Juan Cole took the gloves off this morning and dug deep to analyze the reasons why seven pro-democracy activists died last night in Tahrir Square, Cairo. Many more will no doubt follow, as Mubarak and Egypt's elites have no intention of allowing Egypt to become a representative democracy any more than Israeli PM Netanyahu intends to allow a Palestinian state to come into existence. Following Netanyahu, yesterday Mubarak gave Obama the bird, apparently knowing that he would wimp out in any confrontation.
To be sure, it is not Obama's fault that the American presidency has become so weak and submissive toward Israel, a pattern Egypt is now following. It has almost become a tradition that goes back at least to Clinton when was browbeaten by Netanyahu in the oval office during his first term.
When Wikileaks published its expose of the phony Israeli-Palestinian peace process a few weeks ago, it merely repeated what skeptics like Cole knew all along.
This suggestion, to settle Palestinian refugees in South America, which was just revealed in the Palestine Papers, is probably the most biased, outlandish move on the part of the US to help Israel completely disenfranchise the Palestinian people of their ancestral homelands, in what became Israel in 1948, and what is now the remaining Palestinian territories. The Palestinian refugee problem was created when Israel, starting two months before it declared independence, began ethnically cleansing by force and fear (of massacre) over 800,000 Palestinians from over 470 villages, towns, and cities, from what had been their home for over a thousand years.
Israel's present goal to colonize the Palestinian territories including East Jerusalem, the remaining 22% of original Palestine, finds that there is now no room for the five million or so Palestinians living in UNWRA refugee camps in various Arab countries like Jordan and Lebanon, not even in a negotiated state of Palestine.
Why? Because the state of Palestine will never exist as more than a group of overpopulated bantustans. With the help of US subterfuge, Palestine has been completely obliterated. Only fools will now talk about a two state solution or a Palestinian state. With the Palestine Papers now making it evident that the peace process is dead, it can only assumed that Condi Rice, who suggested that Palestinian refugees be moved to South America, knew all along that Israel had no intention of allowing Palestine, as part of a two state solution, to emerge. Since this clashes with Palestinian refugees' fundamental right to go home ala UN Resolution 194, it is also clear that the US had no intention of respecting international law. As such, we have taken to the 'dark side' when it comes to Middle East.
The UK Guardian's main intro story on the Palestine Papers paints a bleak picture of a deeply dishonest--as well as misguided--process under Bush that Obama did nothing serious to change. The proper backdrop for all this is the 2002 Arab League Peace Deal, which Secretary of State Colin Powell was initially enthusiastic about. But Bush & the neocons around him saw it as a distraction from the war they wanted to take over Iraq, so it was simply allowed to languish. Not only could that plan have brought about regional peace and security, in doing so it would have dramatically reduced the recruting potential for terrorists. It was exactly the sort of pragmatic solution that rightwing ideologues hate. And because that most promising of all approaches was simply ignored, this is what unfolded instead:
Secret papers reveal slow death of Middle East peace process
Massive new leak lifts lid on negotiations
PLO offered up key settlements in East Jerusalem
Concessions made on refugees and Holy sites
Seumas Milne and · Ian Black, · Middle East editor
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 23 January 2011 20.08 GMT
The biggest leak of confidential documents in the history of the Middle East conflict has revealed that Palestinian negotiators secretly agreed to accept Israel's annexation of all but one of the settlements built illegally in occupied East Jerusalem. This unprecedented proposal was one of a string of concessions that will cause shockwaves among Palestinians and in the wider Arab world.
A cache of thousands of pages of confidential Palestinian records covering more than a decade of negotiations with Israel and the US has been obtained by al-Jazeera TV and shared exclusively with the Guardian. The papers provide an extraordinary and vivid insight into the disintegration of the 20-year peace process, which is now regarded as all but dead.
The documents - many of which will be published by the Guardian over the coming days - also reveal:
The scale of confidential concessions offered by Palestinian negotiators, including on the highly sensitive issue of the right of return of Palestinian refugees.
How Israeli leaders privately asked for some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state.
The intimate level of covert co-operation between Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Authority.
The central role of British intelligence in drawing up a secret plan to crush Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
How Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders were privately tipped off about Israel's 2008-9 war in Gaza.
As well as the annexation of all East Jerusalem settlements except Har Homa, the Palestine papers show PLO leaders privately suggested swapping part of the flashpoint East Jerusalem Arab neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah for land elsewhere.
Most controversially, they also proposed a joint committee to take over the Haram al-Sharif/Temple Mount holy sites in Jerusalem's Old City - the neuralgic issue that helped sink the Camp David talks in 2000 after Yasser Arafat refused to concede sovereignty around the Dome of the Rock and al-Aqsa mosques.
The offers were made in 2008-9, in the wake of George Bush's Annapolis conference, and were privately hailed by the chief Palestinian negotiator, Saeb Erekat, as giving Israel "the biggest Yerushalayim [the Hebrew name for Jerusalem] in history" in order to resolve the world's most intractable conflict. Israeli leaders, backed by the US government, said the offers were inadequate.
Intensive efforts to revive talks by the Obama administration foundered last year over Israel's refusal to extend a 10-month partial freeze on settlement construction. Prospects are now uncertain amid increasing speculation that a negotiated two-state solution to the conflict is no longer attainable - and fears of a new war....
The overall impression that emerges from the documents, which stretch from 1999 to 2010, is of the weakness and growing desperation of PA leaders as failure to reach agreement or even halt all settlement temporarily undermines their credibility in relation to their Hamas rivals; the papers also reveal the unyielding confidence of Israeli negotiators and the often dismissive attitude of US politicians towards Palestinian representatives....
