Category Archives: Palestine

Gaza, Israel, Palestine, Syria

Hamas Goes Shopping: from Iran to the GCC and back to Iran (and maybe Syria)……………..

 

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“Most of the missiles are now coming from the Salafi concentrations in the southern part of the enclave –targeting Beersheba and Netivot Thursday morning and as night fell aimed at Ashdod, Ashkelon, Shear Hanegev and the Eshkol region. The firing escalated after Israel laid down its ultimatum. Egypt and Hamas don’t know exactly who is giving Haraka the missiles, except that they are smuggled from Sinai through tunnels managed by Iranian intelligence agents in conjunction with local al Qaeda networks. It is highly unlikely that Hamas will venture to lay hands on these Salafi terrorists at a time when one of its top officials in Gaza, Mahmoud A-Zahar, is visiting Tehran for talks with Iranian leaders who are keen to keep the missile assaults going. His visit marks the Hamas fundamentalists’ return to the Iranian fold – that is if they ever really left it. This, Israeli strategists have chosen to ignore and are treating Hamas as a non-participant in the missile offensive and available to help Cairo bring the terrorists to accept a ceasefire….…….”

Hamas leaders have been touring the region this past month. Ismail Haniyya went to the Gulf states of the GCC before landing in Tehran a couple of weeks ago. No doubt his Muslim Brother brothers in some Gulf states tried to wean him away from the Iranian mullahs. There have been some reports that Hamas may be trying to find new sponsors to replace the Iranians, especially after it distanced itself from the Assad regime in Syria. The reports noted that Hamas leaders are “shopping” for new sources of funds and weapons.
Yet Hamas has not completely broken off with Syria; the Iranians no doubt would have some influence on that. Besides, it may be easy to find new sources of funds among the Gulf potentates, but they will never supply the weapons that Hamas wants. Hamas probably still needs Iranian weapons, and for that they cannot make a complete break with Syria, not yet. Hamas is being especially careful now that the situation on the ground in Syria seems to be shifting against the fractious opposition.
Cheers
mhg


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Hezbollah, Israel, Palestine

Jerusalem: Hezbollah Makes an Improbable Prediction……..

 

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Iran’s Fars News headlines that “Hezbollah Leader Optimistic about Imminent Liberation of Occupied Quds. Secretary-General of the Lebanese Hezbollah Movement Seyed Hassan Nasrallah voiced optimism about the liberation of the Holy Quds specially after the recent developments in the regional and Muslim states. “The regional developments are happening in a way that makes us feel that the liberation of Quds is close to us more than ever,” Nasrallah said Sunday, addressing a forum titled “Declaration of Al-Quds as the capital of Palestine, the Arabs and Muslims” in Beirut……”

Imminent (al-Quds means Holy City: Jerusalem)? To which I would respond, politely, “Imminent, my eye”. The Arabs have been repeating this mantra since before 1948. Almost any Arab army, take any one of the lot, and you’ll agree with my assessment that its commanders can’t organize a piss-up in a brewery let alone a military campaign (as I have noted here in the past). As for Hezbollah: it does a good job in defending its own land, in keeping Israelis out of Lebanon. It has not been defeated; it has inflicted several defeats on the IDF. It will do an even better job in kicking the Saudi Wehrmacht out should the princes revisit their old plan of intervention (Wikileaks). But Hezbollah’s ability at offensive military campaigns is nothing to take seriously. It is about the same as the rest of the Arab armies, the same “piss-up in a brewery” rule applies.
Cheers
mhg


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Corruption, Gulf states, Israel, Palestine, United Nations International Organizations, US Foreign Policy

The Tony Blair Israeli-Palestinian Barbershop Quartet……….

 

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“Yet another deadline passed late last month in the Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” this time over the initial exchange of proposals on border and security issues. Palestinian negotiators were (and remain) under pressure on a number of fronts. The Quartet still holds to a resumption of talks under the current guise and a recent visit from Ban Ki-Moon called for “a gesture of goodwill by both sides” in order to create a positive atmosphere for continuing negotiations……….”

