Mideast Roundup: Syria, Israel, Palestine
Judith Levy ·
Apr 19, 2011 at 7:45am
Ricochettes and Ricocheurs, forgive me; my kids are on their two-and-a-half-week Passover vacation, so I've been unable to get enough alone time in my office to post. My husband just took them all swimming, though, so I have a brief window. I don't know when I'm going to get a chance like this again for the next few days, so rather than post on one item I'm going to lob several at you with some brief commentary.
- This one is hot off the presses: Syria is lifting the emergency laws that have been in place for the past 48 years. This comes on the heels of reports that Syrian security forces have opened fire on protesters in Homs and locked down the city. Al-Jazeera's correspondent at the scene says many wounded are not going to hospital for fear they will be arrested on arrival. Assad keeps ratcheting up both ends of his carrot-and-machine-gun approach, but neither is silencing the masses. The government's statement on the protesters in Homs said some of them "have called for armed insurrection under the motto of Jihad to set up a Salafist state...Their objective is to spread terror across Syria." Assad is pitching his bloody crackdown on his people as a battle against Islamism, which, it will be recalled, was his father Hafez's justification for wiping out most of the population of Hama in 1982.
- The LA Times is claiming that the Quartet (the US, Russia, the EU and the UN) might support the establishment of a Palestinian state according to the 1967 borders if Israel does not quickly present a strategy to restart the moribund peace talks. If this is based on anything other than speculation (and I haven't found any evidence so far), it's a big deal. It's extortion, basically: do as you're told, Israel, or a) lose the option to negotiate a safe peace and b) surrender the contested territory forever. It would place the onus for restarting negotiations entirely on Israel, erasing into irrelevance the Fogel massacre, the intensification of the Hamas war on southern Israel, the disingenuousness of Abbas and Fayyad regarding their true desire for a two-state solution (about which more anon), the status of Gilad Shalit, etc. If this threat is carried out, it will prove the contention that the Obama administration is firmly entrenched in the Palestinian camp. Now, I'm reserving judgment on this one until I see it confirmed elsewhere, but there's no question that the Americans are leaning on Israel right now. Hillary recently told the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Washington that "[t]he status quo between Palestinians and Israelis is no more sustainable than the political systems that have crumbled in recent months" -- a jab at Bibi if ever there was one. He appears to have been listening: he has said he's going to be announcing an initiative of some kind when he visits the US in May.
- Ahmad Khalidi, a senior associate member of St Antony's College, Oxford and a former Palestinian negotiator, published an opinion piece in the Guardian today that warrants close attention. He states that the declaration of statehood that is now, with the help of the UN General Assembly, almost within the Palestinians' grasp, is "out of tune with prevailing Palestinian sentiment." It's an "anachronism" reflecting the outmoded goals of the ossified PLO. What the frustrated Palestinians want, he says, is no longer a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel, but the conquest of Israel and the claiming of all its territory. He describes the Palestinians as moving "away from seeking the ever-shifting goalposts of an inevitably constrained and incomplete form of statehood that would come at the expense of equally fundamental rights to a much broader interpretation of self-determination that includes all the divergent Palestinian constituencies, and a much wider and continuing confrontation with the Zionist enterprise in Palestine [emphasis added]. This shift is premised on forging a new common identity and common national goal – embracing all sectors of Palestinian society and aimed at the entirety of Palestine before 1948 [emphasis added]...From this perspective West Bank statehood seems an irrelevance, almost an anachronism. It matches neither the popular revolutionary zeitgeist of the Arab world nor wider Palestinian aspirations. At best it addresses part of the Palestinian condition on part of the land." I am fully convinced that this is an accurate description of "wider Palestinian aspirations" and hope this piece is being read closely in Washington. If Hillary reads it and chooses to ignore it, she and her boss are either on board with the Palestinian dismantling of the state of Israel or profoundly and irredeemably out of their depth on this issue.
- Mudar Zahran, a Palestinian writer and academic from Jordan now living as a refugee in the UK, has written a piece for the Hudson Institute on why the declaration of statehood being steamrolled through the General Assembly is a bad idea -- for Palestinians.
- The Israeli teenager who was unlucky enough to be the last kid remaining on the school bus targeted by Palestinians with an anti-tank missile earlier this month has died of his injuries.
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Comments :
Jan '11
Re: Mideast Roundup: Syria, Israel, Palestine
Isn't that what they've always wanted? I'm glad Khalidi said it out loud and in print. If enough Palestinians state this objective in worldwide media maybe our "useful idiots" who keep trying to set up a false moral equivalence between Israel and Palestine will realize....oh well. I'm kidding myself. They're already oblivious to reality.
