Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Monday, December 22, 2008

El Baradei interview, part 2

This weekend's interview with Mohamed El Baradei seems to only have been part 1. Part 2, published in Al Hayat (Arabic only), concentrates on nuclear issues. While it is infused with his usual wishful thinking, there are some parts that have some value. I cannot believe that I cannot find this interview in English anywhere - when the head of the IAEA talks about Iranian nuclear ambitions, it is important. Here is some of what he said:

Iran says its nuclear program is only for economic purposes, an that after 20 years of being under siege, and that it would achieve self-sufficiency. But I have no doubt that this is part of its desire to buy an insurance policy, after you hear a lot about the [US] desire for regime change as being part of the axis of evil. It is therefore not surprising that Iran is trying to obtain an insurance policy.

I always say that, whatever the nature of the regime, it is always looking for continuity and survival. Consequently, the draft Iran in large part insurance policy, it considers that the same actors in the region, that were not the largest. It wants to be recognized [as a regional power] with the West, especially the United States, this role. Therefore, another part of its determination to have the capacity to manufacture nuclear weapons is their desire to obtain recognition of this regional role it wants.

Iran's essentially competing for territorial control, and the role that both parties would like to play in the region. Therefore, I always say that the solution to this will only be through dialogue and negotiation. Two parties must sit down at the negotiating table and put forward their concerns and their red lines, to reach a compromise that everyone can live with in peace.

...As far as Obama is concerned, I am optimistic. He will negotiate directly with Iran without conditions, while the Bush administration and the six countries so far require Tehran to suspend enrichment before sitting with them to the negotiating table. But we must wait and see his policy and, if it is true [that Obama requires no preconditions], it would be a very positive step, because there will be no solution without building confidence. In the past six years since we began inspections in Iran, the process of building confidence between Iran and the international community had failed. We have not one inch forward in this regard. We inspect, but there are still outstanding issues. A key part of how to build confidence between Iran and the international community, especially the United States, we have not moved forward.

Also, Obama said he would like to work hard for a world free of nuclear weapons. This is a complete change in the policy of the current administration, in general, the policies of nuclear powers continue to rely on nuclear weapons, and a complete change in the concept of international security and foreign policy will have implications throughout the world, including in the Middle East.

I think [the West] reached this conclusion, not because of ideals, but because of fear, that the continued proliferation of nuclear weapons at the current rate contains the risk that some of these weapons will fall in the hands of extremist groups. Thus, the so-called nuclear deterrence will cease to exist, because the extremist groups if they had the nuclear weapons [would not hesitate to use them.] We are not talking about the States, whether Iran or North Korea, I can not imagine that any country would nuclear weapons because it knows that it will be destroyed completely. This raises the fear that appeared recently, and to make people like Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, who were poles in the Cold War and advocates of nuclear deterrence, calling for a world free of nuclear weapons. If that is what Obama said, there would be a radical change in the subject. The course will have an impact on our region.

Q: What is the price which we believe is required to pay for Iran to stop en route to nuclear weapons?
A: A lot. Regional role, and guarantees of the system and technological assistance, aid and trade. Political and economic security. A system of regional security in the region and assisting Iran in all advanced technologies, including nuclear technology for peaceful purposes, in addition to the international trade agreement. The West made a very generous offer.

Q: Why was this offer not accepted by Iran?

A: Because it requested the suspension of enrichment before negotiations begin. This issue is most important to them. Therefore, we do not want to abandon them at the beginning of negotiations, but may do so in the end. The obstacle in the negotiations is the insistence of the West to suspend enrichment before negotiations on the one hand, and Iran's insistence on refusing to negotiate with these conditions on the other.

What worries me is that there will be a solution to the Iranian problem, and it would be an integral part of it linked to regional security and Iran's role in the region. Therefore, Arab countries must be part of the process of negotiating with Iran, as any solution to the situation will be a regional solution at the expense of Arab States affected. I do not understand how they are absent from the problem like it deems vital to it, and how can a solution without the Arab part of it.

