Mideast Media Sampler 05/10/2011

From an email from DG:

1) Weymouth interviews Amr Moussa

In the Washngton Post, Lally Weymouth interviews Amr Moussa, candidate for the presidency of Egypt.

A number of answers seem detached from the questions. Regarding Israel we get the following exchange:

If you become president would you keep the [peace] treaty with Israel?
The treaty is a treaty. For us, the treaty has been signed and it is for peace, but it depends also on the other side. . . . If you asked me what kind of relations between the Arab world and Israel I would like to see, I would say that the Arab position — of which Egypt is a party — rests on the Arab initiative of 2002.

His response is disjointed, but he seems to be saying that how Egypt views Israel is now determined by the Arab (peace?) initiative. That of course was a non-starter as it made specific demands on Israel, offering nebulous concession in return. Furthermore it effectively gave the Palestinians veto power over whether or not there would be peace with Israel. In other words peace with Israel will get even colder.

Barry Rubin has written more about Moussa.


2) J-Street: pro-Hamas, pro-terror

In Abbas Urges Continuation of U.S. Aid Despite Agreement With Hamas 
Ethan Bronner reports:

Jeremy Ben-Ami, the president of J Street, said he would “bring back to Washington the message that this may be the last opportunity with a Palestinian leader willing to say yes to peace with Israel.” He said he would urge the White House to offer a plan to create a Palestinian state based on the 1967 lines with agreed-upon land swaps and a request of Israel to pause West Bank settlement building for two to three months.

But we know that when he had a chance to say "yes" Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas said "no." In an interview with Al Jazeera, this is what Saeb Erekat described:

In November 2008… Let me finish… Olmert, who talked today about his proposal to Abu Mazen, offered the 1967 borders, but said: “We will take 6.5% of the West Bank, and give in return 5.8% from the 1948 lands, and the 0.7% will constitute the safe passage, and East Jerusalem will be the capital, but there is a problem with the Haram and with what they called the Holy Basin.” Abu Mazen too answered with defiance, saying: “I am not in a marketplace or a bazaar. I came to demarcate the borders of Palestine – the June 4, 1967 borders – without detracting a single inch, and without detracting a single stone from Jerusalem, or from the holy Christian and Muslim places. This is why the Palestinian negotiators did not sign…

In case anyone wants to argue that Erekat was merely posturing here, the Palestine Papers confirm that Abbas never responded.

In other words, Jeremy Ben-Ami defends Fatah for allying with the terrorist group Hamas based on a lie. The article uses J-Street's self description as being "pro-Israel and pro-peace," but Ben-Ami's words here mark him as being neither.


3) Grasshoppers

A side issue brought up by the controversy over Tony Kushner's honorary degree, was a decades old statement made by Yitzchak Shamir about grasshoppers. To his political enemies, Shamir was dehumanizing the Palestinians; to those who are biblically literate it had a much different connotation, as Charles Krauthammer noted at the time.

Now, it turns out that Shamir did not say that Palestinians will be crushed like grasshoppers. The word "crushed" serves to make the grasshopper reference look sadistic and bloodcurdling, but it is pure invention. What Shamir did say is that "those who would destroy what we are building . . . they are in our sight like grasshoppers." 

Here is where the ignorance comes in. Anyone who is familiar with Hebrew culture would know that the grasshopper reference, which to begin with is an odd political metaphor, is a quotation from perhaps the most famous story of national panic and dissension in the Old Testament. When wandering in the wilderness, the Israelites sent spies to scout the Promised Land. Upon returning, they delivered a report of abject defeatism: "And there we saw giants . . . and we were in our own sight as grasshoppers, and so we were in their sight" (Numbers 13:33). (The news so alarmed the Israelites that they demanded to return to the safety - and slavery - of Egypt. They were punished for their faithlessness by being made to wander 40 years in the wilderness.) 

Anyone in Shamir's audience would have recognized the reference. The meaning of the metaphor is clear: It refers to size and strength only, not to the presence or absence of human characteristics. The Biblical spies were saying: In comparison to our enemies we felt small and weak. They were not saying (they were, after all, speaking of themselves): We felt subhuman, insect-like.

Ron Kampeas gets credit for defending Shamir against Andrew Sullivan's calumny.

This wasn't the only time that Yitzchak Shamir's words were distorted. After losing the election to Yitzchak Rabin in 1992 he gave an interview to Ma'ariv in which he said that he expected that negotiations with the Palestinians would take 10 years. For example here's the New York Times headline:

Shamir Is Said to Admit Plan To Stall Talks 'for 10 Years'

Here's Shamir's explanation of what he said:

MEQ: You were quoted as you were about to leave office in 1992 saying, "I would have carried out autonomy talks for ten years, and meanwhile we would have reached half a million people in Judea and Samaria."¹ In retrospect, does this look like the right strategy?
Shamir: This is an inaccurate quote. I said I was willing to continue lengthy negotiations for as long as it may take, in order to reach a comprehensive agreement. The amount of time necessary for negotiation is unimportant; the appropriateness and accuracy of the resulting agreement is what counts. For example, the negotiations concerning the Panama Canal between Panama and the United States were carried on for a very long period with no harm done.

My brother (who lives in Israel) told me at the time that the interviewer confirmed Shamir's understanding of the statement. Shamir said that he expected serious negotiations to take a significant amount of time, whereas his critics twisted into "he admits that he would stall peace efforts."

I bring this up because recently the New York Times reported that Hamas leader, Khaled Meshal accepted a two state solution. But anyone who reads the interview would see no such acceptance. Worse, in a subsequent editorial the Times perpetuated the myth created by its reporter.

In a different context Barry Rubin recently wrote:

While the Times questions every statement by democratic Israel as if it was a claim made by President Richard Nixon during the Watergate affair, it accepts what the Syrian terrorist-sponsoring, anti-American dictatorship says as if it were

Unfortunately, it isn't just true for Syria. Statements made by Israel leaders (especially if they are from the political right) are distorted beyond recognition to support the notion that Israel is insufficiently committed to peace, whereas statements made by terrorists and tyrants are sanitized into paeans for peace, love and understanding.

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