''For the Iraanian government to back away from key areas of agreement at the last minute is not a political maneuver, it is simply foolish.''
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. The sticking point right now seems to be that Iran is insisting that all UN sanctions be dropped immediately. Surely the author would agree that this is what the Iranian people want? And that any deal which does not involve the complete and immediate ending of sanctions is worthless?
So why the claim that Khamanei is the one obstructing negotiations? Given the amount Iran has already conceded, to do this for nothing in return seems absurd. I understand why emigre Iranians dislike the clerical regime, but this article seems poorly informed to me.
''Moreover, because the current Egyptian government abhors the Muslim Brotherhood and movements of political Islam like Hamas, it is unclear that Hamas can restock its rockets and other weapons via the Sinai, as in the past. ''
The upper echelons of the Egyptian military have always detested Hamas, and, it has to be said, Palestinians in general. However, is the same true for the rank and file? I doubt it. I'm willing to bet there are plenty of Egyptian officials on the Rafah crossing who regularly turn a blind eye - perhaps for a financial consideration - to truckloads of contraband passing through Rafah. I'm not sure what can be done to prevent this, especially bearing in mind how little these men get paid.
''s in the past.
Still, what the Israeli military was going for was a result similar to its 2006 war on Hizbullah in Lebanon''
Are you implying that the July war was a success for Israel? If so, I completely disagree. The Israelis may now say that all they wanted was 'quiet' on their northern non-borders, but it's clear that their original war aims were far more ambitious, involving nothing less than the complete destruction of Hizballah. Remember those 'birth pangs of a new Middle East'? If they had wanted 'quiet' they could have negotiated it, not suffered a humiliating defeat. I highly doubt that the IDF was happy to see over 1OO soldiers killed in return and their 'deterrence' exposed as never before in return for a cessation of rocket fire.
'' Israel will press for Gaza to be a demilitarized zone''
They may 'press' for it, but there's no way it can be achieved. Years of a suffocating siege, with the aim of doing just that, have failed, as Hamas is clearly a much more sophisticated fighting force than it was a few years ago.
''Even as I write this, after the beginning of the cease-fire, a plane has landed with a planeload of new immigrants.''
A planeload is what? Maybe 25O people? That's hardly going to solve Israel's 'demographic problem.' It barely matters if the number of Jews emigrating is balanced by those coming into Israel, and this article is very very vague on numbers anyway. What matters is that in the land ruled by Israel, at least 5O% of the population is not Jewish, and that proportion is only likely to increase over time. In this context, it makes little odds if a handful of well-off French Jews maintain second homes in a 'settlement', arranged for them on very favourable terms, of course. The problems of the 'Jewish democracy' can't be solved by that.
Good piece, but why is the journalist uncritically repeating IDF propaganda on the 'Iron Dome'? There is no objective evidence whatsoever that the Iron Dome has shot down 90% of rockets, or anything close. Some analyst claim the real figure may be as low as 5%, with one Israeli expert even claiming the Dome has NEVER intercepted any missile successfully.
I would say that tunnels which allow an occupied people to break through a sadistic siege, and give them leverage against their occupier/prison guards, are very 'constructive'. And given the wanton destruction Israel has visted on Gaza over the past 3 weeks, I don't think they're that interested in promoting 'construction' in Gaza. Au contraire.
Oh, and wasn't it kind of Israel to 'let' Palestinians have cement in their own country? But given the amounts involved, and the fact that Israel places severe restrictions on the amount of cement which can be imported into Gaza, it's likely that most of the materials used to build the tunnels was smuggled. I have heard that this was done by the oldest method of them all - bribing the guards at the Rafah crossing. Given these guys earn so little, getting them to turn a blind eye to the odd truck laden with contraband probably isn't too difficult.
All of which goes to show that however cruelly you seek to cage a population, human ingenuity will find a way.
''Are their egos really that overinflated, their paranoia that extreme, and their delusions really that strong that they can’t see where this is going?''
In a word: Yes. Most Israelis appear to be paranoid, racist and profoundly indoctrinated. Sure, there are exceptions, there always are, but they are few in number and politically insignificant. Israelis have been raised from birth to see all Arabs as Jew-hating primitives whose lives are disposable. That is why Israeli society can happily tolerate massacres of the type being seen in Gaza - and committed by Israel many times before, in Palestine and Lebanon - without batting an eyelid. If they do feel any human sympathy, it doesn't cause them to question their own policies, but rather to blame it on Hamas, or whoever this year's bete noire is.
