Yearly Archives: 2010

Hamas denied entry to Dubai after killing

From The National:

Dubai’s chief of police, Lt Gen Dahi Khalfan Tamim, confirmed that a Hamas delegation would not be allowed to enter the UAE following the slaying of one of its senior operatives in the emirate.

Mahmoud al Mabhouh was killed in his hotel room on January 20.

Gen Tamim said: “We will not allow a Hamas delegation to enter the country, and we will only deal with the Palestinian Embassy and consulate, which are the official representatives in the country. We do not acknowledge the differences. For us, there is only one Palestine, not two.”

There is frustration in Hamas’ Damascus offices over the way the UAE has handled the killing of al Mabhouh, who they say was a frequent visitor to Dubai.

Speaking on condition of anonymity, one senior Hamas official questioned the speed of Dubai’s response to the killing.

“Al Mabhouh was killed on January 20, but there was no announcement until 29 January. That’s almost 10 days. What was the reason for the delay?” he asked. “Such delays gave lots of time for the murderers to escape.”

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Mousavi: the Iranian revolution has failed to eradicate tyranny

From The National:

Iran’s main opposition leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, declared yesterday that the 1979 Islamic Revolution had failed to “eradicate the roots of tyranny and dictatorship” that marked the shah’s era.

His scathing remarks represented his strongest challenge to the Tehran government in months and came at an acutely sensitive time – as Iran marks the 31st anniversary of the revolution.

“Dictatorship in the name of religion is the worst kind. The most evident manifestation of a continued tyrannical attitude is the abuse of parliament and the judiciary. We have completely lost hope in the judiciary,” Mr Mousavi said in an interview on his website, Kaleme.org.

The government’s hardline supporters will be infuriated by Mr Mousavi’s suggestion that Iran is labouring under the yoke of a dictatorship similar to that under the ousted, western-backed shah, and his remarks will increase the risk of his arrest.

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Lebanon’s AK-47 index may be pointing to war

From The National:

[Abu Mahdi, an arms dealer in southern Beirut] says the high point for the price of the AK-47 was in the period of major Sunni and Shiite sectarian tension that preceded the May 2008 clashes between Hizbollah and its allies against groups of Sunnis loyal to the government.

“In the days before the action, I knew that something was going to happen because prices jumped to $1,300 per AK,” he said. “It’s come down just a little but business is too much for this peace to last. Everyone is walking the streets acting all good, but they’re lying.”

This prediction is based on several factors, according to Mr Mahdi. The first is a widespread concern by Hizbollah that al Qa’eda-style groups, who cannot resist having their biggest enemies – the Shiite and Israel – in such close proximity, will target Lebanon. The second problem is a lack of faith in Lebanon’s government.

“There is no government, those people are useless,” says Mr Mahdi. “No one trusts them to keep the peace, so everyone buys weapons to protect their homes and families. Normally I sell about 30 to 40 machine guns a month but right now, it’s double that. And the price is $1,200 for a gun in good condition, almost as high as May 2008.”

“But I know there is a real problem on the streets right now not just because of the machine guns but because I am selling so many RPG (rocket-propelled grenade) launchers. People only buy grenades when they think war is coming. An RPG isn’t really a weapon you use to protect your house, but everyone is buying them anyway. Not good.”

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Arab politicians ‘facing increased persecution’ in Israel

Jonathan Cook:

Leaders of the Arab minority in Israel warned this week that they were facing an unprecedented campaign of persecution, backed by the right-wing government of Benjamin Netanyahu, designed to stop their political activities.

The warning came after Said Nafaa, a Druze member of the Israeli parliament was stripped of his immunity last week, clearing the way for him to be tried for a visit to Syria three years ago.

In recent weeks legal sanctions have been invoked against two other Arab political leaders, following clashes with the Israeli security forces at demonstrations against the occupation, and pressure is growing for two more MPs to be investigated.

Arab politicians are particularly concerned about a bill introduced last month requiring all parliamentary candidates to swear loyalty to Israel as a Jewish state. If passed, the seats of the 10 Arab MPs belonging to non-Zionist parties in the 120-member parliament, or Knesset, would be under threat.

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On Israel-Palestine, no more of the same

Yossi Alpher:

President Obama and Mr. Mitchell must recognize that in the current regional strategic lineup, Syria is more relevant than Palestine. Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, declares himself ready to deal. A Syrian-Israeli process has a better chance of getting underway than a Palestinian-Israeli process. A successful Syrian-Israeli effort offers the United States, Israel and the moderate Arab states immediate benefits by reducing Iran’s penetration of the Levant, weakening its regional proxies and allies and rendering the U.S. withdrawal from Iraq — a major strategic event of the coming year — more likely to succeed. The mere fact of Israel-Syria negotiations would hurt Hamas, thereby strengthening Mr. Abbas.

