Antony Loewenstein

I missed this news a few weeks ago (thanks to Promised Land for picking it up) that a majority of Israelis favour some kind of negotiation with Hamas:

Israelis don’t oppose negotiations in general – but they don’t feel an urgency to negotiate as well. Things are OK right now, so for all they care, they could stay this way. What’s a bit surprising is the high number – 57 percent – willing to negotiated with Hamas (on condition it renounces terrorism and recognize Israel, but as we have seen with the PLO in the 90’s, what’s important is the general willingness).

I don’t think this number can be attributed to a surprising rise in the popularity of Shaul Mofaz, but rather to the fact that unlike the Palestinians in the West Bank, the Hamas does pose a problem to Israelis. It threatens our towns, it holds a captive Israeli soldier, and it causes us diplomatic damage through its use of the Goldstone report. Unlike the Palestinian Authority, Hamas is a threat, and many Israelis apparently understood the hidden lesson of Cast Lead – that it can’t be dealt with only by force. That’s the only way to explain what seems like an incredibly strange fact: Israelis are ready to negotiate with Hamas, but don’t feel any need to do so with Abu-Mazen. And while this is an understandable human tendency – most people treats what’s hurting them; only few use preventive medicine – its implications on the future of the conflict are very grim.

Russia under Putin is an unforgiving place. Impunity is the name of the game.

In this context, a fascinating feature in this week’s New York Times Magazine about Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once the country’s richest man, is sobering. Here’s a man who made staggering amounts of money in the post-Communist circus, seemingly had a conversion, discovered human rights and now stands as a quasi-symbol of a broken legal and political system:

Mikhail Khodorkovsky, once his country’s richest man, has resided in “gulag lite,” as he calls the Russian penal system under Vladimir Putin, for six years. Since the spring, on most working days he is roused at 6:45 in the morning, surrounded by guards and packed into an armored van for the drive to court. For two hours each way, the man who once supplied 2 percent of the world’s oil crouches in a steel cage measuring 47 by 31 by 20 inches. Convicted of tax evasion and fraud in 2005, Khodorkovsky now faces a fresh set of charges that add up to the supposed theft of $30 billion. In the dark of the van, Khodorkovsky tries to prepare for his trial, replaying in his mind his night reading, the daily stack of documents from his lawyers. But Russia’s most famous prisoner worries too about what would happen if a car slammed into the van. (Collisions are routine in Moscow’s clotted avenues.) “Your chances of making it out alive,” he wrote me one day this summer, “at any speed, are next to none.”

Khodorkovsky (pronounced ko-door-KOFF-skee) has spent more than 2,200 days behind bars. He cannot receive reporters. Yet the ban has brought a revival of a dissident tradition dating back to Ivan Grozny and Prince Andrey Kurbsky in the 16th century: the epistolary exchange. For several months this year, from July until October, Khodorkovsky and I were able to conduct a series of exchanges — as he has done with other correspondents, both foreign and native — filtered through the hands of lawyers (who transcribe his oral replies) and avoiding the eyes of prison officials. In court, he has maintained that he fails to understand the case against him. The new indictment runs 3,487 pages but boils down to a single accusation: that the former C.E.O. of the Yukos oil firm and his deputy, Platon Lebedev, were part of an “organized criminal group” that stole 350 million tons of oil from their company between 1998 to 2003. The tonnage exceeds Yukos’s production during the period in question. If convicted, Khodorkovsky, whose first sentence ends in 2011, could face an additional 22 years in jail.

