the role at a singularly weak moment for the position. For one thing, America, weary after a decade of conflict, is turning inward; activist diplomacy is out of favor. For another, State Department employees I interviewed told me that morale is low.
  • the department is too hierarchical, inflexible, and risk-averse—and is in danger of becoming even more so in the aftermath of Benghazi.
  • the intensely controlling Obama administration has centralized foreign-policy decision making in the National Security Council, weakening the State Department.
  • Just a day after Kerry delivered one of the most impassioned speeches of his career, assailing Assad’s use of chemical weapons on civilians as a “crime against conscience” and sending a clear signal that U.S. air strikes on Syria were imminent, the president announced that missile strikes might in fact not be imminent, and that he would be seeking congressional authorization to attack Syria.
  • the president risked causing foreign leaders and negotiators to doubt whether any future warnings or statements issued by Kerry were backed by the White House.
  • Kerry conducted long interviews with every living former secretary of state—Kissinger, George Shultz, Baker, Madeleine Albright, Powell, Condoleezza Rice, and Clinton—and set out to model himself after Shultz, who, in six and a half years serving under Ronald Reagan, was seen as a combination of the two prototypes, both a great diplomat and a good manager.
  • “I don’t care about risk, honestly,” he said, leaning forward in his chair, spoiling for a fight. “The riskiest thing to do is to not act. I would far rather try and fail than fail not trying.”
  • When off the record, in relaxed settings, he is refreshingly direct, profane, and insightful, speaking bluntly about the limits of American power and caustically lamenting Washington’s growing paralysis and partisanship
  • He finishes sentences with phrases such as something like that or that’s about it or thanks, man. Toes tapping, head bobbing back and forth, he speaks with fervor and candor. His tenacity is palpable.
  • Recent secretaries of state have had different strengths. Henry Kissinger and James Baker, two secretaries who had close relationships with their presidents (Nixon in Kissinger’s case, George H. W. Bush in Baker’s), were powerful bureaucratic players.
  • But isn’t staking America’s credibility, and his own reputation, on long-odds breakthrough agreements with Tehran or Moscow, or on Israeli-Palestinian peace talks, a dubious exercise, as Obama’s failed first-term efforts at Mideast peace demonstrated?
  • Colin Powell lost a crucial internal administration battle in failing to halt the Bush White House’s march to war in Iraq—but was adored at the State Department for implementing sweeping administrative reforms.
  • Clinton embraced a new, Google Hangout era of town-hall diplomacy, and she elevated economic development and women’s issues. She was an architect of the administration’s “pivot to Asia,” and she took risks in supporting the Afghanistan troop surge and the intervention in Libya.
  • steered clear of the Middle East, delegating special envoys like Richard Holbrooke and George Mitchell to grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, peace talks with the Taliban
  • Clinton was much more prudent and careful than Kerry, whom one former State Department official describes as more of a “high-risk, high-reward”
  • “My view is that she was pretty sheltered,” he told me. “They were not interpersonally pleasant, and they were very protective of her. You can get into a cocoon.”
  • “My assessment was that she made a calculated political choice not to hang her hat on that thankless task,” Kim Ghattas,
  • the former secretary would have taken bolder risks but was reined in by the White House—especially during her first couple of years in office, when hostility from the bitter 2008 primary campaign still lingered between the Obama and Clinton staffs.
  • she actively engaged in Middle East talks, at one point meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for seven hours in New York.
  • Kennan warned Powell about the dangers of traveling too much—of prioritizing activist diplomacy over providing the White House with solid foreign-policy analysis.
  • Powell gave a copy of Kennan’s letter to Kerry. So far, Kerry is not following the advice. As October came to a close, Kerry had already flown more than 213,000 miles and spent more than 100 days—roughly 40 percent of his time—outside the United States. In his first nine months, he’d traveled more miles than Clinton had in her entire first year in office.
  • In 2009, he convinced Afghan President Hamid Karzai to consent to a runoff in his country’s disputed presidential election.
  • 2011, he was dispatched to Pakistan after the killing of Osama bin Laden to persuade local officials to return the tail of an American helicopter that had crashed at the site.
  • cemented Kerry’s bond with Obama was less his diplomatic achievements than his ability to impersonate another tall, wealthy Massachusetts politician with good hair: Kerry served as Mitt Romney’s surrogate during weeks of preparation for the 2012 presidential debates.
  • Kerry channeled Romney so effectively that, aides to both men say, he got under Obama’s skin.
  • Kerry agreed that the U.S. should try to revive Middle East negotiations before the Palestinians again pushed for statehood, at the United Nations General Assembly in September 2013.
  • In private meetings with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama pushed for a resumption of negotiations. At a final press conference before returning to Washington, Obama announced that he was handing the pursuit of talks over to Kerry.
  • “What I can guarantee is that Secretary Kerry is going to be spending a good deal of time in discussions with the parties.”
  • He met alone with Abbas for two hours in Amman and then flew to Jerusalem to meet with Netanyahu and three of his aides.
  • Kerry pressed on, returning in April to Jerusalem and Ramallah, the de facto Palestinian capital in the West Bank. After 24 hours of talks with both sides, Kerry held a press conference at the airport in Tel Aviv.
  • Kerry held three meetings with Netanyahu and Abbas in three days, including one meeting with the Israeli prime minister that lasted six hours, until 3 a.m. On June 29, he canceled a trip to the United Arab Emirates so he could keep talking with Netanyahu and Abbas, raising expectations of a breakthrough. On June 30, he held another press conference at the Tel Aviv airport.
  • “We started out with very wide gaps, and we have narrowed those considerably.”
  • Five months into the job, Kerry was off to an ominous start. His wife was in the hospital. Syria was convulsing. Progress toward Israeli-Palestinian talks was stalled. Egypt was burning. And Republican attack ads were making it appear as though the secretary of state had spent the weekend yachting.
  • Kerry said, according to the aide. “The only thing I’m interested in is a serious negotiation that can lead to a final-status agreement.”
  • “On behalf of President Obama, I am pleased to announce that we have reached an agreement that establishes a basis for resuming direct final-status negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis,” Kerry said, calmly and deliberately. “This is a significant and welcome step forward.” He declined to take questions.
  • Nine days later, the Israeli cabinet approved the release of the 104 Palestinian prisoners. The next day, Israeli and Palestinian officials arrived in Washington to begin peace talks.
  • The smallness of his circle of aides, which had been seen early on as a detriment to his management of the State Department, now made it easier to keep information contained.
  • Working with consultants from McKinsey, diplomats estimated that $4 billion in long-term private investment would flow to the Palestinians in the wake of an agreement.
  • Palestinian officials appear to have compromised on their demand for a settlement freeze.
  • From the beginning, Kerry had insisted that the Obama administration not allow a halt in Israeli settlement construction to become a public precondition.
  • Kerry also reiterated a core argument: the security that Israel currently enjoys is temporary, if not illusory. Without a two-state solution, Israel will face a European-led campaign of delegitimization, a new intifada, and a Palestinian leader far more radical than Abbas.
  • The crucial concession—the release of the 104 prisoners—came from the Israeli side
  • “It takes time to listen, it takes time to persuade,” Frank Lowenstein told me. “This is where Kerry’s willingness to stay up all night pays off.”
  • The U.S. provided nonlethal aid to the opposition, but White House officials were so fearful of American assistance inadvertently falling into the hands of jihadists that the National Security Council Deputies Committee monitored the distribution of the aid in granular detail. Qatar and Saudi Arabia, meanwhile, were funneling cash and weapons to hard-line militants, including Al Nusra Front, an al-Qaeda affiliate.
  • Russia continued providing Syria with arms and blocking any action by the UN Security Council.
  • When Putin finally received Kerry, after a three-hour delay, Putin reportedly fiddled continuously with his pen and “more resembled a man indulging a long-ago scheduled visit from the cultural attaché of Papua New Guinea than participating in an urgent summit with America’s top diplomat,”
  • At a late-night press conference, a beaming Kerry announced that he and Lavrov would co-host a peace conference in Geneva.
  • “They were great efforts, and again, I reiterate my gratitude to President Putin for a very generous welcome here.”
  • Earlier, in April, after American intelligence officials had confirmed that Assad had carried out several small-scale chemical-weapons attacks, Obama had reluctantly agreed to mount a covert CIA effort to arm and train moderate rebels.
  • if the United States did not “impose consequences” for Assad’s use of chemical weapons, the Syrian leader would see it as “a green light for continued CW use.” But the White House did not alter course.
  • Both Obama and Kerry favored a military response—air strikes—according to a senior administration official. As American intelligence agencies accumulated evidence suggesting that Assad was responsible, Kerry offered to make the public case for strikes. White House officials welcomed the idea and vetted his speeches.
  • “My vision is that, if you can make peace, if you can get Israel and Palestine resolved and can get the Iranian threat of a nuclear weapon put to bed appropriately—even if Syria didn’t calm down—if you get those two pieces or one piece of that, you’ve got a hugely changed dynamic in a region that is in turmoil. And if you take just the Palestinian-Israeli situation, you have the potential to make peace with 57 nations—35 Muslim nations and 22 Arab nations. If the issue is resolved, they will recognize Israel.”
Javier E

