The Israeli press reflects the worry in the establishment: Secretary of State Hillary Clinton said this weekend that no agreement to continued settlement expansion existed. Clinton is right. No such agreement exists, existed or is likely ever to exist. The issue isn’t what she said, but the tone that was used. Once upon a time,…
Showing all posts tagged West Bank
Jews who need a good, long hug
Gideon Levy writes in Haaretz about the worthlessness and bigotry of the settlers in the West Bank and receives this comment (from Australia): It is people like Gideon Levy who do more harm to Israel than any anti-semite any where else could, simply because the fact that he`s *Israeli*, gives him the credibility to undermine…
Lower expectations, don’t buy the spin
Jennifer Loewenstein (no relation) writes in Counterpunch that we shouldn’t expect too much from Obama when it comes to the Middle East: Obama’s brilliance in embracing the self-same rejectionist stance of his predecessors, by employing the language of the two-state solution, is equaled only by Netanyahu’s honesty in rejecting any such reality. For Obama, the…
It has to end, now
Has Israel forgotten who pays the bills? Just after US President Barack Obama’s landmark address in Cairo, and just before US Mideast envoy George Mitchell returns to the region on Tuesday, the dispute between Washington and Jerusalem over settlement construction ratcheted up a notch. Israeli officials rejected on Saturday a statement by US Secretary of…
Changes may be coming
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg: It seems to me that Obama is trying to force the collapse of Netanyahu’s government. I base this mostly on intuition. Of course, the Obama Administration would never claim to be interfering in the internal politics of another country, but it seems obvious that Netanyahu’s narrow coalition won’t survive sustained American…
The temptation to expand was there from the beginning
Tom Segev writes in Haaretz that Israel could have once chosen peace but as usual decided to pursue Greater Israel: On December 5, 1967, then-chief of staff Lt. Gen. Yitzhak Rabin suggested to prime minister Levi Eshkol that a Palestinian state be established in the West Bank. The minutes of that conversation are kept today…
The settlers marinate
The Financial Times provides a necessary cold shower to those who think President Barack Obama’s talk about Middle East peace is realistic in the short-term: The Palestinians, in any case, have little hope of winning a reprieve from the settlements in the near future. The farming village of Jeet in the northern West Bank, for…
Obama in Cairo
My following article was published today on the popular US website Mondoweiss: Back in 2005, then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a rousing speech at Cairo’s American University. “For sixty years”, she argued, “my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East…
Counting all the illegal colonialists
Jonathan Cook writes how the bulk of the Western media based in Israel proper ignore the illegal, Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem: There are about half a million Jews living illegally on land occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Give or take the odd few thousand (Israel is slow to update its figures), there…
Oh yes, those poor, little kids
Is this a joke? Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House foreign affairs subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, said focusing on settlement activity “detracts” from top U.S. goals in the region. However, he added: “I do not support a settlement freeze that calls on Israeli families not to grow, get…