A rare article about an important issue: Palestinian problem is not only Israel's problem - it is not only Israel's fault and it is not in Israel's power to solve it.
The reason: majority of the Palestinians do not live under Israel's control: millions of them live in Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Those in Jordan constitute Jordan's indigeneous population, as originally Jordan was a part of the Brtish Mandate "Palestine" intended to be split into Jewish and Arab (i.e. Palestinian) states.
Those in Syria and Lebanon are descendants of the refugees in the second/third and even fouth generations. They are technically designated as refugees, because neither of these countries is willing to grant the citizenship rights to people who were born in it, if these people have Palestinian ancestry.
These obvious facts are largely unknown to the "international community", which continues to insist on the "two-state solution", i.e. the resolution of the Palestinian problem at Israel's expense only. Israel undoubtedly will have to leave most of the West Bank territiries that it currently controls - this will solve the guilt problem for the Israeli left... yet, it will not solve the national problem for the Palestinians.
Solving Palestinian problem requires democratization of Jordan, Syria, Lebanon and larger Middle East and giving the Palestinian people the full rights in the countries where they live now. It may also require re-unification of teh Palestinians living in Jordan and the West Bank (aka East and West Germany.)
This is not likely to happen soon, since the Middle Eastern dictators have all the reasons to hold to their power... and the enlightened West has all the reasons to support these dictators by insisting on the "two-state solution" and ensuring teh continuous flow of oil.
The article quoted in the beginning out lines the Jordanian King's efforts to disfrinchise the Palestinian people in Jordan of their citizenship rights:
"King Abdullah is seeking to complete the divorce proceedings between Jordan and the Palestinians which his late father, King Hussein, began in 1988.
The separation began in July that year, a few months after the eruption of the first intifada.
King Hussein realized back then that it was not in the interest of his kingdom to maintain a linkage to the West Bank, home to hundreds of thousands of Palestinians.
His biggest fear was that the intifada would spill over into Jordan, where the Palestinian majority would rise against his monarchy. [...]
In 2009, Amman quietly began revoking the Jordanian citizenship of thousands of Palestinians, triggering strong protests from human rights organizations and pro-Palestinian groups around the world. [...]
Talk in Israel and elsewhere about turning Jordan into a Palestinian state has also left the king worried about the future of his kingdom. That explains why he is not even prepared to receive 1,100 Palestinian refugees who have fled Syria in recent weeks, while at the same time welcoming more than 100,000 Syrians who crossed the border into Jordan.
The Jordanians have no problem absorbing tens of thousands of Iraqis, Syrians and Libyans. But when it comes to the Palestinians, it’s a completely different story. The last thing King Abdullah needs is another 500,000 Palestinians in the country. "
Thursday, April 12, 2012
Wednesday, April 4, 2012
Romney's litmus test for intellectuals
The paradox
One of the striking paradoxes of modern democracies is that most people do not choose a candidate/party that would most closely represent their political views! Indeed, more often one simply adopts the positions of the candidate that the one supports.
I could support this thesis with many examples,but none of them would match the absurdity of the presidential campaign that has been unreveling in the US: it so happened that the Republican party is about to nominate a centrist, or perhaps even center-left, candidate (Mitt Romney) to compete with Barack Obama who, despite his class war rhethorics, has borrowed most of his successes from the book of his conservative predecessor (drone war in Pakistan, targeted assassinations, economic stimulus, auto-industry bail-out.)
Etch-a-sketch
For example, here is the criticism of Romney's "etch-a-sketch" changeable political views, aimed at rather educated audience (those with the knowledge of at least quantum mechanics.) Yet, one would think that the intellectual readers who are able to appreciate such an analogy would have worried that their views on Romney match those of some hardcore conservatives. But do they?
Of course, there is nothing new about "etch-a-sketch" (flip-flopping) attitude in politics. In particular, in the US it is a common practice for the candidates to "run to the right/left" during the Republican/Democratic primaries, and then "run towards the center" during the general election. The candidate competing against a sitting president is naturally at disadvantage, since the president usually does not have to compete in his party primaries. This, for example, allowed George Bush campaign to successfully brand his 2004 challenger John Kerry as a "flip-flopper".
