With repetition, truth accretes. For example, repeat that Iran must be stopped from acquiring nuclear weapons, and everyone believes that Iran is trying to acquire nuclear weapons. The problem is, the facts don’t support so certain a conclusion, any more than they prove Iran’s innocence. (More…)
According to Vittorio Longhi, Nepal sees “on average” two guest workers return in coffins to Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport every day. More than 7,000 Nepalese guest workers are known to have died on the job in the Middle East between 2003 and 2013 – over 700 in 2013 alone so far, according to The Kathmandu Post – from a combination of workplace injuries, natural causes, and traffic accidents. (More…)
Just when I thought I was out…they pull me back in!” Those were the words of Michael Corleone, an old man who had spent his life reluctantly running a Mafia family, in the third installment of The Godfather trilogy. This was a movie, of course, but the line probably has some resonance right now for US President Barack Obama. (More…)
September 13th, 2013 marks the 20th anniversary of the now-infamous Oslo Accords. Friday the 13th seems all too appropriate a date for that landmark. What better a marker for an agreement that started with good intentions, but was doomed by its inherent flaws and malicious politics. (More…)
Attacking Syria gets more surreal every day. The abstract nature of that debate, in the United States, as if somehow real lives, Syrian lives, were not hanging in the balance is appalling. And what is most starkly absent from the discussion is any apparent concern over a civil war that has already caused over 100,000 deaths, created some six million refugees and internally displaced persons and promises that the worst is yet to come. (More…)
UN inspectors are going to investigate allegations of a major chemical weapons attack on Syrian civilians by the regime. It’s largely an exercise. The United States has already decided that the red line Obama drew many months ago has been crossed. That line is worth questioning. (More…)
Chemi Shalev is one of Ha’aretz‘ best reporters, and his commentary Strange Bedfellows makes for valuable reading. It describes how the diminished role the US is playing in the Middle East is being interpreted, not without merit, as US weakness, and that is causing so-called “moderate Arab states” (which is a euphemism for those states which are willing, however clandestinely, to work with Israel) to increase their cooperation with Israel. (More…)
“If you think I’m a racist, then Israel is a racist state.” These were the words of the embattled mayor of the Israeli, predominantly Jewish, town of Upper Nazareth, or Natzrat Ilit, in Hebrew. The mayor, Shimon Gafsou (wrongly translated as Gapso) is running for re-election on an anti-Arab platform, and his words bear a very close examination. (More…)
Making a mockery of John Kerry’s peace efforts is an obsession of the Israeli right. This week, it was the Likud Transportation Minister, Yisrael Katz, who got into the act, announcing a plan for massive railroad construction in both Israel and the West Bank. This, however, could also present opportunities for proponents of both one-state and two-state resolutions of this conflict, if they can find ways to take advantage of it. (More…)
On Tuesday, Jews will observe Tisha B’Av. It’s a sad and solemn holiday, which mainly commemorates the destruction of the two Holy Temples, and which has subsumed many other tragic events that have befallen the Jews over the centuries. Those events continued into the 20th century, as on Tisha B’Av in 1942, the mass deportation of Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto to the extermination camp, Treblinka, began. (More…)
It’s hard not to hope that Egypt gets the democracy it deserves. In the wake of the second ouster of a head of state in two years, such hopes might be elevated. However, the current state of affairs in the Middle Eastern country is not an optimistic one. (More…)
Single-state advocates may have a surprising new ally. Likud legislator Tzipi Hotovely believes that the two-state solution is dead, and that Israel should annex the West Bank, granting citizenship to its Palestinian residents. Hotovely, the Deputy Minister of Transportation, is a rising star in her party. While her extremist views are not typical of Likud, her one-state solution is becoming popular amongst Israeli conservatives. (More…)