The striking thing about the most powerful person in the world, as he approaches one year in office, is how, err, lacking in power he appears.

Disappointed and, according to Mark Lynas, insulted by the Chinese in Copenhagen.  A Health Care Bill that isn’t yet on the statute; is much delayed on his original timetable; and, by his own admission, is only “nine-tenths of a loaf” - some would say that half a loaf is nearer the mark and it comes with lashings of pork barrel whatever way you look at it. An Afghan strategy that even he doesn’t seem wholly convinced by and the backdrop to which Andrew Sullivan commented upon by saying:

“Obama arrived in China last month as a fiscal supplicant, not the leader of the free world. He cannot corner the Iranian regime without Russian or Chinese support. He cannot even get Israel, a country receiving $3 billion a year in aid and protected by America’s veto at the United Nations, simply to cease its construction of settlements in East Jerusalem or the West Bank.”

All of which simply serves to illustrate my point: How devoid of power the most powerful can be. That’s not to excuse any disappointments that President Obama may have caused or to defend his record (though, there is much more to defend than the increasingly naysayer conventional wisdom suggests). It is simply to place his presidency in context.

This is a context in which his power is more obviously finite and constrained than has been the case for most modern US presidents. Internationally, this is the consequence of the “unipolar moment”, first proclaimed, I think, by Charles Krauthammer in 1990, waning (or, perhaps, being more obviously exposed as the hubristic delusion it always was). Domestically, this is the bitter fruit of what appears to Paul Krugman to be an increasingly dysfunctional Senate. This is a dysfunctionality that means that the Democrats control the presidency and both Houses but are still held to ransom by (dilute to taste) filibustering, partisan, pork barrel-seeking Republicans.

The international dimensions of this are well illustrated by Philip Bobbitt.

“What if Iran simply agrees to limited inspections, and continues enrichment to the point where weapons-grade nuclear material is created? What then? … Israel has resumed the construction of settlements in the West Bank, and it seems clear that Abbas cannot sustain domestic support in the face of the challenge from Hamas if he goes back to the negotiating table without even a temporary freeze on settlement expansion. Obama has little leverage on this issue—as his predecessors also found—but has committed himself to the proposition that “talks must begin and begin soon.” Or what? … Having previously announced it would not renew talks in the six-party format, North Korea has now indicated to the Chinese that it would re-engage in that forum, provided the US simultaneously opens bilateral talks. The US has insisted, quite sensibly, that regional multilateralism is the best way forward. But what if North Korea continues to refuse?”

The growing worry is that the Iranians, Israelis and North Koreans – not to mention the Chinese, Russians, the Taliban and others – have concluded that “nothing much” is the answer to every “What then?” In other words, as the Economist notes:

“The doubters argue that, however decent and articulate, Mr Obama is gaining a reputation as someone who can be pushed around. This month, after the president pandered to China by refusing to meet the Dalai Lama, China pushed for more by banning questions at his Beijing press conference with Hu Jintao, its president. When Mr Obama demanded that Israel stop all work on its settlements in the occupied territories, Binyamin Netanyahu, its prime minister, defied him and still, staggeringly, won praise from Hillary Clinton.”

It is even said that this praise from Clinton lays the groundwork for her to run against Obama for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2012. This argument goes that she will need an issue on which to split with Obama to do so and support for Israel would fit this bill. It is to be hoped that this argument is nonsense. But the mere suggestion that the President does not command the absolute and complete loyalty of all of his team implies weakness in a manner as profound as the swipes and pushed envelopes that have come his way via China, Israel et al.

The counter to this line of argument is also provided by the Economist:

“Mr Obama has pulled off the urgent tasks of starting to withdraw troops from Iraq and resetting America’s dysfunctional relations with Russia. He has boosted the G20 as a new global forum. This week Israel announced a partial settlement freeze. With health-care reform under his belt, he will soon be able to turn to world affairs with his status enhanced. Besides, you could hardly accuse Mr Obama of timidity. In three speeches in Prague, Cairo and Accra, he set out a new foreign policy that rejects the Manichean view of his predecessor. He means to negotiate deep cuts in nuclear weapons, make peace between Arabs and Jews, engage Iran, heal the climate and establish America as the strongest and most upright pole of a multipolar world. Yes, this work lies ahead, but how much can you ask in a year of war and recession?”

Health care reform is, just about, under his belt and it is hard to argue with the view of the Obama camp that this reform needed to be taken on in the first year of his presidency before mid-term elections which are likely to further undermine his ability to impose his will upon Congress. His presidency moves into a new phase with this reform behind him. However, perhaps, there are lessons to be learned for this next phase from the protracted way in which this reform was secured.

While the dysfunctionality of the Senate bemoaned by Krugman may make it all the harder for Obama’s will to prevail, it is important, no matter how great this dysfunctionality, that Obama exerts a will. In other words, he needs to lead. The tactics of how he does so can be debated, but the President does need to show genuine leadership. As Clive Crook writes:

“Mr Obama promised to strive for consensus. On issues such as energy policy, healthcare, education and immigration, there is no reason why moderates on both sides cannot make common cause. That is something many Americans long for. It was the great hope independents had of Mr Obama. In his first year, he rarely even tried. He simply chose not to exercise this kind of leadership.”

I must confess that I am both surprised and disappointed by the absence of such leadership. I anticipated that it would be forged on the radical centre (or center). Crook is right to worry that the absence of leadership that works towards such radicalism threatens “a drubbing in 2010 that will do for Mr Obama’s agenda what the wipe-out of 1994 did for Bill Clinton’s”.

While a drubbing can be averted, it is likely that the mid-terms will weaken the Democrats in Washington. This underlines the importance of strong leadership from the centre, of the kind which Crook described thus:

“On health, on energy, on public spending, independent voters want him to exercise centrist leadership, as he promised he would. Can’t he even pretend? For the sake of his Democratic majorities, he had better show voters he is listening, even if his allies in Congress are not.”

But there are plenty of willing allies for Obama in Congress who want the Democrats to behave in this way. A key example being Mark Warner, excellently profiled in the Washington Post this week. That he defines his philosophy as “radical centrism” should be a massive hint that this is the kind of Democratic Senator that Obama needs to work with and through to build consensus, bi-partisan if at all possible, for his agenda. It may be indicative of where things have gone wrong for the Democrats and Obama in the past year that the sense that Warner feels a little left out in the cold by his party pervades the Washington Post profile. It cites John J. Castellani, president of the Business Roundtable, an association of chief executives of large U.S. companies, saying of him:

“Obviously, in 2008, America voted for change. But they are maybe finding out now that they didn’t want to vote for big government spending that’s unchecked, or government intervention to a very, very low level into the economy. Mark Warner really represents that kind of middle ground that wants government to help solve problems but not so much interfere with all areas of the economy.”

There is nothing that Democratic Senators like Warner would like more than to work with the President on this middle ground to get America’s economy growing as strongly as it can do in 2010, control public debt and to seriously correct the US’ disturbingly high unemployment. These are causes which, if approached in the right way, these Senators are likely to be able to build bi-partisan support for. Moreover, in terms of the Democrats avoiding mid-term meltdown, we really are looking at a case of “it’s the economy, stupid”.

Obama should be Bill Clinton-like in recognising the political centrality of the economy and also take some lessons from another great Democratic pragmatist: LBJ. While we can all join Anthony Painter in hoping that Afghanistan does not see Obama transformed into Barack B Johnson, Obama should seek to be - pace E. J. Dionne Jr - LBJ-like in terms of working Congress and building up support for his policies amongst Congressmen.

So: insofar as his domestic agenda is concerned, the course which I would recommend to President Obama in 2010 is to reach out to the nation and Congress, particularly colleagues like Warner, through centrist leadership, with a strong focus upon improving America’s economic outlook. This will be the best way to be economical with (indeed, grow) his political capital (which is now dangerously low after the ending of his all too brief honeymoon in the White House). Furthermore, the policies of true radicalism are invariably to be found in policies that are that are the stuff of such leadership, rather than the stuff of Democratic or Republican sacred cows. Essentially, independent voters remain the key demographic (and the biggest threat to Obama being a two term President would come if the Republicans selected a candidate more capable of reaching out to them than someone like Sarah Palin) and the policies which appeal most to these voters are also the policies which will do most to change America in the ways that it should change.

Improvement in America’s economic prospects is a key linkage point between his domestic and international agendas. Niall Ferguson claims that noting that “the yawning US current account deficit was increasingly being financed by Asian central banks, with the Chinese moving into pole position, was, for me at least, the eureka moment of the decade”. He’s right to see this as such a moment and to see this as “the decade that tilted east” and away from the supposed uniploar dominance of the USA.