Even as Putin sought to curb the oligarchs, Khodorkovsky expanded his influence by new means. He brought in American firms like McKinsey and Schlumberger, experts in making the most of oil and profits. He also sought an insurance policy. Nearly a decade ago, he hired APCO, the Washington lobbying firm that employs former ambassadors and Congressmen. But in Putin’s second year in power, Khodorkovsky opened another front, setting up a foundation to support nonprofits and human rights groups. In the months before his arrest, he courted the administration of George W. Bush and power brokers like James Baker. His foundation recruited Henry KissingerLaura Bush, he gave a million dollars to the Library of Congress. He joined the Carlyle Group’s Energy Advisory board, serving alongside Baker, and met — on separate occasions — with the elder Bush, Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney. and Lord Rothschild for its board. He financed policy groups in D.C. and human rights activists at home, and to the joy of

…

Moscow would soon grow famous for operatic oligarchs and Byzantine intrigues, but Khodorkovsky never got caught in a compromising position — never snared at an Alpine resort, a Moscow casino or on a Riviera yacht. Girls, power, even the money, seemed to hold no magic. Where others basked in pomp, he was shy and painfully soft-spoken; you never heard his squeaky voice, a semitone deeper than Mike Tyson’s, at dacha parties for the foreign press, let alone on television. He divorced young but stayed on good terms with his first wife. Inna, his second, he met at the institute. Khodorkovsky was never flashy — he wore jeans and turtlenecks; the family vacationed in Finland — but he radiated the unlikely allure of a muscular technocrat. And yet, even at the top, he seemed adrift, unsure of his role in society. Unlike older Jewish oligarchs, men like Boris Berezovsky and Vladimir Gusinsky, who were often animated by old scores to settle, Khodorkovsky did not seem to consider himself an outsider. Lacking a public persona, he came to personify, by default, the revenge of the Soviet geek.

…

From the beginning, however, an issue has hampered the defense: Khodorkovsky is no classic dissident like Sakharov. As Khodorkovsky built Yukos, the oligarchic standards of the 1990s were maintained: the state bureaucracy and offshore zones were exploited. And in the tumult, as Putin noted recently, there was blood. In 1998, on Khodorkovsky’s birthday, Vladimir Petukhov, the mayor of Nefteyugansk, a Siberian town fed on Yukos oil, who had complained about Yukos’s failure to pay its debts to the town and its workers, was shot dead. Then there was the 2002 disappearance of Sergei Gorin, onetime manager of the Tambov branch of Menatep, and his wife, Olga. To date, their bodies have not been found, but a Moscow court has convicted one of Khodorkovsky’s closest former partners, Leonid Nevzlin, now living in Israel, of ordering their murder. Khodorkovsky, Nevzlin and their lawyers deny any involvement in the crimes.

Khodorkovsky’s arrest divided the human rights community. Many can’t quite embrace an oligarch as a prisoner of conscience. He is a titan who fell from favor, some say, not a dissident physicist or a novelist arrested for a subversive manuscript. Whatever his sins, though, Khodorkovsky was not jailed for breaking the law. His courting of the Bush White House and pursuit of oil partners at home and abroad infuriated the Kremlin. But his gravest error was to challenge Putin. The reason behind his imprisonment, Khodorkovsky claims, “is well known and widely discussed. It was my constant support of opposition parties and the Kremlin’s desire to deprive them of an independent source of financing. As for the more base reason, it was the desire to seize someone else’s efficient company.”

Zvi Bar’el in Haaretz unpacks the lacklustre American efforts to bring “peace” to the Middle East:

And let’s say Israel does freeze construction. What is Washington’s policy regarding the 300,000 settlers currently living in the territories, in settlements that no American president was determined enough to stop? If a plan to construct 900 housing units in Gilo bothers Obama, what does he think about the 40,000 Israelis already living there? What is the point in demanding a construction freeze if it does not involves a comprehensive plan that determines the borders between Israel and Palestine, and where Jews can or can’t live? After all, that will be the next question in negotiations, to which end Obama has Netanyahu in a pincer grip.

