Mideast Media Sampler 09/01/2011

Blogged through my Asteroid

From DG:

1) New York Times op-ed Index August 2011


Seeking balance on the MidEast by Nicholas Kristof, August 3, 2011

This op-ed is a valentine for J-Street, taking Jeremy Ben Ami at face value.

American Jews have long trended liberal, and President Obama won 78 percent of the Jewish vote in 2008. Yet major Jewish organizations, like the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac, embrace hawkish positions. 
That’s because those Jews who vote and donate based on Israel are disproportionately conservative (the same is true of Christians who are most passionate about Israel issues). Ben-Ami argues that “the loudest eight percent” have hijacked Jewish groups to press for policies that represent neither the Jewish mainstream nor the best interests of Israel. 

Ben Ami, of course, won't acknowledge the truth. America is a pro-Israel country and it is his organization's misplaced focus on Israeli concession that is not popular. Without money, political connections and a friendly media, J-Street wouldn't exist. It has no broad based support.

Anti-Israel 1 / Pro-Israel 0



In Israel rent is too damn high by Dimi Reider and Aziz Abu Sarah, August 4, 2011



It's hard to penalize this uncritical look at the Israeli economic protests. Reider is Larry Derfner's partner at the Israel Reconsidered website, which is extremely left wing. So it's little surprise that the op-ed includes this:

So far, the protesters have managed to remain apolitical, refusing to declare support for any leader or to be hijacked by any political party. But there is one issue conspicuously missing from the protests: Israel’s 44-year occupation of the Palestinian territories, which exacts a heavy price on the state budget and is directly related to the lack of affordable housing within Israel proper.
According to a report published by the activist group Peace Now, the Israeli government is using over 15 percent of its public construction budget to expand West Bank settlements, which house only 4 percent of Israeli citizens. According to the Adva Center, a research institute, Israel spends twice as much on a settlement resident as it spends on other Israelis. 

The supposed study they cite is of questionable value as explained here.This argument also debunks the notion that the protests are largely apolitical.

Anti-Israel 2 / Pro-Israel 0



Palestinians and the U.N., Editorial, August 7, 2011


The fear expressed by the editors is that by vetoing any Security Council resolution, the United States, by virtue of its support of Israel would be further "isolated." But if what the United States is doing is correct and principled, what's wrong with being isolated.

All share blame for the stalemate. Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, has used any excuse he can find (regional turmoil, the weakness of his coalition government) to avoid negotiations. He has blustered and balked at President Obama’s prodding. Republican leaders in Washington — who seem mainly interested in embarrassing Mr. Obama — have encouraged his resistance.
Arab leaders haven’t given the Israelis any incentive to compromise. The Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, seemed to give up on diplomacy when Mr. Obama could not deliver a promised settlement freeze. We see no sign that he has thought even one step beyond the U.N. vote. 

This is an interesting finesse of what really happened. Abbas stopped negotiating with Ehud Olmert, Netanyahu's successor. His refusal to negotiate with Netanyahu, won American pressure for a settlement freeze. Then Abbas refused to negotiate until the freeze was about to expire. Going to the U.N. is a further effort to avoid negotiations and receive Israeli concessions in return for nothing.


Anti-Israel 3 / Pro-Israel 0


Jews in a whisper by Roger Cohen August 21, 2011


Ben Cohen delivered an exceptional rebuke to this column, Roger Cohen discovers antisemitism. The former Cohen critiques the latter with:

When someone makes a boneheaded joke about a “JewBerry,” the proper response is to denounce the Israeli occupation.

No need for any further explication from me but read the whole thing.

Anti-Israel 4 / Pro-Israel 0


Methodology: Using the keyword "Israel" I searched the New York Times archives for the past month. I limited the search to the opinion section and included articles that focused on Israel. The impetus for this index was an article by former New York Times public editor, Clark Hoyt, The danger of the one sided debate, which Hoyt used to justify the decision to include an op-ed by an official of the terrorist organization, Hamas. As you can see, critics of Israel are in no danger of disappearing from the opinion pages of the New York Times.


There was a nice short article by James Q. Wilson about what he would do if he were President, but it wasn't a full op-ed. A number of other articles mentioned Israel, but it wasn't the main focus of any those.



2) Heading for a split?

Barry Rubin the other day observed three reasons why Iran may be putting distance between itself and its client, Syrian President Bashar Assad. The second was:

Iran is worried about being isolated from Sunni Muslims, who are the large majority in the region, since this group is overwhelmingly supporting revolution in Syria. By being seen as too Shia Muslim, Iran’s regime could lose its bid to be the leader of revolutionary Islamism in the Middle East. Already, Hamas, the Palestinian Sunni Islamist group, has come out against the Syrian regime and is moving into the Egyptian (Muslim Brotherhood) orbit. That argument makes sense.

The New York Times reported on a speech given by Ayatollah Khameini that seems to confirm that view. The reporter observed:

The omission of Syria in his remarks was especially conspicuous, underlining Iran’s own ambivalence about how to deal with events unfolding there. Iran has been the strongest ally of Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, throughout the five-month-old antigovernment uprising in that country, which Mr. Assad has sought to suppress with ferocious brutality in the face of growing international isolation. But in recent days even Iran has asked the Assad regime to find a way to accommodate demands of the Syrian protest movement, worried that Mr. Assad’s downfall could prove destructive to Iran’s own strategic interests in the Middle East. 

3) Followup

Yesterday I wrote that Israel Reconsidered was co-written by Larry Derfner and Richard Silverstein. I was basing that on the blog's "About" page. The site did start off like that, but Lynn pointed out that the partnership did not last long or end well.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Middle East.