As to your other point, I agree that the complete demise of Israel is a matter of when and how, not if. Israel is hated by just about every single of the hundreds of millions of people that surround it. Any 'support' it has among corrupt dictators and sheikhs is extremely shallow, and no Arab leader would dare to be openly supportive of Israel. So I would say the entity is surely doomed - the only question is to whether the timespan can be counted in years or decades. Israelis cannot face up to it because reality is just too difficult to bear: As I've said, if you've been raised from birth to hate and fear Arabs, the thought that you will eventually have to live alongside them must be horrifying. Too horrifying to think about. So they continue to hide behind the shield of overwhelming military superiority, not pausing to think that almost certainly, the tides will turn and the doctrine of 'might is right' will one day very likely see them on the receiving end.
But the diary of Anne Frank only became available years later.
These tweets can be read NOW, within second of their being written amidst the bombs of Gaza. The world has no excuse. We cannot say we did not know. And yet the world watches, and turns away. Again.
As you say, for young people WWll is ancient history and what was one a sure-fire way to silence an opponent - the 'anti-semite' slur - will evoke no more than a shrug of the shoulders. Plus, as the power of the established West fades, and countries like Brazil and China come to the fore, Israel will no longer have such influence in the corridors of global power. This change will take years, even decades, but it's already happening.
Also, Israel's just not 'cool' anymore. I think it was Max Blumenthal who wrote an article about some Zionist love fest back in the seventies, live on TV. That would never happen now. Israel has precisely zero soft power. All they have - in Western capitals - is money, and in the Middle East, violence. Both will only get you so far. Zionism is doomed.
The chances of large numbers of Jews moving from the 'West' to Israel are negligible. Since the dawn of Zionism, only a small percentage of Jews have actively chosen to live in Israel. The Jews who went there after the Holocaust had no other choice, neither did most of the Jews expelled from Arab countries. Those Soviet Jews who went to Israel after the break-up of the USSR would have jumped at the chance of going to Western Europe or the US instead, if only they could have got visas. Indeed, many of them have since left Israel.
Barring some unforeseen circumstances, the days of large-scale Jewish immigration to Israel are almost certainly a thing of the past. Why would anyone who could live in a prosperous Western democracy choose to live in a glorified ghetto? Given how very ugly Israel has become, we're far more likely to see mass emigration, not mass immigration.
'' The important thing for them is to accomplish what they see as a narrow military and counter-terrorism objective.''
I don't entirely agree. There is nothing 'narrow' about Israel's aims here. If it was all about 'counter-terrorism', they would appreciate the fact that Hamas itself had not fired any rockets at Israel for months before this latest onslaught. In fact, they'd be assisting Hamas in its efforts to crack down on the smaller militant groups who are the ones firing the rockets.
Besides, everyone in Israel's political and military class knows that the rockets are no threat at all. They haven't killed anyone in a long time. However, they do provide a useful means of keeping the Israeli population scared and submissive, and perpetuating the media image of Israel-as-victim. The rockets do next to no damage, but if they didn't exist at all, it would be more difficult for Israel to cry victim, keep the population brainwashed and beg further funding from the US for their overrated 'missile defense' systems.
I think you underestimate the sheer spite and sadism which has always characterised Zionism. In a sense, Israel is bombing Gaza because it can. As for as they're concerned, there's no downside to this - they get to tell Palestinians that resistance is useless, or so they hope, and such assaults always play well with the Israeli public.
''they further corrupt the Israeli soul''
What 'Israeli soul'? Israel was built on the ethnic cleansing of another people's land. The 'Israeli soul' has always been corrupt. Where was the 'Israeli soul' at Deir Yassin? This idea that Israel was once a nation with a 'soul' which gradually become 'corrupted' ignores the fact that Israel could not exist if it showed the slightest compassion for the original inhabitants of the land it stole.
The type of people who watch 'Desperate Housewives' in Saudi Arabia are likely to be the type of people who watch it elsewhere: young or middle-aged women. Hardly 'jihadist' marterial.
