Elder of Ziyon Daily Digest

Why peace is impossible, reason #2671
Syria update: Syrian embassy in US is threatening protesters!
Latest Latma (7/29/11)
Should Israel's policies be dictated by fears of becoming a "pariah"?
Abbas unclear on the concept of "popular resistance"
US Treasury Department details Iran/Al Qaeda links
A honor massacre in Pakistan: Father kills six daughters

Posted: 29 Jul 2011 11:20 AM PDT

A most interesting piece in Dissent magazine by Michael Walzer:

In a "solidarity" march for an independent Palestinian state earlier in July, roughly 90 percent of the marchers were Israeli Jews, but all the flags were Palestinian. Israeli flags were banned at the insistence of the Palestinians, who said that they wouldn't join the march unless their flags were the only ones carried. In the event, not many of them joined anyway. The Israelis agreed to the ban (though many of my friends were unhappy about it), arguing that their flag had become the symbol of occupation and oppression. But that was only true because the settlers and their far-right supporters always march with the flag, while the Left has given it up. And that may help explain why leftist demonstrations and marches are so small these days.

There are many reasons, of course, for the current weakness of the Left. But its militants might begin to overcome their weakness if they were seen by their fellow citizens to be insisting, with a strong (rather than a bleeding) heart, that solidarity has to be a two-way street. They should say to the Palestinians: we will march with your flag only if you march with ours. And they should say to all Israel: our program, two states for two peoples, offers the best hope of securing the national sovereignty that this flag, which we carry proudly, is supposed to represent.

This is a picture-perfect example of hope running roughshod over reality.

Let's say you are walking down a city street and see someone wearing this pin:

What are the chances that he or she is Palestinian Arab?

The answer - as everyone knows, even Mr. Walzer - is zero. The market for these pins ends at the Green Line.

Let's pretend that the Left actually insists that Palestinian Arabs march with the Israeli flag, that if they really want co-existence they must show it in a tangible way. How would the other side react?

They would flat-out refuse. They would insist that the Israeli flag represents apartheid, and genocide, and ethnic cleansing. Their faces would blanch at the thought of it. They would tell the leftists - sorry, but even if it means we lose your support, we will never hold an Israeli flag unless it is to burn it.

As has been pointed out before, there is no equivalent to the Israeli and Western leftist/peace movement among Palestinian Arabs. There is no voice - at least none that can be seen in the Arabic media - demanding that Mahmoud Abbas make "painful compromises" for peace, no peace rallies, no op-eds demanding a resumption of negotiations. Is there a single Palestinian Arab dissident, willing to go to prison, for demanding Abbas give up anything for peace?

This article inadvertently proves that real peace is impossible. And pretending that it will happen if Israel does X, Y and Z is pure wishful thinking.

(Other posts on why peace is impossible: Here, here, here, here..)

(h/t Zach N)

Syria update: Syrian embassy in US is threatening protesters!

Posted: 29 Jul 2011 10:02 AM PDT

Al Jazeera (via Now Lebanon) reports that nine protesters were killed today - so far.

There are reports of more soldiers defecting from the Syrian army.

Here is an extremely graphic video of a man who had been tortured and killed in Syria.

A bomb struck a major oil pipeline in western Syria.

The biggest rally today seems to be this one in Hama, where you can see hundreds of thousands of people.

And here is a chilling story from Al Arabiya:

Early one Friday morning in late April, Hala Abdulaziz, a 29-year-old interior designer, went online from her apartment in Alexandria, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, DC, to check the latest on protests in her home country of Syria.

Moments later, Hala recognized her father in a video of demonstrators under fire. Two other protestors carried him slung between them as he bled profusely into a shirt she gave him on her last trip to Damascus.

Unable to reach her family over jammed telephone lines, Hala didn't receive confirmation that her father had died until she saw his name, Abdalgafar Abdulaziz, on a list of people killed on a news program. It was another month and a half before she could get through to her family on the phone.

"The situation is very bad for us," Hala told Al Arabiya. "I just wanted to talk to my mom, see her, console her, hear from her directly how they are. I had no way of knowing for six weeks."

In the following month, Hala sought recourse the only way she could from Washington – she sued Bashar Al Assad and members of his regime under an American legal clause that gives US citizens the right to sue foreign governments for torturing or killing their relatives.

That's when the scare tactics began. As the Federal Bureau of Investigation later learned, employees of the Syrian Embassy in Washington were behind a campaign of intimidation.

"Someone called me, speaking Arabic, and said they would take my daughter in Syria, kill my family, and kill me if I didn't drop the case," said Hala. She says her five-year-old daughter, who lives with her mother in Damascus, was seized by authorities for five hours, while two of her brothers were arrested and tortured.

