The snippet below originally published by Jerusalem Post staff.
Alistair Burt, UK Under Secretary of State, calls on sides to forgo preconditions, says Israel risks isolation.This is more or less the way that I predicted the current "peace initiative" would play itself out.
Israel is in danger of being further isolated in the international arena if Washington’s latest push for Middle East peace ends in failure, according to a senior British official.
Alistair Burt, who serves as Parliamentary Under Secretary of State and the top Foreign Office official in charge of dealing with the Mideast, told Army Radio on Wednesday that both Israel and the Palestinians must ensure that US Secretary of State John Kerry’s mission be a success.
“If the Kerry initiative ends in failure, the repercussions will be very inconvenient to Israel,” he told Army Radio. “The danger of Israel’s isolation will become greater than ever unless a solution is found.”
It goes like this:
1) The Obama administration calls for negotiations between the parties.
2) Israel agrees to negotiations between the parties.
3) Abbas refuses to negotiate until Israel does this, that, or the other.
4) EU countries, and the western left, including the Obama administration, blame Arab intransigence and refusal to negotiate on Israel and threaten dire consequences.
This is playing out just as I predicted that it would.
The current "peace initiative" is, of course, nothing of the sort. What it really is, is a little sadistic drama for the purpose of putting Israel in the docket in order to make her defend her right to exist.
Watch.
They left out his next line, where he said "nice little country youze got there, be a shame if something happened to it..."
ReplyDelete"Israel is in danger of being further isolated in the international arena..."
ReplyDeleteThe bogeyman to the cosmopolitan Jew who wants to be loved at all costs. You gotta give them credit, they know which heartstrings to tug on. On the other hand, this also means they'll be robbed of their trump card once the steering is passed—as it must be one day, because the old guard won't hold forever—to the nationalist Jews, those who would pay less attention to idle Western threats of Israel's isolation and more attention to preventing the real scenarios of death by a thousand cuts (Lebanonization) that the Arab settlers have in store for the Jewish state.
And that's not even touching the question of what right the heirs of T. E. Lawrence have to tell the Jewish state what to do.
O/T - when you can't even win in Boulder...
ReplyDelete~~~
BOULDER - The Boulder City Council voted 7-2 Monday night to defeat a controversial proposal to forge a "sister city" relationship between Boulder and the Palestinian city of Nablus on the West Bank.
During more than four hours of emotional debate, speakers invoked the long and violent conflict between the people of Palestine and Israel.
Some people cited a 2001 incident, when a university chapter of the militant Palestinian group Hamas built an art exhibit at An-Najah University in Nablus recreating the scene of a deadly suicide bombing attack at a Jerusalem pizza shop.
Another person talked about oppression of women in the city.
Some supporters of the Boulder-Nablus Sister City Project wept during the meeting. The group told the council it wanted to enhance understanding of the area and develop yoga and rock climbing opportunities for Nablus.
~~~
I once (very briefly) considered moving to Boulder during my wandering days. Struck me as kinda like the Berkeley of Colorado. The 7-2 vote against is an interesting result.
'Yoga opportunities' is an absolutely fantastic phrase, for the record...
So Boulder is now sister cities with Neapolis. Interesting, this show of support to those who call the city by a Greek name instead of its original Semitic one. I guess settler-colonialism is all the rage nowadays.
DeleteCouldn't resist...
DeleteNo, they actually voted it down. Which surprises me!
Delete"He's doing yoga!"
DeleteJay,
"No, they actually voted it down. Which surprises me!"
Darn! I skimmed it. Although, for the same reason it surprises you, I was all too prone to that misreading.
My point about ΝΕΑΠΟΛΙΣ vs. שכם (Shechem) still stands, however.
I am just sick to death of this fool's game.
ReplyDeleteWhy do they perpetually demand that Israel accept what it has always accepted?
Why do the never demand that the Arabs accept what they have never accepted?
There is a sadism at the core of all of this.
Paul Berman, in one of his books, discusses how it was at the height of the Second Terror War (intifada), when Israel experienced the equivalent of a 9/11 every two or three weeks for years, that the gleeful western-left arose in order to condemn the victims.
It's just sick.
"...when Israel experienced the equivalent of a 9/11 every two or three weeks for years,..."
DeleteExactly so.
I have to say I appreciate you and your whole work, Mike. Among Israeli Jews we tend to say that those far away could never understand what we've been through, but you're the disproof of this with your amazing solidarity from afar. It's really heartening.
I think NormanF's comment kinda hits uncomfortably close to the core issue, at least for certain types of Westerners. It's a clear-cut form of humanitarian racism. The Jews are seen (quite rightly) as the more reasonable party to the conflict, so the thinking appears to be 'hey let's just keep riding harder on them since we know the other guys won't budge.'
DeleteSoft bigotry, low expectations, and all that...
Perhaps what certain western victims of a colonial white guilt complex, which certainly does not apply to this conflict, need to do is get the hell out of Israel, and go back to worrying about what's going on in England and the US and etc... ;)
"Why do they perpetually demand that Israel accept what it has always accepted?
