McClatchy’s perceptive Jerusalem correspondent Dion Nissenbaum has a great post on his blog today titled “Bush/Olmert: A meeting of lame ducks.” (Though he does note the term was actually coined by Yedioth Aharonoth.)
Later in the post, Dion writes:
- Once Bush leaves, Israeli leaders are expected to step up their [military] operations in Gaza… The military leadership once opposed a ground operation as a potential tar pit. Now, according to Maariv, they see it as inevitable.
I have one word for them. Not just a tar pit, but a sinkhole. And a sinkhole that will suck in not just Israel’s military power but also such shreds as remain of Washington’s once near-hegemonic position of influence within the Middle East.
Can anyone imagine that if, just a short time after a “triumphalist”, extremely pro-Israeli GWB visit to Israel, Israel launches a big, very damaging military attack against Gaza, that wouldn’t have a major impact on the US’s standing around the region?
Meanwhile, it certainly seems that the three-months-long negotiations over a Gaza-Israel ceasefire (tahdiyeh), that Olmert has been conducting with Hamas, with Egypt’s mediation, are currently at a dead-end after the failure of Egypt’s security boss, Omar Suleiman, to nail them down last week.
It looks as though Hamas is preparing some interesting options, too. In this post on the Palestine Info Center website yesterday they called on their Gaza followers to join a march to the Erez checkpoint tomorrow.
I was intrigued that in the short, videotaped “welcome address” that Israeli Prez (and 1996 war-launcher) Shimon Peres had on the website of the grandiose “Facing Tomorrow” conference that Prez. Bush will be addressing today, Peres talked glowingly about “a frontierless world, a world without frontiers…” (The site is here. I’m sure you can find that welcome address if you dig around a little.)
I thought it was pretty strange for Peres to talk that way, given that the hall the conference is being held in is less than three miles from some of the tallest and most impenetrably concrete portions of the Separation Barrier that Israel has put up between itself and the Palestinian communities of the West Bank. But maybe tomorrow we can expect Peres to leap out of the conference hall and go to engage in a Berlin-style orgy of wall-smashing in order to build the “frontierless” world he is forecasting?
The only other explanation for his words is that, like his guest George W. Bush, he inhabits some kind of strange, alternative universe in which the mere “facts on the ground” such as the rest of the world sees and deals with, have no substance and no meaning? And, like Bush, he confidently expects the rest of us to agree with him that “the emperor has lovely clothes!”
Meanwhile, in other Jerusalem-related news, Akiva Eldar tells us that
- The Jerusalem municipality has begun the process of approving a plan for a new [Jews-only] housing complex, including a synagogue, in the heart of the Arab neighborhood of Silwan south of the Old City.
And Dion Nissenbaum tells us that:
- Hours before Bush arrived, Israel’s Shas party, a crucial coalition partner, said that Olmert would approve hundreds of new homes in the West Bank soon after Bush heads home.
The boast was denied by Israel’s Housing Ministry, but… This time around, according to Israel’s Maariv newspaper, Bush has given Olmert the OK for the construction.
So it looks as though no-one in either the present Israeli or US administrations really gives a hoot about about the “two-state solution”, the political viability of the Abbas-Fayyad leadership, or anything else they sometimes claim to care about regarding the Palestinian issue?
“…a sinkhole that will suck in not just Israel’s military power but also such shreds as remain of Washington’s once near-hegemonic position of influence within the Middle East.”
Every cloud has a silver lining.
HC, first, if I might indulge myself-
Why was the Making of Modern Lebanon not your doctoral dissertation? Certainly it could have been.
Watching all the events today, including the appalling missile attack on a mall in Ashkelon, which should and must be condemned by people who care about a peace process, and ending human suffering-what is a way forward?
The Middle East Council of Churches does very good work at the legislative level, as well as the American Friends Service Committee/FCNL-but what about policy actions? H, is there a 5/6 point summary of useful actions to climb out of this atrocious cycle of violence? All life must be valued-
KDJ
Just an FYI, do folks know about the work of
Jewish Voices for Peace?
http://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/
KDJ
Dear Kevin, I’ve been sitting and watching these onrolling tragedies in the ME for 35 years now. In those years, more than a million were killed in Iran (and hundreds of thousands in Iraq) during a Saddam-launched war that was aided and abetted by the US; hundreds of thousands of Iraqi children died because of US-UK (and UN-rubber-stamped) collective punishment of the 1990s; hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians have been killed as a result of the US decision gratuitously to invade Iraq; some scores of thousands of Arab citizens have been killed by a heavily US-backed Israel; and in the low thousands of Israelis have been killed by various Arab parties.
Yes, I do mourn each life lost or blighted by violence, but frankly 14 people wounded (and none, thank God, killed)in one incident is something that would not even register on the radar in Iraq or Gaza on most days.