Given that the Chinese are re-cycling the massive trade surplus that they are running against the US to finance the US current account deficit, part of the correction to this – and an end towards which Obama can work with the likes of Warner – is to reduce the Chinese trade surplus by growing American exports. Another part is to control public debt. There are great opportunities for the American (and British) firms that come to satisfy the wants and needs of the rising middle classes of the BRIC economies, who have got rich (or richer) by producing the exports that are the stuff of the trade deficits (and maxed out credit cards, etc) experienced by both the US and the UK.

But the imbalances in the “Chimerica” economy are too substantial to be corrected by the innovations and efforts of American exporters alone. We’ve have all, allegedly, become Keynesians in the past year or so, but while there has been much talk of fiscal stimulus, there has been much less of the deep concern which Keynes had about surplus economies, which lead to the creation of the Bretton Woods system (though, this system did not conform to the plans Keynes actually had).

There is, perhaps, no better indicator of the way the world has changed than that today the relationship between the Chinese economy (running a massive trade surplus) and the American (running a massive trade deficit) directly parallels the relationship between the American (running a massive surplus) and the British (running a massive deficit) at the time in the 1940s when Keynes’ concerns about surplus economies fed into the debate which resulted in Bretton Woods. 

It is no coincidence that what Derek Scott has described as the “re-emergence of genuine capitalism, including large-scale private sector capital flows” has come about in the decades after the demise of Bretton Woods. This development has been broadly welcome, lifting millions of people in places like the BRIC economies out of absolute poverty. But Bretton Woods increasingly seems something that if it doesn’t exist, as is obviously now the case, is in need of (re)invention. What is required, in essence, is some global mechanism to correct for the imbalances between surplus and deficit economies that are the real story of the economic crisis. 

Andrew Sullivan is, of course, right to lament that ”Britain in the late 1950s had a friendly superpower to whom she could surrender global hegemony. America has no such luxury”. In contrast, the future seems one of contested modernities, with values and visions that would please most Americans and Europeans being ever more marginalised. One of the great dangers that I perceive in coming decades is that the ”west” will react to this by lashing out in ever more ill-advised and dramatic ways. It is again hard to argue with Niall Ferguson’s argument that great episodes of violence occur at the end of empires and the end of America’s empire seems much closer than its beginning.

This would seem much more likely if the “right nation” were to swing back to the right under a President Palin or similar in 2012. The alternative to World War III under Palin, given the absence of a friendly superpower, is to now fashion a multilateral world in which it is much more likely than otherwise that American (and European) interests and values will be best served in the decades to come during which the notion of a unipolar world will be as laughable and out-dated as the excesses of the British Empire now seem (or, at least, the notion of an American unipolar moment may be so, but the Chinese Charles Krauthammer may be closer than many would wish).  

The creation of the global institutions that will form this multilateral world and attempt to steer our Chinese century, now a decade old, is one of the great tasks of Obama’s presidency, and will most probably be passed on to the next president, whether they are as under-qualified or ill-prepared to execute this task as Sarah Palin or otherwise. Obama has made a solid start in this regard, not least through the beefed up role of the G20, but there is much more that remains to be done and, given the significance of the imbalances within the “Chimerican” economy to literally almost everything else, I would commend something along the lines of a Bretton Woods Mark II as a prime candidate for the next round of global institutional building.

The window of opportunity for success in such building is rapidly closing. While the Copenhagen conference itself may be the stuff of such a multilateral world, the outcome of this conference suggests that the Chinese are more interested in looking forward to a very different kind of unipolar world from that envisaged by Krauthammer than working in and through multilateral institutions (i.e. one that would be the stuff of the Chinese Krauthammer’s world view). As one developing country foreign minister said to Mark Lynas: “The Athenians had nothing to offer to the Spartans.” The obvious way to change this dynamic is for the Spartans to have more to offer the Athenians, which, to my mind, takes us back again to the importance of strengthening the American economy, and in turn to Obama working productively with the likes of Warner.

It might seem inane and obvious to propose that America seek to strengthen its economy, but Niall Ferguson is also right that this will require a serious plan for the management of public debt, which may very well require the slaying of some spend-and-tax, Democratic sacred cows, meaning that strong centrist support and leadership will be needed to carry through such a plan. Not least as China’s population is more than four times that of the USA, in the longer-term, it also seems likely to require a immigration system that both provides the labour needed by the American economy and commands the broad support of the American electorate. Such a system is again something which centrist leadership is best able to deliver. 

It might also seem inane and obvious to argue - as I do when I argue that the US should seek to improve its economic performance relative to China and the importance of American exports to Chinese growth - that the negotiating position of American is improved by increased American strength and prestige, but this cuts to the core of many of pivital exchanges confronting America. It is as true around the G20 table as it is in the counterinsurgency battle with the Taliban or battles of will with Iran, North Korea or anyone else. 

The way in which these exchanges are likely to play out could be walked through in game theory models (and such models probably exist in the State Department and elsewhere) but, as any game theorist knows, threats are only of consequence if they are credible. It is clear that American strength is declining as compared with the heady days of the alleged unipolar phase and it is also clear that Obama seems less eager to use force than a Palin or a Dubya (which might be what, ultimately, leads us to the nightmare of a President Palin). However, it is equally clear that America is not without force and influence. To bring this to bear in the great exchanges that confront Obama, a willingness to use this force and influence has to be credible. That’s to say real and seen to be real. In other words, as Obama himself put it in a section from one of his speeches citied by the Economist: “Rules must be binding. Violations must be punished. Words must mean something.”

So: insofar as his international agenda is concerned for 2010, I suggest that President Obama continue to work through and towards the kind of multilateral institutions that will best protect American (and European) interests and values when the world is very much less unipolar than it has been, but without having this faith in multilateral institutions confused with American weakness and seeking to ensure that American strength is brought to bear credibly on all the vital engagements with China, Iran, Israel, North Korea, Russia, Afghanistan, Pakistan et al ad infinitum that confront the US.

This is an agenda that Europe should warmly support. However, it has all too sadly been the case that, while Obama is the President that Europe dreamed of, European governments have been far too slow and unwilling to support Obama in material ways.

If Europe really wants the change that Obama promises, this must change. If liberal America (or liberal anywhere) really wants the change that Obama promises, it too must change. It should stop moaning about Obama and start supporting him. Indeed, all with a stake in the change that Obama seeks (i.e. everyone), should come to genuinely be the change that they want to see in the world. After the poetry of his victory, the prose of the presidency can seem a painful hangover, but change never did come easy.

 ”We tend to think”, as Michael Tomasky notes, ”that Rosa Parks sat on a bus, Martin Luther King gave some great speeches, decent Americans recoiled at racist violence on the nightly news, and boom, change happened. The reality was that nine long years passed from Parks’s act of civil disobedience until Lyndon Johnson signed the civil rights bill – nine years of often mundane and inglorious work.” (That is, of course, by no accident or coincidence the same LBJ that I praised earlier in this blog). “And even then, the civil rights bill didn’t really fix the problem of African Americans being denied the vote, so Congress had to go back the next year and pass the voting rights act.”

Change is tough. But change is already here. “Measured against what different groups of voters thought he had promised – everything they desired – the administration’s performance looks poor”, argues Crook. “Measured against what voters were entitled to expect, it looks much better.” That provides much for liberals to take solace in as they redouble their support for Obama and the Democratic candidates in the mid-terms, but it is what is at stake in terms of the future that should really motivate them in seeking to fortify their President. I am scared of the climatic scenarios painted after the failure of Copenhagen and would be very scared indeed if I came from the Maldives, but the prospect of World War III should scare us all very much more no matter where we come from.

In making recommendations that seek to avert this outcome and bring about the most possible positive change under President Obama, I have probably argued for things which may annoy some liberals or people on the left: “radical centrism”, focusing on the economy, controlling public debt, not being afraid to be prepared to use force to enforce the rules of a multilateral world. I’m sorry if I’ve upset anyone in these ways, but, may be, one lesson of Obama’s first year in office, contrary to what his campaign may have left some people thinking, is that it isn’t possible to please all of the people all of the time.

No one would read Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation and ever think this possible. However, if this classic text were as widely read and understood as it should be, then, possibly, the kind of leadership from Obama and support for this leadership, which I have argued for here, would be more readily forthcoming. Perhaps, this might be a little worthwhile reading for many of us in what remains of the Christmas holidays.