Besides, it's incredibly obtuse to say that just because you enjoy some aspects of US pop culture, you also have to enjoy their foreign policy. What nonsense! I like Desperate Housewives and many Hollywood films, but that has never stopped me being extremely critical of much US policy. I doubt it's any different in the Middle East. It's naive, arrogant and patronising to think otherwise.
This whole theory of the 'liberal inevitability' has been proven wrong time and again - in Russia, China, and also in the Middle East.
It's a shame when people come out with obviously ludicrous 'theories' like this, as it makes it easy to mock those who make credible allegations of Israeli involvement in other contexts.
"This goal requires that Mr. Abbas resign his Presidency and call for free elections."
You mean like the free elections which took place in 2006, leading to the free election of Hamas? The same free elections whose result was in effect invalidated by the 'west's' refusal to recognise the results and instead impose a siege upon the electorate?
That'll work (not!)
No, what the Palestinians need to do is dissolve the whole farce known as the "PA", put an end to the charade known as the 'peace process', stop putting their trust in a US which is systematically utterly biased against them, and always will be. The Palestinians need instead to look for imaginative and constructive ways to resist occupation, not facilitate it.
The siege of Gaza is nothing more or less than sadism. As you say, there is no strategic rationale to it, even by Israel's standards. Neither the leaders nor the people of Gaza have not been told what they must do for the siege to end, which leads one to believe that the GAzans are being punished simply for existing. I suppose if there is any 'rationale' to it, it serves to 'divide and rule', a cautionary tale to the Palestinians of the West Bank: step out of line, and you too could be like Gaza. So those living in the occupied West Bank are encouraged to think of their goal not as liberation from occupation, but as maintaining an even half-way acceptable living standard, even if they are hemmed into ever smaller parcels of land.
As you say, the 'international community' is totally complicit in this wanton cruelty, as are the bulk of the Israeli electorate, who voted for the parties who imposed the siege and - with a few honourable exceptions - evince not the remotest concern for the great suffering visited on the people of Gaza.
"That the Saudis had tracking numbers for the packets that were sent would only be plausible if they had infiltrated the AQAP cell behind the plot."
Also, wouldn't it have been a bit risky to wait until the plane - complete with 'suspicious' cargo - had already taken off before sounding the alert? Surely the appropriate time to take action would have been before the plane took off? Or were the Saudis looking to maximise the PR potential of having 'saved' America?
This is surely thin edge of the wedge stuff. It's been emphasised that this law will only apply to potential new citizens and not to current Israeli citizens, but it wouldn't be too much of a leap to extend it to all non-Jewish Israelis. Israel is becoming a deeply unpleasant place and it's becoming ever more impossible for its defenders to portray it as a Western-style liberal democracy.
The tactic taken by most of said defenders seems to be that this is little different from, say, the UK having an established religion or the US demanding that new citizens pledge alliegance to 'one nation under God'. Aside from the fact that the latter isn't acutally true (you can ask for an alternative wording to the pledge) it's disengeneous at best to claim that this law is religious in nature. As Juan's post explains, exactly what constitutes "Jewishness" is very unclear, probably deliberately so, but in practice there's little doubt that Israel favours an 'ethnic' over a 'religous' definition of Jewishness. There is no way that Isreal is a Jewish state in the way Iran is an Islamic state - just look at the fact that almost all of its leades have been secular. The obvious conclusion is that the 'Jewish state is understood as an ethnocracy. Of course this cannot be said out loud, as priviliging people according to ill-defined notions of 'ethnicity is not acceptable in polite society in the 21st century.
But there can be little doubt that that is what we are dealing with in Israel. Which also begs the question: if and when the percentage of non-Jewish citizens in Israel becomes unaceptalbe in an ethnically defined Jewish state, what happens then? Ethnic cleansing? Hard to think otherwise.
It always makes me laugh when these Gulf emirs think that culture and art is something you can just buy. It's clear that Abu Dhabi wants to avoid the path taken by its crass, vulgar neighbour Dubai, and market itself as a 'cultural' destination. Some of the objections to this have been outlined in the article. There's also the fact that Abu Dhabi is still a deeply conservative place where, until barely a generation or two ago, illiteracy was almost universal. The emirate also has an appalling human rights record, and freedom of the press is almost non-existant.
