Dorothy Online Newsletter

NOVANEWS

Dear Friends,

 

Just a quickie today.  It’s one of our grandson’s 19th birthday and the birthday dinner is at our house.  I apologize, but have not had time and won’t have to scan international media or even to read all of Today in Palestine.  Likewise, you are blessed by only a brief intro and only 6 items this time.

 

Item 1 reveals a secret EU paper that criticizes Israel for its treatment of its Arab minority.  Bravo!  Finally, governments are beginning to see the light.  Unfortunately, the criticism is a watered down version of the original paper.  Fortunately, some criticism is finally, at long last, beginning to emerge.  May this first tiny step lead soon to more criticism of Israel’s many failings regarding its minorities and Palestine.

 

In item 2 Akiva Eldar warns Israel that the day may soon come when Israel will be surrounded by countries unfriendly to it—including Egypt and Jordan.

 

Item 3 tells us that US love for Israel comes at a price, and also clarifies the audience Republican hopefuls are aiming at—less at Jews (who are only about 3% of the electorate) than at Christian Zionists.  That makes sense.  But is that what Israelis need?  Such ‘love for Israel’ at a time when Americans are short of many more important items could also lead to anti-Semitism.

 

In item 4 a top Holocaust scholar blasts US and Israeli ‘Holocaust abuse.’  I totally agree with her on the propaganda use made of the Holocaust, though I do not agree with her Zionist stance.

 

Item 5 shows a part of Netanyahu’s character—vindictiveness. Not that I’d want to read an op-ed by him, but that’s another issue.  One point needs setting straight—the argument below that the Palestinians rejected partition and joined the Arab countries that attacked Israel in 1948.  Well, first of all, I don’t know how many of you would not object to someone taking more than ½ your home, and 2nd, most of the cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine was accomplished way before the Arab armies attacked—was accomplished before Israel declared itself a state.

 

The final item is Today in Palestine.

 

That’s it for today.

Dorothy

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1Haaretz

Friday, December 16, 2011

Secret EU paper aims to tackle Israel’s treatment of Arab minority

Paper states EU should consider Israel’s treatment of its Arab population a ‘core issue’, and not second tier to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/news/secret-eu-paper-aims-to-tackle-israel-s-treatment-of-arab-minority-1.401678

By Barak Ravid

Tags: Jews and Arabs

  The European Union should consider Israel’s treatment of its Arab population a “core issue, not second tier to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” according to a classified working paper produced by European embassies in Israel, parts of which were obtained by Haaretz.

This is an unprecedented document in that it deals with internal Israeli issues. According to European diplomats and senior Foreign Ministry officials, it was written and sent to EU headquarters in Brussels behind the back of the Israeli government.

Other issues the document deals with include the lack of progress in the peace process, the continued occupation of the territories, Israel’s definition of itself as Jewish and democratic, and the influence of the Israeli Arab population.

The original document also included suggestions for action the EU should take, but these were removed from the final version at the insistence of several countries.

Among these were the suggestion that the EU file an official protest every time a bill discriminating against Arabs passes a second reading in the Knesset, and that the EU ensure that all Arab towns have completed urban plans, “with each member state potentially ‘adopting’ a municipality to this end.”

The contents of the 27-page report were kept under wraps, and a number of European diplomats contacted by Haaretz over the past two weeks refused to disclose any details. Foreign Ministry officials said they had heard about it unofficially from some European diplomats a few weeks ago, but to date no Israeli official has been able to obtain a copy.

According to a European diplomat involved in drafting the report, work on it began more than a year ago at Britain’s initiative. The idea was to write a report that could be debated by a forum of EU foreign ministers. At some point, however, several countries, among them the Czech Republic, Poland and the Netherlands, expressed objections to its contents.

After lengthy debates on the issue in an effort to obtain the consensus necessary to send the report to Brussels, it was decided to water it down somewhat and drop the operative conclusions. It was also designated a “food for thought” document, rather than a “report.”

The embassies declared in the document that the breakdown in the peace process was having a negative impact on the integration of Israeli Arabs into society.

“The stalemate in the peace process, and the continuing occupation, inevitably has an impact on the identification of Israeli Arabs with Israel,” the document states. “It will be more difficult for Israeli Arabs to be wholly at ease with their identity while the conflict with the Palestinians continues.”

