Washington Post (May25,2k11)
President Obama said Tuesday that he expected direct negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians to begin “well before” a moratorium on settlement construction expired at the end of September, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel pledged to take “concrete steps” in the coming weeks to get the talks moving.
The brilliant syndicated columnist of Washington Post (WaPo) writes analytically and succinctly of the precedents of the blockade maintained by Israel against the Hamas terrorist regime in Gaza, the tiny enclave of a million souls that snuggles into the shore line of the East Mediterranean sea between Israel's 6 million and Egypt's 80.5 million. I quote a brief snippet from WaPo's edition today (Jun3,2k3):
Oh, but weren't the Gaza-bound ships on a mission of humanitarian relief? No. Otherwise they would have accepted Israel's offer to bring their supplies to an Israeli port, be inspected for military materiel and have the rest trucked by Israel into Gaza -- as every week 10,000 tons of food, medicine and other humanitarian supplies are sent by Israel to Gaza.Krauthammer makes an informative geostrategic analysis of the h+ly relevant concepts pertinent to the specifics of Israel's defense against Hama terrorism from Gaza. The concepts to which he attends are Forward defense and Active defense, and there's a third, Passive defense which must be added given the present situation in the "international community."
Why was the offer refused? Because, as organizer Greta Berlin admitted, the flotilla was not about humanitarian relief but about breaking the blockade, i.e., ending Israel's inspection regime, which would mean unlimited shipping into Gaza and thus the unlimited arming of Hamas.
Land for peace. Remember? Well, during the past decade, Israel gave the land -- evacuating South Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005. What did it get? An intensification of belligerency, heavy militarization of the enemy side, multiple kidnappings, cross-border attacks and, from Gaza, years of unrelenting rocket attack.Since the Active Defense strategy did not work (2000, 2005, Krauthammer notes that Israel "then had to switch to active defense -- military action to disrupt, dismantle and defeat (to borrow President Obama's description of our campaign against the Taliban and al-Qaeda) the newly armed terrorist mini-states established in southern Lebanon and Gaza after Israel withdrew" (2006, 2008-09).
Thanks to law blog Volokh Conspiracy for these YouTube video stunners:
And:
Click on my blog-entry headline above, which will take you to David Bernstein's blog entry yesterday, "Pro-Palestinian "Peace Activists" in VC. Please read his text. Thanks and Hat Tip to Bernstein, VC, YouTube, and whoever video-documented the evidence.
I greatly regret the political impact of this "incident." Turkey has severed ties with Israel, where previously they had been allies, altho recently a cooling-off of relations between the two countries had already begun. Turkey was Isreal's only ally in the region, but the Turks have re-elected an Islamist party which greatly strengthened itself internally against the secularist Army there. The flotilla, a Trojan horse of 10,000 tons of aid carried on 6 ships sailing from Turkey, had among its 1,000 or so passengers embedded a cadre of pro-Hamas paramilitaries among its "peace activists." Bernstein's text, together with the vids, makes the point clear regarding the provocateurs in midst of the "mere" activists.
Further info on this breaking-news story:
•Israel processes Gaza activists, eyes new aid ship (Reuters via Yahoo! News, found it on the blue breaking-news ticker on my sidebar)
•Analysis: High-seas raid deepens Israeli isolation (Associated Press via Yahoo! News, May31,2k10). An excellent overview of this breaking news-story.
-- Politicarp
Under the title "Reforms transform Syrian economy, but not politics," by Associated Press via Yahoo! News, we get an updated bird's-eye view of a country usually seen from an Israeli perspective in much of the English-speaking world. But AP is claiming that the anti-Israeli identity has receded as the raison d'etre of Syria's current regime. Yes, the new entrepreneurs are "licensed" on the basis of polite intrigues and sycophancy by the govt sponsorsponsorship[, one imagines. Neverthless, the evidence of wealth has given Damascus and other urban centers a conspicuous cafe-life. Tho, of course, the gap between the rich (including now the new money), and the poor with the same old, same old, remains.
We need a better look at the universities and education. Are they increasing and receiving more students? What disciplines are growth zones of thawt in Syria? How are hospitals and the medical profession, with its specialists, faring?
