Elder Of Ziyon - Israel News

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

New Blogger feature gives more layout flexibility

Blogger is now testing a new feature where you have much more control over the look of your blog through a graphical interface.

Go to draft.blogger.com, go to your blog, choose Layout and then click on "Template Designer." You have much more control over the layout, and you can test your changes instantly.

It doesn't quite do what I want to do with this blog, but it is a nice feature that can make the CSS-challenged amongst us create beautiful (and probably very ugly) blogs.

Consider this an open thread....and check out my tweets, as I add interesting articles from others a few times a day.

PalArab boycott of Israeli goods grows

While officially the PA is only boycotting "settlement" products, there have been more public calls for Palestinian Arabs to boycott all Israeli goods.

Ma'an Arabic reports that a boycott organization was at a Nablus shopping area today, exhorting people not to buy Israeli products.

They said that every shekel that goes to the Israeli economy goes towards a bulldozer to destroy an Arab house or a bullet to kill an Arab child.

More interestingly, the article mentioned "public anger" at Arabs who actually shop in shopping malls of the settlements. This sounds a lot like the 1930s Arab boycott - will these activists start to threaten those who actually want to buy Israeli goods?

It also mentioned calls for Palestinian Arab authorities "to intensify their efforts to curb the invasion of Israeli goods and settlement goods to our markets to Palestine, because of the lack of border crossings between the Palestinian communities and settlements."

(Which sounds like the relationship between Jews and Arabs who live near each other in the West Bank is not so bad, if they regularly trade goods and shop. That almost sounds like....peace! But that is crazy talk, because we all know that peace is what the leaders say it is, not how ordinary people act.

(One Israeli in the West Bank once told me that Jews in his town used to regularly go to Nablus for their shopping and banking before the first intifada, because it was closer than Jerusalem and convenient. Post Oslo, of course, such ideas are heresy to the people who are invested in the "peace process.")

Anyway, the article ends off with the claim that many Palestinian Arab housewives are not ensuring that their homes are not polluted with any Israeli food, drink or cleaning products. How long before it gets expanded to include "Jewish" and "Zionist" products like Pepsi?

Pat Buchanan publishes Neturei Karta

How can you say that Pat Buchanan is an anti-semite?

After all, his website happily publishes screeds from the Neturei Karta, and who is more Jewish-looking than they are?

The linkage myth

Lee Smith writes in Tablet:

The one uncontroversial fact about the Middle East is that the Arab-Israeli conflict is inextricably linked to every other problem in the region. Known as “linkage,” this is the one idea that has won the support of a broad consensus of U.S. congressmen, senators, diplomats, former presidents, and their foreign-policy advisers, seconded by journalists, Washington policy analysts, almost every American who has ever watched a Sunday morning news roundtable, and the Obama Administration, from National Security Adviser James Jones to the president himself: “If we can solve the Israeli-Palestinian process,” candidate Obama said on Meet the Press in the spring of 2008, “then that will make it easier for Arab states and the Gulf states to support us when it comes to issues like Iraq and Afghanistan. It will also weaken Iran, which has been using Hamas and Hezbollah as a way to stir up mischief in the region.”

...
Having written a book that describes the Middle East in terms of a clash of Arab civilizations, I give no credence to the notion that the Arab-Israeli arena is the region’s defining issue. Rather, it is one among many conflicts that plague this conflict-prone area, and so I see the Arabic-speaking regions in terms of intra-Arab clashes, or an Arab cold war, where regional actors—not just nation states, but also regimes and their domestic rivals, in addition to competing sectarian groups—are warring with each other at varying levels of intensity. There is the Palestinian civil war between Hamas and Fatah that has cooled for the time being; in Lebanon, Hezbollah has routed the pro-democracy March 14 forces; the Houthi rebellion taking place on the Saudi-Yemen border is effectively a proxy war between the Saudis and the Iranians; in Syria, the ruling Alawite minority simultaneously fears the country’s Sunni majority even as it uses Sunni militants to advance its interests in Iraq, Lebanon, Israel, and the Palestinian territories; and in Iraq, Sunnis and Shia seem to be poised for a continuation of the civil war that will ensue after the U.S. withdrawal. That’s the real Middle East, where the Arabs’ fight for power among themselves takes priority over whether or not Washington negotiators have the percentages right in proffered land swaps between Israel and the Palestinians.

