Ask any tea grower in Sri Lanka or banana farmer in Cameroon and they’ll tell you that Israel is seen as a global weapons provider, a political and economic power, an occupying and oppressing state.
Diplomacy
The disappearance of the two-state solution is triggering a third transformation, which is turning Israel from a democracy into an apartheid state. The democracy Israel provides for its (mostly) Jewish citizens cannot hide its changed character. A democracy reserved for privileged citizens while all others are denied individual and national rights and kept behind checkpoints, barbed wire fences and separation walls manned by Israel’s military, is not democracy.
If anyone still had doubts about an imminent conflict with Iran, it was removed this week by the arrival of the U.S. army chief in Israel… [Mullen] stuck to the message he was sent here to convey: that he is concerned by the “unexpected consequences” of an Israeli attack on Iran. Mullen’s remarks, made in public even before his first meeting with his Israeli hosts, immediately dictated the tone of Israeli media would adopt to cover his visit.
[O]n Thursday, officials appeared to harden their rhetoric. Mr. Miliband, who had been briefed on the meeting with the Israeli ambassador, said that it was made clear “how seriously” the U.K. takes the fraudulent use of British passports. “We want to give Israel every opportunity to share with us what they know about this incident,” he said.
Reut says the campaign is the work of a worldwide network of private individuals and organizations. They have no hierarchy or overall commander, but work together based on a joint ideology – portraying Israel as a pariah state and denying its right to exist.
IOA Editor: Conveniently, Israel’s ‘experts’ equate criticism of Israeli actions — mostly, directly connected to the Occupation, and the Occupation itself — for which Israel has deservedly earned the title “pariah state,” with denial of its right to exist. This is an old Hasbara trick: You criticize us, you’re really saying Israel has no right to exist. Left out of the discussion is “The right to exist as what?” As an occupying state? An Apartheid state? The term “delegitimization campaign” is actually turned on its head: It is the Israelis who are attempting to delegitimize their critics by calling them “delegitimizers,” trying to blur the distinctions between “delegitimizers” and anti-Semites, consistent with old Israeli propaganda practices: If you criticize us, and you’re not Jewish, you’re an anti-Semite. (And if you are Jewish, you’re sick – afflicted by “self-hate,” etc. See Ur Shlonsky’s recent email exchange on the Academic Boycott.) Those of us old enough have heard this some four decades ago.
The IOA is proud to be a very small part of the “worldwide network… [having] no hierarchy or overall commander…” We steadfastly reject the Occupation and strongly criticize Israel’s long record of violations of international law.
The Israeli parliament passed on first reading… a bill that would grant tax breaks to residents of the Golan Heights, a move likely to anger Syria from which Israel seized the territory. The bill, which needs to be approved at three further readings before becoming law, was supported by 67 of the 120 members of parliament.
IOA Editor: As most Israelis must know by now, Syria’s president Assad is ready to make peace with Israel based on the return of the Golan Heights to Syria. Now the Knesset has shown him that it is not threatened by his peace overtures, and that it would much rather have a piece of Syria than peace with Syria.
UPDATE: Syrian official: Golan benefits proves Israel doesn’t want peace
Late last night Occupation forces raided the Stop the Wall offices in Ramallah. Some 10 military jeeps, hummers and an armoured bus surrounded the building as soldiers searched rooms, turning the office upside down and confiscating computer hard disks, laptops, and video cameras along with paper documents, CDs, and video cassettes.
Every year since March 2002, Syria and the Palestine Liberation Organization have reiterated their support for the Arab peace initiative. Hopefully they will do so again next month at the Arab League summit in Tripoli. The initiative offers Israel normalization with all Arab League members in return for a withdrawal from all territories occupied in 1967.
Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem warned Israel on Wednesday about launching any war against his country, saying it would turn into a wider conflict. “Israelis, do not test the power of Syria since you know the war will move into your cities,” Muallem told journalists in the Syrian capital Damascus.