At the same time, the embassies said this should not be used as an excuse for “hostile behavior by Israeli Arabs which alienates the Jewish majority, or for failure by Israeli government to achieve genuinely equal treatment of Israeli Arabs.”

The document suggests that the EU discuss Jewish-Arab relations with the Israeli government, while stressing the government’s obligation to bridge the gaps between the Jewish majority and Arab minority.

“We should emphasize that addressing inequality within Israel is integral to Israel’s long-term stability,” the document says.

The document also relates to the demand made by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.

“We do not believe that recognition of Israel as a Jewish State should detract in any way from the vision of equality for all its citizens enshrined in its founding documents,” the report says.

“It is in the interests of all Israelis to demonstrate that Israel is not only Jewish and democratic, but tolerant and inclusive, and that these are patriotic values. We believe in common with most Israelis that Israeli nationality is an inclusive concept which can accommodate equally those of other faiths and ethnic origins.”

Other operative suggestions that were dropped from the final document included supporting projects promoting coexistence in schools, and encouraging European companies setting up high-tech operations in Israel to invest in Arab areas.

 

This story is by:

Barak Ravid

2, Haaretz

Friday, December 16, 2011

Israel may long for good old Hamas soon enough

How long will it take until Jordan closes its border with Israel and Egypt locks the gates of its embassy in Tel Aviv?

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/israel-may-long-for-good-old-hamas-soon-enough-1.401812

By Akiva Eldar

Tags: Hamas

 

DOHA, Qatar − Most of the Israelis on the Royal Jordanian flight to Amman were on their way to the Far East. The Muslim Brotherhood is sending out tentacles everywhere and the security services are advising Israelis to avoid Arab countries, but Israelis are not relinquishing the little that remains of the peace with Jordan.

Who remembers that it all began with the vilified Oslo agreement? Who thinks about how it will all end when that agreement, may it rest in peace, receives an official death certificate? And what will we do when Washington, Paris and Berlin host representatives of the Islamist governments of Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, and subsequently a Hamas government as well?

How will the Americans be able to conduct relations with leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas’ mother party, while boycotting its offspring? After all, they have adjusted to the toppling of their traditional Middle Eastern allies and are encouraging political, social and economic reforms in the region. How long will Israel be able to rely on the “Quartet rules” for negotiations with Hamas and expect the world to blindly follow the pied piper from Jerusalem who is leading them astray?

These questions nagged at me during the discussions held this week at the huge convention center in Doha. Qatar was given the honor of hosting the fourth annual conference of the United Nations Alliance of Civilizations, headed by former president of Portugal Jorge Sampaio. Despite its tense relations with the Israeli government, Qatar’s Foreign Ministry granted entry visas to a group of Israeli peace activists, professors and journalists.

This would not have happened without the approval of Qatar’s emir, Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani. The emir encourages Israeli businessmen to invest in his country, which is awash in petroleum ‏(NIS 0.95 for a liter of 95-octane gasoline‏) but suffers from a shortage of entrepreneurs. If Israel also had a diplomatic initiative, he would be prepared to fling Qatar’s gates wide open.

An editorial in the English-language newspaper Qatar Tribune urged the Gulf states to rethink their joint strategy in light of the political storm sweeping the region. The editorial criticized the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council for tending to react to events after the fact. “They cannot afford such luxury,” exhorted the writer. “They must be proactive, planning for every eventuality.”

These lines could easily be translated into Hebrew with respect to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both the impoverished West and the increasingly wealthy Gulf states are preparing to deal with the Arab world’s youth revolution. They understand that 2011 will replace the terror attacks of 2001 in the history books. But in Israel, the prime minister is devoting his attention to advancing the Likud’s leadership primary. At a time when Israel’s government is promoting a bill to ban mosques from using loudspeakers to broadcast the call to prayer, in Muslim Qatar, veiled women walk past Christmas trees on their way to the hotel restaurant.

In one corner of the large lobby, I saw a group of young people pinning badges on their shirts that bore maps of greater Palestine ‏(the Land of Israel?‏) and the inscription “Right of Return.” Among them were two teenage girls from Tunisia, two Yemenite men and an Iranian. I introduced myself as a peace-seeking Israeli Zionist. I wondered what they had to do with a conference devoted to an alliance among civilizations and how their map accorded with the Arab League’s peace proposal, which adopted the 1967 borders.