Such a potential payoff justifies applying some pressure if necessary on Mr. Netanyahu. It justifies the risk of failure. And it justifies devoting more U.S. diplomatic energy to Damascus instead of Ramallah.

A second revised priority should address Hamas itself. It’s time to recognize that all the strategies mustered against the Hamas “emirate” in Gaza since the takeover of June 2007 have failed. The economic warfare policy invoked by Israel, the Quartet powers — the European Union, the United States, Russia and the United Nations — and Egypt has punished 1.4 million Gazans, impoverished the moderate middle class and empowered and enriched Islamist smugglers, yet has failed to dislodge the Hamas regime. It is plainly counterproductive. Israel’s use of military force in Gaza, most recently a year ago, may have bought it some deterrent time but proved devastating for its international image. Egypt finally acknowledges that its mediation efforts with Hamas have failed. And the fiction that the P.L.O. will soon return to power in Gaza is just that — a fiction.

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How to talk to a jihadist

Andrew Sullivan:

Watching senators and pundits huff and puff about Mirandizing terrorists when they should apparently be declared enemy combatants and tortured at length is a depressing spectacle. To see political leaders in the West have such a low view of the American judicial system and such an elevated view of the world-historical significance of these pathetic, twisted, religious nutjobs … well, they look like a bunch of scaredy cats to me. What the hell happened to “Live Free Or Die?” What happened to the confidence of a society that its ancient traditions are perfectly capable, indeed precisely tailored, to cut down to size these narcissistic, fundamentalist celebrity-seekers?

Which reminds me. One of the high points in the West’s defense against these losers was the trial of one Richard Reid, an unspeakably ugly and deeply stupid Brit whom Dick Cheney decided should – gasp – be treated as a terrorist under the criminal law in the months after 9/11. Not an enemy combatant to be flown to Gitmo and tortured. A terrorist brought to justice in the light of day. Eight years later, Cheneyites are drumming up panic that the Obama administration would do exactly the same thing for exactly the same reasons. But that they have lost their shit is no reason for the rest of us to lose ours.

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‘It’s better to join the Taliban; they pay more money.’


When President Obama announced his 30,000-strong troop surge in December he said: “these additional American and international troops will allow us to accelerate handing over responsibility to Afghan forces and allow us to begin the transfer of our forces out of Afghanistan in July of 2011.”

It was another example of what has become all too familiar: Obama’s ability to govern like Bush without sounding exactly like Bush. He might as well have simply reused Bush’s line and said: “As Afghan forces stand up, we will stand down.” The difference in language is trivial. The real difference between now and 2005 when Bush said that in reference to Iraqi forces is that it turns out Bush’s objective was a bit more realistic.

Consider Rod Nordland’s portrayal or the way the Afghan National Police force is shaping up:

The NATO general in charge of training the Afghan police has some tongue-in-cheek career advice for the country’s recruits.

“It’s better to join the Taliban; they pay more money,” said Brig. Gen. Carmelo Burgio, from Italy’s paramilitary Carabinieri force.

That sardonic view reflects a sobering reality. The attempts to build a credible Afghan police force are faltering badly even as officials acknowledge that the force will be a crucial piece of the effort to have Afghans manage their own security so American forces can begin leaving next year.

Though they have revamped the program recently and put it under new leadership, Afghan, NATO and American officials involved in the training effort list a daunting array of challenges, as familiar as they are intractable.

One in five recruits tests positive for drugs, while fewer than one in 10 can read and write — a rate even lower than the Afghan norm of 15 percent literacy. Many cannot even read a license plate number. Taliban infiltration is a constant worry; incompetence an even bigger one.

Now consider this description of the resistance that US Marines are facing in Helmand Province:

In areas where they have built bases, the Marines have undermined the Taliban’s position. But the insurgents have consolidated and adapted, and remain a persistent and cunning presence.

On the morning of the sweep, made by Weapons Company, Third Battalion, First Marines, a large communications antenna that rose from one compound vanished before the Marines could reach it. The man inside insisted that he had seen nothing. And when the Marines moved within the compounds’ walls, people in nearby houses released white pigeons, revealing the Americans’ locations to anyone watching from afar.