From Inside and Outside the Iron Dome, Once Again - James Fallows - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...374709

israel morality palestine conflict extremism leadership

shared by Javier E on 21 Jul 14 - No Cached
  • When you write that many "vastly more Palestinian families have been killed..because of differences in offensive weaponry and defensive systems and other factors" you might mention that the "other factors" included the Hamas government's refusal to build shelters and defensive systems to protect their people, as well as their use of civilians as shields to hide behind when they shoot rockets at Israeli civilians.
  • From Inside and Outside the Iron Dome, Once Again "If you continue looking up to the sky, you will not notice that the house is already burning from within." A reader in Jerusalem on the real threat to his country. James Fallows Jul 19 2014, 1:17 PM ET
  • When you write that many "vastly more Palestinian families have been killed..because of differences in offensive weaponry and defensive systems and other factors" you might mention that the "other factors" included the Hamas government's refusal to build shelters and defensive systems to protect their people, as well as their use of civilians as shields to hide behind when they shoot rockets at Israeli civilians.
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  • there is an inexhaustible supply of passionate but irreconcilable, and familiar, statements of who is "more to blame" for the escalating violence and who originally wronged whom. 
  • For us living here, the current military operation and the ongoing drizzle of rockets are neither unbearable nor threatening in an existential way. Iron Dome has enabled Israelis to continue with their normal lives neither terrified nor terrorized.
  • this video because watching it reminded me, through its absence, of the quality of moral breadth, compassion, and bravery that distinguishes people willing to take risks for peace.
  • consider this recent CNN exchange between Wolf Blitzer and Israeli Economics Minister Naftali Bennett. I have heard from people in Israel, America, and Europe who say that Bennett is speaking tough, plain, necessary truths. I have heard from others in those same places who think, as I do, that Bennett sounds appallingly callous about other people's loss of life—in this case, the deaths of the four little boys on the beach. Wolf Blitzer himself seems taken aback by what he is hearing. It's worth noting that Bennett features this clip on his own YouTube site. 
  • When you write that many "vastly more Palestinian families have been killed..because of differences in offensive weaponry and defensive systems and other factors" you might mention that the "other factors" included the Hamas government's refusal to build shelters and defensive systems to protect their people, as well as their use of civilians as shields to hide behind when they shoot rockets at Israeli civilians.
  • the rabbi grossly exaggerated the impact of Hamas terror on Jerusalem and portrayed it with unduly epic dimensions. In so doing, he distorts the actual power imbalance in this tragic situation, in addition to victimizing me and my fellow Israeli citizens.
  • As a society, we are a (powerful) side in this conflict, not a helpless victim.
  • The blinding victimhood embodied in the rabbi's comments is shameful because it points at an abject moral, spiritual and leadership failure.
  • The rockets are not really scary nor are they a true existential threat. Racism, radicalism, and religious intoxication from brute power has become an imminent danger to our old and beloved peoplehood. When people are accustomed to hearing that they are perpetual innocent victims of Palestinian aggression, they eventually translate they frustration into rage and start seeking justice in revenge. If you continue looking up to the sky, you will not notice that the house is already burning from within. 
horowitzza

