CapitalistImperialistPig

Some, including some Palestinians, think that in light of Netanyahu's racist campaign, international pressure will force the Israelis to negotiate some rights for Palestinians. IF anyone doubted where Benjamin Netanyahu stood on the question of peace, the Israeli prime minister made himself clear just before Tuesday’s election, proclaiming that there would never be a Palestinian state on his watch. Then he decided to engage in a bit of fear-mongering against Palestinian citizens of Israel in hopes of driving his supporters to the polls. “The right-wing government is in danger,” Mr. Netanyahu announced on Election Day. “Arab voters are heading to the polling stations in droves.” But Mr. Netanyahu’s victory is actually the best plausible outcome for those seeking to end Israel’s occupation. Indeed, I, as a Palestinian, breathed a sigh of relief when it became clear that his Likud Party had won the largest number of seats in the Knesset. This might seem counterintuitive, but the p...

A half dozen of the most senior American national security officials were summoned to a hurriedly called late-night emergency meeting in the White House Situation Room. Nixon himself was not awakened for the meeting on the advice of Alexander Haig, who told Kissinger that the President was “too distraught” to join them. Some of the participants were surprised to find that the President was not there. The officials grimly reviewed the Brezhnev message. Direct Soviet military intervention could not be tolerated; it could upset the entire international order. Brezhnev could not be allowed to assume that the Soviet Union could take advantage of a Watergate -weakened Presidency. There was further reason for alarm. Over the previous few hours, United States intelligence had “lost” the Soviet air transport, which it had been tracking as the planes ferried arms to Egypt and Syria. No one knew where the planes now were. Could they be on their way back to Soviet bases to pick up the airborne tro...

Sadat's surprise attack had caught the Israelis by surprise, and they were reeling. The Prime Minister was bluntly warned that "The Third Temple was falling. Ammunition and other military supplies were desperately short. The Soviets had already begun a massive resupply effort to Syria and Egypt. Wary of offending the Arabs, Washington first hesitated, then rushed supplies into Israel in an effort that was intended to be secret, but thanks to wind and weather, wasn't. Simultaneously, the Arab Oil countries unilaterally raised the price of oil by 70% [to $5.11/barrel!]. The Arabs were deciding how to use the oil weapon. Meanwhile, back in Washington, the Saturday Night Massacre had occurred and Nixon became preoccupied with the ongoing Watergate induced collapse of his presidency. Kissinger was running US foreign policy. But resupply of Israel had succeeded, and then it became Egypt's Third Army that was on the brink of annihilation. Soviet leader Brezhnev blu...

On Yom Kippur, October 8, 1973, Anwar Sadat and Assad launched a surprise attack on Israel. The surprise was nearly complete, but it shouldn't have been. Israeli and American intelligence had had explicit warnings, but chose to disbelieve them. Months earlier, King Faisal of Saudi Arabia had warned that trouble was brewing if the US continued its lockstep support of Israel. On a visit to President Nixon at his home in San Clemente, an agitated Leonid Brezhnev had had Nixon awakened in the middle of the night to give him a similar warning. Oil executives at ARAMCO had been warned by the Saudis in similar fashion and had passed this information on to the the press and the government. The Arabs had made two previous attempts to wield the oil weapon, in the 1956 Suez crisis and the 1967 Israeli war, but had failed both times, due to excess capacity in the US and their own disunity. But by 1973, all that had changed. Oil capacity was tight and US production was falling. This t...

Someone, probably Israel, aided by Iranian anti-government militants, has been blowing up Iranian nuclear scientists. Iran seems to have taken offence, and has apparently launched a series of attacks against Israelis abroad. So far, they have fallen far short of the Israeli efficiency and professionalism, but I doubt that we can count on that over the long run. It seems that the American government has distanced itself from the assassinations , which was probably a really good idea, since if Iran starts attacking inside the US, we will have little alternative but to smash them. The Israelis face the fundamental question of "Now what?" It's not beyond credibility that Israeli hardliners pushed the assassination program in order to force Iran to respond and provide a casus belli .

Arun reports : Haaretz NEW YORK - The owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, has suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu consider ordering a Mossad hit team to assassinate U.S. President Barack Obama so that his successor will defend Israel against Iran. What an asshole. This nutcase, Andrew Adler, owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, has probably done more damage to Jews in America than anybody since the Rosenbergs. Of course his despicable nonsense is a first cousin to and natural outgrowth of the lies and slanders spewed by the right wing noise machine. It's hard to see an upside for anybody in this. Chemi Shalev examines the entrails .

Andrew Sullivan looks at what he call's Netanyahu's "War on Christmas." The latest craziness from Jerusalem is an ad campaign directed at Israeli ex-pats not to marry American Jews. They might even find their children celebrating Christmas! Video, in Hebrew (mostly). Israel's neighbors are taking stumbling steps toward modernity.  Israel seems headed the other way.

