Another point is that there are different kinds of 'negotiation'. When both parties seek a number of things they can be traded one for another, In this case Iran simply wants the sanctions lifted while the others want countless different things so the process is more like adding this and that until a set of scales tip. As for distrust, all you need do is look at the DOS Press Briefings http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/ for April 8/9 to see the obscurities of the US position outlined by the President himself in a NPR interview. The spokesperson claims he could have expressed himself more clearly while the Iranians might well take the view that inadvertently he expressed himself all too clearly.
The message I got from what Khamenei said was he was trying to calm everyone down by providing a sane perspective against a tidal wave of ill-informed pontification. The Iranians have made it quite clear their engagement in these negotiations is to have the sanctions lifted. To that end they are prepared to forgo for a while a lot of what they are quite entitled to which is less of a challenge than it might be since they are not interested in a nuclear weapon anyway. If the sanctions are not to be lifted or they are to be treated in an arrogant and undignified manner then not only will they not agree to all this intrusive activity but they might well leave the table early. The concessions that have been put into this framework are entirely for US benefit, the only thing that interests Iran is the lifting of sanctions – but they are realists and if necessary they will have to continue to live with those for anther moon or two. They will have done their best.
Jack, You touch the fundamental division in our human species; the conflict between the independent individual and the pull of the collective; look after yourself and your own or share broader mutual responsibilities. The former can leave many dependent on charity while the latter too easily morphs into totalitarianism, take your pick.
There is no particular virtue in consistent consistency. US presidents need to be consistent only to the notion of keeping the US on top of the pile which is what empires have ever done. This requires dominating all others and is accomplished by military means, bribery, threats or tenuous alliances; the combinations vary but the mix remains directed to that top dog objective. This is true for all national leaders except most have to operate in the shadow of one above or at their shoulder. Before he died, I met Ben Gurion and he talked of his admiration for de Gaulle because he had always put the French first. in aetate veritas. Anyone expecting altruism should glance at the northern members of the Euro-zone salivating over the misfortunes of Greece.
Federica Mogherini, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif issued a joint statement in Switzerland 6 days ago, a statement approved by all parties to the negotiations, and that is the only valid summary of the current state of the negotiations regardless of what anyone else says. As for the sanctions, their effects on the Iranian population should be viewed in the context of the broader economic circumstances in the US, the EU and elsewhere rather than some Norman Rockwell fantasy of employment, prosperity, peace and integrity.
Obama may be too late to save US authoritarianism from disintegrating further. European industrial, agricultural and commercial interests might have ridden along with all these sanctions if every one else was on board but they cannot sit on their backsides watching others pick all the fruit. Iranian and Russian sanctions are costing Europe far too much to be worth whatever benefit they are argued to provide. Once they go by the board, European leaders will feel increasingly pressured by their electorates to deal firmly with the threat posed by Israel in the ME, a threat that with its support from across the Atlantic has reduced much of the Arab world to anarchy and bloody terror with tentacles reaching deep into European society and eroding security and freedom in a manner scarcely reached at the height of WWII.
It's also possible the US will withdraw it's umbrella from those Middle Eastern nations it protects from normal social and political evolution. Israel would never have reached this point without that umbrella and the same might be said of the KSA and others in the area. Obama may understand this but he doesn't possess the freedom to override the vested opposition and make a substantive change just like that. The US president may be 'the most powerful ruler' but he is more constrained than the British prime minister and other leaders whose powers devolved from monarchy as opposed to rising from the people. Although it doesn't look like it at the moment, it is still possible for international consensus to rise to the occasion, the institutions exist and and firing them up would only require the US to take its finger off the veto button. That wouldn't solve the evolving problems overnight but it would likely head them in a more manageable direction.
It is not all that difficult to espouse contradictory, even mutually exclusive convictions; individuals, groups and nations do it all the time. What is difficult is to be consistent in defiance of the appeals of pragmatism and expediency, and the seductions of moral weakness.
After WWII the whole world was in shock but out of it rose a hope for the future of the human race which fed into the birth of Israel, founded with the most optimistic of expectations and from the most generous of motives. I was nine at the time and my fond companion was a furry hamster called the Empress. One day I found an abandoned nest of newborn mice. I gathered the little pink orphans and gave them to the Empress to nurture. I can still hear their screams as she devoured them and I get echoes of the same helpless horror from the fate Israel visits on Palestine and its people.
He may well wish to appear prepared 'sincerely' to try but isn't that what they've all been doing for years? He's a politician, if he tried such a thing unilaterally he'd likely be shot.
Changing the status quo requires a solution acceptable to Israel and the Palestinians. Israel accepts no responsibility for the havoc it has caused the Palestinians while even liberal Jews imagine some future where they will retain much of what they have usurped, and something they vaguely envisage as 'sharing' the land with its owners, hard-liners want more. The US does not want yet another Arab nation in the area, particularly one that has been submerged in US duplicity for 60 years. Meanwhile the BDS movement wants Israel back behind its 67 borders and full rights of return. I do not believe any politician on either side is capable of bridging the gaps. The way I see it a Netanyahu win would generate a lot of negative energy which could well accelerate European support for BDS principles. On the other hand an alternative result would likely lead to efforts to undo the damage done to the US relationship over Iran. Once Iran takes its proper place in local and international affairs the whole picture changes, and in a more extended, slower and more peaceful way it also changes with regard to Palestine and its people.
A Netanyahu win might be better for the Palestinians since it would likely give BDS renewed impetus, particularly in Europe. On the other hand the Livni Herzog double act seems likely to maintain the status quo under the US umbrella of blather, duplicity and delay. However, anything that takes pressure off the Iran impasse and allows Europe to reconnect with its trade and culture is to be welcomed. People forget that everything they are not allowed to do with us, we are not allowed to do with them. It takes, as they say, two to tango.
No one appears concerned for the impression all this is making on the rest of the world, particularly European allies who have had to overlook increasing examples of unrepentant human rights hypocrisy, unsustainable economic policies, blatant intrusive surveillance, unforgivable misuse of the UN veto to protect their lawless ally Israel, and a dangerous stand-off with Russia, which is both a blow to European economies and raises the spectre of serious war. The US is beginning to resemble the proverbial bull in the china shop and, quite frankly, Putin, Khomeini and Xi Jinping appear comparatively more stable with each passing day, and that's not because of any change in them.
The dissimilarity is that one side feels justified in taking an imperial view while the other regards that as impertinent interference. The negotiators are seeking to rise above these opposing positions to a level at which they may be reconciled.
It may be a fanciful thought but can the PA not sell these unsettled Israeli tax debts to some sympathetic consortium who can then claim payment in an appropriate court, the UK perhaps?
It must be well nigh impossible to sit in complete safety and work up the attitude necessary to slaughter defenseless human beings at a distance. Traditional war was quite different because both sides were vulnerable so it was more like a dangerous competitive game. The other day PressTV carried an account of post Operation Protective Edge Israeli soldiers needing psychiatric help. http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/03/05/400335/Gaza-war-traumatizes-350-Israel-troops. An even darker side of all this is that if these warmongers can't find enough home grown killing fodder they will subcontract to commercial outfits and we will be awash with mercenaries whose continued existence is entirely dependent on wars. Europe was all but torn to shreds with them in the Middle Ages. The extra danger today, however, is that there are corporations, interest groups, even individuals, with the resources to hire them for their own purposes.
“Israel made every effort, every effort possible to avoid seeing innocent civilians getting caught up in the crossfire.” Says Mark Regev. That must have been difficult with the world's media broadcasting graphic sights and sounds of precisely that more or less round the clock.
You are, of course, absolutely right. However, if you wish to extend the perception it becomes a matter of how the vacuum occurred. Myself, I take refuge in the notion that cause and effect are simply the comforting way we account for the progression of cloud illusions through time.
Genghis Khan was doing this kind of thing on a much larger canvas nine hundred and some odd years ago but relatively few people heard of it at the time. Today, news of Daesh/ISIL massacres reaches the internet almost as soon as they happen. Whether these modern barbarians are Moslem or not is simply a question of what they are called or what they call themselves, any effort to be more precise on the issue is a matter of theological dialectic. How they came about is a subject for historians. It is fashionable today to devote often considerable care and effort picking a path back in time from now to some antecedent moment in order to turn it on its head and argue the reverse was how a current situation came into being, Things tend to have more discernible evolutionary patterns if we are not directly involved with them; once subjected to outside involvement, particularly our own, they become all but impenetrable as unraveling their motives increasingly requires us to examine ours as well.
Iran has immense mineral resources apart from oil, gas, coal and exportable power from nuclear facilities. It enjoys a level of self-sufficiency Israel can only dream of. Were sanctions to be lifted and Iran's potential as an importer and exporter to come fully on stream, Iran would swiftly become the dominant power in the area with enough allies, and defence and trade agreements to make it an enviably significant voice in world affairs. This Israel doesn't want and I see the nuclear weapon business as a cover for such concerns and an effort to ward off the fateful day, not unlike the the way they try to keep the unsustainable Palestinian issue on the boil (Netanyahu might lift the lid and peek into those kettles as I sense they are both all but dry). An agreement with Iran and the lifting of sanctions would indeed tend towards the destruction, not of Israel itself but of its Zionist and other ambitious dreams, particularly if accompanied by even a marginal reassessment of US policies in the ME. In that sense Netanyahu is quite right to see it as a threat although 'existential' is perhaps a shade extreme, but then the closer the day looms the more frantic he becomes. Obama shaking hands with Khamenei? What a political legacy! You can almost sympathise with the poor man.
Although we know what might be done to reduce this trend, it is abstract knowledge, to be practical the initiative would have to be global and authoritarian. It would also require complete rejection of many values and practices taken for granted in the Western world and those areas the West contaminates like mould in Stilton. Economy would need to replace consumption as an ideal. The concept of 'want' would have to melt back into one of 'need'. The means of exchange would have to become finite again; we went off the gold standard onto what has become a currency backed only by our survival, a currency we expend with the careless extravagance of a mindless gambler. We have eroded authority with liberalism and there no longer exists anything to effect such changes before they force themselves upon us with painful, savage necessity. If that sounds apocalyptic, it should. Nature will not harm us, we will have harmed Nature until she can no longer sustain us, and then there will be looting, theft and murder as the 99% revert to some kind of neolithic barbarism. Does anyone remember that 1973 film Soylent Green with Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson? Prepare for something along those lines. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/
For the US media to make an issue of this would distort the preferred image of the US. The simple truth is North Americans don't much care for Moslems and there is no automatic sense of outrage when things like this happen, outrage such as there would be were the victims from some more affectionately recognised subsection of US society able to provoke communal solidarity as it does in the Middle East. This sort of atrocity can even make people uncomfortable by forcing them to consider things about their society over which they have no direct control and would sooner not know about, things better left for officials to sweep under the carpet by putting on solemn faces, strongly condemning them, expressing sympathy to the families and promising investigation, etc. etc.
These talks are a waiting game and expressions such as Ayatollah Khamenei's latest are simply different ways of keeping the game alive. A satisfactory resolution will remain elusive while Israel continues to possess heaven knows how many of what Iran is not allowed even to think of having. Israel, as is so often the case, is a distorting lens preventing the issue from being rationally approached. Some years ago a Brookings Institute survey of public opinion in the ME showed overwhelming support for a ME entirely free of nuclear weapons. However, the majority of those questioned also felt that while Israel possesses such weapons it's probably better for Iran to have them as well. I don't recall the exact details but that was the gist of it and I doubt such findings would be substantially different today, particularly factoring in Israel's more recent bursts of irrational aggression, and ongoing disregard for international law and the niceties of timeless diplomatic custom. What I imagine the negotiating sessions are waiting on is either a change in US policy towards Israel, or some rebalancing of global authority towards a more poly-central system with a larger role for international norms. I can't see much immediate prospect for either, so expect the sparring to continue in an ever more formalized manner.
If the argument is that forewarning mitigates the brutality then Daesh have certainly announced in advance what would happen to their US and other victims were they not ransomed. We don't know the details that passed between them and the Jordanians but it is not inconceivable that the US put pressure on Jordan to refuse a deal; an awful lot of money suddenly appears to be set to flow into the king's military coffers.
While perfectly possible to employ instant history and connect this immolation to drone or other Western activities, it doesn't explain how similar barbaric behaviour is as old as life and thriving on every continent. What is different today is the sophistication of the media in feeding graphic, carefully presented examples of mankind's more extreme behaviour. With all the build up of a theatrical Chorus our emotional response is orchestrated to a pitch and held for a while until dissipated in analysis and comment. The sequence is classic, not unlike the Roman games and circuses where men and animals fought to their bloody deaths by the thousand to keep the populace quiescent. It works by first presenting the circumstances in all their brutality so as to arose a strong emotional response, and then objectivizing them to distance them from any suggestion of personal 'we' involvement. If you read comments in other less restrained places you will readily encounter retributive attitudes hardly distinguishable from these executioners.
