This week's postings at JfJfP.com


November 29, 2015
Sarah Benton

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This week, November 23-29, 2015 a number of the postings are linked by the principle MidEast reality – the vacuum that was left after the overthrow of the dictators in which popular movements were fragmented and which then has sucked in jihadi groups with their grim form of law and order. Nouriel Roubini writes on ‘the arc of instability’ that now runs from the Maghreb to Afghanistan.
Glut of oil and weapons. No jobs or hope.

Ramzy Baroud, founder of Palestine Chronicle, looks at the same wrecked landscape but sees only the hand of American intervention.
The end of sanity, from US to MidEast

All the old dictators were nominally ruling on behalf of the people. The Palestinians constitute the great exception. Israel makes no pretence of being anything other than a colonial ruler. As Marc Ellis wrote, ‘Jewish theology and spirituality today is thoroughly infected with imperialism, colonialism, ethnic cleansing and atrocity. This includes the Jewish establishment…’ Jews of conscience have to venture into the most difficult ethical areas in order to hold onto that tradition. Robert Cohen praises Ellis’s thoughts and work.
Scavenging on a nearly wrecked ethical tradition

Al Shabaka (‘the Palestinian policy network’) is doing much to fill the political gap by running a series of articles by Palestinian political intellectuals.
PLO: should they go or should they stay?
and
Palestinian parties face irrelevance

For the older Palestinian generation as well as the Israeli state the continuing ‘knife intifada’ is deeply troubling. To the parents it can seem pointless and nihilistic, if comprehensible. (the latest fatality figures – 91 Palestinians, 19 Israeli Jews, are in The victims of the current conflict)

The Israeli government is in disarray and Netanyahu continues to ignore advice from the IDF and Shin Bet.
No agreed Israeli plan for Palestinian unrest

The compromise Netanyahu has reached with the IDF is to give military commanders the power to lock down any Palestinian village which has residents whom the IDF thinks might pose a threat to Israeli security. Thus most Palestinians are now subject to extra-judicial rule.
Military commanders given power to close Palestinian villages

Netanyahu has of course insisted that Israel is the victim of widespread terrorism, and alludes to ISIL. Opinion polls show that Daesh has very little support from Palestinians – which Netanyahu ignores.
Most Palestinians do not support ISIL

Furthermore, says the PM, the Israeli state will continue to control ‘security’ in the West Bank in the foreseeable future.
Israel wants to control security in future Palestinian state

He is taken to task by writers for JPost, normally the most conservative of the English-language Israeli papers, for his inability (refusal) to make distinctions between different Islamic tendencies:
Israel under threat by unified killer Muslims

Verbally, and occasionally physically, the worst antisemitism has been expressed in Belgium and France. The JTA has been hard at work publishing material on European antisemitism and the need to move to safety in Israel.
Fear of antisemitism in France and Belgium

Israeli Rogel Alpher says on the contrary, stay in France and make the most of your democracy. You won’t find it in Israel where the only thing you are asked to fight for is the sacredness of Israel.
Jews living in democracies – don’t move to Israel!

The discriminatory rules of law which Israel operates is apparent in its extremely lenient treatment of the settler youth who physically attacked Rabbi Arik Ascherman of Rabbis for Human Rights. The youth himself, and his Honenu defenders, blame all the conflict in Israel and the oPt on human rights’ groups.
Human rights groups blamed for conflict in Israel

In short, the underlying theme of this week, as so often, is that Israelis blame everyone – last week Sheikh Raed Salah, the week before social media, the week before that the PA, this week Daesh and human rights groups – but themselves and their occupation for the anger of Palestinians.

 

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