Friday 8 June 2012

So does either side actually want a two-state solution?

... As we look at the continuing impasse, and the reality that there has been less than a month of tentative negotiation in the three years since this government came to office, Israeli officials have been telling anyone who’ll listen that the Palestinians are wholly to blame for the absence of peace talks. The Prime Minister, they say, has been waiting for Mahmoud Abbas to join him for peace talks; instead the Palestinian Authority President has tried to circumvent negotiations and unilaterally force the issue at the UN.


For their part the Palestinians claim that negotiating with Netanyahu would be a waste of time. And it is the case that, in a fashion familiar to observers of the Prime Minister’s first term in office, he has rhetorically supported moderate positions while giving a nod and a wink to hardliners in his government and the settlement movement. For instance following his announcement of the ten-month settlement freeze in 2009, he quickly moved to reassure settler leaders that this was a one-off event and that building would resume in the West Bank once the period of the moratorium had elapsed....
To continue reading, follow the link to my blog on The Times Of Israel.

Monday 2 April 2012

It was fascism in Toulouse


The original suspects for the cold-blooded murder in Toulouse of Jonathan Sandler, his young children Aryeh and Gabriel, and 8-year old Miriam Monsonego were three neo-Nazis. Police had linked the atrocity to the fatal shooting, a few days earlier, of three French off-duty paratroopers, who also happened to be Muslim.  It did seem reasonable to assume that the killer was a far-right activist, "collecting" ethnic minority victims.

The discovery that the killer was actually Mohamed Merah, an Islamist linked to Al-Qaida, will not surprise anyone alive to the reality of Muslim radicalization in Europe. However, it will be interesting to see whether the great liberal consciences of the West, who were poised to loudly condemn this latest demonstration of murderous contemporary fascism, will now fall silent, or whether they will press on with their intended message. For make no mistake, this is fascism...
To continue reading, follow the link to my blog on The Times Of Israel.

Friday 30 March 2012

Kadima election - first thoughts

I confess I have something of a soft spot for Tzipi Livni, for two principal reasons.Firstly, and it's worth remembering, she could and would have been prime minister had she given in to Shas's extortion and continued the government she inherited from Ehud Olmert on the back of increased funds for Charedi yeshivot and schools. That she preferred to stick to her principles was admirable, and a marked contrast to the man who did become Prime Minister. Netanyahu often acts as though being in power is the end rather than the means.

Secondly, she is the only leading Israeli politician in recent years to have made a point of speaking out on the need for Jewish pluralism in Israel and for really trying to ask questions about how to strengthen Jewish identity in Israel in a pluralistic way. In 2010 she even held a day-long conference in the Knesset on the subject, moderated by the Shalom Hartman Institute - one of the outstanding centers of open-minded Jewish and Zionist thought in the world.

Thursday 5 January 2012

Christopher Hitchens on fascism and religion: lessons for Israel


THE DEATH of Christopher Hitchens last month, at the age of 62, robbed the world of one its most eloquent advocates for freedom and democracy.

He was a man of contradictions: a graduate of British Marxism whose political hero was Thomas Jefferson; in 2000 he described George W. Bush as "unusually incurious, abnormally unintelligent, amazingly inarticulate, fantastically uncultured, extraordinarily uneducated, and apparently quite proud of all these things", and then vocally supported his re-election against Democrat John Kerry four years later. The victims of his mercilessly caustic pen also included Republican statesman Henry Kissinger, Democratic President Bill Clinton and even Mother Theresa ("She spent her life opposing the only known cure for poverty, the empowerment of women and the emancipation of them from a livestock version of compulsory reproduction").

However one consistent thread running through his seemingly scattergun worldview was his hatred of tyranny and oppression.  Indeed, his uncompromising atheism – of which more later – was based on his belief that religion equaled slavery, with God cast as an all-seeing, authoritarian overlord.  His socialism was, in his words, "anti-totalitarian" rather than "anti-imperialist". He eschewed the knee-jerk anti-Americanism so prevalent among European leftists, instead supporting US-led military campaigns against ethnic cleansers like Slobodan Milosevic and Saddam Hussein.