Tomorrow human rights activists around the world will be commemorating — but certainly not celebrating — the first anniversary of Israel’s Operation Cast Lead against the population of Gaza. As was made clear in the report by Judge Richard Goldstone and his UN team, there is sufficient evidence to warrant investigations into both the Israeli Defense Force and Hamas on charges of war crimes. Several senior Israeli politicians amd military leaders are theoretically at risk of being arrested when they traval abroad, though many Western governments have reassured them that they will in fact be safe from prosecution. Just as Israel has consistently violated the Geneva Conventions and other instruments of international law — not least by the construction of illegal settlements in the West Bank and the systematic judaisation of East Jerusalem — without any effective international sanction. The British government has been shameful in its relative silence, mouthing token protests at settlement activity, for example, without doing anything pratical to bring Israel to heel — including putting pressure on Washington. Indeed, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu got a noticeably warm welcome from Gordon Brown when he visited 10 Downing Street a while back.

There is only one mainstream British political party, the Liberal Democrats (and only one party leader, Nick Clegg).  that can hold its head up high on the Palestinian issue, not only for endorsing the Goldstone Report but also for reminding the British electorate of the ongoing suffering in Gaza as well as in the Occupied Territories. The LibDems have rightly condemned Palestinian rocket attacks on Israeli communities and other forms of terror activity. But that does not justify the treatment the Palestinian civilian population is still receiving at the hands of the Israeli Defense Force and some militant Jewish settlers. The most urgent priority now is for Israel to lift the blockade on Gaza, so people there can regain some sort of normality in their lives. Nick Clegg made a clear and brave statement about that in an article in The Guardian earlier this week. So, tomorrow mourn for the victims of the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, on both sides of the divide. And stand up for the right of the Palestinians to be treated as dignified human beings.

Link: www.ldfp.eu

By Ira Sharkansky

JERUSALEM — There are times in politics, and they may be most of the times, when it is best to do nothing.

Long ago I learned that the essential rule in policy making is: Don’t make things worse. At about the same time, I heard that America is safest when Congress is on vacation. Now I am pretty sure that Israel is safest when the Knesset is not in session.

Politicians in both countries–and in many others–do not know the rules. They want to fix things with laws, typically with their name on them. However, we can thank politicians for the competition that is built into their work. Legislators propose many more laws than their colleagues are willing to approve. Each may get a few minutes of media exposure with the claim that they are about to fix something, but the purposely cumbersome nature of the legislative process limits the damage.

There are several examples of damage control in Israel this week, as politicians are striving to do nothing.

The Shalit affair bumps from one negotiating episode to the next, without results. The prime minister stays in the middle, not clearly joining the camp of those in favor or those opposed to the deal most recently on the table. His rhetoric is almost as good as Barack Obama’s. He is dealing with the dilemma of trying to bring the soldier home, without endangering Israelis in the process.

We hear once again that some Kadima MKs are pondering a move to Likud, but are not doing it yet. Why should they? Likud has enough strength in the Knesset without them, and they are not likely to be more powerful as Likud back benchers than as members of the Kadima opposition. There is no election on the horizon, so they can wait for better opportunities. the same can be said for the Labor back benchers straining under the rule of Ehud Barak, and threatening to bolt the party but not quite doing it.

President Obama is concentrating on health, and most likely Christmas and New Year celebrations. Without any imminent pressure on Israel from his White House, it is best for Israeli officials to enjoy the local quiet due to someone else’s holiday season. They won’t be caught celebrating Christmas, and the religious parties will damn those who celebrate the New Year of the goyim. Doing nothing is better than a mistake while anticipating pressure that has not come yet, and might not come at all.

Different political and bureaucratic actors are saying things and issuing documents about the settlement freeze, but nothing decisive is happening. The multiple actors who have something to do with a freeze, or with granting exceptions, are enough to assure uncertainty.

Iran may be the most burning issue on Israel’s agenda, but it is also important to other countries. Why should Israel alone pre-empt, when the governments of Sunni Arab countries,  the United States, and others also have an interest in stopping the development of an Iranian nuclear weapon, or having to decide how to live with an Iranian nuclear weapon if the process does not stop?

Jews who worry about another Holocaust may think their concerns are the most pressing. Insofar as others are in the same boat, cautious Israeli ask why should they do the bailing all by themselves. In response, others will say that the Jews of Europe said in the 1930s that “It will not happen to us.” And “Those who do not know history are fated to repeat it.”

However, history never repeats itself. The details always differ, and the “Devil is in the details.”

In short, people are maneuvering, seeming intent to stay out of trouble by not doing the wrong thing, or not doing the right thing in the wrong way.

Coping with uncertainty is how politics works most of the time. And among the principal strategies of coping are avoidance and delay.

The future is ambiguous. Many things can influence the near future, and many more will influence what happens later. There are likely to be pleasant as well as unpleasant surprises, and wise people see a lack of clarity when they look ahead.

Advance planning is desirable, provided it preserves flexibility. On occasion it may seem essential to pre-empt a hostile force by even greater hostility. Most of the time, however, it is worth waiting to see if the threat that might be really is.

In most countries that matter, the people can count on a week of celebration.

Happy Holidays

*
Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University

–

JERUSALEM (WJC)–Western diplomatic sources have told Arab newspaper ‘al-Hayat’ that Israel has agreed to release 443 of the 450 prisoners Hamas has demanded be freed in exchange for the release of captive IDF soldier Gilad Shalit.

In addition, the sources said Israel had demanded that over 100 of the prisoners to be freed will be banned from returning to the West Bank. According to the report, the government of Prime Minister Netanyahu has refused to release seven prisoners, including the former Fatah Secretary-General Marwan Barghouti and the secretary-general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, Ahmad Saadat.

Hamas is reportedly expected to give a positive response to the offer if Israel agrees to release all 450 prisoners on the list, even if Jerusalem insists on the deportation. The ‘Reuters’ news agency quoted a top Hamas official as saying that the German mediator had postponed his scheduled visit to Gaza because Israel wanted to modify its reply to the Hamas demands. Hamas deputy chief Moussa Abu Marzouk refused to comment on his movement’s stance on the deportation of prisoners. Marzouk told ‘al-Hayat’ that “we do not reject it, or accept it, it is part of the negotiations, and there are details to be discussed.”

Israeli officials familiar with the negotiations said Jerusalem was intent on preventing Palestinians convicted of killing Israelis from returning to the occupied West Bank, which is close to Israeli population centers.

*
Preceding provided by World Jewish Congress

By Gary Rotto

SAN DIEGO–The Guardian of Great Britain called the recently completed Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, “the biggest environmental meeting in history.”  But the final result is an agreement that calls for monitoring emissions but neither sets a target for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and no deadline for reaching a formal international climate treaty.  The agreement also provides for an aid fund, estimated to reach $100 billion by 2020, to help poor nations adapt to changing climate and increase the use of low-emissions fuels.   

The Washington Post quoted Ian Fry, a climate-change representative for Tuvalu, as responding, “To use a Biblical allusion, it looks like we’re being offered 30 pieces of silver to bargain away our future. Mr. President, our future is not for sale.” Tuvalu is midway between Hawaii and Australia and may be submerged by rising seas in a matter of decades.  But no matter how imperfect, an agreement was reached despite opposition.

As widely reported, one key focus is on the new economic dynamos of India and China, two countries whose greenhouse gas emissions have risen as dramatically as their economies have boomed.  Their concerns are that the newly developing world would be held to similar standards of the maturing economies of Europe and the US.  It’s about the money and the economic power that their countries exert by virtue of their new position in the world economy. 

And one player with money is Saudi Arabia. As reported by the Associated Press back in October “Saudi Arabia has led a quiet campaign during these and other negotiations — demanding behind closed doors that oil-producing nations get special financial assistance if a new climate pact calls for substantial reductions in the use of fossil fuels.  That campaign comes despite an International Energy Agency report released this week showing that OPEC revenues would still increase $23 trillion between 2008 and 2030 — a fourfold increase compared to the period from 1985 to 2007 — if countries agree to significantly slash emissions and thereby cut their use of oil.”

 Maybe it was the Saudis who came up with the definition Chutzpah and not our Eastern European ancestors?  And it may be that the average Saudi has much to lose economically, but why doesn’t the monarchy redistribute more of its oil-produced wealth to its own people?   Could it be that the Saudi government is more willing to spend its petro-dollars as “foreign aid” to undeveloped countries that are willing to play an obstructionist role to any accord?