Two Israelis Killed, Teen Stabbed in Attacks in Jerusalem - 0 views

http://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/two-israelis-killed-teen-stabbed-attacks-jerusalem-n438186

israel crisis

started by horowitzza on 04 Oct 15 no follow-up yet
qkirkpatrick

Contested Holy Site in Jerusalem Reopens for Muslim Worship - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ple-mount-noble-sanctuary.html

muslim worship culture religion Israel Holy

shared by qkirkpatrick on 31 Oct 14 - No Cached
  • Thousands of Palestinians prayed Friday amid a heavy Israeli police presence at Jerusalem’s most contested sacred site
lenaurick

ISIS: What does it really want? - CNN.com - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

politics crisis policy culture isis

shared by lenaurick on 12 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • The group's rise in Iraq -- and its capture of thousands of square miles of land -
  • "We have not defeated the idea," he is reported to have said. "We do not even understand the idea."
  • A global caliphate secured through a global war. To that end it speaks of "remaining and expanding" its existing hold over much of Iraq and Syria. It aims to replace existing, man-made borders, to overcome what it sees as the Shiite "crescent" that has emerged across the Middle East, to take its war -- Islam's war -- to Europe and America, and ultimately to lead Muslims toward an apocalyptic battle against the "disbelievers."
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  • Dabiq is a town in northern Syria currently held by ISIS where, according to Islamic prophecy, the armies of Rome will mass to meet the armies of Islam.
  • And according to those prophecies, the Islamic armies will ultimately conquer Jerusalem and Rome.
  • Libya is the only other country where ISIS holds territory -- the coastal town of Sirte and other patches along the Mediterranean
  • The revival of the caliphate is the launching pad for a global battlefield. No caliph can govern without pursuing offensive jihad, and that jihad will continue, as Dabiq put it, until "the shade of the blessed flag will expand until it covers all eastern and western extents of the Earth."
  • "There will come a time when three armies of Islam shall simultaneously rise, one in the Levant, one in Yemen and one in Iraq."
  • It is powerful motivation to ISIS supporters, and it's also a message to Muslims: The end of times is at hand, and if you want to be a true Muslim, on the right side of history, you had better join us.
  • Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi said it was an obligation to establish the caliphate and therefore to recognize him as caliph.
  • A caliphate can only exist if it holds territory: ISIS' raison d'etre is to sustain and expand
  • ISIS followers -- and Dabiq -- are fond of quoting the words of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi -- the "spiritual" father of the movement and leader of al Qaeda in Iraq until he was killed in 2006.
  • No matter that the majority of Muslims -- even many jihadists - see ISIS' interpretations of the Quran and the hadith as manipulations or distortions.
  • Libyan territory can also be (and has been) the platform for launching terror attacks in neighboring Egypt and Tunisia.
  • But ISIS' ambitions run much further -- it has established a presence in Yemen, Afghanistan and the Sinai Peninsula in Egypt.
  • ISIS does not recognize the borders of nation states that make up the modern world nor the idea of a democratic state or citizenship.
  • "The Islamic State does not recognize synthetic borders, nor any citizenship besides Islam," he declared in 2012.
  • "We won't enjoy life until we liberate the Muslims everywhere, and until we retrieve Al-Quds (Jerusalem) and regain Al-Andalus (Andalucia in Spain), and conquer Rome," Adnani said in 2013.
  • ISIS wants to stir religious hatred in Europe and the United States -- so that Muslims no longer feel they belong in the West, and either carry out attacks in their homelands or leave to join the caliphate.
  • It has already shown extreme cruelty toward Shiites -- most notably slaughtering more than 1,500 Iraqi air force cadets in Tikrit in June 2014.
  • And it sees the United States as complicit in supporting a Shia government in Iraq.
  • Embroiling the U.S. and the West in a land war -- ISIS reasons -- would give Muslims no choice but to come to the defense of the caliphate, setting up a global confrontation.
  • "Now that it has taken Dabiq, the Islamic State awaits the arrival of an enemy army there, whose defeat will initiate the countdown to the apocalypse,"
  • "We will conquer your Rome, break your crosses, and enslave your women. If we do not reach that time, then our children and grandchildren will reach it."
Javier E