Q; However, any regional security solution will include Israel as well.
A: Yes, of course. It will involve Israel and the Palestinian problem and Israeli nuclear arms. I am convinced that all this would be raised during negotiations. Therefore, I do not understand that the Arabs are not part of it.

Neighboring countries are sitting with North Korea. With the issue of Iran, the Arab countries are absent, just as we were not in Iraq, as well as in Darfur, in Somalia and member of the Arab League, the Arabs deal with it as if it were in Central America.

[Later, in a non-sequitor answer that had nothing to do with the question, El Baradei has to say] Even on the Palestinian issue which is the core of all problems in the Middle East. Finally I saw Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft, both former advisor to the national security of the heads of Democrats and Republicans, wrote to Obama in a letter not to waste time in the Middle East and to begin the solution to the Palestinian cause as the basis of the Arab sense of injustice, injustice and humiliation.

Q: Based on estimates, how long it would take for Iran if the situation continues as it is to produce a nuclear bomb?
A: I do not want to go into talking about numbers. But Iran can not have a nuclear bomb as long as it is subject to IAEA inspection regime, as the degree of uranium enrichment will remain low in the range of 5 percent enrichment. Nuclear weapons requires a rate of 90 percent enrichment, this will not happen as long as they are subject to the Agency inspections.

Therefore, to get Iran to a nuclear bomb, it must opt out of the first inspection regime and non-proliferation. This of course would be a signal to the world that Iran is moving in another way, and there will be time to deal with it. This is first.

Secondly, not only must Iran have the capacity to enrich uranium by 90 percent, but also to convert it into a bomb. And that they have the means to weaponize enriched uranium, a complicated process that takes some time. There are many assumptions and possibilities talking about a scenario evolution of a sudden, is that Iran out of the agreement and expel the inspectors and has become the enriched uranium necessary and the capacity to manufacture. We are talking at least several years. Even the uranium found in Iran is now not enough for one bomb.

Q: The source of this uranium?
A: The enrichment facility in Natanz were imported after uranium ore. All this was done under the supervision of the IAEA. But there is a lot of worry, as if we will wake to a nuclear Iran. As I said we are not talking about months, but a year or two at least. These estimates are difficult because we do not see the whole picture, we do not know the extent of Iran's progress in the manufacture of enriched uranium. Even U.S. intelligence agencies reported that Iran has itself conducted some studies, only studies in this area, but stopped in 2003. We have not seen otherwise.

There is no evidence of any state that Iran was able to (see) the manufacture of a nuclear bomb in a military sense, or evidence of the possession of low-enriched uranium, enough to make even one bomb at the present time, and are subject to inspection. What I would like to say that there is still time to reach a peaceful solution.

Q: Is it possible that there will be Iranian nuclear facilities that you are not aware of?

A: - Of course, this is possible in any country. But there is no evidence of any State or intelligence on the existence of undeclared facilities to them. The inspection system can not guarantee that we know everything one hundred percent of the nuclear activities of any State. We are always in a conflict between demand for greater transparency and the attempt to say that it can not open fully because it has the sovereignty and military installations and military secrets. What distinguishes Iran of course, is that it concealed some of its activities in the past, so we say that it must take the initiative and show greater transparency so that it is our understanding that all nuclear activities are for peaceful purposes.

El Baradei's confidence in the IAEA's ability to know exactly what is happening in Iran, even as he admits that he cannot possibly know if Iran has a secret nuclear program, should scare the hell out of anyone who relies on the IAEA for any assurances. He is clearly an intelligent man and has thought about these issues a great deal, but his blind spot is that his very position depends on peaceful negotiations and the IAEA has no real ability to look beyond the places it is allowed to go. It is not a spy agency and it generates a great deal of data from the information it is allowed to gather, so the IAEA fools itself by burying its collective head in the information it can verify and it all but ignores everything else.