The Taliban and their supporters use other signals besides car horns and pigeons, including kites flown near American movements and dense puffs of smoke released from chimneys near where a unit patrols.

“You’ll go to one place, and for some reason there will be a big plume of smoke ahead of you,” said Capt. Paul D. Stubbs, the Weapons Company commander. “As you go to the next place, there will be another.”

“Our impression,” he added, “is the people are doing it because they are getting paid to do it.”

The people are getting paid… right.

You don’t have to be a Holywood screenwriter to see this description — the smoke signals, pigeon alerts and so forth — as a classic image of resistance. The foreign fighters are better armed, but the resistance fighters have the home-turf advantage — they’re being protected by the civilian population. Do the civilians have to get paid for their services? Conceivably, but I kind of doubt it. More likely it simply comes down to knowing who are “our boys”.

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Israeli commander: ‘We rewrote the rules of war for Gaza’

From The Independent:

A high-ranking officer has acknowledged for the first time that the Israeli army went beyond its previous rules of engagement on the protection of civilian lives in order to minimise military casualties during last year’s Gaza war, The Independent can reveal.

The officer, who served as a commander during Operation Cast Lead, made it clear that he did not regard the longstanding principle of military conduct known as “means and intentions” – whereby a targeted suspect must have a weapon and show signs of intending to use it before being fired upon – as being applicable before calling in fire from drones and helicopters in Gaza last winter. A more junior officer who served at a brigade headquarters during the operation described the new policy – devised in part to avoid the heavy military casualties of the 2006 Lebanon war – as one of “literally zero risk to the soldiers”.

The officers’ revelations will pile more pressure on Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to set up an independent inquiry into the war, as demanded in the UN-commissioned Goldstone Report, which harshly criticised the conduct of both Israel and Hamas. One of Israel’s most prominent human rights lawyers, Michael Sfard, said last night that the senior commander’s acknowledgement – if accurate – was “a smoking gun”.

A policy of “zero risk to the soldiers” — think about that. Isn’t that exactly what the infamous Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira believes in — a rabbi, it should be noted, who has been portrayed as being a fanatic and an extremist.

This is how the views of Shapira, head of the Od Yosef Chai Yeshiva, were described in the Jerusalem Post a few days ago:

In sharp contrast to the Goldstone Report, which criticizes the IDF for purportedly committing “war crimes” against Palestinians during Operation Cast Lead, Od Yosef Chai’s criticism of the IDF is totally different.

IDF battlefield ethics are seen as immoral not because they allow for the killing of innocent bystanders but because they force Jewish soldiers to needlessly endanger themselves to protect gentiles.

The measures taken by the IDF to protect non-combatants, such as using ground forces to weed out terrorists embedded in highly populated civilian areas so as to minimize collateral damage, are viewed by Shapira as downright evil, because they lead to the needless injury or death of Jewish soldiers.

So, Shapira should be relieved to hear that Jewish soldiers were not put at unnecessary risk — though he’d hardly need to have waited a year to figure that out, since the war’s casualty figures (six soldiers killed, not including four killed by friendly fire) make it transparent that Israel minimized its risks. Indeed, as the Independent report reveals, one of the principal ways the operation kept soldiers out of harms way was through heavy reliance on drone attacks.

“Most of the guys taken down were taken down by order of headquarters. The number of enemy killed by HQ-operated remote … compared to enemy killed by soldiers on the ground had absolutely inverted,” an Israeli soldier told Yedhiot Ahronot.

Since the Independent has, at least in part, run Yedhiot Ahronot‘s own story, hopefully the Israeli newspaper can muster the courage to print the rest of it.

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Avi Shlaim – Blair: Gaza’s great betrayer

From The Guardian:

The savage attack Israel ­unleashed against Gaza on 27 December 2008 was both immoral and unjustified. Immoral in the use of force against civilians for political purposes. Unjustified because Israel had a political alternative to the use of force. The home-made Qassam rockets fired by Hamas militants from Gaza on Israeli towns were only the ­excuse, not the reason for Operation Cast Lead. In June 2008, Egypt had ­brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement. ­Contrary to Israeli propaganda, this was a success: the average number of rockets fired monthly from Gaza dropped from 179 to three. Yet on 4 November Israel violated the ceasefire by launching a raid into Gaza, killing six Hamas fighters. When Hamas ­retaliated, Israel seized the renewed rocket attacks as the ­excuse for launching its insane offensive. If all Israel wanted was to protect its citizens from Qassam rockets, it only needed to ­observe the ceasefire.