The British government has called the Saudis and others out on the subject.  On the eve of the conference, Prime Minister Gordon Brown stated in an interview with The Guardian, “With only days to go before Copenhagen we mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate skeptics.  We know the science. We know what we must do. We must now act and close the 5bn-tonne gap. That will seal the deal.”

By contrast, Israel fully accepts the concept of climate change.  But according to a governmental report issued days before the Copenhagen Summit, is not prepared to properly track its emissions.  As reported by Haaretz, Israel has not implemented the basic actions necessary for dealing with climate change and lacks the professional capability to monitor climate change, according to a State Comptroller’s report released Sunday ahead of the UN climate change conference in Copenhagen. According to a report Comptroller Micha Lindenstrauss, the meteorological service responsible for observing climate change is not equipped for long-term monitoring, due to a lack of professional manpower and challenges in maintaining the network of meteorological centers.”  The Netanyahu Government has work to do in order to implement even the basic, compromise language of the new accord.  But at least it acknowledges a role in tracking and reducing emissions.

 *
Rotto is a freelance writer based in San Diego

 By Rabbi Dow Marmur

JERUSALEM–When we left Israel last May, the country had a Prime Minister known for his right-wing intransigent views. To support him he had several even bigger hawks in his cabinet, including as Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman, the leader of a party consisting largely of anti-progressive immigrants from the former Soviet Union.

 Coming back to the country some seven months later, we now find a seemingly conciliatory, pragmatic and much less doctrinaire leader of the Government of Israel. But he’s the same person: Binyamin Netanyahu. Here are some indicators:

 (1) Last June he declared that he accepts a two-state solution: an Israeli and Palestinian state living side by side. (2) A few weeks ago he agreed to (a kind of) ten months’ freeze of settlement expansion.  (3) He has ordered the lifting of restrictions on the movements of Palestinians. (4) There are signs of economic growth in the territories. 

 The reasons for these visible pointers toward transformation are the same now as they were when other right-wing leaders were at the helm: Menachem Begin who made peace with Egypt; Ariel Sharon who withdrew from Gaza; Ehud Olmert who hobnobbed with the President of the Palestinian Authority Abu Mazen. It’s called Realpolitik.

 Israel is dependent on the United States. When its President wants the Jewish state to act in a certain way, the Prime Minister has little choice but to comply. Some of us hoped that such pressure would point in the direction of peace in the Middle East when Barak Obama was elected. By responding positively to the President, Netanyahu may either challenge the Palestinians to reciprocate or show the world that they aren’t serious.

 The Palestinian response is by no means certain. But the Israeli course of action is also problematic. For in the short time that Netanyahu has been in office, the settler movement – the backbone of some of his hawkish coalition partners – may have become stronger and decidedly more strident. The recent torching of a mosque in a Palestinian village, allegedly in protest against the settlement freeze, has pointed to settlers as suspects. (However, the Israeli public’s strong reaction against such vandalism has been very reassuring and may suggest that the settlers can and will be kept in check.)

 Equally troubling is the “guidance” offered by nationalist Orthodox rabbis to soldiers. A generation ago, the elite groups of the Israel Defense Forces were members of (largely left-wing) kibbutzim. With the collapse of the kibbutz movement as a result of the economic perestroika in Israeli society, its sons are no longer in the forefront. Some graduates of nationalist institutions in which extremist rabbis play a prominent part, again with roots in West Bank Jewish settlements, appear to have taken their place. Though there’s no reason whatsoever for alarmist hysteria about the danger of an army take-over, there’s reason to view the phenomenon as another obstacle to peace.

 Even if Netanyahu manages to deliver the critics within his own party, it’s less clear that he’ll be able to persuade some of his coalition partners. As ideologues they may prefer to be outside the government than support a pragmatic approach. Therefore, if he appears to act inconsistently, it may not be because he’s duplicitous but because he finds himself between the rock that’s Obama and the hard place of his partners in government.

 Trying to follow Israeli politics is indeed exciting. For those of us anxious about the future of our children, it’s also very personal and at times worrying.

*
Rabbi Marmur, the emeritus spiritual leader of Holy Blossom Temple in Toronto, divides his time between Canada and Israel

By J. Zel Lurie

DELRAY BEACH, Florida–Sometimes you live too long and know too much. I celebrated my 96th birthday last week so I was around when East Jerusalem and the West Bank of Jordan were conquered by Israel in 1967.

I learned from an aide to Teddy Kollek what he and Moshe Dayan were up to when they tripled the size of Jerusalem. They did not expect that Israel would keep the West Bank. They expected a phone fall from King Hussein which would begin negotiations for its return. So the new city line of Jerusalem would be the frontier of the State of Israel.

No historian has ever mentioned this. None of the many books on Jerusalem which line my study have discovered this essential fact.

Hussein never called and the West Bank and expanded Jerusalem remained in Israel’s hands.

At first Israel and the media celebrated the reunification of Jerusalem. This was not strictly accurate because Abu Dis had been a section of East Jerusalem.

When Dayan and Kollek drew the new borders of Jerusalem, they excluded Abu Dis. Today a high 15 foot wall separates Abu Dis from its neighbors in East Jerusalem.

When it reports on East Jerusalem, the New York Times carefully notes that East Jerusalem was annexed by Israel in 1967. Annexed  is accurate but it annoys me because it presents a false picture. It does not tell the reader that East Jerusalem was tripled in size, that a score of West Bank villages to the East, South, and North of Jewish Jerusalem were urbanized overnight by adding them to Jerusalem.

What’s more is they suddenly became as sacred as the Temple Mount/Harm al-Sharif.  The Shjuafat camp of 1948 refugees was now a part of the eternal capital of Israel, never to be divided again. And so was Um Tuba and eit Hanina and Issawiye and Jebel Mukaber and  other West Bank villages. Which suddenly became Arab neighborhoods of Jerusalem.

The quarter million Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem have been paying city taxes but they have not been getting the services that Jewish neighborhoods get. Their schools are backward, and most important they are  not citizens of Israel. They have the status of permanent residents and if they live elsewhere for seven years, in neighboring Abu Dis for instance, they lose the right to return to their birthplace. 4,577 Arabs lost their residency rights in Jerusalem in 2008.

West Bank ProsperityIs Misleading
I am both happy  and, once again,  annoyed by the recent stories in the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere on the remarkable growth in business and jobs on the West Bank.  Prime Minister Salem Fayyed talks about an 11 percent increase in the GNP (gross national product) this year.

What these stories omit is that this growth is confined to Area A which is the cities of Ramallah, Nablus, Tulkarim and a few other urban centers.  The evil occupation continues unabated on the vast majority of the land of  the West Bank.

The harassment of the Palestinian farmers by the Army and the armed settlers  has taken a new and diabolic turn. Here is what occurred last week in the village of Enabus as described by Adam Keller, the editor of “The Other Israel.” I quote Keller:

Exacting a Price

Enabus. I was there two years ago, to help with the olive harvest. A Palestinian village south of Nablus. Industrious, lively and hospitable inhabitants. A very steep mountain terrain. Not the most ideal of agricultural lands, but the people of Enabus do their best. They build terraces on the mountainside, plant olive trees even on the most tiny plot available.

This week uninvited guests arrived in Enabus. Settlers. They arrived in Enabus in the middle of the night, burned cars and also a tractor, tried to set a house on fire, threatened inhabitants with their guns. (The guns which had been provided to them by the army for “self defense”).

This was not because of something which the Enabus villagers had done. It was because the settlers are angry at Netanyahu’s “settlement freeze”. When settlers are angry at something which the Government of Israel is doing (or pretends to be doing), they are quick to “exact a price” from the first Palestinians they happen to encounter.

In fact, this is not the settlers’ own invention. This method is already centuries old. Historically, in quite a few countries people who were furious with the King’s latest decree took out their anger on the nearest Jews. In such places, this was called simply “a Pogrom.” –Adam Keller

Adam Keller’s little publication on line is the only one that bothered to report on what happened in Enabus. Similar pogroms by the settlers against their Arab neighbors have occurred. They have been ignored by the police and the army.

I hope this makes you as angry as it makes me. Write to Ehud Barak. Minister of Defense, Hakirya,  Tel Aviv, Israel. He is the ruler, the King,  of the West Bank. He can stop the settlers depredations if has the guts to combat them. The Israel Army will obey his order despite the recent minor revolt in its ranks.