How Should We Talk About the Israel Lobby's Power? - 0 views

nymag.com/...t-the-israel-lobbys-power.html

tolerance partisan polarization liberal immigrants fraud israel lobbying

shared by Javier E on 09 Mar 19 - No Cached
  • Is it possible to write honestly about the Israel lobby’s power in D.C. without using any anti-Semitic “tropes” at all?
  • A very powerful lobby deploys the money and passions of its members to ensure that a foreign country gets very, very special treatment from the U.S.
  • defending Israel is a core interest of not only Jews but all of us in what’s left of the West.
  • ...21 more annotations...
  • The question, it seems to me, is one of proportion.
  • The average aid for high-income countries like Israel, according to USAID, is $79 million a year. Israel gets 48 times more.
  • In return for giving Israel $3.8 billion a year … the U.S. is expected to consent to anything and everything Israel wants. When you look at this from a distance, it is really quite amazing.
  • And, of course, Israel won in the end. Under Trump, Israel has achieved almost every goal it aimed for: the scrapping of the Iran deal, the recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, moving the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, a surge in settlements, and an intensification of the abuse of the Palestinians
  • Again you might ask: What did the U.S. get in return for all this from Israel? And again the answer is: Nothing.
  • Actually, worse than nothing. The U.S. suffers internationally from this alliance. Don’t take it from me. Here’s General James Mattis: “I paid a military price every day as the commander at CentCom because the Americans were perceived as biased toward Israel and that moderates all the moderate Arabs who want to be with us.” Or David Petraeus: “The conflict foments anti-American sentiment, due to a perception of American favoritism toward Israel.”
  • Now observe the public discourse in Washington. Here is Nancy Pelosi last year: “If this capitol crumbled to the ground, the one thing that would remain would be our commitment to aid — I won’t even call it aid — our cooperation with Israel.” Chew on that a minute. If the United States were to collapse, its one objective would be to aid a foreign country
  • The first bill introduced into the Senate in this Congress was one that made it illegal for any American to boycott goods from the West Bank, without suffering real economic consequences from their own government. It’s a federal bill designed to buttress several state bans on Americans’ right to boycott Israeli goods. Now here’s a clear case of conflict between the free speech rights of Americans and Israel’s continuing occupation of the West Bank. And the Senate voted for Israel’s occupation over the rights of its own citizens by a margin of 77– 23
  • It seems to me that it is simply a fact that the Israel lobby uses money, passion, and persuasion to warp this country’s foreign policy in favor of another country — out of all proportion to what Israel can do for the U.S.
  • The reason seems quite simple: Migrants now know that the U.S. border system is overwhelmed. More to the point, they now know that if they bring their children with them, they will not be abruptly sent back, and cannot be detained for longer than 20 days, after which they will be free to go and work anywhere in the country. That incentive is much stronger now than it was a year ago
  • The one-way street has also corrupted Israel, wrecked its moral standing, and enabled the country to keep ratcheting toward the far right in self-destructive ways.
  • History matters. But it’s not a rational way for a great power to conduct foreign polic
  • What has happened in Guatemala to produce such a growing mass of asylum seekers? The truth appears to be some food insecurity after a failed harvest — but mostly the news that the U.S. border is effectively open, and if you bring your kids and show up, you’re home free
  • The Democrats for their part keep saying that there is no crisis at all, berate the administration for insufficient care or tougher enforcement at ports of entry, and actually attempted to restrict the number of beds assigned for detention in their last negotiation with the president (it didn’t happen). At some point, they’re going to have to grapple with this genuine emergency.
  • But how do we stop this? Congress has to act to change the law that enables this. Asylum, traditionally understood, was once for those fleeing political or ethnic persecution. It wasn’t a catch-all for any economic migrant, who can be coached to say the right words to the right official. It’s a vast loophole in the immigration system — and if it isn’t fixed legislatively soon, the current massive wave will keep building
  • If you think that won’t empower more nativist demagogues and help reelect Trump, you’re dreaming.
  • “among white liberals … 79.2 percent agreed that ‘racial discrimination is the main reason why many black people can’t get ahead these days.’ 18.8 percent agreed that ‘blacks who can’t get ahead in this country are mostly responsible for their own condition. … Among blacks, 59.9 percent identified discrimination as the main deterrent to upward mobility for African-Americans, and 32.0 percent said blacks were responsible for their condition.”
  • These white super-liberals are also, according to a fascinating survey featured in The Atlantic, the most blinkered. Money quote: “The most politically intolerant Americans, according to the analysis, tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves
  • The survey found that the city most intolerant of other people’s views was Boston, specifically around Cambridge
  • This most tolerant town is in a county that voted for Trump by a 20-point margin. Let’s absorb that fact for a while, shall we?
  • the results suggest a damning verdict on American higher education. My alma mater Harvard, a university where free speech, ideological differences, and competing arguments should flourish is, in fact, a nest of smug intolerance. Our elite colleges may be the most “diverse” ever. But they have also become machines for closing students’ minds.
oliviaodon

Waiting for the Bomb to Drop - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...549599

trump war

shared by oliviaodon on 15 Jan 18 - No Cached
  • The decision to move the American embassy to Jerusalem makes a war in Korea more likely. Not because there is any direct connection between the two, nor because it was a bad idea, recognizing as it did the simple fact that the western part of Jerusalem has been Israel’s capital for over 70 years and will most assuredly remain so. The dangerous bit, rather, was when pundits and diplomats wrung their hands and predicted calamity and (far more predictably) nothing happened. The Arab street grumbled, while Cairo, Riyadh, and Abu Dhabi looked the other way, and Donald Trump could be forgiven for thinking that his instincts had been proven entirely correct.
  • As we can see from the irritable id that manifests itself in his tweets, Trump believes that he has been an exceptionally successful president, who deserves credit for the absence of deaths from plane crashes, a soaring stock market, and a tax cut rammed through on a completely partisan basis by a Republican majority that has thirsted for little else for decades.
  • This is serious. The president feels vindicated, smart, and self-confident beyond the outlandish egotism of his campaign days in 2016.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • This is serious first and foremost because the North Korean threat is serious.
  • Any administration faced with these facts, and at this technological moment in the North Korean program, would have weighed carefully the possibility of a preventive war —it would be the prudent strategic thing to do. And then that administration would have walked away from it. A deliberately initiated war still runs the risk of a humanitarian disaster because, as everyone now realizes, Seoul is within range of thousands of North Korean artillery tubes and rocket batteries. Hundreds of thousands of civilians, including American expats and dependents, would perish in the war that could be unleashed. Even assuming some magical technologies that enable the U.S. to disarm North Korea and decapitate its leadership, who is to say that the ensuing war would not have its way even so?
  • The consequences of preventive war—a war deliberately initiated by the United States or launched as a result of provocations by one side or both that then escalates—go far beyond this. South Korea, within the memory of people now living, has gone from being poorer than most African countries in 1950 to becoming a first-world technological and economic powerhouse.
  • What the president’s advisers may not fully appreciate are the political perils of taking such a hazardous course. The fact is that a majority of the American people seem to believe that many words coming out of the president’s mouth are lies.
  • There are sounds, for those who can hear them, of the preliminary and muffled drumbeats of war. The Chinese are reported to be preparing refugee camps along the North Korean border. Resources are being shifted to observe and analyze the North Korean military. Mundane logistical processes of moving, stockpiling, and updating crucial items and preparing military personnel are under way. Only the biggest indicator—the evacuation of American dependents from South Korea—has yet to flash red, but, in the interest of surprise, that may not happen.
ecfruchtman