…

It is increasingly seeming that the demand for a settlement freeze is no more than a desire to chalk up some sort of achievement, one that does not change the status quo but does grant prestige. That suspicion is based on the fact that the United States has had nothing to say about the Israeli-Syrian conflict. If peace in the Middle East is so important, why is Washington not speaking out about the settlements in the Golan Heights? Why does the United States not call a Syrian-Israeli summit? Are negotiations with Syrian President Bashar Assad less important than those with Abbas? The Arab peace initiative, it should be noted, involves Israeli withdrawal from all the territories.

The freeze in settlement construction is an essential step in a meaningful peace plan. Standing alone, it is a hollow gesture.

PRESS RELEASE

19 November 2009

Ambulances Prevented from Entering Palestinian Neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem without Prior Approval or Police Escort

 Magen David Adom (MDA) ambulances may not enter Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem to transfer injured or sick persons to hospital without a police escort, even in life threatening situations

 Preventing ambulances from entering Palestinian neighbourhoods in East Jerusalem without a police escort violates the residents’ right to life and health

 Adalah, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights sent an urgent letter to the Israeli Deputy Minister of Health and the Jerusalem Police Chief demanding the immediate cancellation of this policy Adalah, Physicians for Human Rights – Israel and Al Mezan Center for Human Rights sent an urgent letter to the Israeli Deputy Minister of Health and the Jerusalem Police Chief on 10 November 2009 demanding the immediate cancellation of instructions preventing Magen David Adom (MDA) ambulances from entering the Palestinian neighborhoods in East Jerusalem without prior permission and police escort even in emergency cases. According to the instructions, the MDA ambulance must wait in a Jewish neighborhood adjacent to the Palestinian neighborhood and may not enter it to transfer the injured or the sick person to the hospital until a police escort arrives, even in life threatening situations. In many cases, the patient’s family members must transfer him/her in their own cars to the ambulance, which could increase the severity of the illness or injury and result in medical complications.

These procedures violate the first rule in the work of emergency crews, which is to provide medical aid as soon as possible, and the state’s obligation to ensure the life and physical well-being of each person under its authority. These practices may also be considered medical negligence by the MDA and a violation of professional and medical ethics. Further they may constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment under international law. These instructions do not apply to Jewish settlements in the heart of Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem; the ambulances travel through the Arab neighborhoods to reach the Jewish settlements without any police accompaniment. A case in point is the settlement of Nof Tzion, located in the heart of the Jabal al-Mukaber neighborhood in southeast Jerusalem; it is just separated by one street. The ambulances travel on this street on their way to the settlement, but refuse to enter this same street to transfer a Palestinian patient without police protection.

Mr. Fuad Abu Hamed is the “Clalit” health care clinic director in the Sur Baher neighborhood in East Jerusalem. He emphasized that when an ambulance is called to the clinic to transfer a patient to the hospital, it is forced to wait outside the neighborhood for a long time, even an hour or more until the police arrive to accompany it to the clinic. This delay sometimes leads to a significant deterioration in the patient’s condition or even death. Recently, an ambulance was called to the Silwan neighborhood to transfer a person suffering from angina to the hospital. The ambulance waited for more than two hours at the entrance of the village; the police refused to accompany the ambulance claiming that a violent quarrel was taking place which could put its forces and the crew at risk.

Attorney Haneen Naamnih of Adalah argued in the letter that “these examples, among many others, prove that the considerations determining the work of the Israeli ambulances in Jerusalem are not objective; they do not take into account the seriousness of the patient’s condition but solely consider his/her nationality and place of residence in violation of the law.” Ms. Reut Katz of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel stressed that “the police escort of ambulances to transport patients coupled with their presence alongside medical staff during the treatment process also constitutes a flagrant violation of the privacy rights and medical confidentiality of the patient.”

News just in!

