Archive for the ‘Netanyahu’ tag
Obama on the Middle East – Full of Sound and Fury, Signifying Nothing.
Lincoln, eat your heart out.
Among Thespians quoting Macbeth is seen as tempting the fates, but I hope they hold off from bringing me bad luck, because there really is no better way of describing the quintessential Obama than to borrow from the Bard.
Obama clearly loves the idea of being an orator. He stands at the podium, poised, easy, modulated, with a careful cadence to match his apparently oracular wisdom. There really is nobody around that’s better than Barack at looking the part. But it’s a con job. He seems so good at soaring rhetoric, he fools most of us that he is actually that good.
He isn’t.
His speeches are grab bags of ideas guaranteed to address every angle of every situation, the pros the cons, the acceptable, and even, flirtingly, the unacceptable. They please everyone and no-one, are both bold and conservative. And the result is that when the speeches are all added up, nobody really knows what the man has said, and thus begins the – to quote one pundit’s apt response to the recent Middle East speech – talmudic parsing of every word.
In the current round of tea-leaf sorting that’s going on over Obama’s State Department speech, many people are under the mistaken impression that he signalled a sea-change in US Middle Eastern policy, drawing together the strands of US policy up until now haphazardly expressed in the so-called “Arab Spring”. It’s not true. Nothing has changed about US policy. It’s still the same as it was in Condi Rice’s State Department, an unseemly, and ill-coordinated compote of neo-conservative wishful thinking on the one hand, with Bismarckian realpolitik on the other. And with these two being essentially exclusive in concept, and message, we’re in the same old hot mess we’ve been in for a decade. Read the rest of this entry »
Thereisnoplan Prediction – Unilateral Declaration of Palestinian State Coming Soon
It’s been a whirlwind in the Middle East since the turn of the year. Dictators toppled, others wobbled, others definitely off their appetites. There’s been a profound ‘decolonization’ of the Arab World, to the point where we can hardly talk of an “Arab World” at all. The fragmentation of the historical legacy of Western control of these disparate collections of people, most Muslim, many not is in full flow. There are and will be many changes, and the history of profound stagnation might alter for better and perhaps for worse.
Among the many truths that is emerging is this, Palestinians can no longer depend on the same friends they once had. In many respects, in Syria, Jordan, the Emirates, and in Saudi Arabia, a new-found urgency to remedy the injustices of their own populations means that the Palestinian cause isn’t quite so useful as a means of social control anymore. The Egyptian transitional government’s brokering of ‘peace’ between Fatah and Hamas, is an apparent exception, but even that is more about jockeying for domestic points with a restive Egyptian population.
Fatah and Hamas realize that without attempting to unify they can never hope to make any headway against an economically and militarily strong Israeli state that has been bolstered by the chaos outside their borders. This at a time when Fatah has made it clear it’s focused on a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian sovereign state. Ramallah knows that the world will not look kindly on the creation of that state unless the orphan status of Gaza is taken into account. Is Gaza to be a part of it or not? And if not, what will its status be. Therefore, in order to declare that state, Gaza must be part of it. Read the rest of this entry »
Israel must shape its future before the future is out of its hands
Israel must control its destiny
There are three possible paths for Israel to take, and two outcomes.
The paths are as follows; First, a two-state solution, in which Israel and Palestine sit side by side and Palestine becomes a client state of Israel. Second, a one state solution in which Israel falls under the demographic hammer and loses its identity after a monumental all-consuming war. Third , resistance to any solution in which Israel falls under the demographic hammer, and loses its identity after a monumental all-consuming war.
Clearly, the only path that is remotely feasible is the first, and yet there is a very good chance that the next prime minister of Israel will be a man for whom all but the third option are complete anathema. Netanyahu speaks the language of pragmatism, but with Avigdor Lieberman breathing down his neck, it’s unlikely to go anywhere. This is a problem, a very, very big problem. And it’s made worse by the fact that in a few years the demographic future of Israel will become very obvious to the Palestinians who will quite simply wait Israel out, until they outnumber the Jews in Israel proper. That possibility makes the two-state option all the more important to pursue now. To do it, Israel needs to both assert its power, and make powerful and strategic concessions.
Bush Laterals to Obama. Mid-East Peace
don't fumble my legacy, dude
Among all the other total disasters Bush is handing over to Obama is the small matter of finding peace in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. But the current attacks on Gaza are part of an old school of thought. The future of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will have a completely new landscape.
Benny Morris, a prominent historian of Israeli History wrote a superb primer on Israel’s current predicament in the New York Times. To sum it up, Israel faces unconventional enemies in both Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza, as well as the looming threat of Iran’s nuclear ambitions, and the demographic ticking time bomb of the increasingly radicalized and fast growing Arab-Israeli population that is likely to outnumber the Israeli Jews by 2040 or 2050. Read the rest of this entry »