*
Lurie is a freelance writer based in Delray Beach, Florida

By Ira Sharkansky

JERUSALEM–Israel’s limited, 10-month settlement freeze is not working like a well oiled Swiss watch, assuming that metaphor still has validity in the digital age. Settlers have massed to demonstrate against what they call the abominable anti-Jewish doctrines of the prime minister many of them had supported, and they are sending their teen age sons and daughters to wrestle with the inspectors who come to the settlements with orders to stop building.

The settlers do not govern the country. At least one of their threats–to block key junctions throughout the country during a morning rush hour–did not work. There were more police to keep the junctions open than settlers and their supporters who came to block them. Israeli officials are familiar with mass demonstration. It will take a lot more than the 10,000 estimated to have gathered near the prime minister’s residence to change policy.

However, the settlers and their supporters are a significant minority. Their efforts parallel all those Americans who oppose abortion. In both cases there is religious doctrine capable of exciting opposition to what a government might do. Government can move against such sentiment. Abortions do happen in the United States, but officials are chary in the extreme about supporting them with public money. In the case of the Israeli settlements, most likely there will be a damper on construction, at least in the smaller and most isolated settlements, and some of the smallest ones recognized as illegal are being dismantled. However, the prime minister has promised increased public funding for the largest of the settlements, i.e., those that function as suburbs for the major cities, and have wide support as areas that should not be traded away to the Palestinians.

Rather than accusing Israel of violating one symbol of good government, i.e., the efficient administration of government policy, what we are seeing is another symbol of good government, i.e., the flexible enforcement of a policy opposed by a substantial element of the population. The rabbis of the Talmud said in several contexts that even the laws proclaimed by the Highest Authority are subject to dispute as to their meaning for concrete cases; that one should respect local practice; and not seek to implement a measure that goes against the capacity of the community to accept it.

It is not clear what will come of this messy situation.

On the one hand, those feeling that settlements are indeed a blockage in the way of an accord might blame Barack Obama for what is happening. By raising the specter of a sweeping freeze, he mobilized the settler community to demand the freedom to build. The fervor generated might recruit more Jews to settle in forbidden lands than it persuades those already living there to leave for  housing more acceptable to the White House.

It is most likely that the whole bluster is irrelevant, except for the headaches provided to several clusters of Israeli officials and activists. We can read the behavior of the Palestinians for some years now–at least since they have been negotiating with Israelis–to indicate that the settlements are not the major problem. Moreover, the independent and feisty people in charge of Gaza have signed on to a no recognition, no concession posture toward Israel whose roots are in the Khartoum Resolution of 1967. Would a Palestinian state without Gaza be practical? It might end up being in the size range of Delaware or Rhode Island, surrounded by Israel, without direct access to the sea or to another country. And should Israel negotiate the possibility of Palestine in the West Bank while the nay sayers of Gaza remain intent on continuing the fight?

It is easier to ask these questions than to answer them.

*
Sharkansky is professor emeritus of political science at Hebrew University

ATTENDED FORUM—From left Nita Lowey, Ted Kaufman, Joseph         Lieberman, Binyamin Netanyahu, Henry Waxman, Lindsey Graham,
Howard Berman and Susan Davis
_____________________________________________________________
WASHINGTON, D.C  (Press Release)– Congresswoman Susan Davis of San Diego recently attended the 2009 Saban Forum in Israel which brought together leading policymakers from America and Israel to discuss U.S.-Israel relations and the critical issues facing the Middle East.

The U.S delegation also included former President Bill Clinton, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, Independent Senator Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, Democratic Senator Ted Kaufman of Delaware, and Democratic Reps. Nita Lowey of New York and fellow Democratic Congress members from California Howard Berman, Henry Waxman, and Jane Harman.

The Israeli participants were Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, Defense Minister Ehud Barak, Kadima leader Tzipi Livni, Foreign Minister Avigdor Liberman, Former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, Israel Security Agency (Shin Bet) director Yuval Diskin and Director of Military Intelligence General Amos Yadlin.

“This was an incredible opportunity to engage in a dialogue on issues that are critical to the national security of both the United States and Israel,” said Davis, a member of the House Armed Services Committee.  “It is these dialogues that will help lead to a lasting peace in the Middle East.”

The issues discussed ranged from the Iranian threat to Syria to the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.

Part of the three-day conference was a trip to Ramallah on the West Bank for a meeting with Palestinian Authority Prime Minister Salam Fayyad.  The delegation witnessed the progress being made on the economic and infrastructure developments and improved security in Ramallah.

The conference was sponsored by the Saban Center for Middle East Policy.  Founded in 2004, the center works to promote policy dialogue between Israel and the U.S.

*
Preceding provided by Congresswoman Susan Davis

Sorry I’m late folks! I was away last week visiting number one son as he was being honorably discharged from Fort Carson, Colorado, after two Iraq tours and additional overseas service in Germany. Ok, so I’m letting my proud papa colors show a little. I hope you don’t mind. And, all right ok, the real reason for the visit was to spend Thanksgiving week with him and his darling wife and three girls. So that’s my excuse for not being here for a while.

My access to news was limited while I was gone, but I couldn’t escape noticing the one big item coming out of Jerusalem — the 10 month settlement “freeze” announced by Prime Minister Netanyahu. I was actually a little surprised that the stuff didn’t quite hit the fan as I would have expected. Sure, the settlement movement is putting up a fight as it ought to do, and the more right-sided elements within the political structure are voicing apt concerns, but it otherwise appears as though this thing is going through without too much trouble. What’s wrong with this picture? Has Bibi finally knuckled under Obamaniac pressure? But he was doing so well!

I don’t think we know the whole story yet, as is so often the case with Israeli affairs, and with Mr. Netanyahu in particular. I’d like to think he has some cards up his sleeve, but I have to watch myself that I don’t get to the point where I start to think that he’s simply incapable of blowing it. Perhaps this editorial in the Jerusalem Post comes as close as anything to laying out just how convoluted the whole matter is.

And it’s easy for me as an American to be a sidelines quarterback (did I just invent a new oxymoron?) and not have to decide what, if anything, to do about it. But it’s also difficult for me as an American to ignore what happens in Israel, since the direction we’re headed is becoming more & more linked to the direction we take with regard to that ancient land.

Am Israel chai.

lineman

Binyamin “Bibi” Netanyhu is Israel’s Prime Minister and shrewdest politician. Even his fiercest critics admire his savvy. But his latest maneuver, intended to appease both voters at home and U.S. President Barack Obama, may permanently debilitate peace talks. We must not fall prey to his sly trick.

Under pressure from the Obama Administration, Bibi agreed last week to what sounds like a complete freeze of settlements. But, as the New York Times’ Editorial Board aptly pointed out, it is one that “exempts Jerusalem, schools and synagogues and permits Israel to complete 3,000 housing units already under construction.” This is tantamount to claiming that housing currently being built by Israel under (at best) questionable means in East Jerusalem, should not be considered ’settlements’ by the international community.

For more, please see the Tikkun Daily blog.

Bibi’s bad week

Source: Caroline Glick.com

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu weakened Israel this week. And he did so for no good reason.

Thursday’s headlines told the tale. The day after Netanyahu bowed to US pressure and announced a total freeze on Jewish construction in Judea and Samaria for ten months, Yediot Aharonot reported that the Obama administration now wants Israel to release a thousand Fatah terrorists from prison.

The Americans also want Israel to allow US-trained, terror-supporting Fatah paramilitary forces to deploy in areas that are currently under Israeli military control. Moreover, the Americans are demanding that Israel surrender land in the strategically crucial Jordan Valley to Fatah.

And these are just American preconditions for starting negotiations with the Palestinians. According to Yediot, if those talks ever begin, the White House will demand that Israel accept a Palestinian state in Jerusalem, Judea, Samaria and Gaza and agree to ethnically cleanse all the areas of Jews.

So far from winning American support or at least causing the White House to ease its bullying, US President Barack Obama sees Netanyahu’s decision to implement a militarily irrational, bigoted policy of prohibiting Jews from building in Israel’s heartland as a drop in the bucket.

THE TRUTH is that Israel should not be in the business of negotiating the right of Israeli cities and villages to exist and prosper. The notion that it is acceptable to demand that Jews not be permitted to live in Judea and Samaria – or anywhere else in the world – is not a notion that Israel should countenance.

That being said, putting the so-called “settlements” genie back in the bottle is a tall order. After all, Israel agreed to place it on the table in the 1993 Oslo agreements and made its willingness to dry out Jewish communities explicit with its acceptance of the so-called road map in 2004. To take Israeli communities off the agenda it would be necessary to repudiate these deals.

