Fintan O’Toole is a a prominent Irish writer, journalist and theater critic. Writing in the Irish Times, he lays into Israel, accusing it of all of manner lies and obfuscations to disguise the reality of its actions. There are references to other conflicts sprinkled throughout the text but the central intention is clear: strip away the rotten cladding of untruth and show the Israelis to be the blood-soaked monsters that they are.
Archive for January, 2009
This is a guest post by Michelle Sieff of the American Jewish Committee.
As despair about the possibility of a two-state solution swells, Robert Mackey in the New York Times is contemplating the idea of a one-state solution. As he notes, even as early as 1999, Edward Said called for the abandonment of the two-state solution - embodied in the Oslo peace process - and the embrace of a bi-national Israeli-Palestinian state. More recently, Tony Judt echoed these arguments in the New York Review of Books.
Last week, Human Rights Watch slammed Israel for what it alleged was the “unlawful” use of white phosphorus in its Gaza operation. HRW’s accusation has been now countered from an unlikely source.
Continue reading ‘Israel’s White Phosphorus Use: Not Unusual, Not Illegal’
This is a guest post by Doug Lieb of the American Jewish Committee, who is currently participating in a solidarity mission to Israel
In a corridor of the emergency ward at Ashkelon’s Barzilai Hospital, there’s a dull beep coming from an appliance on the wall. It sounds as if someone’s IV has finished, or a patient is paging his nurse. No one makes anything of it.
Of all the countries caught up in the current wave of antisemitism, Turkey is arguably the greatest worry. While Turkey has traditionally been a reliable diplomatic ally and an even closer military partner of Israel, that hasn’t prevented a rash of antisemitic statements and demonstrations in the short period since the Gaza conflict began.
Gerry Adams, the president of Sinn Féin, the political wing of the now defunct Irish Republican Army (IRA,) says
…the international community has to recognise the democratic mandate of Hamas and open dialogue with them.
Bob left the following comment on an earlier post. I want to be sure that everyone sees it.
“I frequently walk past the Zimbabwe embassy in London - a grand Edwardian building in high British imperial style - and am moved to see the dignity of the protesters (mostly black Zimbabwean exiles) who regularly gather there, sometimes singing, sometimes standing in quiet mourning, ignored by the mainstream media. Such a stark contrast to those outside the Israeli embassy…”
Terry Glavin has drawn my attention to a certain group of protesters at a demonstration about Gaza in the Canadian city of Calgary, which provides yet more proof of the murky overlap between the extremes of right and left.
“Thus, while many well-intentioned human rights campaigners blame Israel and call for an end to the fighting, the organisations to which they belong share the moral responsibility for this tragedy and loss of life. A ceasefire that only prepares the way for the next and more deadly round will accomplish nothing. To make a lasting and moral difference, the double standards and deep prejudices that have eroded the essential universality of human rights, and allowed leaders of groups like Hamas to expect ‘victories,’ must also end.”
Read Gerald Steinberg on the exploitation of human rights rhetoric by Hamas.
“The so-called ‘liberal elite’ must snigger and snark about a duplicitous, posturing everyman who shilled for John McCain pretending he has any credentials whatsoever to be a war reporter. Conservative populists must then rail against said elite, citing the duplicity and unabashed political bias of the ‘MSM’ (that’s mainstream media to you laymen), while claiming that Joe represents a silent majority of Americans and is thus every bit as entitled to cover the Gaza conflict as are, say, Wolf Blitzer and Ted Koppel.”
Read Michael Weiss on Joe the Plumber’s new life as a reporter in Israel.
This is a guest post by Petra Marquardt-Bigman, author of the Warped Mirror blog at the Jerusalem Post
Naomi Klein’s recent call for a boycott of Israel has already been countered with some appropriate responses which might be summed up by Ben Cohen’s description of her argument as “monstrous and monumentally stupid”. But I think it’s worthwhile to explain what exactly makes her argument so monstrous, because her call for a boycott is not just “politically irresponsible” for all the reasons listed by David Hirsh. Her aim is to bring campaigns against Israel from the activist fringes into the political mainstream.
Continue reading ‘Naomi Klein Wants to Mainstream the Boycott’
This is a guest post by Doug Lieb of the American Jewish Committee, who is currently participating in a solidarity mission to Israel
Many Jewish Israelis have not-so-distant roots in, and close connections to, Europe and the US. And Israel is - as detractors who cry ‘colonialism’ sometimes point out - something of a Western democratic outpost in the heart of the Middle East. So why the seemingly yawning disconnect between the way many Western political and media elites see Israel, and the way mainstream Israelis see themselves?
The above photograph is not from Gaza. More about that at the end, though. I want to begin with Anthony H. Cordesman, who is one of the leading thinkers on military strategy in the US. Consequently, his views on the Gaza conflict will be taken seriously, even when they are found to be analytically suspect, as is the case with this article.
That’s Michael Ignatieff and Michael Walzer, who are, among other things, two of the most compelling minds currently addressing the questions of human rights, just war and humanitarian intervention. And they have both spoken out on the Gaza conflict.
A number of British Jews have published an open letter concerning the current situation in Gaza. I’d like to make a couple of points about it.
Continue reading ‘Gaza: A Response to the Open Letter from British Jews’
