Ban Ki-moon is the secretary general of the United Nations. The world is in pretty good shape. This is why he can spend so much of his time relieving the pain of the Arabs of Palestine, who are (if you don’t know already) the only people who suffer from their neighbors. The other Arabs probably suffer from their local overlords. But most of this is kept hush-hush, maybe because Barack Obama wants to have nice relations with them. Mr. Ban certainly wants to have good ties with them.
The Baroness Ashton is a very unhappy woman. You can see it on her face, poor lady.
You do not need insider information to know that Hillary Clinton threw a hissy fit at Bibi Netanyahu last Friday morning. And you don’t need that kind of information to know that she was sent out to do this little job by her boss.
Frankly, it’s a little bit embarrassing to be citing the Commentary crowd so often. But the fact is that the other powerful venues which seem to understand that the Palestinians do not really want peace--or act as if they don’t--are few and far between. Yes, there is the Washington Post, where Jackson Diehl, Charles Krauthammer, and Chuck Lane analyze what everyone can (but most refuse to) see or describe. Then, of course, there are the editorials, the collective voice of the Post, which strike an independent voice free of Arabisant cant and America bashing.
They are not unconnected. They are not unconnected at all.
Now, presumably the president didn't want to provoke the rage of the Palestinians. (Although, then again, he might just have anticipated it.) But Palestinian rage is very easy to provoke. Snap your fingers and, there, you have it. You don't even have to rent a mob. It comes free will, so to speak.
The fact is that Obama did more than snap his fingers. He sent out very top members of his administration to beat up on Israel and they did.
Recently I was rummaging through the living mess of papers in my office--my nachlass, however hard-driven, will not be a hard drive--when I discovered a fading sheet I had not seen in decades. It was a copy of a letter that was given to me by a little man in the municipal hall in Hebron in 1980. I had traveled to Hebron to look into an incident that occurred a few days earlier on Purim, a triumphalist holiday on which Jews are enjoined to revel in inversions and to drink themselves out of their capacity to distinguish between good and evil.
Yes, many—likely most—Israelis want this or that part of the city to go ultimately to the Palestinian Authority, a larger portion more forthcoming than less… But none want any of it to go to Hamas. Who will be the legatee, however, is not something that Israel has the ability to decide.
Some Israelis want the whole of Jerusalem to remain under their sovereignty. That is neither feasible nor desirable.
JERUSALEM—Suddenly, my city feels again like a war zone. Since the suicide bombings ended in 2005, life in Jerusalem has been for the most part relatively calm. The worst disruptions have been the traffic jams resulting from construction of a light rail, just like in a normal city.
The Wall Street Journal accuses the Obama administration of creating a diplomatic crisis with Israel for no good reason:
In fact, Israel explicitly told them that it would, and Washington--with some regret, to be sure--accepted the fact.
So why are the Obami having such conniptions? Because they’ll do anything and everything to pacify the Palestinians, and that’s because the president has a special place in his heart for these zealots who aspire neither to democracy nor to social justice but to revenge on historical progress which they bitterly repelled. Like the rest of the Arab peoples for whom Obama seems also to have undeserved and unrequited affection.
I am a little embarrassed to be so self-referential this morning, but I am going back to my Spine from yesterday, “The Relentless Facts of Palestine.”
This is apropos my last Spine.
The editorial habits of the New York Times are to utter hortatory dicta about how this should happen and that.
Everything is narrative. And the present “responsible” narrative, we are told, comes from President Obama. It’s too bad he knows very little about the intrinsic history of the dispute or about its present contours, which, after all, he--in his arrogance, vanity, and suave--has done much to make both sides more rigid rather than more amenable to compromise. (Actually it’s at least three sides if you count Hamas-controlled Gaza, which the president blithely ignores ...
Hardly a day goes by that the Financial Times doesn’t do a hit job on Israel. The otherwise sober pink sheet has such an obsession with the Jewish state that I’ve come to wonder what its views were on the rescue of Jewish children into England during the Nazi onslaught on them and on their parents.
That would make one less “special envoy” in the president’s service, which couldn’t be bad.