While the war failed in its primary aim of regime change in Gaza, it left ­behind a trail of death, devastation, ­destruction and indescribable human suffering. Israel lost 13 people, three in so-called friendly fire. The Palestinian death toll was 1,387, including 773 civilians (115 women and 300 children), and more than 5,300 people were injured. The ­entire population of 1.5 million was left traumatised. Across the Gaza Strip, 3,530 homes were completely ­destroyed, 2,850 severely damaged and 11,000 suffered structural damage.

The UN Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees, tending to the needs of four million Palestinian ­refugees, stated that Gaza had been “bombed back, not to the Stone Age, but to the mud age”; its inhabitants ­reduced to building homes from mud after the fierce 22-day offensive.

War crimes were committed and possibly even crimes against humanity, documented in horrific detail in Judge Richard Goldstone’s report for the UN human rights council. The report ­condemned both Israel and Hamas, but reserved its strongest criticism for Israel, accusing it of deliberately targeting and terrorising civilians in Gaza. The British government did not take part in the vote on the report, sending a signal to the hawks in Israel that they can continue to disregard the laws of war. Gordon Brown’s 2007 appointment as a patron of the Jewish National Fund UK presumably played a part in the adoption of this ­pusillanimous position.

One year on, the Gaza Strip, one of the most densely populated areas on earth, continues to teeter on the verge of a humanitarian disaster. Israel’s ­illegal blockade of Gaza, in force since June 2007, restricts the flow not only of arms but also food, fuel and medical supplies to well below the minimum necessary for normal, everyday life. Reconstruction work has hardly begun because of the Israeli ban on bringing in cement and other building materials to Gaza. Thousands of families still live in the ruins of their former homes. Hospitals, health facilities, schools, government buildings and mosques cannot be rebuilt. Nor can the basic ­infrastructure of the Gaza Strip, including Gaza City’s sewage disposal plant. Today, 80% of Gaza’s population ­remain dependent on food aid, 43% are unemployed, and 70% live on less than $1 a day.

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Blair lied in build-up to Iraq invasion, claims Clare Short

From The Times:

The former development secretary was scathing about Mr Blair’s failure to ask Washington to delay the invasion despite warnings that the military and aid officials were not ready.

“I think he was so frantic to be with America that all that was thrown away. If he had done that, his place in history and the UK’s role in the world would have been so much more honourable,” she said.

She told that inquiry that she believed Mr Blair genuinely believed he was right to overthrow Saddam. “I am not saying he was insincere. I think he was willing to be deceitful because he thought it was right.”

(Note: The Sky News clip appearing above is different from the one appearing at the top of the Times article – the latter includes interesting comments from Short on Britain’s need to re-conceive what it means to have a “special relationship” with the United States.)

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Riz Khan – Iraq: Reopening sectarian wounds?

Al Jazeera English’s Riz Khan: Now, of course, in 2005 when the Sunni community generally boycotted the elections taking place then, there was violence on the street. And I wonder, because there’s, you know, if there’s a sense of being sidelined and excluded and being left out of any kind of voice in Iraqi politics? Whether there’s a chance of people taking to the streets again this time? What do you expect?

Dr. Saleh al-Mutlaq, a leading Sunni Iraqi politician: Well, it is really a very dangerous and worrying situation because although we told people when we heard this news about excluding us from the election, we told them they should not worry about this. They should go to the election. They should vote. Whether we are in or we are out and we will struggle against dictatorship, against the oppressing government whether we are inside the political process or outside the political process, whether we are inside the election process or outside the election process.

But we could not convince people. People, now, are depressed, pessimistic about what’s going on. They say to us, they still saying, that if you are in the political process and you are a leader in this process that you cannot protect yourself. So how could we protect ourself when we go to the election? So they cannot guarantee their lives and their family lives if they go to the election. Plus they do not guarantee that the results will not be fixed from now.

If the IHEC [Iraq’s Accountability and Justice Commission], the, I mean, the election committee and the government is capable of cheating the people and fixing the situation as they want in a very obvious way. So aren’t they able to cheat the people and to make the fraud in the coming election? These are the arguments the people argue and most of the people, we talk to them, they said we will not go to the election. And this is very dangerous because then they will lose hope. And if they lose hope, then they will go to the violence again.