Given what it will take to remove Jewish communities from the negotiations chopping block, it makes sense that Netanyahu has not moved in that direction since taking office. But willingness to discuss these communities is not the same as giving them away for nothing. In discussing the dispositions of these towns and villages, at a minimum Netanyahu should have taken advantage of the fact that the Americans, the Europeans and the Arabs all consider the so-called “settlements” to be the most important obstacle to peace.

Netanyahu should have capitalized on US Congressman and Obama ally Robert Wexler’s statement from last July that in exchange for freezing Jewish construction, Israel would gain normalized relations with all Arab League member states. Were Israel to see 20 Arab embassies opening in exchange for a temporary freeze in Jewish construction, one could say that Netanyahu’s massive concession was justified.

But Netanyahu decided to give away this high card – Israel’s ace of spades as it were – for free. Actually, he paid for it.

The Arabs rejected Wexler’s offer in July. And five seconds after Netanyahu announced the freeze the Palestinians proclaimed his unprecedented prohibition on Jewish building worthless. But then unlike Netanyahu, the Palestinians are playing their cards wisely. Why should they accept his move as sufficient when they know the Americans will demand still more concessions from him?

And sure enough, moments after Netanyahu’s speech, former senator George Mitchell stood before the cameras in Washington and said that his move is too little to impress the likes of Mitchell and Obama.

MANY COMMENTATORS claim that Netanyahu’s announcement Wednesday night was his way of balancing his desire to release 450 Hamas murderers from prison in exchange for hostage Gilad Schalit with an equal concession to Fatah. That is, the freeze was required, it is argued, because without a move of this magnitude, the terrorists-for-hostage deal would destroy Fatah completely.

This view is the quintessence of the notion that two wrongs make a right.

In an interview with Channel 2 Wednesday night, Defense Minister Ehud Barak admitted that in negotiating Schalit’s release, Netanyahu has gone well beyond former prime minister Ehud Olmert’s offers to Hamas. With Netanyahu and Likud in the opposition loudly proclaiming the truth that any deal with Hamas will imperil untold numbers of Israelis, Olmert didn’t dare accept Hamas’s demand that Israel release its most brutal mass murderers from its prisons. But now that Netanyahu and Likud are in the driver’s seat, they are only too happy to accept what was previously unacceptable.

By Thursday, it appeared that the Iranians and the Syrians had placed the
proposed swap on the back burner. But even if the deal presently being discussed doesn’t go through, Netanyahu’s moves on the issue to date have already weakened the country considerably.

Simply by agreeing to negotiate with Hamas, Netanyahu conferred legitimacy not only on the terror group, but on the act of taking hostages. After all, until Hamas had Schalit, no government in Israel was willing to cut a deal with it. But today, in the interest of making a deal, Israel has allowed Hamas commanders – including Schalit’s captor Ahmad Jabari – safe passage to Egypt where they are feted by senior Egyptian officials and meet with other senior terrorists. In so doing Israel has effectively accepted them as legitimate leaders.

Netanyahu’s willingness to release murderers from prison also signs the death warrants of countless Israelis. The Schalit-obsessed local media insists that politicians who claim they oppose the deal must be willing to look Schalit’s parents in the eyes and tell them that they will not “do what it takes” to bring Gilad home. But Schalit’s parents and the 450-terrorists-for-one-hostage-swap champions in the media and in the Knesset need to be asked whether they will be willing to look the families of the next IDF hostages in the eye after they are abducted due to Israel’s decision to spring murderers from prison in exchange for Schalit. So too, they should ask themselves what they will say to the families of the Israelis who will be murdered because of this deal.

Unfortunately, our foolish media elites and their lackeys in the government are incapable of recognizing that the deal with Hamas doesn’t pit the Schalit family against the families of the Israelis that these prisoners already murdered. It places Noam and Aviva Schalit against the families of the still unidentified Israelis who will be murdered by these imprisoned terrorists in the future if they are allowed to see the light of day.

Even if the current negotiations end in failure, Netanyahu this week made clear that he is willing to conduct a massive release of terrorists in exchange for Israeli hostages. The message has been received by our enemies and they will make us pay for it with interest.

FINALLY, NETANYAHU’S willingness to spring terrorists from prison in exchange for Schalit weakens Israel’s deterrent posture. This week The Jerusalem Post reported that the IDF has commissioned a study to figure out how to tell who has won in an inconclusive war against terrorists.

It seems a shame that there is apparently such a dearth of common sense in the General Staff that the IDF needs someone from the outside to explain the facts of life to its generals.

Those facts, for instance, indicate that when you fight a war against a terrorist group that serves as a proxy for enemy regimes, and in the aftermath of the war the terror group takes over the government of its own country and its state sponsors build nuclear arsenals unhindered by your government and the international community as a whole, while your own generals and soldiers are threatened with indictments by UN war crimes tribunals, the terrorists have won and you have lost.

By the same token, apparently it is unclear to IDF Chief of General Staff Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi – who said this week that he cannot wait to greet Gilad at home – that by offering to release hundreds of terrorists for a hostage soldier, he is telling all the thousands of IDF troops who risk their lives every day to arrest terrorists and fight them that they are risking their lives for nothing.

Why bother staging a middle-of-the-night raid in Nablus where your men are liable to be killed in order to arrest a terrorist if he’s just going to be released from prison within a year or two in exchange for another soldier? In fact, why have an army at all? Perhaps we’d all be better off if we just paid our enemies protection money until they are ready to deliver the coup de grace.

BUT THEN, perhaps that’s what Israel is doing today. On Tuesday Barak noted that whereas on the eve of the 2006 war Hizbullah had an arsenal of 14,000 rockets, today it has an arsenal of 50,000 rockets. His remarks might have been perceived as a warning that Israel is gearing up to take preemptive action against Hizbullah. But that perception would be wrong, unless what one had in mind was preemptive capitulation.

On Thursday it was reported that Israel is ready to transfer control over the northern half of Ghajar – the border town that is officially half in Israel and half in Lebanon – to UNIFIL forces. These would be the same UN forces that have done nothing to prevent Hizbullah from rearming and taking over the Lebanese government. These would be the same Italian-commanded UN forces that former Italian president Francesco Cossiga claims cut a deal with Hizbullah according to which UNIFIL turns a blind eye to Hizbullah’s activities and in exchange, Hizbullah doesn’t kill UNIFIL forces.

Since the 2006 war, the UN and the US have been bullying Israel to give up the northern half of Ghajar. Their pressure has come despite their sure knowledge that the moment IDF forces withdraw from the northern half of the town, it will again become a smuggling capital for drugs, terrorists, Hizbullah spies and ordnance. Barak and Netanyahu apparently are of the opinion that despite – or worse, perhaps due to – the growing dangers emanating from Hizbullah-controlled Lebanon, it is better for Israel to seek to curry favor with the UN and the US than to take the steps necessary to defend the country from Hizbullah.

This is the depressing message that Netanyahu and his merry band of ministers have communicated to the world this week. In the hopes of appeasing the unappeasable Obama administration, the government has adopted Obama’s anti-Semitic policies against Jewish communities in Judea and Samaria. To win points with the imbecilic, unaccountable and irresponsible local media, Netanyahu has jeopardized the lives of untold numbers of Israelis by expressing his willingness to free hundreds of terrorist murderers from prison. And to placate the pro-Hizbullah UN, Israel has decided it is willing to further strengthen Hizbullah.

The mind reels at the thought of what next week may bring.

Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.

The prime minister of Israel, Binyamin Netanyahu, told a news conference earlier today that there will be a ten-month stop in the construction of new settlement housing in the West Bank. The Israeli cabinet approved the move by a margin of eleven to one.

