Diskin to Abbas: Defer UN vote on Goldstone or face “second Gaza”
The request by Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas to the United Nations Human Rights Council last year to postpone the vote on the Goldstone report followed a particularly tense meeting with the head of the Shin Bet security service, Haaretz has learned. At the October meeting in Ramallah, Shin Bet chief Yuval Diskin told Abbas 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.” [continued…]
Lebanese protest Egypt’s Gaza barrier
Lebanese protesters accused Egypt’s president Sunday of acting like an agent of Israel over his country’s construction of an underground steel wall along the Gaza border.
The Egyptian barrier could deprive Gaza’s Hamas rulers of their only lifeline by blocking hundreds of smuggling tunnels. [continued…]
Israel is engaging in gangster diplomacy
Now we have also shown the Turks who we are, because when it comes to the Jewish, Zionist honor of a nation that endured the Holocaust and the Goldstone report, no one will make a movie about us – certainly not the Turks – portraying us as war criminals. If Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan thinks he can reprimand us without a reaction, we’ll show him and all the other countries of the world.
There’s no choice because they only understand force. Britain wants to boycott Israeli goods? We’ll summon the British ambassador and have him sit on a bed of nails. The United States handles the settlements unfairly? We’ll point an unloaded gun at the American ambassador’s head and pull the trigger, just to scare him. We’re not murderers. We’re just trying to frighten, which, as is well known, creates respect. Just ask the Godfather. [continued…]
So who is Israel’s one true friend? Clue: it isn’t the US
Friends don’t let friends drive drunk, an old American slogan says. By that measure the US has hardly been a real friend to Israel over the past decade. It has enabled a pattern of Israeli behaviour so reckless as to endanger Israel’s prospects of ever achieving peaceful coexistence with the states and peoples around it.
An aggressive drunk often reserves his most toxic invective for those of his friends who tell him the truth: that his behaviour is intolerable, is dangerous to himself and others, and can’t be allowed to continue.
So it should come as no surprise that the most belligerent of Israel’s leaders are shaking their fists at Turkey, most recently in last week’s adolescent stunt in which the deputy foreign minister deliberately humiliated the Turkish ambassador. The specific complaint was a negative portrayal of Israelis in a Turkish TV drama. The deeper grievance is that Turkey, a long-time friend of Israel, has started to deliver a message no longer heard from the US or most of Europe: that normal relations with Israel depend on Israel pursuing a policy of peace. [continued…]
Detained American journalist Jared Malsin goes to court today to fight deportation from Israel
Four days ago we posted on the the case of Jared Malsin, the chief English editor at the Palestinian Ma’an News Agency. Malsin was detained at the Ben Gurion Airport for the past four days and is in danger of deported from Israel/Palestine today. Apparently, the primary reason for his detention was his critical reporting of Israeli policy. Here is a timeline of Malsin’s case so far. People who have been in touch with Malsin say he has been kept in a windowless room for five days. [continued…]