Absent a global authority with the will and means to enforce our abstract moral beliefs and aspirations these contradictions will continue. I am not even sure there is much new about them except the manner in which they have become media currency, providing controlled opportunities to focus outrage and diffuse it in onanistic, largely harmless, vaguely comforting ways. Look at that piece about the Koch brothers, you would imagine Cenk Uygur and the other guy think the situation funny; arms waving, voices rising in faux incredulity. Or the self-righteous media protestations as 30 US suits (and others) rush headlong to congratulate Riyadh days after a viral snuff film showed an executioner taking three sword strokes to remove the head of a Burmese woman in a public square in Mecca.
In the 1930's the global population was around 2 billion today it's close to 7 billion. Dramatic changes in population in the past have tended to be both downwards and relatively local. Even so they had profound social, cultural and economic consequences. Whether we like it or not circumstances arising from this population phenomenon are beckoning us towards the need to become more cooperative as a species, and much of the underlying tension in the world today mirrors a struggle between that impulse and corresponding resistance from the more exploitive attitudes of the past. This is largely why people feel the need to move from one cultural environment to another in the first place. We might meliorate the effects of this struggle by re-empowering the UN but in the end it just has to work itself out.
The growth of European ultra right wing political parties is a phase and only incidentally, if at all, connected to Islamic extremism. Racism inevitably develops during periods of economic stress and it's focus is normally the nearest identifiable alien racial group. All over the world there has been outrage at this attack with rallies in many capitals which rather express a new international solidarity which certainly isn't anti-Islam. In fact, a couple of says ago there was an immense rally in Dresden against racism. http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/10/us-germany-islam-rally-idUSKBN0KJ0IN20150110 It's nice and tidy to link Jihadist extremism with quasi fascist European movements but in my view it's over simplistic, and even dangerous since it fosters the paranoia promoted by Netanyahu and other like-minded warmongers.
Most of the Western world is offended by perspectives contrary to its own and feels evangelically that all others should shuffle themselves into the Western line or be silenced, slaughtered and swept aside. There is no such thing as a paradisaical world for all mankind, and it is salutary to consider that approaching two and a half millennia ago Plato wrote The Republic precisely to demonstrate its impracticality. We are speeding whether we like it or not into a new post-Rational age, and it is time to for those still clinging to Reason to accept that it is simply a tool of thinking and no longer a religion. Look around, deny it if you can.
Charlie Hebdo once ran a cartoon caricature of a naked Mohammed, with a star on his backside the words 'a star is born', and that is only one of the more notorious examples. Just consider a journal ridiculing Jews, gays, whatever, in the US where jobs and practically heads can be lost for a private unconsidered remark.
bin Laden claimed responsibility more than once for 9/11 and explained precisely that the US presence in his native Saudi Arabia was the motive. Whether any other group had foreknowledge and looked the other way is quite another matter.
I am not over familiar with these things but the tax revenue is presumably a debt from Israel to the PA in which case could the PA not sell the debt and the purchaser call it in?
Each step the PA has made has created potential for a consecutive move, and at each point there has been an opportunity for Israel to buckle down and start to accommodate the PA, UN and increasing others. Presenting the UN draft was proceeded by such period with Abbas' assurance that if it failed he would join the ICC. The ICC signing opens another such opportunity before specific application is put before the court. The difference now is the threats are getting closer to key decision making individuals. Meanwhile BDS advances like dawn and Israel's behaviour calls to mind Shakespeare’s Richard II: Now mark me how I will undo myself. IV (i)
One can go round in circles with this sort of thing. Although the US is weakened by its absurd politics, moral corruption and endless wars, it is still top of the pile. As such it is above the law in the sense that there is no one to enforce it on them. Such situations are not unfamiliar and cultivate attitudes and behaviour in line with those of the most notorious, Off with their heads, rulers of the past. Sooner or later their rule comes to an end, usually because they run out of money.
As for Cuba, Obama said that sanctions haven't worked, by which presumably he means they didn't achieve their purpose of regime change. Being practical he therefore now lifts them and will shortly start to foster the sort of political opposition which seems to be working in Ukraine. Who knows, it may not even cost 5 billion.
Human Rights is an abstract, aspirational concept, a subdivision of the concept of 'Good'. Abstract aspirational concepts are important, they are like one side of a coin, without them there couldn't be a coin, but they can't exist on their own.
The US is happy with any political system that supports its hegemonic aspirations and it's moot whether it utters more blind hypocrisy about 'human rights' or 'democracy'.
Mortals should not seek too high perfection... if more good than evil is within thee who are but human then you shall do full well. Euripides Hippolytus
I don't see what it has to do with France or the UK or anyone else for that matter. The ICC exists and the Palestinians can apply to join, that's what it's there for. So if they want to join, that's what they should do. Most of the world will be behind them anyway. The peace process is a cloud illusion. What is necessary is for Israel to get the hell out of all occupied Palestine.
I wouldn't read too much into it, protecting your property is as old as time and for China, whose investments are state directed, commercial interests are just that. At the same time, few nations are happy with the hack handed way the US is trying to lead against ISIL, or the ambiguities of many US partners. One would like to think the US knows what it's doing but increasingly it looks like patients have taken over a psychiatric ward.
I just spent a while doing a 'find' on 'Israel' to see exactly how and with which others it voted one each of the many issues debated and found it cumulatively highly illuminating, well worth the few minutes it takes.
There has to be cooperation. The US just doesn't want to admit it. The result is Matt Lee and others circle round the DOS spokespersons firing the same questions posed in slightly different ways until the truth becomes apparent not in the answers the get but the ones they don't get. It's often a question of semantics. The US insists that we’re not coordinating any military activity with Iran, but then is being informed of some Iranian purpose, commenting on it favourably, or perhaps even suggesting modifications, and passing the details to your own folk really coordinating military activity with Iran? Is a casual bit of fellatio the same as having sex?
The Ukraine crisis was in some ways provoked by aggressive expansionism by the EU and NATO into former Russian spheres of influence.
Do you think there would be a crisis had the West not provoked it? There was no other reason why Ukraine should not have enjoyed fruitful relationships East and West; like a child spending equal time with separated parents. Is that not closer to what Putin looked to and probably would be happy with today?
This is an ancient ploy, the temptation is all but irresistible when the source of funds is not the paymaster. You have soldiers coming and going, no one ever counts them, and their names are incomprehensibly similar. Thomas Holloway, a self made millionaire from the manufacture and sale of pills for women, built Holloway College for women in the 19th century as a philanthropic gesture of restitution. It is said that he arrived on site daily with a leather bag of coinage and paid each construction worker himself. A man well versed in the foibles of human nature.
It is probably a translation thing, 'You cannot make an equality' is scarcely even English. The phrase, whatever it was (aynı değildir?), very likely meant 'not the same'. And that surely has to be true or we wouldn't need separate words for 'man' and 'woman'.
Over recent weeks the suspicion these talks would fail has been hardening to near certainty; DOS spokespersons were becoming increasingly opaque and evasive about the deadline. So now we're off down this path instead of that, but the underlying reality remains the same since the issue was never really the nuclear program but the role an unbridled Iran would inevitably come to play in the region and that hasn't changed. Congresspersons may well glow with bum clenching delight at the prospect of further hardship for Iran, just as they do over Russia, but the fact is there is economic hardship almost everywhere including the US' own backyard. The capitals of Europe are regularly filled with demonstrators facing riot police, unemployment is dangerously high, poverty and homelessness abound, and the hardship induced by sanctions needs to be measured against those realities rather than some long faded 1950's dream. Furthermore, both Iran and Russia possess considerable assets, http://www.mining.com/iran-opens-new-gold-processing-plant-to-counter-sanctions-63090/ They may not be able to trade them freely but that doesn't mean they go away or that their capital value diminishes. There may be fewer consumer choices in their shops but that's not the end of the world.
Iranians are not fools. They must have realised the fantasy nature of these negotiations but have gone along with them because they push the prospect of military intervention further towards the edge of the table.
Iran will probably, for its own reasons, continue to contribute off stage in efforts to curtail Daesh/ISIL but the concerted global effort the situation demands will remain elusive.
Israel's unpopularity will inevitably continue to rise, while the US may well find Europe slipping out the back door as sanctions on Russia and Iran hurt there more than across the water.
Also expect further stress between the oligarchical US legislature and a Presidency drifting towards the monarchical.
These essentially internecine Jewish conflicts are contaminating the big wide world where they attract passionate debate. It is not possible to make all states conform to the same abstract, Western, democratic, humanitarian ideal, the less so when you consider that it doesn't actually exist anywhere in the real world and never has, thus any debate about how far any group is planning to stray from it is like the Walrus's discussion:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings.
It diverts attention from what is actually happening which is that these people are doing unpalatable things in land that is not theirs. They should first be invited > urged > threatened > forced back behind the boundaries awarded them in 1947. Once there the problem becomes local, and as far as much of the world is concerned they can behave as they choose, but not in someone else’s territory or we'll find they've swallowed it all.
"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?”
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.
Another possibility is that under increasing BDS type ostracisation the fragile Israeli society might fragment and tear itself apart in bloody internecine dissensions. This has occurred periodically since biblical times and, according to Josephus, largely contributed to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. The necessary basic divisions are present, always have been, and it could prove the tidiest solution for the rest of the world since it would lead towards an entirely internal resolution requiring no initial input from AIPAC, the US or any one else.
Considering these beheadings teleologicaly, it appears possible the ISIL objective is to provoke the US etc. into a boots on the ground invasion. The West is in economic meltdown, the populations are dead against more wars, elected leaders are far from popular. A spanner of Damocles suspended over the works?
One may also hope that Bennett’s honesty will help Western governments to recognize the urgent necessity to save the two-state solution...
I doubt Western governments will pay much attention to Bennett. His security argument is simply a specious justification for clinging on to what Israel has stolen and doesn't want to give back. Governments are only guided by considerations of international law and the UN Charter when it suits them, rarely if ever as a controlling principle. It is the people, particularly Europeans acting on their elected representatives, who will determine the way this all works out. Israel might have maintained an active central role in forging the future of the area but they have frittered that away and their role is likely to become increasingly passive, in much the way white South Africans lost the initiative down there.
It's not that simple. You cannot play poker if you are not able to keep your cards to your chest. I said it elsewhere ...: Democracy is not the best political system for conducting remote foreign policy. I hold no light for Vladimir but his task is enviably easy compared to Obama's.
Situations change, Obama's earlier intentions about no boots on the ground have clearly slipped from the eye. He tried to hold them back by asking others to deploy their boots instead but his appeal was received with less than generous enthusiasm, and few local troops, most of whom are economic refugees and only enlisted for the pay, have the qualities necessary for any meaningful stand up to the torrent of messianic ISIL, preferring rather to flee, discarding their military accoutrements as the go. You cannot turn an ordinary civilian into a killing machine by giving him a uniform and a shiny new weapon. It doesn't work like that, there needs an ideology, some irrational belief structure like Zionism, to make that happen. Furthermore, efforts to encourage religious leaders to preach how ISIL behavior is not Islamic are counterproductive because, whatever the US may wish to believe, Islam in its purest sense is a peaceable faith which such messages only confirm. So, since he's determined, Heaven knows why, to challenge ISIL to the death Obama needs must put his own boots where no one else is particularly inclined to tread. It will all end in tears, my mother used to say when I became obstreperous or over excited. And she was invariably right.
Obama may also be concerned about the absence of broad international enthusiasm for the US lead in this fraught and complicated issue. Not because of sympathy for ISIL but because few are sure precisely what US intentions are, and even doubt the US is all that sure either. The US reputation for omniscient moral authority looks increasingly like the emperor's wardrobe, and while there is not much can be done about that Obama can at least try to avoid standing entirely alone when the cry is taken up.
If you rely on others it's important that not only your objectives but your priorities coincide. Were I Obama I would forget about Turkey, make nice with Assad, get his help to push back the IS then throw him under a bus and make nice with Erdogan again. Running empires is not a job for moralists.
It's an interesting moment. I think you are right and the Administration will veto it but only because it's hands are tied. So long as the US veto stands alone, it will be seen an offer of self sacrifice on the pyre of Zionist aspirations. The gamble, and I would say it's a good one, is that the the US will sustain the damage but Netanyahu won't.