Hala is one of many receiving threats from the embassy, according to Syrian activist Mohammad Abdallah, who served jail time in Syria for political dissidence before moving to the US.

Mr. Abdallah recounted run-ins with embassy employees at protests over the past few months. Employees would film and photograph demonstrators, and threaten to send their names to intelligence officials in Syria to put pressure on their families back home.

"Many activists were receiving threats, so they came together to report them to the authorities. The FBI investigation revealed that the threats were coming from people employed by the embassy… so the embassy was conducting surveillance on American citizens," said Abdallah.

One activist's mother was barred from leaving Syria, and others have had family members arrested, prompting some protestors to start covering their faces during demonstrations.

US officials are taking the accusations seriously. The State Department summoned Syrian Ambassador Imad Moustapha to address the complaints earlier in July. As recently as Wednesday this week, Assistant Secretary for the Middle East Jeffrey Feltman said the FBI will continue to investigate the embassy's actions.

Hala Abdulaziz remains undeterred, though she said the FBI recently started watching her apartment after she reported a suspicious man from the embassy lurking near her home. She says she will continue to demand accountability for the Syrian regime – not just on behalf of her father, but also for the hundreds of thousands of Syrians who have sacrificed.

"I will not drop the case until Bashar Al Assad is brought to justice."

Latest Latma (7/29/11)

Posted: 29 Jul 2011 08:49 AM PDT

Some new faces in this one.

Should Israel's policies be dictated by fears of becoming a "pariah"?

Posted: 29 Jul 2011 07:05 AM PDT

In my Twitter exchange with Jeffrey Goldberg yesterday, he pretty much admitted that Israel's giving up the West Bank would very possibly not bring Israel peace anyway. But he fell back to a second argument for Israel's withdrawal from the territory:

I believe, however, that Israel will become a pariah if the Palestinians aren't granted statehood, or the vote in Israel.

My point was that a Palestinian Arab state could exist while Israel still holds onto parts of the territories deemed necessary for security as well as areas that already have large Jewish communities.

But the issue he brought up, that Israel would become a pariah if it didn't act in certain ways, is worth exploring.

What makes Israel unpopular?

I would argue that it has almost nothing to do with Israeli policies. While certain Israeli actions cause Western opinion to temporarily go in one direction or another, the general trend of opinion is independent of Israeli actions.

The Western world liked Israel in 1967 and after Entebbe in 1976. It liked Israel immediately after the peace agreement with Egypt but that disappeared soon after. It liked Israel after the Gaza withdrawal but that disappeared when Israel acted to stop the rockets that still rained down. The world liked Israel a little after the withdrawal from Lebanon but that disappeared as well. It liked Israel after the Oslo agreement was signed but it was silent when suicide bombings flared up in years afterwards. In other words, world opinion is mercurial and the world has a short-term memory, driven by the most recent news.

But underneath the zig-zag chart of world opinion of Israel there is a longer trend against Israel, a trend that is relentlessly downward. We now live in a world where people who seem otherwise intelligent have no problem singling out Israel for perceived crimes that she is far less guilty of that even other Western nations under remotely similar circumstances. (One only has to look at the hysterical reaction to the admittedly problematic "BDS law" while comparing it to the criminal restrictions on freedom of speech in most European countries today, for a recent example.)

What is behind this continuous downtrend of world opinion?

There is, and always will be, a large and hard core set of people who are against Israel's very existence. They hated the idea of a Jewish state before it was born, they hated Israel when it was a tiny struggling nation, they hated it when it won and they hated it when it lost. This core consists of Arabs and the radical hard-Left.

Any reasonable observer can identify that the source of this irrational, seething hate is good old-fashioned anti-semitism. There is no other explanation for the double standards and disproportionate focus on only the Jewish state.

But anti-semitism is declasse. So this hate has been redefined in terms of human rights, of Arab rights, of Israeli aggression, of fairness and justice, of a tiny oppressed underdog against a huge Zionist war machine.

This coalition of Arabs and hard-left Jew-haters has been cynically framing the argument in these terms, consistently, for decades now. But make no mistake - it is a strategy, not a spontaneous expression of digust at supposed Israeli crimes. The PLO (probably in coordination with the Soviets) sketched this strategy out immediately after the Six Day War, and published it in the Palestine National Assembly Political Resolutions in July, 1968:

The enemy consists of three interdependent forces:
a) Israel.
b) World Zionism.
c) World imperialism, under the direction of the United States of America.