Japanese author Taro Gomi’s beloved children’s book, Everyone Poops, will soon be available in Hebrew. The book candidly and delightfully presents defecation as a natural bodily function performed by virtually every sentient life form on our shared planet. In Everyone Poops, eliminating waste is unselfconscious, essential and nothing to be ashamed of. From North America to the Pacific Rim, Gomi’s charming illustrations and simple text have enabled parents and children alike to comfortably explore life’s elemental processes. The Hebrew translation of Everyone Poops was prepared under the auspices of the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies at the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. According to AISS spokesperson and noted PTSD sufferer Natan Sharansky, a “handful of revisions” were made to Gomi’s work, to remove the “new anti-semitism” implicit in its contents. Circus Israel obtained an early review copy from Sharansky by nodding gravely at everything he said. The full text of the book appears below.

Everyone poops.
Jews poop.
Their poop is Chosen.

Israeli Jews poop best of all.
Their poop nourishes the desert and makes it bloom.
Their poop has natural growth
and its own special wall
to keep other poop away.

Hebrews pooped in Jerusalem thousands of years ago,
so nobody else should poop in Jerusalem today.
Armenians should send their poop to Armenia.
Catholics should poop in the Vatican.
Muslims over 50 can poop in a tiny part of old Jerusalem,
then disappear forever.

Arabs poop.
On other people’s land.
Israel makes them stop and wait
all day long
just to check their poop.
Sometimes Palestinians won’t poop at all,
so the world will feel sorry for them.
In Gaza, the IDF pooped on their floors
for security reasons.
In Hebron, the settlers dump poop on their homes
for security reasons.
Sometimes the Palestinians get so mad
their poop explodes.
That poop comes from Iran.

Richard Goldstone talked poop about Israel.
His report is perverted bullpoop.
Israel’s military poop is the most moral military poop in the world.
Here’s a syllogism about Richard Goldstone and poop:
Richard Goldstone poops.
Anti-semites poop.
Ergo, Richard Goldstone is an anti-semite.

Europeans poop.
It’s all they do.
Americans poop.
They show it to everybody,
with a big proud smile.
The Hindus in India poop
and they set it on fire.
Canadians just hold their poop inside.

Everyone eats.
So everyone poops.
The Europeans and the Americans
and the Indians and the Canadians
all like the flavor
of Israel’s poop.

The land of Israel and Palestine is all ours, Jerusalem Post writer Michael Freund argues. Why? Well, he’s given us the best reason imaginable; the dude in the sky:

Israel should move ahead with steps to formally and legally incorporate all of the Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria into the Jewish state. This will serve as a tangible and reasonable response to the Palestinian attempts to circumvent the bilateral negotiating process.

More importantly, it will at last delineate the Israeli stance on the final disposition of these communities. This will effectively close off the troublesome debate within Israeli society over the future of the settlements, which has bred so much division and disunity, and ultimately enable us to present a more unified stance vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

In recent days, a number of leading Israeli politicians have thankfully begun to voice such proposals. The talented and articulate environment minister, Gilad Erdan of the Likud, told Israel Radio on Tuesday that if the Palestinians adopt a unilateral stance, then Israel should also consider “passing a law to annex some of the settlements.”

Likewise, Likud MK Danny Danon called for annexing all of Judea and Samaria with the exception of the Arab-inhabited cities.

Of course, annexation should not merely be viewed as a tit-for-tat response to unilateral Palestinian moves, for that casts it in a negative light, presenting it as merely a punitive or retaliatory measure.

In reality, annexation is justified for the simple reason that this land belongs to us, and to nobody else. The act of asserting Israeli sovereignty over the Jewish communities of Judea and Samaria would mark the closing of a historic circle, reviving our formal dominion over these areas after an interlude of nearly 2,000 years.

These areas are ours by Divine right, and we should not shy away from asserting as much. The Palestinians do not hesitate to invoke their beliefs, so why on earth should we? Just think how refreshing it would be to hear an Israeli leader stand up and declare this most elementary of truths to the world: that the Land of Israel belongs to the people of Israel because the God of Israel said so.

Who knows – maybe if we finally stand on principle and start affirming our faith, then perhaps we will at last begin to earn the respect and support that we so rightly deserve.