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The Iraqi oil conundrum

At TomDispatch, Michael Schwartz writes:

How the mighty have fallen. Just a few years ago, an overconfident Bush administration expected to oust Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein, pacify the country, install a compliant client government, privatize the economy, and establish Iraq as the political and military headquarters for a dominating U.S. presence in the Middle East. These successes were, in turn, expected to pave the way for ambitious goals, enshrined in the 2001 report of Vice President Dick Cheney’s secretive task force on energy. That report focused on exploiting Iraq’s monstrous, largely untapped energy reserves — more than any country other than Saudi Arabia and Iran — including the quadrupling of Iraq’s capacity to pump oil and the privatization of the production process.

The dream in those distant days was to strip OPEC — the cartel consisting of the planet’s main petroleum exporters — of the power to control the oil supply and its price on the world market. As a reward for vastly expanding Iraqi production and freeing its distribution from OPEC’s control, key figures in the Bush administration imagined that the U.S. could skim off a small proportion of that increased oil production to offset the projected $40 billion cost of the invasion and occupation of the country.

All in a year or two.

Almost seven years later, it will come as little surprise that things turned out to cost a bit more than expected in Iraq and didn’t work out exactly as imagined. Though the March 2003 invasion quickly ousted Saddam Hussein, the rest of the Bush administration’s ambitious agenda remains largely unfulfilled.

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Iraq’s coming civil war?

Steve Clemons at The Washington Note writes:

As Iraq tilts towards March 7th elections, there are disconcerting trends unfolding inside the Maliki-run government that portend serious problems and potentially civil war in the not distant future.

Iraq expert and military affairs specialist Tom Ricks recently commented on Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room on CNN that he believed that there was a 50-50 chance Iraq would erupt in civil war, and a 10-15% chance that the growing tensions in and around Iraq could become a regional war involving several of the other major states around Iraq.

maliki.jpgPart of the growing trouble inside Iraq stems from the growing sense that politically empowered Shiites in the Iraq Government led by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki are still carrying on campaigns against Sunni political interests.

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Iran says ready to send uranium abroad as UN wants

From the Associated Press:

Iran said on Tuesday it was ready to send its uranium abroad for further enrichment as requested by the U.N.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad announced the decision in an interview with state Iranian television.

He said Iran will have “no problem” giving the West its low-enriched uranium and taking it back several months later when it is enriched by 20 percent.

The decision could signal a major shift in the Iranian position on the issue.

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US missile test mimicking Iran strike fails

From Reuters:

A U.S. attempt to shoot down a ballistic missile mimicking an attack from Iran failed after a malfunction in a radar built by Raytheon Co (RTN.N), the Defense Department said.

The abortive test over the Pacific Ocean coincided with a Pentagon report that Iran had expanded its ballistic missile capabilities and posed a “significant” threat to U.S. and allied forces in the Middle East region.

The Missile Defense Agency said that in Sunday’s test both the target missile, fired from Kwajalein in the Marshall Islands, and the interceptor, from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, had performed normally.

“However, the Sea-Based X-band radar did not perform as expected,” the agency said on its web site. Officials will investigate the cause of the failure to intercept, it said.

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Reconsidering America’s place in the world

In Nader Mousavizadeh‘s interesting analysis on America’s failure to deal effectively with so-called “rogue states”, he begins by pointing out that the world that created such states is gone:

Obama came into office thinking that a more responsive diplomacy could rally global support for the old Western agenda, but that’s not enough. What’s needed, more than a change in tone or a U.S. policy review, is a new set of baseline global interests—neither purely Western nor Eastern—defined in concert with rising powers who have real influence in capitals like Rangoon, Pyongyang, and Tehran. This requires a painful reconsideration of America’s place in the world. But it promises real help from rising powers in shouldering the financial and military burden of addressing global threats.

Today countries large and small, well behaved and not, are looking for partners, not patrons. Where Washington looks to punish rogues, seeking immediate changes in behavior, rival powers are stepping in with investment and defense contracts, and offering a relationship based on dignity and respect. This is the story of China in Burma, Russia in Iran, Brazil in Cuba, and so on down the line. And given that the core institutions of global governance—the U.N. Security Council, the World Bank, and the IMF—are unwilling to grant the new powers a seat at the decision-making table, it’s not surprising that they feel no obligation to back sanctions they’ve had no say in formulating.

Far from being coy about their newfound independence, the rising powers are asserting their status with increasing strength. During a recent state visit, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva stood beside President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran and declared bluntly: “We don’t have the right to think other people should think like us.” These words resonate more deeply outside the Western world than new calls for unity against the rogues. Days earlier, Ahmadinejad had been hosted by Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who had embraced his neighbor at a summit of Islamic nations and insisted that Iran’s nuclear program was “peaceful.” Predictably, the Western press attacked both Lula and Erdogan for betraying democratic values and solidarity, missing the point entirely. Established democrats like Lula and Erdogan are not siding with Ahmadinejad, supporting his government’s violent crackdown on protesters or its covert nuclear programs. Rather, they are demonstrating their intention—and, more important, their ability—to have a say in who the rogues are and how they should be dealt with.

