Has Israel forgotten who pays the bills? Just after US President Barack Obama’s landmark address in Cairo, and just before US Mideast envoy George Mitchell returns to the region on Tuesday, the dispute between Washington and Jerusalem over settlement construction ratcheted up a notch. Israeli officials rejected on Saturday a statement by US Secretary of…
Showing all posts tagged settlements
Changes may be coming
The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg: It seems to me that Obama is trying to force the collapse of Netanyahu’s government. I base this mostly on intuition. Of course, the Obama Administration would never claim to be interfering in the internal politics of another country, but it seems obvious that Netanyahu’s narrow coalition won’t survive sustained American…
The temptation to expand was there from the beginning
Tom Segev writes in Haaretz that Israel could have once chosen peace but as usual decided to pursue Greater Israel: On December 5, 1967, then-chief of staff Lt. Gen. Yitzhak Rabin suggested to prime minister Levi Eshkol that a Palestinian state be established in the West Bank. The minutes of that conversation are kept today…
The settlers marinate
The Financial Times provides a necessary cold shower to those who think President Barack Obama’s talk about Middle East peace is realistic in the short-term: The Palestinians, in any case, have little hope of winning a reprieve from the settlements in the near future. The farming village of Jeet in the northern West Bank, for…
Obama in Cairo
My following article was published today on the popular US website Mondoweiss: Back in 2005, then US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gave a rousing speech at Cairo’s American University. “For sixty years”, she argued, “my country, the United States, pursued stability at the expense of democracy in this region here in the Middle East…
Counting all the illegal colonialists
Jonathan Cook writes how the bulk of the Western media based in Israel proper ignore the illegal, Jewish settlers in East Jerusalem: There are about half a million Jews living illegally on land occupied by Israel in the 1967 war. Give or take the odd few thousand (Israel is slow to update its figures), there…
Oh yes, those poor, little kids
Is this a joke? Rep. Gary L. Ackerman (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House foreign affairs subcommittee on the Middle East and South Asia, said focusing on settlement activity “detracts” from top U.S. goals in the region. However, he added: “I do not support a settlement freeze that calls on Israeli families not to grow, get…
The occupation, day 76532
The separate May meetings in Washington between US President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signalled an undoubted shift from the Bush administration. Obama is reportedly examining ways he can pressure Israel to cease all settlement building in the West Bank, a reality that radically upsets the Zionist…
The people the world ignores
Harvard Middle East scholar Sara Roy writes in the Harvard Crimson about the forgotten world of Gaza: Gaza is an example of a society that has been deliberately reduced to a state of abject destitution, its once productive population transformed into one of aid-dependent paupers. This context is undeniably one of mass suffering, created largely…
How strong is Obama?
The US President: Part of being a good friend is being honest. And I think there have been times where we are not as honest as we should be about the fact that the current direction, the current trajectory, in the region is profoundly negative, not only for Israeli interests but also U.S. interests. We…