Nonetheless, I can hardly help but recognize the central role that U.S. Middle East policy has given to the belief that, from the Persian Gulf all the way to Western North Africa, a region encompassing many thousands of tribes and clans, dozens of languages and dialects, ethnicities and religious confessions, the Arab-Israeli issue is the key factor in determining the happiness of over 300 million Arabs and an additional 1.3 billion Muslims outside of the Arabic-speaking regions. Where does such an extraordinary idea come from? The answer is the Arabs—who might be expected, in the U.S. view of the world, to give us an honest account of what is bothering them. However, this would ignore the fact that interested parties do not always disclose the entire truth of their situation, especially when they have a stake in doing otherwise.
...
Nor apparently can the Americans admit that linkage was just a strategic instrument that leveraged the Arab narrative to the advantage of the United States. The further U.S. policymaking gets from the origins of the myth, the more magical and enticing it has become. The myth of linkage has grown to such legendary proportions at this point that it is the extent of the current White House’s Middle East policy. We have no other strategy to stop the Iranian nuclear program but linkage. Movement on the peace process, the Obama Administration believes, will get the Arab regimes to help us with Iran. The problem is that the Arabs will not help us with Iran. They want us to deal with Iran ourselves, but if we keep forcing the issue of linkage they have no choice but to go along with the ruse that everything is linked to the Arab-Israeli crisis. After all, it’s their narrative, and they can’t disown it now.

In reality, the reason the Obama Administration, Gates, and Petraeus are pushing linkage into overdrive is that there is no Iran strategy, and nothing—not even linkage—is going to stop the Iranians. They are telling the Arabs that they are going to do what they can about the Palestinian question, because they are not going to do anything about Iran. That’s the Arabs’ consolation prize for being an American ally. What a cruel joke fate has played at the expense of Arabs, who have been talking out of both sides of their mouth about the Palestinians and linkage for almost a century, a myth that came to link the fate of the Americans to that of the Arabs, and theirs to ours. Since we have no other policy than a magic trick, the Arabs have no choice but to pretend to believe it’s real.

Read the whole thing.

(h/t EBoZ)

UN ambassador: US supports Fayyad plan

US Ambassador to the United Nations Susan Rice spoke at the Arab American Institute's Kahlil Gibran Awards in Washington on April 21st.

Some of what she said appears to be contradictory.

First she stated:

First, let there be no doubt: President Obama and all of us in his Administration are determined to reach a comprehensive peace in the Middle East—central to which is a two-state solution. President Obama has defined this goal as a vital U.S. interest. Now, none of us need to be reminded that this is very tough work. But we believe that through good-faith negotiations, the parties can mutually agree to an outcome that ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and Israel’s goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israel’s security requirements.

Israelis and Palestinians, as well as all those interested in peace, need to confront a basic reality: the status quo has neither produced long-term security nor served their interests. All parties must accept their share of responsibility for reaching a comprehensive peace that will benefit the entire region and the world. Our efforts must be driven from both above and below. That’s why the United States is focused on two mutually reinforcing tracks: resuming negotiations between the parties, and helping develop the institutions of a future Palestinian state. We strongly endorse the Palestinian Authority’s two-year state-building plan and are doing all we can to support it.

Contrast this with the next paragraph:

It is also important that the parties fulfill their Roadmap obligations. Unilateral actions taken by either party cannot be allowed to prejudge the outcome of negotiations and will not be recognized by the international community. Our position remains clear: we do not accept the legitimacy of continued Israeli settlement activity. Israel should also halt evictions and demolitions of Palestinian homes. At the same time, the Palestinian Authority should continue to make every effort to ensure security, to reform its institutions of governance, and to take strong, consistent action to end all forms of incitement.

