Should Israel be in Bush’s Back Seat?

Ever since Israel’s invasion of Lebanon last summer, I’ve been wondering about the changing nature of the U.S.-Israel relationship — it was plain in that conflict that the Bush Administration actually wanted Israel to go a lot further than Israel was ready to go in terms of committing forces to a battle to eliminate Hizballah. We’d all watched over a couple of years how Ariel Sharon had cynically walked back a hopelessly naive Bush and Rice from most traditional U.S. positions on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — much to the chagrin of Colin Powell and Brent Scowcroft. But still, the expectation was that the U.S. ultimately needed to balance Israeli interests with those of those of its Arab allies (even if, under first Clinton and then Bush, that balance was increasingly, untenably tilted in favor of Israel). Israel’s neophyte leadership plunged into Lebanon, no doubt assuming that the U.S. would soon enough call a halt, allowing Israel to make a symbolic “deterrent” point without getting too mired (or bloodied) in a ground war in Lebanon. Instead, it found the U.S. essentially demanding that it finish the job. Where once the U.S. had acted as a restraint, now it had created a vacuum. And for an Israeli leadership weaned on the principle that the U.S. would always set the limits, this was a disaster.

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Israelis, Jimmy Carter and Apartheid

Jimmy Carter has been branded as everything from an agent of Saudi Arabia to a cyrpto anti-Semite in a campaign of unprecedented hysteria by a Zionist establishment desperate to squelch any discussion in America of the moral implications of Israel’s apartheid policies in the West Bank and Gaza. So what, one imagines, would the same apparatus of Orwellian obfuscation, denial and diversion make of Tommy Lapid. Never mind apartheid, Lapid last week compared the actions of the Hebron settlers who regularly and viciously abuse the town’s Palestinian majority to the behavior of European anti-Semites in the early Nazi era. It’s entirely appropriate that someone draw attention to the vicious racism of the Hebron settlers, but you’d imagine the Alan Dershowitz-Marty Peretz crowd would turn its talk show artillery on anyone comparing Israelis to Nazis and their ilk. Except that Tommy Lapid was a member of Ariel Sharon’s cabinet, and is currently the chairman of the council of Israel’s Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial museum.

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Let Our Children Live
"We Are All Victims of the Occupation"

Bassam Aramin spent nine years in an Israeli prison. He belonged to Yasser Arafat's Al Fatah in the Hebron area and attempted to throw a grenade at an Israeli army Jeep in occupied Hebron. Last Wednesday morning, an Israeli soldier in a jeep in his village of Anata, on the West Bank, shot his nine year old daughter, Abir, in the head. The soldier will not spend an hour in jail. In Israel, soldiers are not imprisoned for killing Arabs. Never. It does not matter whether the Arabs are young or old, real or potential terrorists, peaceful demonstrators or stone throwers. The army has not conducted an inquiry in Abir Aramin's death. Neither the police nor the courts have questioned anyone. There will be no investigation. As far as the Israeli Defense Forces are concerned, the shooting did not happen. The army's official account of her death is that she was hit by a stone that one of her classmates was throwing "at our forces." We who live in Israel know that stones thrown by 10 year olds do not blow brains out. Just as we see every day the Israeli jeeps circling Palestinian children on their way to and from school and greet them with stun-bombs, "rubber" bullets and riot control gas.

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PA: Decision to move W. Bank fence undermines peace efforts

The Palestinian Authority on Wednesday condemned Prime Minister Ehud Olmert's decision to approve moving the separation barrier near Modi'in Ilit away from the Green Line in order to take in two settlements, as was first revealed by security sources and a brief submitted by the state to the High Court of Justice. Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator with Israel, said the Israeli move "undermines everything we're doing to revive the peace process." "The wall is the continuation of unilateralism and dictation, and destroys the prospects of any real negotiations," he added.

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  thanks to Antiwar.com