When the prime ministers took down the hijackers
Before Operation Thunderbolt in Entebbe there was Operation Isotope.Jimmy Carter: Two-state solution is dead, Israel to blame
On May 8, 1972, four Palestinian terrorists hijacked the Belgian Sabena Airlines’ flight 571 as it flew from Vienna to Tel Aviv.
The plane landed in what was then known as Lod Airport, now Ben Gurion International. A 30-hour standoff between the hijackers and the Israeli government followed, before members of the crack Sayeret Matkal unit stormed the plane and took down the terrorists, killing two and capturing two.
Some 43 years later, Keshet Broadcasting has created a new film about the episode, with interviews from those who took part on both sides of the kidnapping, archival footage and modern dramatizations of the events.
The operation was led by former prime minister Ehud Barak, who commanded Sayeret Matkal at the time. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a team leader in the unit, was injured by friendly fire in the assault.
Though the film will not be broadcast in Israel until September 8, it premiered Tuesday evening in Jerusalem’s Cinema City, with many of the individuals who took part in the operation on hand, including Barak, Netanyahu, and then-transportation minister Shimon Peres.
Former US president Jimmy Carter said that the two-state solution has “zero chance” of being realized today, and blamed this on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, in a wide-ranging interview with Prospect Magazine Thursday.NGO Monitor: EU research funds wasted on Amnesty’s Hollywood-style CSI adventure
Carter accused Netanyahu of adopting a “one-state solution,” and lamented that the “US had withdrawn” from making further efforts. He further accused the Jewish state of denying Palestinians equal rights, but stopped short of labeling Israel an apartheid state, a term he utilized in his 2006 book, Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.
“These are the worst prospects for peace between Israel and the Palestinians for years. At this moment, there is zero chance of the two-state solution,” Carter said.
Carter, who served as US president from 1977 to 1981, said he believes that Netanyahu has no intention of pursuing peace, and lamented that “They [Palestinians] will never get equal rights [to Israeli Jews, in a one-state solution].”
Netanyahu “does not now and has never sincerely believed in a two-state solution for Israel and Palestine,” Carter added. He noted that when he visited Israel and the West Bank in April, he did not bother to contact Netanyahu for a meeting, on the grounds that “it would be a waste of time to ask” — expecting that the request would be rebuffed as were previous ones.
The former president and Nobel Peace Prize winner gave the interview ahead of the launch of his new book, A Full Life: Reflections at 90, and shortly after he announced Wednesday that he has been diagnosed with cancer. He will turn 91 in October.
In July 2015, amid great fanfare, including a media blitz and later a press-conference in Jerusalem, Amnesty International and the UK-based Forensic Architecture project launched their “Gaza Platform.” The stated objective was to shed “new light on violations of international law committed” in last summer’s bitter war.
This pseudo-scientific exercise repeated Amnesty’s standard political bias and was immediately exposed as factually inaccurate – terrorists were identified as civilian health care workers; a “journalist” doubled as a Hamas operative, etc.. The major investment in graphics and public relations not withstanding, the impact of the “Gaza forensics architecture project” was largely and justifiably non-existent. The claim that computerized maps and “eyewitness testimony” gathered by NGOs in Gaza could somehow determine whether war crimes were committed is clearly untenable. (Under international law, this would require examination of the intentions of Israeli military officials, and determining the presence or absence of Hamas terrorists and their weapons at the time and location of each attack. “Forensic architecture” can do neither.)
However, on one issue, the implications are significant – the amount of European taxpayer money that was wasted on this Hollywood-style exercise in pseudo-science. Apparently persuaded by buzz-words and the promise of hi-tech graphics, the EU framework known as the European Research Council (ERC) paid the bills. An initial grant of €1.2 million was provided for the 2011-2015 period to Eyal Weizman, the “principle investigator”. An additional €150,000 came from the ERC in 2014 for a “Media Aggregation and Plotting Platform” (MAPP), ostensibly to give human rights organizations “a highly efficient research and advocacy tool.”
To qualify for this grant, Forensic Architecture is listed as a research project at the University of London (Goldsmiths), explained vaguely as “a field of practice and as an analytical method for probing the political and social histories inscribed in spatial artefacts and in built environments.” The Forensic Architecture website, however, is not hosted by the University, suggesting a very limited connection.