The storm that has hit the Middle East obliges each state to choose whether to enter the scientific age or not. If it does not, it will have no growth. The great and intriguing debate in Egypt today is about the constitution, in effect about whether to give women freedom or not. It is here that the Arab Spring will be judged. President Obama asked me who I think is preventing democracy in the Middle East. I told him, “The husbands.” The husband does not want his wife to have equal rights. Without equal rights, it will be impossible to save Egypt, because if women are not educated, the children are not educated. People who cannot read and write can’t make a living. They are finished.
Rabin's widow called Netanyahu a 'nightmare'
Leah Rabin, the late widow of assassinated premier Yitzhak Rabin, used words such as “nightmare,” “monstrosity,” “corrupt” and “liar” to describe Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in letters she wrote over a decade ago that have recently been obtained by Haaretz.
In November 1998, about two weeks after the third anniversary of the assassination, Leah wrote: “I hope, pray, that the days of this government are numbered. Benjamin Netanyahu is a corrupt individual, a contentious liar who is ruining everything that is good about our society. He is breaking it to bits, and in the future, we will have to rebuild it all over.”
In March 1999, she wrote in a similar vein: “We all want this nightmare to end, that this monstrosity called Netanyahu will get lost, because he exhausted our patience a long time ago.”
Leah also stressed in her letters that her husband had always opposed the settlements and supported giving up the West Bank.
We need to flatten entire neighborhoods in Gaza. Flatten all of Gaza.
Gilad Sharon, son of form Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, writing for the Jerusalem Post.
Ugly and stupid.
It’s perfectly understandable, of course, that with the nation on the cusp of combat, its media would rally around the flag. But it’s also not too much to ask that among the din of the tum-tums, journalists deliver more sober assessments of what lies ahead. As usual, this job falls to Ha’aretz, and to it alone. In a terrific piece, the newspaper’s editor, Aluf Benn, reminded his readers that Israeli prime ministers have a habit of mounting major military operations a few months before they are up for re-election—Ehud Olmert, for example, did it in 2009 with Operation Cast Lead in Gaza, and Shimon Peres in 1996 with Operation Grapes of Wrath in Lebanon—and that such operations, historically, have a way of yielding very little results except for crushing political defeats to those who orchestrated them.
Religious leaders call on Congress to reevaulate military aid to Israel
As Christian leaders in the United States, it is our moral responsibility to question the continuation of unconditional U.S. financial assistance to the government of Israel. Realizing a just and lasting peace will require this accountability, as continued U.S. military assistance to Israel — offered without conditions or accountability — will only serve to sustain the status quo and Israel’s military occupation of the Palestinian territories….We request, therefore, that Congress hold Israel accountable to these standards by making the disbursement of U.S. military assistance to Israel contingent on the Israeli government’s compliance with applicable U.S. laws and policies.
Romney has said, Anybody could have decided to finish bin Laden. Even [Jimmy] Carter. This again was a mistaken concept. President Obama didn’t just decide [one day to kill bin Laden]. The operation to end the life of bin Laden necessitated multiple points of decision by him. I know from operations I have been involved with on a smaller scale.
They are very intricate. You don’t just give the order and wait in your office for commanders to come three months later and say it’s done. No. This kind of operation, which is accident prone, hands on operation, one has to make one decision after the other […] It took courage and cool headedness and leadership. Anyone who says it was an easy thing to decide, doesn’t understand what he’s talking about. [Such comments] show a total lack of understanding of what this kind of operation means.
As long as Netanyahu is Israel’s prime minister, Israel is not our ally. It’s a liability, undermining US foreign policy in the most important struggle we still face: Jihadist violence.
In 1992…
Israeli parliamentarian Benjamin Netanyahu tells his colleagues that Iran is 3 to 5 years from being able to produce a nuclear weapon – and that the threat had to be “uprooted by an international front headed by the US.”
“President Obama has thrown allies like Israel under a bus.”
- Mitt Romney, in his convention speech.