“That belongs to an earlier time, to [ousted Egyptian President Hosni] Mubarak and [ousted Tunisian President Zine El Abidine] Ben Ali,” said one of the girls. “Don’t you know that everything has changed?” Her friends nodded their heads in agreement.

How easy it will be for Muslim extremists to gather these young people around the television screens when Al Jazeera broadcasts footage of Jewish soldiers shooting Arab children in the next intifada. How long will it take until Jordan closes its border with Israel and Egypt locks the gates of its embassy in Tel Aviv? One of these days, we will find ourselves longing for good old Hamas.

In advance of Qatar’s national holiday, which will be celebrated on Sunday, clowns riding on costumed ostriches invaded the busy bazaar. I thought to myself that no creature could be more suited to be named Israel’s national animal.

3 Haaretz

Thursday, December 15, 2011

U.S. love for Israel comes with a price

The Republican’s unconditional support for Israel is undoubtedly gratifying for many Jewish voters, but in the long run, it could do more harm than good.

http://www.haaretz.com/print-edition/opinion/u-s-love-for-israel-comes-with-a-price-1.401505

By Chemi Shalev

 

The race for the Republican presidential nomination will formally be launched in Iowa in three weeks. But from an Israeli point of view, it can already be described as a watershed event. Israel has never been so prominent in any presidential race. It never served as such a “wedge issue.” And it never received such sweeping and unequivocal support – especially for its right flank.

 

The statement made by the current front-runner, Newt Gingrich, about the Palestinians being “an invented nation” is only the most recent in a string of policy statements that, in Israeli terms, would position the Republican candidates – with the exception of Ron Paul – somewhere in the Knesset’s radical right, between the Likud’s Danny Danon and National Union’s Aryeh Eldad. Michele Bachmann says Israel shouldn’t give back one more inch of territory; Rick Perry says Israel can build settlements to its heart’s content; Rick Santorum has already annexed the West Bank to Israel proper; Jon Huntsman claims that Israel is the only American interest in the Middle East; and Mitt Romney thinks the United States should keep its mouth shut on the peace process and surrender the floor to his good friend “Bibi” Netanyahu. Oh, and they all promise to move the American Embassy to Jerusalem, at once.

 

The Republicans believe that dissatisfaction with President Barack Obama’s attitude toward Israel creates a golden opportunity for them to make significant inroads into American Jews’ traditional financial and electoral support for the Democrats. But their main target is the evangelical Christians, whose votes may decide numerous primary contests. The evangelicals’ absolute support for Israel derives from a deep religious belief in an inevitable confrontation between Good and Evil – and the Republicans have adopted a similar approach.

 

This unconditional support is undoubtedly gratifying for many Jewish voters, but in the long run, it could do more harm than good. Ordinary Americans are bound to wonder about the sway this distant country holds over American politics and about the motives of the Jews that support it. The unusually prominent place given to Israel – often at the expense of pressing domestic issues such as education, crime and poverty, as well as significant foreign policy issues such as Russia, China, the Eurozone crisis and the Arab Spring – is, one must admit, often surreal.

 

In their effort to portray themselves as the only party that looks after Israel’s interests, Republicans are also eroding a long tradition of bipartisanship, and their campaign slogans may turn into self-fulfilling propaganda. Polarized presidential politics are bound to seep into Congress and may diminish Israel’s ability to enlist consensual support in its time of need. Voters who oppose the Republican Party may come to accept that this also includes opposing the party’s support for Israel.

 
Finally, one cannot ignore the possibility that derogatory anti-Palestinian statements, of which Gingrich provided a good example, could inflame an already stormy Arab world and, by extension, strengthen Iran’s regional standing. But of course, this won’t upset those who are waiting with bated breath for the war between Gog and Magog and the Apocalypse. It’s only a problem for those who still cling to the anachronistic concept that managing a country’s foreign relations requires wisdom, prudence and good judgment.

4. Friday, December 16, 2011

Top Holocaust scholar blasts ‘Holocaust-abuse’ by U.S., Israeli politicians

Deborah Lipstadt lambasts ‘unhealthy and embarrassing’ pandering of Republican presidential candidates; says U.S. envoy Gutman’s comments on Muslim anti-Semitism were ‘stupid.’

http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/top-holocaust-scholar-blasts-holocaust-abuse-by-u-s-israeli-politicians-1.401821

By Chemi Shalev

Tags: US Jews Holocaust Jewish World

 

  Renowned Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt says that American and Israeli politicians who invoke the Holocaust for contemporary political purposes are engaging in “Holocaust abuse”, which is similar to “soft-core denial” of the Holocaust.

