AFP – Israel’s premier on Friday briefly met the parents of captive soldier Gilad Shalit who have set up camp outside his official residence in Jerusalem, his office said.
AP – More than 15,000 Israelis marched into Jerusalem on Thursday and rallied at a park downtown for the government to conclude a deal for the release of a captive soldier held by Palestinian militants.
By offering nothing new, Israel keeps wrong footing Washington, writes Khaled Amayreh from occupied Jerusalem
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Supporters of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit are due in Jerusalem after a 12-day march aimed at securing his release.
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The parents of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit begin a long march to Jerusalem to press for his release, four years after his capture.
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AP – Israel’s decision to expel four Hamas politicians from Jerusalem threatened to set off a new crisis over the disputed city and could hinder U.S. efforts to restart peace talks.
Despite being 60 kilometres from coast, Jerusalem is about to get its first beach.
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A commenter left a question about yesterday’s links, regarding my reservations about Ali Abunimah’s post on Noam Chomky’s attitude towards Salam Fayyad. There’s an excellent article addressing Fayyad’s difficult position in The Economist:
A PORTLY official from the office of the Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, planted a kiss on Musa Abu Mariya’s right eye, enveloped him in a bear hug and sped off in his sport utility vehicle trailing a cloud of dust. Mr Abu Mariya organises protests in Beit Omar, a town on the West Bank, against Israel’s appropriation of land for settlements and security walls that can cut through Palestinian farms and hurt the villagers’ livelihood. As official visits go, it was better than most. But the kiss left Mr Abu Mariya squirming. These days he no longer knows whether the pre-dawn knock on his door heralds Israeli or Palestinian security men. In recent weeks, both have hauled him off to their prisons.
The Palestinian official’s visit illustrates the dilemma faced by the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Mr Fayyad. Publicly, the PA celebrates Mr Abu Mariya’s peaceful protests beneath Israel’s concrete watch-towers. His sit-downs in Beit Omar, on the main road that Jewish settlers use between Jerusalem and Hebron, the biggest Palestinian city in the southern part of the West Bank, chime with the PA’s own boycott of anything to do with the settlements. The PA recently gave the 25,000-odd Palestinians who work in them until the end of the year to give up their jobs or face up to five years in jail. And both the protesters and the PA share the common aim of ending the occupation in the 80% of the West Bank, known as Areas B and C, that are controlled directly by the Israeli army.
Yet the increasingly vocal protests by Mr Abu Mariya and others like him are disturbing the quiet that the PA has preserved since Israel crushed the Palestinians’ second intifada(uprising) some four years ago and that has given Mr Fayyad the space to start building a state from the bottom up. While the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, looks to American-mediated negotiations, which have just resumed indirectly, to bring about a future Palestinian state, Mr Fayyad has used the calm to try to resuscitate the economy and train security forces. Should protests, now concentrated in the rural parts of the West Bank and numbering around 40 a week, turn violent, Israel may once again feel obliged to rumble in and upset the PA’s plans. “Things are happening outside the cities beyond our control,” says a PA security official. “You can ride the tiger, but you have no idea where it is heading.”
Read more of the article for the impossible situation Fayyad is in, as well as some of the security provision he provides for the Israelis. The lesson I would take from it is that, with the failure of the political process almost certain, West Bankers should not rush, but make the next intifada one that counts (like the first before it was subverted by Arafat and Fatah and unlike the second, which led nowhere.) There needs to be strategic as well as tactical thinking.
Eldar/ Haaretz/ here
In an overtly self-deprecating comment last week during a meeting with Jewish congressmen, U.S. President Barack Obama said he had stepped on a few mines as he took his first steps in the Middle East. The delegation left the White House assuaged, feeling perhaps that a president who has been hurt by mines would be wary of much bigger bombs. It appears that the Obama administration has realized that it will not succeed where its predecessors have failed. If no peace with the Arabs emerges from the president’s initiative, why should he fight with the Jews? When Republicans are threatening to take over the House of Representatives in six months, it’s not so bad if the Israeli occupation continues for another 43 years.