Obama himself recently gave an example of this tendency of politicians to put their election campaign above the ideological integrity in his overheard comments to the Russian President.
Ironically, the most memorable example of "etch-a-sketch" comes also from Obama: the statement that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided" has generated a great applouse among the Jewish audience in the 2008 AIPAC conference, but was retracted by Obama immediately after the speech was over.
Comparison
A few points for comparing Mitt Romney and Barack Obama:
1. Obama's signature achievement in domestic policy is his healthcare legislation. This legislation was however modeled after a similar law introduced earlier in Massachusets by Romney. In fact, the two laws were even designed by the same people!
2. As a governor of Massachusets Romney was supportive of pro-choice groups and sexual minority rights. Despite formally abandoning these positions in the primary, he has enjoyed ovewhelming support among the female voters, and has continued to be attacked for his liberal views by other Republican candidates.
3. During the primaries Romney has adopted unusually harsh stance on illegal immigration. However, Obama has a record of merely paying lip-service to immigration reform, while significantly ramping up the number of deportations.
4. Romney's views support for exerting US military power around the world will be matched by the Obama's pride of the "smart" drone war in Packistan, the targeted assassinations of Bin Laden and US citizen Anwar al-Aqlaki, and keeping open the detention camp in Guantanamo - all morally questionably undertakings of the kind which the Democrats has been outraged about since George Bush years.
5. Obama hardly can be blamed for the current economic troubles - he happened to be president at the low of the economic cycle, whsoe downward swing dates back not only to teh Bush presidency, but also to the economic growth bubble of teh Clinton years. Yet, the intellectuals will have hard time explaining why they would rather entrust the US economy to the law professor (Obama) than to the career businessmen (Romney).
One of the striking paradoxes of modern democracies is that most people do not choose a candidate/party that would most closely represent their political views! Indeed, more often one simply adopts the positions of the candidate that the one supports.
I could support this thesis with many examples,but none of them would match the absurdity of the presidential campaign that has been unreveling in the US: it so happened that the Republican party is about to nominate a centrist, or perhaps even center-left, candidate (Mitt Romney) to compete with Barack Obama who, despite his class war rhethorics, has borrowed most of his successes from the book of his conservative predecessor (drone war in Pakistan, targeted assassinations, economic stimulus, auto-industry bail-out.)
Etch-a-sketch
For example, here is the criticism of Romney's "etch-a-sketch" changeable political views, aimed at rather educated audience (those with the knowledge of at least quantum mechanics.) Yet, one would think that the intellectual readers who are able to appreciate such an analogy would have worried that their views on Romney match those of some hardcore conservatives. But do they?
Of course, there is nothing new about "etch-a-sketch" (flip-flopping) attitude in politics. In particular, in the US it is a common practice for the candidates to "run to the right/left" during the Republican/Democratic primaries, and then "run towards the center" during the general election. The candidate competing against a sitting president is naturally at disadvantage, since the president usually does not have to compete in his party primaries. This, for example, allowed George Bush campaign to successfully brand his 2004 challenger John Kerry as a "flip-flopper".
Obama himself recently gave an example of this tendency of politicians to put their election campaign above the ideological integrity in his overheard comments to the Russian President.
Ironically, the most memorable example of "etch-a-sketch" comes also from Obama: the statement that "Jerusalem will remain the capital of Israel, and it must remain undivided" has generated a great applouse among the Jewish audience in the 2008 AIPAC conference, but was retracted by Obama immediately after the speech was over.
Comparison
A few points for comparing Mitt Romney and Barack Obama:
1. Obama's signature achievement in domestic policy is his healthcare legislation. This legislation was however modeled after a similar law introduced earlier in Massachusets by Romney. In fact, the two laws were even designed by the same people!
2. As a governor of Massachusets Romney was supportive of pro-choice groups and sexual minority rights. Despite formally abandoning these positions in the primary, he has enjoyed ovewhelming support among the female voters, and has continued to be attacked for his liberal views by other Republican candidates.