While technically the Syrian state is still at war with Israel, one doesn't see Syria as planning and spending for that eventuality, if its putting money into hospitals and universities, and educating a new generation in a wide spectrum of professions.
One wonders how the ancient Christian communities of this country are faring these days.
The press* is gasping and grasping to report developments in Israel's defense assault on hyperfanatical Hamas which had long supplied a steady rain of rockets on Israeli territory. Hamas is a nationalist-Palestinian Islamic terrorist organization, with a world agenda, and a power base in the dense urban districts in Gaza. These districts and their neighborhoods have been "wired" by the Hamas Defense Force. How Hamas came to power in Gaza in the last 2 yrs (I should factcheck my time estimation); and then, as I mentioned, once solidly in power in Gaza, how Hamas institutionalized the dribble of rocket attacks into Israeli populations, a practice already indigenous to some Gazans, finally instituted that continuous dribble into a regular bombardment of Israelis, even civilians, of course: all these details constitute a book in themselves (of which there shall be dozens, we may be sure).
In the second info wave of the news cycle on this story, one got word from Jerusalem Post reporters Yaakov Katz and JPost.com staff (Jan3,2k9, Saturday nite Israel Defense Forces [IDF] "[were sweeping] into northern Gaza Strip." Meanwhile, the Cabinet (an often creaky coalition) "approved the call-up of tens of thousands of reservists, mostly from combat units, but also from the Home Front Command" -- just short, it seems to me, of a total mobilization of the society for war, just in case --
sources said that the goal was to conquer territory in northern Gaza, including rocket launch sites. Soldiers from the Armored Corps, Engineering Corps, and Paratroopers, Givati, Golani brigades were participating in the fighting, with at least four brigades' worth of troops inside the Gaza Strip. ¶ The sources said that a majority of the rockets fired into Beersheba [Israel] and Ashdod [Israel] were launched from the northern Gaza Strip.Tens of thousands of IDF combat reservists called up> by Jaakov Katz and JPost.com
One of the major aims of the operation was also to deliver a serious blow to the Hamas military wing, which the IDF estimated had not been severely weakened under the air campaign. ¶[But] The IDF would not enter Gaza City or the refugee camps .... "We must end the hostile actions against Israel... We will not abandon our citizens."
"The fragmentation has really frustrated the population," said Qais Abdul Karim, a Palestinian Legislative Council member who belongs to neither Fatah nor Hamas. "There is no unity in the national movement and no unity in the street. These attacks have increased the divisions. They should have done the opposite.At this very moment there seem to be two Arab entities in conflict, the West Bank (PA, Abbas, Fatah) vs. Gaza (Hamas).
That dynamic may explain, at least in part, why public reaction to the Gaza strikes in the Israeli-occupied West Bank has been milder than many analysts predicted.
The rift between the two factions hit a critical point in June 2007, when Hamas ousted Fatah security forces from Gaza after bloody street battles. Since then, Hamas, which won the 2006 Palestinian legislative elections, has had sole control of Gaza. Fatah has continued to exercise power in the West Bank, where it has banned Hamas from political activity.Israel's attacks on Gaza deepen Palestinian rift by Griff Witte, Jan1,2k9.WaPo.
The fortunes of the two territories -- which together with East Jerusalem would make up a future Palestinian state -- have diverged sharply since the Hamas takeover of Gaza. While economic conditions for the 2.5 million Palestinians in the West Bank have improved as international development money poured in, Gaza's 1.5 million people have suffered under a strict Israeli embargo.
In Ramallah, seat of power for the Fatah-run administration and one of the wealthiest cities in the West Bank, businessmen sip lattes in European-style cafes and car dealerships showcase gleaming new Mercedes-Benzes. In Gaza City, the home base of Hamas, donkeys sometimes outnumber cars because of fuel shortages and residents fight over their daily allocation of bread.
Israeli restrictions on the movement of Palestinians in both territories -- which are separated by about 30 miles of Israeli land -- have deepened the sense of disconnection between Gaza and the West Bank.