The DOS press briefing on October 1 revealed a uniquely tough position on the latest Jerusalem settlement announcements;
Matt Lee: ... but I wanted to know if you got answers to some questions that have been raised over the past couple days about Israeli activity or plans in East Jerusalem, also on the Palestinian draft resolution that’s been floating around at the – in New York today.
MS. PSAKI: Mm-hmm. We are deeply concerned by reports that the Israeli Government has moved forward the planning process in the sensitive area of Givat Hamatos in East Jerusalem. This step is contrary to Israel’s stated goal of negotiating a permanent status agreement with the Palestinians, and it would send a very troubling message if they proceed with tenders or construction. This development will only draw condemnation from the international community, distance Israel from even its closest allies; poison the atmosphere not only with the Palestinians, but also with the very Arab governments with which Prime Minister Netanyahu said he wanted to build relations; and call into question Israel’s ultimate commitment to a peaceful negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.
and then later in the same briefing:
QUESTION: But based on your – this is contrary to Israel’s stated goal, you’re condemning it, you say it poisons the atmosphere and calls into question their commitment, what’s the consequence of that? Is there one? Is there any?
MS. PSAKI: Look, I think, Matt, that it’s not just the United States, it’s the international community who will respond strongly to this kind of continued activity.
I may be reading too much into it but that seems to suggest the US may be ready to let the International community pick up the baton, which could imply that the Administration is not going to interfere with Abbas' next steps. Spine?
Exactly the same process is under-way in the UK, 3 billion savings on Social Security payments for the most vulnerable and a bombing spree in Iraq. Cumulatively these actions further weaken confidence in the political system and any residual respect for it. This, of course, increases manifestations in the streets and a corresponding rise in brutal police action to quell them.
Meanwhile the State Department just held a lavish feast to honour the Hindu president of India in the middle of a nine day Hindu fasting period, an extravagant culinary gesture justified, according to the spokesperson, for its 'symbolic' significance. Has she ever uttered a truer word!
Those who have a passion for domination regard everything else as nothing in comparison with obtaining what they desire: they often give up their dearest friends and closest kin in exchange for their bitterest foes. Cassius Dio. (AD 155–235) plus ça change...
The more the West intervenes in Syria, the more the regime can depict itself as innocent victim of foreign plots.
Ah, a glimmer of truth at last. Assad was never before atrocious in a random manner. It was his political opponents who suffered his retribution, and even there he was a degree less dramatic than his father who was known to suspend them from lampposts in Damascus. The simplest solution was to take up something useful like dentistry, get on with your life and avoid political dissension; one cannot, after all, expect the fire brigade to respect the furnishings.
Population growth increases the urgency for land and resources, urbanisation distances mankind from any responsible relationship with the environment, and literacy raises aspirations from the practical to the abstract. Combined they make a toxic mix engendering eruptive change and potential chaos way beyond the Arab nations. We see increasing totalitarianism of one kind or another most everywhere, but its a tactical response, as is the call for regionalism, there is no strategy. The current world population of 7.2 billion is projected to increase by 1 billion over the next 12 years and reach 9.6 billion by 2050, according to a United Nations report*. Our long term fate is increasingly in the hands of Nature.
The five preferences listed would apply to any area of the UK, the Scots, and to a lesser extent the Welsh, simply possess more readily identifiable characteristics for most non British observers. There are local anti-fracking movements wherever it is proposed, broad distrust of the whole process and outrage at the sacrifice of ancient parkland. Nor is the urge for more independence from central authority peculiar to the UK, there are formidable movements in Catalonia in Spain and the Vèneto region of Italy, and less formidable ones in almost all European regions. We've seen federalist aspirations in Eastern Ukraine and they exist as far afield as China. The five selected preferences are symptoms of the much broader desire for local control over innumerable things that affect local people including health, education, and a more equitable distribution of wealth. The UK coalition of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats acts as it does only because it is in power, the Labour Party would be exactly the same. Cameron is not 'conservative',* he's just another tool of the 1%. Centralization has moved decision making too far from the people it directly affects and in the process rendered them increasingly powerless, the frustration born of that is what fuels the urge for regional autonomy. Aside from Scotland and Wales, the UK has eight regions, and London, and there are regionalist aspirations in all of them.
* The NHS is under enormous stress and in a state of economic chaos. I suggested to Cameron that it might help cut interminable waiting lists and reduce pressure on the system if bona fide medical expenses were tax deductible. He didn't like that, he said he believed medical treatment should be the same for everybody, a purely political response to avoid any possible suggestion that he might appear to be favoring higher tax payers in an election year.
Most rebellions are against rather than for something. A meaningful element in this whole business is simple anti-Americanism, and I think that is what motivates many ex patriot volunteers. No one trusts the US, not even it's closest allies. Its track record is appalling.
It's perfectly natural for neighbours to engage in competitive activities including armed ones. It was going on in Europe when I was a toddler, and still is although morphed into economic conflict. These conflicts are manifestations of the flux of ordinary social life and are better left to local resolution, your third paragraph confirms this. Much of the chaos in the ME is the direct result of US hegemonic aspirations, everybody knows that; leaders of the so called terrorists have frequently come out and said so quite openly, clearly and unequivocally. The IS announced exactly why it was going to execute the US and UK captives and what was required to abort the executions. Osama bin Laden frequently addressed similar messages to the US. The US pays no attention, it's as if those responsible cannot imagine anyone actually meaning what they say. The Australians decided, heaven knows why, to support the US against the IS and in direct consequence have just had to employ 800 police to arrest potential assassins planning to behead random Australians in Australia! http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/18/terrorism-raids-police-arrests-raids-sydney-brisbane. Is it any wonder Kerry cannot readily put together his coalition and has to content himself with ever shifting circumlocutory evasions.
War is basically a game of deception without rules and, despite what he says publicly, I cannot believe Obama will eschew all liaison with Damascus over bombing raids on Syrian ISIL positions.
It's quite sad/funny watching Kerry buzzing about trying to get his coalition together. It reminds me of a Hollywood party years ago where a well known actor, seriously passed his prime, was set on gathering a group of guests to take to his home for purposes that were far from appealing. Each time he returned to the group with a new victim he found others had absented themselves in his absence. I stayed long enough to savour his increasing frustration which made for a better performance than any he had ever recorded on film.
Money flows of states through banks can be interfered with more easily However, to achieve results positive to US purposes would that not require them to be flows of petrodollars? If Russia may even now be able to sustain US sanction inhibited investment in its energy sector by trading ruble/yuan with China perhaps these others will find similar routes. http://thebricspost.com/ruble-yuan-to-pave-way-for-us-dollar-substitution/#.VBEAVVc33IW
It's scarcely even obliquely relevant but I am struck by a comment of Cassius Dio on G. Papirius Carbo, Governor of Bithnyia 69BC, who had accused his predecessor of corruption only to find himself similarly accused and convicted (by his own son no less) on his return to Rome.
Some persons, of course, can more easily censure others than admonish themselves, and when it comes to their own case commit very readily deeds for which they think their neighbours deserving of punishment. Hence they cannot, from the mere fact that they prosecute others, inspire confidence in their own detestation of the acts in question.
The international political and economic elites have long understoo what you write above and either play along with it or try to ignore it. What is changing is their electorate's eyes opening, particularly in Europe, remember the UK parliament vote against intervening in Syria. It's one thing for the US president to browbeat an ambassador or even a leader, but he can't browbeat an electorate. There is increasing support for right wing parties in Europe and while that is mainly fuelled by a host of socio economic factors it tends to be isolationist in terms of remote foreign affairs, particularly those that cost money and lives. Also, significant right wing leaders have shed their more racist origins, and can appear extremely commonsensical, certainy less hypocritical. 2http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/interview-with-french-front-national-leader-marine-le-pen-a-972925-2.html A wide range of recent events begin to suggest that US authority may be like the Emperor's wardrobe; Netanyahu's behaviour is probably the most strident but there are many others, nations like Bahrain, the DPRK, China, Russia, Venezuela, etc. who seem not to do what the US demands while receiving little more than mild diplomatic rebukes or sanctions which, as with Russia now, can be a double edged sword. Then there are those like the citizens of Noga in Okinawa http://rt.com/news/185868-japan-military-us-opposition/ who have no qualms about seriously discommoding important US strategic purposes. Some might also think the erstwhile unassailable petrodollar is not perhaps quite what was. Wherever all this is leading or whatever it means it does appear to be evolving and despite local authoritarian efforts may not be stoppable, I doubt it will lead to a better world but surely a different one.
Are not Iran and Syria also well poised to intervene against ISIL? The US DOS spokesperson, Marie Harf, on Friday said *: Well, we’re not going to coordinate military action or share intelligence with Iran. We have no plans to do so. In the same briefing she also said: We don’t work with the Assad regime. These were offered in response to questioners who clearly thought it would be sensible to do so. It seems to me the seriousness of this situation demands putting these holier-than-thou attitudes aside, even if only for the duration. Persisting in refusing to do so suggests either the US has its own priorities which transcend the urgency or it just doesn't think the IS as threatening to global security as Obama insists it is. This is essentially still a ME issue and the response should surely be led by a ME consortium calling on US, NATO or other support and aid as they may need it. Heavens above, they are all but drowning in weapons way beyond anything the IS can even dream of.
Not much enthusiasm is of course a euphemistic way of saying none at all, and I would imagine a fair amount of opposition. There is only so much leaders, even those with the monarchical authority of the British PM, can do in direct defiance of their electorates. This doesn't mean that anyone favours the IS and its brutal conquests, but that the US way of dealing with such problems seems only to make them worse. There was a dictator in Iraq who was overthrown because he was supposed to have WMDs but didn't, and now there is chaos and insecurity from Libya to Pakistan. If a company had a CEO whose policies provided parallel results he would lose support and be dumped by the shareholders.
On the other hand Russia and China may not trust the US to limit itself to so narrow a UNSC authorization. Putin could broker a deal with Assad as he did over the chemical weapons; I would be surprised if he's not already lining up another such Syrian finesse.
There is a danger in promoting a perspective that is simply not available to the majority. Societies of whatever size, from family to nation, are inevitably divided between 'leaders' and those led, whatever the definitions, from warrior to wealth. What creates stability in society is a stable and influential middle class. For the last 50 years or so the Western middle classes have been squeezed, a few have scrambled up into wealth but the majority have slipped down into debt. Debt is slavery. Slaves have no rights and little control of their lives beyond choosing who they mate. All that is available when circumstances become too extreme is revolution. It is against the prospect of that tidal wave that Western freedoms are being eroded and police forces are armed with sophisticated anti-personnel weapons, and imbued with confrontational attitudes to the public it was once their career choice to serve. Russia, China, Iran and so on are really irrelevant to this, except in providing a constant distraction from what is actually going on. Snowden's revelations provided a glimpse but the real issue is less what NSA and others are doing but why they are doing it. I doubt there is a practical solution since the descent of the middle classes into debt/slavery and political impotence looks irreversible. In 1973 the polymath Jacob Bronowski wrote a book and TV series titled The Ascent of Man. I remember the concept gave me pause at the time. Perhaps climate change will cleanse the stables. “…a dance party on the deck of the Titanic”. Why not? At least there is some dignity to it.
For a while it suited the IS and Assad to give each other a bit of guarded leeway since the one was able to pursue its ideological goals by cleaning the other's stables. But that time is now passed, a new round has begun, and it better suits Assad to align with the IS opposition since, although sharing the same enemy doesn't make you allies, it does introduce possibilities not present in stalemate.
DOS Press briefing, Monday: Jen Psaki answers a question on Russian plans to send a second aid convoy to Ukraine
...So you can’t say one thing and do another and expect the international community to believe that there is legitimate or credible intention behind your words..
It's a sound position but the danger is such a UN force would morph into security guards protecting Israel's loot. The single-minded deviousness of Israeli purposes is unbounded and can only be countered by an equally single-minded campaign to get them all back behind their 1947 borders. The route to that is public pressure brought to bear on European governments via parliamentarians seeking re-election. Once Israelis are back behind their own borders, and the inhabitants of Tel Aviv are obliged to rub shoulders with the settlers, internal political conflict should keep them diverted from territorial adventure. And then the UN can be called upon to ensure their security. As for potential post Assad Palestinian leaders, many have been removed from the board by being incarcerated in Israeli goals, including of course Marwan Barghouti, and there are others in exile. Vacuums fill and a leader will arise.