The great tragedy here for America--and for Obama, who never seemed to even know what he was missing--is that failing to pursue the Arab League's offer ensured the ongoing spread of violent conflict and distrust along multiple vectors, that is now turning the neo-con fantasy of an endless "Long War" into a reality that none but the extremist ideologues on all sides get anyting out of.
WHAT "left wing"? How easily we overlook today the fact that the so-called "left wing" in Israel - aka Mapai/Labor - is the party that initiated the 1967 war, instituted the Alon Plan for the illegal colonization of the occupied territories, illegally colonized, and ultimately illegally annexed the Golan Heights, build the first "settlements" (more accurately called colonies) in the OPT, and in the earlier decades of the occupation did far more actual confiscation, destruction, and construction of "facts on the ground" than the "right wing". As we used to say, "Likud talks about settlements, Labor builds them".
I recently reported on the tragic death of the Palestinian protester Jawaher Abu Rahma, who was asphyxiated by an American made 'tear gas' grenade during a demonstration in the Palestinian town of Bil'in.
Here is an epitaph written on her death by Mohammed Rabah Suliman, which demonstrates the resolve of the Palestinian people to achieve freedom and self-determination via a country called Palestine in their own ancestral lands.
Experts widely concede that Israel cannot maintain its occupation and colonialism of the Palestinian territories (and siege of Gaza) except that it remains on a war footing.
David Reeb is a 58 year old Israeli peace activist has, for the past two years, documented the continuing Palestinian fight for freedom and self-determination in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Here are some of the latest nonviolent protests that took place over the past couple of weeks, in November.
We've been told--even by people like Kieth Olbermann, who should know better--that theWikiLeaks document dump of State Department cables contains very little serious information. But, of course, that perception is generated by the same press corps that was totally clueless about its own role in fraudulently leading our nation to war against an ideological enemy of those who attacked us on 9/11. Such a press corps has already proven itself professrionally incapable of recognizing what is significant, and what is not--much less what is simply an outright lie. To understand the value and significance of the WikiLeaks document dump, you must turn to those who have a reasonable recor of understanding US foreign policy and international relations in the first place. This is why Tuesday's program of Democracy Now! was so important. First off, Amy Goodman interviewed Investigations Executive Editor David Leigh at the Guardian, who told her that much more was to come:
DAVID LEIGH: These revelations aren't over yet. In fact, they've barely started. We at the Guardian and the other international news organizations will be making revelations, disclosures from now, day-by-day, for probably the next week or more. So, we haven't seen anything yet, really.... In the coming days, we're going to see some quite startling disclosures about Russia, the nature of the Russian state and about bribery and corruption in other countries, particularly in Central Asia. We're going to see a wrath of disclosures about pretty terrible things going on around the world.
AMY GOODMAN: What are your thoughts today? For example, we just played this clip of New York republican congress member Peter King who says WikiLeaks should be declared a foreign terrorist organization.
NOAM CHOMSKY: I think that is outlandish. We should understand--and the Pentagon Papers is another case in point--that one of the major reasons for government secrecy is to protect the government from its own population.... If you look at the papers themselves, there are things Americans should have known that others did not want them to know. And as far as I can tell, from what I've seen here, pretty much the same is true.
Goodman went on to play a clip of Hilary Clinton, trying to spin the cables to US propaganda advantage:
....subtitled, goodbye Tom J, who recently joined "the banned" at Daily Kos.
Strikes of political blogs are generally only symbolic protests and this one is no different. A week ago, a Daily Kos diarist was banned from the site by an administrator, for no apparent reason, which ticked off Arab and Palestinian bloggers, and their sympathizers. So one of them called for a strike, and others joined in.
The banning was of Tom J. Tom J was a regular diarist at Daily Kos who provided factual diaries about daily events taking place in Israel and Palestine against its indigenous inhabitants, the Palestinians. Diaries about the effects of Israel's occupation, the enforced colonization it has been conducting for over 40 years, stories about killings, house demolitions, wrecking of farmlands and orchards, and deprivation of water resources, all for the purpose of expanding Jewish settlements, the towns and cities Israel has built over the years on stolen Palestinian lands.
Tom J provided a daily account of the horrors taking place through news stories, pictures, and videos, the kind of reporting that is usually censored from mainstream US media. Without implying conspiracy, Tom J is also the proprietor of the site, STOP AIPAC.
By simply revealing the reality, Tom J continually disturbed the large gang of right wing Zionists who blog at Daily Kos, viewed his diaries as Israel-bashing, and him as part of the "Israel is always wrong" crowd. However, under the brutal conditions of the Palestinian occupation/colonialism, there has never been an "Israel is right" diary posted on Daily Kos that justified Israel's behavior toward the Palestinians. Diaries about left wing peace activism inside Israel or Palestine or in the US, especially among Jewish peace groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, recently condemned as anti-Israel by the ADL, have always been considered Israel-bashing, strange as it may seem.
Picked up this blast of the ADL, and its bigoted leader, Abe Foxman, a little late, but since the ADL has joined the right wing pro-Israel lobby and will presumably continue with its anti-Palestinian, anti-Arab, and anti-Islamic diatribes, it seemed to be a good place to start understanding the ADL. This is not the ADL of old, you understand, which had been active since 1903 as a force fighting anti-Semitism in the US, and now in Europe. It is the new ADL that is willing to partake of bigotry itself if it believe that it will in some way benefit Israel.
The subtitle says it all: "Abe Foxman calls Jewish Voice for Peace one of the "top 10 anti-Israel groups in America"
Self-haters the JVPers are no doubt, all of them. Here's some of the Salon War Room text, this time not written by Glenn Greenwald, but by Justin Elliott.
STATE BLOGS
