Israel Sandbags Biden
US Vice President Joe Biden, on a trip to Israel, has condemned the plans for new homes in East Jerusalem. (photo: Ariel Schalit/AFP/Getty Images)
he far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu in Israel majorly sandbagged Vice President Joe Biden on Tuesday, demonstrating once again that it has not the slightest interest in pursuing a just peace with the Palestinian people or in trading a cessation of its colonization of the Palestinian West Bank for a comprehensive peace with the Arab world.
Biden went to the Mideast to kick off negotiations between the Palestinians and the Israelis, and reassured the latter of undying US support for them. On Chris Matthews' Hardball, Biden explained that when you marry someone, you tell them you love them, but that does not remove the obligation to keep saying it years later. Apparently, however, Washington is henpecked by Tel Aviv to the point almost of being a battered spouse. In response to Biden's loyal support for Israel over decades, the Likud-led government kicked him in the teeth. Israeli Interior Minister Eli Yishai abruptly announced that he would build 1600 new households (for 8,000 people?) in a part of the Occupied West Bank that the Israeli government had annexed to Jerusalem District. It was precisely such new and increasing Israeli building on Palestinian territory that had led Palestine Authority President Mahmoud Abbas to reject negotiations and to threaten to resign. The announcement put in doubt whether the negotiations would go forward, and made Biden and the United States government look like fools.
Joe Biden should have turned around and left the country. Instead, he showed up 90 minutes late to a state dinner hosted by Netanyahu and dared actually directly complain about the way he was treated, "I condemn the decision," he said, calling it "precisely the kind of step that undermines the trust we need right now and runs counter to the constructive discussions that I've had here in Israel."
Aljazeera English reports on Biden's visit and the Israeli announcement of new colonization measures:
The Netanyahu government had announced a settlement freeze in much of the West Bank for 8 months, but does not include the areas it unilaterally annexed to the district of Jerusalem as West Bank territory. Nor is the 'settlement freeze' really any such thing, since there are plans to expand housing in existing colonies on the West Bank.
This controversy comes on the heels of demonstrations in al-Khalil/ Hebron and Jerusalem by Palestinians outraged by the unilateral Israeli designation of the Tombs of the Patriarchs and the tomb of Rachel, in Palestinian West Bank territory, as Israeli heritage sites. In Palestinian experience, such Israeli claims often precede Israeli annexation. While US mass media did not cover the demonstrations in any detail (much reporting from Israel in US media is by dual citizens or by reporters who have served or have children serving in the Israeli army), they are a big story in the Middle East, and the creeping Israeli expulsion of Palestinians from East Jerusalem is guaranteed to enrage the world's 1.5 billion Muslims and result in violence.
The Obama administration came into office determined to restart the negotiations between Abbas and the Israelis, with the aim of achieving a two-state solution. After over a year of meetings and carrying messages and cajoling, the patient-as-Job special envoy George Mitchell finally convinced Mahmoud Abbas to agree to indirect negotiations with Israel. For the past year, Abbas had refused to talk, on the grounds that the Israelis were actively colonizing the West Bank and so taking away the very territory that was subject to negotiation. How do you parlay with someone who is stealing from you at that very moment?
The Oslo process of the 1990s, initiated by Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, had aimed at establishing two states side by side, Israel and Palestine. Neither the Likud Party of Netanyahu nor Hamas among the Palestinians wanted to see that process succeed. Likud wanted all of the former British Mandate of Palestine to be permanently under Israeli control, including the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, which Israel occupied in 1967 and which have a stateless, rights-less Palestinian population of over 4 million persons. The Israelis have steadily and determinedly usurped Palestinian territory throughout the last nearly a century, and by now it is highly unlikely that what is left of the Palestinian West Bank and the besieged, half-starving Gaza Strip can plausibly be cobbled together into a 'state.'