The more successful the IS is the more likely to fragment into internecine conflict. It ought to be possible to encourage such an outcome by selective elimination of some of its leaders thereby encouraging the ambition of others. As for Assad, the US should talk to him. It is not unlikely that once stability is in sight he would agree to hold free elections since the antecedent, largely historical situation has morphed beyond recall, and it ought to be possible to encourage that with a tacit agreement to close the book on the past once such elections are held. The CIA are the obvious people to undertake the eliminations while Iran could bridge the gap with Assad who cannot possibly be enjoying the horrors of the present mess. It's all very well blaming him for creating ISIL but, if true, it was surely a tactical response to a situation not entirely of his own making.
The IS appears to have clear objectives and has made no secret of them. It has also clearly annunciated the extent and reasons for its opposition to US foreign policy, and was quite clear about why they would and did execute Mr Foley, by a method which, albeit with greater panache, is fundamental to the judicial system of the US Saudi ally. Whether one likes it or not, it would appear US foreign policy lies behind the eruption of this group as it did its precursor al Qa’ida. There is an ever clearer division in our world between those variously committed to US foreign policy and those opposed to it, of which the IS is at one extreme end and the US military complex at the other, with increasingly populated middle ground between them.
Because the US insists that it is right and everyone else is wrong most of our world faces escalating bloodshed, debilitating levels of insecurity and numbing daily scenes of death and destruction, while the serious issues facing the world are delegated to interminable debate.
Any mechanism to deal with this needs to be above the divisions and have the authority to put the interests of all mankind first. Such a mechanism exists in the UN but is ineffective due to the veto power exercised by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, a power designed for a quite different age and now arguably the greatest impediment to any solution to the innumerable divisions that plague us. At the DOS Daily Press Briefing on August 19, the spokesperson, replying to a question whether there were any circumstance in which the U.S. would not veto a resolution calling for Israel to be investigated for war crimes, replied that she could not envision a scenario in which the US would not veto such a resolution.* There I think we have it in a nutshell. The late and somewhat lamented Muammar Gaddafi often expressed the view that the UN needs reformation, and if that could be accomplished we might all sleep more quietly.
Unless getting the Israelis back behind definitive borders is the primary specific objective of global BDS it is likely to falter. Such a purpose would unite BDS supporters in a single unequivocal purpose and it would be clear when it had been achieved. No negotiation would be necessary beyond setting a reasonable time schedule. The borders should, of course, be those set in 1947. The official Palestinian BDS movement states its objectives thus:
Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall;
Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.s
The second and third objectives should not be allowed to obscure the first. An article in Mondoweiss mentions the story reported here as maybe giving the Israelis a 'wakeup call', an attitude that implies a line of adjustment, but that in itself is unnecessary, it should not concern BDS whether the Israelis are asleep or awake, only that they be pressured until they vacate all occupied land.
What a sad story, disillusion is one of the toughest emotions to bear. Observing the sheer viciousness of Israelis, and their Orwellian disregard for truth, I find it hard to imagine either an harmonious two state future or a workable Israel with equal rights for everyone. Israelis simply would neither respect the first nor tolerate the second. Maybe a bit of both might work, one state of Palestine with an autonomous region for those diehard Jews who simply cannot live with others, a bit like the Vatican or Monte Carlo. I don't see a racist Jewish region as the worst of all possible solutions so long as it is not on occupied land but confined within internationally recognised borders. The Zionist dream itself would better have remained a 'dream of the night'. Remember Lawrence:
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”
Whatever the future, it must be properly planned in all detail, including such things as the right of return, and what is to happen to the Jewish squatters. Also, I don't think going to the ICC will solve anything. The notion may be better left as a threat. What is really needed is a fresh start.
The US particularly but other countries as well are adept at being partners with each other on some matters while in serious opposition on others. It's a characteristic of human nature to entertain views whose mutual exclusivity in one set of circumstances gives way at another, like rival counsel sparring in Court in the morning lunching amicably later.
I think Obama has been aware for some time that if anything is going to confront Israel it will draw its impetus first from the European public. A year or so ago, while continuing to support Israel publicly, one might even say flamboyantly, he nevertheless ceased demanding Europeans do quite the same. I remember thinking that the significance was, perhaps, less in of what he did than what he had ceased doing. Meanwhile I understand that Abbas is waiting for Hamas to sign his document for war crimes charges against Israel* and I would wager Obama is fully on board on that. Abbas must get Hamas signature, there will be powerful opposition and he needs a completely united front to have a chance against it. It's his ace of trumps and he can only play it once.
Egypt was an ancient and stable polytheist society ruled by powerful priesthoods under an incarnate deity, a system to which the inflexible monotheism of the Hebrews was an obvious threat. It is more likely they became scapegoats during a rare period of drought and, far from escaping, were driven out.
Whatever it's called, it is totally unacceptable. While Israel is indeed the perpetrator, it is arguable that the US also bears culpable responsibility. Not only has the US consistently emasculated the UN whenever it has sought to rein in these purposes, but even now, as the world stands aghast, it feeds the flames with additional funds and weaponry for Israel. In a court the US could well be enjoined in accusations of genocide for funding Israel to murder Palestinians since it provides not only the cash but many of the actual weapons, and the fact that Israel is happy to do it would not likely be accepted in mitigation. Laws that cannot be enforced are nonetheless custodians of international moral norms, norms which the US and Israel are holding in flagrant defiance. Unrighteousness breeds unrighteousness, and the dark tide of antisemitism can already be seen leaking back onto the streets and squares of Europe where it should be born in mind that few hold a positive view of Jews collectively.
I have long felt that the past illuminates the future much less than the present illuminates the past, and in the scenes emerging from Gaza I see vivid reflections of the distorted body parts, agonised faces, despair, and ruthless destruction levied on the inhabitants of Jericho three and a half millennia past.
This particular 'threat to US security' is also a symptom of the broader changing attitude the world has to the US and its role as arbiter of global affairs. By extension it is also a 'threat' is to the Western world, to its less fundamental moral concepts, assumptions, standards of living and expectations. Similar symptoms heralded the disintegration of Rome; ruthless social division, financial constraint, endemic corruption, powerful enemies encroaching on overstretched borders, and the melting away of moral authority until, like a cloud illusion, Rome just wasn't there any more; it remained an echo, a variously regretted memory, for a generation or so and then a subject for historical dialectic.
The stand-off between the US and Russia seems to me more immediately significant than the horrors perpetrated by Israel in Palestine because if the US pushes the people of Europe too far towards another goddam war they could detach from it like a vast ice-flow in a warming sea. That would shake the kaleidoscope and, should it happen, Israel would be doomed, without a supporter left on earth, and the peoples of our world could find themselves sufficiently united to view the present as one helluva near miss and, contemplating how close we were to disaster look to establishing the more federal global structure I suspect younger generations dream of already. It seems to me doubtful Russia, China, India, or any group of nations would be seek take up the moth eaten mantle of US imperial ambition. Maybe it is Israel's destiny to bring us to the brink so we turn towards a new horizon where our exponential scientific abilities are applied to our common humanity and the care of our fragile environment rather than the mindless and soulless destruction of both.
It's perhaps not so much that they don't know what they are doing, rather that they lack perspective so they are dealing largely with symptoms, rarely with causes. It is a confrontational, one might say medieval, attitude of mind where one side wins and the other side loses. Most senior members of the administration studied law, and US law, as opposed to the Napoleonic variety, is quintessentially confrontational, almost gladiatorial. The idea that the function of courts is painstakingly to investigate circumstances in pursuit of truth is alien, which is why many Americans get so hot under the collar about investigations like that in Italy relating Amanda Knox. Considering these 'leaders' were probably pretty good at their law studies, it is hardly surprising they carry that approach into their later lives. Those with classical or philosophical backgrounds acquire more perspective, and that colours their view of events and their response to them but they are rarely attracted to political life and not much welcomed when they are.
What is necessary is a sensible proposal and time-scale for Israel to get out of the occupied areas. That would be something to 'negotiate' about. Talk of 'peace' is diversionary. Yes, there is an humanitarian crisis is Gaza but it is not war, it is the illegal armed oppression of indigenous people and their comparatively puny but courageous response. The recent campaign has nothing to do with rockets or the deaths of those young Israelis, it is a familiar periodic Israeli undertaking and one might just as well talk of peace between foxes and huntsmen. Inhuman behaviour provoked the response that set a pendulum swinging. If Israel wants to avoid its Versailles then it needs to come up with a coherent proposal for evacuating the occupied territories in good order. Else the conflict will not end, the Palestinians will be supported by ever increasing numbers of vocal allies, and Israel's future will be more like the Etruscan disappearance from Northern Italy than the rise of the Third Reich.
The legal route really worries them and quite rightly. Inherent in it is the fact that much international law is embedded in EU and other nation's laws. Here is an interesting summary I came across the other day. Specifically paragraph 9 and on.
Yes, I believe Herzl made such a suggestion but I have never had the patience to pursue a confirming source. The point is, however, that some solution needs to be formulated to encompass the increasingly likely success of global efforts to turn back the Israeli tide. BDS demands retreat to pre-1967 borders and although future generations of Jews may well be content to live in harmony with Arabs, that certainly doesn't apply to most settlers today. I suspect that although many of them voice disgustingly anti-Arab sentiments, they are really seed fallen on stony ground and might well be inspired to pack up and go to another 'promised land'. The US could, after all, divert much of its billions to their new world. Jewish spin is pretty potent stuff and they might well be persuaded that the deity that gave them Canaan in their tribal past is now giving them this new chunk of land for their technological future, the site perhaps for the third temple. While expending energy on the predicament of the persecuted Palestinians, would it not be helpful to propose an accessible exit door for the hundreds of thousands of Jews who will otherwise be placed in a similarly hopeless situation where resisting to the death or Masada like self destruction are their only ways out. Comparisons are often made with the BDS movement against South African apartheid but the big difference is that the inhabitants of South Africa 'only' had to adjust their internal constitution whereas in Palestine waves of illegal immigrants have to depart which, even if they want to, they can scacely do without some alternative destination.
Aside from the unanswered question, what Israel sees as the future for the Palestinian people, there is the counterpart question, what is the future for the Jewish squatters. It is unrealistic to imagine them being treated as they treated those they displaced; driven away at gun point and herded into refugee camps. Nor is it really practical to see them all going back to where they came from, particularly as so many are now second and third generation incomers. So, what happens to them in a future where a Palestinian state is formed and dispersed Palestinians return to reclaim possession of their lands?
Zionism is not a simple In or Out ideology, it is a quintessentially Jewish thing, it craves a home for the Jewish people, and even the most liberal Jews see that as being in Palestine and Jerusalem. Diehard Zionists view possession of the whole area as a mythopoeic imperative while others look to some kind of Utopian cohabitation with the indigenous people. Neither is realistic. The Palestinian BDS movement which seems to be the main focus of opposition to Israel's behaviour offers no solution. I have posed the question several times to liberal Jews but they have either ignored the issue, or evaded it by pointing back to the notion of cohabitation.
As Juan's map vividly illustrates, the issue is primarily one of geography; there are too may Jews for that particular area. In earlier times such a problem would often be resolved by creating a colony for surplus population, and maybe that's a solution even at this late stage; somewhere on the planet land for the establishment of an Israeli colony to which settlers could be encouraged to migrate with whatever inducements were necessary. Maybe I am being fanciful but it is an issue that must be faced otherwise we will only witness another round of self inflicted human suffering.
© 2025 All Rights Reserved
Another point is that there are different kinds of 'negotiation'. When both parties seek a number of things they can be traded one for another, In this case Iran simply wants the sanctions lifted while the others want countless different things so the process is more like adding this and that until a set of scales tip. As for distrust, all you need do is look at the DOS Press Briefings http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/ for April 8/9 to see the obscurities of the US position outlined by the President himself in a NPR interview. The spokesperson claims he could have expressed himself more clearly while the Iranians might well take the view that inadvertently he expressed himself all too clearly.
The message I got from what Khamenei said was he was trying to calm everyone down by providing a sane perspective against a tidal wave of ill-informed pontification. The Iranians have made it quite clear their engagement in these negotiations is to have the sanctions lifted. To that end they are prepared to forgo for a while a lot of what they are quite entitled to which is less of a challenge than it might be since they are not interested in a nuclear weapon anyway. If the sanctions are not to be lifted or they are to be treated in an arrogant and undignified manner then not only will they not agree to all this intrusive activity but they might well leave the table early. The concessions that have been put into this framework are entirely for US benefit, the only thing that interests Iran is the lifting of sanctions – but they are realists and if necessary they will have to continue to live with those for anther moon or two. They will have done their best.
Jack, You touch the fundamental division in our human species; the conflict between the independent individual and the pull of the collective; look after yourself and your own or share broader mutual responsibilities. The former can leave many dependent on charity while the latter too easily morphs into totalitarianism, take your pick.
