Category: Israel 2003-08

Ehud Olmert continued his election campaign today by (1) traveling to the West Bank settlement of Ariel and telling its residents they would be included inside the news borders he plans to draw for Israel, and (2) sending the IOF’s tanks and bulldozers in aganst the PA prison in Jericho holding PFLP leader Ahmed Saadat.
I suppose that on the scale of aggressive actions taken by Israeli PMs during election campaigns– oh ain’t Israeli “democracy” wonderful!– this was not as bad as Shimon Peres’s infamous 1996 invasion of South Lebanon.
On this occasion, the British seem clearly to have connived in the Israeli action. Since 2002, the British had been keeping three of their own monitors (and intermittently, supervising monitors from other countries, too) in the Jericho Prison… That was part of an international deal whereby Ahmed Saadat, who was wanted by the Israelis for his role in the killing of Tourism Minister Rahavam Ze’evi but had taken refuge with Arafat in the Muqata during the long siege of spring 2002, was allowed to leave the Muqata. A PA security court gave Saadat and some colleagues a quick trial for the killing of Ze’evi, and sentenced him to a lengthy prison sentence, which was served in Jericho with the British monitors specially deployed there to check on the adequacy of his confinement…
As this well-written piece by the Guardian’s Chris McGreal spells out, the local Israeli commander was just waiting this morning for the British monitors to leave before they stormed the prison compound. How amazing! Do the Brits expect anyone to believe the story that they had not colluded with the Israelis at all in this? After all, Col. Ronnie Belkin, interviewed by McGreal there, would most certainly not have had his assault force sitting there around the pirson for many days just “on the off-chance” that the British monitors might all take it into their heads to leave the site together at some point…
Of course, if the British had stayed there, it is very unlikely that the Israelis would have dared storm the prison by force.
I believe that two Palestinians were killed in the assault. BBC t.v. had some very strong images of IOF bulldozers smashing into the prison building while, presumably, there were still people inside. And of course there are also the images of Saadat and his collagues being led away from the prison by the Israeli soldiers, dazed, after holding out there for some ten hours– and also of a big group of prisoners (or prison guards?) who were forced to strip down to their underpants and stand around in public in them, at the orders of the IOF assault force.
Britain is of course represented in the Quartet through its membership in both the EU and the UN. Given Britain’s defiant dereliction of its contracted duty to the PA under the 2002 agreement, PA President Mahmoud Abbas is quite right to have protested very strongly. But actually, the PA is to a large extent the dependent ward of the international community. So why should any powerful member of the international community, like Britain, feel it needs to listen to Abbas, anyway?
In the absence of their quasi-state authority having any power to protect even its own institutions from the assault of the occupying forces and the perfidy of London, angry Palestinians later smashed up various British installations, and kidnaped a number of westerners in the occupied territories. Not at all a constructive way to make their grievances known, I realise. But in the Palestinians’ present state of almost complete powerlessness, I guess it was what they felt they had left to them.

Israeli researcher Gershom Gorenberg has an important new book coming out about the first decade of Israel’s pursuit of its settlement policy in the occupied territories, 1967-77. This recent piece in HaAretz tells us some of the important things in the book, which is titled “The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977.”
The HaAretz piece quotes Gorenberg as saying, “The title means that the Labor movement leaders had no organized plan to keep the territories, but even without a plan, they each made major decisions that when taken in aggregate, accidentally created the Israeli empire in the territories.”
The HaAretz piece indicates the degree to which the US administrations of those years underestimated the seriousness and intent of the Israeli settlement project.
In an article of his ownin Friday’s New York Times, Gorenberg focuses on one particular aspect of the early years of the settlement venture: the degree to which the Israeli governments of those years understood that the settlements were a violation of international law, but proceeded with building them anyway.
He writes:

In early September 1967, Prime Minister Levi Eshkol was considering granting the first approval for settlements in the West Bank and Golan Heights, conquered three months earlier in the Six-Day War. An Arab summit meeting in Khartoum had rejected peacemaking. The prime minister believed that the Golan and the strip of land along the Jordan River would make Israel more defensible. He also wanted to re-establish the kibbutz of Kfar Etzion near Bethlehem, which had been lost in Israel’s 1948 war of independence.
The legal counsel of the Foreign Ministry, Theodor Meron, was asked whether international law allowed settlement in the newly conquered land. In a memo marked “Top Secret,” Mr. Meron wrote unequivocally, “My conclusion is that civilian settlement in the administered territories contravenes the explicit provisions of the Fourth Geneva Convention.”
In the detailed opinion that accompanied that note, Mr. Meron explained that the Convention — to which Israel was a signatory — forbade an occupying power from moving part of its population to occupied territory. The Golan, taken from Syria, was “undoubtedly ‘occupied territory,’ ” he wrote.
Mr. Meron took note of Israel’s diplomatic argument that the West Bank was not “normal” occupied territory, because the land’s status was uncertain. The prewar border with Jordan had been a mere armistice line, and Jordan had annexed the West Bank unilaterally.
But he rejected that argument for two reasons. The first was diplomatic: the international community would not accept it and would regard settlement as showing “intent to annex the West Bank to Israel.” The second was legal, he wrote: “In truth, certain Israeli actions are inconsistent with the claim that the West Bank is not occupied territory.” For instance, he noted, a military decree issued on the third day of the war in June said that military courts must apply the Geneva Conventions in the West Bank.
There is a subtext here. In treating the West Bank as occupied, Israel may simply have been recognizing legal reality. But doing so had practical import: if the land was occupied, the Arabs who lived there did not have to be integrated into the Israeli polity — in contrast to Arabs within Israel, who were citizens.

This is very interesting. I guess I never knew that Theodor Meron– a Holocaust survivor who went on to become a professor at New York University law school, then the president of the International Criminal Tibunal for Yugoslavia– had been the legal counsel to the Israeli Foreign Ministry in that critical period.
Gorenberg writes:

Today a quarter-million Israelis live in the West Bank. Legal arguments cannot undo 38 years of settlement-building.

Well, yes and no. But neither can 38 years of Israel’s completely unilateral pursuit of its settlement-building project undo the whole body of international humanitarian law.
I think it’s excellent that Gorenberg has given new life to that judgment that Meron reached 39 years ago. It would of course have been great if Meron, today a very respected international jurist, had spoken out some more about this question throughout the intervening years, to reinforce the crux of what he wrote in that memo. I don’t recall hearing of him ever speaking out about it. I’ve read a number of his books on international humanitarian law, and don’t recall him ever dealing with the question of the status of the occupied territories as occupied territories or the illegality of building civilian settlements therein.
Maybe I should go and ask him about these things the next time I’m in The Hague…

One of the interesting things about being in Israel is to be able to read the paper versions of English-language Ha’Aretz and the Jerusalem Post… However good it is to read content on-line, still, there’s something special about newsprint!
The weekend edition of H’Aretz, which came out yesterday, had a number of really interesting articles:
This well-researched piece by Akiva Eldar, which is worth reading in full, tells us about the failure of the government to live up to its commitment to destroy settlement outposts that were constructed not just– as all Israeli settlements in the occupied territories have been– in clear contravention of international law but also, in contravention of Israel’s own laws about such construction activities.
Eldar writes:

Next Wednesday will mark a year since the modest ceremony at which the outposts report was submitted to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. Instead of an answer to the obvious question, “What has happened since then,” the author of the report, former state prosecutor and attorney Talia Sasson, suggests visiting Migron, in the Binyamin region. This outpost starred in the report as a symbol of systemic collapse.
It all began in April 2002, with a fake antenna, “a pole with a costume,” as the Israel Defense Forces’ brigade commander told Sasson. Pinhas Wallerstein, the head of the Binyamin Regional Council and a public servant, gave a commitment in writing that the antenna would not develop into another illegal outpost. But it ended up as such – the permanent home of 150 families, with public buildings, roads, lighting and so on.
“I am not naive about the state’s conduct in the territories,” says Sasson, “but in the case of Migron, it is a matter of establishing a settlement on private land that belongs to Palestinians, without a government decision and without any legal status. And as if that were not enough, it is the public coffers that are paying for the tractors that broke the road through to the outpost and funded the public buildings there. It is important to understand that every day that the state allows the settlers to hold on to the land is another day of violating the law and human rights. A state that respects its desire to be democratic cannot accept this phenomenon. I put very grave findings on the government’s table, but to my great regret, what there was is what there is and apparently also what there will be.”
Sasson notes that at least half a dozen outposts the High Court of Justice ordered evacuated are still standing. The court handed down this decision after the Defense Ministry and the area commander told it that the outposts are not legal and that therefore the government must evacuate them. “This is a serious and unparalleled failure at the government level,” says Sasson decisively.
And indeed, despite the government’s explicit commitment – in the framework of the road map plan – to dismantle the 24 illegal outposts that have been established during the terms of Sharon’s governments, not a single outpost has been evacuated. Had it not been for the petition by Peace Now, even the nine houses at the Amona outpost would have remained standing.