In my view, it doesn't really matter if Netanyahu's slap in the face to Biden derails the proposed indirect talks. The Likud-led government has no intention of allowing a Palestinian state, and there is now no place to put one. Israel-Palestine has unalterably entered the era of Apartheid (actually something worse), and it will spell both the end of dreams of peace in our generation, and probably over time the end of Israel as Netanyahu's generation knew it. The Palestinians cannot be left stateless (the legal estate of slaves as well as of Jews under Nazi rule, i.e. people with no legal rights) forever. If they can't have Palestinian citizenship, then they'll have to have Israeli citizenship. The future of Israel-Palestine is likely to become a multi-ethnic, multi-religious state like Lebanon. Ironically, it is Netanyahu who is in no small measure responsible for this likely outcome, the opposite of the one he aspires to.
Israelis claim a 'birthright' to do things like colonize Palestinian territory, based on romantic-nationalist reworkings of biblical narratives. But Canaan was populated for millenia before some Canaanite tribes adopted the new religion of Judaism, and it was also ruled, as Palestine, for centuries by Romans and Greeks, and for 1400 years by Muslims. The Palestinian Jews converted to Christianity and then to Islam, so they are cousins of the European Jews (who appear to have gone to Europe voluntarily as male merchants around 800 CE,, where they took local wives). European Jews are about half European by parentage and all European by cultural heritage, and it is no more natural that they be in geographical Palestine than that they be in Europe (where nearly two-thirds of their mothers were from and about a third of their fathers). From a Middle Eastern point of view, European Jews planted in British Mandate Palestine by the British Empire were no different from the million colons or European colonists brought to Algeria while it was under French rule from 1830-1962. (Algeria had been ruled in antiquity by Rome, and the French considered themselves heirs of the Roman Empire, so it was natural that people from Marseilles should return to 'their' territory. Romantic nationalism, whether French or Zionist, always has the same shape). I don't predict the same fate for Jewish Israelis as befell the French colons. Rather, I think they are likely to more and more resemble in their position the Maronite Catholics of Lebanon-- i.e. powerful and formerly dominant population-wise, but increasingly challenged by other rising communities.
|
THE NEW STREAMLINED RSN LOGIN PROCESS: Register once, then login and you are ready to comment. All you need is a Username and a Password of your choosing and you are free to comment whenever you like! Welcome to the Reader Supported News community. |
 05 February 2012
|
 06 February 2012
|
 05 February 2012
|
 07 February 2012
|
 07 February 2012
|
 06 February 2012
|
 06 February 2012
|
 06 February 2012
|
 05 February 2012
|
Comments
I would have cut their foreign aid support of 30 Billions a long long time ago.
Once they will not receice this money any more they will make PEACE ASAP.
Now you see why nobody likes the present Israeli goverment.
The illegal settlements are what is blocking peace in the region--not the idiotic, ineffective missiles that appear from time to time and harm no one.
American founder of CLASSIC Reform Judaism Opposed
the Settling of Israel because of the War Like surrounding States. This Great Man Isaac Myer Wise was right in his evaluation but was overruled and eliminated from Jewish History
by the fear of another Holocaust. He predicted that the endless fighting would cause the loss of the Jewish Soul.I agree. This is a great tragedy for all concerned .
Next, the prime minister promised a housing freeze, agaisnt his party, in Judea and Samaria, but not in Jerusalem -- the capital of Israel and the eternal capital of the Jewish people.
Third, the building approved in Jerusalem had nothing to do with the prime minister. It had been in the pipeline for three years already.
The timing was unfortunate, but the Israelis have every right to build housing in their capital, just as the United States has the right to build in Washington DC.
Mike, we are too intelligent for your ad hominem arguments.
The fact is that Israel is a sovereign country, jut like the United States and Canada. And as such, Israelis can build homes in the capital of Israel.
Give me a break!
Jewish prayer asks for all Jews to be restored to Zion -- and this prayer is receited three times daily.
The psalm says "If I forget thee, o Jerusalm, may my right hand lse its cunning.
The Jeiwsh people has been tied to Jerusalem for 3000 years.
Now do you get it?
They are living in an area that is considered Holy and sacred and perhaps they would be better served if they moved somewhere else and the area was deemed an International Historical Park.