There is no particular virtue in consistent consistency. US presidents need to be consistent only to the notion of keeping the US on top of the pile which is what empires have ever done. This requires dominating all others and is accomplished by military means, bribery, threats or tenuous alliances; the combinations vary but the mix remains directed to that top dog objective. This is true for all national leaders except most have to operate in the shadow of one above or at their shoulder. Before he died, I met Ben Gurion and he talked of his admiration for de Gaulle because he had always put the French first. in aetate veritas. Anyone expecting altruism should glance at the northern members of the Euro-zone salivating over the misfortunes of Greece.
Federica Mogherini, the EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy, and Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif issued a joint statement in Switzerland 6 days ago, a statement approved by all parties to the negotiations, and that is the only valid summary of the current state of the negotiations regardless of what anyone else says. As for the sanctions, their effects on the Iranian population should be viewed in the context of the broader economic circumstances in the US, the EU and elsewhere rather than some Norman Rockwell fantasy of employment, prosperity, peace and integrity.
Spyguy, You may have seen this interview from RT a few days back.
http://rt.com/op-edge/243897-us-china-bank-infrastructure-economy/
Obama may be too late to save US authoritarianism from disintegrating further. European industrial, agricultural and commercial interests might have ridden along with all these sanctions if every one else was on board but they cannot sit on their backsides watching others pick all the fruit. Iranian and Russian sanctions are costing Europe far too much to be worth whatever benefit they are argued to provide. Once they go by the board, European leaders will feel increasingly pressured by their electorates to deal firmly with the threat posed by Israel in the ME, a threat that with its support from across the Atlantic has reduced much of the Arab world to anarchy and bloody terror with tentacles reaching deep into European society and eroding security and freedom in a manner scarcely reached at the height of WWII.
It's also possible the US will withdraw it's umbrella from those Middle Eastern nations it protects from normal social and political evolution. Israel would never have reached this point without that umbrella and the same might be said of the KSA and others in the area. Obama may understand this but he doesn't possess the freedom to override the vested opposition and make a substantive change just like that. The US president may be 'the most powerful ruler' but he is more constrained than the British prime minister and other leaders whose powers devolved from monarchy as opposed to rising from the people. Although it doesn't look like it at the moment, it is still possible for international consensus to rise to the occasion, the institutions exist and and firing them up would only require the US to take its finger off the veto button. That wouldn't solve the evolving problems overnight but it would likely head them in a more manageable direction.
It is not all that difficult to espouse contradictory, even mutually exclusive convictions; individuals, groups and nations do it all the time. What is difficult is to be consistent in defiance of the appeals of pragmatism and expediency, and the seductions of moral weakness.
After WWII the whole world was in shock but out of it rose a hope for the future of the human race which fed into the birth of Israel, founded with the most optimistic of expectations and from the most generous of motives. I was nine at the time and my fond companion was a furry hamster called the Empress. One day I found an abandoned nest of newborn mice. I gathered the little pink orphans and gave them to the Empress to nurture. I can still hear their screams as she devoured them and I get echoes of the same helpless horror from the fate Israel visits on Palestine and its people.
He may well wish to appear prepared 'sincerely' to try but isn't that what they've all been doing for years? He's a politician, if he tried such a thing unilaterally he'd likely be shot.
Changing the status quo requires a solution acceptable to Israel and the Palestinians. Israel accepts no responsibility for the havoc it has caused the Palestinians while even liberal Jews imagine some future where they will retain much of what they have usurped, and something they vaguely envisage as 'sharing' the land with its owners, hard-liners want more. The US does not want yet another Arab nation in the area, particularly one that has been submerged in US duplicity for 60 years. Meanwhile the BDS movement wants Israel back behind its 67 borders and full rights of return. I do not believe any politician on either side is capable of bridging the gaps. The way I see it a Netanyahu win would generate a lot of negative energy which could well accelerate European support for BDS principles. On the other hand an alternative result would likely lead to efforts to undo the damage done to the US relationship over Iran. Once Iran takes its proper place in local and international affairs the whole picture changes, and in a more extended, slower and more peaceful way it also changes with regard to Palestine and its people.
A Netanyahu win might be better for the Palestinians since it would likely give BDS renewed impetus, particularly in Europe. On the other hand the Livni Herzog double act seems likely to maintain the status quo under the US umbrella of blather, duplicity and delay. However, anything that takes pressure off the Iran impasse and allows Europe to reconnect with its trade and culture is to be welcomed. People forget that everything they are not allowed to do with us, we are not allowed to do with them. It takes, as they say, two to tango.
Sorry
علی حسینی خامنهای
They all look alike to me!
No one appears concerned for the impression all this is making on the rest of the world, particularly European allies who have had to overlook increasing examples of unrepentant human rights hypocrisy, unsustainable economic policies, blatant intrusive surveillance, unforgivable misuse of the UN veto to protect their lawless ally Israel, and a dangerous stand-off with Russia, which is both a blow to European economies and raises the spectre of serious war. The US is beginning to resemble the proverbial bull in the china shop and, quite frankly, Putin, Khomeini and Xi Jinping appear comparatively more stable with each passing day, and that's not because of any change in them.
The dissimilarity is that one side feels justified in taking an imperial view while the other regards that as impertinent interference. The negotiators are seeking to rise above these opposing positions to a level at which they may be reconciled.
It may be a fanciful thought but can the PA not sell these unsettled Israeli tax debts to some sympathetic consortium who can then claim payment in an appropriate court, the UK perhaps?
It must be well nigh impossible to sit in complete safety and work up the attitude necessary to slaughter defenseless human beings at a distance. Traditional war was quite different because both sides were vulnerable so it was more like a dangerous competitive game. The other day PressTV carried an account of post Operation Protective Edge Israeli soldiers needing psychiatric help. http://www.presstv.ir/Detail/2015/03/05/400335/Gaza-war-traumatizes-350-Israel-troops. An even darker side of all this is that if these warmongers can't find enough home grown killing fodder they will subcontract to commercial outfits and we will be awash with mercenaries whose continued existence is entirely dependent on wars. Europe was all but torn to shreds with them in the Middle Ages. The extra danger today, however, is that there are corporations, interest groups, even individuals, with the resources to hire them for their own purposes.
'Lying?' tut, tut, tut. It's called misremembering.
“Israel made every effort, every effort possible to avoid seeing innocent civilians getting caught up in the crossfire.” Says Mark Regev. That must have been difficult with the world's media broadcasting graphic sights and sounds of precisely that more or less round the clock.
You are, of course, absolutely right. However, if you wish to extend the perception it becomes a matter of how the vacuum occurred. Myself, I take refuge in the notion that cause and effect are simply the comforting way we account for the progression of cloud illusions through time.
Genghis Khan was doing this kind of thing on a much larger canvas nine hundred and some odd years ago but relatively few people heard of it at the time. Today, news of Daesh/ISIL massacres reaches the internet almost as soon as they happen. Whether these modern barbarians are Moslem or not is simply a question of what they are called or what they call themselves, any effort to be more precise on the issue is a matter of theological dialectic. How they came about is a subject for historians. It is fashionable today to devote often considerable care and effort picking a path back in time from now to some antecedent moment in order to turn it on its head and argue the reverse was how a current situation came into being, Things tend to have more discernible evolutionary patterns if we are not directly involved with them; once subjected to outside involvement, particularly our own, they become all but impenetrable as unraveling their motives increasingly requires us to examine ours as well.
Iran has immense mineral resources apart from oil, gas, coal and exportable power from nuclear facilities. It enjoys a level of self-sufficiency Israel can only dream of. Were sanctions to be lifted and Iran's potential as an importer and exporter to come fully on stream, Iran would swiftly become the dominant power in the area with enough allies, and defence and trade agreements to make it an enviably significant voice in world affairs. This Israel doesn't want and I see the nuclear weapon business as a cover for such concerns and an effort to ward off the fateful day, not unlike the the way they try to keep the unsustainable Palestinian issue on the boil (Netanyahu might lift the lid and peek into those kettles as I sense they are both all but dry). An agreement with Iran and the lifting of sanctions would indeed tend towards the destruction, not of Israel itself but of its Zionist and other ambitious dreams, particularly if accompanied by even a marginal reassessment of US policies in the ME. In that sense Netanyahu is quite right to see it as a threat although 'existential' is perhaps a shade extreme, but then the closer the day looms the more frantic he becomes. Obama shaking hands with Khamenei? What a political legacy! You can almost sympathise with the poor man.
Although we know what might be done to reduce this trend, it is abstract knowledge, to be practical the initiative would have to be global and authoritarian. It would also require complete rejection of many values and practices taken for granted in the Western world and those areas the West contaminates like mould in Stilton. Economy would need to replace consumption as an ideal. The concept of 'want' would have to melt back into one of 'need'. The means of exchange would have to become finite again; we went off the gold standard onto what has become a currency backed only by our survival, a currency we expend with the careless extravagance of a mindless gambler. We have eroded authority with liberalism and there no longer exists anything to effect such changes before they force themselves upon us with painful, savage necessity. If that sounds apocalyptic, it should. Nature will not harm us, we will have harmed Nature until she can no longer sustain us, and then there will be looting, theft and murder as the 99% revert to some kind of neolithic barbarism. Does anyone remember that 1973 film Soylent Green with Charlton Heston and Edward G Robinson? Prepare for something along those lines. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0070723/
For the US media to make an issue of this would distort the preferred image of the US. The simple truth is North Americans don't much care for Moslems and there is no automatic sense of outrage when things like this happen, outrage such as there would be were the victims from some more affectionately recognised subsection of US society able to provoke communal solidarity as it does in the Middle East. This sort of atrocity can even make people uncomfortable by forcing them to consider things about their society over which they have no direct control and would sooner not know about, things better left for officials to sweep under the carpet by putting on solemn faces, strongly condemning them, expressing sympathy to the families and promising investigation, etc. etc.
These talks are a waiting game and expressions such as Ayatollah Khamenei's latest are simply different ways of keeping the game alive. A satisfactory resolution will remain elusive while Israel continues to possess heaven knows how many of what Iran is not allowed even to think of having. Israel, as is so often the case, is a distorting lens preventing the issue from being rationally approached. Some years ago a Brookings Institute survey of public opinion in the ME showed overwhelming support for a ME entirely free of nuclear weapons. However, the majority of those questioned also felt that while Israel possesses such weapons it's probably better for Iran to have them as well. I don't recall the exact details but that was the gist of it and I doubt such findings would be substantially different today, particularly factoring in Israel's more recent bursts of irrational aggression, and ongoing disregard for international law and the niceties of timeless diplomatic custom. What I imagine the negotiating sessions are waiting on is either a change in US policy towards Israel, or some rebalancing of global authority towards a more poly-central system with a larger role for international norms. I can't see much immediate prospect for either, so expect the sparring to continue in an ever more formalized manner.
If the argument is that forewarning mitigates the brutality then Daesh have certainly announced in advance what would happen to their US and other victims were they not ransomed. We don't know the details that passed between them and the Jordanians but it is not inconceivable that the US put pressure on Jordan to refuse a deal; an awful lot of money suddenly appears to be set to flow into the king's military coffers.
While perfectly possible to employ instant history and connect this immolation to drone or other Western activities, it doesn't explain how similar barbaric behaviour is as old as life and thriving on every continent. What is different today is the sophistication of the media in feeding graphic, carefully presented examples of mankind's more extreme behaviour. With all the build up of a theatrical Chorus our emotional response is orchestrated to a pitch and held for a while until dissipated in analysis and comment. The sequence is classic, not unlike the Roman games and circuses where men and animals fought to their bloody deaths by the thousand to keep the populace quiescent. It works by first presenting the circumstances in all their brutality so as to arose a strong emotional response, and then objectivizing them to distance them from any suggestion of personal 'we' involvement. If you read comments in other less restrained places you will readily encounter retributive attitudes hardly distinguishable from these executioners.
Absent a global authority with the will and means to enforce our abstract moral beliefs and aspirations these contradictions will continue. I am not even sure there is much new about them except the manner in which they have become media currency, providing controlled opportunities to focus outrage and diffuse it in onanistic, largely harmless, vaguely comforting ways. Look at that piece about the Koch brothers, you would imagine Cenk Uygur and the other guy think the situation funny; arms waving, voices rising in faux incredulity. Or the self-righteous media protestations as 30 US suits (and others) rush headlong to congratulate Riyadh days after a viral snuff film showed an executioner taking three sword strokes to remove the head of a Burmese woman in a public square in Mecca.