The only unilateral action that she decries are those that are done by Israel.

Yet the two year state-building plan that she says the US endorses is meant to culminate in the unilateral declaration of a Palestinian Arab state - in direct contradiction with the Road Map (not to mention Oslo and all other agreements.) It also includes building in Area C which would be a unilateral move that violates Oslo.

She didn't say a word against those, nor am I aware of any White House statement that says that the Fayyad plan is unacceptable due to its unilateral nature.

Perhaps when she says that the US is against unilateral actions, she only means by one side.

UNRWA starts funding UNHCR Iraq refugees

I cannot find details yet, but Palestine Today quotes UN Radio as saying that the European Commission of UNRWA is donating a million euros to help the 2300 refugees of Palestinian Arab ancestry who fled Iraq and are now on the Iraqi-Syrian border.

These refugees do not fall under UNRWA, but rather under UNHCR, which has been diligently trying to resettle them in other countries - the way a UN refugee agency should act.

Their Arab brethren have treated them as pariahs.

Since their grandparents lived in Palestine in 1947, Arab nations refuse to let them become citizens. Syria took in hundreds of thousands of Iraqi refugees but refused to support the ones who are termed "Palestinian" because of Arab League rulings that they should always be treated differently to enforce their fake nationalism. So Arabs who lived in Iraq for generations are not Iraqi nor are they Iraqi refugees.

Arabs have not been happy with UNHCR's resettling hundred of these refugees to the West, preferring that they stay in misery in order to strengthen the "Palestinian" cause.

The question is, is UNRWA contributing out of humanitarian considerations or is this the beginning of a power play to take over the refugees from UNHCR?

Hamas claims that their executions are getting results

Hamas leaders are claiming that their execution of two "collaborators" last month has resulted in many others turning themselves in out of fear.

A Gaza interior ministry spokesman said that Gazans have been surrendering to Hamas, and that Israel is using experts in psychology to target weak spots in vulnerable people to entice them to be spies. He also warned again about how Israel is using social networking sites to communicate with potential agents.

Another article talks about others who have been caught by Hamas, with a picture of what is alleged to be a secret radio transmitter and a map.

I am not sure why radios make sense nowadays when Gazans can easily use Skype or other encrypted Internet methods to securely talk with their Israeli handlers.

More tunnel deaths

Today a Gazan was killed in a tunnel collapse. Yesterday another was killed.

By my count, sixteen Gazans have been killed this year from smuggling tunnel accidents - collapses, electrocutions, or suffocations.

A question of dignity

Ma'an reports:

The Palestinian Authority is working in full swing to make sure no laborers will be working in Israeli settlements by the end of 2011, PA Minster of National Economy Hasan Abu Libda said Tuesday.

“There are currently 25,000 Palestinians who make their living from working in Israeli settlements. They should stop as they aren’t any different from 200,000 other unemployed workers,” Abu Libda said in an interview with Ma'an.

“Even though Palestinian law prohibits work in Israeli settlements, we know that a large number of people left their jobs and have gone to work in settlements,” he said, urging laborers to “work out another solution.”

Asked what alternatives those 25,000 workers could expect to find, the minister said there were 200,000 others out of work and that in seven months, the PA would take action to protect national interests by completely stopping all economic relations with settlements.

“In no country in the world is the unemployment rate zero, and so long as Israel continues to discourage the Palestinian national economy, the only alternative is to get citizens to consume national products,” Abu Libda explained. Only 18 percent of consumption in Palestine is national products, he explained, and if the PA can raise this rate to 40 percent, that will provide 50-60,000 jobs.

With regard to quality and competitiveness of national products, “Work is ongoing with the private sector to provide budgets to improve the quality of products and in a couple of weeks or months, there will be a noticeable improvement in quality of Palestinian national products, he said. “Once they improve, consumers will trust national products, and they will eventually be able to compete with Israeli products.”

This is going to be very interesting.