I had a good talk with Eldar as couple of days ago. He did say that he thinks that after the failure of the extremist settlers to prevent last summer’s disengagement from Gaza, he thinks the settlers are “in deep crisis”. He said that whereas previously, most Israeli elections have been fought over the issue of how (or wherther) to make peace with the Palestinians, “This time the issue is not about peace; it’s about quiet. It’s about conflict management, not conflict resolution.”
Though he sees Kadima’s position as representing this broad public sentiment at this time, he said he thought the longer-term outlook for the party isn’t very good. “The Kadima Party is a cocktail party,” he said. “It’s not yet the end of Labour and Likud… Israel has seen a whole series of these ‘third parties’ that have come and gone, and most likely Kadmia will be like the rest of them.”
He said that the Hamas victory in the OPTs hadn’t affected the Israeli electrions much– “except that it seems to prove to many Israelis that ‘there’s no-one to talk to.’ So it’s made Labour more irrelevant.”
Well, talking of Labour, Ha’Aretz also had a lengthy, very informative (to me) interview with new Labour head Amir Peretz. He presented himself very much as a plucky outsider who has fought for his values and will keep the interests of Israel’s huddled masses front and center in his work. (Not surprisingly, since his power base was with the Histadrut trade-union federation. Additionally, he’s of Moroccan Jewish background, which makes him doubly an ‘outsider’.)
Here’s what he said about the ‘peace process’:

Continue reading “Weekend Haaretz”

Well, I just heard I got my Israeli press pass.  This is excellent
news.  One of the main reasons I need it is that being the bearer of a
press pass is the only
way foreigners and Israelis get to cross into Gaza at all these
days.  Of course, once I’ve got it no doubt there are all sorts of
other fascinating things I can do with it.

I’m still in Tel Aviv.  I’ve been hanging around waiting for an
interview that now (nearly 6 p.m.) looks as though it ain’t going to
come through for me.  All Israeli political figures are incredibly
busy these days, organizing their campaigns for the March 28
elections.  I even had a hard time getting an “appointment” with
Naomi Chazan, the former deputy Knesset Speaker from the leftist Meretz
Party, whom I think of as a dear friend.  Oh well, I understand…

Actually, one thing quite a few Israelis have remarked on since I came
here has been how indifferent much of the public seems to be to the
whole campaign.  Usually, politics in Israel is a 24/7
obsession.  But as much as I can figure out from listening to
radios in taxi-cabs, that portion of the media seems much more
interested in Hamas (or as Israelis say it, “Khamas”) and Abu Mazen
than they are in their own politicians. Go figure.

Also, I haven’t seen one single recognizably electoral billboard or
informally posted flyer on the hoardings in the streets yet. 
There are plenty of billboards bearing the ayatollah-like image of the
Shas Party’s spiritual mentor Rabbi Ovadia Youssef– not just
billboards, but massive displays on the sides of buses, etc etc. 
But people say even that even there, the “message” is not political at
all, but one that features some kind of religious exhortation.

In fact, Youssef’s bearded and turbaned visage on these billboards and
displays is quite reminiscent of the parades of beared and turbaned
ayatollahs who (along with their own religious homilies) grace many of
the billboards of Hizbullah-dominated South Lebanon or come to think of
it of the posters for Hamas I saw in the West Bank, which have an
impishly grinning photo of a (bearded, headscarveded) Sheikh Ahmed
Yassin.

.. Well, anyway, late this morning, cellphone clutched in hand, I
decided to walk down the seaside promenade to the old city of Jaffa
that’s perched on a hilly promontory that juts out into the
Mediterranean just over a mile south of Tel Aviv’s city center. 
The seaside promenade is beautiful: much nearer to sea-level than the
Corniche in Beirut, and much cleaner and better appointed.  As I
walked briskly along I passed a few groups of older guys sitting
together on folding chairs playing shesh-besh (backgammon) almost
exactly as they would be doing at the very same time on the Beirut
Corniche…

Continue reading “Tel Aviv, Jaffa, Walls”