This looks like just a way to keep Tony Blair doing something other than making a lot of money serving various Middle East potentates and Central Asian petroleum dictators. He is right here: it is time for Tony should to form a new quartet, a barbershop Quartet of Persian Gulf potentates and Central Asian dictators. (I don’t think Tony is on the payroll of J P Morgan anymore; that was during ‘the deal’ with Qaddafi). Then he, and they, can sing their hearts out away from the media. Then we won’t have to see his deceptive sanctimonious face and his asinine statements and platitudes about world affairs.
Moony at the UN should declare the Quarter dead and done with because in fact it is deader than a doornail.
Cheers
mhg


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Israel, Middle East, Palestine, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

Romney and Gingrich and GOPP: Kissing Netanyahu’s Ring, Kissing History Goodbye………

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Quotes from Republican candidates at the Florida debate last night:

“ROMNEY: Well, the reason that there’s not peace between the Palestinians and Israel is because there is in the leadership of the Palestinian people are Hamas and others who think like Hamas who have as their intent the elimination of Israel. And whether it’s in schoolbooks that teach how to kill Jews, or whether it’s in the political discourse that is spoken either from Fatah or from Hamas, there is a belief that the Jewish people do not have a right to have a Jewish state. …… I think he (Obama) disrespected Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu……..”
 
Romney doesn’t give a fig about Netanyahu, He probably recognizes him for the political hustler and serial liar that he is; he probably admires him, if at all, for these qualities more than his being a statesman (he is not). What Romney meant to say was that Obama disrespects the New York and New Jersey and other northeast retirees in Florida. He is appealing to all the Jewish elderly retirees in south Florida, normally a strong Democrat bloc of voters.

“GINGRICH: It was technically an invention of the late 1970s, and it was clearly so. Prior to that, they were Arabs. Many of them were either Syrian, Lebanese, or Egyptian, or Jordanian……… ……..”

Funny, when I was a kid at school, many of my teachers were Palestinians: that is what everybody called them. Well before 1970. Gingrich supposedly studied history, so presumably he knows that he is lying here (as do most of his listeners, possibly even a few of the Republicans in the audience).
GOPP: Grand Old Pandering Party.
Cheers
mhg


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Iraq, Islamophobia, Israel, Middle East, Muslims, Palestine, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

(1) Newt Gingrich and the Middle East: Calculated Muslim-Baiting…….

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“Gingrich’s faltering presidential campaign was completely resuscitated by a 5 million donation from Las Vegas casino king and super-Zionist Sheldon Adelson. (According to Wikipedia, Adelson is currently the 8th wealthiest American and 16th wealthiest person in the world, with a net worth of $23.3 billion.) Rising from the ashes, Gingrich now has won the South Carolina primary and has a decent chance of becoming the Republican presidential nominee…… Adelson and his Israeli-born wife, Miriam, have spent time and money lobbying for a bill to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Gingrich has promised that his first executive order as president would be the embassy move. Adelson is an ardent Zionist. Since 2007 the Adelson Family Foundation has made contributions totaling $100 million to Birthright Israel, which finances Jewish youth trips to Israel, Adelson is such a hard-line Zionist that he even stopped supporting AIPAC when it appeared to support a 2007 peace initiative championed by Olmert, President Bush, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. In 2009, the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), which is a hard-line Zionist group that wants Israel to retain the occupied territories and expand the Jewish settlements, presented Adelson its most distinguished and historic award, the Theodor Herzl Gold Medallion for outstanding achievement in Zionism. His wife received the Louis D. Brandeis Award. The couple now have their names on one of ZOA’s major awards, the Dr. Miriam & Sheldon Adelson Defender of Israel Award. Adelson is intimately involved in Israeli politics………..”

Newt Gingrich has promised to move the American embassy in Israel to Jerusalem. That is a standard promise for most presidential candidates in the United States, and reneging on the promise afterwards is also standard procedure. The idea of where the embassy is located has no strategic implications, and I suspect that most Arab regimes will just do some posturing and then accept it. Unless it is moved to East Jerusalem.

