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Middle East Tag

Posted by David Gerstman on December 24, 2014 1 Comment
In his column yesterday, anti-Israel columnist Roger Cohen of The New York Times talked to Tzipi Livni, candidate for prime minister and Israel's peace negotiator, about why the John Kerry-sponsored peace talks failed earlier this year. Livni tells of the three ways the Palestinians destroyed the peace talks. The administration in March had presented a framework for both sides.
Livni considered it a fair framework, and Netanyahu had indicated willingness to proceed on the basis of it while saying he had reservations. But Abbas declined to give an answer in what his senior negotiator, Saeb Erekat, later described as a “difficult” meeting with Obama. Abbas remained evasive on the framework, which was never made public.
One part of the framework was to accept the 1967 lines (really the 1948 armistice lines) as the basis of negotiations. In other words, Netanyahu made a major concession here and Abbas still refused to play ball. Still at the behest of the administration talks continued and a few weeks later, the Palestinians were at it again.
Then, Livni said, she looked up at a television as she awaited a cabinet meeting and saw Abbas signing letters as part of a process to join 15 international agencies — something he had said he would not do before the deadline.
Abbas offered the excuse that Israel was stalling. Still, this was a unilateral action outside the framework of negotiations and a broken promise. Finally, there was this:

Posted by David Gerstman on December 15, 2014 11 Comments
Following the dissolution of the Israeli government this week, Labor Party leader Isaac Herzog and Hatnua leader Tzipi Livni agreed to join forces in an effort to unseat Likud as the governing party. At The Times of Israel Haviv Rettig Gur wrote a positive analysis of the merger, arguing that in bringing Livni on board Herzog aimed to capture the center of the Israeli electorate, rather than ceding it to Likud.
Yet Israel’s political center is actually far larger than the parties who formally declare themselves to be “centrist.” On the key issue that defines the left-right axis, Palestinian statehood, polls have shown that as many as half of those who vote for the explicitly right-wing parties Likud, Yisrael Beytenu and even Jewish Home actually support Palestinian statehood. Countless polls suggest that Israeli centrists – usually defined by pundits as those who support Palestinian independence while distrusting Palestinian willingness to reciprocate with peace – vote for the right because they hear their skepticism reflected in the rhetoric of right-wing leaders. For 20 years, Herzog’s predecessors – Labor has seen 11 leadership changes in 22 years – have been fighting a losing battle against this vast, inchoate center. But on Wednesday night, Herzog launched the left’s most dramatic bid since the 1990s for the Israeli center’s trust.
Herzog, according to Gur, no longer talks about "peace and reconciliation" but of "separation." There are two assumptions to Gur's analysis here that I'm skeptical about.

Posted by David Gerstman on December 07, 2014 5 Comments
Last week, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu fired his finance minister (Yair Lapid of Yesh Atid) and justice minister (Tzippi Livni of Hatnua), both coalition partners, effectively bringing down the current government and forcing new elections now scheduled for March 17. The latest polls suggest that Netanyahu would be able to form the next coaltion.
According to a Channel 10 poll, Likud would win 22 seats, Jewish Home 17, Labor 13, Yisrael Beytenu 12, Moshe Kahlon’s as-yet-unnamed party 12, Yesh Atid nine, the ultra-Orthodox United Torah Judaism eight, Shas seven, Meretz seven, Hatnua four and the Arab parties nine. A survey by Channel 2 showed Likud with 22, Jewish Home 17, Labor 13, Kahlon and Yisrael Beytenu with 10 apiece, Yesh Atid with nine, Shas with nine, United Torah Judaism with eight, Meretz with seven, Hatnua with four, and the Arab parties with 11. Both polls would have made pleasant reading for Likud leader Netanyahu, showing a strengthening of the right, and numerous potential coalition options for him.
However, a lot can happen in four months. For example two years ago, Likud created a joint list with Yisrael Beiteinu (Avigdor Liberman's party) and then the combined list lost ten seats in popularity polls in the final month of the campaign.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 30, 2014 4 Comments
"Nakba" is the phrase Arabs use to refer to the creation of Arab refugees from the British Mandate of Palestine created during the civil war and then Arab armies invasion after Arabs rejected the U.N. General Assembly 1947 Partition Plan. Had the Arabs accepted that plan, there would have been an Arab state created in 1947.  Since Jordan was created from most of the original Mandate, the Partition Plan would have given Arabs the supermajority of the land.  Instead, the Arabs declared holy war on the Jews, and lost the civil war and 1948 War. In the course of that loss, hundreds of thousands of Arabs fled, then were kept in refugee camps by other Arabs, and have been kept as non-citizens in those Arab countries pending the destruction of Israel. The there was another "Nakba" resulting from the Arab rejection of Israel. The story of 850,000 Jewish refugees from Arab countries has been told here many times, but rarely is discussed in the public debate over the Middle East. The silence on the Jewish Nakba is changing. Ben-Dror Yemini, writing in Ynet, What about the Jewish Nakba? (h/t Israel Matzav) writes:

Posted by David Gerstman on November 11, 2014 4 Comments
Two Israelis were killed yesterday in separate terror attacks by knife wielding assailants. Yesterday morning, a 20 year old soldier, Almog Shiloni, was stabbed in Tel Aviv. The Times of Israel reports:
Almog Shiloni, 20, of Modiin, died of multiple wounds to his stomach and chest, an official from the Sheba Medical Center at Tel Hashomer Hospital said. “After resuscitation efforts that began in the field and continued for hours in the hospital, the stabbing victim who arrived at the hospital earlier today was declared dead,” a spokesperson announced. When Shiloni was first brought into the hospital following the attack he had no pulse, although doctors were able to restart his heart.
His girlfriend, who was talking to him on the phone at the time, rushed to the scene when she heard a commotion and Almog didn't answer. When she arrived at the scene she saw "Almog lying in a pool of blood as emergency teams tried to resuscitate him." In the afternoon a 26 year old woman, Dalia Lemkus,  was stabbed to death and two others were wounded in a knife attack in Gush Etzion (the Etzion Bloc) by a terrorist who was shot and wounded by a security guard.
The stabber was shot by a guard on duty at the site, police said. Initial reports indicated he was killed, but later reports dispelled that claim. Magen David Adom said he was in serious condition. A 26-year-old man suffered light-moderate injuries, and a man in his 50s was lightly hurt in the incident. Their names were not released. Channel 2 reported that the older man was driving by the scene when he saw the attack in progress, then stopped his car and wrestled with the attacker before suffering an injury to his face.
Sherri Mandel, whose teenage son Kobi, was killed in 2001 during the so-called "Aqsa intifada," wrote a tribute to Lemkus, What the didn't tell you about Dalia, at The Times of Israel:

Posted by David Gerstman on November 10, 2014 3 Comments
With the Senate flipping from Democratic control to Republican control, the question emerges whether the legislature, now in the hands of the opposition, will be able to rein in President Barack Obama in the event that he engineers a bad nuclear deal with Iran. In short, the Senate will almost certainly be more willing to stop a bad deal. The bad news is that it may be too late. As far as the deal itself, it is not considered a treaty and therefore not subject to Congressional approval. However, the sanctions bill passed by Congress allows the President to suspend (not permanently cancel) sanctions. A bill co-sponsored by Sens. Robert Menendez (D-NJ) and Mark Kirk (R-IL) that would impose stronger sanctions on Iran, if the Islamic Republic would either "violate the interim agreement or walk away from the negotiations," was scuttled by the White House in January. Although there was bi-partisan support in the Senate for the bill, Obama prevailed on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to keep the bill from coming to a vote. Obama viewed the bill as a violation of the P5+1's commitment  in last year's Joint Plan of Actions (JPA) (.pdf) to "refrain from imposing new nuclear-related sanctions." Since the Kirk-Menendez bill would only come into effect if Iran violated its commitments, Obama's concern seems baseless. With Reid no longer Majority Leader, the Kirk-Menendez bill should at least come to a vote, as incoming Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said in January, “We’re going to continue to press the majority leader to allow a vote on an issue that obviously enjoys the support of a very large bipartisan majority here in the Senate.”