In short it's hard to imagine a less suitable venue for a 'cultural hub'. Of course, the big name museums in the West will happily take the emirs' money in these hard times, while laughing at their pretensions behind their backs. It has been ever thus in this part of the world.
The media silence on these killings, especially when contrasted with the furure over the murders of the Israeli settlers in Hebron/Al Khalil, is deafening. I see you refer to the killer as a 'contractor' which is certainly better than the term 'security guard' used to refer to him in the few media reports. However, if this man were an Arab, he'd simply be referred to as a 'militant'. The heavily armed Israeli 'settlers' are probably the biggest militia in the Middle East. And one of the most dangerous.
One of the standard hasbara lines about Arafat was that he said one thing in English and quite another in Arabic. This was probably true, but a bit hypocritical coming from the Israelis!
But this piece shows what a nonsense the whole 'easing the blockade' farce is. The blockade needs to be dropped, not 'eased'. This is a transparant PR stunt aimed at taking a bit of the heat off Israel and hoping that the siege will drop out of the international headlines. And thanks for the important reminder that this siege was never about 'preventing Hamas from re-arming'. That (spurious) justificaiton was only used after the siege was imposed, and probably only in English. It was clear from the start that the Israelis considered this a form of collective punishment, 'putting them on a diet' to use the horrible phrase which had the Knesset split their sides in laughter.
The thing is, by any rational, cost-benefit analysis, the US (and EU) has far more to gain from a strong alliance with Turkey than with Israel. In terms of population size, military (Turkey is a NATO member) and strategic interests, among other things, if forced to choose between Israel and Turkey, there should be no contest for the US - Turkey would win hands down.
That, however, asssumes a rationality about these issues which is completely absent when it comes to the US and the Middle East. The fact that the US is risking its relationship with a rising - and past - power like Turkey in order to indulge an increasingly maniacal minor Levantine nation, is something which will give future historians food for thought - and puzzlement.
''For the Iraanian government to back away from key areas of agreement at the last minute is not a political maneuver, it is simply foolish.''
I'm not sure what this is supposed to mean. The sticking point right now seems to be that Iran is insisting that all UN sanctions be dropped immediately. Surely the author would agree that this is what the Iranian people want? And that any deal which does not involve the complete and immediate ending of sanctions is worthless?
So why the claim that Khamanei is the one obstructing negotiations? Given the amount Iran has already conceded, to do this for nothing in return seems absurd. I understand why emigre Iranians dislike the clerical regime, but this article seems poorly informed to me.
''Moreover, because the current Egyptian government abhors the Muslim Brotherhood and movements of political Islam like Hamas, it is unclear that Hamas can restock its rockets and other weapons via the Sinai, as in the past. ''
The upper echelons of the Egyptian military have always detested Hamas, and, it has to be said, Palestinians in general. However, is the same true for the rank and file? I doubt it. I'm willing to bet there are plenty of Egyptian officials on the Rafah crossing who regularly turn a blind eye - perhaps for a financial consideration - to truckloads of contraband passing through Rafah. I'm not sure what can be done to prevent this, especially bearing in mind how little these men get paid.
''s in the past.
Still, what the Israeli military was going for was a result similar to its 2006 war on Hizbullah in Lebanon''
Are you implying that the July war was a success for Israel? If so, I completely disagree. The Israelis may now say that all they wanted was 'quiet' on their northern non-borders, but it's clear that their original war aims were far more ambitious, involving nothing less than the complete destruction of Hizballah. Remember those 'birth pangs of a new Middle East'? If they had wanted 'quiet' they could have negotiated it, not suffered a humiliating defeat. I highly doubt that the IDF was happy to see over 1OO soldiers killed in return and their 'deterrence' exposed as never before in return for a cessation of rocket fire.
'' Israel will press for Gaza to be a demilitarized zone''
They may 'press' for it, but there's no way it can be achieved. Years of a suffocating siege, with the aim of doing just that, have failed, as Hamas is clearly a much more sophisticated fighting force than it was a few years ago.
''Even as I write this, after the beginning of the cease-fire, a plane has landed with a planeload of new immigrants.''