The wall of shame, as Egyptians call it, will complete the transformation of Gaza into an open-air prison. It is the cruellest example of the concerted Israeli-Egyptian-US policy to isolate and prevent Hamas from leading the Palestinian struggle for self-determination. Hamas is habitually dismissed by its enemies as a purely terrorist organisation. Yet no one can deny that it won a fair and free election in the West Bank as well as Gaza in January 2006.
Sharvit-Baruch… was concerned by the Goldstone report’s negative effect on Israel’s legitimacy in the global arena, and that Israel could potentially turn into “a kind of South Africa or Serbia” or a “criminal” or “racist” state in international opinion…. [S]he added, “We are now in a situation in which we need to give our friends – who don’t want to see lawsuits filed against us in their own courts – the tools to do away such claims, along with other charges against us,” she said. “If they need a commission of inquiry then that’s what we’ll give them,” she added.
IOA Editor: Israel is clearly very concerned about damage to its image in the aftermath of the Goldstone report. Yet, if there is any ‘regret’ here, it is strictly a tactical PR and legal issue: Let’s help our friends help us get out of the legal mess our own Gaza war-crimes put us in.
In a rare speech to an Israeli audience, Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad said Tuesday that Israel must show the Palestinians that it is beginning to roll back the occupation, and that the way to do that is primarily by stopping both settlement construction and IDF incursions into Palestinian areas.
IOA Editor: So, “it’s the Occupation, stupid,” eh? Some of us have been saying it for over four decades.
Also The Washington Post: Palestinian premier gives a key address…
Like the Clinton and Bush administrations… the idea that the United States ought to use its leverage and exert genuine pressure on Israel remains anathema to Obama, to Mitchell and his advisors, and to all those pundits who are trapped in the Washington consensus on this issue. The main organizations in the Israel lobby are of course dead-set against it — and that goes for J Street as well — even though there is no reason to expect Israel to change course in the absence of countervailing pressure.
IOA Editor: Whether effective lobbying or effective propaganda – Obama’s “cynical charade” – isn’t quite as obvious as Walt makes it sound.
The diplomatic stalemate and the provocations by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government in East Jerusalem harm not only the chance for peace in the future but also past fruits of peace. Fifteen years after the peace treaty between Israel and Jordan was signed, the two countries are now deep in a crisis the government is doing nothing to resolve.
The crisis with Jordan is much less public than the one with Turkey, but it is far more acute and stands in deep contrast both with the warm relationship of Netanyahu’s predecessor, Ehud Olmert, with the king, as well as Netanyahu’s close connection to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.
Israel will maintain a security presence along the eastern border of a future Palestinian state in order to prevent weapons smuggling, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Wednesday.
IOA Editor: This is part of the on-going Israeli snow-job, underway for years now: talking about the borders of the “future Palestinian state” while overwhelming the land of such conceptual state with Jewish settlements and urban neighborhoods thereby assuring that it can never materialize. The “rockets and missiles” excuse is particularly vacuous in that such missiles can be fired into Israel across far greater distances.
[I]n 1948, the Israelis wanted to create a state without Palestinians, and they almost succeeded in driving them out. In 1967, their victory reunited the refugees with those who had remained in Israel. We were scattered, they brought us back together. The Israelis are sowing their own failure by their success. The colonization of Jerusalem and the West Bank, which makes impossible a two-state solution, will force Israel to live with a sizable Arab population and to reconsider its democratic system.
IOA Editor: Sari Nusseibeh has long advocated the Two-State solution. After decades of relentless Israeli colonial settlement in the West Bank, he now sees it as a near-impossibility.
[A]s far as the Middle East is concerned, Mrs. Merkel has paid scant attention to the miserable living conditions of Palestinians in Gaza as well as Israel’s settlements and detention policies. German legislators and analysts say that of all chancellors of the postwar period, Mrs. Merkel is considered the most pro-Israeli. “The chancellor is particularly close to Israel.”