Gingrich does not seem to believe that the Palestinians deserve their own state(-let) on the West Bank (and Gaza?). This may seem like a strongly pro-Israeli policy, but it is not necessarily so in the long-term. It means he prefers Israel to annex territory covering anywhere between 2 to 3 million more Palestinian Arabs (in addition to Arab Israelis who are less than 24% of the population). Yet what would they do with all these Arabs? Citizenship and voting rights mean a huge, nay a seismic, political shift. An apartheid-type policy is not an option in this day and age (even the Bahrain regime on the Gulf is having trouble keeping its apartheid policy intact). Besides, it would truly upset and turn off most Jewish-Americans who would not condone such policy (in comparison Jewish-Russians probably wouldn’t give a fig about it, nor would the “Christian” right).
Gingrich has also done some of the usual Republican Muslim-baiting. He made some appropriate (to the right wingers) noises about the dangers the Shri’a law presents to the United States. He knows there is no such danger because it won’t happen. He also was slated to share the speaking stage with Dutch Neo-Nazi politician and rabble-rouser Geert Wilders at an anti-Muslim rally a couple of years ago in New York, but he was smart enough to go AWOL on that day. His Muslim-baiting is calculated, unlike that of some other republicans: that only means he is smarter than his colleagues in the Party.

I have not posted anything recently about my earlier suggestion that Newt Gingrich take a hike, literally, on the Iraq-Iran border. That was meant to shore up his foreign policy credentials.  But that hike may be impossible now, given that overt American military presence in Iraq is limited to John McCain and Joe Lieberman camping in Falluja. (Congressmen don’t get much in-depth foreign policy experience unless that sit on certain specialized committee or subcommittee. Just look at poor Rick Santorum, the subject of my next brief posting).
Cheers
mhg


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Gaza, Israel, Palestine

Fools of Hamas: Making Netanyahu’s Job Easier, Somali Dollar………….

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“Hamas yesterday declared itself bolstered by the Arab Spring and the exchange with Israel of more than 1,000 Palestinian prisoners, as the group mounted a show of strength with tens of thousands attending a lavishly staged rally in the centre of Gaza City. Gaza’s ruling Islamic faction bussed in supporters from across the territory for a mass rally to mark its 24th anniversary at which their leaders’ rhetoric laid heavy emphasis on continued adherence to armed struggle and the eventual “liberation” of the whole land, including what is now Israel. Ismail Haniyeh, Gaza’s de facto prime minister, told the rally: “We affirm that armed resistance is our strategic option and the only way to liberate our land, from the [Mediterranean] sea to the River [Jordan]. God willing, Hamas will lead the people… to the uprising until we liberate Palestine, all of Palestine.”……….”

Hamas is in no position to liberate anyone. The fact that they had to trade one scrawny Israeli soldier for over one thousand of their people tells it all: an exchange rate of a thousand to one (like the dollar or euro to the, say, Somali or Bengali currency). This type of statement only feeds the hostility and belligerence of the American GOP right-wing, and possibly many Democrats as well, who are against a Palestinian state even in Gaza and the West Bank. Yet Mahmoud Abbas is quoted that Hamas had promised him to accept a solution based on Gaza and the West Bank.

Cheers
mhg


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Israel, Palestine, Religion

West Bank Churches on Fire: GOP to Expel Palestinians and Bomb Iran…….

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“Member of the Revolutionary Council of the Palestinian National Liberation Movement (Fatah), Dimitri Diliani, Tuesday held Israel fully responsible for the settlers’ attack on a church near the Jordanian border, under the watch of Israeli soldiers. Diliani said in a press release that the Israeli army evacuated the church at one o’clock in the morning, after more than four hours spent by the settlers in damaging the church and its contents. The attack on the Orthodox church , located a few kilometers east of Jericho, came after strong opposition from Jordan against demolishing Magharbe gate ramp in East Jerusalem. Diliani said these settlers’ attacks are a result of the Israeli government’s policy that encourages such terrorist groups to attack Palestinians and their holy sites. He said that the extremist group vandalized the church and its contents under the watch of the Israeli army, damaging the church’s crosses, doors and windows…………..”