Let them fight with someone else, somewhere else and without the monetary and political alliance of the USA. We can no longer afford to "keep" them.
There is a name for that, I think. It's called anti- something, I believe.
For the past 1400 years, Palestine has been occupied by... wait for it... Palestinians! Gee, who woulda thought?
There's a name for your attitude, too: denial of reality.
Most Arabs living west of the Jordan River in Israel, the West Bank (Judea and Samaria) and Gaza are newcomers who came from surrounding Arab lands after the turn of the 20th century because they were attracted to the relative economic prosperity brought about by the Zionist Movement and the British in the 1920s and 1930s.
This is substantiated by eyewitness reports of a deserted country -- including 18th-century reports from the British archaeologist Thomas Shaw, French author and historian Count Constantine Volney (Travels through Syria and Egypt, 1798); the mid-19th-century writings of Alphonse de Lamartine (Recollections of the East, 1835); Mark Twain (Innocents Abroad, 1867); and reports from the British Consul in Jerusalem (1857) that were sent back to London.
First, in Israel, as in the U.S., what is called by the right-wing owned media as "center-right" is in real human terms pretty far right.
Next, the "settlement" in question is not IN Jerusalem, but in the "Jerusalem District", an arbitrary area that is just defined by Right-wing aspirations for a district of ethnic cleansing.
Third, "In the pipeline for 3 years"? What part of "freeze" are you unclear on? A real freeze does just that, freezes projects at whatever state they are in at that time.
And as to timing being unfortunate, only the extremely naive and gullible would believe that the timing of ANY of this type of activity is "an accident" as you would have us believe.
And as for the analogy with Washington DC, I think you would find a more analogous situation in Apartheid-era Afrikaaners having "every right" to displace people in Soweto or any of the Bantustans.
No matter who is in power in Israel, the press is controlled by the Israeli left.
Not "Jerusalem District," but Jerusalem. Sheikh Jarrah is a neighborhood in Jerusalem. Fact.
Once again, the freeze did not and does not apply to Jerusalem, Israel's capital.
And the timing was indeed unfortunate, unless Sean is a conspiracy theorist.
The nonsensical comparison of Israel with South Africa has been disproved, and even that moron Jimmy Carter has apologized for saying that.
The Arabs have 22 states; the Jews have but one. And Sean would like to dismember that one too.
Reading your responses has been revealing. It is you who doesn't seem to know what truth is. You are way too conceptual about all this. All "isms" get in the way of truth. Judaism, Christianity, and all other religions have a purpose, but, at the same time, cloud reality. Man has made all this up. This land does not belong to any one group. Drop it, Ira! Try to see through all your indoctrination.
You see, the Jews have but one homeland in all the world. The Arabs would like to take that away from them. But the Arabs already have 22 countries.
.
East Jerusalem is not recognized internationally as sovereign Israeli territory, and until it is, the state of Israel does not have the right to displace Palestinians there with new Jewish settlers.
However, Semantic distortion ignores the reality of Arab discrimination and hostility toward Jews. Arabs, like any other people, can indeed be anti-Semitic. The term "anti-Semite" was coined in Germany in 1879 by Wilhelm Marrih to refer to the anti-Jewish manifestations of the period and to give Jew hatred a more scientific sounding name. "Anti-Semitism" has been accepted and understood to mean hatred of the Jewish people.
While Jewish communities in Arab and Islamic countries fared better overall than those in Christian lands in Europe, Jews were no strangers to persecution and humiliation among the Arabs and Muslim. As Princeton University historian Bernard Lewis has written: "The Golden Age of equal rights was a myth, and belief in it was a result, more than a cause, of Jewish sympathy for Islam."
It's actually part of their religion, Islam.
Israel would not had been a state if Eisenhower had not come to your aid in the six day war. What Israel has done is the same Hitler did to the Jewish people in WWII. Israel has repeatedly treated the Palestinians like trash, and looks to their value of life as if they were dirty dogs. Hitler had the same view of the Jews. Shame on Israel and such treatment has nothing to do with what God "Yahweh" would expect of a righteous people.