My schedule here in Israel and Palestine is gradually coming together. I decided I needed to get a bit more specific in defining what I want to report while here… Well, that process continues over time, anyway, with serendipity and learning both having their effect on raw intentionality.
This morning I started working my cellphone fairly intensively. I had a good talk with my old friend Ze’ev Schiff, who gave me some good ideas of other people to talk to. He talked a little about how he sees the political situation here but we agreed that I’d try to get down to Tel Aviv next week to catch up with him in person.
I had another good (though short) talk with Naomi Chazan, the former Deputy Speaker of the Knesset from the leftist Meretz Party. She sounded extremely busy. She lives here in Jerusalem but is working very hard on the party’s election campaign– which is based in Tel Aviv. So we’ll try to get together either here or there in the days ahead.
I talked with the PA’s (former? outgoing?) Deputy Foreign Minister, Abdullah Abdullah, and arranged to meet him in Ramullah tomorrow.
I talked with a few other very interesting people, then I struck reportorial “gold” when I called the former Israeli Ambassador to the UN, Dore Gold, whom I’ve known for many years: he suggested I go talk to him this very afternoon, which I did. I’d actually asked if he had 30 mins to talk but the interview ended up being well over an hour.
Dore is now head of something called the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, which has made news in recent days by hosting public events for former Chief of Staff Moshe Ya’alon and for Maj. Gen. Yair Naveh who’s the commander of the “Central” Front (i.e., facing onto Jordan)… Naveh caused a big diplomatic ruckus by telling a supposedly “closed” session at the JCPA that “a dangerous axis starting in Iran, continuing in Iraq and Jordan is in the process of conception” and that, “I am not sure there will be another king [in Jordan] after King Abdullah.” Jordan’s chargé d’affaires in Israel (who had had a colleague at the event) immediately condemned Naveh’s words saying they could have a “negative effect” on Israeli-Jordanian relations.
(Naveh subsequently apologized.)
Well, anyway, the JCPA is located in a lovely old stone house in the “Greek Colony” neighborhood of south-west Jerusalem. I waited for Dore for around 5 minutes in the same conference room/library where Naveh had spoken, then went into D’s office where we talked.
Dore Gold has a very definite point of view about the nature of the current situation. It is quite clear from all the conversations I’ve had with Israelis since coming here that the successive shocks of Sharon proposing the unilateral disengagement from Gaza; him then pushing it through and implementing it; him splitting from Likud and then forming his own party; and him then suffering a serious stroke had already, as of January 24, completely changed the political lineup in the country and left much of its political class reeling… And then came the Hamas victory.
Gold’s view of the political effects of this was as follows:

Continue reading “Conversations in Jerusalem, #1”

JWN readers might like to know that I arrived in Jerusalem
yesterday.  I’m staying in a very calm hotel in East
Jerusalem…  Listening to a tinny church bell as I write this,
having earlier heard the noon-time call to prayer from the minaret of
the Sheikh Jarrah Mosque. 

I’ll be in Israel and Palestine for the next 18 days, reporting on the
political developments in both communities– I ‘ll be writing a couple of pieces for
Salon.com as well as my usual print outlets: the CSM and Boston Review.  So it’ll
probably be hard work, as well as really interesting.  The
logistics have been just a touch challenging.  The hotel here has
the funkiest electric sockets, and I’ve been figuring whether any
combination of my plug-adapters can be rammed into them.  (Yes–
but it also involves poking a pen into the socket at the same time…
Don’t ask.)  The SIM card in my phone had timed out, and I had to
buy a new one.  And the zipper on my suitcase got shot.  Grrr.

But those are minor inconveniences.  Mainly, it’s just good to be
back.  I think this is my 10th visit to Israel and
Palestine.  Back in 1989, Bill and our then-4-year-old and I spent
most of the summer here in Jerusalem– I was doing some research on
Palestinians and Israelis and nonviolence.

Jerusalem is still the most amazing place.  In itself it’s a
microcosm of almost the entire Israeli-Arab conflict.  I wrote a
couple of times about the immense potential of this city– once the
Palestinians and Israelis make a sustainable peace– to become a real
center of world culture and cultural exchange.  It’s an
enthusiastically bilingual city — though there is very rigid
segregation between the Hebrew-speaking areas and the Arabic-speaking
areas as well as huge amounts of discrimination against the city’s
Palestinian residents and their neighborhoods. And it’s certainly a
place where the three Abrahamic religions are all well represented and
have have many institutions.