A planeload is what? Maybe 25O people? That's hardly going to solve Israel's 'demographic problem.' It barely matters if the number of Jews emigrating is balanced by those coming into Israel, and this article is very very vague on numbers anyway. What matters is that in the land ruled by Israel, at least 5O% of the population is not Jewish, and that proportion is only likely to increase over time. In this context, it makes little odds if a handful of well-off French Jews maintain second homes in a 'settlement', arranged for them on very favourable terms, of course. The problems of the 'Jewish democracy' can't be solved by that.
Good piece, but why is the journalist uncritically repeating IDF propaganda on the 'Iron Dome'? There is no objective evidence whatsoever that the Iron Dome has shot down 90% of rockets, or anything close. Some analyst claim the real figure may be as low as 5%, with one Israeli expert even claiming the Dome has NEVER intercepted any missile successfully.
http://www.globes.co.il/en/article-defense-prize-winner-shefer-iron-dome-is-a-bluff-1000954085
I would say that tunnels which allow an occupied people to break through a sadistic siege, and give them leverage against their occupier/prison guards, are very 'constructive'. And given the wanton destruction Israel has visted on Gaza over the past 3 weeks, I don't think they're that interested in promoting 'construction' in Gaza. Au contraire.
Oh, and wasn't it kind of Israel to 'let' Palestinians have cement in their own country? But given the amounts involved, and the fact that Israel places severe restrictions on the amount of cement which can be imported into Gaza, it's likely that most of the materials used to build the tunnels was smuggled. I have heard that this was done by the oldest method of them all - bribing the guards at the Rafah crossing. Given these guys earn so little, getting them to turn a blind eye to the odd truck laden with contraband probably isn't too difficult.
All of which goes to show that however cruelly you seek to cage a population, human ingenuity will find a way.
''Are their egos really that overinflated, their paranoia that extreme, and their delusions really that strong that they can’t see where this is going?''
In a word: Yes. Most Israelis appear to be paranoid, racist and profoundly indoctrinated. Sure, there are exceptions, there always are, but they are few in number and politically insignificant. Israelis have been raised from birth to see all Arabs as Jew-hating primitives whose lives are disposable. That is why Israeli society can happily tolerate massacres of the type being seen in Gaza - and committed by Israel many times before, in Palestine and Lebanon - without batting an eyelid. If they do feel any human sympathy, it doesn't cause them to question their own policies, but rather to blame it on Hamas, or whoever this year's bete noire is.
As to your other point, I agree that the complete demise of Israel is a matter of when and how, not if. Israel is hated by just about every single of the hundreds of millions of people that surround it. Any 'support' it has among corrupt dictators and sheikhs is extremely shallow, and no Arab leader would dare to be openly supportive of Israel. So I would say the entity is surely doomed - the only question is to whether the timespan can be counted in years or decades. Israelis cannot face up to it because reality is just too difficult to bear: As I've said, if you've been raised from birth to hate and fear Arabs, the thought that you will eventually have to live alongside them must be horrifying. Too horrifying to think about. So they continue to hide behind the shield of overwhelming military superiority, not pausing to think that almost certainly, the tides will turn and the doctrine of 'might is right' will one day very likely see them on the receiving end.
No wonder Israeli society is so insane and ugly.
But the diary of Anne Frank only became available years later.
These tweets can be read NOW, within second of their being written amidst the bombs of Gaza. The world has no excuse. We cannot say we did not know. And yet the world watches, and turns away. Again.
I agree.
As you say, for young people WWll is ancient history and what was one a sure-fire way to silence an opponent - the 'anti-semite' slur - will evoke no more than a shrug of the shoulders. Plus, as the power of the established West fades, and countries like Brazil and China come to the fore, Israel will no longer have such influence in the corridors of global power. This change will take years, even decades, but it's already happening.
Also, Israel's just not 'cool' anymore. I think it was Max Blumenthal who wrote an article about some Zionist love fest back in the seventies, live on TV. That would never happen now. Israel has precisely zero soft power. All they have - in Western capitals - is money, and in the Middle East, violence. Both will only get you so far. Zionism is doomed.