When I first heard of the Iranian plot to kill the Saudi ambassador , my first thought was - hmmm, could this be an Israeli false flag operation? If so, could they really fool our FBI and CIA? How about a joint US-Israel bit of tricksiness? It seems like a long shot, but it still could be convenient. Iran seems likely to be approaching nuclear weapon development, at least if we credit those 4-6 years to a nuke predictions we heard five to seven years ago. Is this a big enough provocation to cause the US to sponsor a bomb, bomb, bomb Iran event? Not if the reaction to date - calls for more sanctions - is an indicator. Consider the proposed targets, however. What does Israel need to attack Iran? One thing they might need is a clear flight path, and the clearest flight path is probably right over Saudi Arabia. Of course they probably also need at least tacit permission from the US. Could this sufficient provocation to produce such permissions? TBD. At the minimum, the US could...

Andrew Sullivan (again) has some quotes from Tony Judt's last interview: The characterization that comes to mind is "autistic." Israel behaved in a way that suggests it is no longer fully able to estimate, assess or understand the way other people think about it. Even if you supported the blockade (I don't) this would be an almost exemplary case of shooting oneself in a painful part of the anatomy. ... In short, this is the action of a country which is fast losing touch with reality. ... Another perspective, the long one, would be to say that Israel is behaving very much like the annoying little Judean state that the Romans finally dismantled in frustration. This classical analogy may be more relevant than we think. I suspect that in decades to come America (the new Rome) will abandon Israel as annoying, expensive, and a liability. The thing is, it's hard to be humble when you are sure that you are chosen by God. The Israel lobby is not fond of Jews who str...

Benny Morris sees tough challenges ahead . Israel is under assault. On Sept. 20 the Palestinian Authority plans to unilaterally declare statehood and go to the United Nations for recognition. This is a rejection of all efforts for a peaceful compromise. In its wake will come waves of Palestinian violence. And yet this is just the latest manifestation of an embattled Israel that is being threatened from the outside—by Muslim Arab states and societies, Egyptians storming the Israeli Embassy, a nuclear-arming Iran (with its local sidekicks, Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Hizbullah in Lebanon), and a besieged President Bashar al-Assad in Syria—and from the inside by domestic upheaval that led to the largest mass protests in the country’s history. More than 50 years ago, Israel’s leaders, headed by David Ben-Gurion, believed and hoped that they were creating a social democracy, with all the requisite egalitarian accoutrements (socialized national health care, progressive income tax, child bene...

Well, yes. If Israel were surrounded by economically and culturally vigorous Arab democracies instead of rotten autocracies, the apartheid state it is currently trying to establish would be far less tenable and for less acceptable to the world. And, no. Because if that should happen, the excuse for the apartheid state would vanish, and it might actually reform itself.

Lumo - Pig, whether you like it or not, Israel is both a Jewish state and the only Jewish state. It's very clear that it means much more for the Jews than it does for the non-Jews, and this is true even for average Jews who live in other countries. The Israel-Jewish relationship is not "peripheral" by any stretch of imagination. In the same way, Israel is not "peripherally related" to Jewish kingdoms and tribal states that existed millennia ago; Israel is their modern continuation - something that may be hard to understand for someone whose national history is only 234 years old but something that is nevertheless true and important for historically rich places such as the Middle East. jpd - Pig, whether you like it or not, Ireland is both a Irish state and the only Irish state. It's very clear that it means much more for the Irish than it does for the non-Irish, and this is true even for average Irish who live in other countries. The Ireland-Irish relation...

... or ever, asks Thaddeus Russell. Not much, is his answer. Anybody have a persuasive alternate answer? UPDATE: here is what is probably Russell's most sensational claim: “There was not a single act of Arab terrorism against Americans before 1968, when the U.S. became the chief supplier of military equipment and economic aid to Israel.” Anybody have a counterexample?

Andrew Sullivan on our problem with Israel . Petraeus sees what so much of Washington refuses to see: that Israel's year-long contempt for Obama, initiated by the Gaza campaign, entrenched by Netanyahu's victory and compounded by continued settlements and last week's humiliation of Biden is a problem. More then a problem, Israel's total impunity for its intransigence is becoming a liability for the advance of US interests around the world. Petraeus was so disturbed by a recent trip to the Middle East that he asked a team of top CENTCOM officers to brief Admiral Mullen, and asked that the region be made part of his command: In my reading of the Israeli reaction to the Biden dust up it seemed that the dominant meme was "the US should mind its own business." That is indeed a consummation devoutly to be wished. Please and pretty please. All that we need to do is stop sending them several billion dollars each year, stop selling them weapons on any basis other tha...