Obama’s efforts to woo Jewish politicians are like our secular politicians who make a pilgrimage to Rabbi Ovadia Yosef. The meeting with the congressmen was preceded by one with Elie Wiesel – his dinner with the president after the Nobel peace laureate called on the administration to remove Jerusalem from the negotiations. Also, two senior members of the National Security Council at the White House were sent to calm the leadership of the Anti-Defamation League. And White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel held private talks with a group of concerned rabbis. All went home pleased; they were promised that Obama would not pressure Benjamin Netanyahu’s government to give back land. In simpler words: They don’t want peace; there is no need for it.
It’s possible that Obama’s withdrawal from his vision of peace (“when Jerusalem is a secure and lasting home for Jews and Christians and Muslims …. It is time for these settlements to stop …. T he continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza does not serve Israel’s security,” Cairo address, June 4, 2009 ) will open the purses of a handful of Jewish donors to his party. However, it’s not at all certain that a business-as-usual approach toward a right-wing government in Israel will improve Obama’s lot among Jewish voters . The vast majority of them are not interested in the ethnic origin of their congressmen. Very few know the names of the Jewish congressmen who are being presented to them by Obama and his aides.
In his flight out of the Middle Eastern minefield, the U.S. president stepped on a homemade mine. He failed to address the steady weakening of the link between the Jewish community in the United States and the Jewish community in Israel. The vast majority (78 percent ) of Jewish voters voted for Obama and Democratic candidates for Congress. Peter Beinart, who comes from an Orthodox Jewish family, describes in the New York Review of Books the growing alienation of American Jews from the Zionist idea. These are mostly the young ones.
Obama’s Jewish camp is not buying the message of the poor weakling that the right wing is selling with some success in the local market. A Jewish student at Princeton feels greater affinity to his Muslim classmates than to Effi Eitam, Netanyahu’s public-relations messenger to U.S. university campuses who is calling for the eviction of Arab MKs from the Knesset. A Jewish lawyer in Los Angeles doesn’t see which justice serves as the basis for throwing a Palestinian family, refugees from the Jerusalem neighborhood of Katamon, out of their home in Sheikh Jarrah, only to put in their place settlers from the extreme right. The Jewish lecturer in Boston finds it hard to explain to his children why Israelis prevented his colleague, Prof. Noam Chomsky, from speaking at Bir Zeit University.
Unfortunately, Obama’s mine is our bomb; over the years, U.S. Jewry has become one of the Zionist movement’s most strategic assets. This influential community’s link to the historic homeland and its influence on centers of power in the United States is one of the cornerstones of Israel’s deterrence. The damage caused by the Netanyahu government to this core support of American Jews is no better than the threat of a nuclear Iran.
“….. If the Obama administration wants to leave any kind of decent mark in history for its handling of the Middle East—pretty poor so far—it should do something right now that would clear the air and save Mitchell the four months he’s allocated. It’s simple. Just invite the Palestinians to do what the Israelis have done for decades, which is to declare in the language of their own people that both sides have genuine claims to this land (not really!), that both sides have the right to live in peace, and that a viable compromise is possible….The Israelis are clearly prepared to live with a Palestinian state along their borders. The trouble is precisely that the Palestinians are not….. Decades of terrorism have left Israelis demoralized about the potential of negotiations…..
What will make it difficult for the Israelis to be forthcoming in the brokered negotiations with the Palestinians is the widespread concern that this administration, unlike others going back to the Truman years, lacks a basic commitment to Israel, or sympathy for it…. the Israelis no longer believe that the American commitment to Israel is rock-solid. They have witnessed the erosion of U.S. support for Israel at the United Nations and more recently at the International Atomic Energy Agency. The United States has taken public positions on the settlement freeze and Jerusalem that enhanced the expectations of the Palestinians, who cannot be less pro-Palestinian than the White House and, therefore, cannot climb down from the positions taken by the U.S. administration.
… When the Israelis left Lebanon (UNDER DURESS!), Iran operated through its proxy, Hezbollah; when the Israelis left Gaza, Iran went in through Hamas, and all the U.N. and international guarantees failed to stop the attacks….Obama clearly wonders whether the current Israeli prime minister is serious about making peace……”
Learn To Read And Write Arabic
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