Jerusalem Post columnist Caroline Glick dislikes anybody who doesn’t love everything about Israel (especially the settlers and the occupation).

Her latest piece argues that a growing number of American Jews are allegedly turning against the Jewish state:

Some of Israel’s most high-profile supporters in the US are conservative talk radio and television hosts like Rush Limbaugh, Mark Levin, Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck. But rather than thank them for their support, the Anti-Defamation League, which is supposed to be dedicated first and foremost to defending Jews from anti-Semitism, published a special report this week where it insinuated that they cultivate a climate of hatred and paranoia which could endanger Jews among others.

The ADL report, “Rage Grows in America: Anti-Government Conspiracies,” dubbed Beck the “fearmonger-in-chief,” for his opposition to Obama’s domestic and foreign policies. It similarly castigated the so-called “tea party” movement which has attracted millions of Americans opposed to high taxes, and the townhall meetings this past summer where millions of Americans peacefully argued against Obama’s healthcare policies.

The ADL’s decision to issue a special report attacking Obama’s political opponents and insinuating that Americans who oppose him cultivate an environment in which paranoid and dangerous fringe groups feel comfortable operating is strange given that the ADL never put out a similar report against parallel anti-Bush movements. As Commentary’s Jonathan Tobin noted this week, the ADL was more likely to see overt and vicious anti-Semitic statements and placards being waved around at anti-Iraq war rallies than at anti-Obama healthcare and tax policy demonstrations.

Ironically, the ADL has a specific institutional interest in combating leftist paranoia. A recent movie attacking the ADL called Defamation, by leftist, anti-Israel Israeli filmmaker Yoav Shamir, is currently hitting the film festival circuit in the US and Europe. A major hit among anti-Israel activists and regular anti-Semites on the Left and Right, Defamation accuses the ADL of exaggerating the Holocaust and anti-Semitism to justify what Shamir views as its nefarious aims. Apparently, tribal loyalty to the Left trumps the institutional interests of the ADL.

Glick wrote the following on her website in August:

As I have written in a number of articles recently, Israelis consider President Obama to be deeply hostile to Israel. A Jerusalem Post poll from June showed that only 6 percent of Israeli Jews think that he is pro-Israel and a more recent Haaretz poll showed that a mere 12 percent of Israelis think Obama is supportive of Israel.

Our suspicion of the US President extends to his staff, and particularly to White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel. It was Emanuel, the son of an Israeli father who got Obama’s anti-Israel train rolling with his statement to AIPAC members in the spring that the US now links its willingness to do something against Iran’s nuclear program to Israel’s willingness to bar Jews from building homes in Jerusalem, Judea and Samaria. Emanuel is widely perceived as being a self-hating Jews who is determined to prove himself to Obama by sticking it to Israel.

In my life outside Jerusalem Post columns, I started a Hebrew website earlier in the year called www.latma.co.il.

Latma means “slap” in Hebrew slang. Latma is a satirical website that focuses on criticism  of the uniformly far left local media in Israel. Our tiny team of researchers, writers, actors and production staff devotes itself to pointing out media bias and professional incompetence of Israel’s leading media celebrities and news outlets both through daily web updates and through our flagship weekly online video broadcast.

…

By the way, Latma is fully funded through generous donations from philanthropists to the Washington DC-based Center for Security Policy’s Middle East media program which I run in my capacity as the CSP’s Senior Fellow for Middle Eastern Affairs.

At Latma it is our belief that by exposing the Israeli media to ridicule through satire, we will help to change the nature of the public discourse in Israel. We will empower the public to question the authority of our media elite. And once their authority is no longer taken for granted, we believe that the Israeli people will bypass the media and develop a relevant, educated, responsible and alternative national discourse on the internet. We believe that such an alternative national discussion is crucial for Israelis to be able to understand and contend with the massive challenges we face as a country and to provide our leaders the tailwind they need to make the difficult decisions these times demand of them.