“We have been told by our friends that once Israel takes the first meaningful steps towards peace, the Arab world and the Palestinians will follow,” said Netanyahu following the cabinet’s endorsement of the move. “Well, the government of Israel has taken a very big step towards peace today, and I hope the Palestinian and the Arab world will work with us to forge a new beginning for our children and theirs.”
The freeze was made “out of broad national interests with the aim of encouraging negotiations with our Palestinian neighbours,” he continued. “When the period of freeze ends my government will return to the previous policy of building in Judea and Samaria [the Jewish name for the West Bank].”
“This is a far-reaching and painful step [...] We hope that this decision will help launch meaningful negotiations to reach an historic peace agreement that will finally end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians,” Netanyahu later said.
Under the plan, construction permits for new residential buildings would be put on hold for ten months. The government said that “natural growth” — characterised by the construction of homes by young people, who were raised in the settlements and want to build houses for their own families — would be exempt from the freeze. Parts of the West Bank that Israel annexed to the Jerusalem municipality would also be excluded from the freeze. The building of schools and places of worship, which will enable settlers to live what Netanyahu described as “normal lives”, will also continue.
“We will not halt existing construction and we will continue to build synagogues, schools, kindergartens and public buildings essential for normal life in the settlements,” he commented.
The prime minister added that there would be no change to Israel’s existing policy on the issue of Jerusalem. “Regarding Jerusalem, our sovereign capital, our position is well-known. We do not put any restrictions on building in our sovereign capital,” he said.
Several members of the Israeli cabinet expressed their disapproval at the proposal, with the conservative, ultra-Orthodox Shah party boycotting the cabinet meetings.
“I think it’s a complete crumbling of Netanyahu’s position and is contrary to all of his electoral promises. He promised an end to unilateral steps, and here we see him after only a few months in office giving up, even though there is no reciprocity from the Palestinians,” said the head of the main settler lobby, Danny Dayan, to the Christian Science Monitor. We are 300,000 citizens, living in 150 communities. It is impossible to freeze us. I don’t how it will happen, but we will break this freeze.”
Many Palestinians also criticised the proposal, mainly because East Jerusalem was not included in the settlement freeze. Nabil Abu Rudeineh, a Palestinian spokesman, said to the Wafa news agency that Palestine “rejects returning to peace talks without the complete cessation of settlement activities in the West Bank and Jerusalem.”
Palestinian prime minister Salam Fayyad also rejected the plan. “The exclusion of east Jerusalem is a very, very serious problem for us. We are not looking for the resumption of the process just for the sake of it, for it to falter a week or two down the road,”
Israel captured East Jerusalem from Jordanian control, following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Arab-Israeli War. The Jewish state annexed that part of the city in a move that was not recognized by the international community.
Earlier this week, on a visit to Argentina, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas stepped up his campaign to put international pressure on Israel to stop building on lands that Palestinians say are their own. Abbas urged US president Barack Obama, as well as leaders of other nations that support Israel, to press the Jewish state to end its construction of settlements on occupied lands.
Netanyahu has in the past offered to restrain settlement growth, but today’s announcement was the first time that he set a clear timeframe.

The Jerusaelm Post, 26 November 2009: “The government plans to spend NIS 3.5 million to renovate battered women’s shelters, and will give a grant of NIS 10,000 to shelter residents who leave to rejoin the workforce, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu said Wednesday” READ MORE>>

Earlier in the day, around a hundred protesters dressed in black marched across Tel Aviv in what organizers called a “funeral procession,” carrying 15 black “coffins” meant to represent the 15 women killed in Israel this past year by domestic violence.

Hillary Rodham Clinton
Secretary of State
Jerusalem
October 31, 2009

MODERATOR: Good evening, and we welcome Secretary of State Clinton. We shall start with a few words, and then we’ll take two questions from each side. Prime Minister, please.

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: It’s my pleasure to welcome Secretary of State of the United States Hillary Clinton to Jerusalem. Welcome, Hillary. You are a great friend and a great champion of peace. I think that we owe a vote of thanks to you, to George Mitchell, to your staffs, and of course, to President Obama and the entire Obama Administration for the tireless efforts to re-launch the peace process – the peace process between us and the Palestinians, and between us and the Arab world – following the President’s vision of a regional peace.

We are eager to advance on both. We think that the place to resolve outstanding issues and differences of opinion is around a negotiating table. We think we should sit around that negotiating table right away. We’re prepared to start peace talks immediately. I think what we should do on the path to peace is to simply get on it and get with it. So I’m sure we’ll discuss these things and other things in the spirit of friendship between us and you, between Israel and the United States. Welcome to Jerusalem.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Thank you so much, Prime Minister. It is a great personal pleasure for me to be back in Jerusalem and a great honor to be here as Secretary of State once again. And I look forward to our discussion, and I appreciate the very positive words about the need to get back into a negotiation that would be in the best interests of Israel and Israel’s security, as well as create a state for the Palestinian people. Both President Obama and I are committed to a comprehensive peace agreement because we do believe that it holds out the best promise for the security and future of Israel, and for the aspirations of the Palestinians.

So I’m looking forward to our discussion tonight. I know you’re someone who is indefatigable, so even though we’re starting our meeting so late, I have no doubt that it will be intense and cover a lot of ground. And I’m very much eager to begin those discussions.

QUESTION: Madame Secretary, do you think both sides should re-launch the peace process without any preconditions?

SECRETARY CLINTON: I want to see both sides begin as soon as possible in negotiations. We have worked – and of course, Senator Mitchell has worked tirelessly – in setting forth what are the approaches that each side wishes to pursue in order to get into those negotiations, so I’m not going to express my opinion as to whether or not there should be conditions. The important thing, as the prime minister just said, is to get into the negotiations. I gave the same message today when I met with President Abbas.

We know that negotiations often take positions that then have to be worked through once the actual process starts. I think the best way to determine the way forward is, as the prime minister said, get on the path.

MODERATOR: Mark.

QUESTION: Mark Landler, New York Times. Madame Secretary, when you were here in March on the first visit, you issued a strong statement condemning the demolition of housing units in East Jerusalem. Yet, that demolition has continued unabated, and indeed, a few days ago, the mayor of the city of Jerusalem issued a new order for demolition. How would you characterize this policy today?

For the prime minister, sir, there’s been increasing tension, as you know, around – surrounding the Temple Mount, some civil unrest in the streets. Every time the peace process has lagged, often matters have been settled through violence. Are you worried that we are heading into that phase?

And then a last question, if I may. (Laughter.)

SECRETARY CLINTON: That’s the New York Times, for you. (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Dr. Abdullah’s aides in Kabul have confirmed that he’s not going to take part in the runoff. Are you concerned that a Karzai government elected without the benefit of a runoff, given all the fraud in the first round, will be lacking in legitimacy?

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, let me say I have nothing to add to my statement in March. I continue to stand by what I said then.

With respect to Afghanistan and Dr. Abdullah’s decision, I think that it is his decision to make. Whatever went into that determination is obviously his choice. But I do not think it affects the legitimacy. There have been other situations in our own country as well as around the world where, in a runoff election, one of the parties decides, for whatever reason, that they are not going to go on. I do not think that that in any way affects the legitimacy. And I would just add that when President Karzai accepted the second round without knowing what the consequences and outcome would be, that bestowed legitimacy from that moment forward, and Dr. Abdullah’s decision does not in any way take away from that.

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: I’m concerned with the attempts to create provocations around the issue of the Temple Mount. There are parties who are trying to do that. I assure you that the Government of Israel is not one of them. There are also extraordinary falsifications. My staff decided to have a meeting, a free evening, a few weeks ago. They decided to have it in the Old City. In the David City there’s a little restaurant there. They said, “Could you come for dessert,” because I worked long hours. I said, “Sure, I’ll see what I can do. I don’t promise, but we’ll make the arrangements.”

Our security people went there. Within an hour, Palestinian news agencies carried the story that Netanyahu was coming to the Old City to burrow a new tunnel under the Temple Mount. So help me God, this became an issue of great consequence. There were rumors that the violence would break out, exactly as you said. Now, this is entirely false. I give that as one example. There are daily examples of this and daily actions by militants, particularly the militant Islamic radicals who are trying to stir up trouble on the Temple Mount.

We are going to continue our efforts to keep Jerusalem safe, open, quiet, accessible to all three great faiths – Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. And the city is now very robust. It’s got a lot of tourism, as you see in the entire area. And the best way to see what is happening there is to go for yourself. Go take a look. You’ll see. And you’ll see our actual policy in place. We want a peaceful Jerusalem without provocations on the Temple Mount or anywhere else.

QUESTION: Madame Secretary, you went to Abu Dhabi, and I believe you came up with not much from Abu Mazen, who is actually presenting Israel and the United States with lots of no’s. Also, United States is encountering many no’s from Iran. At the moment, it doesn’t look like some arrangement is being made at the moment. What is your reaction to what – receiving the no’s from the Arab world?

And the same question, please, to Prime Minister Netanyahu.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, first of all, I believe that strategic patience is a necessary part of my job, and I view the conversations that we had this morning with President Abbas and his team as being very constructive and useful in continuing the move toward engagement that leads to negotiations. So if Senator Mitchell and I appear to be patient and persistent, it’s because we are. We think it’s worth being both.

