Extra Judicial Assassination

Glenn Greenwald:

Obama - the killer of Anwar al-Awlaki, Awlaki's 16-year-old American son Abdulrahman, and countless other innocent men, women, teenagers and children - could not possibly condemn Israeli actions in Gaza without indicting himself. Extra-judicial assassinations, once roundly condemned by US officials, are now a symbol of the Obama presidency, as the US and Israel converge more than ever before: if not in interests, than certainly in tactics.

Why Wikileaks doesn't publish more leaks from Israel.

Jeffrey Goldberg :

As I wrote last week, there's very little Israel's right-wing government has done in the past year or so to suggest that it is willing to wean itself from its addiction to West Bank settlements, and the expansion of settlements bodes ill for the creation of a Palestinian state -- and the absence of Palestinian statehood means that Israel will one day soon confront this crucial question concerning its democratic nature: Will it grant West Bank Arabs the right to vote, or will it deny them the vote? If it grants them the vote, this will be the end of Israel as a Jewish state; if it denies them the vote in perpetuity, it will cease to be a democratic state.

You what?!

Blair has been an "envoy" to the Middle East for how long? And this is his first visit to Gaza!!!!!

Oh. And, by the way, he won't meet any Hamas politicians. FAIL!

One thing that infuriates my wife is that whenever she gives an opinion about something, I almost always start to disagree. Not so much because I disagree, but because seeing three sides of an argument is *interesting* to me. And hearing one side immediately triggers my attempt to find counters.

After reading another gruelling account of the current Israeli attack on Gaza and discussing the current situation I found myself saying that "but of course it wasn't as simple as the Jews stealing the land from the Palestinians. This area already had a large Jewish population under the Ottoman empire." which was a "factoid" that I'd picked up somewhere.

Today someone sent me an invite to one of those "lets get millions of people together on Facebook to condemn Israel" kind of things, which I felt reluctant to join. Was it "nuanced" enough? (I never like condemning anything - my preferred mode is understanding.) Might it not really be a front for perennial Arab nationalist? Etc. But I started to realize that this was mere prevarication ... excuse not to get involved. So I may end up joining and forwarding to all my Facebook friends (you've been warned).

Anyway, following a link from a discussion there I found Palestine Remembered and a debunking of the "already a large Jewish population" argument. Can't be sure how reliable it is, but I find this pretty compelling; and this linked story giving further support.

So I guess I was wrong. It seems that the Jewish population was a minority, and the theory that most Palestinians are just children of "gastarbeiters" is misleading propaganda. More fool me for immersing myself in too many warblogs and neocon apologists in recent years.

And when one thinks about that starkly, the whole edifice of Israel does start to look pretty dodgy. Was the whole thing really built by mass ethnic cleansing of the indigenous Arab population?

DebateGraph does Gaza

I don't have the energy to say much about this personally. Anyone wants me on record : I'm against the offensive on both pro-Palestinian grounds - the Palestinians are being unjustifiably collectively punished if not worse (ie. genocided) -; and pro-Israeli ones - it won't work, it will bleed away what precious moral strength Israel has left and may leave the country untenable in the longer run.

Great! So having spent their time in office and power (last 8 to 10 years) supporting the Israeli occupation, Blair and Bush, once they're gone (or going and effectively powerless), bother to actually go to Israel and have a look at the situation and end up calling for Israel to withdraw as part of a deal.

In other words they play the same corrupt logic of every politician who gets into this.

They accept the validity of Palestinian claim to statehood, yet somehow want to postpone it as a bargaining chip to use against those Palestinian political factions who are anti-Israel.

That is what keeps the whole thing in motion. If "the middle-eastern problem" is ever to be solved it's this logic that needs to be broken. There may or may not be a justified Palestinian claim to a separate state. But whether there is or not, it is not somehow conditional on Palestinians behaving themselves.

To treat the issue like that is identical to collectively punishing the whole Palestinian population for the behaviour of the actively anti-israeli sub-population.