And no one in the Israel government ever claimed to stop building in the capital city.
The Six Day War was in 1967. President Eisenhower left office in 1961. This is typical of the anti-Israel people here. They have no idea of what happened, by whom, or when.
At least this guy didn't blame President Lincoln for helping Israel.
I believe the Iraelis knew there were no WMD. Nada. The simplest explanation being they have the very best intelligence agency in the world. And they either told Bush there were none or they just kept quiet when they knew Bush was just itching to play cowboy hero.
We sapped ourselves!!!!!
: There are very few refugees left in Gaza. The children and grandchildren of these refugees are not, according to international law, refugees. They are only considered "refugees" because the Arab states have refused to resettle them or build them permanent housing. In addition, not all Palestinians who fled Israel in 1948 were "driven out." Some fled areas of fighting and some left of their own accord.
Your article is very interesting, but I just want to point out that the maps are wrong and misleading. In map no. 3 there was no Palestinian land. The West Bank was Jordan and Gaza was Egypt. So there should be no green, but colors representing Jordan and Egypt, respectively.
Map No. 4 however shows true Palestinian land created by the Oslo agreement. This means that Palestinian land (the green-colored area) INCREASED between the period represented by maps 3 and 4 (1967 to 2000), not decreased, and Israeli WHITE land DECREASED, not increased. In other words, Israel GAVE UP land, not took it, between 1967 and 2000. (Israel also gave up South Lebanon to Hezbollah and the "gigantic" Sinai to Egypt, because both sides were serious about peace.)
Israel, in other words, is the first country (some like to say "empire") in history that got bigger by getting smaller. Nice paradox.
Who is Juan Cole and where are his allegiances? He makes it sound like Jews have no rights to Israel. The displaced people should be treated fairly but there are factors of national security that also need to be considered.
All the land west of the Jordan River had been ceded to the Jews by the Balfour Declaration, and the Arabs were given all the land east of the Jordan. At that time the country was called Trans-Jordan.
Israel has never stolen any land from the Palestinians. The land has belonged to the Jewish people from more than 3000 years.
The Jewish people base their claim to the Land of Israel on at least four premises: 1) the Jewish people settled and developed the land; 2) the international community granted political sovereignty in Palestine to the Jewish people; 3) the territory was captured in defensive wars and 4) God promised the land to the patriarch Abraham.
Sorry, but what had been called Palestine until 1948 is now called Israel. There is no Palestine today.
Netanyahu was voted in by the Israeli right, and now he has adopted a centrist position, so Judy is right in claiming that he does not represent the people who voted for him.
AIPAC took good care of him. Still will. He is doing their bidding. Don't be fooled. The palestinians are on their own.
historical homeland. - to be continued
A 1947 United Nations resolution endorsed the partition of Palestine into Jewish and Arab states and on May 14, 1948 Israel declared its independence; immediately four Arab neighbors invaded Israel and tried to end its existence and that of all of its inhabitants. Since then Israel has had to fight five wars for its survival and defend itself and its innocent civilians, sometimes daily, from suicide bomb attacks by lunatics. That is the accurate history, not your false maps and your fantasies.
Even the control of the Jordan border would be the given to the Palestinians once trust has been restored.
Israel wants the Palestinians to have an economicaly viable state and knows that this would be impossible if it looked like swiss cheese as Mr Cole suggests.
Bill, U.S. Army Air Corps, 1942-45 (WW II for those of you too young to remember)
They are in a hard position but some of their decisions, supported by the U.S. have been cruel and heartless..
The maps speaks a thousand words.
+
Also, the truth might be, most Americans don't trust Jews nor Arabs, much less our government telling other countries about "peaceful" co-existance. After all, these dudes (Jews and Arabs) have been fighting each other for thousands of years and will continue to do so until the end of time.
I think this country is sandbaged to allow Israel to dictate US foreign policy. Biden is just posuring. Both he and Obama had to genuflect to AIPAC in order to quallify for their executive positions.