This also explains his single-minded insistence on "peaceful negotiations" and on rewarding Iran for its obstinacy. The IAEA needs legitimate data and it can only get it with the inspected nation's approval. The blind spot is the inability - even in the face of known deception in the past - to imagine that a large amount of information is being purposefully hidden from IAEA inspectors.

And yet he even admits explicitly that Iran wants to build nuclear weapons! The entire interview is an object lesson in how easy it is for even a smart man to fool himself.

Happy Chanukah!

I'm stuck in an airport waiting for a delayed flight, and I couldn't find any Chanukah clip-art that impressed me.

So, I made this:

Mild milestone

Sometime over the past week or so I passed 400,000 visitors as well as 500,000 pageviews.

Here's a neat graph of my blog readership growth by quarter since Q1 2005:

Thanks to all my readers!

Egyptian police find suitcase bomb

From Daily News Egypt:

AL-ARISH: An Egyptian security official says a booby trapped suitcase carrying 25 kilograms of explosives was defused near the Egyptian border with Israel and Gaza.
Police often find weapons caches destined for the Gaza Strip, but the official said finding an "advanced" bomb is rare.
The official said the bomb is being inspected to determine who was behind it and whether it was heading to Israel.

Al Arish is where yesterday's fuel truck explosion was as well.

25 kilos is quite a large bomb, and it indicates that Hamas is trying hard to come up with new and innovative ways to murder Jews.

The Gang That Couldn't Shoot Straight

Palestine Today, the Islamic Jihad mouthpiece in Gaza, publishes a "cartoon" that looks more like a movie poster:

Apparently, Giant Abdul is aiming his rifle at the Mediterranean, Mohammed is shooting his RPG at Egypt and Ahmed is firing his submachine gun at the Negev.

Even funnier is the caption:

"Factions are preparing for calm"

Any better ideas for captions?

This morning's Palestinian Arab news

Al Azhar's Sheikh Tantawi, still smarting over the withering criticism for his handshake with Shimon Peres, decided it is best not to visit a meeting of imams and rabbis in France. He also refuses to go to Iran, which is probably a very smart move.

Hamas leaders have decided to stay out of sight, fearing Israeli assassination attempts.

Islamic Jihad declared that Israeli "settlers

" must not be allowed to sleep as long as Gazan children are "without electricity or medicine." His definition of "settler," obviously, includes all citizens of Israel within the Green Line.

Speaking of Islamic Jihad, here's a nice picture from their unofficial newspaper showing five terrorists praying before shooting rockets meant to kill Zionist women and children.

Carter praises Hamas leaders

From The Carter Center, Jimmy breathlessly tries to make Hamas leaders seem to be just like Western leaders:

In the afternoon Bob, Hrair, and I met with Khaled Mashaal and his fellow Hamas politburo members, all of whom are scientists, medical doctors, or engineers – none trained in religion. It was the anniversary of Hamas' founding, and they were watching Prime Minister Haniya's speech in Gaza to an enormous crowd.

They're professionals! They wear suits! They don't talk about religion all day! How can you not love these guys?

And, as Israel Matzav points out, Carter was not above giving his terrorist pals some friendly advice on how high a price to demand for the release of Gilad Shalit:

We discussed items on my agenda that included ... formulas for prisoner exchange to obtain the release of Corporal Shalit.

Why would that great humanitarian Jimmy Carter demand an unconditional release of Gilad Shalit when he can agree with Hamas that kidnapping soldiers can help them gain more terrorists from Israeli prisons?

There's more in this "trip report" that shows exactly where Carter's even-handedness lies:

We spent one day visiting the UNIFIL area south of the Litani River. We flew by helicopter along the coast past Tyre and Sidon, then landed at Naqoura just north of the Israeli border. We then traveled along the "blue line" between Israel and Lebanon and viewed the distant Sea of Galilee from the helicopter while proceeding eastward toward Mount Hermon. ... Israelis are also occupying the northern (Lebanese) 2/3 of a small village named Garjaa. The general showed us a graph of the many flights of Israeli planes over all parts of Lebanon, averaging about a dozen each day. Neither Hezbollah nor the Lebanese Armed Forces have any anti-aircraft weapons for defense.