British woman fatally stabbed by Palestinian in Jerusalem, police say - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by ecfruchtman on 20 Apr 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 20 Apr 17
     
    Paramedics rushed Hannah Bladon, 20, to the hospital, police said, but she died shortly after she arrived there. In a statement Saturday by the UK Foreign Office, her relatives said they were "devastated by this senseless and tragic attack." "Hannah was the most caring, sensitive and compassionate daughter you could ever wish for," her family said.
mattrenz16

As Israelis Await Netanyahu's Fate, Palestinians Seize a Moment of Unity - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ians-netanyahu-government.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Jun 21 - No Cached
  • JERUSALEM — When Israelis opened their newspapers and news websites on Tuesday, they encountered a barrage of reports and commentary about the possible downfall of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the country’s longest-serving leader.
  • Mr. Netanyahu’s political future hung in the balance on Tuesday night, as opposition leaders struggled to agree on a fragile coalition government that would finally remove him from office for the first time in 12 years. The deadlock set the stage for a dramatic last day of negotiations, which the opposition must conclude by Wednesday at midnight or risk sending the country to another round of early elections.
  • During his current 12-year term, the Israeli-Palestinian peace process fizzled, as both Israeli and Palestinian leaderships accused each other of obstructing the process, and Mr. Netanyahu expressed increasing ambivalence about the possibility of a sovereign Palestinian state.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • But to many Palestinians, his likely replacement as prime minister, Naftali Bennett, would be no improvement. Mr. Bennett is Mr. Netanyahu’s former chief of staff, and a former settler leader who outright rejects Palestinian statehood.
  • Yet alongside last month’s deadly 11-day war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, and the worst bout of intercommunal Arab-Jewish violence to have convulsed Israel in decades, these disparate parts suddenly came together in a seemingly leaderless eruption of shared identity and purpose.
  • Among the Arab minority in Israel, many of whom define themselves as Palestinian citizens of Israel, the prospect of a new government has divided opinion. While the government would be led by Mr. Bennett, and packed with lawmakers who oppose a Palestinian state, some hoped the presence of three centrist and leftist parties in the coalition, coupled with the likely tacit support of Raam, an Arab Islamist party, might moderate Mr. Bennett’s approach.
  • The cabinet is expected to include at least one Arab, Esawi Frej, of the left-wing Meretz party. Raam’s leader, Mansour Abbas, has said he will support the new government only if it grants more resources and attention to the Arab minority. And the likely appointment of a center-left minister to oversee the police force might encourage officers to take a more restrained approach to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, where clashes between the police and protesters played a major role in the buildup to the recent war in Gaza.
  • Mr. Trump’s administration helped broker a series of historic normalization agreements between Israel and the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Sudan and Morocco, which bypassed the Palestinians and ruptured decades of professed Arab unity around the Palestinian cause.
  • The Palestinians have been aided by the international awakening and momentum of movements like Black Lives Matter, speaking the language of rights and historical justice, according to experts.
  • In a measure of the popular excitement about what would have been the first ballot in the occupied territories since 2006, more than 93 percent of eligible Palestinians had registered to vote, and 36 parties with about 1,400 candidates planned to compete for 132 seats in the Palestinian assembly. Nearly 40 percent of the candidates were 40 or younger, according to the Palestinian Central Elections Commission.
  • Some analysts say they doubt that this recent flash of Palestinian unity will have any immediate, profound impact on the Palestinian reality. But others argue that after years of stagnation, the Palestinian cause is back with a new sense of energy, connectivity, solidarity and activism.
  • The events of the last few weeks were “like an earthquake,” said Hanan Ashrawi, a seasoned Palestinian leader and former senior official. “We are part of the global conversation on rights, justice, freedom, and Israel cannot close it down or censor it.”
mattrenz16

How South Africa is viewing Trump vs. Biden (opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by mattrenz16 on 02 Nov 20 - No Cached
  • South Africans are painfully aware that their country generally does not loom large, if at all, in the awareness of most Americans, nor in the policies of their government.
  • But that doesn't mean they're not waiting with keen interest to see the outcome of Tuesday's race between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
  • US involvement in South Africa peaked during the Cold War.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • During the apartheid years, the White minority governments aligned themselves with the Western nations and leveraged SA's militarily strategic position to maximize British and US support.
  • The government's views tend to be at odds with those of President Donald Trump's administration over Zimbabwe, Venezuela, Iran, the recognition of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the seemingly intractable issue of Palestinian statehood, of which Ramaphosa's government is a vocal supporter.
  • There was anger when he tagged all of Africa, along with Haiti, as "shithole" countries, causing an affronted South African administration to summon the US chargé d'affaires for a dressing down.
  • This support, articulated by President Ronald Reagan as "constructive engagement," alienated the oppressed Black majority and left a lingering bad taste with many in Nelson Mandela's African National Congress, which has been the ruling party since South Africa's first democratic election in 1994.
  • President Cyril Ramaphosa's government seized on the #BlackLivesMatter protests to lament George Floyd's "regrettable death" and condescendingly observed that the incident "[presented] the USA with an opportunity to address fundamental issues of human rights."
  • Privately, it has a preference for Biden, with a government analyst telling me that South Africa believes the Democratic candidate would return to the multilateralism that Trump has scorned and is expected to be less protectionist and isolationist when it comes to China.
  • South Africa is dependent on a strong economic relationship with the US. There are around 600 US firms here, with many making SA their springboard to the rest of Africa.
  • The US is South Africa's third-biggest export destination and the country benefits from the Generalized System of Preferences trade program and the country hopes to continue to benefit from the US African Growth and Opportunity Act, currently under review.
  • Trump's stance on Israel has also drawn strong but quiet support from some sectors of South Africa's shrinking Jewish community, which numbers barely more than 50,000, equivalent to only 0.1% of the country's population of 58 million.
jaxredd10