The Jewish state must now be ordered to withdraw, negotiate immediately the return of all stolen territory from the nation called Palestine, and will instead facilitate Palestine's establishment of an Army, Navy and Air Force for it's own defense.
Israel agreed to all of these things, and therefore must now be forced to comply with it's own agreements. Defending the lost of any race is not "Christian."
What God gave Abraham, the father of both Jews, and Arabs, it is NOT the business of the US to guarantee.
The naming of that square after that terrorist, has been carried out by the Fatah terror group that rules the Palestinian Authority today.
The U.S. seems to be willing to fund and/or fight all of Israel's wars. WWIII is coming with the unjustified attack on Iran and there is money to be made.
Wall Street and Tel Aviv will make a killing - literally.
So, PLEASE, in the interest of progress and sanity, get your facts straight before developing an opinion.
thank you.
Despite the Quran's alleged prohibition, Jews were forced to convert to Islam or face death in Yemen (1165 and 1678), Morocco (1275, 1465 and 1790-92), and Baghdad (1333 and 1344).
Muslim "protection" meant only that they did not kill and rob Jews as vigorously as Christians. But not being a cannibal does not necessary mean to be a vegetarian. The number of the pogroms perpetrated by Muslims against Jews is not very much fewer than the number of pogroms perpetrated by Christians.
Palestinian Arabs cast themselves as a native people in "Palestine" -- like the Aborigines in Australia or Native Americans in America. They portray the Jews as European imperialists and colonizers. This is simply untrue.
Until the Jews began returning to the Land of Israel in increasing numbers from the late 19th century to the turn of the 20th, the area called Palestine was a God-forsaken backwash that belonged to the Ottoman Empire, based in Turkey.
The land's fragile ecology had been laid waste in the wake of the Arabs' 7th-century conquest. In 1799, the population was at it lowest and estimated to be no more than 250,000 to 300,000 inhabitants in all the land.
Have you considered Israel’s humanitarian aid to Gaza?
• 900: Percent increase in humanitarian aid delivered to Gaza in 2009, compared to 2008.
• 630,253: Tons of humanitarian aid delivered to the Gaza Strip, Jan. 19 – Dec. 13, 2009.
• 24.5 million gallons (92.7 million liters): Heavy-duty diesel fuel delivered to the Gaza Strip, Jan. 19 – Oct. 31, 2009.
• 10,346: Gaza residents who entered Israel for medical and humanitarian reasons, Jan.19 – Nov. 7, 2009.
• 57,295 tons: Monthly average of humanitarian aid entering Gaza since Operation Cast Lead, Jan. 19 – Dec. 5, 2009.
Israel’s Humanitarian Aid to Gaza
• 900: Percent increase in humanitarian aid delivered to Gaza in 2009, compared to 2008.
• 630,253: Tons of humanitarian aid delivered to the Gaza Strip, Jan. 19 – Dec. 13, 2009.
But just to set things straight, a Jew cannot won land in Jordan; nor in Saudi Arabia.
But the prize is in the areas administered by the Palestinian Authority. Anyone who sells land to a Jew is subject to the death penalty.
How do you like that?
.
Until Israel acts like a member of the "neighborhood" instead of a bunch of arrogant bigots, their neighbors will hate them, for good reason. The Israeli leadership abuses not only Palestinians, they abuse and denigrate Sephardim and Misrahi with abandon.
Until Israel/Palestine becomes two states, the walls are torn down, settlements are abandoned and Israel returns the half of Jerusalem that is sacred to Muslims, they don't deserve any military aid from the US. Without blood-thirsty Likud there would be no Hezbollah.
It's offensive to support such a criminal regime. There's no place in Israel for Sephardic Jews like me due to apartheid.
First, Sephardim have equal rights; they are Knesset members, government ministers and army chief of general staff, to give but a few examples.
The sacredness of Jerusalem to Muslims is a very recent phenomenon.
The majority of Jews in Israel are Sephardim.
The Hisb'Allah wants to murder all Israelis, Sephardim and Ashkenazim alike.
To put it mildly, there is not a grain of truth to the far-out claims made by Betty.
RSS feed for comments to this post.