In the 1930's the global population was around 2 billion today it's close to 7 billion. Dramatic changes in population in the past have tended to be both downwards and relatively local. Even so they had profound social, cultural and economic consequences. Whether we like it or not circumstances arising from this population phenomenon are beckoning us towards the need to become more cooperative as a species, and much of the underlying tension in the world today mirrors a struggle between that impulse and corresponding resistance from the more exploitive attitudes of the past. This is largely why people feel the need to move from one cultural environment to another in the first place. We might meliorate the effects of this struggle by re-empowering the UN but in the end it just has to work itself out.
The growth of European ultra right wing political parties is a phase and only incidentally, if at all, connected to Islamic extremism. Racism inevitably develops during periods of economic stress and it's focus is normally the nearest identifiable alien racial group. All over the world there has been outrage at this attack with rallies in many capitals which rather express a new international solidarity which certainly isn't anti-Islam. In fact, a couple of says ago there was an immense rally in Dresden against racism. http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/01/10/us-germany-islam-rally-idUSKBN0KJ0IN20150110 It's nice and tidy to link Jihadist extremism with quasi fascist European movements but in my view it's over simplistic, and even dangerous since it fosters the paranoia promoted by Netanyahu and other like-minded warmongers.
Most of the Western world is offended by perspectives contrary to its own and feels evangelically that all others should shuffle themselves into the Western line or be silenced, slaughtered and swept aside. There is no such thing as a paradisaical world for all mankind, and it is salutary to consider that approaching two and a half millennia ago Plato wrote The Republic precisely to demonstrate its impracticality. We are speeding whether we like it or not into a new post-Rational age, and it is time to for those still clinging to Reason to accept that it is simply a tool of thinking and no longer a religion. Look around, deny it if you can.
Charlie Hebdo once ran a cartoon caricature of a naked Mohammed, with a star on his backside the words 'a star is born', and that is only one of the more notorious examples. Just consider a journal ridiculing Jews, gays, whatever, in the US where jobs and practically heads can be lost for a private unconsidered remark.
Nothing is ever quite that simple. You can plot a route from B to A but you cannot extrapolate that there is no other way to get from A to B.
bin Laden claimed responsibility more than once for 9/11 and explained precisely that the US presence in his native Saudi Arabia was the motive. Whether any other group had foreknowledge and looked the other way is quite another matter.
Not all consequences are so precisely intended. It could also have been a brutal extremist response to content considered offensive.
I am not over familiar with these things but the tax revenue is presumably a debt from Israel to the PA in which case could the PA not sell the debt and the purchaser call it in?
Each step the PA has made has created potential for a consecutive move, and at each point there has been an opportunity for Israel to buckle down and start to accommodate the PA, UN and increasing others. Presenting the UN draft was proceeded by such period with Abbas' assurance that if it failed he would join the ICC. The ICC signing opens another such opportunity before specific application is put before the court. The difference now is the threats are getting closer to key decision making individuals. Meanwhile BDS advances like dawn and Israel's behaviour calls to mind Shakespeare’s Richard II: Now mark me how I will undo myself. IV (i)
One can go round in circles with this sort of thing. Although the US is weakened by its absurd politics, moral corruption and endless wars, it is still top of the pile. As such it is above the law in the sense that there is no one to enforce it on them. Such situations are not unfamiliar and cultivate attitudes and behaviour in line with those of the most notorious, Off with their heads, rulers of the past. Sooner or later their rule comes to an end, usually because they run out of money.
As for Cuba, Obama said that sanctions haven't worked, by which presumably he means they didn't achieve their purpose of regime change. Being practical he therefore now lifts them and will shortly start to foster the sort of political opposition which seems to be working in Ukraine. Who knows, it may not even cost 5 billion.
Human Rights is an abstract, aspirational concept, a subdivision of the concept of 'Good'. Abstract aspirational concepts are important, they are like one side of a coin, without them there couldn't be a coin, but they can't exist on their own.
The US is happy with any political system that supports its hegemonic aspirations and it's moot whether it utters more blind hypocrisy about 'human rights' or 'democracy'.
Mortals should not seek too high perfection... if more good than evil is within thee who are but human then you shall do full well. Euripides Hippolytus
I don't see what it has to do with France or the UK or anyone else for that matter. The ICC exists and the Palestinians can apply to join, that's what it's there for. So if they want to join, that's what they should do. Most of the world will be behind them anyway. The peace process is a cloud illusion. What is necessary is for Israel to get the hell out of all occupied Palestine.
I wouldn't read too much into it, protecting your property is as old as time and for China, whose investments are state directed, commercial interests are just that. At the same time, few nations are happy with the hack handed way the US is trying to lead against ISIL, or the ambiguities of many US partners. One would like to think the US knows what it's doing but increasingly it looks like patients have taken over a psychiatric ward.
The full UN General Assembly meeting is here.
http://www.un.org/press/en/2014/ga11593.doc.htm
I just spent a while doing a 'find' on 'Israel' to see exactly how and with which others it voted one each of the many issues debated and found it cumulatively highly illuminating, well worth the few minutes it takes.
There has to be cooperation. The US just doesn't want to admit it. The result is Matt Lee and others circle round the DOS spokespersons firing the same questions posed in slightly different ways until the truth becomes apparent not in the answers the get but the ones they don't get. It's often a question of semantics. The US insists that we’re not coordinating any military activity with Iran, but then is being informed of some Iranian purpose, commenting on it favourably, or perhaps even suggesting modifications, and passing the details to your own folk really coordinating military activity with Iran? Is a casual bit of fellatio the same as having sex?
The Ukraine crisis was in some ways provoked by aggressive expansionism by the EU and NATO into former Russian spheres of influence.
Do you think there would be a crisis had the West not provoked it? There was no other reason why Ukraine should not have enjoyed fruitful relationships East and West; like a child spending equal time with separated parents. Is that not closer to what Putin looked to and probably would be happy with today?
This is an ancient ploy, the temptation is all but irresistible when the source of funds is not the paymaster. You have soldiers coming and going, no one ever counts them, and their names are incomprehensibly similar. Thomas Holloway, a self made millionaire from the manufacture and sale of pills for women, built Holloway College for women in the 19th century as a philanthropic gesture of restitution. It is said that he arrived on site daily with a leather bag of coinage and paid each construction worker himself. A man well versed in the foibles of human nature.
It is probably a translation thing, 'You cannot make an equality' is scarcely even English. The phrase, whatever it was (aynı değildir?), very likely meant 'not the same'. And that surely has to be true or we wouldn't need separate words for 'man' and 'woman'.
Over recent weeks the suspicion these talks would fail has been hardening to near certainty; DOS spokespersons were becoming increasingly opaque and evasive about the deadline. So now we're off down this path instead of that, but the underlying reality remains the same since the issue was never really the nuclear program but the role an unbridled Iran would inevitably come to play in the region and that hasn't changed. Congresspersons may well glow with bum clenching delight at the prospect of further hardship for Iran, just as they do over Russia, but the fact is there is economic hardship almost everywhere including the US' own backyard. The capitals of Europe are regularly filled with demonstrators facing riot police, unemployment is dangerously high, poverty and homelessness abound, and the hardship induced by sanctions needs to be measured against those realities rather than some long faded 1950's dream. Furthermore, both Iran and Russia possess considerable assets, http://www.mining.com/iran-opens-new-gold-processing-plant-to-counter-sanctions-63090/ They may not be able to trade them freely but that doesn't mean they go away or that their capital value diminishes. There may be fewer consumer choices in their shops but that's not the end of the world.
Iranians are not fools. They must have realised the fantasy nature of these negotiations but have gone along with them because they push the prospect of military intervention further towards the edge of the table.
Most importantly these next months of extended negotiation will see further development of the BRICS bank alternative to petrodollar dominance of the global economy http://rt.com/business/208367-brics-new-monetary-system/ and http://ftmdaily.com/preparing-for-the-collapse-of-the-petrodollar-system/
Iran will probably, for its own reasons, continue to contribute off stage in efforts to curtail Daesh/ISIL but the concerted global effort the situation demands will remain elusive.
Israel's unpopularity will inevitably continue to rise, while the US may well find Europe slipping out the back door as sanctions on Russia and Iran hurt there more than across the water.
Also expect further stress between the oligarchical US legislature and a Presidency drifting towards the monarchical.
These essentially internecine Jewish conflicts are contaminating the big wide world where they attract passionate debate. It is not possible to make all states conform to the same abstract, Western, democratic, humanitarian ideal, the less so when you consider that it doesn't actually exist anywhere in the real world and never has, thus any debate about how far any group is planning to stray from it is like the Walrus's discussion:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings.
It diverts attention from what is actually happening which is that these people are doing unpalatable things in land that is not theirs. They should first be invited > urged > threatened > forced back behind the boundaries awarded them in 1947. Once there the problem becomes local, and as far as much of the world is concerned they can behave as they choose, but not in someone else’s territory or we'll find they've swallowed it all.
"O Oysters," said the Carpenter,
"You've had a pleasant run!
Shall we be trotting home again?”
But answer came there none--
And this was scarcely odd, because
They'd eaten every one.
Another possibility is that under increasing BDS type ostracisation the fragile Israeli society might fragment and tear itself apart in bloody internecine dissensions. This has occurred periodically since biblical times and, according to Josephus, largely contributed to the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. The necessary basic divisions are present, always have been, and it could prove the tidiest solution for the rest of the world since it would lead towards an entirely internal resolution requiring no initial input from AIPAC, the US or any one else.
Considering these beheadings teleologicaly, it appears possible the ISIL objective is to provoke the US etc. into a boots on the ground invasion. The West is in economic meltdown, the populations are dead against more wars, elected leaders are far from popular. A spanner of Damocles suspended over the works?
La nature est très méchant, quand on l'attaque elle se défend.
One may also hope that Bennett’s honesty will help Western governments to recognize the urgent necessity to save the two-state solution...
I doubt Western governments will pay much attention to Bennett. His security argument is simply a specious justification for clinging on to what Israel has stolen and doesn't want to give back. Governments are only guided by considerations of international law and the UN Charter when it suits them, rarely if ever as a controlling principle. It is the people, particularly Europeans acting on their elected representatives, who will determine the way this all works out. Israel might have maintained an active central role in forging the future of the area but they have frittered that away and their role is likely to become increasingly passive, in much the way white South Africans lost the initiative down there.
It's not that simple. You cannot play poker if you are not able to keep your cards to your chest. I said it elsewhere ...: Democracy is not the best political system for conducting remote foreign policy. I hold no light for Vladimir but his task is enviably easy compared to Obama's.
Situations change, Obama's earlier intentions about no boots on the ground have clearly slipped from the eye. He tried to hold them back by asking others to deploy their boots instead but his appeal was received with less than generous enthusiasm, and few local troops, most of whom are economic refugees and only enlisted for the pay, have the qualities necessary for any meaningful stand up to the torrent of messianic ISIL, preferring rather to flee, discarding their military accoutrements as the go. You cannot turn an ordinary civilian into a killing machine by giving him a uniform and a shiny new weapon. It doesn't work like that, there needs an ideology, some irrational belief structure like Zionism, to make that happen. Furthermore, efforts to encourage religious leaders to preach how ISIL behavior is not Islamic are counterproductive because, whatever the US may wish to believe, Islam in its purest sense is a peaceable faith which such messages only confirm. So, since he's determined, Heaven knows why, to challenge ISIL to the death Obama needs must put his own boots where no one else is particularly inclined to tread. It will all end in tears, my mother used to say when I became obstreperous or over excited. And she was invariably right.
Obama may also be concerned about the absence of broad international enthusiasm for the US lead in this fraught and complicated issue. Not because of sympathy for ISIL but because few are sure precisely what US intentions are, and even doubt the US is all that sure either. The US reputation for omniscient moral authority looks increasingly like the emperor's wardrobe, and while there is not much can be done about that Obama can at least try to avoid standing entirely alone when the cry is taken up.
Shiite and Sunni find themselves sharing a boat in a storm.
A bit of hysteria keeps democracy at bay.
If you rely on others it's important that not only your objectives but your priorities coincide. Were I Obama I would forget about Turkey, make nice with Assad, get his help to push back the IS then throw him under a bus and make nice with Erdogan again. Running empires is not a job for moralists.
'absorb' perhaps rather than 'sustain'.
It's an interesting moment. I think you are right and the Administration will veto it but only because it's hands are tied. So long as the US veto stands alone, it will be seen an offer of self sacrifice on the pyre of Zionist aspirations. The gamble, and I would say it's a good one, is that the the US will sustain the damage but Netanyahu won't.