Moreover, it is incontestable that world imperialism makes use of the forces of reaction linked with colonialism.

If we are to achieve victory and gain our objectives, we shall have to strike at the enemy wherever he may be, and at the nerve centres of his power. This is to be achieved through the use of military, political and economic weapons and information media, as part of a unified and comprehensive plan designed to sap his strength, scatter his forces, destroy the links between them and undermine their common objectives.

A long-drawn out battle has the advantage of allowing us to expose world Zionism, its activities, conspiracies, and its complicity with world imperialism and to point out the damage and complications it causes to the interests and the security of many countries, and the threat it constitutes to world peace. This will eventually unmask it, bringing to light the grotesque facts of its true nature, and will isolate it from the centres of power and establish safeguards against its ever reaching them...

An information campaign must be launched that will throw light on the following facts:

a) The true nature of the Palestinian war is that of a battle between a small people, which is the Palestinian people, and Israel, which has the backing of world Zionism and world imperialism.

b) This war will have its effect on the interests of any country that supports lsrael or world Zionism.

c) The hallmark of the Palestinian Arab people is resistance, struggle and liberation, that of the enemy, aggression, usurpation and the disavowal of all values governing decent human relations.

This blueprint has really not changed much since 1968. The goal of these rabid Israel-haters is to divide Israel from the Western world, especially America, by painting Israel as an aggressive bully that is trampling on the rights of a poor but proud people. It is no coincidence that this plan was conceived in the aftermath of a war where combined Arab armies tried unsuccessfully to destroy Israel and when Israel was riding a wave of popularity.

The larger Left, which is not anti-semitic, has over the years slowly adapted these exact talking points as their own. This is not out of malice towards Israel so much as it is because most of their members do not know enough to argue with these points and Israel did a poor job countering them in the same frame of reference. Indeed, Israel has little to apologize for in its human rights record towards the Palestinian Arabs in the territories, and has always sought to solve the problem in the framework of a larger Middle East peace process. The problem is that the hard-left has successfully decoupled the Palestinian Arab issue from the larger Israel-Arab issue (even though even this same PLO document admits that the two are the same.) Israel, a tiny and besieged country that craves peace, has been successfully cast as a big warmongering bully.

This demonization of Israel has been infecting the rhetoric of the Left for a long time now. It is unlikely that Israel can stop it. In fact, there is an easy formula for Israel's enemies keep it alive. Even if Israel accedes to all of the current demands by the PLO, we have seen in the past how easily world opinion can be turned against Israel again - just stage more attacks. Israel's response will almost inevitably and regrettably kill civilians, and all the goodwill gained would evaporate in an instant. It happened in Gaza, it happened in Lebanon, and the lies of Jenin prove that it can happen even if Israel doesn't do anything wrong.

Given this, Israel's media strategy must be to fight the battle using the same language of human rights that has been co-opted by her enemies. It takes time to reframe the argument but that is the only option.

The fact is that a great number of Palestinian Arabs are not under Israeli rule, but living as second-class citizens under Arab rule. Issues like these need to be publicized so that Israel doesn't suffer from the tunnel-vision imposed by those with an agenda that does not accept Israel's right to exist to begin with. It is a regional issue that must be solved in a comprehensive way, and if that is impossible then a detente is the best we can hope for.

It should go without saying that Israel must act morally. The first duty of any sovereign nation is to protect its citizens, and the human rights of Israelis must be protected no less than those of Palestinian Arabs. Israel must safeguard Palestinian Arab rights as much as humanly possible without compromising on the security of Israel's own citizens.

This, not PR, must be he driving force behind Israel's policy and strategy. Major decisions cannot and should not be driven by external pressure. If a Palestinian Arab state can be set up where Israel is not threatened with terror and rockets and continuous demands for more and more concessions even after an agreement, then peace can be here pretty quickly. But short of that, concessions given because of political pressure are usually counterproductive.

One more point. It is worth noting that Western nations, and probably even Arab nations, are far more sympathetic towards Israel than they say publicly. Every nation is keenly aware of its own challenges and the threat of separatists, anarchists and terrorists are shared among most nations. There is a big game going on where states are willing to publicly castigate Israel to mollify the Arab world - with the full knowledge that the US will act as the "bad cop" and ensure that Israel doesn't fall. This is far from ideal, and it might not be sustainable, but it is also not as bad as it sometimes sounds from the media obsession about unrelenting pressure on Israel.

Abbas unclear on the concept of "popular resistance"

Posted: 29 Jul 2011 05:54 AM PDT

From Reuters:

President Mahmoud Abbas urged Palestinians Wednesday to step up peaceful protests against Israel, urging "popular resistance" inspired by the Arab Spring to back a diplomatic offensive at the United Nations.