Crusades: Definition, Religious Wars & Facts - HISTORY - 0 views

www.history.com/...crusades

shared by jaxredd10 on 25 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • The Crusades were a series of religious wars between Christians and Muslims started primarily to secure control of holy sites considered sacred by both groups.
  • Byzantium had lost considerable territory to the invading Seljuk Turks
  • In November 1095, at the Council of Clermont in southern France, the Pope called on Western Christians to take up arms to aid the Byzantines and recapture the Holy Land from Muslim control. This marked the beginning of the Crusades.
  • ...16 more annotations...
  • A less organized band of knights and commoners known as the “People’s Crusade” set off before the others under the command of a popular preacher known as Peter the Hermit.
  • Encamping before Jerusalem in June 1099, the Christians forced the besieged city’s governor to surrender by mid-July.
  • Muslim forces began gaining ground in their own holy war (or jihad) against the Christians, whom they called “Franks.”
  • News of Edessa’s fall stunned Europe and caused Christian authorities in the West to call for another Crusade
  • In September 1191, Richard’s forces defeated those of Saladin in the battle of Arsuf, which would be the only true battle of the Third Crusade.
  • In response, the Crusaders declared war on Constantinople, and the Fourth Crusade ended with the devastating Fall of Constantinople, marked by a bloody conquest, looting and near-destruction of the magnificent Byzantine capital later that year.
  • Throughout the remainder of the 13th century, a variety of Crusades aimed not so much to topple Muslim forces in the Holy Land but to combat any and all of those seen as enemies of the Christian faith.
  • A so-called Children’s Crusade took place in 1212 when thousands of young children vowed to march to Jerusalem
  • From 1248 to 1254, Louis IX of France organized a crusade against Egypt. This battle, known as the Seventh Crusade, was a failure for Louis.
  • a new dynasty, known as the Mamluks, descended from former slaves of the Islamic Empire, took power in Egypt
  • In 1291, one of the only remaining Crusader cities, Acre, fell to the Muslim Mamluks.
  • While the Crusades ultimately resulted in defeat for Europeans and a Muslim victory, many argue that they successfully extended the reach of Christianity and Western civilization.
  • Trade and transportation also improved throughout Europe as a result of the Crusades.
  • After the Crusades, there was a heightened interest in travel and learning throughout Europe, which some historians believe may have paved the way for the Renaissance.
  • the Crusaders were regarded as immoral, bloody and savage.
  • Even today, some Muslims derisively refer to the West’s involvement in the Middle East as a “crusade.”
Javier E

As World's Gaze Shifts to Gaza, Israel's Psyche Remains Defined by Oct. 7 Attack - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...l-netanyahu-politics-mood.html

israel psyche palestine attitudes culture politics

shared by Javier E on 26 Dec 23 - No Cached
  • When Israel was founded in 1948, the defining goal was to provide a sanctuary for Jews, after 2,000 years of statelessness and persecution. On Oct. 7, that same state proved unable to prevent the worst day of violence against Jews since the Holocaust.
  • “At that moment, our Israeli identity felt so crushed. It felt like 75 years of sovereignty, of Israeliness, had — in a snap — disappeared,” said Dorit Rabinyan, an Israeli novelist.“We used to be Israelis,” she added. “Now we are Jewish.”
  • For now, the assault has also unified Israeli society to a degree that felt inconceivable on Oct. 6, when Israelis were deeply divided by Mr. Netanyahu’s efforts to reduce the power of the courts; by a dispute about the role of religion in public life; and by Mr. Netanyahu’s own political future.
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  • Nearly 30 percent of the ultra-Orthodox public now supports the idea of military service, twenty points higher than before the war,
  • “Something fundamental has changed here, and we don’t know what it is yet,” said Yossi Klein Halevi, an author and fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute, a research group in Jerusalem. “What we do know is that this is kind of a last chance for this country.”
  • Roughly a third of voters for Mr. Netanyahu’s right-wing party, Likud, have abandoned the party since Oct. 7, according to every national poll since the attack.
  • Perhaps surprisingly, 70 percent of Arab Israelis now say they feel part of the state of Israel, according to a November poll by the Israel Democracy Institute, a Jerusalem-based research group. That is 22 points higher than in June and the highest proportion since the group began polling on the question two decades ago.
  • But for others, the scale of the Oct. 7 atrocities has left them struggling to even empathize with Gazans, let alone retain hope in a peaceful solution to the conflict.In 2018, Mr. Klein Halevi, the author, wrote a book addressed to an imagined Palestinian, “Letters to My Palestinian Neighbor,” in which he attempted to set out a vision for a shared future between Arabs and Jews in the Middle East.Since Oct. 7, Mr. Halevi said, he has found it hard to even consider what such a future looks like. An observant Jew, he still prays for Palestinians, but more from duty than empathy, he said.“I spent years explaining the Israeli narrative and absorbing the Palestinian narrative — and I tried to find a space where both could live together,” Mr. Klein Halevi said.“I don’t have that language right now,” he said. “It’s emotionally unavailable to me.”
Javier E

Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize in Germany today | Samantha Hill | The Guardian - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...masha-gessen-israel-gaza-essay