3. During the primaries Romney has adopted unusually harsh stance on illegal immigration. However, Obama has a record of merely paying lip-service to immigration reform, while significantly ramping up the number of deportations.
4. Romney's views support for exerting US military power around the world will be matched by the Obama's pride of the "smart" drone war in Packistan, the targeted assassinations of Bin Laden and US citizen Anwar al-Aqlaki, and keeping open the detention camp in Guantanamo - all morally questionably undertakings of the kind which the Democrats has been outraged about since George Bush years.
5. Obama hardly can be blamed for the current economic troubles - he happened to be president at the low of the economic cycle, whsoe downward swing dates back not only to teh Bush presidency, but also to the economic growth bubble of teh Clinton years. Yet, the intellectuals will have hard time explaining why they would rather entrust the US economy to the law professor (Obama) than to the career businessmen (Romney).
Tuesday, April 3, 2012
Inequality and economic growth
A worthy new addition to my "Theatre of the Absurd" section, coming from no one else but President Obama himself:
“In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class,” Obama intends to say, according to the prepared text. “That’s why studies have shown that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.”
Yes, just look at Europe...
(I presume the President had in mind capitalist countries, because there is even less inequality in Cuba or North Korea.)
“In this country, broad-based prosperity has never trickled down from the success of a wealthy few. It has always come from the success of a strong and growing middle class,” Obama intends to say, according to the prepared text. “That’s why studies have shown that countries with less inequality tend to have stronger and steadier economic growth over the long run.”
Yes, just look at Europe...
(I presume the President had in mind capitalist countries, because there is even less inequality in Cuba or North Korea.)
Monday, April 2, 2012
Is terrorism right or left?
This article tries to identify the causes of the home-grown terrorism, addressing the particular example of the recent terror attacks in Toulouse, France. It hits however an important point:
"Many French initially and secretly hoped that what happened in and around Toulouse would prove to be a repetition of the attacks in and around Oslo in 2011 – that the terrorist would turn out to be the product of the extreme right. Merah claimed to be acting in the name of fundamentalist Islam; in reality, he was the product of a bloody and deviant sect. How can a petty delinquent, a lost child of the French nation, fall prey to terrorist hatred of any variety?"
In short, we have by now witnessed equally horrifying attacks originating from the extreme right and from the extreme left. What causes the terrorism is not the part of the political spectrum that one belongs to, but how far one is ready to go in order to impress his/her views onto the others.
"Many French initially and secretly hoped that what happened in and around Toulouse would prove to be a repetition of the attacks in and around Oslo in 2011 – that the terrorist would turn out to be the product of the extreme right. Merah claimed to be acting in the name of fundamentalist Islam; in reality, he was the product of a bloody and deviant sect. How can a petty delinquent, a lost child of the French nation, fall prey to terrorist hatred of any variety?"
In short, we have by now witnessed equally horrifying attacks originating from the extreme right and from the extreme left. What causes the terrorism is not the part of the political spectrum that one belongs to, but how far one is ready to go in order to impress his/her views onto the others.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Nuclear deterrence
A good analysis addressing the logical merits of the argument that Iran armed with nuclear weapons vis-a-vis Israel will make the Middle East or the World a safer place:
"But I was nervously aware that I was urging good sense about a strategic situation that was senseless, because it was premised upon the credibility of a threat of holocaust. I was careful to note my discomfort in my book: deterrence, I said, may be supported but not celebrated, because it is another term for an unprecedentedly lethal danger, which it elects to manage rather than to abolish. I was uneasy with the commonplace notion that deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union “worked,” because this was impossible to verify.
[...]
I CANNOT SAY with sufficient confidence that an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be rational or right. There is too much information that I do not possess. I worry about the costs. I do not fear that the region would go to hell, because the Arab states would rejoice in such an action. (In this matter the leader of the Sunni bloc is the Jewish state.) But I do not know that Iran in its current political configuration will be deterred, and neither does anybody else."
