[NeroASERCH]

Martin Sherman tears Tom Friedman a new orifice in an excellent op ed on ynet news:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...028408,00.html

[Drugmachine]

Sol Stern also refutes NYT Magazine related column by Avishai:

http://pajamasmedia.com/ronradosh/20...inglepage=true

You can count on the New York Times to continually let its readers know how Israel is the guilty party when it comes to finding out why the Israeli-Palestinian peace process fell apart. This time, its readers were given a 4700 word cover article in the paper’s Sunday magazine by Bernard Avishai, who favors the replacement of Israel by what he calls a secular “Hebrew republic” open to all who inhabit its borders, rather than the existing Jewish state. Avishai is also a “peace activist,” although the magazine does not inform his readers of this.


The heart of Avishai’s claim is that a chance recently existed “to end the Israeli occupation and found a Palestinian state.” Its essence took place in 2008 when Ehud Olmert was prime minister of Israel, and he and Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority engaged in two-year long negotiations and made what Avishai calls “far-reaching proposals.” As Avishai relates the story, both sides almost concluded an agreement that would have ended with a Palestinian state living in peace alongside Israel. Abbas, he says, “had been most flexible on Israel’s security demands”; Olmert had “conceded to Abbas every major demand Palestinians had made for decades.”


So what happened? You can read Avishai’s article yourself. But the reason this agreement came to naught is simple: Israel backed out! As Avishai writes: “Olmert made his most comprehensive offer to Abbas on Sept.16,2008, the opening day of the General Assembly in New York. Abbas then ‘went silent.’” But it wasn’t his fault. Abbas was ready to resume talks, but corruption charges and the Gaza war distracted him, and he failed to send someone to a talk proposed in Washington by Condoleezza Rice. But he made it clear he was ready to continue negotiations until a settlement took place. Olmert, facing his own problems, did not respond. And then, the Netanyahu government won the Israeli election, and as we all know, the hard-line new PM is opposed to a settlement with the Palestinians.


So, Avishai argues, now is the time for President Obama to use his position to resuscitate peace talks and pick up where Olmert and Abbas left off

before it is too late.


The New York Times, in running Avishai’s lead piece, and putting it online as well in its world news section, makes it clear they consider Avishai a journalist who has delivered a major scoop — the first person to present all the previously hidden details of what had ensued and had led to abandonment of the one moment that both sides had come closest to reaching a deal.


The problem is, Avishai’s article is a complete fraud! Thank God for Sol Stern, a journalist who years ago, ironically, used to write from Israel for the NYT as a special reporter, and who himself used to have feature articles in the New York Times Magazine. But that was decades ago, when Stern was on the political left and was an editor of Ramparts magazine. Now he is a conservative working at the Manhattan Institute; the New York Times is not exactly knocking at his door.


Writing today at Jewish Ideas Daily, a relatively new website edited by former Commentary editor-in-chief Neal Kozodoy, Sol Stern demolishes Avishai’s article, and not only makes mincemeat of it, but embarrasses the editors of the magazine for even having run the article in the first place, since, as he proves, there is nothing new in it and, as Stern writes, “what’s new isn’t true.”


What Sol Stern has produced is nothing less than a tour de force. His article should be mandatory reading in journalism schools for how the mainstream media gets things wrong, and especially how what was once the paper of record does so. First, Stern shows that Avishai’s narrative appeared January 27 in a supposed scoop by Ethan Bronner, who wrote that progress towards peace was stopped when the new “hard-line” government of Benjamin Netanyahu took over. Bronner based his article on an interview that none other than Bernard Avishai had conducted with Olmert and Abbas earlier. Now, a short time later, “the paper has twice put its weight behind pieces of copycat journalism that…happen to fortify its own editorial position” on the so-called peace process.