One of those recent Latma productions is the following about the UN Goldstone report on Gaza. This is “humour”, extreme Zionist style:

Graffiti on the streets of Tehran. Resistance continues:

Israeli human rights B’Tselem publishes the facts:

Today (Sunday, Nov 22nd), Israeli human rights group B’Tselem commemorates 20 years since its founding with release of data collected by the organization from 1989-2009. This period includes many of the main events of the first Palestinian Intifada, the Oslo period and the Second Intifada, as well as the recent military operation in the Gaza Strip (Cast Lead). B’Tselem’s Executive Director, Jessica Montell, said that “a twenty-year perspective leaves one with a heavy heart, especially due to the ongoing violation of the right to life of Palestinians and Israelis resulting from the conflict. However, we can also note several human rights achievements: for instance, twenty years ago, thousands of Palestinians were systematically and routinely tortured during investigations. Thanks to the efforts of the human rights community, including B’Tselem, this torture has stopped”.

Casualties

Israeli security forces killed 7,398 Palestinians in Israel and the Occupied Territories in the last 20 years, among them at least 1,537 minors. The year with the highest number of Palestinian casualties was 2009: 1033 persons were killed, of them 315 minors. Most of those were killed in Gaza during operation Cast Lead. 1999 saw the lowest level of Palestinian casualties (8 people killed). B’Tselem’s website provides the breakdown of casualties since September 2000, according to participation in the hostilities and other categories.

During the past twenty years, Palestinians killed 1483 Israelis, of them 139 minors. Of this number, 488 were members of the security forces, and 995 were civilians, killed in Palestinian attacks in Israel and the Occupied Territories. The year with the highest number of Israeli casualties was 2002; 420 persons were killed, of them 269 were civilians, including 47 minors, and 151 members of the security forces. 1999 was also the year with the lowest level of Israeli casualties, which numbered 4.

House demolition

Israel demolished at least 4300 homes in the Occupied Territories in the years 1989-2009, either for being built without a permit, or as punishment. This figure does not include the destruction of property justified for military necessity. This type of demolition include 3540 houses demolished during operation Cast Lead alone, and an estimated 2700 homes demolished during previous military incursions into Gaza.

Administrative detention

In November 1989, 1,794 Palestinians were held by Israel in administrative detention, a detention without trial. Today the number of administrative detainees is 335. The lowest number of administrative detainees, 12, was registered in December 2000. The highest number of those held without trial during the second intifada was 1,007, in January 2003.

Settlements

The last two decades saw a substantial increase in the number of Israelis living over the Green Line (the 1949 armistice line). In 1989, the settlement population was 69,800 in the West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem), and 118,100 in East Jerusalem. Today, over 300,000 Israelis live in the West Bank, as well as about 190,000 in East Jerusalem.

Casualty figures are from 1.1.1989-31.10.2009. Additional statistics, including the breakdown of Palestinian casualties according to participation in the hostilities, here.

The US-based Anti-Defamation League is usually far more interested in slamming critics of Israel, but its latest report makes for sobering reading:

Since the election of Barack Obama as president, a current of anti-government hostility has swept across the United States, creating a climate of fervor and activism with manifestations ranging from incivility in public forums to acts of intimidation and violence.

What characterizes this anti-government hostility is a shared belief that Obama and his administration actually pose a threat to the future of the United States. Some accuse Obama of plotting to bring socialism to the United States, while others claim he will bring about Nazism or fascism. All believe that Obama and his administration will trample on individual freedoms and civil liberties, due to some sinister agenda, and they see his economic and social policies as manifestations of this agenda. In particular anti-government activists used the issue of health care reform as a rallying point, accusing Obama and his administration of dark designs ranging from “socialized medicine” to “death panels,” even when the Obama administration had not come out with a specific health care reform plan. Some even compared the Obama administration’s intentions to Nazi eugenics programs.