The chances of large numbers of Jews moving from the 'West' to Israel are negligible. Since the dawn of Zionism, only a small percentage of Jews have actively chosen to live in Israel. The Jews who went there after the Holocaust had no other choice, neither did most of the Jews expelled from Arab countries. Those Soviet Jews who went to Israel after the break-up of the USSR would have jumped at the chance of going to Western Europe or the US instead, if only they could have got visas. Indeed, many of them have since left Israel.
Barring some unforeseen circumstances, the days of large-scale Jewish immigration to Israel are almost certainly a thing of the past. Why would anyone who could live in a prosperous Western democracy choose to live in a glorified ghetto? Given how very ugly Israel has become, we're far more likely to see mass emigration, not mass immigration.
'' The important thing for them is to accomplish what they see as a narrow military and counter-terrorism objective.''
I don't entirely agree. There is nothing 'narrow' about Israel's aims here. If it was all about 'counter-terrorism', they would appreciate the fact that Hamas itself had not fired any rockets at Israel for months before this latest onslaught. In fact, they'd be assisting Hamas in its efforts to crack down on the smaller militant groups who are the ones firing the rockets.
Besides, everyone in Israel's political and military class knows that the rockets are no threat at all. They haven't killed anyone in a long time. However, they do provide a useful means of keeping the Israeli population scared and submissive, and perpetuating the media image of Israel-as-victim. The rockets do next to no damage, but if they didn't exist at all, it would be more difficult for Israel to cry victim, keep the population brainwashed and beg further funding from the US for their overrated 'missile defense' systems.
I think you underestimate the sheer spite and sadism which has always characterised Zionism. In a sense, Israel is bombing Gaza because it can. As for as they're concerned, there's no downside to this - they get to tell Palestinians that resistance is useless, or so they hope, and such assaults always play well with the Israeli public.
''they further corrupt the Israeli soul''
What 'Israeli soul'? Israel was built on the ethnic cleansing of another people's land. The 'Israeli soul' has always been corrupt. Where was the 'Israeli soul' at Deir Yassin? This idea that Israel was once a nation with a 'soul' which gradually become 'corrupted' ignores the fact that Israel could not exist if it showed the slightest compassion for the original inhabitants of the land it stole.
The type of people who watch 'Desperate Housewives' in Saudi Arabia are likely to be the type of people who watch it elsewhere: young or middle-aged women. Hardly 'jihadist' marterial.
Besides, it's incredibly obtuse to say that just because you enjoy some aspects of US pop culture, you also have to enjoy their foreign policy. What nonsense! I like Desperate Housewives and many Hollywood films, but that has never stopped me being extremely critical of much US policy. I doubt it's any different in the Middle East. It's naive, arrogant and patronising to think otherwise.
This whole theory of the 'liberal inevitability' has been proven wrong time and again - in Russia, China, and also in the Middle East.
It's a shame when people come out with obviously ludicrous 'theories' like this, as it makes it easy to mock those who make credible allegations of Israeli involvement in other contexts.
"This goal requires that Mr. Abbas resign his Presidency and call for free elections."
You mean like the free elections which took place in 2006, leading to the free election of Hamas? The same free elections whose result was in effect invalidated by the 'west's' refusal to recognise the results and instead impose a siege upon the electorate?
That'll work (not!)
No, what the Palestinians need to do is dissolve the whole farce known as the "PA", put an end to the charade known as the 'peace process', stop putting their trust in a US which is systematically utterly biased against them, and always will be. The Palestinians need instead to look for imaginative and constructive ways to resist occupation, not facilitate it.
Excellent comment.
The siege of Gaza is nothing more or less than sadism. As you say, there is no strategic rationale to it, even by Israel's standards. Neither the leaders nor the people of Gaza have not been told what they must do for the siege to end, which leads one to believe that the GAzans are being punished simply for existing. I suppose if there is any 'rationale' to it, it serves to 'divide and rule', a cautionary tale to the Palestinians of the West Bank: step out of line, and you too could be like Gaza. So those living in the occupied West Bank are encouraged to think of their goal not as liberation from occupation, but as maintaining an even half-way acceptable living standard, even if they are hemmed into ever smaller parcels of land.
As you say, the 'international community' is totally complicit in this wanton cruelty, as are the bulk of the Israeli electorate, who voted for the parties who imposed the siege and - with a few honourable exceptions - evince not the remotest concern for the great suffering visited on the people of Gaza.