Avishai’s new article, however, is supposed to be a fuller account as well as authoritative. Stern writes:
In self-aggrandizing mode, Avishai touts his “exclusive” revelations as themselves constituting a new opportunity for peace—particularly, he pointedly adds, if President Obama now steps into the breach, picks up where the Israelis and Palestinians left off more than two years ago, and with the aid of the international community pushes through a deal that Israel has no choice but to accept. Otherwise, Avishai quotes a frustrated Abbas as saying, “If nothing happens, I will take a very, very painful decision. Don’t ask me about it.”Stern continues to write that the details about the Olmert offer to Abbas in September 2008 are actually old news, having appeared elsewhere in major newspapers and magazines three times earlier. Stern himself conducted one of the interviews with Olmert, who told him that Abbas had broken a promise to return for further discussions, and that he had never heard from him since. He continues to write:
Thus, contrary to the Times’ assertion that Olmert has revealed exclusive new information to Avishai, it is abundantly clear that the former Israeli prime minister, widely despised at home and desperate to remain relevant, started blabbing about his negotiations with Abbas over a year and a half ago to anybody who would listen.I guess that to the NYT’s editors, until the same story is in their paper, it is not new and is not news. But as Stern points out, the other problems are the falsehoods in Avishai’s article. Here is the most important one:
The most significant concerns Avishai’s effort to create a plausible cover story absolving Abbas of responsibility for walking away from yet another ostensibly golden opportunity to win a Palestinian state—just as Yasir Arafat, Abbas’s predecessor, walked away from Bill Clinton’s offer of a state at the 2000 Camp David talks, and at a similar moment when the two sides were supposedly within an inch of an agreement. Without any qualification, Avishai simply accepts at face value Abbas’s transparently self-serving claim that the reasons the negotiation with Olmert didn’t continue after September 2008 were the start of the Gaza war and his good friend Olmert’s preoccupation with his legal troubles. In other words, it was Israel’s fault.The truth is, as Stern shows, that this is “pure hokum.” The Gaza war was not on Israel’s horizon until three months after the final Olmert-Abbas meeting. Moreover, Olmert’s legal problems would have made Olmert more willing, not less, to bolster his reputation and credibility by producing a lasting peace agreement with the Palestinians. The real reason the negotiations failed is simple. Stern nails it: “In actuality, there is only one plausible reason for Abbas’s failure to return to discuss the issue of borders. It is that the PA president could not and cannot ever allow himself to announce to the Palestinian refugees and their myriad descendants that their 60-year-old dream of returning to their homes in Israel is over.”

[softy54534]

Stern is referring to the so-called “right of return,” which no Palestinian negotiator has ever been willing to abandon nor tell his constituency that it will not happen. When I spoke with Saeb Erekat three years ago , the man who has just resigned as chief negotiator for the PA after holding the position for decades, he said that peace would be simple to achieve. He then firmly declared that he and any other Palestinian would never compromise on the “right of return.”


Finally, Stern notes that Olmert has now changed what he tells reporters from what he told them a year earlier. In saying that they were really close to an agreement, Olmert, Stern writes, is making a claim that “is completely contrary to his statement to me in 2009 that he was dismayed by Abbas’s decision to break off negotiations and go silent—an obvious sign that Abbas was nowhere near close to a deal, let alone very close.” Whom do you trust, Olmert to journalists soon after the negotiations ended, or Olmert today, who needs to tell a different version to get noticed and to seem relevant?


Stern concludes:
Now the Times has made up for the lack by letting Abbas lay the blame on Israel’s present government, thus tacitly endorsing the paper’s own spin on the peace process. It is often said that truth is the first casualty of war. Delusions of “peace,” it seems, can have a similarly debilitating effect on political leaders, the journalists who write about them, and the editors of influential newspapers.In any other time, responsible editors would have spiked Avishai’s article. If they ran it, major magazines would run a dissection of it such as the one Stern has written. Clearly, the magazine ran an article that reaffirms the paper’s editorial views, thus further erasing the difference between objective reporting and the editorial division of the paper. Don’t hold your breath for the Columbia Journalism Review to cover this. Send Sol Stern’s article around, and let’s use the internet to embarrass the New York Times and to let its readers learn the truth.

UPDATE: It has just come to my attention that an article which appeared in The Australian in January 2009 completely confirms Sol Stern’s analysis of the Bernard Avishai article. Written by the paper’s foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, it relates what he was told by the former Israeli PM while he visited Sydney that month.