Notice Jimmy the Dhimmi's thinking: IDF planes that are passively monitoring Hezbollah terror activity and weapons smuggling are terribly offensive, and he would advocate that Hezbollah or the Lebanese Army have anti-aircraft missiles to shoot them down - and that would be considered "defense."

Saudi girl handles her own passport: "I felt independent!"

Once again, the Arab News has an article about how Saudi Arabia is liberalizing itself, while the article itself shows instead how impossibly far it has to go:

At the immigration check at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport, Ghadeer Al-Swailim got her first taste of how things are done in the West. As he always does, Al-Swailim’s brother handed the immigration officer his passport as well as his sister’s. The immigration officer initially refused to take the booklets, telling the brother that his sister must hold her own passport when she goes through the immigration and customs process at the airport.
“I felt independent!” said Ghadeer, a 20-year-old Saudi postgraduate student on her way to Maastricht under Custodian of the Two Holy Mosques King Abdullah’s foreign scholarship program.
Holland, one of the most liberal countries in the world, has 138 Saudi students currently on scholarships; 36 of them are women. In 2007 the country was added to the list of authorized Saudi scholarship destinations; students are able to choose from three fields there: Medicine, dentistry and engineering.
Twenty-year-old Kawthar Al-Marhoon, from Qatif, shares an apartment with her women colleagues in Groningen, located in northern Holland. There are 56 Saudi students studying there. She began studying medicine in May after receiving the Saudi study-abroad scholarship.
Kawthar’s brother stayed with her the first three months.
One of the requirements for Saudi women to obtain government study-abroad scholarships is that a legal guardian must accompany them during the entire duration of their studies. In many cases, however, the guardian will go and then return to Saudi Arabia later. The requirement to send a guardian to accompany an unmarried Saudi woman (which is usually a brother, though mothers are also allowed to be guardians in this case) for the entire study-abroad period places an additional burden on women scholarship-seekers, especially if they are unmarried.
In Kawthar’s case, her brother left and she had to learn to deal with a lot of responsibilities that she used to ascribe to men.
“It wasn’t easy for me to adjust with load of household tasks, such as fixing the Internet in my apartment or going to the electricity company to pay my bill,” said Kawthar, who had never been in any European country before winning her scholarship.
Now Kawthar travels to Amsterdam to process her own immigration documents. In Saudi Arabia, a woman would typically need permission to travel to another city and the presence of her male guardian to engage in bureaucratic procedures.

IAEA chief El Baradei talks about the Arab world

I cannot find this interview of Egyptian-born International Atomic Energy Agency director Mohammed El Baradei in English anywhere. El Baradei plans on leaving his position next year, so he feels much freer to speak openly. Too bad the Arab interviewer didn't go into any questions on Iran and Syria's nuclear programs.

Q: Are you afraid for the future of the Arab and Islamic world?

A: Yes, I am very afraid for the future of the Arab world, as well as the future Muslim world. Indeed, the problems are known. The solutions are known as well: Science. Freedom. Equality. Social solidarity.

Q: Meaning education?

A: Exactly. We can not compete with underdeveloped education curriculum available to us in the Arab world. We in the Arab world do not learn. We do not learn. We have no education and we do not have scientific research.

Q: Do I understand that there is no future for the Arabs if this continues?

A: They have no future at all, if it continues. I say this after forty years of service within the Arab world and beyond. When comparing the Arab world today in other parts of the world say we have no future unless we had frank with ourselves first and we recognized that we have reached the bottom in all areas and must begin again. And focus first and foremost the rights and needs of education, freedom and hope. Give him these things and we will start as any other human being.

Q: Do I understand you consider that the Arab capitals were at their best fifty years ago, for example?