Posted by David Gerstman on October 31, 2014 6 Comments
Elder of Ziyon picked up on a recent bit of hypocrisy when Egypt began destroying hundreds of homes along the Sinai's border with Gaza. In So where are the Rachel Corries for Egypt?  Elder writes:
800 homes demolished in the next few days? Israel has never demolished so many in so little time. Yet over the years there have been numerous NGOs and reports about Israel's home demolitions - and no one cares about Egypt's. There are no groups popping up where young idealistic moronic college students volunteer to act as human shields to protect these homes. Indeed, no one cares about Egypt's demolishing homes for security purposes.
Rachel Corrie was a college student who didn't heed the IDF's warning to get out of the way during the demolition of a house in Gaza that housed a smuggling tunnel; Corrie was killed during the demolition. Elder is right in saying that there has been precious little protest of Egypt's actions. (Ken Roth of Human Rights Watch has been exception. In the case of Egypt, as with Israel, he sides with Hamas.) But what's frustrating is not just in the vastly different reactions to demolitions carried out by Israel as opposed to those carried out by Egypt, but also the contrast in how the world treats Israeli construction plans. This week the topic of Israel building in its capital, Jerusalem, has gotten the world worked up. From the New York Times (emphasis mine):
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Monday that Israel would fast-track planning for 1,060 new apartments in populous Jewish neighborhoods of East Jerusalem, a move that appears calibrated to appeal to the maximum number of Israelis while causing the minimum damage to Israel internationally, according to Israeli analysts. But as is often the case, Mr. Netanyahu’s decision prompted swift international condemnation at a time when Israel’s relations with Washington are already strained and risked further igniting Palestinian anger and tensions in Jerusalem. It was also unlikely to satisfy the right-wing political rivals it was intended to appease, the analysts said.
Though there was "Palestinian anger" there's no immediate consequence to this action. No one lost property. No one was displaced.

Posted by David Gerstman on October 29, 2014 11 Comments
Yesterday Prof Jacobson rightly assessed Jeffrey Goldberg's The Crisis in U.S.-Israel Relations Is Officially Here as describing a crisis "in Obama-Israel relations." Although the White House has offered a disavowal of the profane insult made by one of Goldberg's sources, the full substance of his remarks needs to be rebutted. The offending official explained his boorish insult of Netanyahu :
“The good thing about Netanyahu is that he’s scared to launch wars,” the official said, expanding the definition of what a chickenshit Israeli prime minister looks like. “The bad thing about him is that he won’t do anything to reach an accommodation with the Palestinians or with the Sunni Arab states. The only thing he’s interested in is protecting himself from political defeat. He’s not [Yitzhak] Rabin, he’s not [Ariel] Sharon, he’s certainly no [Menachem] Begin. He’s got no guts.”
This is utterly false. Bret Stephens pointed out (Google link, emphasis mine):
The real problem for the administration is that the Israelis—along with all the other disappointed allies—are learning how little it pays to be on Barack Obama’s good side. Since coming to office in 2009, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has agreed, against his own inclination and over the objections of his political base, to (1) recognize a Palestinian state; (2) enforce an unprecedented 10-month settlement freeze; (3) release scores of Palestinian prisoners held on murder charges; (4) embark on an ill-starred effort to reach a final peace deal with the Palestinians; (5) refrain from taking overt military steps against Iran; and (6) agree to every possible cease-fire during the summer’s war with Hamas. In exchange, Mr. Kerry publicly blamed Israel for the failure of the peace effort, the White House held up the delivery of munitions at the height of the Gaza war, and Mr. Obama is hellbent on striking whatever deal the Iranians can plausibly offer him.