Some of these assertions are motivated by prejudice, but more common is an intense strain of anti-government distrust and anger, colored by a streak of paranoia and belief in conspiracies. These sentiments are present both in mainstream and “grass-roots” movements as well as in extreme anti-government movements such as a resurgent militia movement. Ultimately, this anti-government anger, if it continues to grow in intensity and scope, may result in an increase in anti-government extremists and the potential for a rise of violent anti-government acts.

Two recent articles in the Israeli press indicate the direction some of the Middle East debate is moving. Praise the “moderate” Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad while ignoring the ever-growing colonies in the West Bank. We should always be suspicious when occupiers praise the occupied:

First, David Horowitz in the Jerusalem Post:

Steadily and methodically, the PA prime minister is putting together the central constituents of Palestinian statehood. Steadily and methodically, too, he is gathering international support for statehood – not solely from the automatic backers of a sovereign Palestine, but also from the nations most committed to Israel’s well-being, notably the United States.

To one side stood Sen. Joe Lieberman, the former vice presidential candidate. To the other stood Rep. Howard Berman, the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. And as these two staunch Jewish supporters of Israel nodded their encouragement, the Palestinian Authority’s Prime Minister Salam Fayyad explained at a press conference in Ramallah on Sunday precisely how he was preparing the Palestinians for statehood.

“The proclamation of statehood is for the PLO to decide, at the right time, in due course,” the compact, dapper Fayyad declared, neatly sidestepping this week’s controversy over plans by his boss, PA President Mahmoud Abbas, to seek new international backing for Palestinian sovereignty everywhere beyond the pre-1967 lines.

The task of the PA, Fayyad went on, is to “ensure effective, corruption-free institutions, building a state that lives up to the aspirations of its people. When we approach it this way, we stand a good chance of getting the support of the international community.”

Within two years, Fayyad concluded, the goal is “to have strong and competent institutions of state that will make the issue of state proclamation a formality.”

Brisk and understated, Fayyad cuts an impressive figure, but it is his achievements over the past two and a half years as prime minister that have impressed members of the international community – Israel and the United States emphatically among them.

The Israeli security establishment affirms that the 2,200 members of the PA’s Jordanian-trained security forces are coordinating more effectively with Israel than was ever previously the case, and performing more efficiently in bringing law and order to Palestinian cities.

And here is Nahum Barnea in Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth:

Grand Park is the most luxurious hotel in Ramallah. On Sunday afternoon, Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad held a press conference there. About 20 local reporters, security people, Fayyad, US Senator Joe Lieberman and others from a US congressional delegation, crowded into a small room at the end of a corridor. There was a smell of cigarettes in the air. There was a definite lack of oxygen.

The right to the first question was given to Ha’aretz reporter Amira Hass. She had two. The first was for Fayyad. She reminded him that three people from his village of Deir al-Ghosoon had been arrested by the IDF for demonstrating against the separation fence. How can you talk about an agreement with Israel when this is what Israel does, she admonished.

She asked Lieberman how he, as a Jew, could accept Israel’s discriminatory attitude toward minorities.

Both felt awkward. Lieberman is not used to having his origins thrown at him.  “What could I say,” he told me afterwards with a sad smile. “I said I supported the establishment of two states.” Fayyad met with me and Yedioth Ahronoth reporter Roni Shaked again, the next day, in his Ramallah office.  I asked him how he felt. He was amused. “For some people, I’m not loyal enough to Palestine,” he said. “Many of them are Israelis.”

The Americans—Congress people and administration officials—admire Fayyad. In the expanse between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea, there is no living politician whom they admire more. Like a series of politicians educated in the United States who settled in eastern Europe and the Third World, he knows how to talk to them in their language, their values, their temperament. And in contrast to the destructive legacy of Palestinian politics, he is not addicted to victimhood, he does not put his fate in other’s hands, those of Arab rulers or suicide bombers. He takes action.