The DOS press briefing on October 1 revealed a uniquely tough position on the latest Jerusalem settlement announcements;
Matt Lee: ... but I wanted to know if you got answers to some questions that have been raised over the past couple days about Israeli activity or plans in East Jerusalem, also on the Palestinian draft resolution that’s been floating around at the – in New York today.
MS. PSAKI: Mm-hmm. We are deeply concerned by reports that the Israeli Government has moved forward the planning process in the sensitive area of Givat Hamatos in East Jerusalem. This step is contrary to Israel’s stated goal of negotiating a permanent status agreement with the Palestinians, and it would send a very troubling message if they proceed with tenders or construction. This development will only draw condemnation from the international community, distance Israel from even its closest allies; poison the atmosphere not only with the Palestinians, but also with the very Arab governments with which Prime Minister Netanyahu said he wanted to build relations; and call into question Israel’s ultimate commitment to a peaceful negotiated settlement with the Palestinians.
and then later in the same briefing:
QUESTION: But based on your – this is contrary to Israel’s stated goal, you’re condemning it, you say it poisons the atmosphere and calls into question their commitment, what’s the consequence of that? Is there one? Is there any?
MS. PSAKI: Look, I think, Matt, that it’s not just the United States, it’s the international community who will respond strongly to this kind of continued activity.
I may be reading too much into it but that seems to suggest the US may be ready to let the International community pick up the baton, which could imply that the Administration is not going to interfere with Abbas' next steps. Spine?
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2014/10/232414.htm
What should we do? Nothing. Let it work itself out. Try to repair our own societies so they appear like a beacon.
Exactly the same process is under-way in the UK, 3 billion savings on Social Security payments for the most vulnerable and a bombing spree in Iraq. Cumulatively these actions further weaken confidence in the political system and any residual respect for it. This, of course, increases manifestations in the streets and a corresponding rise in brutal police action to quell them.
Meanwhile the State Department just held a lavish feast to honour the Hindu president of India in the middle of a nine day Hindu fasting period, an extravagant culinary gesture justified, according to the spokesperson, for its 'symbolic' significance. Has she ever uttered a truer word!
Those who have a passion for domination regard everything else as nothing in comparison with obtaining what they desire: they often give up their dearest friends and closest kin in exchange for their bitterest foes. Cassius Dio. (AD 155–235) plus ça change...
The more the West intervenes in Syria, the more the regime can depict itself as innocent victim of foreign plots.
Ah, a glimmer of truth at last. Assad was never before atrocious in a random manner. It was his political opponents who suffered his retribution, and even there he was a degree less dramatic than his father who was known to suspend them from lampposts in Damascus. The simplest solution was to take up something useful like dentistry, get on with your life and avoid political dissension; one cannot, after all, expect the fire brigade to respect the furnishings.
Population growth increases the urgency for land and resources, urbanisation distances mankind from any responsible relationship with the environment, and literacy raises aspirations from the practical to the abstract. Combined they make a toxic mix engendering eruptive change and potential chaos way beyond the Arab nations. We see increasing totalitarianism of one kind or another most everywhere, but its a tactical response, as is the call for regionalism, there is no strategy. The current world population of 7.2 billion is projected to increase by 1 billion over the next 12 years and reach 9.6 billion by 2050, according to a United Nations report*. Our long term fate is increasingly in the hands of Nature.
* http://www.un.org/apps/news/story.asp?NewsID=45165#.VB-OjVecwwg
The five preferences listed would apply to any area of the UK, the Scots, and to a lesser extent the Welsh, simply possess more readily identifiable characteristics for most non British observers. There are local anti-fracking movements wherever it is proposed, broad distrust of the whole process and outrage at the sacrifice of ancient parkland. Nor is the urge for more independence from central authority peculiar to the UK, there are formidable movements in Catalonia in Spain and the Vèneto region of Italy, and less formidable ones in almost all European regions. We've seen federalist aspirations in Eastern Ukraine and they exist as far afield as China. The five selected preferences are symptoms of the much broader desire for local control over innumerable things that affect local people including health, education, and a more equitable distribution of wealth. The UK coalition of the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats acts as it does only because it is in power, the Labour Party would be exactly the same. Cameron is not 'conservative',* he's just another tool of the 1%. Centralization has moved decision making too far from the people it directly affects and in the process rendered them increasingly powerless, the frustration born of that is what fuels the urge for regional autonomy. Aside from Scotland and Wales, the UK has eight regions, and London, and there are regionalist aspirations in all of them.
* The NHS is under enormous stress and in a state of economic chaos. I suggested to Cameron that it might help cut interminable waiting lists and reduce pressure on the system if bona fide medical expenses were tax deductible. He didn't like that, he said he believed medical treatment should be the same for everybody, a purely political response to avoid any possible suggestion that he might appear to be favoring higher tax payers in an election year.
Most rebellions are against rather than for something. A meaningful element in this whole business is simple anti-Americanism, and I think that is what motivates many ex patriot volunteers. No one trusts the US, not even it's closest allies. Its track record is appalling.
It's perfectly natural for neighbours to engage in competitive activities including armed ones. It was going on in Europe when I was a toddler, and still is although morphed into economic conflict. These conflicts are manifestations of the flux of ordinary social life and are better left to local resolution, your third paragraph confirms this. Much of the chaos in the ME is the direct result of US hegemonic aspirations, everybody knows that; leaders of the so called terrorists have frequently come out and said so quite openly, clearly and unequivocally. The IS announced exactly why it was going to execute the US and UK captives and what was required to abort the executions. Osama bin Laden frequently addressed similar messages to the US. The US pays no attention, it's as if those responsible cannot imagine anyone actually meaning what they say. The Australians decided, heaven knows why, to support the US against the IS and in direct consequence have just had to employ 800 police to arrest potential assassins planning to behead random Australians in Australia! http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/sep/18/terrorism-raids-police-arrests-raids-sydney-brisbane. Is it any wonder Kerry cannot readily put together his coalition and has to content himself with ever shifting circumlocutory evasions.
'Obama's Dangerously Vague New War' a German view
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/american-war-on-islamic-state-isis-is-risky-and-uncertain-a-991645.html#ref=nl-international
War is basically a game of deception without rules and, despite what he says publicly, I cannot believe Obama will eschew all liaison with Damascus over bombing raids on Syrian ISIL positions.
It's quite sad/funny watching Kerry buzzing about trying to get his coalition together. It reminds me of a Hollywood party years ago where a well known actor, seriously passed his prime, was set on gathering a group of guests to take to his home for purposes that were far from appealing. Each time he returned to the group with a new victim he found others had absented themselves in his absence. I stayed long enough to savour his increasing frustration which made for a better performance than any he had ever recorded on film.
The US doesn't do international law. Only the little nations do international law
Money flows of states through banks can be interfered with more easily However, to achieve results positive to US purposes would that not require them to be flows of petrodollars? If Russia may even now be able to sustain US sanction inhibited investment in its energy sector by trading ruble/yuan with China perhaps these others will find similar routes. http://thebricspost.com/ruble-yuan-to-pave-way-for-us-dollar-substitution/#.VBEAVVc33IW
It's scarcely even obliquely relevant but I am struck by a comment of Cassius Dio on G. Papirius Carbo, Governor of Bithnyia 69BC, who had accused his predecessor of corruption only to find himself similarly accused and convicted (by his own son no less) on his return to Rome.
Some persons, of course, can more easily censure others than admonish themselves, and when it comes to their own case commit very readily deeds for which they think their neighbours deserving of punishment. Hence they cannot, from the mere fact that they prosecute others, inspire confidence in their own detestation of the acts in question.
The link above should have been
http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/interview-with-french-front-national-leader-marine-le-pen-a-972925-2.html
The international political and economic elites have long understoo what you write above and either play along with it or try to ignore it. What is changing is their electorate's eyes opening, particularly in Europe, remember the UK parliament vote against intervening in Syria. It's one thing for the US president to browbeat an ambassador or even a leader, but he can't browbeat an electorate. There is increasing support for right wing parties in Europe and while that is mainly fuelled by a host of socio economic factors it tends to be isolationist in terms of remote foreign affairs, particularly those that cost money and lives. Also, significant right wing leaders have shed their more racist origins, and can appear extremely commonsensical, certainy less hypocritical. 2http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/interview-with-french-front-national-leader-marine-le-pen-a-972925-2.html A wide range of recent events begin to suggest that US authority may be like the Emperor's wardrobe; Netanyahu's behaviour is probably the most strident but there are many others, nations like Bahrain, the DPRK, China, Russia, Venezuela, etc. who seem not to do what the US demands while receiving little more than mild diplomatic rebukes or sanctions which, as with Russia now, can be a double edged sword. Then there are those like the citizens of Noga in Okinawa http://rt.com/news/185868-japan-military-us-opposition/ who have no qualms about seriously discommoding important US strategic purposes. Some might also think the erstwhile unassailable petrodollar is not perhaps quite what was. Wherever all this is leading or whatever it means it does appear to be evolving and despite local authoritarian efforts may not be stoppable, I doubt it will lead to a better world but surely a different one.
Are not Iran and Syria also well poised to intervene against ISIL? The US DOS spokesperson, Marie Harf, on Friday said *: Well, we’re not going to coordinate military action or share intelligence with Iran. We have no plans to do so. In the same briefing she also said: We don’t work with the Assad regime. These were offered in response to questioners who clearly thought it would be sensible to do so. It seems to me the seriousness of this situation demands putting these holier-than-thou attitudes aside, even if only for the duration. Persisting in refusing to do so suggests either the US has its own priorities which transcend the urgency or it just doesn't think the IS as threatening to global security as Obama insists it is. This is essentially still a ME issue and the response should surely be led by a ME consortium calling on US, NATO or other support and aid as they may need it. Heavens above, they are all but drowning in weapons way beyond anything the IS can even dream of.
* http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2014/09/231306.htm
Not much enthusiasm is of course a euphemistic way of saying none at all, and I would imagine a fair amount of opposition. There is only so much leaders, even those with the monarchical authority of the British PM, can do in direct defiance of their electorates. This doesn't mean that anyone favours the IS and its brutal conquests, but that the US way of dealing with such problems seems only to make them worse. There was a dictator in Iraq who was overthrown because he was supposed to have WMDs but didn't, and now there is chaos and insecurity from Libya to Pakistan. If a company had a CEO whose policies provided parallel results he would lose support and be dumped by the shareholders.
Watch this space.
On the other hand Russia and China may not trust the US to limit itself to so narrow a UNSC authorization. Putin could broker a deal with Assad as he did over the chemical weapons; I would be surprised if he's not already lining up another such Syrian finesse.
There is a danger in promoting a perspective that is simply not available to the majority. Societies of whatever size, from family to nation, are inevitably divided between 'leaders' and those led, whatever the definitions, from warrior to wealth. What creates stability in society is a stable and influential middle class. For the last 50 years or so the Western middle classes have been squeezed, a few have scrambled up into wealth but the majority have slipped down into debt. Debt is slavery. Slaves have no rights and little control of their lives beyond choosing who they mate. All that is available when circumstances become too extreme is revolution. It is against the prospect of that tidal wave that Western freedoms are being eroded and police forces are armed with sophisticated anti-personnel weapons, and imbued with confrontational attitudes to the public it was once their career choice to serve. Russia, China, Iran and so on are really irrelevant to this, except in providing a constant distraction from what is actually going on. Snowden's revelations provided a glimpse but the real issue is less what NSA and others are doing but why they are doing it. I doubt there is a practical solution since the descent of the middle classes into debt/slavery and political impotence looks irreversible. In 1973 the polymath Jacob Bronowski wrote a book and TV series titled The Ascent of Man. I remember the concept gave me pause at the time. Perhaps climate change will cleanse the stables. “…a dance party on the deck of the Titanic”. Why not? At least there is some dignity to it.
For a while it suited the IS and Assad to give each other a bit of guarded leeway since the one was able to pursue its ideological goals by cleaning the other's stables. But that time is now passed, a new round has begun, and it better suits Assad to align with the IS opposition since, although sharing the same enemy doesn't make you allies, it does introduce possibilities not present in stalemate.
DOS Press briefing, Monday: Jen Psaki answers a question on Russian plans to send a second aid convoy to Ukraine
...So you can’t say one thing and do another and expect the international community to believe that there is legitimate or credible intention behind your words..
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2014/08/230859.htm#UKRAINE
The US has fingers in more pies than it has fingers. These things are only irony to a rational mind; we are being drawn into a post-rational age.