“I think it is dangerous, just plain dangerous. It’s a distortion of what Israel is all about, what Zionism is all about,” said Lipstadt, who has just published a retrospective book “The Eichmann Trial” on the 1961 Jerusalem trial of the infamous Nazi criminal.

  Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, Jan 11, 2000.

Photo by: AP

“When you take these terrible moments in our history, and you use it for contemporary purposes, in order to fulfill your political objectives, you mangle history, you trample on it,” she said.

In a hard-hitting interview with Haaretz, Lipstadt singled out Republican presidential candidates for rebuke, describing their “pandering” as “embarrassing” and “unhealthy”. Of last week’s appearance of the top Republican candidates at a Washington forum organized by the Republican Jewish Committee, she said: “It was unbelievable. It made me cringe. I couldn’t watch it.”

“You listen to Newt Gingrich talking about the Palestinians as an ‘invented people’ – it’s out-Aipacking AIPAC, it’s out-Israeling Israel,” she said. .”There’s something about it that’s so discomforting. It’s not healthy. It’s a distortion,” she said.

She also used the word “despicable” to describe settlers who use the term “Nazi” against IDF soldiers. “And it’s so inaccurate. And it’s such an abuse of history. The people who started it know it’s not true, but the kids, the yeshiva kids, and the high school kids – they don’t know it’s not true. And so when real Nazism comes around – no one will recognize it.”

Lipstadt, who is the Dorot Professor of Modern Jewish and Holocaust Studies at Atlanta’s Emory University, became a hero of American Jewry after she singlehandedly inflicted a devastating blow on Holocaust-denial in the West in her famous London courtroom victory in 2000 over master-denier David Irving, who had sued Lipstadt and her publisher, Penguin Books, for libel. The London Times said of Lipstadt’s victory: “History has had its day in court and scored a crushing victory.”

Lipstadt described US Ambassador to Belgium Howard Gutman’s controversial comments about the causal connection between the Arab-Israeli conflict and Muslim anti-Semitism as “stupid”, adding that “he sounded as if he was rationalizing anti-Semitism.” But, she said, the reaction to his statements had also been “over the top.”

Lipstadt decried the “hysteria” and “neuroses” of many Jews and Israelis who compare the current situation in Europe and in the Middle East to the Holocaust era. “People go nuts here, they go nuts. There’s no nuance, there’s no middle ground, it’s taking any shade of grey and stomping on it. There are no voices of calm, there are no voices of reason, not in this country, not in Israel. “

“This is the kind of thing that scares me,” she said. “Jews have always been neurotic – I mean everyone’s neurotic, we just recognize it more – but we’ve raised our neuroses to a level that’s not healthy. We should eschew hysteria, but we don’t. Hysteria is never useful.”

The New York-born Lipstadt said that President Barack Obama’s “flatfooted” handling of Israel at the beginning of his term “gave an opening to Republicans in America and to ‘Republicans’ in Israel.” She said that “more and more Jews are scared and here’s someone [the Republicans, CS] who is going to protect them. It’s so over-the-top irrational.”

Lipstadt rebuffed suggestions that what she describes as the “unhealthy neuroses” of the Jews in 2011 is a direct outgrowth of the legacy of the Eichmann trial. “The Eichmann trial was a pivotal moment in the history of Israel, in the history of Zionism. It personalized the Shoah, and it was the beginning of change in the Israeli attitude toward Shoah survivors.”

One of the more controversial chapters in Lipstadt’s new book deals with Hannah Arendt, whose own book Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil was immensely popular in the West in the years following the trial but was roundly condemned by Jews and Israelis. Though Lipstadt demolishes Arendt’s main theses that Eichmann was but a bureaucratic cog in the Nazi machine and denounces here criticism of the Judenrats in Nazi-occupied Europe – she does find some positive points in Arendt’s coverage of the trial, including her observation that “for the first time since the year 70, when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans, Jews were able to sit in judgment on crimes committed against their own people.”

Arendt, says Lipstadt, “was mean and cruel, but she captured something very essential about the trial.”