… Once I got through passport control and customs yesterday at
Ben-Gurion airport I got into a “Nesher” ride-share van posted for
Jerusalem.  The ten seats filled up pretty fast and up we
came.  There is always this strong sense of coming “up” to
Jerusalem, which really is perched on  top of the craggy ridge
of  the Judean Hills.  As always, the van trundled around
several neighborhoods to let out other riders before getting to my
destination.  One rider went to a very new part of Mevasseret
Zion, a small town just east of the city– an extremely well-funded and
well-appointed series of neighborhoods there, with spectacular views
across a ravine towards the receding hills of the West Bank, to the
north.  Another went to Bayt Zayit, an older Jewish village also
just east of Jerusalem.  Then the driver, a Jewish guy who spent
most of the ride swearing under his breath in extremely colorful
Arabic, took us into the center of the city through some fairly heavy
rush-hour traffic.  He dropped an orthodox Jewish family (father,
mother, 13-year-old son with long peyot)
off at the city-center Supersol… along with about seven truly
enormous bags they had flown in with.   It looked like they
were planning a long stay.  Then he threaded through some of the
tight streets of old West Jerusalem into the equally tight streets of
East Jerusalem, where he dropped another passenger and me at our
respective hotels.

I love to walk around these older neighborhoods– Jewish and Arab. Each
definitely has its own flavor.  I also love to walk around the
walled Old City.  I haven’t been there yet.  Anyway, I’ve got
some interesting things set up here for the next couple of days, and a
bunch more phone calls to make.  I’ll check in and post some
things here from time to time… But mainly, I’ll be  in “receive”
mode for the next few days.

Kevin Sites has a fascinating interview in his ‘Hot Zone’ project– with Gal Uchovsky, the Israeli writer of a new film called ‘Walk on Water.’
Excerpt:

KEVIN SITES: Your movie deals with a variety of issues, but a prominent theme is how a society’s history defines its present. The Holocaust has defined Israel in many ways — even dominating it — but to evolve a society has to put history in its proper place and move forward.
Do you think that’s hard to do when you have people like Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad questioning whether the Holocaust actually took place?
GAL UCHOVSKY: I don’t care about this guy from Iran. He’s not part of my life. I’m not part of the political game to the point that I care what someone in Iran says. But I am interested in how the Holocaust has shaped the Israeli male. It’s been 70 years and we have to make some peace with it. But we still see ourselves as victims of the Holocaust.
We become victimized to the point that we’ve become aggressors, and now others use terror as a weapon against us. It’s not the tool of the strong, it’s the tool of the weak. So (in our film) we wanted to examine the fact that we still see ourselves as victims — even though we are a vibrant nation and have a strong army that can defend us just fine.
SITES: It does say on your film’s Web site, “The filmmakers believe that the fact that Israelis are still so obsessed with the Holocaust and their status as victims renders them blind to the fact they themselves have become aggressors, imposing pain and suffering on the Palestinians. The filmmakers believe that the first step in helping the Israelis understand how cruel they themselves have become lies in making some kind of peace with their own traumatic past.”
What kind of suffering specifically do you mean that the Israelis have imposed on the Palestinians?
UCHOVSKY: Well, the occupation — building all these settlements on Palestinian lands. Apartheid roads…
… SITES: Back to the earlier question though, how do Israelis make that peace with their history, keep the Holocaust from making them a society of permanent victims?
UCHOVSKY: We have to understand that we’re not there anymore. It was 1945. We had long hollow cheeks; we were very, very hungry. Some of our families were turned into soap. It was terrible. But we are not there anymore. We are a vibrant force in the world. We’re not there anymore. Jews are pretty much safe in most places in the world. We are not like sheep to the slaughter. Israel was built on the notion of victimization.

Sounds like a movie worth seeing.

Sharon hasn’t even (as far as I know) died yet and some people are already writing the kinds of rosy-tinted things about him that are usually reserved for obituaries. How about this, from AP’s Steven Gutkin in Jerusalem?

Ariel Sharon’s massive stroke threw Israeli politics and Mideast peacemaking efforts into turmoil, threatening momentum for a deal with the Palestinians and enhancing the position of hard-liners.

