A Palestinian leader jailed by Israel is urging Palestinians at home and abroad to stage mass rallies in September to support a bid to gain U.N. membership for an independent Palestine.
In a letter published Wednesday in Palestinian media, Marwan Barghouti calls for "millions" of Palestinians to demonstrate peacefully in Palestinian communities, Arab and Muslim nations and international capitals.
In the first two paragraphs Barghouti is a "leader jailed by Israel" apparently for some arbitrary reason.
It is only in the third paragraph that we learn:
Barghouti is a popular leading member of the Fatah movement of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. Israel jailed him for life in 2004 on charges of murder related to the killings of Israelis in a Palestinian uprising a decade ago.
I would have written "Barghouti was convicted of murder in the killing of 5 people during the uprising he led ten years ago." That's a much more direct way of putting it. For those who want to know a bit more about Barghouti,
here's Barry Rubin:
Despite media coverage there is no evidence of the “pragmatic” or “grass-roots” factors. In fact, the only “grass-roots” figure is Marwan Barghouti, in an Israeli jail for large numbers of killings done under his direction as the organizer of the intifadah that began in 2000—at a time when Israel was offering an independent Palestinian state with its capital in east Jerusalem.
The news report cited about presents Barghouti as innocuous. In truth he is an unrepentant murderer. But you can't expect most news organizations to portray him like that.
By the way which news organization was responsible for this particular bit of propgaanda? VOA News. American tax dollars at work.
2) Leaving Obama's mess for others
Mark Landler of the New York Times reports
As U.S. Steps Back, Europe Takes Bigger Role in Mideast Peace Push
It is a truism of Middle East peacemaking that the United States is the pivotal player — the most credible broker between the Israelis and thePalestinians. But with talks at a standstill, the Obama administration now finds itself on the sidelines, and Europe is emerging as the key diplomatic actor.Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel and the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, have crisscrossed the Continent in recent weeks, trying to woo leaders who are weighing whether to support a Palestinian bid for statehood at the United Nations in September. Neither man has visited Washington since the spring.
That may suit the administration just fine. The White House, several officials said, has deliberately kept a low profile since President Obama’s speech on the Middle East in May, in which he tried unsuccessfully to break the stalemate by proposing a starting point for negotiating the contours of a Palestinian state.
If I'm reading this correctly, the President attempted to get the parties back to the table by making a speech. When the speech didn't work, he left it to others.
Of course missing from all of this analysis is the simple fact that it is the Palestinians who have not been negotiating.
For some Europeans, leaving the door open to Palestinian recognition is a handy way to pressure Israel to return to negotiations, which have been on ice since last fall. To break that deadlock, Mr. Obama proposed using the prevailing borders before the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, adjusted to account for Jewish settlements in the West Bank, as the basis for negotiating a new Palestinian state. Mr. Netanyahu initially rejected that formula, saying it would render Israel indefensible. But an Israeli official said that in recent weeks, Mr. Netanyahu had moved much closer to accepting the idea, provided that the Palestinians agreed to recognition of Israel as a Jewish state, something they have long refused.
Last week, the United States tried to build support for such a quid pro quo from the Quartet, a Middle East peacemaking group that also includes the European Union, the United Nations and Russia.
Winning the Quartet’s endorsement would have put pressure on both sides to resume negotiations and taken much of the steam out of the Palestinian march to the United Nations.
What's going on? Some European countries want to pressure Israel (?) to return to negotiations, when - as mentioned above - it was the Palestinians who walked out. Is Landler reporting here or offering his opinion? Worse it appears that the only way the Quartet seems willing to go is to bring more pressure to bear on Israel and to treat, what ought to be a
fundamental principle of co-existence as a bargaining chip.
What's troubling about the article is the false sense of urgency permeating the reporting. Someone has to do something.