Arendt prize anti-Semitism irony law

shared by Javier E on 07 Apr 24 - No Cached
  • The Foundation, which is affiliated with the German Green party, founded the prize not to honor Arendt but to “honor individuals who identify critical and unseen aspects of current political events and who are not afraid to enter the public realm by representing their opinion in controversial political discussions”, withdrew its support, causing the city of Bremen to withdraw its support, leading to an initial cancellation
  • The Foundation said Gessen’s comparison was “unacceptable”, but has since backtracked and has now said that they stand behind the award.
  • The comparison is not a one-to-one argument, but rather a barometer for urging individuals – and countries – to think about their support for Israe
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • The comparison from Gessen’s essay, which caused such uproar, closely echoes a passage from Arendt’s correspondence written from Jerusalem in 1955 to her husband Heinrich Blücher, which is far more damning:
  • “The galut-and-ghetto mentality is in full bloom. And the idiocy is right in front of everyone’s eyes: Here in Jerusalem I can barely go for a walk, because I might turn the wrong corner and find myself ‘abroad’, ie, in Arab territory. Essentially it’s the same everywhere. On top of that, they treat the Arabs, those still here, in a way that in itself would be enough to rally the whole world against Israel.”
  • Within the culture of German memory politics the Holocaust is treated as singular; it is understood as a historical exception
  • his exception-to-history mentality has the effect of placing the Holocaust outside of history altogether, which allows the German government to espo
  • By making the comparison between a Nazi-occupied ghetto and Gaza before 7 October, Gessen is making a political argument meant to invoke historical memory and draw attention to concepts like genocide, crimes against humanity and “never again”, which emerged out of the second world war.
  • For Arendt, the political emancipation of the bourgeoisie was the cornerstone of the modern nation-state, in which political laws were governed by the private interests of businessmen who had found it necessary to take over the apparatus of the state in order to deploy the military in their colonial ventures
  • In exile in Paris from 1933 until she was interned in 1940, she worked to help Jewish youth escape to Palestine and even went there in 1935 with Youth Aliyah.
  • he said she only wanted to do Jewish work to help the Jewish people, because her mother had taught her that when one is attacked as a Jew one must fight back as a Jew
  • She was attacked at the conference for calling for a rejection of Ben-Gurion’s vision
  • in 1948, she joined Albert Einstein and Sidney Hook among others in signing a letter published in the New York Times to protest against Menachem Begin’s visit to America, comparing his “Freedom” party “to the organization, methods, political philosophy and social appeal to the Nazi and Fascist Parties”.
  • Hannah Arendt would not qualify for the Hannah Arendt prize. She would be cancelled in Germany today for her political position on Israel and opinions about contemporary Zionism, which she remained critical of from 1942 until her death in 1975
  • while antisemitism as an ideology was central to the organization of the masses, it was not the only political factor at play in her account.
  • Arendt was critical of the nation-state of Israel from its founding, in part because she was worried that the state would exhibit the worst tendencies of the European nation-state
  • It was this co-option of the nation, and transformation of the nation into a nation-state by private economic interests that lay at the heart of her understanding. And what she emphasized – and was criticized for – was the argument that antisemitism was being used politically by the nation-state in order to further its political and economic interests.
  • Of course Eichmann had been antisemitic, she argued, but his hatred of the Jewish people was not his primary motivation. Instead, she argued it was his commonplace hubris that made him want to ascend the ranks of the Third Reich
  • She argued that this was the banality of evil, and defined the banality of evil as the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another
  • All of which is to say, it is necessary that we as human beings be able to imagine the world from the perspective of another to prevent evil from happening, and to stand up to evil when we are confronted with it
  • right now Germany’s resolution forbids it
  • This moral obligation to compare means two things: that Germany is not allowed to continue to treat the Jewish people or Jewish history as an exception to the rule in order to justify their political support of Israel; and that all people have a right to exist freely everywhere, regardless of where they appeared in the world by chance of birth
  • The question she wrote in her notebook as she thought about how Germany should remember the war was this: “Is there a way of thinking that is not tyrannical?”
  • What Arendt meant by banality, arguing that it was the inability to imagine the world from the perspective of another, was that people had gone along with the radical shift in moral norms overnight that transformed “Thou shalt not kill” into “Thou shalt kill”, without questioning
  • Moral complexity is necessary in the face of evil
  • Perhaps the greatest irony of reality today is that the rhetoric of Germany’s “antiantisemitism” is being used to justify the mass slaughter of Palestinian people, while having the effect of actually increasing antisemitism and making Jewish people less safe everywhere.
Javier E

What Mideast Crisis? Israelis Have Moved On - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...is-israelis-have-moved-on.html

israel palestine peace politics

shared by Javier E on 26 May 13 - No Cached
  • Few even talk about the Palestinians or the Arab world on their borders, despite the tumult and the renewed peace efforts by Secretary of State John Kerry, who has been visiting the region in recent days. Instead of focusing on what has long been seen as their central challenge — how to share this land with another nation — Israelis are largely ignoring it, insisting that the problem is both insoluble for now and less significant than the world thinks. We cannot fix it, many say, but we can manage it.
  • Jewish Israelis seem in some ways happier and more united than in the past, as if choosing not to solve their most difficult challenge has opened up a space for shalom bayit — peace at home. Yes, all those internal tensions still exist, but the shared belief that there is no solution to their biggest problem has forged an odd kind of solidarity.
  • Israel has never been richer, safer, more culturally productive or more dynamic. Terrorism is on the wane. Yet the occupation grinds on next door with little attention to its consequences. Moreover, as the power balance has shifted from the European elite, Israel has never felt more Middle Eastern in its popular culture, music and public displays of religion. Yet it is increasingly cut off from its region, which despises it perhaps more than ever.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • alarm over the failure to address the Palestinian problem has grown in a surprising place — among some of the former princes of the Zionist right wing.
  • “It is a sword of Damocles hanging over our heads,” he said. “We are living on illusions. We must do everything we can on the ground to increase the separation between us and the Palestinians so that the idea of one state will go away. But we are doing nothing.”
  • Mr. Lapid said Israel should not change its settlement policy to lure the Palestinians to negotiations, nor should any part of Jerusalem become the capital of the Palestinian state he says he longs for. He has not reached out to any Palestinian politicians nor spoken publicly on the issue. As finance minister, he is focused on closing the government’s deficit.
  • most Israelis considered the peace process irrelevant because they believed that the Palestinians had no interest in a deal, especially in the current Middle Eastern context of rising Islamism. “Debating the peace process to most Israelis is the equivalent of debating the color of the shirt you will wear when landing on Mars,”
  • An afternoon in Ramallah revealed no stronger sense of urgency among Palestinians. But, unlike Israeli Jews, they are increasingly depressed and despondent over their quandary and dysfunctional leadership.
  • All of which suggests that, as has long been argued, there can be no Israeli-Palestinian peace deal so long as outsiders want it more than the parties themselves. Some have likened Israel to the deck of the Titanic. That may not be right, but you can’t help wondering about that next iceberg.
Javier E