Jun '10
Re: Mideast Roundup: Syria, Israel, Palestine
No. 2 standing alone is idiocy. No. 2, in light of no. 3, is thuggish criminality. So Israel holding its position, but making occasional concessions, is bad. The Palestianians get to change position at will--and Obama and the rest of feckless world goes along. Sickening.
Edited on Apr 19, 2011 at 8:29amMay '10
Re: Mideast Roundup: Syria, Israel, Palestine
Passover Vacation! How un-PC is that? Hope they aren't hunting for "spring spheres".
OK, Claire is saying re Syria, everything can get worse. I don't see how. We got a nigh-Noko black box of a police state controlled by Iran and controlling Lebanon, threatening Israel. Tell me how regime change could be a negative.
I wanna see you and Claire in a baby penguin vs hedgehog cage-match, basically.
Re: Mideast Roundup: Syria, Israel, Palestine
I suspect that Ahmad Kalidi has read the writing on the wall. Given the likely consequences of the revolution in Egypt, the ball is now in the hands of Hamas.
Dec '10
Re: Mideast Roundup: Syria, Israel, Palestine
As painful and un-PC as this is for me to write, there is no solution here nor has there ever been. There are 2 possible outcomes - the destruction of the Palestinians (they've become what the Amorites of old were - worshippers only of death) or the destruction of Israel (no saints but a democracy & a functioning economy). The middle ground doesn't exist here. Paraphrasing Sir Isaiah Berlin, there is too much history in too small a place for too many people. Kalidi only speaks the truth. The question will be, does Israel believe him and does the West care?
Edited on Apr 19, 2011 at 10:43amRe: Mideast Roundup: Syria, Israel, Palestine
"What the frustrated Palestinians want, he says, is no longer a Palestinian state living side-by-side in peace with Israel, but the conquest of Israel and the claiming of all its territory."
Here's my question, Judith--if I'm fortunate enough to get it in before your kids get back from the pool:
Do Israelis understand this?
Israeli public opinion matters, I think, just hugely. If the prime minister believes the political situation forces him to continue to engage in this kabuki play of pretending he and the Palestinians are just a few negotiations away from a deal, well then, he'll do just that, muddling public opinion still further. But if he believes he has the country behind him, he can much more freely say what needs to be said.
So I think. You'd know.
Aug '10
Re: Mideast Roundup: Syria, Israel, Palestine
Judith, I don't think I'd ever have heard the name of Daniel Viflic if it wasn't for your post.Is he any less a victim than the sainted Rachel Corrie? (Clearly he is more of a victim). I get more and more frustrated at the wilful ignorance of Palestinian atrocities- it's as if too many people have invested too much of their time and credibility in demonising Israel to accept the brutal reality of Hamas and it's fellow travellers.
Dec '10
Re: Mideast Roundup: Syria, Israel, Palestine
paulebe asked, "...does the West care?"
I honestly do not believe that 2% of the people in the diplomatic corps, or elected office, care. I was never a big fan of James Baker, but was still astounded when he was asked, "What about Israel?, and he responded, "(Ricochet COC violation) Israel".
I think that the majority of Americans care, but that is not the West. However, the abandonment of Israel will badly bite elected officials in this country that do not clearly oppose it. That's my guess. I don't think efforts to paint the Palestinians as underdogs in this situation have worked with most of the American populace and Americans tend to support underdogs.
Feb '11
Re: Mideast Roundup: Syria, Israel, Palestine
Let's assume the Israeli public believes the real situation is as Kalidi describes. (60 Israeli intellectuals today showed they don/t.) Then what?
Short of Israel becoming the 51st state, there appears to be no solution anywhere on the horizon with generations of Palestinians born and bred into Jew-hatred. The rest of the Koran-reading Middle Eastern Muslim world is not far behind. Egypt, armed to the teeth with sophisticated American weaponry, seems ready for a turn to the worse, making nice with Iran. Jordan is shaky. Iran will not let go of Syria or Lebanon as it readies its nuclear missiles to wipe Israel off the map. The question is, “How long can Israel continue to defend itself successfully with enemies surrounding it, military hardware becoming more lethal and obtainable and with the world becoming conditioned to the liquidation of another six million Jews?” Would even the U.S. would stand by, metaphorically wringing its hands?
Whatever Netanyahu says to Congress next month, he will only be trying to buy time until the anti-Israel Obama administration is gone. But then what?
The problem isn’t Israel. It’s Islam.
Nov '10
Re: Mideast Roundup: Syria, Israel, Palestine
Part of me thinks statehood for the West Bank would be good for the Israelis. Then there would be no doubt, no ambiguity; Israel will officially be at war with an aggressive neighboring state, and no one will be able to deny their right to defend themselves (not that that'll stop anyone.)