Friday, July 30, 2004
Left starts to wake up to Arafat
After 10 years of contortions and turning a blind eye, the New York Times has finally woken up to the erstwhile Nobel Prize winner, or so a recent editorial might indicate:
"It's been the misfortune of the Palestinian people to be stuck with Yasser Arafat as their founding father, a leader who failed to make the transition from romantic revolutionary to statesman. All he seems capable of offering Palestinians now is a communal form of the martyrdom he seems to covet ... That the Palestinian lands are in total ruin, that the fruits of the Oslo accords are in tatters, seems of no importance to him. His reflexive insistence that this is all the fault of `Zionists,' the West, other Arabs, is unsustainable. Arafat himself bears a large share of the responsibility for these misfortunes."
(See Good Morning, New York Times (Yoel Marcus))
Marcus says of Arafat:
"He built around himself a corrupt Mafia-style regime with the gang he brought over from Tunisia. He kept a handle on things by greasing palms, torturing his rivals and brutally bumping them off.
"I am not belittling Israel's role, with its overuse of force against the Palestinian Authority and the widespread destruction it has caused. But somewhere along the line we began to realize that we are sick and tired of living year after year in the grip of bloody terror.
"There was a time when both Clinton and Barak offered Arafat 97 percent of the territories. Arafat's response was the Al-Aqsa Intifada that claimed thousands of lives. Israel is now preparing to leave the Gaza Strip. But Arafat, over in the Muqata, is busy sabotaging the start of Israel's withdrawal from the territories and dragging his people down into the depths of despair."
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Now (August 4) it is reported that the EU fraud investigation agency(OLAF) has unanimously endorsed investigating evidence that money sent by the EU to the Palestinian Authority was used by Arafat's group to fund terrorist attacks.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Marwan Muashar on the fence
The Jordanian Foreign Minister seems to show far more savvy than the UN and ICJ in his comments on the security barrier, as reported in Ha'aretz.
Muashar opposes the barrier, but explicitly recognises that it is a security mechanism and respects Israel's rights and intention in that regard.
He expresses grave concerns about the effect of the barrier on Jordan. Some of his points are worthy of consideration and answer.
Tuesday, July 27, 2004
New Low for UN
The General Assembly resolution calling for Israel to tear down it's security fence is a starkly political affair.
The Chirac-led European bloc has clearly cashed in on an opportunity broaden the fissure separating it ideologically from the United States.
For Israelis on both the left and right, the resolution emphatically underlines the tyranny of the majority at the UN that has dogged the world's only Jewish state for decades.
Several articles by Aluf Benn in the left-centrist Ha'aretz newspaper cover some of the core issues:
Analysis
Israel summons EU ambassadors
International Court of Justice ruling
Some features of the ruling noted by Benn include:
(1) "The only dissenting voice was that of the American justice on the panel, Thomas Buergenthal. He was supported, however, by the Dutch judge, Pieter Kooijmans, in his rejection of the call for all countries to act against the project. The other 13 judges ruled in favor of this call."
The other judges included a Chinese judge who led the panel, and other judges from Islamic countries. In other words, there is a strong suggestion here that judges may have split along political lines.
(2) The ICJ ruled that the fence: "cannot be justified by ... the requirements of national security or public order" (!, precisely the reason the fence has been erected).
(3) The ICJ also ruled that "the barrier could become tantamount to annexation of Palestinian land". That seems to be an entirely hypothetical argument rejected by Israel as well as every nation on the planet.
Absolutely noone is disputing that in the absence of acts of terrorism the fence can come down. The idea of the fence has only arisen as a - legitimate, plausible and so far very effective - defence to acts of terrorism.
(4) The ICJ said that the fence "violated international humanitarian law by infringing on Palestinians' freedom of movement and freedom to seek employment, education and health."
That is quite an unbelievable statement. It completely ignores the basic right to life that is the very essence of all humanitarian law, which Israel is clearly aiming to protect on behalf of its own citizens by erecting the fence.
The statement also seems rather specious in view of the range of variables, many very positive and arguably on balance so overall, for Palestinians in the territories.