Abbas, addressing a Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) meeting, reiterated his decision to seek full U.N. membership for a state of Palestine alongside Israel, a diplomatic move resulting from paralysis in the U.S.-backed peace process.

"In this coming period, we want mass action, organised and coordinated in every place," Abbas said. "This is a chance to raise our voices in front of the world and say that we want our rights."

"I insist on popular resistance and I insist that it be unarmed popular resistance so that nobody misunderstands us. We are now inspired by the protests of the Arab Spring, all of which cry out 'peaceful', 'peaceful'," he said.

The entire point of the Arab Spring is that the protests were conceived, organized and carried out by the people.

If Abbas is telling his people to protest, by definition it is not a "popular protest." It is more like the cynical rallies that Bashir Assad has been organizing to pretend that the Syrians are really behind him.

Then again, Mahmoud Abbas has far more in common with Bashir Assad than with any Western head of state. His term as president expired years ago, he refuses to hold new elections, he ruthlessly acts against media that is not toeing the line, he severely limits anti-PA protests, and his leadership derives not from any election but from his being the head of the PLO to which the PA answers, and he hand-picked his prime minister. Does he sound like a democratic leader?

(h/t Yoel)

US Treasury Department details Iran/Al Qaeda links

Posted: 29 Jul 2011 04:30 AM PDT

From NYT:

The Treasury Department on Thursday accused the Iranian authorities of aiding Al Qaeda and said it was imposing financial sanctions on six people believed to be Qaeda operatives in Iran, Kuwait, Qatar and Pakistan.

Weighing in on the puzzling question of whether Iran's Shiite regime seeks to help the primarily Sunni Al Qaeda, Treasury officials asserted that the Iranian government had entered into an agreement with operatives of the terrorist group and was allowing the country to be used as a transit point for funneling money and people from the Persian Gulf to Pakistan and Afghanistan.

The officials say they have become convinced that Ezedin Abdel Aziz Khalil, whom they described as a "prominent Iran-based Al Qaeda facilitator," is operating in Iran under an agreement between Al Qaeda and the government.

"This network serves as the core pipeline through which Al Qaeda moves money, facilitators and operatives from across the Middle East to South Asia, including to Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, a key Al Qaeda leader based in Pakistan," the Treasury said in a statement.

Mr. Rahman, another of the six people named in the Treasury action, is believed to have recently ascended to the No. 2 position in Al Qaeda, reporting directly to the organization's new leader, Ayman al-Zawahri, who took over after the death of Osama bin Laden.

"By exposing Iran's secret deal with Al Qaeda allowing it to funnel funds and operatives through its territory, we are illuminating yet another aspect of Iran's unmatched support for terrorism," said David S. Cohen, the Treasury under secretary for terrorism and financial intelligence.

[O]ne senior administration said the action sought to expose both "a key funding facilitation network for Al Qaeda and a key aspect for Iranian support for international terrorism."

"Our sense is this network is operating through Iranian territory with the knowledge and at least the acquiescence of Iranian authorities," the official said in a conference call with reporters.

In May, a congressional panel released a report detailing military ties between Al Qaeda and the Al Quds force of Iran's Revolutionary Guards.

A footnote in this MEMRI report on a previously unknown Al Qaeda leader who emerged after Bin Laden's assassination notes that he had lived in Iran for years.

None of this is strong evidence for high-level cooperation between Iran and Al Qaeda, but there is no reason to doubt that they do cooperate when it is convenient for both of them.

(h/t Yoel)

A honor massacre in Pakistan: Father kills six daughters

Posted: 29 Jul 2011 02:41 AM PDT

From the Express Tribune (Pakistan):

A man gunned down six of his daughters on suspicion that two of them were in relationships with boys in the neighbourhood.

On Tuesday morning, Arif Mubashir called his teenage daughters to his room and shot them while the rest of the family, including their mother, watched. His wife Musarrat called the police after the incident.

Mubashir shot the girls after their brother said two of them were in a relationship. He told police officials that he had killed his daughters because they were both "without honour". The man said his daughters Sameena, 14, and Razia, 16, were in a relationship with college boys from the neighbourhood and the sisters had helped each other. "I should have been told immediately but the girls sided with each other. They were both corrupt," Mubashir told Tandlianwala Police Inspector Javed Sial.

Police officials have taken Mubashir into custody and filed a case against him. "He does not regret what he did. He boasted that he would do it all over again if he had to," Sial told reporters.

And if the mother would have objected to the murders, there would be seven victims.

(h/t jzaik)