American Jews who go to Israel frequently get what I call the "propaganda tour" - a highly fictionalized account of the origin and construction of the Jewish state. In this version, Zionists came to an unpopulated land, turned it green with native ingenuity, and thereby attracted a nuisance crowd of Arabs eager to catch the crumbs that fell from their tables. The real story of how land and water was acquired from Palestinian farmers, sometimes by purchase, sometimes by the familiar connivance's of European political economy, and sometimes by force and fear gets lost. The final struggle, where the Palestinians were utterly defeated in war and slaughtered and expelled from their lands is told as an epic with heroes on only one side. Americans have seen this western, of course. We acquired our own land by a longer, more brutal, and far more drastic genocide. The story itself is at least as old as civilization. In our modern scientific age we like to try to peer beneath the l...

Mort Zuckerman is a billionaire real estate mogul and media magnate, and a strong supporter of Israeli and international Jewish causes. In this Huffpost article , he takes issue with Mearsheimer and Walt's new book about the Israel Lobby - of which Zuckerman, need it be said, is pretty much a charter member. Unfortunately, like previous critics, he winds up long on accusation and short on facts. Let's consider just one paragraph: Some of their policy allegations are nothing short of startling. Did you know for starters, that the Iraq War was not the work of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Colin Powell, and Condi Rice, as we all thought but of "The Israel Lobby"? Zuckerman doesn't address the substance of the claims M&S make, becuase he prefers the lest honest indirect attack. M&S say: Pressure from Israel and the Lobby was not the only factor behind the U.S. decision to attack Iraq in March 2003, but it was a critical element. I'm not sure I...

The Israeli attack on Syria, which reputedly offed a bunch of North Koreans as well as Syrians, has been mainly flying beneath my radar. As Kevin Drum noted Friday: The whole thing is still murky, since everyone seems to agree that it doesn't really make sense, but it's now pretty hard to ignore. Either someone is dead serious about planting some disinformation about a Syria-North Korea nuclear connection in the press, or else there really is such a connection. I don't know what to think about it myself, but it's now officially a story to follow. Today sees a new entry in the puzzle from The Sunday Times . Now I try never to venture in to Murdoch territory without some protection, so, having armed myself with a crucifix and some garlic, I ventured into the story. Israeli commandos seized nuclear material of North Korean origin during a daring raid on a secret military site in Syria before Israel bombed it this month, according to informed sources in Washington and Jerus...

One more visit with Mearsheimer and Walt, this one prompted by a new review linked by Arun: Walt-Mearsheimer's Best Seller: Why the Hysteria? by M J Rosenberg . Another important review is The New York Times review by William Grimes. Grimes (or his headline writer) calls the book a "A Prosecutorial Brief Against Israel and Its Supporters." I don't believe his review supports this title: Slowly, deliberately and dispassionately Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt lay out the case for a ruthlessly realistic Middle East policy that would make Israel nothing more than one of many countries in the region. On those occasions when Israel’s interests coincide with America’s, it should count on American support, but otherwise not. What Americans fail to understand, the authors argue, is that most of the time the two countries’ interests are opposed... The reason they do not realize this, Mr. Mearsheimer and Mr. Walt insist, can be explained quite simply: The Israel lobby makes sure ...

Responding to a Debate in the Comments: A couple of years ago a Jewish relative of mine returned from a trip to Israel filled with enthusiasm for the country and its accomplishments. We fell to discussing the Palestinian question and she explained to me that the Arabs there were mostly immigrants, and that the country had been almost unoccupied when the Zionists started arriving. This seemed implausible to me - a fertile country, a stone's throw from the origins of early civilization, unoccupied and uncultivated. I started researching the question, and it quickly became clear that this had to be nonsense. In 1944, for example, the British survey found that 90% or more of the land was owned by Arabs, who produced an even larger proportion of the agricultural production. The notion that the land was unpopulated is also belied by the statistics; From census data: The Ottoman census of 1878 for Jerusalem, Acre, and Nablus showed 400,000 Muslims, 43,000 Christians, and 25,000 Jews, of w...

From David Remnick's article The Lobby in The New Yorker : Last year, two distinguished political scientists, John J. Mearsheimer, of the University of Chicago, and Stephen M. Walt, of the John F. Kennedy School of Government, at Harvard, published a thirty-four-thousand-word article online entitled “The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy,” a shorter version of which appeared in The London Review of Books. Israel, they wrote, has become a “strategic liability” for the United States but retains its strong support because of a wealthy, well-organized, and bewitching lobby that has a “stranglehold” on Congress and American élites. Moreover, Israel and its lobby bear outsized responsibility for persuading the Bush Administration to invade Iraq and, perhaps one day soon, to attack the nuclear facilities of Iran. Farrar, Straus & Giroux will publish a book-length version of Mearsheimer and Walt’s arguments on September 4th Remnick's short article is essentially an attack masqu...