The vast majority of Arabs want dignity. Dignity means supporting your family with honor.

Dignity is the reason why the Arab boycott of the 1930s was such a spectacular failure, even though it is now considered "The Great Revolt" by people who try to manufacture Palestinian Arab history. Arabs who hated the Jews killed hundreds of Arabs who just wanted to keep their jobs and raise their families by cooperating with those same Jews.

Dignity is also the reason that so many Palestinian Arabs moved to Kuwait and other Gulf countries in the 1950s and 1960s - so they could get jobs, make money and live semi-normal lives (while being forced to remain stateless by the Arab League.) It is the reason that so many have moved to the West.

In many ways, the Arabs who stayed behind in camps were the lazy ones who preferred UNRWA handouts to their own dignity, and in that way the Palestinian Arab psyche has slowly changed from the most dynamic of the Arabs to a welfare mentality where the world owes them everything.

Now we have a clash between personal dignity and an imposed "national" dignity. The question is, which will win?

History so far has shown that ordinary Palestinian Arabs have traditionally placed their own welfare above that of their illusory nation, but 60 years of an externally imposed national culture - combined with the slow change from a people who care about their personal dignity to a people who feel a sense of entitlement - may have changed that.

The PA is officially telling tens of thousands of its gainfully employed citizens that they must plan to quit the jobs that provide them with their dignity, with the nebulous promise that other jobs will magically appear (propped up with Western money, of course.) This is on top of the thousands of newly unemployed Palestinian Arabs who are suffering from the ten-month building freeze in the territories.

The question is - what will the remaining dignified Arabs do in response?

Incidentally, it seems that the statement that "Palestinian law prohibits work in Israeli settlements" is not currently true, as the article goes on to say:

For his part, PA Minister of Labor Ahmad Majdalani asserted that nothing in Palestinian law prohibited work in settlements. However, workers should stop on their own free will for moral and political reasons, Majdalani told Ma'an. In any case, Palestinian law prohibits only the import of settlement products, he said.

Which means that a PA minister doesn't even know the law of his quasi-country.

Islamic Jihad is reading Israeli analyses

The Islamic Jihad-linked Palestine Today reproduces and translates a paper from the Israeli Institute for National Security Studies on how Israel should react to Palestinian Arab "resistance."

The paper, by Michael Milstein, is titled "The Challenge of al-Muqawama (Resistance) to Israel."

While it is not surprising that Islamic Jihad or other terror groups would be keenly interested in any Israeli military analysis, I have never seen such an article in Arabic before.

For example, one section which reads like a playbook for the Gaza operation reads:

The preferred policy (or more precisely, the lesser of the evils) is that
of a relatively extensive military campaign once every few years. The
scope of the campaign and its frequency are dictated by the intensity
of the threat posed by the elements of resistance, the nature of the
battlefield, and the regional and international circumstances prevailing
at the time. However, in every scenario it is crucial that Israel’s military
response be disproportionate, so as to demonstrate to the enemy the
heavy cost inherent in every attempt to undermine the security of Israel’s
regional sphere. Such a step must not last long, but must focus on causing
extensive damage to the leaderships of the resistance organizations (both
at the military and the political echelons) and the various infrastructures
under their auspices (including civilian). Such a step may well be
accompanied by extensive damage to the Israeli home front, and also
by extensive damage – unintentional, of course – to the enemy’s civilian
sphere. Therefore, Israel’s leadership must conduct a public diplomacy
campaign on two fronts: one at home, where it will have to clarify the cost
Israel’s citizens must pay for confrontations with resistance elements
and stress that one must not expect a quick victory or decision by the IDF;
and the other for international audiences, where it will be necessary to
explain the complexity of tackling resistance elements and describe the
constraints the enemy imposes on Israel, first and foremost the necessity
to fight in the densely populated civilian sphere.