"That the Saudis had tracking numbers for the packets that were sent would only be plausible if they had infiltrated the AQAP cell behind the plot."
Also, wouldn't it have been a bit risky to wait until the plane - complete with 'suspicious' cargo - had already taken off before sounding the alert? Surely the appropriate time to take action would have been before the plane took off? Or were the Saudis looking to maximise the PR potential of having 'saved' America?
This is surely thin edge of the wedge stuff. It's been emphasised that this law will only apply to potential new citizens and not to current Israeli citizens, but it wouldn't be too much of a leap to extend it to all non-Jewish Israelis. Israel is becoming a deeply unpleasant place and it's becoming ever more impossible for its defenders to portray it as a Western-style liberal democracy.
The tactic taken by most of said defenders seems to be that this is little different from, say, the UK having an established religion or the US demanding that new citizens pledge alliegance to 'one nation under God'. Aside from the fact that the latter isn't acutally true (you can ask for an alternative wording to the pledge) it's disengeneous at best to claim that this law is religious in nature. As Juan's post explains, exactly what constitutes "Jewishness" is very unclear, probably deliberately so, but in practice there's little doubt that Israel favours an 'ethnic' over a 'religous' definition of Jewishness. There is no way that Isreal is a Jewish state in the way Iran is an Islamic state - just look at the fact that almost all of its leades have been secular. The obvious conclusion is that the 'Jewish state is understood as an ethnocracy. Of course this cannot be said out loud, as priviliging people according to ill-defined notions of 'ethnicity is not acceptable in polite society in the 21st century.
But there can be little doubt that that is what we are dealing with in Israel. Which also begs the question: if and when the percentage of non-Jewish citizens in Israel becomes unaceptalbe in an ethnically defined Jewish state, what happens then? Ethnic cleansing? Hard to think otherwise.
It always makes me laugh when these Gulf emirs think that culture and art is something you can just buy. It's clear that Abu Dhabi wants to avoid the path taken by its crass, vulgar neighbour Dubai, and market itself as a 'cultural' destination. Some of the objections to this have been outlined in the article. There's also the fact that Abu Dhabi is still a deeply conservative place where, until barely a generation or two ago, illiteracy was almost universal. The emirate also has an appalling human rights record, and freedom of the press is almost non-existant.
In short it's hard to imagine a less suitable venue for a 'cultural hub'. Of course, the big name museums in the West will happily take the emirs' money in these hard times, while laughing at their pretensions behind their backs. It has been ever thus in this part of the world.
The media silence on these killings, especially when contrasted with the furure over the murders of the Israeli settlers in Hebron/Al Khalil, is deafening. I see you refer to the killer as a 'contractor' which is certainly better than the term 'security guard' used to refer to him in the few media reports. However, if this man were an Arab, he'd simply be referred to as a 'militant'. The heavily armed Israeli 'settlers' are probably the biggest militia in the Middle East. And one of the most dangerous.
One of the standard hasbara lines about Arafat was that he said one thing in English and quite another in Arabic. This was probably true, but a bit hypocritical coming from the Israelis!
But this piece shows what a nonsense the whole 'easing the blockade' farce is. The blockade needs to be dropped, not 'eased'. This is a transparant PR stunt aimed at taking a bit of the heat off Israel and hoping that the siege will drop out of the international headlines. And thanks for the important reminder that this siege was never about 'preventing Hamas from re-arming'. That (spurious) justificaiton was only used after the siege was imposed, and probably only in English. It was clear from the start that the Israelis considered this a form of collective punishment, 'putting them on a diet' to use the horrible phrase which had the Knesset split their sides in laughter.
Considers breaking off Ties;
Israel Lobbies in Congress denounce Ankara
The thing is, by any rational, cost-benefit analysis, the US (and EU) has far more to gain from a strong alliance with Turkey than with Israel. In terms of population size, military (Turkey is a NATO member) and strategic interests, among other things, if forced to choose between Israel and Turkey, there should be no contest for the US - Turkey would win hands down.
That, however, asssumes a rationality about these issues which is completely absent when it comes to the US and the Middle East. The fact that the US is risking its relationship with a rising - and past - power like Turkey in order to indulge an increasingly maniacal minor Levantine nation, is something which will give future historians food for thought - and puzzlement.