“The governments have failed to display the reactions that the world’s Muslims expected from them. And this has been a pitiful aspect of the matter,” Erdogan told reporters.
Akiva Eldar: Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told Abbas [in October 2009] that if he did not ask for a deferral of the vote on the critical report on last year’s military operation, Israel would turn the West Bank into a “second Gaza.”
IOA Editor: The “thugs” of Gaza, to quote former Israeli Foreign Minister Livni, don’t seem to hesitate repeating their crimes in the West Bank.
The power to arrest individuals reasonably suspected of war crimes anywhere in the world should they set foot on UK soil is an efficient and necessary resource in the struggle against war crimes, and must not be interfered with.
Also: British MP: Israel and Egypt’s blockade of Gaza is ‘evil’
Ayalon praised Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman’s policies. “His policy is proving to be effective. We will not allow a situation where every country will kick us. If there will be an attack on Israel, we will leave all options open, including the expulsion of ambassadors.”
IOA Editor: The “only democracy in the Middle East,” and one that cannot stand criticism.
Alon Liel, a former director-general of the Israeli foreign ministry and an expert on relations with Turkey, said Mr Ayalon’s treatment of the ambassador had made “Israeli diplomacy look ridiculous.”
IOA Editor: The “thugs” of Gaza, to quote former Israeli Foreign Minister Livni, let their thuggery spill into the diplomatic arena. No wonder they look ridiculous.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared on Tuesday that Israel would never cede control of united Jerusalem nor retreat to the 1967 borders, according to a statement.
Press reports highlighted the fact that Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon made Ambassador Ahmet Celikkol sit on a low couch while the Israelis sat on high chairs, as he reprimanded the envoy over a Turkish television thriller which portrays Israeli Mossad agents as baby-snatchers.
Egyptian FM Abul Gheit: “Egypt will no longer allow convoys, regardless of their origin or who is organising them, from crossing its territory”… Egypt accused Galloway, who once called at a London rally for the overthrow of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, of trying to embarrass the country, which has refused to permanently open its Rafah border crossing with Gaza.
More on Mubarak’s position in Seumas Milne’s Terror is the price of support for despots and dictators
Israel’s relentless drive to establish “facts on the ground” in the occupied West Bank, a drive that continues in violation of even the limited settlement freeze to which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu committed himself, seems finally to have succeeded in locking in the irreversibility of its colonial project. As a result of that “achievement,” one that successive Israeli governments have long sought in order to preclude the possibility of a two-state solution, Israel has crossed the threshold from “the only democracy in the Middle East” to the only apartheid regime in the Western world.
From the wider international perspective, it is precisely this western embrace of repressive and unrepresentative regimes such as Egypt’s, along with unwavering backing for Israel’s occupation and colonisation of Palestinian land, that is at the heart of the crisis in the Middle East and Muslim world… The poisonous logic of this imperial quagmire is now leading inexorably to the spread of war under Barack Obama.
The Palestinian Authority may be seeking renewed talks with Israel even in the absence of an Israeli freeze on settlements.
These days, it’s tough to find a used car with a bumper sticker that reads “Peace is better than a Greater Israel.” Nowadays, everyone seems to favor the latest formula: two states for two peoples.
Netanyahu has in essentially confirmed that he knew in advance that a limited settlement freeze wouldn’t bring the Palestinians back to the negotiating table. He could have bet that Abbas wouldn’t accept less than what the road map gave the Palestinians more than six years ago: a total freeze that includes natural growth and the immediate dismantling of all outposts established since March 2001.
Catherine Ashton… leveled scathing criticism at the “Israeli occupation,” in her first speech as the European Union’s first high representative for foreign affairs and security policy. The British stateswoman, who has also served as the Commissioner for Trade in the European Commission, said that in the EU’s view, “East Jerusalem is occupied territory, together with the West Bank.”
Former prime minister Ehud Olmert proposed giving the Palestinians land from communities bordering the Gaza Strip and from the Judean Desert nature reserve in exchange for settlement blocs in the West Bank.