According to what Ehud Olmert told Sheridan, the fault for his proposals going nowhere lay entirely with the Palestinians. Sheridan called his interview the longest undertaken by Olmert with any media since he had left office.


Sheridan asked Olmert “to compare the failure of Abbas to conclude a peace agreement with him, with the opportunity Yasser Arafat passed up at Camp David in 2000.” Olmert responded that while Arafat “never wanted to make peace with Israel,” and was a “murderer and terrorist,” Abbas “wants peace.” He stressed that Netanyahu also does and “is not an obstacle to peace,” but is rightfully “worried about security.”
“Olmert’s term in office,” Sheridan writes, “is best remembered for the extensive negotiations, and final peace offer that he undertook with Abbas.” He continues to write that “Olmert explains this position to me in unprecedented detail. Can the Palestinian leadership ever accept any offer that an Israeli prime minister could ever reasonably make?”


The first thing that is clear is that Avishai has produced an article with nothing new in it. How could the editors at the NYT not know about this article, which a simple Google search or Lexis/Nexis search would have immediately revealed? Here is what Sheridan writes:
It is important to get Olmert’s full account of this offer on the record: “From the end of 2006 until the end of 2008 I think I met with Abu Mazen more often than any Israeli leader has ever met any Arab leader. I met him more than 35 times. They were intense, serious negotiations.”


These negotiations took place on two tracks, Olmert says. One was the meetings with the two leaders and their senior colleagues and aides (among them Kadima leader Tzipi Livni on Olmert’s side). But Olmert would also have private, one-on-one meetings with Abbas.
“On the 16th of September, 2008, I presented him (Abbas) with a comprehensive plan. It was based on the following principles.
One, there would be a territorial solution to the conflict on the basis of the 1967 borders with minor modifications on both sides. Israel will claim part of the West Bank where there have been demographic changes over the last 40 years.”


This approach by Olmert would have allowed Israel to keep the biggest Jewish settlement blocks which are mainly now suburbs of Jerusalem, but would certainly have entailed other settlers having to leave Palestinian territory and relocate to Israel.


In total, Olmert says, this would have involved Israel claiming about 6.4 per cent of Palestinian territory in the West Bank: “It might be a fraction more, it might be a fraction less, but in total it would be about 6.4 per cent. Israel would claim all the Jewish areas of Jerusalem. All the lands that before 1967 were buffer zones between the two populations would have been split in half. In return there would be a swap of land (to the Palestinians) from Israel as it existed before 1967. So what happened as a result? Here is what Olmert told Sheridan, a conclusion that is a bombshell, because it is the refutation of everything in the NYT Magazine article:
Olmert says he showed Abbas a map, which embodied all these plans. Abbas wanted to take the map away. Olmert agreed, so long as they both signed the map. It was, from Olmert’s point of view, a final offer, not a basis for future negotiation. But Abbas could not commit. Instead, he said he would come with experts the next day.


“He (Abbas) promised me the next day his adviser would come. But the next day Saeb Erekat rang my adviser and said we forgot we are going to Amman today, let’s make it next week. I never saw him again.”Olmert told Abbas that this was a major opportunity. He told him: ‘This is the offer. Sign it and we can immediately get support from America, from Europe, from all over the world.’ I told him he’d never get anything like this again from an Israeli leader for 50 years.” Olmert added that we should today ask Abbas to respond to this plan, and if they refuse, “there’s no point negotiating.”


Sheridan asks: “If the Palestinian leadership cannot accept this offer, can they accept any realistic offer? Do they have the machinery to run a state? Is their society too dysfunctional and filled with anti-Semitic propaganda to live in peace next to the Jewish state?” He asked these questions of Olmert, who reiterated that “I never received a positive response from them. I think it’s up to them to prove the point.”


So I ask the editors of the New York Times Magazine the following question. How come you did not know about this lengthy interview, which contradicts all of Avishai’s claims? If you did know about the Sheridan interview with Olmert, is it not the Times’ responsibility to let its readers know about what Olmert had told him, in as great a detail as anything he said later to Bernard Avishai?