Read the full transcript of the interview at http://www.haaretz.com/jewish-world/full-interview-with-holocaust-historian-deborah-lipstadt-1.401823

5.  Jerusalem Post

Friday, December 16, 2011

   Photo by: Marc Israel Sellem

 Netanyahu to ‘New York Times’: Take a hike

http://www.jpost.com/DiplomacyAndPolitics/Article.aspx?id=249718

By HERB KEINON

Prime minister “respectfully declines” to pen an op-ed piece for ‘NYT’ citing newspapers negative spin on Netanyahu government.

Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is refusing to pen an op-ed piece for The New York Times, signaling the degree to which he is fed up with the influential newspaper’s editorial policy on Israel.

In a letter to the Times obtained by The Jerusalem Post on Thursday, Netanyahu’s senior adviser Ron Dermer – in response to the paper’s request that Netanyahu write an op-ed – wrote that the prime minister would “respectfully decline.”

Dermer made clear that this had much to do with the fact that 19 of the paper’s 20 op-ed pieces on Israel since September were negative.

Ironically, the one positive piece was written by Richard Goldstone – chairman of the UN’s Goldstone Commission Report – defending Israel against charges of apartheid.

“We wouldn’t want to be seen as ‘Bibiwashing’ the op-ed page of The New York Times,” Dermer said, in reference to a piece called “Israel and Pinkwashing” from November. In that piece, a City University of New York humanities professor lambasted Israel for, as Dermer wrote, “having the temerity to champion its record on gay rights.”

That piece, he wrote, “set a new bar that will be hard for you to lower in the future.”

Dermer’s letter came a day after NYT columnist Thomas Friedman wrote that the resounding ovation Netanyahu received in Congress when he spoke there in May had been “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

With Friedman clearly – but not solely – among those in mind, Dermer wrote that “the opinions of some of your regular columnists regarding Israel are well known. They constantly distort the positions of our government and ignore the steps it has taken to advance peace. They cavalierly defame our country by suggesting that marginal phenomena condemned by Prime Minister Netanyahu, and virtually every Israeli official, somehow reflect government policy or Israeli society as a whole.”

Dermer also took the paper to task for running an op-ed piece by Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas in May that asserted that shortly after the UN voted for the partition of Palestine in November 1947, “Zionist forces expelled Palestinian Arabs to ensure a decisive Jewish majority in the future state of Israel, and Arab armies intervened. War and further expulsions ensued.”

Those lines, Dermer wrote, “effectively turn on its head an event within living memory in which the Palestinians rejected the UN partition plan accepted by the Jews, and then joined five Arab states in launching a war to annihilate the embryonic Jewish state. It should not have made it past the most rudimentary fact-checking.”

That it did find its way into the op-ed pages of the “paper of record,” he wrote, showed the degree to which the paper had not internalized former senator Daniel Moynihan’s admonition that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but… no one is entitled to their own facts.”

Furthermore, Dermer wrote, the paper’s sole positive piece about Israel since September – the Goldstone piece rejecting the apartheid charges – “came a few months after your paper reportedly rejected Goldstone’s previous submission. In that earlier piece, which was ultimately published in The Washington Post, the man who was quoted the world over for alleging that Israel had committed war crimes in Gaza fundamentally changed his position. According to The New York Times op-ed page, that was apparently news unfit to print.”

Dermer wrote that the paper’s refusal to run positive pieces about Israel was not because they were in short supply. In fact, he said he understood that in September the paper had turned down a piece cowritten by House Majority Leader Eric Cantor (R-Virginia) and Minority Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Maryland), expressing bipartisan support for direct Israeli-Palestinian negotiations and opposition to the PA’s statehood gambit at the UN.

“In an age of intense partisanship, one would have thought that strong bipartisan support for Israel on such a timely issue would have made your cut,” he wrote.

Meanwhile, Rep. Steve Rothman (D-New Jersey) called on Friedman to apologize for saying the congressional ovation Netanyahu received in May was “bought and paid for by the Israel lobby.”

Rothman said he gave Netanyahu a standing ovation not because of “any nefarious lobby,” but because it is in the US’s vital strategic interest to support Israel.

“Thomas Friedman’s defamation against the vast majority of Americans who support the Jewish state of Israel is scurrilous, destructive and harmful to Israel and her advocates in the US,” Rothman said. “Friedman is not only wrong, but he’s aiding and abetting a dangerous narrative about the US-Israel relationship and its American supporters.”

6.  Today in Palestine

December 15, 2011

http://theheadlines.org/11/15-12-11.shtml

 

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