Next week, I’ll be at AJC’s annual meeting in Washington, DC. Among my myriad tasks there will be the production of two webcasts, which I encourage readers to register for. On Thursday April 29 at 2.15 PM ET, Paul Berman and Christopher Caldwell will feature on a panel which I will be moderating, examining the future of Islam in Europe. Then, on Friday April 30 at 10.30 AM, Bret Stephens and Roger Cohen go head-to-head in a debate on Iran’s nuclear ambitions. You’ll be able to submit questions online via the webcast player - and I hope you will.
There are far more similarities than differences in the two papers coverage of the crisis. Both see Israel as entirely at fault, whether through malevolence or incompetence, and both would probably like the crisis to get worse and for the Israelis to get their comeuppance from Washington, but neither can quite bring itself to believe this might be possible. Both share a view of the Palestinians as generally passive, with Israel bearing practically the whole responsibility for the absence of a Palestinian state, almost as if it was something it possessed and perversely refused to hand over, as if the only obstacle to the creation of a state was Israel’s refusal to allow it. Their view of the conflict is an Israel-obsessed one and it sees the Palestinians as having, at best, a partial political subjectivity, waiting for others, principally Israel but also the Americans, to do the right thing and vindicate their rights for them. They both see Israel, in both its existence and its actions as the sole motor of history in the conflict and have a very thin view of the history of the conflict. Despite their evident sympathy for the Palestinians neither paper treats them with the seriousness it treats the Israelis.
Juan Miguel Muñoz is the Jerusalem correspondent for El País and nobody who has followed his coverage of the Israel-Palestine conflict in recent years can have been left in any doubt as to his views on it. There’s a brio and a frank partisanship in his writing that’s absent from that of his British colleague, Rory McCarthy of The Guardian. Between the 9th and 22nd of March El País ran a story almost every day from Muñoz, devoted either wholly or in part to the developing crisis.
The March 14theditorial in El Páis dealing with fallout from Biden’s visit is titled “Dark Horizon”, and starts like this,
The U.S. Vice President, Joseph Biden, arrived in Tel Aviv last week with the intention of promoting a rapprochement between Israelis and Palestinians, but he was received by the Netanyahu Government with the announcement of new settlement projects: 112 housing units in the West Bank and 1,600 in East Jerusalem.
The controversy arose from the fact that during a visit in early March from Vice President Biden, Israel announced its intention to build 1600 new housing units in a part of the city of Jerusalem captured from the Kingdom of Jordan during the Six Day War. Given that Biden was in the country to make encouraging noises to both sides in the then approaching proximity peace talks, the timing of the announcement was unfortunate to say the very least. Biden himself immediately condemned the move while Secretary of State Hilary Clinton described it as “deeply negative” and David Axelrod, a senior adviser to President Obama, described it both as an “affront” and an “insult”. Michael Oren, Israel’s Ambassador to the United Sates, is alleged to have said that the row amounted to the worst crisis in US-Israeli relations in 35 years, though he later claimed to have been misquoted. Prime Minister Netanyahu claimed that he was unaware that the announcement was to be made during Biden’s visit, expressed regret about its timing and set up a committee to ensure that such a decision would not be made public without his approval in the future. The Palestinian side reacted by threatening not to participate in the proximity talks.
The purpose of this piece is to compare some aspects of the coverage of the recent diplomatic tension between the United States and Israel arising from Israel’s announcement of its intention to build new homes in a disputed part of Jerusalem during the recent visit to Israel of United States Vice President Joe Biden. The Guardian, of London and El País, of Madrid were the newspapers chosen for examination because they are usually regarded as leaders in the advocacy of liberal and progressive politics in their respective countries and progressive and liberal opinion in some democratic nations has in recent years taken a sharp turn against Israel. Putting it very roughly, when Israel was frequently involved in large-scale conventional warfare and expanding the territory under its control it was generally seen in sympathetic terms. Now that it has withdrawn from huge extensions of territory conquered in war, made comprehensive peace deals with two of countries that border it and abandoned fantasies of remaking the map of the Middle East to suit its proposes, it is increasingly seen as a uniquely evil state, illegitimate from birth, perverse in its policies, cruel in its behavior and ruled by a nefarious ideology, Zionism.
The Celtic Tiger is dead and buried and Ireland is going through an economic crisis unprecedented in seriousness in the history of the state. The banks are all bankrupt, unemployment and the budget deficit are soaring and emigration is starting to rise again. The Irish Congress of Trade Unions held a special one-day conference to address these issues today.
The absolutist Palestinian demand for a complete halt to settlement construction was cemented at the Fatah party congress in August. But the US had eased away from insisting on a wholesale cessation of settlement activity. After all, both the Bush administration and Israeli-Palestinian negotiators had recognized that any final peace arrangement would involve some kind of territorial swap, withIsrael retaining major settlement blocs and handing over some territory within its pre-1967 border.
Abbas remained adamant, refusing to return to negotiations that had been ongoing since the 1993 Oslo Accords. He rebuked Netanyahu’s announcement in November of a 10-month freeze on new settlement construction - a move the Obama administration welcomed and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called “unprecedented.” By then, however, Abbas had announced his readiness to resign as PA president, fueling speculation about the future of democratic PA government.
AJC’s Kenneth Bandler in the Jerusalem Post - read the entire piece here.
Here’s an interesting note from the TULIP website about our old adversary, South African antisemite Bongani Masuku (seen in the above photo addressing a pro-boycott meeting in London; the portly man in the blue shirt to his right is South African Stalinist Ronnie Kasrils.)
COSATU’s International Relations spokesperson Bongani Masuku could soon be hauled before South Africa’s Equality Court after failing to apologise for comments made at a Palestine solidarity rally in March last year that the South African Human Rights Commission (SAHRC)found amounted to hate speech.
Recent reports in the South African Cape Times and South African Legalbrief suggest legal action in the is imminent.
Let’s hope Masuku is exposed for what he is. And if you’re not sure what I mean by that, you can start by looking here and at numerous posts here.
But this is no easy ride/For a child cries… - The Smiths, “Suffer Little Children”
We often spotlight obscene analogies with the history of antisemitism, and particularly the Holocaust, made by individuals on the far left. No less obscene are the widely-reported remarks of Raniero Cantalamessa, a Franciscan priest, approvingly quoting an unnamed “Jewish friend” who compared the storm over sexual abuse carried out by Catholic clergy with the persecution of Jews through the ages. Pope Benedict was present in the same church as he said it.
For a Vatican representative to try to usurp the role of victim from those who suffered the nightmare of being beaten, groped, abused and raped when they were children is shameful enough. For him to do so by invoking a history which culminated in the Holocaust - among whose victims were 1.5 million children - beggars belief.
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