We are waiting for an answer.

[Beerinkol]

Here is the article referenced above:
http://www.jewishideasdaily.com/cont...-peace-process

The Peace Plan that Almost Was and Still Could Be": blazoned over the entire cover of the February 13 New York Times Magazine, the sensation-seeking headline comes accompanied by a photograph from the back of former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, each with his arm around the other. The two men, declares the Times excitedly, "almost made a historic deal in 2008," and now—right now—"is the moment to resuscitate it."

The article within, by Bernard Avishai, follows closely on a news story that appeared in the Times as a front-page "scoop" on January 27. In that story, written by the paper's Israel correspondent Ethan Bronner, readers had early word of just how tantalizingly "close to a peace deal" Olmert and Abbas had been toward the end of 2008, only to have the deal put on hold because of Olmert's legal problems and the start of the Gaza war. According to Bronner, progress toward peace was then finally stopped in its tracks by the election in early 2009 of a new hard-line Israeli government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.


Bronner's account was itself based on an interview with Olmert (and a similar one with President Abbas) that had been conducted for the Times by the same Bernard Avishai—a freelance writer, peace activist, and proponent of transforming Israel from a Jewish state into a secular "Hebrew republic." It is Avishai's own 4,700-word account of the Olmert-Abbas negotiations that has now, complete with illustrations and maps, been sprawled across several pages of the Times Magazine. Thus, within a period of two weeks, the paper has twice put its weight behind pieces of copycat journalism that, by coincidence, happen to fortify its own editorial position on which party is most responsible for the Israel-Palestinian impasse and how best to resolve it.
As Avishai's is intended to be the fuller and more "authoritative" account, let us focus on his telling of the story. According to him, both Olmert and Abbas have separately confirmed that they did indeed meet many times in 2007 and 2008—and that the critical breakthrough toward a peace agreement and a two-state solution came on September 16, 2008. On that day, at the prime minister's residence in Jerusalem, Olmert presented Abbas with a large map showing how Israel could retain 6.3 percent of Palestinian land on the West Bank and thus avoid evacuating most of the Jewish settlements. To compensate, Olmert proposed transferring an equivalent amount of Israeli land to the future Palestinian state. He also agreed to divide the city of Jerusalem, with a five-nation consortium controlling the Old City and the Jewish and Muslim holy places. For their part, the Palestinians would have to drop their historic demand for the "right of return" to Israel of the 1948 refugees and their descendants—although Olmert offered to admit 5,000 refugees over five years on "humanitarian" grounds.


As for Olmert's map, Abbas assured the Israeli prime minister that it was worthy of study and further negotiations, and the two men parted on that note. But then, according to Olmert, Abbas "went silent" on him—although discussions with the Palestinians continued at a lower level until the election of Netanyahu tragically turned the clock back. Abbas's version of the same events is that Olmert, distracted by the corruption charges being brought against him and by the pending Gaza war, failed to send a representative to a meeting in Washington called by Condoleezza Rice, but that he, Abbas, had been ready to resume talks anyway, even after Israel invaded Gaza.


And what is the urgency in publishing such an article now? As Avishai puts it, the further passage of time, together with the current turmoil in the Arab Middle East, has raised the breakthrough possibility of reviving those talks, abandoned just at the moment when "the gaps appear[ed] so pitifully small." In self-aggrandizing mode, Avishai touts his "exclusive" revelations as themselves constituting a new opportunity for peace—particularly, he pointedly adds, if President Obama now steps into the breach, picks up where the Israelis and Palestinians left off more than two years ago, and with the aid of the international community pushes through a deal that Israel has no choice but to accept. Otherwise, Avishai quotes a frustrated Abbas as saying, "If nothing happens, I will take a very, very painful decision. Don't ask me about it."


There are only two problems with Avishai's narrative and the conclusions he draws from it. One is that what's true in the material the Times has published twice in as many weeks isn't new; the other is that what's new isn't true.