Posted by David Gerstman on October 22, 2014 2 Comments
Earlier today, a Palestinian drove his car off the road into a group of people who had just gotten off Jerusalem's light rail at the Ammunition Hill stop, killing a three month old baby and injuring seven others. The Times of Israel reports:
“A private car which arrived from the direction of the French Hill junction hit a number of pedestrians who were on the pavement and injured nine of them,” police spokeswoman Luba Samri said in a statement. “Initial indications suggest this is a hit-and-run terror attack,” Samri said. The baby died at the nearby Hadassah Hospital on Mount Scopus a few hours after the incident. A spokesperson for Israeli rescue service Magen David Adom said a 60-year-old woman and seven other people, including the baby’s father, were also lightly and moderately wounded in the attack. ...
The suspect , Abdelrahman al-Shaludi, previously served time in jail and has been identified by Israeli government spokesman Ofir Gendelman as a member of Hamas. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu blamed Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas for partnering with Hamas and inciting violence.

Posted by David Gerstman on October 15, 2014 6 Comments
Few publications were more enthusiastic about last year's election of "moderate" Hassan Rouhani as president of Iran than The New York Times. Perhaps some of that enthusiasm stemmed from the possibility of engaging in commercial enterprises with the regime in Tehran. Ira Stoll editor of SmarterTimes noted the other day that The New York Times is promoting a tour of Iran accompanied by one of its journalists, Elaine Sciolino. After noting some of the peculiarities of the deal, Stoll writes:
There's no mention at all in the Times promotional language about the tour of Iran's status as a state supporter of terrorism, of its pursuit of nuclear weapons, or of its human rights abuses. For information about those abuses, anyone considering plunking down nearly $7,000 for the pleasure of accompanying a Times journalist on a "relaxing evening and dinner" after antique shopping in Iran may want to consider, first, browsing the State Department's latest human rights report on Iran. It reports that under Iranian law, "a woman who appears in public without an appropriate headscarf (hijab) may be sentenced to lashings and fined." It also says that "The law criminalizes consensual same-sex sexual activity, which may be punishable by death or flogging."

Posted by David Gerstman on October 08, 2014 21 Comments
The Houthis, Iranian backed rebels have taken control of Yemen's capital, Sanaa. The Washington Post reports:
The capital of Yemen, the Arab world’s poorest and perhaps most chronically unstable nation, has new masters. Shiite rebels man checkpoints and roam the streets in pickups mounted with anti­aircraft guns. The fighters control almost all state buildings, from the airport and the central bank to the Defense Ministry. Only a few police officers and soldiers are left on the streets. Rebel fighters have plastered the city with fliers proclaiming their slogan — “Death to America, death to Israel, a curse on the Jews and victory to Islam” — a variation of a popular Iranian slogan often chanted by Shiite militants in Iraq and supporters of Lebanon’s Hezbollah.
The comparison to Hezbollah is apt as Reuters is reporting that the Houthi are blocking the appointment of Yemen's president.
Abdel-Malek al-Ejri said Hadi had suggested five names at a meeting of his advisors, who represent various political parties in Yemen. When the aides failed to agree on a candidate Hadi suggested his presidential office director, Ahmed Awad bin Mubarak, as a compromise. "But we did not agree, and the matter is still under consultation," Ejri told Reuters.
Similarly, Hezbollah has kept Lebanon's politics unsettled preventing the appointment of a President. So what's Iran's interest in Yemen? It was spelled out by Michael Segall of the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs two and a half years ago. A couple of Segall's observations are sobering:

Posted by David Gerstman on September 23, 2014 2 Comments
Yesterday a jury in a federal court in New  York found the Arab Bank - the largest lender in Jordan - liable for "knowingly supporting terrorism efforts connected to two dozen attacks in the Middle East." The New York Times reports:
Arab Bank, a major Middle Eastern bank with $46 billion in assets, was accused of knowingly supporting specific terrorist acts in and around Israel during the second Palestinian uprising of the early 2000s. The verdict is expected to have a strong impact on similar legal efforts to hold financial institutions responsible for wrongdoing by their clients, even if the institutions followed banking rules, and could be seen as a deterrent for banks that conduct business in violent areas. The plaintiffs in this case, about 300 victims of 24 terrorist attacks, said the acts had been carried out by Hamas, and accused Arab Bank of supporting the organization by handling transfers and payments for Hamas members.
The Times quotes Jonathan Schanzer of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies on the significance of the verdict.
“What this has done is it’s made the effects of American law felt in far-off places, and that is significant,” said Jonathan Schanzer, vice president for research at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies and a former terrorism finance analyst for the Treasury Department. “I don’t think any country, any bank, would want to be cut off from the U.S. financial sector, and they’re going to start thinking very carefully about whether they accept financial transactions” even from people or groups who are not on designated terrorist lists.
The damages were not determined and will be decided at a future  trial.

Posted by David Gerstman on September 19, 2014 3 Comments
The New York Times earlier this month published an expose of how foreign money influenced think tanks. One of the subjects of the article was the Brookings Institution, its vice president Indyk and $14.8 million grant that the government of Qatar had given Brookings. A former scholar at Brookings cautioned that because of Qatar's influence any report coming out of the institution is likely not to be the "full story." The New York Times didn't seem much concerned with the implication of its reporting but some people did notice. In Tablet this week Lee Smith pounced on the Times for not looking into the implications of what it reported.
Or maybe the editors decided that it was all on the level, and the money influenced neither Indyk’s government work on the peace process nor Brookings’ analysis of the Middle East. Or maybe journalists just don’t think it’s worth making a big fuss out of obvious conflicts of interest that may affect American foreign policy. Maybe Qatar’s $14.8 million doesn’t affect Brookings’ research projects or what the think tank’s scholars tell the media, including the New York Times, about subjects like Qatar, Hamas, Israel, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and other related areas in which Qatar has key interests at stake. Maybe the think tank’s vaunted objectivity, and Indyk’s personal integrity and his pride in his career as a public servant, trump the large piles of vulgar Qatari natural gas money that keep the lights on and furnish the offices of Brookings scholars and pay their cell-phone bills and foreign travel.
Smith also observed that the Qatar connection made Indyk poorly suited as an interlocutor for both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

Posted by David Gerstman on September 16, 2014 12 Comments
The United Nations announced yesterday that it was withdrawing all of its United Nations Disengagement Observer Force (UNDOF) peacekeepers out of Syria due to "[t]he situation in UNDOF on the Syrian side and the area of separation has deteriorated severely over the last several days."
Armed groups have made advances in the area of UNDOF positions, posing a direct threat to the safety and security of the UN Peacekeepers along the “Bravo” line and in Camp Faouar. All the UN personnel in these positions have thus been relocated to the “Alpha” side. UNDOF continues to use all available assets to carry out its mandated tasks in this exceptionally challenging environment.
The "Alpha side" is Israel. https://twitter.com/LTCPeterLerner/status/511583877295403008

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 14, 2014 30 Comments
I only followed in passing the incident where Ted Cruz was booed off the stage at a gathering to support Christians in the Middle East after saying that Israel was the best friend Christians have in the Middle East. The Daily Caller reported:
Sen. Ted Cruz was booed offstage at a conference for Middle Eastern Christians Wednesday night after saying that “Christians have no greater ally than Israel.” Cruz, the keynote speaker at the sold-out D.C. dinner gala for the recently-founded non-profit In Defense of Christians, began by saying that “tonight, we are all united in defense of Christians. Tonight, we are all united in defense of Jews. Tonight, we are all united in defense of people of good faith, who are standing together against those who would persecute and murder those who dare disagree with their religious teachings.” Cruz was not reading from a teleprompter, nor did he appear to be reading from notes.