A: Speaking about Lebanon that I know of, Beirut and Mount Lebanon. And Cairo. The situation was much better, we lived as part of the world. There were Greek and Italian communities and people from all communities. Our strength lies in the plurality. Now we are trying to be a single pattern, which means a return to backwardness. The world today is a source of strength in multi-civilizations and cultures and languages. We stoop to the most serious rejection of the other. Others refuse to reject the same in the end. We must be part of the human family.

Q: Are these the worst times for Arabs?

A: I've never seen in my life, at least, the Arab world in a worse position than we are today. It is the worst, at least in the past fifty years, both in our internal or external relations. At home we suffer a lot of problems, and Saudi King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz opened the Arab summit in Riyadh saying that the fundamental problem in the lack of credibility of the system of government.

There is a crisis of credibility to regimes in the Arab world. Half of the Arab world is illiterate, more than in the sub-Saharan Africa. How I will be able to compete and be my role in human civilization if half of the Arab world does not read or write? We are issuing to the world, including oil, 4 percent of world trade, with imports 3 percent.

When we talk about education, we believe that the number of books translated into Spanish in one year is equivalent to the number translated to Arabic in a thousand years. Translations into Arabic is one third those translated into Greek. Greek is spoken by more than 15 million people. We are 300 million Arabs. We have no education or a system of good governance, the rights of the Arabs today feel that subjugated by the government, and he is being treated unfairly by the outside world.If we look at these indicators together, I believe that you have a ticking bomb. What I see every day is the continuation of the process of radicalization of the Arab and Islamic worlds, as we see in the London Underground and in Mumbai.

Abba Eban, December 21, 1973

In the wake of the Yom Kippur War, the UN held the Geneva Peace Conference on December 21, 1973, exactly 35 years ago.

Here is a portion of Abba Eban's speech:

Mr. Secretary-General, distinguished Prime Minister, Foreign Ministers, Gentlemen. There has never been an Arab-Israel peace conference before. Instead there have been many wars, for which the price has been paid in thousands of lives and in a region's long agony. Today at last a new opportunity is born. No wonder that this Conference opens under the burden of an immense expectation. Millions of people across the world are hoping that we shall somehow succeed to break the cycle of violence, to give a new purpose and direction to Middle East history, and to bring a halt to the spreading contagion of force.
We have no way of knowing whether this opportunity will be fulfilled or wasted. The answer lies in the intentions of many governments and peoples in the Middle East -- and beyond. Israel for its part is resolved to seize the chance.

Now, the agreed purpose of this Conference is to negotiate peace between States whose relations until now have been scarred by a fierce enmity which has exploded again and again into war. The assault launched against us by Egyptian and Syrian armies on 6 October was only the most recent link in a chain of violence extending with tragic results across the entire life of Israel as a modem State. To achieve its aim, therefore, this Conference must reverse the whole tide of recent history. It is not going to be an easy task, nor at best can its fulfilment be rapid. We shall have to reconcile a sense of urgency with a capacity for patience. And yet, when all the calculations of prudence and caution and realism are duly made, our heart and imagination inspire a positive hope. We cannot ignore experience but nor are we committed to its endless reiteration. So Israel comes to Geneva in the conviction that there is room for innovation, initiative and choice.

We must be well aware of the particular complexity of our task. There is nothing in any degree similar to the Arab-Israel conflict. The crisis of the Middle East has many consequences, but only one cause. Israel's right to peace, security, sovereignty, commerce, international friendship, economic development, maritime freedom, indeed its very right to live, has been forcibly denied and constantly attacked. All the other elements of the conflict are consequences of this single cause. In no other dispute has there ever been such a total denial, not only of the sovereign rights of a State but even of its legitimate personality. And the emotional assault on Israel has gone much beyond the political context. It sweeps all human solidarities aside. It is nourished by a copious literature with official endorsement that gives support to Nazi anti-Jewish myths. It nourishes a conspiratorial theory of Jewish history. It explodes into the mutilation of Israeli soldiers in the field, the murder and torture of Israeli prisoners, and it has culminated most recently in Syria's sadistic refusal to carry out the Geneva Convention on the treatment of prisoners of war. Out of this kind of ferocious hatred springs the kind of assault on humane values that was enacted in Munich last year, in Rome airport five days ago and with weary regularity in other places between, before and since. When sportsmen in the shelter of the Olympic flag are bound hand and foot and calmly shot in the head, one by one, when passengers in a civil aircraft are methodically blown up and burned, to fragments, do we not come face to face with the mentality and ideology which produced the gas chambers and the gallows of Auschwitz?