Not only is Avishai not the first journalist to reveal details about Olmert's September 2008 offer to Abbas, he isn't even the second or third. The first to report was Newsweek's Kevin Paraino, in June 2009. According to Paraino, Olmert told him about the map he had presented to Abbas the previous September, plus the offer to divide Jerusalem. Abbas, wrote Paraino, "studied the materials and began to formulate a response. . . . But time eventually ran out."


Two months later, I published a separate account in City Journal of the Olmert-Abbas talks, based on an interview I conducted with Olmert in which he told me, too, about the September 16, 2008 meeting and about the map he had presented to Abbas, adding that Abbas had taken the map away with him (a detail missing from Avishai's story) and then broken the promise he had made to return the following day for further discussions. A call did come from Abbas's office saying that the PA president had forgotten an appointment in Amman with the Jordanian king but would return for more talks in the next days. According to Olmert, that was the last he ever heard from Abbas.


The third journalist to report on the Olmert-Abbas meeting was Aluf Benn, a respected reporter with the Hebrew daily Haaretz. In a story filed on December 17, 2009—and headlined as an "exclusive"—Benn provided all the details of Olmert's September 2008 offer to Abbas. The newspaper also published the Olmert map detailing the proposed land swaps between Israel and the prospective Palestinian state.

[Raj_Copi_Jin]

Thus, contrary to the Times' assertion that Olmert has revealed exclusive new information to Avishai, it is abundantly clear that the former Israeli prime minister, widely despised at home and desperate to remain relevant, started blabbing about his negotiations with Abbas over a year and a half ago to anybody who would listen.


So much for what isn't new. More egregious is what isn't true. Among the many items to pick from here, the most significant concerns Avishai's effort to create a plausible cover story absolving Abbas of responsibility for walking away from yet another ostensibly golden opportunity to win a Palestinian state—just as Yasir Arafat, Abbas's predecessor, walked away from Bill Clinton's offer of a state at the 2000 Camp David talks, and at a similar moment when the two sides were supposedly within an inch of an agreement. Without any qualification, Avishai simply accepts at face value Abbas's transparently self-serving claim that the reasons the negotiation with Olmert didn't continue after September 2008 were the start of the Gaza war and his good friend Olmert's preoccupation with his legal troubles. In other words, it was Israel's fault.


This is pure hokum. A war with Gaza wasn't on the Israeli government's horizon for more than three months after the final Olmert-Abbas meeting. Moreover, Olmert's pending legal problems would have made the prime minister more, rather than less, eager to bolster his reputation by laying the foundations of a peace agreement with the Palestinians. In actuality, there is only one plausible reason for Abbas's failure to return to discuss the issue of borders. It is that the PA president could not and cannot ever allow himself to announce to the Palestinian refugees and their myriad descendants that their 60-year-old dream of returning to their homes in Israel is over.


It must be added that, in whitewashing Abbas's irresponsibility in walking away from Olmert's unprecedented and quite breathtaking offers, Avishai has an accomplice. That is Ehud Olmert himself, who has now completely changed his version of the events being described. Avishai quotes Olmert as saying "We were very close, more than ever in the past, to complete an agreement on principles that would have led to the end of the conflict between us and the Palestinians."


"We" were very close? For whatever reasons that now suit Olmert's personal purposes, this is completely contrary to his statement to me in 2009 that he was dismayed by Abbas's decision to break off negotiations and go silent—an obvious sign that Abbas was nowhere near close to a deal, let alone very close. Nor, I suspect, did Olmert say anything about being close to an agreement in his interviews with Newsweek and Haaretz. If he had, surely those publications would have found it newsworthy to print an Israeli prime minister's confirmation of his Palestinian counterpart's commitment to peace.
Now the Times has made up for the lack by letting Abbas lay the blame on Israel's present government, thus tacitly endorsing the paper's own spin on the peace process. It is often said that truth is the first casualty of war. Delusions of "peace," it seems, can have a similarly debilitating effect on political leaders, the journalists who write about them, and the editors of influential newspapers.

Sol Stern is a contributing editor of City Journal, published by the Manhattan Institute.

