Peace and Justice Post

Exclusive: Republicans and Democrats in Congress leapt to their feet again and again to applaud Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu even as he was challenging the policies of President Barack Obama. Yet, this pro-Israeli solidarity could have harmful consequences for Israel, the Palestinians and the United States, writes Robert Parry.

By Robert Parry, Consortium News,  May 25, 2011

Congress, with repeated standing ovations, showed its love for Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but the valentine may have unintended consequences by stirring dangerous passions of Likud’s rejectionist wing, which is now weighing the risks of transforming Israel into an overtly apartheid state.

These hardliners might well interpret the congressional obsequiousness as signaling that Israel still has a free hand to do whatever it wants, even if that means defying President Barack Obama’s mild pressure for movement toward peace with the Palestinians.

As Democrats and Republicans competed to see who could jump to their feet the fastest and most often, Netanyahu mixed a rhetorical commitment to peace with preconditions that he knows are unacceptable to the Palestinians, including his insistence that they not only recognize Israel’s right to exist but hail it as a Jewish state.

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Mark Twain once described members of Congress as having “the smallest minds and the selfishest souls and the cowardliest hearts that God makes.” Twain’s mordant assessment provides a parsimonious explanation for the predictably rapturous reception that Bibi Netanyahu received there yesterday. All one can say about the vast majority of our courageous elected officials is that they aren’t genuine friends of Israel, because every burst of applause was another nail in the coffin of the Zionist dream.

Why? Because Netanyahu’s central message yesterday was an emphatic rejection of a genuine two-state solution. While professing to be willing to make major sacrifices for the sake of peace, his lengthy list of preconditions made it abundantly clear that he thinks Israel is entitled to rule the Palestinian population in perpetuity-even when it becomes numerically larger than Israel’s Jewish citizens — and that the United States should back this effort no matter what. And even though the only alternatives to a two-state solution are 1) further ethnic cleansing, 2) a binational, one-state democracy, or 3) permanent apartheid, Congress is just fine with that.

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by Francis A. Boyle, Dissident Voice,  October 21st, 2010

Israel’s Likudnik Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu reached into his bag of Zionist tricks and pulled out a brand-new demand that had never surfaced before in the history of the Middle East Peace Process going all the way back to their beginning with the negotiation of the original Camp David Accords conducted under the personal auspices of U.S. President Jimmy Carter in 1978: The Palestinians must recognize Israel as “the Jewish State.” Not surprisingly, the Zionist controlled and funded Obama administration publicly endorsed this latest roadblock to peace that was maliciously constructed by Israel.

Netanyahu deliberately shifted the goal-posts on the Palestinians. It would be as if the United States of America demanded that Iran recognize it as the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) State as a condition for negotiating and then concluding any comprehensive peace settlement with it. Of course such demands are racist and premeditated non-starters to begin with.

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Socialist Worker, May 24, 2011

Blackwater’s Erik Prince

YOU CAN buy a war for half a billion dollars. But get in quick. That’s at current market prices.

Costs may rise following last Saturday’s New York Times story revealing that the United Arab Emirates has paid $529 million to a company set up by Blackwater boss Eric Prince to recruit and train a mercenary army to undertake “special missions” against the oil state’s enemies, defend oil pipelines, crush internal opposition and so forth.

Emirate dictator Sheik Mohammed bin Zayed al-Nahyan has also agreed to pay more than $100 million a year to meet running costs and supply weapons and equipment–including rifles, mortars and armored vehicles.

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Lauded by settlers and derided by commentators, the US president’s AIPAC speech is portrayed as a victory for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu

Saleh Naami, Ahram Online, Monday 23 May 2011

President Barack Obama arrives to speak at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) convention in Washington (Photo:AP)

Jewish settler leaders were moved to express their satisfaction with Barack Obama’s Middle East speech at the AIPAC annual conference, going as far as inviting the US president to join the leadership of their association.

Benny Katzover, longtime leader of the West Bank settlement movement, said that the speech didn’t just represent a victory for Israel, but it was also a great statement of support to the concept of settlement and to the “entrenchment of Jewish presence” in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan.

In an interview with Israel’s Channel Seven, Katzover explained that Obama’s honest and clear mention of the necessity to take into consideration the demographic shifts taking place in the West Bank, Jerusalem and the Golan after 1967 gives legitimacy to Israel’s right to keep Jewish settlements in the West Bank, and supports without reservation the Jewish right to reinforce the settlement project as a whole and the Judaisation of Jerusalem. In his speech, Obama implied his support for Jerusalem to be the eternal and unified capital for the Jewish people, said Katzover.

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Speaking one day after President Barack Obama’s address to their national conference, AIPAC Executive Director Howard Kohr warned the president against treating both Israel and the Palestinians “even-handedly.”