It's a sound position but the danger is such a UN force would morph into security guards protecting Israel's loot. The single-minded deviousness of Israeli purposes is unbounded and can only be countered by an equally single-minded campaign to get them all back behind their 1947 borders. The route to that is public pressure brought to bear on European governments via parliamentarians seeking re-election. Once Israelis are back behind their own borders, and the inhabitants of Tel Aviv are obliged to rub shoulders with the settlers, internal political conflict should keep them diverted from territorial adventure. And then the UN can be called upon to ensure their security. As for potential post Assad Palestinian leaders, many have been removed from the board by being incarcerated in Israeli goals, including of course Marwan Barghouti, and there are others in exile. Vacuums fill and a leader will arise.
The more successful the IS is the more likely to fragment into internecine conflict. It ought to be possible to encourage such an outcome by selective elimination of some of its leaders thereby encouraging the ambition of others. As for Assad, the US should talk to him. It is not unlikely that once stability is in sight he would agree to hold free elections since the antecedent, largely historical situation has morphed beyond recall, and it ought to be possible to encourage that with a tacit agreement to close the book on the past once such elections are held. The CIA are the obvious people to undertake the eliminations while Iran could bridge the gap with Assad who cannot possibly be enjoying the horrors of the present mess. It's all very well blaming him for creating ISIL but, if true, it was surely a tactical response to a situation not entirely of his own making.
The IS appears to have clear objectives and has made no secret of them. It has also clearly annunciated the extent and reasons for its opposition to US foreign policy, and was quite clear about why they would and did execute Mr Foley, by a method which, albeit with greater panache, is fundamental to the judicial system of the US Saudi ally. Whether one likes it or not, it would appear US foreign policy lies behind the eruption of this group as it did its precursor al Qa’ida. There is an ever clearer division in our world between those variously committed to US foreign policy and those opposed to it, of which the IS is at one extreme end and the US military complex at the other, with increasingly populated middle ground between them.
Because the US insists that it is right and everyone else is wrong most of our world faces escalating bloodshed, debilitating levels of insecurity and numbing daily scenes of death and destruction, while the serious issues facing the world are delegated to interminable debate.
Any mechanism to deal with this needs to be above the divisions and have the authority to put the interests of all mankind first. Such a mechanism exists in the UN but is ineffective due to the veto power exercised by the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, a power designed for a quite different age and now arguably the greatest impediment to any solution to the innumerable divisions that plague us. At the DOS Daily Press Briefing on August 19, the spokesperson, replying to a question whether there were any circumstance in which the U.S. would not veto a resolution calling for Israel to be investigated for war crimes, replied that she could not envision a scenario in which the US would not veto such a resolution.* There I think we have it in a nutshell. The late and somewhat lamented Muammar Gaddafi often expressed the view that the UN needs reformation, and if that could be accomplished we might all sleep more quietly.
* http://www.state.gov/r/pa/prs/dpb/2014/08/230741.htm
Unless getting the Israelis back behind definitive borders is the primary specific objective of global BDS it is likely to falter. Such a purpose would unite BDS supporters in a single unequivocal purpose and it would be clear when it had been achieved. No negotiation would be necessary beyond setting a reasonable time schedule. The borders should, of course, be those set in 1947. The official Palestinian BDS movement states its objectives thus:
Ending its occupation and colonization of all Arab lands occupied in June 1967 and dismantling the Wall;
Recognizing the fundamental rights of the Arab-Palestinian citizens of Israel to full equality; and
Respecting, protecting and promoting the rights of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in UN Resolution 194.s
http://www.bdsmovement.net/bdsintro
The second and third objectives should not be allowed to obscure the first. An article in Mondoweiss mentions the story reported here as maybe giving the Israelis a 'wakeup call', an attitude that implies a line of adjustment, but that in itself is unnecessary, it should not concern BDS whether the Israelis are asleep or awake, only that they be pressured until they vacate all occupied land.
What a sad story, disillusion is one of the toughest emotions to bear. Observing the sheer viciousness of Israelis, and their Orwellian disregard for truth, I find it hard to imagine either an harmonious two state future or a workable Israel with equal rights for everyone. Israelis simply would neither respect the first nor tolerate the second. Maybe a bit of both might work, one state of Palestine with an autonomous region for those diehard Jews who simply cannot live with others, a bit like the Vatican or Monte Carlo. I don't see a racist Jewish region as the worst of all possible solutions so long as it is not on occupied land but confined within internationally recognised borders. The Zionist dream itself would better have remained a 'dream of the night'. Remember Lawrence:
“All men dream: but not equally. Those who dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake up in the day to find it was vanity, but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.”
Whatever the future, it must be properly planned in all detail, including such things as the right of return, and what is to happen to the Jewish squatters. Also, I don't think going to the ICC will solve anything. The notion may be better left as a threat. What is really needed is a fresh start.
The US particularly but other countries as well are adept at being partners with each other on some matters while in serious opposition on others. It's a characteristic of human nature to entertain views whose mutual exclusivity in one set of circumstances gives way at another, like rival counsel sparring in Court in the morning lunching amicably later.
I think Obama has been aware for some time that if anything is going to confront Israel it will draw its impetus first from the European public. A year or so ago, while continuing to support Israel publicly, one might even say flamboyantly, he nevertheless ceased demanding Europeans do quite the same. I remember thinking that the significance was, perhaps, less in of what he did than what he had ceased doing. Meanwhile I understand that Abbas is waiting for Hamas to sign his document for war crimes charges against Israel* and I would wager Obama is fully on board on that. Abbas must get Hamas signature, there will be powerful opposition and he needs a completely united front to have a chance against it. It's his ace of trumps and he can only play it once.
* http://www.dailynews.com/general-news/20140731/mahmoud-abbas-seeks-broad-support-for-war-crimes-charges-against-israel
Egypt was an ancient and stable polytheist society ruled by powerful priesthoods under an incarnate deity, a system to which the inflexible monotheism of the Hebrews was an obvious threat. It is more likely they became scapegoats during a rare period of drought and, far from escaping, were driven out.
Whatever it's called, it is totally unacceptable. While Israel is indeed the perpetrator, it is arguable that the US also bears culpable responsibility. Not only has the US consistently emasculated the UN whenever it has sought to rein in these purposes, but even now, as the world stands aghast, it feeds the flames with additional funds and weaponry for Israel. In a court the US could well be enjoined in accusations of genocide for funding Israel to murder Palestinians since it provides not only the cash but many of the actual weapons, and the fact that Israel is happy to do it would not likely be accepted in mitigation. Laws that cannot be enforced are nonetheless custodians of international moral norms, norms which the US and Israel are holding in flagrant defiance. Unrighteousness breeds unrighteousness, and the dark tide of antisemitism can already be seen leaking back onto the streets and squares of Europe where it should be born in mind that few hold a positive view of Jews collectively.
I have long felt that the past illuminates the future much less than the present illuminates the past, and in the scenes emerging from Gaza I see vivid reflections of the distorted body parts, agonised faces, despair, and ruthless destruction levied on the inhabitants of Jericho three and a half millennia past.
This particular 'threat to US security' is also a symptom of the broader changing attitude the world has to the US and its role as arbiter of global affairs. By extension it is also a 'threat' is to the Western world, to its less fundamental moral concepts, assumptions, standards of living and expectations. Similar symptoms heralded the disintegration of Rome; ruthless social division, financial constraint, endemic corruption, powerful enemies encroaching on overstretched borders, and the melting away of moral authority until, like a cloud illusion, Rome just wasn't there any more; it remained an echo, a variously regretted memory, for a generation or so and then a subject for historical dialectic.
The stand-off between the US and Russia seems to me more immediately significant than the horrors perpetrated by Israel in Palestine because if the US pushes the people of Europe too far towards another goddam war they could detach from it like a vast ice-flow in a warming sea. That would shake the kaleidoscope and, should it happen, Israel would be doomed, without a supporter left on earth, and the peoples of our world could find themselves sufficiently united to view the present as one helluva near miss and, contemplating how close we were to disaster look to establishing the more federal global structure I suspect younger generations dream of already. It seems to me doubtful Russia, China, India, or any group of nations would be seek take up the moth eaten mantle of US imperial ambition. Maybe it is Israel's destiny to bring us to the brink so we turn towards a new horizon where our exponential scientific abilities are applied to our common humanity and the care of our fragile environment rather than the mindless and soulless destruction of both.
It's perhaps not so much that they don't know what they are doing, rather that they lack perspective so they are dealing largely with symptoms, rarely with causes. It is a confrontational, one might say medieval, attitude of mind where one side wins and the other side loses. Most senior members of the administration studied law, and US law, as opposed to the Napoleonic variety, is quintessentially confrontational, almost gladiatorial. The idea that the function of courts is painstakingly to investigate circumstances in pursuit of truth is alien, which is why many Americans get so hot under the collar about investigations like that in Italy relating Amanda Knox. Considering these 'leaders' were probably pretty good at their law studies, it is hardly surprising they carry that approach into their later lives. Those with classical or philosophical backgrounds acquire more perspective, and that colours their view of events and their response to them but they are rarely attracted to political life and not much welcomed when they are.
What is necessary is a sensible proposal and time-scale for Israel to get out of the occupied areas. That would be something to 'negotiate' about. Talk of 'peace' is diversionary. Yes, there is an humanitarian crisis is Gaza but it is not war, it is the illegal armed oppression of indigenous people and their comparatively puny but courageous response. The recent campaign has nothing to do with rockets or the deaths of those young Israelis, it is a familiar periodic Israeli undertaking and one might just as well talk of peace between foxes and huntsmen. Inhuman behaviour provoked the response that set a pendulum swinging. If Israel wants to avoid its Versailles then it needs to come up with a coherent proposal for evacuating the occupied territories in good order. Else the conflict will not end, the Palestinians will be supported by ever increasing numbers of vocal allies, and Israel's future will be more like the Etruscan disappearance from Northern Italy than the rise of the Third Reich.
The legal route really worries them and quite rightly. Inherent in it is the fact that much international law is embedded in EU and other nation's laws. Here is an interesting summary I came across the other day. Specifically paragraph 9 and on.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/MID-01-080714.html
Yes, I believe Herzl made such a suggestion but I have never had the patience to pursue a confirming source. The point is, however, that some solution needs to be formulated to encompass the increasingly likely success of global efforts to turn back the Israeli tide. BDS demands retreat to pre-1967 borders and although future generations of Jews may well be content to live in harmony with Arabs, that certainly doesn't apply to most settlers today. I suspect that although many of them voice disgustingly anti-Arab sentiments, they are really seed fallen on stony ground and might well be inspired to pack up and go to another 'promised land'. The US could, after all, divert much of its billions to their new world. Jewish spin is pretty potent stuff and they might well be persuaded that the deity that gave them Canaan in their tribal past is now giving them this new chunk of land for their technological future, the site perhaps for the third temple. While expending energy on the predicament of the persecuted Palestinians, would it not be helpful to propose an accessible exit door for the hundreds of thousands of Jews who will otherwise be placed in a similarly hopeless situation where resisting to the death or Masada like self destruction are their only ways out. Comparisons are often made with the BDS movement against South African apartheid but the big difference is that the inhabitants of South Africa 'only' had to adjust their internal constitution whereas in Palestine waves of illegal immigrants have to depart which, even if they want to, they can scacely do without some alternative destination.
Aside from the unanswered question, what Israel sees as the future for the Palestinian people, there is the counterpart question, what is the future for the Jewish squatters. It is unrealistic to imagine them being treated as they treated those they displaced; driven away at gun point and herded into refugee camps. Nor is it really practical to see them all going back to where they came from, particularly as so many are now second and third generation incomers. So, what happens to them in a future where a Palestinian state is formed and dispersed Palestinians return to reclaim possession of their lands?
Zionism is not a simple In or Out ideology, it is a quintessentially Jewish thing, it craves a home for the Jewish people, and even the most liberal Jews see that as being in Palestine and Jerusalem. Diehard Zionists view possession of the whole area as a mythopoeic imperative while others look to some kind of Utopian cohabitation with the indigenous people. Neither is realistic. The Palestinian BDS movement which seems to be the main focus of opposition to Israel's behaviour offers no solution. I have posed the question several times to liberal Jews but they have either ignored the issue, or evaded it by pointing back to the notion of cohabitation.
As Juan's map vividly illustrates, the issue is primarily one of geography; there are too may Jews for that particular area. In earlier times such a problem would often be resolved by creating a colony for surplus population, and maybe that's a solution even at this late stage; somewhere on the planet land for the establishment of an Israeli colony to which settlers could be encouraged to migrate with whatever inducements were necessary. Maybe I am being fanciful but it is an issue that must be faced otherwise we will only witness another round of self inflicted human suffering.