[TorryJens]

Martin Sherman tears Tom Friedman a new orifice in an excellent op ed on ynet news:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...028408,00.html

See also: Omri Ceren

Early in the Egypt crisis, Alana wrote a post citing Walter Russell Mead, who suggested that the loss of reliable Arab allies might bring the United States closer to Israel. That makes intuitive sense, including from within a kind of lay realist approach, where it’s better to have allies in a resource-critical region than to not have allies in a resource-critical region. It’s the natural direction for a foreign policy oriented toward preserving American influence to take.
Apparently, certain elements of the Obama administration are embracing a different approach. Shmuel Rosner picks up on an article by Thomas Friedman, where Friedman channels White House “disgust” at Israel for — ostensibly — “telling the president he must not abandon Pharaoh” and “using the opportunity to score propaganda points.” If the statements hold up, the inevitable result will be a chill in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, since it will appear to the Israelis that the White House is trying to damage American public opinion of the Jewish state:
I didn’t hear anyone that’s “disgusted” with Israeli interlocutors. Maybe I’ve been talking to the wrong people — maybe those “disgusted” with Israel feel more comfortable talking to Friedman (he also has more readers, and is more handsome). I can tell you this: There are quite a few Israelis thinking that Friedman is the spokesperson for the Obama administration. If his words will not meet denials from the WH, this impression will become even stronger. I can also tell you that there were quite a few Israeli officials “disgusted” with Friedman’s article’s hysterical tone.The turmoil in Egypt has already endangered key military and intelligence assets, and we still don’t know when and if a democratically elected government will take power, or how it will relate to the West. Meanwhile the Obama administration has alienated both sides of the Egyptian uprising, Biden’s unblinking declarations about the U.S. “speaking with one voice” notwithstanding. Things were going to be complicated anyway, since Obama had cut pro-democracy aid in 2009 because it felt good to be the anti-Bush, before he went all-in on democracy in 2011. But the White House’s fumbling indecision and poor intelligence throughout the crisis burned whatever bridges we still might have had. The only faction we’ve more or less consistently sucked up to is the Muslim Brotherhood, from State’s 2010 engagement with Tariq Ramadan through the White House’s crisis-time flirtation with the group, ending, of course, with Clapper’s idiotic comment about the Muslim Brotherhood being secular. But the Brotherhood doesn’t seem interested in helping us maintain our Middle East presence — that’s just not the vibe it gives off — so it’s doubtful that our gambits there will really help.


UAE? Unhappy. Jordan? Pretty annoyed. Saudi Arabia? So angry that the last phone call between Obama and Abdullah triggered rumors that the king had suffered a fatal heart attack out of sheer fury, with the Kingdom having already expressed a similar sentiment through Foreign Minister Al-Faisal.
Our list of allies, in other words, is growing dangerously short.


So naturally, someone in the White House thinks the time is ripe to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Israel. Smart power!

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/20...gainst-israel/

[TorryJens]

Martin Sherman tears Tom Friedman a new orifice in an excellent op ed on ynet news:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...028408,00.html

See also: Omri Ceren

Early in the Egypt crisis, Alana wrote a post citing Walter Russell Mead, who suggested that the loss of reliable Arab allies might bring the United States closer to Israel. That makes intuitive sense, including from within a kind of lay realist approach, where it’s better to have allies in a resource-critical region than to not have allies in a resource-critical region. It’s the natural direction for a foreign policy oriented toward preserving American influence to take.