Posted by David Gerstman on September 01, 2014 7 Comments
Central to the charge that Israel's conduct warrants an investigation by an "independent" commission to investigate whether it committed war crimes is the premise that Israel, in defending itself against rockets launched by Hamas into its territory, caused a disproportionate number of civilian deaths. Since a commission appointed by the anti-Israel United Nations Human Rights Council is looking to convict, a fair investigation into the violence is in order. Unfortunately, in an article from last week entitled "The U.N. says 7 in 10 Palestinians killed in Gaza were civilians. Israel disagrees," The Washington Post failed to provide the necessary context to allow a proper understanding of Operation Protective Edge.
The war in Gaza will now continue in a battle between databases to determine who was killed and why. The most contested number, the one that attracts the most stubborn insistence and ferocious rebuttal, is not the total fatalities on the Palestinian side, the more than 2,100 dead in the Gaza hostilities. The controversy centers instead on the ratio of civilians to combatants, or as the Israelis call them “terrorist operatives.”
In the second sentence the reporter, William Booth, mentions the "stubborn insistence and ferocious rebuttal," but doesn't acknowledge his own role in supporting the "stubborn insistence." Booth's articles on Operation Protective Edge have often contained similar language describing "mounting Palestinian civilian casualties." Furthermore, in other instances articles on which Booth was bylined listed casualty totals with no judgment as to their veracity. For example on July 19 a dispatch on which he had a byline reported:
The Palestinian death toll from the conflict rose Saturday to more than 330, including about 60 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry. An additional 2,200 have been injured. The United Nations estimates that about 80 percent of the casualties are civilians, many of them children.

Posted by David Gerstman on August 22, 2014 3 Comments
At his Muckraker column at Forbes, The Media Intifada: Bad Math, Ugly Truths About New York Times In Israel-Hamas War, investigative journalist Richard Behar exposes many of the problems - really scandals - with the MSM reporting on Gaza. Though he focuses a lot on The New York Times, he focuses on other news outlets too and how, through a combination of credulousness, bias and laziness, they have become in the words of his friend, and fellow investigative journalist, Gary Weiss, "part of the Hamas war machine.” In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal The New York Times led the journalistic pack by hiring a "public editor" to handle complaints in the hopes of averting another similar scandal. But the problem with public editors or ombudsmen, as they are also called, is that they don't challenge the assumptions of the editors and reporters. Rather they seem to be explaining why the readers don't understand the high minded principles that professional journalists adhere to. What's important about Behar's takedown of the reporting is that he challenges the assumptions that news organizations accept. Behar looked at the media in general and specifically at The New York Times "because it is, without question, the most important media outlet in the world, in terms of setting the table each day for other outlets.". I can't cover the whole scope of Behar's critique as it is sweeping and comprehensive, but I'd like to focus on a few of his specific criticisms and then on a few of his observations. Richard Behar Media Intifada Behar's first critique of the Times is for its Gaza based reporter Fares Akram, and what he discovered when he visited Akram's Facebook page.

Posted by New Neo on August 19, 2014 25 Comments
ISIS has released a video purporting to show the beheading of American journalist James Wright Foley, who had been missing for almost two years. The video, which also threatens to do the same to a man identified as American journalist Steven Sotloff, will not be linked to on this blog. Foley had gone missing in northwest Syria in November of 2012, and Sotloff, a reporter for Time, had disappeared in mid-2013, perhaps in Libya. ISIS accompanied the video with a message that:
...U.S. President Barack Obama’s authorization of strikes against the group places the United States “upon a slippery slope towards a new war front against Muslims,” according to BNO. “Any attempt by you, Obama, to deny Muslims liberty & safety under the Islamic caliphate, will result in the bloodshed of your people,” the ISIS person added. Foley also speaks in the video, saying: “I call on my friends, family members and loved ones to rise up against my real killers, the U.S. government.”
There is a longer version of Foley's statement here.
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