According to Jack Khoury in Ha’aretz, the information came from “an Arab political source,” unidentified but published in Hadith a-Nass, a Nazareth-based daily (responsible, I’m told).
No one who has read either Start-Up Nation: The Story of Israel's Economic Miracle (by Dan Senor and Saul Singer) or The Israel Test (by George Gilder) could have been surprised by the news that Israeli scientists and private investors have produced a no-nonsense electric car that meets all the myriad objections raised to other vehicles of the type.
First, I'm back. And back from Rome, at that. I'm not sure that modern Romans actually appreciate the antiquity amidst which they live, an antiquity that goes back eight centuries before the birth of Christianity. Which means that the Etruscans, the Greeks, and the Jews were there before, well before the Romans.
The Financial Times is the six-day-a-week newspaper of the Pearson Publishing Group. It is, then, the sister of The Economist. Both are widely read, although the weekly magazine--that is, the latter journal--no longer has much competition in the English-speaking world. (And certainly not from Time or Newsweek.)
“The cruel God of the Jews has you beaten too.”--Racine
Tel Aviv’s distinctive architectural style is that of the Bauhaus. Many exemplars of that school of design dot Haifa and; here and there in Jerusalem, you will also find its presence. There’s a Bauhaus Museum on Bialik Street in what’s called the White City, mostly in recognition of the Jewish escapees, architects, and designers from the Nazi regime which swallowed up Bauhaus.
Three years ago, an Israeli jet fighter prowling for one particular Palestinian terrorist just missed Ahmad Dahduh's car. Alongside it was Hamdi Aman's car, which the jet hit. Aman's oldest son, wife, and mother were killed. His daughter Marya was thrown from the car. Marya's spinal cord was broken at the neck.
During the Gaza war, Hamas dispatched a rocket into Beersheva. Actually, two rockets. The first one missed. The second one hit Orel, who quite literally lost half his brain.
Jews usually go out to the movies on Christmas ... and then they go out to eat "Chinese." I've spent it writing. Below is my harvest. I wish you all good cheer.
Here are the motifs of my writing day. Alas, none of them cheery.
1. THE REAL GRIM REAPER: HOLY DAY VICTIMS IN IRAQ AND PAKISTAN
2. COLD COMMON SENSE ABOUT IRAN FROM, MIRABILI DICTU, "THE NEW YORK TIMES"
3. A WISE EUROPEAN FOREIGN MINISTER: "WE SHOULD SHUT UP ABOUT THE MIDDLE EAST"
4. A SOBER "TIMES" PIECE ON ISRAELI MILITARY DOCTRINE
5. THE SON OF THE MAN WHO WAS KILLED BY TERRORISTS IN THE WEST BANK: "REVENGE IS NOT FOR JEWS"
6. THE PRESIDENT AND ONE DUMB JEWISH WOMAN, THE ANTI-ANTI-SEMITISM CZARINA IN WASHINGTON
7. COPENHAGEN AND THE UNSEATING OF AMERICA AS A GREAT POWER
8. THE CHRISTMAS TERRORIST
So here goes:
1. THE REAL GRIM REAPER: HOLY DAY VICTIMS IN IRAQ AND PAKISTAN
The Jerusalem Post says Obama is scaling back his diplomacy:
With the Palestinians refusing to return to the negotiations, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu not calling for a complete settlement freeze and the Arab world declining to make any gestures to Israel, the current sense in Jerusalem is that the US is scaling back its intensive involvement in the diplomatic process.
Israel and Palestine: Reappraisals, Revisions, Refutations
By Avi Shlaim
(Verso, 392 pp., $34.95)
Avi Shlaim burst upon the scene of Middle Eastern history in 1988, with the publication of Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. Before that, as a young lecturer at Reading University in England, he had produced two books, British Foreign Secretaries Since 1945 (1977) and The United States and the Berlin Blockade, 1948–1949 (1983), and several revealing essays on modern Middle Eastern historical issues in academic journals. But it was Collusion Across the Jordan, with its 676 pages of solid and well-written research, that thrust him into the academic limelight.