Apparently, certain elements of the Obama administration are embracing a different approach. Shmuel Rosner picks up on an article by Thomas Friedman, where Friedman channels White House “disgust” at Israel for — ostensibly — “telling the president he must not abandon Pharaoh” and “using the opportunity to score propaganda points.” If the statements hold up, the inevitable result will be a chill in the U.S.-Israeli relationship, since it will appear to the Israelis that the White House is trying to damage American public opinion of the Jewish state:I didn’t hear anyone that’s “disgusted” with Israeli interlocutors. Maybe I’ve been talking to the wrong people — maybe those “disgusted” with Israel feel more comfortable talking to Friedman (he also has more readers, and is more handsome). I can tell you this: There are quite a few Israelis thinking that Friedman is the spokesperson for the Obama administration. If his words will not meet denials from the WH, this impression will become even stronger. I can also tell you that there were quite a few Israeli officials “disgusted” with Friedman’s article’s hysterical tone.The turmoil in Egypt has already endangered key military and intelligence assets, and we still don’t know when and if a democratically elected government will take power, or how it will relate to the West. Meanwhile the Obama administration has alienated both sides of the Egyptian uprising, Biden’s unblinking declarations about the U.S. “speaking with one voice” notwithstanding. Things were going to be complicated anyway, since Obama had cut pro-democracy aid in 2009 because it felt good to be the anti-Bush, before he went all-in on democracy in 2011. But the White House’s fumbling indecision and poor intelligence throughout the crisis burned whatever bridges we still might have had. The only faction we’ve more or less consistently sucked up to is the Muslim Brotherhood, from State’s 2010 engagement with Tariq Ramadan through the White House’s crisis-time flirtation with the group, ending, of course, with Clapper’s idiotic comment about the Muslim Brotherhood being secular. But the Brotherhood doesn’t seem interested in helping us maintain our Middle East presence — that’s just not the vibe it gives off — so it’s doubtful that our gambits there will really help.

UAE? Unhappy. Jordan? Pretty annoyed. Saudi Arabia? So angry that the last phone call between Obama and Abdullah triggered rumors that the king had suffered a fatal heart attack out of sheer fury, with the Kingdom having already expressed a similar sentiment through Foreign Minister Al-Faisal. Our list of allies, in other words, is growing dangerously short. So naturally, someone in the White House thinks the time is ripe to drive a wedge between the U.S. and Israel. Smart power!

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/20...gainst-israel/

[NeroASERCH]

Martin Sherman tears Tom Friedman a new orifice in an excellent op ed on ynet news:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...028408,00.html

Good article!

From news article:
Tom Friedman is journalist of undoubted talent. [...]
However, when it comes to Israel – specifically the Israel-Palestinian question – his writing morphs from the lucid to the ludicrous.
[...]
Indeed, since the beginning of the Obama Administration in late 2008, Friedman has sallied forth with series of articles that have not only been harshly critical of Israel, but also decidedly haughty and hostile. But as irritating as his condescending and contemptuous style may be, what is far more troubling is how the substance of his writings has become so detached from reality and/or so devoid of context.

[radikal]

Another good article about Thomas Friedman by Giulio Meotti:

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7...071894,00.html

[Slonopotam845]

Grassroots Zionist group Israel Online Ambassadors has kicked off a Facebook campaign against New York Times columnist and close Barack Obama supporter Thomas Friedman, under the slogan – “Tom Friedman, Get Out of Our Lives!”

This follows Prof. Phyllis Chesler's article slamming Friedman for distorting the truth about Israel and suggesting what could lead to violence and the start of another intifada against the Jewish state.

In his most recent column (25.5), Friedman came up with a suggestion for the Arabs who claim parts of the Land of Israel, calling for them to march on Jerusalem...

The Ambassadors asked their fans to write Friedman at tlfriedman@aol.com and politely yet firmly tell him what they think of his recommendation. source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/144533

Here is the quote from Friedman's article:

Announce that every Friday from today forward will be ‘Peace Day,’ and have thousands of West Bank Palestinians march nonviolently to Jerusalem, carrying two things — an olive branch in one hand and a sign in Hebrew and Arabic in the other. The sign should say: ‘Two states for two peoples. We, the Palestinian people, offer the Jewish people a two-state solution based on the 1967 borders — with mutually agreed adjustments — including Jerusalem, where the Arabs will control their neighborhoods and the Jews theirs.”

