In 1716, Francois de Callieres, an emissary of King Louis XVI, made this pithy observation about powers great and small in one of the foundational texts of modern diplomacy, On the Manner of Dealing with Princes:
The blunder of the smallest of sovereigns may indeed cast an apple of discord among all the greatest powers, because there is no state so great which does not find it useful to have relations with the lesser states.
Solomonia rightly draws attention to this remarkable lecture by Robert Bernstein, the founder of Human Rights Watch. Bernstein, you’ll remember, published an op-ed in the New York Times in October 2009 in which he eviscerated HRW for “helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state.”
Turkish-Israeli relations have fallen to their lowest point in the months following the flotilla dispatched to Gaza by the pro-Hamas Islamist charity IHH. Joint military exercises have been canceled, Israeli tourism to Turkey has dropped by 90 per cent and Turkish officials have threatened “irreparable consequences” to relations between the two countries. Into this breach has stepped Greece.
A deadly conflict in Lebanon could derail the prospect of direct talks between Israel and the Palestinian Authority, thus boosting Hamas at just the time that the Obama Administration is urging the PA to drop its reticence. Iran also has a vested interest in opening up a western front. In the last fortnight, a host of countries from the United States to the European Union to Japan have added a new layer of sanctions to those already agreed by the UN Security Council in response to Tehran’s continued nuclear defiance. And Hezbollah - as Sheikh Naim Qassem confessed in a 2007 interview with Iranian broadcaster Al Qawathar - invariably does Iran’s bidding, to the point of securing clearance for its operations from Iran’s leaders.
Though the AMIA massacre occurred on July 18th, 1994 the official commemoration of its sixteenth anniversary took place on the 16th. In these two stories covering the events that took place you’ll find Guillermo Borger, head of the AMIA community organization. the one directly affected by the attack, praising the “good performance” of the present administration with regard to the investigation into the attack and lauding Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s “bravery” in calling for the extradition of the Iranian fugitives in her speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations.
So here’s the deal. Give Israel some U.S. support in exchange for modest steps that the administration hopes accomplishes its goals. Israel will give some things that don’t appreciably hurt its interests in order to maintain good relations with the United States.
Helen Thomas is retiring. Now wait for the usual chorus of Jewish/ZOG/Israel lobby conspiracy theorists who will claim that Helen was the victim here, and that her bloodcurding demand that Jews “return” to the lands from which most of them were physically eliminated in the middle of the last century was simply… criticism of Israel.
Here’s Adam Holland with an interesting item about the Ron Paulistas support for Thomas.
Now this is where tragedy turns to farce. Sari Hanafi is an academic at the American University of Beirut. He recently visited the UK to participate in “Israel Apartheid Week,” which gave him a platform to promote the book he co-authored on the “anatomy of Israeli rule in the occupied Palestinian territories.” Halfway through his visit, Hanafi was forced to return to Beirut in order to face a furious gathering of AUB faculty and students who denounced him for collaborating with Israel. The basis for this charge? The co-authors of Hanafi’s book were two Israelis, Michael Givon and Adi Ophir. Because of this heinous act of betrayal, an Arab academic whose book is energetically promoted at a global event which marks the highlight of the boycott movement’s calendar finds himself condemned for breaking the very same boycott through the very same book.
More on this here and here. Most instructive is this statement put out by Hanafi’s supporters - “We strongly sense that a normative and literal application of the rules may sometimes produce paradoxical outcomes” - which is another way of saying that the boycott can make you look extremely silly indeed.
But don’t take my word for it. Here are the Pythons:
UPDATE: Thanks to Elder of Ziyon for figuring out a way to copy the above map. Some of you have said that the link below isn’t working, so if you want to see the above online, go here.
As David Axelrod might put it, this is an insult and an affront. Visit the online route map of EgyptAir, the airline owned by the same state which signed an historic peace agreement with Israel in 1979, and you will see, once you click on the “Middle East & Gulf” section, that Israel has, well, disappeared.
Norway FM Jonas Gahr Støre toured the Middle East between January 16th-20th, visiting Jordan, the Palestinian Territories, Israel, Egypt and UAE. The topics of Støre’s meetings in the different countries as well as the manner in which he was received shows us a Norwegian foreign policy bathed in the gold sheen of hypocrisy. The manner in which the Norwegian media reports on Støre’s tour reveals how this hypocrisy is rooted in a bedrock of popular denial.
On Thursday, December 10, President Obama will deliver the Nobel Peace Prize Lecture in Oslo. Prominent among the issues that the president may want to bring up is the failed quest for peace that began in Oslo back in 1993, when Israeli and Palestinian negotiators held a series of meetings in the Norwegian capital to formulate the accords that launched the Israeli-Palestinian peace process. The feeling that it is time to give up on this process - and perhaps even on peace - is widespread, but claims that everything has been tried are not quite true.
When cultural historians look back at this week’s J-Street conference in Washington, DC, they will observe that many of the participants invested its proceedings with an almost mystical significance: a Woodstock moment for Jewish politics in America which poked a finger into the flabby bellies of the establishment organizations by declaring, “change has come, move aside.”
This is a crosspost by Mark Gardner of the CST blog.
It is plain that if the Jewish state is regarded as a pariah, a compulsive serial abuser of human rights, then Jews everywhere will suffer by (real or imaginary) association.
So, it matters when Robert Bernstein, founder and emeritus chair of Human Rights Watch (HRW), and its chairman for 20 years, writes in the New York Times to regretfully inform HRW that its scrutiny and attitude to Israel “are helping those who wish to turn Israel into a pariah state”. As with HRW’s recent Marc Garlasco controversy, however, what matters even more is HRW’s public response to Bernstein:
We fundamentally disagree with Mr Bernstein’s views.
“The next time the terms apartheid or oppression are used with reference to the Middle East, one must remember the intolerable conditions of Palestinians in most of the Arab countries,” writes Khaled Abu Toameh. He says:
Here’s an interesting tidbit from Stratfor: “Iran will build a 435 mile-long cement wall topped with barbwire along 100 percent of the border between Iran and Afghanistan to prevent the entry of narcotics from Afghanistan, Farsi News Agency reported July 30. The proposed wall is scheduled to be completed by March 2010.”