It is from this tradition that we must seek to break away. The prospects for this Conference to succeed depends in the last analysis on whether the Arab nations and Israel want to reach an objective understanding of each other. Now, we have no trouble or reluctance in understanding what Arab nationalism is all about. It is the moving story of a people's liberation from external servitudes. It is an effort to build a bridge between past glories and future hopes. The success of the Arab nationalist enterprise is reflected in the existence of 19 States, occupying 12 million square kilometres, in which 100 million Arabs live under their sovereign flags, in command of vast resources. The world, including Israel, has come to terms with Arab nationalism. The unsolved question is whether Arab nationalism will frankly come to terms with the modest rights of another Middle Eastern nation to live securely in its original, and only, home.

For this to happen it will, I suggest, be necessary for political and intellectual leaders in the Arab world to reject the fallacy that Israel is alien to the Middle East. Israel is not alien to the Middle East: it is an organic part of its texture and memory. Take Israel and all that has flowed from Israel out of Middle Eastern history and you evacuate that history of its central experiences. Israel's historic, religious, national roots in the Land of Israel are a primary element of mankind's cultural history. Nothing - not even dispersion, exile, martyrdom, long separation - has ever disrupted this connexion. Modern Israel is the resumption of a primary current in the flow of universal history. We ask our neighbours to believe that it is an authentic reality from which most of the other elements in Middle Eastern history take their birth. Israel is no more or less than the Jewish people's resolve to be itself and to live, renewed, within its own frame of values, and thus to contribute its particular shape of mind to the universal human legacy.

That is what Israel is all about, and all this is much too deep and old and strong to be swept away. I ask Arab leaders and thinkers when they reflect on Israel, to ponder a French historian's definition of nationhood: "A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle. To share a common glory in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together; to want to do them again - these are the essential conditions of being a nation."

When to all this memory you add the special tragedy of Jewish homelessness, you will understand why Israel faces the other Middle Eastern nations in the perfect consciousness of its own legitimacy. It will neither disappear nor apologize for itself, nor compromise its sovereign destiny nor surrender its name and image, nor be swallowed up in something else. Within the framework of its own legitimate existence it seeks reconciliation and peace.

It seems to me that the effort to resist the existential truth about Israel as inseparable from Middle Eastern destiny lies at the root of every other discord. We ought to remember that the war against Israel is a little older than the State of Israel itself. If we want to know the authentic answer to the question "How did it all begin?", we could go to the library downstairs and look up the documents and find the report of the United Nations Partition Commission of 20 April 1948. I quote:
"Arab opposition to the plan of the General Assembly has taken the form of organized efforts by strong Arab elements both inside and outside Palestine, to prevent its implementation and thwart its objectives by threats and acts of violence.... Powerful Arab interests, both inside and outside Palestine, are defying the resolution of the General Assembly, and are engaged in a deliberate effort to alter by force the settlement envisaged therein."

That is the report.

How little has changed since then. Can we not describe today's condition in these sentences without changing many words? The pendulum of military advantage swings this way and that. The tide of political struggle ebbs and flows. One thing alone has been constant - the volcanic atmosphere in which the Middle East lives, with only a few years between each eruption and each succeeding lull. And so in the twenty-sixth year, as in the first, we woke up one morning to find the Arab forces moving against us from south and north. Nobody believes that if those massive armoured thrusts had gone forward as their commanders wished, they would have come to a voluntary halt, at any particular line. The distinguished Egyptian writer, Muhammad Hasainein Heikal, has put it very clearly in "Al-Ahram" of 19 October:
"If the Arabs succeeded by force of arms in liberating the lands conquered in June 1967, what is to prevent them in the next stage from liberating the whole of Palestine itself by force of arms?"

