Josh Rogin reads tea leaves and thinks Hillary and Bibi may be headed to a breakthru, in which the future borders between Israel and Palestine will be outlined, and the issue of construction in the settlements will go away: Israel will build only within the lines. This would be a good thing if it could work; I'd assume it would not relate to Jerusalem, so that might remain a problem.
Elliot Jager talks about the mostly defunct Israeli Left.
Barry Rubin reminds us how ghastly Yaasir Arafat was (he died six years ago this week), and how much of the world's media refused to admit this:
At the time of his death he was more popular in France, where almost half the population saw Arafat as a great national hero, than among his own people. In a June 2004 poll, only 23.6 percent of Palestinians named him as the leader they most trusted. Actually, Arafat's popularity rating among Palestinians was lower than that of President George W. Bush among Americans, though the U.S. leader was-in sharp contrast to Arafat--widely portrayed as being reviled and mistrusted by a large part of his people.
3 comments:
The American proposal to Israel after 7 hours marathon talks: "a 90-day construction moratorium in West Bank in exchange for US veto on anti-Israel initiatives in UN". Is that all? What happens to Palestinian recognition of Israel as a Jewish State?
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3983969,00.html
Israel is really made to pay for every little favour
it looks so stupid to me, it would be so much smarter to just stand by her. If one looks like a reliable partner that's what one is liked for and the US right now looks neither here nor there.
Silke
PS: this piece from my current favourite on the NGO-complex says some "nice" things about Clinton, the former ...
http://www.tnr.com/blog/foreign-policy/78986/why-we-abandoned-haiti-abandon-it-we-have
Jager is mistaken in the last paragraph of his article saying that "...the parliamentary Left may be down and out, but the Left that dominates the Israeli judiciary, the media and the arts, the educational system and other large parts of the bureaucracy—that Left is another matter, and another story."
Sadly but they belong to the same story - the narcistic egotism of these elite groupings; their disconnection from reality and the "man of the street" is causing tremendous damage to the parliamentary left parties, they will be severely punished at the next elections by the voters because of the actions and behaviour of the leftwing intellectual elite.
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