David Simon | Barack Obama And The Death Of Normal - 0 views

davidsimon.com/evitabilities-and-barack-obama

us hierarchy normal coalition plurality conservative demographics

shared by Javier E on 09 Nov 12 - No Cached
  • America is different now, more so with every election cycle. Ronald Reagan won his mandate in an America in which 89 percent of the voters were white. That number is down to 72 percent and falling. Fifty thousand new Latino citizens achieve the voting age every month. America will soon belong to the men and women — white and black and Latino and Asian, Christian and Jew and Muslim and atheist, gay and straight — who can comfortably walk into a room and accept with real comfort the sensation that they are in a world of certain difference, that there are no real majorities, only pluralities and coalitions. The America in which it was otherwise is dying, thank god, and those who relied on entitlement and division to command power will either be obliged to accept the changes, or retreat to the gated communities from which they wish to wax nostalgic and brood on political irrelevance.
  • Eighty years ago, the Democratic party became a national utilitarian enterprise, molding the immigrant waves of Irish and Italian and Jew into a voting bloc that stunned the political opposition and transformed American society, creating the world’s greatest economic engine in the form of a consumer class with vast discretionary income. The New Deal asserted for American progress — shaping and influencing administrations both Democratic and Republican — for three decades before running aground on the shoals of the civil rights movement, resulting racial fears and resentments, and, of course, the Southern strategy of political cynics
  • right now, the conservative movement in America is fleeing from dramatic change that is certain and immutable. A man of color is president for the second time, and this happened despite a struggling economic climate and a national spirit of general discontent. He has been returned to office over the specific objections of the mass of white men. He has instead been re-elected by women, by people of color, by homosexuals, by people of varying religions or no religion whatsoever. Behold the New Jerusalem. Not that there’s anything wrong with being a white man, of course. There’s nothing wrong with being anything. That’s the point.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • This election marks a moment in which the racial and social hierarchy of America is upended forever. No longer will it mean more politically to be a white male than to be anything else. Evolve, or don’t. Swallow your resentments, or don’t. But the votes are going to be counted, more of them with each election. Arizona will soon be in play. And in a few cycles, even Texas. And those wishing to hold national office in these United States will find it increasingly useless to argue for normal, to attempt to play one minority against each other, to turn pluralities against the feared “other” of gays, or blacks, or immigrants, or, incredibly in this election cycle, our very wives and lovers and daughters, fellow citizens who demand to control their own bodies.
  • now, normal isn’t white or straight or Christian. There is no normal. That word, too, means less with every moment. And those who continue to argue for such retrograde notions as a political reality will become less germane and more ridiculous with every passing year.
fischerry

The Crusades - 0 views

history-world.org/crusades.htm

shared by fischerry on 30 Oct 16 - Cached
  • The word "crusade" literally means "going to the Cross." Hence the idea at the time was to urge Christian warriors to go to Palestine and free Jerusalem and other holy places from Muslim domination.
  • fischerry on 30 Oct 16
     
    Talks about the History of the crusades. 
alexdeltufo

The Israeli general who compared the Jewish State to Nazi-era Germany - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...wish-state-to-nazi-era-germany

shared by alexdeltufo on 08 May 16 - No Cached
  • JERUSALEM — On the eve of Holocaust Remembrance Day last week, a top Israeli general gave a speech saying he saw “revolting trends” in today’s Israel that he compared to Nazi-era Germany and Europe in the 1930s.
  • His speech comes amid revelations that an Israeli soldier shot and killed a wounded Palestinian attacker in the head,
  • The general’s speech may have sparked reflection in some sectors, but mostly it inspired criticism — and calls for his head.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • Israel’s culture and sports minister, Miri Regev, said Golan should resign. "It cannot be that the deputy chief of staff, a
  • If there is one thing that frightens me about the memory of the Holocaust, it is identifying the revolting trends that occurred in Europe as a whole, and in Germany in particular, some 70, 80 and 90 years ago, and finding evidence of those trends here, among us, in 2016.
  • Israel and parts of the Jewish world, especially on such a sensitive day, and that he was fully aware that within the space of a few hours he would become public enemy no. 1 for Israeli right wingers and self-styled Jewish patriots abroad.
  • This is not the first time in recent months that Israeli military brass have found themselves criticized by Israel's hard right.
  • It is probably worth noting that the day after Golan gave his speech, he issued a statement in which he walked back his remarks, saying he had not meant to compare Israel to Nazi Germany, nor to criticize the current leadership, nor the Israel Defense Forces,
proudsa

Five Findings From the State Department Report on Terrorism - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...485387

shared by proudsa on 03 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • ongressionally mandated analytical and statistical review of global terroris
  • m. It is important to understand how the U.S. government defines this subjective phenomenon:
    • proudsa
      proudsa on 03 Jun 16
       
      start with the definition
  • overall decrease in global terrorism
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • n both the 2014 and 2015 reports, just over half of all attacks took place in five countries
  • The Taliban replaced the self-proclaimed Islamic State as the number-one global perpetrator for terrorism attacks, with 1,093, which represents an alarming increase of 69 percent since 2013.
  • The biggest surprise was the removal of the Somali group al-Shabaab from the top-five list of perpetrators, that outfit having been responsible for the third-most attacks in 2014
  • The most consequential and troubling revelation is the reach and estimated size of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP). According to the State Department, “AQAP has since consolidated its control over Al Mukalla and has expanded its reach through large portions of Yemen’s south,
  • owever, this is still fewer than the average number that have tragically been killed each year since 9/11, 27. The location of international attacks on U.S. citizens increased from six countries to 11, with the new countries being Bangladesh, France, Jordan, Jerusalem, Libya, and Mali.
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