With respect to Iran, there is not yet a final decision with respect to the Tehran research reactor. The important matter that I would underscore is the unity among the P-5+1, which includes not only the United States but the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Russia, China, and also the EU, in putting forth and in staying firm with this. The world is united in a view that Iran should not have or acquire nuclear weapons capacity. And our view is that we are willing to work toward creative outcomes like shipping out the low-enriched uranium to be reprocessed outside of Iran. But we’re not going to wait forever. Patience does have, finally, its limits. And it is time for Iran to fulfill its obligations and responsibilities to the international community, and accepting this deal would be a good beginning.

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: You asked two questions, one on Iran and the other on the peace process. On Iran, I want to express our appreciation for the very clear stance adopted by President Obama that has united, as Secretary Clinton has just said, an international consensus that Iran must cease its efforts to become a nuclear military power. I think the fact that there has been unity that has not been seen for a long time on this position is something very valuable, very important. And I think it’s important not only for Israel, I think it’s important for the Middle East, for our region, for the peace of the world. So I want to commend the efforts of you and President Obama and the Western and other leaders have taken here to – on this issue that I think is central to the future of the world, to the future of peace.

As far as the question about the peace process is concerned, look, first let me, before you talk about the no’s, talk about the yes. And I want to put rhetoric aside and talk about facts. It’s a fact that since my government took office, we dismantled hundreds of earth blocks, checkpoints, facilitated movement in the Allenby Bridge, and eliminated a lot of bureaucratic hurdles to daily life and economic activity in the Palestinian Authority’s areas. And as a result, there’s been a Palestinian economic boom. That is a fact.

The second fact is that I gave a speech at Bar Ilan University in which I said that Israel will accept the vision of two states for two peoples, a demilitarized Palestinian state that recognizes the Jewish state of Israel. It wasn’t easy to do, but we did it. That is a fact.

The third fact is that we’ve been talking earnestly, openly, and transparently to the American Administration, and we’ve talked about measures that we can take to facilitate further the launching – the re-launching of the peace process. That is a fact.

The simple fact is this: We are willing to engage in peace talks immediately without preconditions. The other fact is that, unfortunately, the other side is not. It is asking and piling on preconditions that it never put on in the 16 years that we’ve had that the peace process since the annunciation of the Oslo Accords. There have not been these preconditions. It’s a change of Palestinian policy, and I hope they change back to the right thing, which is to get into the negotiating tent. We’re eager and sincere in our desire to reach an agreement to end this conflict. I happen to think that we’re able to do this, contrary to all the pessimists around us. But the only way we can get to an agreement is to begin negotiating, and that is something that we are prepared to do. That is a fact.

MODERATOR: Finally, Joe Klein from Time Magazine. Yes.

QUESTION: I’m tempted to ask why is this night different from all other nights –

SECRETARY CLINTON: Do you want us to burst into song? (Laughter.)

QUESTION: Yes. For 40 years, we’ve seen American secretaries of state and Israeli prime ministers in a similar situation. Despite the prime minister’s optimism, the talks are stalled. The prospect of talks is stalled. And while you’ve said yes without preconditions to talks, so many of your – you’ve said no to a settlement freeze. And I wonder whether that would be open to negotiation.

And Madame Secretary, is the Obama Administration still in favor of a total freeze? And if not, what’s plan b?

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: Joe, the specific question you asked about the settlements also has to be fully factual. The fact of the matter is that we – I said we would not build new settlements, not expropriate land for addition for the existing settlements, and that we were prepared to adopt a policy of restraint on the existing settlements, but also one that would still enable normal life for the residents who are living there.

Now, there has not been in the last 16 years – not 40 years but 16 years, since the beginning of the peace negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians – any demand every put not on restraint, but on any limitation on settlement activity as a precondition for entering negotiations. This is a new thing. Now, it’s true that you can take a new thing and you can repeat it ad nauseum for a few weeks and a few months, and it becomes something that is obvious and has been there all the time. It’s not been there all the time.

QUESTION: It was there in the first Bush Administration, right?

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: No, there has not been a precondition for entering or continuing with the peace process between us and the Palestinians. There’s not been a demand coming from the Palestinians that said we will not negotiate with you unless you freeze all activity – something that is problematic in so many ways, judicial and in other ways. I won’t get into that. But this is a new demand. It’s a change of policy, the Palestinian policy. And it doesn’t do much for peace. It doesn’t work to advance negotiations. It actually – this uses a pretext, or at least does something as an obstacle that prevents the reestablishment of negotiations.

Now, mind you, the issue of settlements, the issue of territories, the issue of borders – these will be engaged in the negotiations, and they’ll have to be resolved for a peace agreement to be achieved. But you can’t resolve it in advance of the negotiations, and you certainly shouldn’t pile it on as a precondition.

SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, I would add just for context that what the prime minister is saying is historically accurate. There has never been a precondition. It’s always been an issue within the negotiations. What the prime minister has offered in specifics of a restraint on the policy of settlements, which he has just described – no new starts, for example – is unprecedented in the context of the prior two negotiations. It’s also the fact that for 40 years, presidents of both parties have questioned the legitimacy of settlements.

But I think that where we are right now is to try to get into the negotiations. The prime minister will be able to present his government’s proposal about what they are doing regarding settlements, which I think when fully explained will be seen as being not only unprecedented but in response to many of the concerns that have been expressed. There are always demands made in any negotiation that are not going to be fully realized. I mean, negotiation, by its very definition, is a process of trying to meet the other’s needs while protecting your core interests. And on settlements, there’s never been a precondition, there’s never been such an offer from any Israeli government. And we hope that we’ll be able to move in to the negotiations where all the issues that President Obama mentioned in his speech at the United Nations will be on the table for the parties to begin to resolve.

PRIME MINISTER NETANYAHU: Thank you very much.

Defiant UN backs Israel war crimes report
By Gavin Cordon,

October 16 2009

Britain and France today failed in an attempt to delay a crunch Middle East vote at the UN, amid warnings by Israel that it could derail the peace process.

The UN Human Rights Council in Geneva voted by 25 to six to refer a controversial report accusing Israel of war crimes during the Gaza offensive in January to the Security Council.
Eleven countries formally abstained, however Britain and France did not even take part, having unsuccessfully argued for more time to reach an agreed resolution.

A Downing Street spokesman said: “We did not participate in the vote. We were involved in discussions with Israel and the Palestinians about potentially substantive improvements in the situation on the ground and have therefore asked for a delay to the vote.”

Earlier, Gordon Brown held fresh discussions with Israeli counterpart Binyamin Netanyahu after the two men had reportedly clashed over the report by Judge Richard Goldstone earlier in the week.

Mr Netanyahu was said to have been furious after Britain and other European countries warned they would abstain in today’s vote.

In what were reported to be “robust exchanges” over the telephone, Mr Brown was said to have told the Israeli leader that his country needed to hold an independent inquiry into the Gaza offensive if it was to escape censure.

Downing Street would not comment on the earlier conversation, which took place on Wednesday, but the Prime Minister’s spokesman said they had spoken again this morning ahead of the Geneva vote.

“I think the fact that there have been discussions this morning is the important point,” the spokesman said.

“The Prime Minister’s priority throughout these negotiations has been to move the peace process forward.”

As well as urging the Israelis to establish an independent inquiry into the loss of civilian life in Gaza, Britain has been pressing for a reopening of the Gaza crossing and a freeze on settlement building.

Source

How they voted:

In favour (25): Argentina, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, China, Cuba, Djbouti, Egypt, Ghana, India, Indonesia, Jordan, Mauritius, Nicaragua, Nigeria, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Russia, Saudi Arabia, Senegal, South Africa, Zambia.

Against (6): US, Italy, Holland, Hungary, Slovakia, Ukraine.

Absentions (11): Belgium, Bosnia, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Gabon, Japan, Mexico, Norway, South Korea, Slovenia, Uruguay.

Britain, France, Madagascar, Kyrgyzstan and Angola did not vote.

Well I am sure Israel with either not comply as par usual or they will fabricate a report.

Odds are they will just refuse to comply like everything else.

They don’t even comply with UN Resolutions, just this week they were in violation of Resolution 1701.  They have yet to let weapons inspectors into Israel as well.

Lebanon: Monday night Explosion/ Israel in violation of Resolution 1701

The UN Mission 575 Page Report on Gaza/Israel War

Aftermath of war: Drug addiction taking a toll in Gaza

Resolution 487 (1981)Israel to place its nuclear facilities under IAEA/Refrain from Acts or Threats

Israel warns soldiers of prosecution abroad for Gaza ‘war crimes’/Israels Latin America “Trail of Terror” From January 2009

Gaza (1): A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words

Indexed List of all Stories in Archives sorted by month/year