Strangely it appears that the voice of reason in the article is that of Robert Malley:
Still, the administration has opted for what one Middle East diplomat called a “tactical withdrawal,” leaving it to Tony Blair, the former British prime minister who is the special envoy to the Quartet, to try to close the gaps. While the United States does not want to be isolated by vetoing a Palestinian resolution, which Mr. Obama has signaled he will do, the administration appears less agitated by this prospect than it was a few months ago.
“The U.S. is frustrated, but ultimately an outcome where it vetoes a resolution is not the end of the world,” said Robert Malley, the Middle East and North Africa program director at the International Crisis Group.
This isn't the only place I've seen the sentiment that the United States would be "isolated" by vetoing a Security Council resolution supporting a Palestinians state. So what? I think Malley has it right here.
Jackson Diehl presents things much differently in
The blunders of Palestinian leader Abbas.
Back in May, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas adopted a new and radically different political strategy. Turning his back on the United States and peace talks with Israel, he signed a ”reconciliation” agreement with the Hamas movement and announced his intention to appeal to the United Nations in September for recognition of Palestinian statehood.
September is still six weeks away, but already it’s becoming clear that Abbas committed a monumental blunder, one that will leave his movement at a dead end — and possibly lead to an eruption of violence in the West Bank and Gaza.
While Diehl presents the possibility of violence in September, he lays out what happened. Abbas rejected the West and now it appears it has gained him nothing. The contrast between the two articles is instructive. Landler is obsessed with the question of getting the peace process going and, specifically, how to get Israel back to the table. Landler constructs an explanation and gets supporting quotes. Diehl, on the other hand, looked at what happened and described it. Ironically, Landler's article appeared in the news pages and Diehl's in the opinion section.
3) More sense in South Sudan than in Europe (or the New York Times)
While many European countries are wondering whether the Palestinians should be pressured to accept Israel as a Jewish state, the new country of South Sudan enthusiastically supporting that belief.
I found
this by accident from the South Sudan News Agency.
The Islamist age-old seething against the Jewish state is often publicly projected as a solidarity posture towards the Palestinian Arabs whose land is said to have been occupied by the Jews. Yet, it is the very Jews, now internationally paraded as settlers and occupiers of their own ancestral land, who gave birth to both Christianity and Islam (Islam might have been born in Saudi Arabia but three-quarter of the Quran is from the Bible) in the presently contested land of the state of Israel, Judea and Samaria or West Bank as it was renamed by the British.
There would be neither Christianity nor Islam without Judaism, and that Judaism was born in the current Holy Land of Jerusalem, Bethlehem, Galili, and Jericho etc till the Romans destroyed the temple and exiled the Jewish. Afterward, Islam conquered the land around 638 A.D and installed their mosque on the very spot where the famed Biblical Temple of Solomon once stood, after its destruction by the Romans.
Understandably, South Sudanese have no sympathy for the Palestinians’ cause because their judgment and stance is informed by the fact that they view Palestinians Arabs, just like the so-called Sudanese Arabs, as occupiers of the Jewish ancestral land rather than being victims as South Sudanese are at the hand of the northern Arabs. Thus, South Sudanese Christians could not bring themselves to comprehend how Muslims could, on the one hand, bar everybody else from their Holy Land of Mecca and Medina and yet, on the other hand, have the audacity to lie claim to Jerusalem and Bethlehem as theirs, let alone branding the Jews—their own Semitic kinsmen—as occupiers and settlers of their own Biblically land.
4) Did you hear the one about the belly dancer and the hard rock band?
You didn't? Then
read this:
The controversial joint appearance and performance by Lebanese belly dancer Johanna Fakhry (reportedly based in France) and the Israeli heavy-metal band Orphaned Land last month at the Hellfest music festival in Clisson, France only recently emerged in the news and is now stirring the pot.
Amateur video footage purportedly showing the performance depicts a member of Orphaned Land singing in what appears to be Hebrew while Fakhry dances around him wearing traditional belly dancer's grab and holding a Lebanese flag.
She then approaches the singer and helps him hold a large Israeli flag before taking her own Lebanese flag and brandishing it alongside the Israeli before the audience.
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