According to Kohr, treating both sides equally would mean “Israel is authomatically at a disadvantage” and that it would put “Palestinians and Arabs” in a better position. The comments echo Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s angry condemnation of the notion of a return to the 1967 borders.

Of course in yesterday’s speech, Obama already completely disavowed his previous comments about the 1967 borders. Prime Minister Netanyahu likewise insisted that Obama’s furious backpedal was acceptable to him. This Kohr’s rebuke of Obama seem like kicking a man when he’s down.

Kohr went on to insist that even the suggestion of equal treatment by the US in brokering a peace deal would make such a deal impossible, and that only by insisting the US and Israel have identical positions would the Palestinians ever agree to a deal. The talks ended in September after Israel refused to pause expanding settlements into the territory of a potential Palestinian state.

by Stephen Lendman, Dissident Voice,  May 23rd, 2011

On February 9, London Guardian writer Chris McGreal headlined, “Egypt’s army ‘involved in detentions and torture,’ ” saying:

Military forces “secretly detained hundreds and possibly thousands of suspected government opponents since mass (anti-Mubarak) protests began, (and) at least some of these detainees have been tortured, according to testimony gathered by the Guardian.”

Moreover, Human Rights Watch (HRW) and other human rights organizations cited years of army involvement in disappearances and torture. Former detainees confirmed “extensive beatings and other abuses at the hands of the military in what appears to be an organized campaign of intimidation.” Electric shocks, Taser guns, threatened rapes, beatings, disappearances, and killings left families grieving for loved ones.

Under Mubarak, Egypt’s military wasn’t neutral. It’s no different now, cracking down hard to keep power and deny change, policies Washington endorses, funds and practices at home and abroad.

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uruknet.info, May 23, 2011

Source: The News International

MIRAMSHAH: Seven people were killed in a US drone strike on a vehicle in Machikhel village in Mir Ali subdivision in North Waziristan Agency (NWA) on Monday, sources said. Sources said an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) fired two missiles at a vehicle moving on a road in Machikhel village. The vehicle was destroyed and its seven occupants killed. The identity of the slain men, whose bodies were disfigured, couldn’t be ascertained. This is the seventh missile attack by US drones in North Waziristan since the May 2 assassination of Osama bin Laden by US Special Forces in Abbottabad. This strike is the 28th by the CIA-operated drones in North Waziristan this year. North Waziristan is the primary target for US drones in Pakistan nowadays. Occasionally, the unmanned planes also attack targets in neighbouring South Waziristan Agency. These drone strikes are being conducted despite a recent unanimous resolution by parliament in Islamabad, asking the government to put an end to such attacks.

by Jack D. Douglas, LewRockwell.com, May 23, 2011

I’ve heard Congress people and others say repeatedly that the U.S. has no real or clear foreign policy for the Middle East. I think the U.S. has a clear but complex and changing, general policy in the Middle East which we can infer from U.S. actions, but Obama et al. keep using short run tactics and proclamations to deceive the various major powers there and the American people.

There is no simple, overall, constant policy like containment was toward the USSR for its final roughly forty years of existence. But there is a systematic set of nearly absolute goals which are interrelated. Let me set them out a bit starkly and clearly.

1. The U.S. will do whatever is necessary, if possible, to keep the Saudi and Persian Gulf oil flowing at its current rate.

2. The U.S. will protect Israel to keep it going.

3. The U.S. will contain Iran, work to decrease its wealth and power, carry out cyber and spy attacks on vital industries like nuclear enrichment and encourage revolutions against the government to bring it down and put a pro-U.S. one in place.

4. The U.S. will seek to keep in place pro-American puppet regimes by all effective means that do not subvert the other general goals.

5. The U.S. will accept new pro-American regimes when necessary and work to make them more so in every way to control the oil and other vital resources.

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AP

President Obama meets with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel Friday at the White House.

(updated below – Update II [Mon.])

This week’s hysterical, reality-deprived reaction to President Obama’s pronouncements on the Israel/Palestine conflict genuinely provoked laughter on several occasions.  That happened when I thought of the intense controversy triggered by publication of Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer’s The Israel Lobby, which examined the “loose coalition of individuals and organizations who actively work to steer U.S. foreign policy in a pro-Israel direction,” a coalition driven by “a core consisting of organizations whose declared purpose is to encourage the U.S. government and the American public to provide material aid to Israel and to support its government’s policies, as well as influential individuals for whom these goals are also a top priority.”  This week’s events underscore how remarkable it is that that book’s argument was demonized as some sort of radical, hateful conspiracy tract rather than treated as what it was: a statement of the bleeding obvious (albeit a brave one, given that discussions of that reality had previously been taboo).

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