What indeed? And so in October 1973, as in May 1948, the issue for Israel became no less than the survival of life and home, of national future, of personal destiny, of all that had been built and cherished and defended, in common action, for 25 years.
Let us all atone for 25 years of separation by working towards a co-operative relationship similar to that which European States created after centuries of conflict and war. It may take time to achieve that full objective. But does not every serious architect design a vision of the finished structure before anybody begins to face the prosaic difficulties of construction? At any rate, our vision must be one of sovereign States, the Arab States and Israel, each pursuing its national life within its own particularity while co-operating with its neighbours in a broader regional devotion.

The peace treaties that we want to negotiate and conclude should provide for the permanent elimination of all forms of hostility, boycott and blockade. The peace settlement must be the product of mutual agreement and not of external pressure, or of intimidation of one party by the other. It is only by freely accepting national and international responsibility for the peace that the signatory Governments can ensure its stability. Our peace agreements should of course provide for the renunciation of the use of force in our relations with each other. They should contain specific and unequivocal recognition of each other's political independence, integrity and sovereignty.

They should prohibit any hostile action, including terrorist action, conducted from the territory of one of the signatories against the territory and population of the other. They should formally proclaim the permanent end of the conflict and the renunciation of all claims or acts arising from belligerency. They should ensure that all international conventions which each of the signatories has signed should be applicable to the other signatory without any of the reservations entered by Arab Governments in the past into such international obligations. Nations at peace with each other do not seek to impede the movement of each other's ships or aircraft, or forbid them the normal civilities of air transit and maritime passage. Governments establishing peaceful relations after long years of conflict invariably define their intentions with respect to formal relations with each other in the economic, commercial, cultural and political domains. With the establishment of peace it would become normal for Israel and the Arab States to take their places jointly in regional development organizations.

There is also need for attitudinal change. Bertrand Russell wrote that "all wars originate in classrooms". Long years of conflict have given successive generations of our people a distorted vision of each other. The transition to peace should have its effects in educational systems, expelling all the images and stereotypes which nations at war invoke both as causes and consequences of their hostility. A peace settlement should unlock the arteries of our region's communications.

Now, these aims may seem very remote and visionary today, but they do not go beyond what Governments have usually accomplished in their transition from hostility to peace. In fact, I have never come across any peace agreement which does not include everything that I have listed here. The three Governments represented at this Conference all accepted these aims when they endorsed Security Council resolution 242, of which the main provisions are the establishment of a just and lasting peace, the mutual acknowledgement by all States in the area of each other's sovereignty, integrity, independence and right to security. Another provision of that resolution is the elimination of all forms of belligerency, agreement on secure and recognized boundaries to which forces would be withdrawn in the context of a peace settlement. Israel adheres to what it said on this subject in its communications to you, Mr. Secretary-General, in August 1970.

We shall seek to know from the Arab participants in this Conference whether they share our understanding of the obligations, rights and prohibitions involved in a peace agreement. If we can reach a harmonious understanding on this point, we shall still face many complexities but there will be a stronger probability, than otherwise, of agreement and compromise.

Of course, the peace treaty to be negotiated with each neighbouring State should contain an agreement on boundaries. The decisive test for Israel will be the defensibility of its new boundaries against the contingency of attacks and blockades, such as those threatened and carried out in 1967 and 1973. The experience of October 1973 confirmed our view that the permanent boundaries must be negotiated with the utmost precision and care. If those armoured thrusts had begun from EI Arish or northern Gaza, or from the Golan Heights itself, then the first assault might well have been the last. Peace-makers do not reconstruct vulnerable, inflammatory situations. They try to correct them. Therefore there cannot be a return to the former armistice lines of 1949-1967, which proved to be inherently fragile and which served as a temptation to an aggressive design of encirclement and blockade, from which Israel broke out in 1967 after weeks of solitude and peril.