None of the steps described is likely to cause the complete surrender
of resistance elements or convince them to enter into direct talks with
Israel or recognize its existence (at least not in the foreseeable future).
However, military moves, particularly extensive ones accompanied by
serious damage to the resistance elements, are likely to create long term
deterrence with regard to undertaking violent operations against Israel.
Indeed, resistance elements developing sovereign or semi-sovereign
status have also developed a sensitivity and vulnerability they lacked
in the past. The assets of a governing entity, such as those of Hamas
in the Gaza Strip, give Israel more targets to damage and spell out loss
considerations to the resistance organizations, especially at a time when
governmental stability hangs in the balance.

How closely the IDF follows the advice (or how often it independently arrives at the same ideas) is an open question. It is still interesting to see that the Arabs are closely following Israeli military thinking.

I assume the IDF is doing the same against the terrorist organizations.

Does anyone still get their news from the networks?

For the first time in years I watched the network evening news. In this case I watched NBC's coverage of the arrest of the Times Square bomber.

They said a number of times that Faisal Shahzad was a "lone wolf." Their Pakistan correspondent said that there were no arrests made there, and their terrorism expert tslked about how inept the bomb-making was and how he clearly acted alone (he said words to the effect of "he must have been asleep during bomb class.")

Yet, a couple of hours before the broadcast, the news broke over the wire services that Pakistan did arrest several people in connection with the case. Even the MSNBC website mentions that!

I knew that the news broadcasts were bad, but I had no idea that they were that incompetent.

Or, worse, that they are so invested in the idea that this was not an organized Muslim terrorist attack that their wishful thinking affects what they choose to report.

Dore Gold on the "1967 borders"

From Dore Gold:

[T]he 1967 lines are coming back as a common reference point when many officials and commentators talk about a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is increasingly assumed that there was a recognized international border between the West Bank and Israel in 1967 and what is necessary now is to restore it. Yet this entire discussion is based on a completely distorted understanding of the 1967 line, given the fact that in the West Bank it was not an international border at all.
In fact, Article II of the Armistice with the Jordanians explicitly specified that the agreement did not compromise any future territorial claims of the parties, since it had been "dictated by exclusively by military considerations." In other words, the old Armistice Line was not a recognized international border. It had no finality. As a result, the Jordanians reserved the right after 1949 to demand territories inside Israel, for the Arab side. It was noteworthy that on May 31, 1967, the Jordanian ambassador to the UN made this very point to the UN Security Council just days before the Six-Day War, by stressing that the old armistice agreement "did not fix boundaries."

Read the whole thing.

Ma'an Arabic says that the PA sent a high-level delegation to the funeral of Moshe Hirsch, the Neturei Karta leader who did everything he could to destroy Israel while claiming that the Torah demands it.

The delegation presented a telegram to Hirsch's son from Mahmoud Abbas.

Sorry for posting this during lunchtime.

Toolbar test open thread

I saw that Israellycool added a toolbar, and it looked interesting, so I added the same one. It includes a chat, a search function, links to my YouTube page and some site stats. I can add other tools as well, just checking it out.

This is only a test - if it starts getting obtrusive I'll pull it. But let me know what you think. I'll see what other apps it has....

UPDATE: Removed it after a complaint.

What a surprise!

As you all know, I spend a great deal of time reading the Arabic press. By definition, the press is more moderate and thoughtful than the Arabic message boards or social media. Even so, however, it truly is a different world out there - a different mindset, a different narrative, a different history - than how Westerners think.

There is some internal consistency in the narrative, although it is comical when it comes up against real facts, which the Arab media tends to dismiss as lies or as conspiracies.

The readers of that media know, for a fact, that terrorism is a Zionist attribute. There are some crazy Islamic extremists but they are a tiny minority. The major danger to the world at large is Israel. Yet when a Koran is allegedly desecrated, the billion peaceful Muslims who are exhorted to violently come to the defense of Islam in that same media. No contradiction there.

So we can expect to see massive amounts of cognitive dissonance in reaction to the news that the person who attempted to kill hundreds of people in Times Square, Faisal Shahzad, is a Muslim. It will end up, as always, being a Zionist plot.