Palestine

Saturday

Daniel Korski

Philistines for Free Palestine

From our UK edition

This summer I had the pleasure of listening to the Belgrade Philharmonic Orchestra performing in the once-ravaged Croatian coastal town of Dubrovnik. The concert, conducted by the Indian maestro Zubin Mehta, was beautiful and moving. A particularly memorable moment came when a Croatian tenor sang a duet with a Serbian soprano. Under the Dalmatian sky, music served as a vehicle for human understanding and reconciliation. How different the audience - and Zubin Mehta - must have felt when the performance of the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra in the Royal Albert Hall was disrupted by pro-Palestinian hoodlums, who brought the Promenade Concerts to a halt for the first time since 1895.

Thursday

Daniel Korski

Will Britain recognise Palestine?

From our UK edition

Will Britain recognise Palestine as a state if, as planned, the matter comes to a vote at the UN General Assembly in September? Right now, the government says it has not decided. But if France were to push, the likelihood is that William Hague will order British diplomats either to accept or abstain from the vote. The strategic rationale for a Yes vote is obvious: at a time when Britain is waging war in Libya and rallying support against Syria and Iran, it would be disadvantageous to be seen by Middle Easterners as blocking Palestinian aspirations. And having accepted the case for Palestinian statehood in principle why not support it in practice?

Sunday

Daniel Korski

Trouble in Golan

From our UK edition

In a clear move to distract attention from his own problems, Syrian president Bashir Assad has allowed people to march from the Syrian border toward the Israeli-controlled Golan Heights, in the hope it will lead to a violent reaction from the Israelis. It did. Israeli forces opened fire on the people, wounding several. There are reports of at least four people killed and 13 wounded but these have not been verified. There can be no doubt that the incursion is part of a Syrian plan. The protests coincide with the 44th anniversary of the Six-Day War, when Israel captured the Golan from Syria, as well as the West Bank and Gaza Strip. The border area is a military zone and people will have been bussed or waved through Syrian checkpoints 50 kilometres before they reached the border.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Netanyahu’s Myopia

From our UK edition

What scares Israel more than anything else? Not, I wager, the rockets flying over the fence from Gaza or even, at least on a quotidian basis, the Iranian shadow. No, what happens if the Palestinians say Yes? Granted, the Palestinian leaderships - not without their own battles - have persistently demonstrated a fatal lack of imagination. Jerusalem or Bust and it's always been Bust. But if the Palestinians could bring themselves to acknowledge the Jewish state, Israel would find itself in a corner, hemmed in by the Palestinians' engagement, international pressure and its own sense of what kind of country it should be. But freezing the conflict - which is essentially what is happening now - hardly benefits Israel either.

Tuesday

Alex Massie

1967 And All That

From our UK edition

How do you reconcile these comments? Argument A: "Abbas and co have had a laughably free pass despite their serial aggression, bad faith, reneging on treaties and repeated expressions of exterminatory aggression and incitement to hatred and murder of Jews. Yet it’s Israel alone upon which Obama has dumped, by expecting it to make suicidal concessions to its attackers. At best, Obama remains even-handed between Judeophobic exterminators and their victims; that puts him on the side of the exterminators." Argument B: "Obama offered the Palestinians nothing." They're from the same post. If B is true then A seems odd; if A is true then B seems even odder.

Friday

Alex Massie

No, Obama Did Not Throw Israel “Under the Bus”

From our UK edition

President Obama's speech yesterday confirmed that the main thrust of American foreign policy in the middle east may now fairly be characterised as Obama men and Bush measures. In large part it could have been written by David Frum. Admittedly, as Frum says there's a difference between broad statements of principle and the actual, more difficult, policy decisions that might put flesh on those bones. Despite this, the conservative reaction to the speech appears utterly unhinged. As any member of the sanity-based community could appreciate, there was little in the address that significantly departed from long-standing American policy. Indeed, I think Jeffrey Goldberg is right to argue that the speech: [W]as enthusiastically pro-Israel.

Monday

Daniel Korski

US Middle East initiative takes early holiday

From our UK edition

When the Obama administration started its latest Middle East initiative, it was amid great fanfare. I blogged – sceptically -- about the optimism exuding from the State Department at the time. Now, however, the US government has given up its push for a freeze in Jewish settlement construction as quietly as possible. As Martin Indyk of the Brookings Institution puts it: “The Middle East peace process just died, but nobody seems to be in mourning. Twenty months of U.S. efforts to freeze Israeli settlement activity to create a conducive environment for negotiations have produced only deadlock.

Thursday

Martin Bright

The ultimate Jewish conspiracy theory

From our UK edition

This has to be the ultimate Jewish conspiracy theory story. Why have the Wikileaks disclosures been so soft on Israel? Here is Tariq Shahid from the Palestine Think Tank. I’m hoping it’s a spoof but here’s my favourite section: “Browse through all the news sources available on the latest Wikileaks revelation, and try to find even only one revelation that actually damages Israel, even though so many of the revealed documents are directly or indirectly connected to Middle East politics, and to a large extent to Israeli affairs. Did you find any document among them that either creates difficulties for the government of the Zionist entity, or even slightly embarrasses it?

Sunday

Fraser Nelson

The other Rachel

From our UK edition

The boat the Israelis peacefully intercepted was called Rachel Corrie  - named after a young American protester accidentally killed when  offering herself as a human shield in Gaza. Her name became immortalised, some 30 songs have been written for her, a London play named after her and a film last year. But another Rachel, completely forgotten, is Rachel Thaler - a 16-year-old British citizen murdered by a Palestinian suicide bomber in 2002. Only one British publication has ever mentioned her: The Spectator.

Monday

David Blackburn

Hague pitches it right

From our UK edition

It would be wrong to pass comment on the loss of life on the Gaza Flotilla; the facts are not established. Israel is right to investigate convoys that it feels might be supplying Hamas with arms. But, as ever in the Middle East conflict, it must be determined whether Israel’s use of force was proportionate. Not that the answer to that question ever deters Hamas from terror or Israel from retaliation. Peace does not lie in abstract nouns. However, international law will determine the facts of this incident, and perhaps bring clarity to the divisive Gaza border issue.

Friday

Daniel Korski

US-Israeli spat ends, but may have long-term effects

From our UK edition

Week two and the US-Israeli spat has calmed. More than a dozen Republican and Democratic Congressmen have pressed the Obama administration to tone down its criticism, following initial outrage of Benjamin Netanyahu's plan to build 1,600 homes in the disputed East Jerusalem territory - announced during Vice President Joe Biden’s visit. Claims that the US-Israel relationship have sunk to the worst level for 35 years were rejected by Hillary Clinton. And in his first public comments on the controversy, President Obama downplayed criticism of the Israeli government over the illegal settlement expansion plan. But I am with Israel’s ambassador to the US: there is real risk of a lasting rift with the United States.

Thursday

Alex Massie

Israel’s Enemy Within

From our UK edition

I confess I don't know very much about Isi Leibler, but he's a columnist at the Jerusalem Post who wrote this week that: The exploitation of Judge Goldstone's Jewish background by our enemies intensifies our obligation to confront the enemy within - renegade Jews - including Israelis who stand at the vanguard of global efforts to demonize and delegitimize the Jewish state. Such odious Jews can be traced back to apostates during the Middle Ages who fabricated blood libels and vile distortions of Jewish religious practice for Christian anti-Semites to incite hatred which culminated in massacres. It was in response to these renegades that the herem (excommunication) was introduced...