"But I was nervously aware that I was urging good sense about a strategic situation that was senseless, because it was premised upon the credibility of a threat of holocaust. I was careful to note my discomfort in my book: deterrence, I said, may be supported but not celebrated, because it is another term for an unprecedentedly lethal danger, which it elects to manage rather than to abolish. I was uneasy with the commonplace notion that deterrence between the United States and the Soviet Union “worked,” because this was impossible to verify.
[...]
I CANNOT SAY with sufficient confidence that an Israeli strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities would be rational or right. There is too much information that I do not possess. I worry about the costs. I do not fear that the region would go to hell, because the Arab states would rejoice in such an action. (In this matter the leader of the Sunni bloc is the Jewish state.) But I do not know that Iran in its current political configuration will be deterred, and neither does anybody else."
Kissinger on Arab Spring
Henry Kissinger on the Arab spring and the US policy (or the current lack thereof) in the Middle East:
"For more than half a century, U.S. policy in the Middle East has been guided by several core security objectives: preventing any power in the region from emerging as a hegemon; ensuring the free flow of energy resources, still vital to the operation of the world economy; and attempting to broker a durable peace between Israel and its neighbors, including a settlement with the Palestinian Arabs. In the past decade, Iran has emerged as the principal challenge to all three. A process that ends with regional governments either too weak or too anti-Western in their orientation to lend support to these outcomes, and in which U.S. partnerships are no longer welcomed, must evoke U.S. strategic concerns — regardless of the electoral mechanisms by which these governments come to power. Within the framework of these general limits, U.S. policy has significant scope for creativity in promoting humanitarian and democratic values."
"For more than half a century, U.S. policy in the Middle East has been guided by several core security objectives: preventing any power in the region from emerging as a hegemon; ensuring the free flow of energy resources, still vital to the operation of the world economy; and attempting to broker a durable peace between Israel and its neighbors, including a settlement with the Palestinian Arabs. In the past decade, Iran has emerged as the principal challenge to all three. A process that ends with regional governments either too weak or too anti-Western in their orientation to lend support to these outcomes, and in which U.S. partnerships are no longer welcomed, must evoke U.S. strategic concerns — regardless of the electoral mechanisms by which these governments come to power. Within the framework of these general limits, U.S. policy has significant scope for creativity in promoting humanitarian and democratic values."
Wednesday, March 21, 2012
What is in common between Afghanistan and Gaza?
If it were not so said, it would make an addition to my "Theatre of the Absurd" collection (JPost repeats here the information provided by LeFigaro):
"A man engaged in a shoot-out with French police on Wednesday, suspected of killing four people at a Jewish school this week, claims to be linked to al-Qaida, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant said.
"He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al-Qaida," Gueant told journalists at the scene of the siege.
He also said the man had been in Afghanistan. "He wanted revenge for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions," Gueant said."
My comment:
Sadly, I am pretty sure that most of the readers see nothing unusual about this claim. Yet, think for a moment about the links between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Al Qaida, on the other hand, and France and Palestinian children on the other. However outraged you may be about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, you will have hard time connecting it to the events in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Al Qaida without accepting some kind of "global Jihad" point of view or taking a point that all of the World's troubles are faults of Israel and the Jews.
"A man engaged in a shoot-out with French police on Wednesday, suspected of killing four people at a Jewish school this week, claims to be linked to al-Qaida, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant said.
"He claims to be a mujahideen and to belong to al-Qaida," Gueant told journalists at the scene of the siege.
He also said the man had been in Afghanistan. "He wanted revenge for the Palestinian children and he also wanted to take revenge on the French army because of its foreign interventions," Gueant said."
My comment:
Sadly, I am pretty sure that most of the readers see nothing unusual about this claim. Yet, think for a moment about the links between Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Al Qaida, on the other hand, and France and Palestinian children on the other. However outraged you may be about the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, you will have hard time connecting it to the events in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Al Qaida without accepting some kind of "global Jihad" point of view or taking a point that all of the World's troubles are faults of Israel and the Jews.
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