If this church desecration had happened in an Arab country, the Republican candidates would have headlined it during last night’s Iowa debate. Rick (big hat, no cattle) Perry would have called for his usual “boots on the ground”. Gingrich would have called for painful sanctions, to start with. Rick (Pretty Boy Floyd) Santorum would have called for expelling all Palestinians from planet earth and the immediate bombing of ……Iran.
Cheers
mhg


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Israel, Middle East, Palestine

A Favorable Exchange Rate: Palestinians for One Israeli……….

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“A new report on the conditions of Palestinians jailed in Israel says that since the Shalit prisoner transfer deal last month, the situation has improved little, leaving many to wonder if it was a bad bargain. A report recently published from the Palestinian Ministry of Prisoners Affairs stated that improved conditions for Palestinians in Israeli jails agreed on in the swap deal freeing Israeli IDF soldier Gilad Shalit, are not being implemented. The report noted that 60 prisoners in Ashkelon jail have been banned from buying goods from the prison store for two months and have also been denied family visits for more than one month. The prisoners are withheld higher education, room raids are commonplace and beatings from prison administration often occur, the report said………..”

I don’t know: releasing over a thousand Palestinians for one scrawny Israeli soldier seems like a good deal for the Palestinians. It even almost seems like a good deal for the Israelis too, apparently since they had only one captive. An exchange rate of 1 : 1000 is steep, and it is not necessarily good for the Palestinians to exchange, say, 2000 of their own for one scrawny Israeli soldier. It has certain unfortunate implications of human valuation: if some think one scrawny Israeli is worth more than one thousand Palestinians, maybe two thousand. There is no way to go around this. On humanitarian grounds, both sides gained by getting their captive people back.
Cheers
mhg


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Espionage, Israel, Palestine

In Old Palestine: British Boys, Jewish Girls, Arab Girls, Zionists, Spies………

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“The Zionist battle to wrest control of the country from the British and establish a Jewish homeland was led politically by the Jewish Agency and militarily by guerrilla organisations such as the Haganah and Irgun. “The Jewish Agency set up special clubs for the purpose of propaganda,” said Motti Golani, a historian of the British Mandate at Haifa University. “There were dancing parties, clubs with lectures, dinners. The Agency pushed young girls, of around 18 or 20, to have relationships with British soldiers. It was a kind of spying.” The Jewish Agency’s message was confusing: on the one hand the relationships were encouraged for political purposes, but they were meant to stop short of becoming sexual or permanent. “It was an indecent thing, for a Jewish girl to have a British boyfriend,” Segev told the Observer. “Not because he was British, but mostly because he wasn’t Jewish. It was something a family would hide.”…..… The British did not confine their romances to Jewish women. The highest-profile relationship of the era was between the commander of the British forces in Palestine, General Evelyn Barker, and Katy Antonius, the socialite wife of a prominent Arab. Barker, who was also married, wrote almost 100 passionate letters to his lover …….The Jewish Agency, he added, “had very good information. There were a lot of spies. There were hardly any real secrets. Both the British and Jewish Agency used code names, but they both knew who the other was talking about……...”

Interesting bit of old history of Palestine under the Mandate. Not clear how much is true and how much gossip. I suspect most of it is true. But you get the flavor of the time.
Cheers
mhg


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Israel, Palestine, U.S. Congress, U.S. Politics, US Foreign Policy

Obama, Palestine, Netanyahu Reading a Telephone Book to a Drunk U.S. Congress……….

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“Nor did I find much sympathy for Obama in Israel. The right thinks of him as a naïf who can easily be out-maneuvered, as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has consistently done. The left is disappointed in him for the same reason: that Obama let Netanyahu push him around. The spectacle of members of Congress leaping to their feet to clap after almost every sentence of Nethanyahu’s address gave comfort to the right that America could always be manipulated. To the Israeli left it was pathetic. “Netanyahu could have been reading from the telephone book,” said author and journalist, Yuval Elizur……..”

What can I say? Members of Congress were intoxicated by all the bullshit Mr. Netanyahu spread under the some of the Capitol, as he is wont to do wherever he goes. They recognized a sour b.s. disseminator, a right-winger, one of their own. Only better at it.
Cheers
mhg


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