This week's postings at JfJfP.com


November 22, 2015
Sarah Benton

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This week, November 16-22, 2015 the 2002 Arab Peace Iniative, initiated by Saudi Arabia, has made a surprise comeback. Every few years somebody or other points to it as the best basis for negotiation:
New life for the Arab Peace Initiative

And the most recent person to pluck it out of the cupboard of MEPP failures is Tony Blair on his personal mission to achieve Middle East peace. [The full text of the API is in this posting.] He is finding that most Israelis believe a peace agreement is not possible, and that the Fatah/Hamas division makes talks hard to imagine. But we should remember that he met Khaled Meshaal in Doha last August:
Tony Blair leads talks with Hamas

so at least he’s on speaking terms with all parties:
Tony Blair’s gifts

At present, the parties seem to be on increasingly divergent paths, especially if we include young Palestinians as one of the parties:
A brief breeze or a great whirlwind?

The veteran Daoud Kuttab considers the question while another veteran, Jonathan Cook, writes eloquently about what Palestinians could achieve through non-violent direct action. Renunciation of violence does not mean kow-towing to the PNA:
Palestinians can reclaim non-violent resistance

The new order in Germany, instituted 1933, destroyed the known, vocal opponents (communists and social democrats) before moving onto the learning-disabled, morally degenerate (homosexuals, prostitutes), gypsies, Jews and all and any Slavs/Russians). Most Germans affected ignorance while this lethal ‘cleansing’ was proceeding. Ilana Hammerman accuses her fellow Israelis of affecting the same ignorance when it comes to the persecution of Palestinians.
Like the Germans, Israeli Jews don’t want to know about persecuted people

The keystone of Nazi power was the abolition of the rule of law. This included habeas corpus, due process, the customary honouring of rights to life, property and family life. These abnegations are features of all undemocratic regimes. A key feature is rule over police behaviour so that police stay within human rights rules. This appears to have been abandoned by the Israeli government which sits complacently while police or IDF carry out a shoot to kill policy. Adalah is on their case:
Israeli police acting outside law

Budgets are a good guide to who a government wants to enrich and who it hopes will wither and die. Mazal Mualem analyses Israel’s budget and finds most money is going to settlements and religious institutions. These are decisions which are likely to make Netanyahu’s job of selling Israel as ‘the only democracy in the Middle East’ more difficult:
Follow the money

Seeing which way the wind is blowing, settlers’ groups have begun lobbying the government for separate Israeli-Palestinian roads in the West Bank, in the name of security. These are the architects of apartheid.
Settlers demand apartheid road network

The toxic Ayelet Shaked is willing to push the new order more quickly than Netanyahu. She wants to create a ‘national security court’. It would use different criteria and processes from the Supreme Court and is a terrifying augury of states which suspend, or bypass, accepted judicial procedures.
Of cats, courts and the devouring sword

After two decades of quiescence, the new generation of Palestinians decides that has brought them no benefits. Their response is not the civil disobedience that Jonathan Cook yearns for (see above). It is the ‘knife intifada’. The numbers increase, and vary, day by day. At least 91 Palestinians have been shot dead and 15-17 Israelis killed. The numbers we provide are sober and have been checked.
The victims of the current conflict

The hideous slaughter by Daesh of young Parisian concert-goers has produced predictable responses from the Israeli PM’s office – not worth posting. Several commentators have attributed it to the Qu’ran. From far away in Seattle, Richard Silverstein hears and reads the Islamophobic tenor of much American coverage – a generalisation from the actions of a few – and asks why there are no such generalisations about Jews or the Torah after a murderous rampage by such as Baruch Goldstein?
Blame the cult not the sacred text

Those who can only see Muslims as mad killers blame the source: the Qu’ran. (As if the Torah and the New Testament did not have their own incitements to righteous and necessary killing.)

Incitement is the Israeli government’s official position on Palestinian unrest (why else would these docile, contented people get uppity?) Having first blamed Abbas and the PNA, the government is now blaming Islamist groups and has banned Raed Salah’s northern branch of the Islamic Movement although Shin Bet decided it was NOT a terrorist group:
Bibi seizes chance to ban Islamist group

Shlomo Ben-Ami, former Israeli foreign minister, suggests the idea of incitement as the fundamental force for action is embedded in Netanyahu’s history; he spent much of his pre-governmental life inciting lethal hostility to, for example, Yitzhak Rabin:
The man who knows all about incitement

To a disinterested observer, the entrenching of power with a settler/religious elite is very notable. The American Anthropological Association – who may or may not be disinterested – has voted to boycott Israeli academic institutions. As experts on social and family power dynamics, they may see Israeli society as a notable case of inequality and dysfunction:
American anthropologists vote to boycott Israel

 

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