“Our countries are good friends. And I’m the minister of defense, I can tell you that I can hardly remember — I was in uniform for decades — I can hardly remember a better period of support, American support and cooperation and similar strategic understanding of events around us than what we have right now.”
- Israeli Minister of Defense Ehud Barak, 5/2012
“Mr. President, I know your commitment to Israel is deep and profound. And under your leadership, security cooperation between the United States and Israel reached its highest level.”
- Israeli President Shimon Peres, 3/2012
The Palestine Romney doesn’t know
Palestinians have no say in our economic development. Every resource — water, land, soil, minerals, airspace, humans — is controlled and commandeered by Israel, which then deigns to sell us back a small portion.
In the West Bank, for example, Israeli settlers consume on average 4.3 times the amount of water as Palestinians. In the Jordan Valley alone, some 9,000 settlers in Israeli agricultural settlements use one-quarter the amount of water consumed by the entire Palestinian population of the West Bank, about 2.5 million people.
Palestinians have no control over our borders. This means we cannot import or export without being subject to discriminatory measures by our occupier. It also means that, without Israeli permission, we cannot hire experts to enhance our employees’ skills or send employees for overseas training.
Worse, we are restricted within the territories ostensibly under our “control.” At any given time, there are more than 500 Israeli checkpoints, roadblocks and other barriers to movement within the occupied West Bank — an area smaller than Delaware — hindering Palestinians and their goods from moving between their own towns and cities and the outside world.
Palestinian development of all kinds is severely hindered by the Israeli occupation. Yet Palestinians have not given up. Palestine has one of the highest literacy rates in the Arab world. Our youth continue to graduate from our universities, opening businesses and gaining skills. Our private sector innovates and grows.
All of this is happening on the 22 percent of historic Palestine that is the West Bank and Gaza. If Romney had any historical perspective, he would dispose of his racist judgments about Palestinian culture and instead imagine our potential without Israel’s imposed hindrances.
Israel To Destroy Palestinian Solar Panels
Electricity from solar panels and wind turbines has revolutionized life in rural Palestinian herding communities: Machines, instead of hands, churn goat milk into butter, refrigerators store food that used to spoil and children no longer have to hurry to get their homework done before dark.
But the German-funded project, initiated by Israeli volunteers, is now in danger. Israeli authorities are threatening to demolish the installations in six of the 16 remote West Bank communities being illuminated by alternative energy, arguing the panels and turbines were installed without permits.
Obama, the first U.S. president to tell AIPAC the truth
Obama’s AIPAC speech is the bill the president is submitting to Netanyahu for the dinners that the Israeli prime minister thought he had gotten for free. The time has come to pay for American opposition to the Goldstone commission report on the Israeli incursion in Gaza and the veto of the UN Security Council’s condemnation of construction in West Bank settlements. Obama denied Netanyahu the opportunity to exercise a veto on the terms for negotiations with the Palestinians. The U.S. president said that negotiations could not be conducted with Hamas as long as the organization does not recognize Israel’s right to exist, refuses to accept existing international obligations and engages in terrorism. The Palestinian party to the negotiations was and remains the Palestine Liberation Organization and not Hamas.
Obama also rejected Netanyahu’s demand that negotiations begin based on the principle of Palestinian recognition of Israel as the nation-state of the Jewish people. The president was careful to speak about both parties’ right to self-determination. Period.
Netanyahu believes that US power is forever and that the US political consensus to support Israel in almost any policy choice it makes will never change. So he can simply ignore the currents of history and international affairs and thumb his nose at every other country in the world. But neither is true. Most of Israel’s leaders and all the giants of early Zionism — who are demeaned even to be compared to Netanyahu — realized this.
Jamila al-Habash, a 16-year-old student from the Tufah neighborhood in Gaza city was hit by a missile while playing on the roof of her house on 4 January 2009. One of her sisters and a cousin were killed in the same attack. The photograph is from ‘The Book of Destruction’ by Kai Wiedenhofer.