So far as I know, up until Sharon had his stroke there was almost zero momentum for a deal with the Palestinians. What there was (possibly) momentum for was a further unilateral step by Sharon’s new Kadima Party that might cede some control over some small areas of the West Bank to the Palestinians in “return” for Israel winning greater international support for its seizure of East Jerusalem and many other significant parts of the West Bank.
If Sharon had been headed toward “a deal with the Palestinians” there were many, many things he could have done to negotiate/coordinate with them both last year’s Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the other supplementary negotiations that were supposed to follow on from that (like the Gaza-WB link.)
He did not. Philosophically as well as in practice his very strong preference has always been for forceful unilateral action that imposes his own personal preferences on all other parties, whether Palestinian, Israeli, Lebanese, or other.
Sharon is still alive, and his family and supporters must all be wracked with worry over his fate. So personally, I think it’s inappropriate to go into too many details of the man’s long record as a military and political leader. It’s not obituary time yet. Also, any obituary, when written, will require an assessment of all his activities from the 1950s on, and not just of the two intriguing decisions he made in the past 26 months: to pull all Israeli ground presences out of Gaza, and then to break from Likud and found Kadima.
Also, I don’t agree with that assessment above that Sharon’s exit from active political life will necessarily strengthen Israeli hardliners. As we saw last summer, a large majority of Jewish Israelis clearly supported the decision to pull the settlers out of Gaza, and there is also a clear majority who favor further significant Israeli withdrawals from the West Bank. Israeli hardliners do have an advantage over the “left” in terms of ideological/political clarity (aka rigidity), and some possible advantage in terms of organization. But if the leaders on the left can muster a clear and realistic approach to peacemaking then they have a good chance of being able to mobilize the country’s many, many supporters of a decent and realistic approach to peacemaking.
The position of the US government and the rest of the international community will be crucial in helping to determine whether it is the Israeli moderates or the hardliners who emerge stronger from the collapse of the (thus far highly “personalized”) Sharonist center. It is extremely unhelpful for anyone in the international arena to be fatalistic about any “inevitability” of the empowerment of the hardliners.
In this regard the US government is not just “one more” representative of the international community. It is the sole outside power that has supported Sharon’s positions against the Palestinians through thick and thin over recent years. Now, Washington will be forced to make some huge further choices regarding Palestine. Let’s hope it makes them in a wise and foresighted way, and not in a way that stokes further violence by anyone… and that includes the Israeli hawks both in and outside the security forces.

So, Sharon had a cerebral hemorrhage today… and in Palestine the humiliating concrete barricade that has kept the Palestinians of Gaza separated from those of their countrymen who live in Egypt was breached by out-of-control elements from one of Fateh’s rapidly proliferating lunatic fringes.
Both these events– Sharon’s expected absence from active politics for at least the next few weeks and perhaps forever, and the continuing implosion of Abu Mazen’s Fateh movement (as described in more detail here)– have thrown the Palestinian-Israeli theater into a state of great uncertainty and risk.
Less than two months ago, Sharon upset the complex jigsaw of Israeli party politics by quitting Likud, and set up his own new, highly personalized party, Kadima. In his absence from politics, daily governance of Israel (presumably including of its armed forces) will be under the control of acting premier Ehud Olmert, a reasonably moderate and level-headed man.
But will Olmert be able to ride herd on hawks in the security apparatus in the same way Sharon was able to, when he chose? That’s the first question.
The second is whether the Palestinian election scheduled for January 25 will go ahead… Or if not, what?
The third is how on earth can rapid escalations of violence between Israelis and Palestinians be headed off over the next few weeks?
The fourth, and most burning issue is how can a hopeful, authoritative and far-reaching peace negotiation be started and concluded between these two very fearful, very jumpy national groups amid conditions of such intense political uncertainty– both in their area and also in the region more broadly?
I wish Sharon well as a person. I hope he pulls through this physical crisis. (Though I disagree with the hyperbole engaged in by one Palestinian commentator, Ghazi al-Saadi, who reportedly gushed that Sharon has been “”the first Israeli leader who stopped claiming Israel had a right to all of the Palestinians’ land.” Untrue. Yitzhak Rabin pioneered that position in modern times– and lost his life for it a decade ago.)
But the crisis now engulfing these two peoples is much, much broader than just the fate of that one man, Sharon, or of the infant party he had launched.
… Wow, yet another element has been added to W’s “perfect storm”. Violence, unpredictability, and a real risk of massive escalations in Israel/Palestine, posing a challenge to the Prez at the same time as all the other challenges pouring in on him from inside the US, and from the Persian Gulf…
I think we all need to pray for calm, sanity, inter-human recognition,and the choosing of de-escalatory, nonviolent paths.