If Palestinians peacefully march to Jerusalem by the thousands every Friday with a clear peace message, it would become a global news event. Every network in the world would be there. Trust me, it would stimulate a real peace debate within Israel — especially if Palestinians invited youth delegations from around the Arab world to join the marches, carrying the Saudi peace initiative in Hebrew and Arabic. Israeli Jews and Arabs should be invited to march as well. Together, the marchers could draw up their own peace maps and upload them onto YouTube as a way of telling their leaders what Egyptian youth said to President Hosni Mubarak: “We’re not going to let you waste another day of our lives with your tired mantras and maneuvering.” source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/144539

[9mm_fan]

I have no idea whether There is a Palestinian partner for a secure peace with Israel, along the lines that President Clinton laid out. I just know one thing. Given the implication for Israel, if it gets stuck permanently holding the West Bank, it is in Israel's overwhelming interest to test, test and test again, OK? Because that would be a huge strategic threat to Israel if it has no choice but to absorb the West Bank ...

On and on he went in this vein to his adoring interviewer, Fareed Zakaria.

It left me shaking my head and it brought an old phrase to my mind which gives the definition of insanity. It goes something like this:
"Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting different results."I mean, how many times do people like Friedman expect Israel to make concession after concession after concession for the sake of that elusive peace which this generation of Palestinian Arabs are just not interested in? And what is this exaggerated dread of "getting stuck" in the West Bank? It is that old bogey that the Israeli left invented of course. But the reality of course is not as dreadful as they pretend. At the worst, if the Pals continue with their obduracy and intransigence, Israel could always decide to annex as much of the unpopulated areas of the West Bank as possible and just leave the population centres to the Arabs. That way, Israel would not need to rule over an unruly population forever and Israel would not become undemocratic as the Thomas Friedmans warn. The fact that such an act would leave the Arabs in an untenable situation would be their problem. A problem of THEIR making. And if they would try to make it Israel's problem too by the use of terrorism, Israel has ways to defend itself. Ways such as the security barrier and a strong army. In any case, their situation would not be worse. In fact it would be better than if they make repetitive concessions, as Friedman demands, only to find that the Arabs would still not give up their terrorism. Which is exactly what happened in the past ...

[S.T.D.]

Israel could always decide to annex as much of the unpopulated areas of the West Bank as possible and just leave the population centres to the Arabs. This would make islands of arab settlements that would need to co-operate with Israel in order to trade and sustain an economy. These arab settlements would be obliged to live peacefully alongside a Jewish state in order to have their basic needs met, such as electricity, water and sewage to name but a few.
"Arab settlements" that felt so good to finally be able to call them what they really are. Reffo perhaps you have hit the only solution to the problem there. The only way to peace with the arabs is to make them totally dependent on Israel so they have to live peacefully, like it or not.

[doctorzlo]

As long as those Arabs would not become Israeli citizens. Those Arab population centres could either become independent principalities like Monaco, San Marino or the Vatican, for all I care. Or re-join Jordan and become Jordanian citizens again for all I care.

Hey, lets not get me wrong. I am not advocating this yet but sooner or later if the Pals keep up their obduracy and intransigence, this would be the only outcome that they will get. Why? Because they will leave Israel no other option.

[LottiFurmann]

Don't dis the idea Reffo. Out of all the solutions this is the only one that would be liveable with as far as Israel is concerned. IMO eventually I think that the arabs would dissipate into the areas that they originally came from, particularly when they realise that they actually have to work and earn a crust to survive like the rest of humanity. The greener pastures of Israel is out of their reach and the UNRWA gravy train is grinding to a halt, last stop Reality, all passengers please alight.
Bring it on.

[Lt_Apple]

Don't dis the idea Reffo

I guess this is not about personal preferences, but if it would be, then my personal preference would be for a sustainable peaceful solution involving give and take by both sides. A solution which would result in two states with freedom of movement for all individuals between the two states. That's my fantasy which I know is not achievable at least in our life time. And since it isn't and because the majority of Arab leaders and the Arab street still prefers to play the zero sum game of winner takes all, I accept that reality. And therefore, I advocate the next best thing from our point of view. A solution in which Israel will be the winner that takes if not all, then most. Of course the down side of that is the price that would have to be paid. But hey, it would still be better than losing all, which is the strategy that is being pursued by the Israeli left and their international advocates such as Friedman. Fortunately though, the support for the left in Israel is shrinking and I think, eventually, the same thing will happen in other western countries, if leftists like Friedman and the New York Times continue with their shrill advocacy of their bankrupt policies ...