His source of inspiration is David Ben-Gurion and the Zionist enterprise that preceded the establishment of the State of Israel. “The State of Israel,” says Fayyad, “was not established in 1948. It was declared in 1948. The state was established earlier, in the course of years of building institutions. When I say this on the Palestinian street, I’m accused of being a Zionist.”

My following book review appears today in Sydney’s Sun Herald newspaper:

Republican Gomorrah: Inside the Movement That Shattered the Party
Max Blumenthal
(Nation Books, $49.95)
Reviewed by Antony Loewenstein

Christian fundamentalists have taken over the Republican Party. “It’s become the party of birthers, deathers and Civil War re-enacters,” Max Blumenthal told the Los Angeles Times last month. Last year’s vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin – anti-abortion, pro-war, pro-torture, anti-Islam and evangelical – epitomised the new, radical America: parochial, intolerant yet homely. “She’s bright and a blank page,” said a former White House official working at the neo-conservative American Enterprise Institute. The world is aching to be ruled by Washington or at least controlled by it. This book explains the fears and power inherent in this ideology.

Blumenthal is known for making short films documenting the Christian Right and publishes regularly in The Huffington Post, The Nation and The Daily Beast. He’s an unconventional figure, largely allowing his subjects – gun nuts, anti-Semites and Barack Obama haters – to speak in their own words. George W. Bush and Karl Rove were just two of the most recent individuals to push this agenda on a national stage and gained considerable political power in the process. Fear is a rallying tool.

During last year’s Republican National Convention, the writer observes a hard truth about the party that nominated John McCain but almost forced him to select Palin to appease the radical base of the party: “Almost exclusively white, overwhelmingly evangelical, fixated on abortion, homosexuality and abstinence education; resentful and angry and unable to discuss how and why it has become this way.”

Fox News’s Glenn Beck today speaks for some of these people (despite his occasional criticism of the Republicans.) In mid-October, he again called for a return to a “simpler time” in America, a past that never existed except in the minds of those who conveniently ignore the fact that America was a society based on racial apartheid less than 50 years ago.

Blumenthal gives a potted history of the key cultural figures in the Christian Right – James Dobson founded Focus on the Family in the 1970s and shot to fame with a best-selling book that encouraged beating children into submission to restore respect for God – and explains how a “culture of personal crisis” thrives in its bowels. “This culture is the mortar that bonds leaders and followers together,” Blumenthal writes. A politician beat his wife, cheated on her or picked up a gigolo in a male toilet? Christian-oriented solutions can soothe the aches and pains of Middle America (and resurrect flailing careers).

Witness possible future Republican presidential nominee Newt Gingrich, who after failed marriages prostrated himself before Dobson in 2007 almost to ask for forgiveness and now enjoys considerable backing from the radical fringe. His conversion to Catholicism was a shameless attempt to use his own personal crisis to generate sympathy and power. Blumenthal’s book is littered with similar examples.

Perhaps the most striking element of this work is how prescient it has become (the book entered The New York Times bestseller list within weeks of its release). The bitter, sometimes racist campaign against Obama is symptomatic of the rot (though there are many reasons why one would oppose the Democratic Party, from the war in Afghanistan to its policy on the occupation of Palestine).

But appropriation of the most extreme segments of political thought now defines the Republicans. Take its moves last month to investigate America’s leading Muslim advocacy group for wanting to place Muslim interns as aides in congressional offices. Or a leader of the so-called Tea Party movement opposing Obama’s healthcare plan accusing the President of being an “Indonesian Muslim turned welfare thug and a racist in chief”.

The point isn’t that these views exist and always will; it’s that they are being amplified and supported by leading figures in America’s alternative ruling class. Blumenthal questions the moral code of a party that supports water-boarding but doesn’t tolerate a woman’s right to choose.

Republican Gomorrah is both new and old history, the trajectory of a vocal minority of Americans who both fear the world and want to control it.

It’s a sober warning that as most of the Western world moves towards a more tolerant, secular future, the United States may embrace a doctrine of radical exclusion.