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Israeli officers get ‘slap on wrist’ for white phosphorus use in Gaza

From The Times:

Israel has reprimanded two senior army officers who were responsible for firing white phosphorus artillery shells at a UN compound during last year’s offensive in Gaza.

In the first admission of any wrongdoing the Israeli military found that Brigadier-General Eyal Eisenberg and Colonel Ilan Malka were guilty “of exceeding their authority in a manner that jeopardised the lives of others”.

The Israeli report was in response to a damning UN investigation into the Gaza war, which concluded that both Israel and Hamas, the Palestinian group, had committed war crimes and possible crimes against humanity and which called on both sides to investigate the conduct of their forces.

An Israeli defence official said that its internal investigation could lead to further disciplinary action against soldiers involved in the 22-day offensive. The two officers disciplined yesterday were served a mild reprimand and had a “note” placed in their personal files noting their involvement. One defence official described the punishment as a “slap on the wrist.”

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The New Intifada

As one pompous ass said to another on Monday: “I can think of few peoples who have contributed more to Western civilization than our two peoples. In both Rome and in Jerusalem, the foundations of Western culture were laid.”

Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, at the beginning of a three-day tour of Israel, responded to this self-flattering compliment from Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu by saying: “We are here to show our recognition and our pride in the fact that we are part of a Judeo-Christian culture that is the basis for European culture.”

Many Israelis might express political contempt for Europe — a reputed well-pool of rising anti-Semitism — yet they still cling to European culture. To be told by a European, as an Israeli diplomat recently was, “we have nothing in common with you,” cuts right to the bone. Without its cherished European and Western identity, Israel has nothing.

This doesn’t say much about European virtues, yet the fact that with increasing frequency prominent Israelis struggle to maintain even a superficially civil bearing, is pushing them outside Europe’s cultural embrace. Israelis are becoming the new barbarians.

Aluf Benn writes:

In a speech at a conference not long ago, an Israeli diplomat serving in a European capital touted Israel’s hoary PR line, distinguishing between “the only democracy in the Middle East” and its autocratic Arab neighbors. “We share common values,” the Israeli told the Europeans. To his surprise, a member of the audience stood up and replied to him: “What common values? We have nothing in common with you.”

In diplomatic conversations, Europeans are critical of Israel because of the Gaza blockade, the construction in the Jewish settlements, the home demolitions in East Jerusalem, the pervasive loathing of the right-wing government and even the social gaps and the way Israel is moving away from the European welfare-state model.

The Netanyahu-Lieberman government is nearly always described as “hard-line” in the foreign media. This is not entirely fair: The government of Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni went to war in Lebanon and Gaza and built thousands of apartments for Jews in East Jerusalem and the West Bank settlement blocs – many more than did Netanyahu, who has refrained from employing military force and has declared a 10-month freeze on settlement construction. But they liked the Kadima government because Olmert and Livni made the right noises about their desire for peace and a final status agreement, whereas they don’t believe Netanyahu when he talks about “two states for two peoples.” The fact that Olmert and Livni achieved nothing in the negotiations makes no difference. It’s the intentions that count.

Netanyahu and his aides have answers to the accusations against Israel. The blame for the Gaza blockade lies squarely with the Palestinians, who chose Hamas to reign over them and kidnapped soldier Gilad Shalit. “You are worrying about the humanitarian rights of 1.5 million Palestinians in Gaza. You should be worrying about one Israeli who is being held there,” Netanyahu’s people tell UN representatives.

In East Jerusalem, the government is hiding behind Mayor Nir Barkat and the planning and construction institutions, which are approving building plans for Jews and home demolitions for Palestinians. And for the diplomatic stagnation, it is blaming Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, who is refusing to renew the talks.

There is one little problem: The world isn’t buying Israel’s explanations and it isn’t prepared to condemn Palestinian obduracy.

Political scientists Shaul Mishal and Doron Mazza warn of a “white intifada” — apparently they didn’t notice: the West isn’t white anymore — but even if their warning is misnamed, their fear is not misplaced.

The threats to Israel’s legitimacy emanating from the West, may well turn out to be much potent than loudly heralded threats to Israel’s existence coming from the East.

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