In this matter as in others there must be a basic readiness on all sides to make such concessions as do not threaten vital security interests. Israel does not seek acceptance of any of its positions as a prior condition of the negotiation, just as we should not be asked to seek acceptance of any prior condition as a condition of negotiation. Having heard Arab positions and stated our own, we should at an appropriate stage seek to bring our policies into compromise. Security arrangements and demilitarized areas can supplement the negotiated boundary agreement, without, of course, replacing it.

But for Israel the overriding element in the peace discussion is that of security. It is true that we have again come out successfully from a military assault, this time with every conceivable advantage on the other side - advantage in numbers, in quantity of weapons, in initiative and total surprise. But despite this success the mood in Israel is sombre, for we come up again and again against the predicament of human vulnerability. The losses sustained in 1973 compound the sacrifices of 1948 and 1956 and 1967 and all the attritions and infiltrations in between. And Israelis always contemplate these losses against the cruel background of the European holocaust, which took millions of our kinsmen away to their deaths. Now there is no other national experience even remotely similar to this. Too much of Jewish history is occupied by the simple ambition of being Jewish and yet staying alive, and usually this reconciliation has not been achieved. The only people to suffer such massive annihilation of its human resources and the only sovereign State to live for 25 years without a single month of peace - how does anyone expect such a people and such a State not to claim respect for a particularly intense concern for individual and collective survival.

The attainment of peace will make it possible to resolve the problem of refugees by co-operative regional action with international aid. We find it astonishing that States whose revenues from oil exports surpass 15,000 million dollars a year were not able to solve this problem in a spirit of kinship and human solidarity. In the very years when the Arab refugee problem was created by the assault on Israel in 1947 and 1948, 700,000 Jewish refugees from Arab and Moslem lands and from the debris of Hitler's Europe were received by Israel and integrated in full citizenship and economic dignity. There have been other such solutions in Europe, in the Indian sub-continent, in Africa. The Arab refugee problem is not basically intractable: it has been perpetuated by a conscious decision to perpetuate it. But surely a peace settlement will remove any political incentive which has prevented a solution in the past. At the appropriate stage Israel will define its contribution to an international and regional effort for refugees resettlement. We shall propose compensation for abandoned lands in the context of a general discussion on property abandoned by those who have left countries in the Middle East to seek a new life.

We declare our opposition to any explosive fragmentation of the area between three States in the region between the desert and the sea, where there are after all two nations, two languages, two cultures, and not three.

Israel's inability to state its case as clearly, boldly and unapologetically as Abba Eban did is one if its main deficiencies.

A tanker containing an astonishing 50,000 liters of fuel, meant to be smuggled into Gaza from Egypt, exploded in El Arish. The explosion destroyed four homes.

I'm sure it is Israel's fault, somehow.

Weekly Bilin protesters now throw shoes

From Ma'an:

Four Israeli soldiers were reported injured along with eight protesters and two journalists at an anti-wall demonstration in the West Bank village of Bil’in, near Ramallah.

A statement from the protest group claimed that demonstrators marched after Friday prayers, carrying Palestinian flags and banners calling for an end to the Israeli occupation. During the event, two journalists were injured by rubber-coated bullets along with six others, the group claimed.

Meanwhile, Israeli sources were reporting on Friday afternoon that four soldiers had been injured during the same event, although the reports were non-specific.

When soldiers fired teargas canisters toward the crowd, participants reportedly began throwing shoes toward the Israeli army stationed behind cement blocks.

It's nice to see this shoe thing catch on. (It appears doubtful that the shoes are what caused the Israeli soldiers to be injured; usually that comes much faster projectiles.)

Let's make a deal: let the PalArabs change the payload of Qassams, mortars and Grad rockets to be shoes instead of explosives, and Israelis will pretend to be highly humiliated.