DeleteWhy do the never demand that the Arabs accept what they have never accepted?"
Because one side will fly airplanes into towers and Pentagons and stuff while the other side won't.
From Peter Berkowitz in "The National Interest"
ReplyDeletehttp://server1.nationalinterest.org/commentary/israels-image-isnt-fraying-8578
in response to an article by Jacob Heilbrunn’s “Israel’s Fraying Image”
http://nationalinterest.org/article/israels-fraying-image-8378
Berkowitz:
"To be sure, there is strong public support for Israel. Gallup, which has conducted the most opinion polls on the question of American support for Israel and has data going back to at least 1967, finds that current support in America for Israel has reached “a high- water mark.” According to their February World Affairs poll, Americans favor Israel over the Palestinians by a margin of 64% to 12%. Relative support for Israel has risen significantly over the last decade.
Nevertheless, Jacob is not altogether wrong about declining support for Israel. Support has clearly declined among progressives and in the Democratic Party. Like Peter Beinart, author of The Crisis of Zionism, Jacob conflates declining support for Israel among progressives and the Democratic Party with declining support generally."
See also Jonathan Tobin in Commentary:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/06/12/no-need-to-say-kaddish-to-a-jewish-state-leon-wiseltier-peace-process
"It is true that Israel suffers from international isolation and the abuse thrown at it by its opponents. However the false apartheid charges won’t be any more factual in the future than they are today. Israelis will never accept incorporation of the Arabs of the West Bank into the Jewish state just as the Palestinians won’t accept a state alongside Israel. That creates a standoff that leaves the Palestinians in limbo. But it is the fruit of their own addiction to a nationalism that defines itself solely by rejection of Zionism rather than a positive vision of Palestinian identity. Perpetuation of this situation into the future may seem impossible but it should be remembered that few in 1967 (when Israel came into possession of the West Bank and united Jerusalem) would have believed that the status quo would have lasted 46 years. At this point, the assumption that it cannot last any longer underestimates both the ability of Israelis to hang on despite criticism and the willingness of Palestinians to go on shooting themselves in the foot."
I think Berkowitz misstates the case a bit though. When he says
ReplyDelete"However, no serious discussion of the peace process can take place without a proper understanding of what each side has done to advance the cause of peace and what each side has done to thwart peace. Much of Jacob’s analysis reads as if the only relevant actor were Israel, and as if Israel’s iniquities were the only real obstacle to peace. Such an approach feeds into the fevered accounts according to which Israel—the only fully functioning liberal democracy in Middle East, whose Arab citizens enjoy greater rights than any other Arabs in the Middle East because they enjoy all the political rights of Jewish citizens of Israel—is an arrogant, bullying, and bigoted regime that prefers the violent acquisition of territory and the despotic rule over others to peace."
He's stating a rational case in a world where rational cases don't matter. If you say the Arabs have it pretty good the BDStards retort with "Well fed slaves!" If you tell them about Hamas rough justice and public hangings and honor killings they tell you it doesn't matter or worse, as captured here "Israel Made Me Beat My Wife".
http://honestreporting.com/israel-made-me-beat-my-wife/
And so on. There's no rational case to be made. So don't bother making it. As far as Mr. Alastair Burt is concerned? So what? David Cameron is a salesman trying to close arms deals and doesn't want the competition from Israel. And when he means Israel will be shunned he means who? FM Hague? Again who cares.
Or he could mean Chuck Hagel and Samantha Power - both of whom have expressed some interest in putting American boots on the ground for the Palestinians' benefit. But I'm sure Obama wouldn't have any such interest. /sarc
DeleteIn fact we've heard these cries about "Israel running out of time" for 60 years. We need to understand that all of these statements by the west, by the US and the UK are strictly driven by their own political timelines not Israel's. John Kerry mouths these words because Obama needs a win and fast given the torrent of scandals, disclosures and failures. William Hague makes similar Cassandra sounds noises for somewhat the same reason. Meanwhile they both politely ignore the fact that Tony Blair has made 87 trips to Ramallah and achieved nothing and it's gone on for years and years and none of them make the least squawk at the PLO.
ReplyDeleteY'know, I don't see hardly anybody today singing the praises of the Obama peace process. This is because it doesn't really exist. Certainly the Israelis are not buying this load of garbage and they shouldn't.
DeleteThe last time that they did so thousands of people ended up dead in the terror war that followed.
Negotiations are worthless because the Arabs are not interested in compromise. That being the case, Israel must act in unilateral fashion.
This does not necessarily mean annexing the entirety of Judea and Samaria, but it does mean declaring final borders.
I understand about Gaza and Sharon and the thousands of rockets that came afterward, but what I don't understand is why Israel cannot declare its final borders, remove the IDF to behind those borders, and then hit back hard when the Arabs attack, as they always do.
I guess that I very much crave finality.
I want an end to the long Arab war against the Jews in the Middle East.