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Posts Tagged ‘Middle East peace’
July 18th, 2012 at 12:55 pm
The Perversity of “Doing Something” for It’s Own Sake
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With most media attention focused on the thrust and parry of the presidential race, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s 13-day trip abroad garnered precious little media attention. That’s a shame, because an important message came out of the Secretary’s stop in Israel. It just wasn’t the one she intended. As Seth Mandel notes at Commentary‘s “Contentions” blog:

According to an Israeli official who was briefed on the content of the meetings, Clinton told the different Israeli officials that Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Salam Fayyad are the best partners the Israelis ever had, adding that “it is unclear who will come after them.”

If Abbas and Fayyad–who resolutely refuse to even meet with Israeli leaders face to face–are the best Palestinian “peace partners” Israel has ever had, it is clear the peace process has gone practically nowhere since it began.

Mandel is precisely right. Peace in the Middle East is such a talisman to American presidents that they often stop thinking about the quality of any potential deal, looking solely for the achievement. That’s easy to do when you’re thinking of it as nothing more than a wing in your presidential library, but harder when you’re considering the lives of the people on the ground.

We may be waiting beyond our lifetimes for meaningful peace in the Middle East. But that’s a far preferable outcome to an agreement reached in haste that condemns the region to increased strife in coming years.

July 7th, 2011 at 11:06 pm
Senior UN Official Caught Peddling Anti-Semitic Cartoon
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It should come as no surprise given the United Nations’ disgusting Goldstone Report (blaming Israel for war crimes during the Gaza war) and the body’s seeming rush to recognize Palestinian statehood, but it seems that the UN’s envoy for human rights in the Palestinian territories has been freelancing in just the kind of anti-semitism that is the trademark of Turtle Bay. Alana Goodman at Commentary’s Contentions blog has the story (our more sensitive readers should note that the linked cartoon will be deeply offensive to most decent sensibilities):

The controversy began when Richard Falk, the UN envoy for human rights in the Palestinian territories, posted a cartoon of a yarmulke-wearing dog chewing on a bloody skeleton and urinating on Lady Justice on his personal blog last month.

 After he was confronted about the cartoon’s anti-Semitic connotations, he initially denied posting it. “It is a complete lie,” he reportedly wrote on his blog. “I know nothing about such a cartoon, and would never publish such a thing, ever.” A few minutes later, Falk backtracked, removing the post from his blog and explaining he “didn’t realize that it could be viewed as anti-Semitic, and still do not realize.”

And now Falk has finally issued an “apology,” clarifying that he opposes any denigration of individuals “based on ethnicity, race, religion, stage of development.”

“My intention has never been to demean in any way Jews as a people despite my strong criticisms of Israeli policies, and some versions of Zionist support,” said Falk.

There can be little question that Falk is profoundly stupid. But one wonders if — just maybe — the institutional culture at the UN is such that passing around this kind of filth falls within the range of acceptable (or at least tolerable) behavior.

It’s good that the cartoon is no longer on his blog. It would be better if the ideas that inspired it were no longer in the United Nations.

May 20th, 2011 at 3:25 pm
The Netanyahu Rejection
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Yesterday, we noted that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was headed to his Washington meeting with President Obama ready for confrontation after the the president unilaterally changed the proposed terms for Middle East peace.

Unlike Obama (he of the “limited engagement” in Libya), a promise from Netanyahu means something. And he made that apparent within the White House walls earlier today. Reuters reports: 

 

Netanyahu’s remarks after the White House talks underscored how a new U.S. push for Middle East peace had opened one of the deepest divides in years in relations between the United States and close ally Israel.

“Peace based on illusions will crash eventually on the rocks of Middle East reality,” an unsmiling Netanyahu told Obama in the Oval Office.

Netanyahu told Obama that Israel was willing to make compromises for peace but flatly rejected the idea of going back to 1967 borders, which he described as “indefensible.”

The hubris by which Obama thought he could dictate terms for Middle East peace is breathtaking. The fact that these terms were disproportionately unfavorable to one of our closest allies even more so. But the insult added to this injury was that the Israelis apparently received no advanced notification of the policy shift and that it was announced on the eve of their prime minister’s visit to Washington. The best possible reading of the Obama Administration’s behavior is halting incompetence. The worst (and more likely) is that it was a calculated insult. Given that fact, Netanyahu was totally within his rights to return the favor.

May 19th, 2011 at 9:27 pm
How Not to Welcome a Guest
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President Obama welcomes (if that’s the word) Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to the White House on Friday. Oh, to be a fly on that wall.

The president chose to spend the day before his meeting with the head of the Jewish state’s government calling on Israel to return to its 1967 borders, meaning that it would give up all claims to the West Bank, East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the Golan Heights — all of which are essential to Israeli security as long as the nation is surrounded by enemies.

Don’t expect Netanyahu to roll over. As the New York Times reports:

Mr. Netanyahu said in a pointed statement just before boarding a plane to Washington that while he appreciated Mr. Obama’s commitment to peace, he “expects to hear a reaffirmation from President Obama of American commitments made to Israel in 2004 which were overwhelmingly supported by both Houses of Congress.”

Those commitments came in a letter from President George W. Bush which stated, among other things that “it is unrealistic to expect that the outcome of final status negotiations will be a full and complete return to the armistice lines of 1949,” another way of describing the 1967 boundaries.

The next time Obama chooses to be so imperious with his prescriptions for Middle East peace, he’d do well to remember one of the salient differences between himself and the Israeli Prime Minister: only the latter’s consent is essential for a deal.

November 8th, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Who Spiked Tom Friedman’s Drink?
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On most days, the New York Times’ opinion page is a gallery of liberal stereotypes. There’s Maureen Dowd, whose “liberating” neo-feminism somehow renders her as joyless as a puritan schoolmarm; Frank Rich, the kind of “tolerant” liberal whose Cliff’s Notes understanding of history leaves with him only three totalitarian regimes to compare Republicans to; and then there’s Thomas Friedman

Friedman is inarguably the Times’ greatest success story. His books are consistent best-sellers and he’s a regular fixture on television and the lecture circuit. This mostly owes to the fact that Friedman substitutes enthusiasm for erudition. He’s an emotive presenter, but his ideas usually center around haute couture social engineering (his affection for “the green economy”) or aging conventional wisdom (how “The World is Flat” became a hit over a decade after globalization was a household concept is beyond me).

I introduce these criticisms as penance for what I’m about to say: Thomas Friedman has gotten something completely and commendably right.

In his new column, “Call White House, Ask for Barack” (a title that owes to a wonderfully direct James Baker quote featured in the piece), Friedman argues that it’s time to throw up our hands and leave the Israeli-Palestinian peace process behind … at least until an outside factor motivates the parties towards substantive work.  It’s a rare tour de force and an enticing look into what a significant public intellectual Friedman could be if he spent less time on fashionable shibboleths. Among the best passages:

It is obvious that this Israeli government believes it can have peace with the Palestinians and keep the West Bank, this Palestinian Authority still can’t decide whether to reconcile with the Jewish state or criminalize it and this Hamas leadership would rather let Palestinians live forever in the hellish squalor that is Gaza than give up its crazy fantasy of an Islamic Republic in Palestine.

A rare — but decisive — win.  Here’s hoping to more like this from Friedman.