You can call all these cycles of violence, and at one important level they have that form. But we should also be aware that at the human level they are highly asymmetrical; and because of the asymmetry in lethal capabilities the US-backed side always inflicts a whole lot more human suffering than it undergoes. For example, check the Israeli casualty figures against those suffered by the Palestinians, as recorded by B’tselem or PCHR.
Let’s value each human life equally?
As for a doctoral thesis– what for? I am not one who thinks the p-h-d letters are coterminous with human wisdom. I did at one stage do a little work towards getting a graduate degree in philosophical ethics but found the department I was at was ways too scholastic to have any relevance to my concerns. Hence the return to ink-stained scribedom.
By the way, my two-point policy prescription to reduce the suffering is that lovers of peace, justice, and human equality living inside and outside the US should work together to (1) rein in the still little-bridled power of the US, and (2) reinstate and bring to bear throughout the whole Middle East the UN’s once-strong norms of human equality, nonviolent conflict resolution, and support for the sovereign self-governance of peoples. It really is not so very difficult. All it takes is clarity, commitment– and a good helping of courage, I suppose. But there are 6 billion of you people living outside the US. Maybe y’all could throw a little more help to those of us who are struggling from inside the belly of the imperial beast?
Dear Helena:
THANK YOU for this reply-for your courage and honesty-I genuinely respect you and have long-admired your books. I guess a PhD-teaching, but of course, you do this each day. Helena, I love the Making of Modern Lebanon-such an important book. I have not read Re-Engage, but why not send a copy to Senators Leahy and Feingold, both exemplary leaders who along with Senator Reed, strongly opposed the US invasion of Iraq?
I wish you the very best, and THANK YOU for this important space.
A PS, to Ms. Cobban:
It would be my honor to have a glass of Lebanese wine in Beirut with you, one day.
A PS, to Ms. Cobban:
It would be my honor to have a glass of Lebanese wine in Beirut with you, one day-should I be so fortunate!
KDJ
There’s at least one elephant in the peace-making room: the pernicious effect of organized religion – obscurantist, undemocratic, divisive.
I defend the right to believe in any of the numerous deities whose adherents can’t agree on who’s number one. But once we open the door to irrationality, it’s hard to complain about who walks through, and we surrender a crucial tool – logic – for objecting to their behavior. The scale of today’s weaponry means that all of us are dragged into their holy wars.
Religion should be treated like alcohol, gambling, and fatty foods – permitted but not encouraged.
Right or wrong…justified or not…I can’t imagine Israel – or any nation for that matter – not responding to a rocket attack on a major city like Ashkelon. True, only 11 people were injured, none fatally, but that was this time.
Right or wrong…justified or not…I can’t imagine Israel – or any nation for that matter –
Yes it’s Any Nation to defending itself from aggression by invader, as we see and wee reads here and in most of news and media Iraqis defending their country are terrorists/ insurgences…
Its a matter of self convenience of using the expression for some nation and war worriers, isn’t Truesdell?
Palestinians are a nation their land taken or theft by people without land.
BTW, now I am in a short trip in Gulf States back within ten days.
Indeed this is not my blog, but since we are discussing this issue-existentially, I cannot support the deliberate attack on civilians-not to mention, as Malcom Smart of AI states, the catastrophe such violence reaps-of course, I wish the people of Gaza would turn that beautiful territory into a thriving place on the Med-and I wish for Israel to allow it to do so-yet I know it is just not that simple-for me it comes back to armed groups and impunity-I really support JStreet’s efforts-all efforts to bring people together, and to encourage our legislators to do so-If only all Human Rights Organizations-could have the floor-I guess, for me, it is an existential struggle-
Very tragic.
“Right or wrong…justified or not…I can’t imagine Israel – or any nation for that matter – not responding to a rocket attack on a major city like Ashkelon.”
Right or wrong…justified or not…I can’t imagine Palestinians – or any group of human beings for that matter – not responding to disposession, bombings, assassinations, house demolitions, shootings, “incursions”, kidnappings, indefinite detentions, torture, deliberate deprivation of the basic necessities of modern life, etc., etc., etc. inflicted on them daily in their cities and towns.
it looks as though no-one in either the present Israeli or US administrations really gives a hoot about about the “two-state solution”,
Indeed Helena it’s a promise for Promised Land people done by older
Dear Lord Rothschild,
I have much pleasure in conveying to you, on behalf of His Majesty’s Government, the following
declaration of sympathy with Jewish Zionist aspirations which has been submitted to and approved by the Cabinet
“His Majesty’s Government view with favour the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people and will use their best endeavours to facilitate the achievement of this object. It being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country.”
I should be grateful if you would bring this declaration to the knowledge of Zionist Federation.
Balfour, November 2nd 1917