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- Yoav Peled and Horit Herman Peled write in a guest column for Informed Comment The Way Forward in the Middle East Reversing a bi-partisan US policy in effect for the last two decades, the Republican National Committee recently endorsed the one-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, resolving that “peace ...can be afforded the (Middle east) region only through a united Israel governed under one law for all people.” In all likelihood, this was an unintended consequence of the Republican party’s election-year pro-Israel frenzy. But, intentional or not, the RNC statement is correct. The Israeli-Palestinian “peace process,” that aims at the establishment of two independent states, Israel and Palestine, bounded, more or less, by the 1967 borders, is totally bankrupt. If any evidence is needed, just look at the seventeen futile initiatives meant to revive Oslo process since its demise in 2000. What makes the two-state solution unachievable is the fact that since 1967 Israel...See More
- Hélé Béji, a prominent woman writer from an old notable family in Tunis, was outraged by an incident in early January when a small crowd of religious extremists at the airport in Tunis to greet a visiting Hamas leader chanted “Death to the Jews.” She published this cry of the heart in Le Monde on January 19, and kind...ly consented for it to be translated and appear at Informed Comment in English. Tunisians do not betray the ideals of your revolution! by Hélé Béji, writer. Tunisians, you rose up against tyranny and injustice with true hearts: you were righteousness. You have illumined the world of the flame of your dignity: you were humanity. You made your streets ring with cries of generosity: you were fraternity. You have rekindled the sense of valor of the next generation: you were goodness itself. You have won the esteem of all by your panache: you were pride. You smiled with your million different faces: you were tolerance. But recently at Tunisia’s Carthage Internati...See More
- The Republican candidates for president once again tried to out-do the Likud Party in their devotion to the doctrine of the Iron Wall and their attempt to erase the Palestinian people from history and justify their being kept in a condition of statelessness and lack of citizenship in any state. (The first thing the Na...tional Socialists in Germany did to the Jews was to strip them of citizenship, understanding that a stateless people is “flotsam” that no one wants and which lacks any legal standing). Israel is in a race with time. The 11 million Palestinians are not going to go away, and those in the West Bank, Gaza and Lebanon have gained powerful new friends because of the Arab uprisings of 2011. Israel can only survive in some recognizable form if it achieves peace with the Palestinian people and with their supporters in the Muslim world, which means making arrangements for Palestinians to have citizenship in a state. Israel caught a break during its first 60 years because it...See More
- Perhaps 100,000 Egyptians came out on Wednesday in Tahrir Square in Cairo to mark the anniversary of the first massive protest that led to the overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak. There was also a huge crowd in Alexandria, Egypt’s second city. But the gathering was not simply a commemoration. The revolutionary yout...h used the occasion to put more pressure on the Egyptian military to step down and go back to the barracks, handing power to the elected parliament and its speaker. The leftist youth are not concerned that the civilian parliament is heavily dominated by right wing religious deputies from the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafi Nur Party. They will take their chances with the fundamentalists. They believe that nothing can be accomplished in the new Egypt unless military rule is ended. Aljazeera English reports: The established parties, such as the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party and the secular, middle class Wafd Party, were also present in Tahrir...See More
- President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address treated the Middle East at several points, underlining the unusual importance of this region to the United States. Obama began by celebrating the end of the Iraq War and of the presence of US troops in that country. Although Obama might have been open to US forces bei...ng stationed in Iraq, as they are in South Korea, the Iraqi refusal to grant them legal immunity made it impossible for the president to keep them there. Ending the war is indeed a great achievement, but Obama may not get so much credit for it because he is too conflicted over the episode to take strong stances. He praised this generation of soldiers for having made the US safer. It wasn’t clear to me if he was saying that US military activities in Iraq made the US safer, but if so, this assertion certainly is in error. The Bush administration destabilized Iraq for the foreseeable future, and with it destabilized both the oil-rich Persian Gulf and the greater Eas...See More
- Graffiti from Mission Street, San Francisco in honor of Mohamed Bouazizi, whose self-immolation kicked off the Tunisian Revolution, inspired the Tahrir Square demonstrations, and the Arab Spring: Mohamed Bouazizi Graffitti, Mission St., San Francisco OSW San Francisco demonstration, California Street, January 20, 2012 (inspired by the Tahrir Square demonstrations of January 25, 2011, and after in Egypt).
- William J. Astore writes at Tomdispatch: “Weapons ‘R’ Us Making Warbirds Instead of Thunderbirds By William J. Astore Perhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college. It’s about auto workers back in 1955 who wer...e “young and proud” to be making Ford Thunderbirds. But in the early 1980s, Seger sings, “the plants have changed and you’re lucky if you work.” Seger caught the reality of an American manufacturing infrastructure that was seriously eroding as skilled and good-paying union jobs were cut or sent overseas, rarely to be seen again in these parts. If the U.S. auto industry has recently shown sparks of new life (though we’re not making T-Birds or Mercuries or Oldsmobiles or Pontiacs or Saturns anymore), there is one form of manufacturing in which America is still dominant. When it comes to weaponry, to paraphrase Seger, we’re still young and proud and makin’ Pre...See More
- The European Union threatened Iran on Monday with cutting off petroleum imports into the 27 EU member states, and announced sanctions on Iranian banks and some port and other companies. Iran sells 18 percent of its petroleum to Europe, and Greece, Italy and Spain are particularly dependent on it. Europe also sells... Iran nearly $12 billion a year in goods, which likely will cease, since there will be no way for Iran to pay for these goods. Some in Europe worry that the muscular anti-Iran policy of the UK, France and Germany in northern Europe will worsen the economic crisis of southern Mediterranean countries such as Greece. About 60% of Iran’s petroleum now goes to Asian countries, especially China, India, South Korea and Japan. China and India have no announced plans to reduce purchases of Iranian crude, and South Korea says it will seek an exemption from the US so as to continue to import. Japan says it plans only very slowly to reduce imports from Iran. Iran and India ...See More
- Ellen Cantarow writes at Tomdispatch.com Shale-Shocked Fracking Gets Its Own Occupy Movement By Ellen Cantarow This is a story about water, the land surrounding it, and the lives it sustains. Clean water should be a right: there is no life without it. New York is what you might call a “water state.” It...s rivers and their tributaries only start with the St. Lawrence, the Hudson, the Delaware, and the Susquehanna. The best known of its lakes are Great Lakes Erie and Ontario, Lake George, and the Finger Lakes. Its brooks, creeks, and trout streams are fishermen’s lore. Far below this rippling wealth there’s a vast, rocky netherworld called the Marcellus Shale. Stretching through southern New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia, the shale contains bubbles of methane, the remains of life that died 400 million years ago. Gas corporations have lusted for the methane in the Marcellus since at least 1967 when one of them plotted with the Atomic Energy Agency ...See More
- What are the big stories in the Arab world today? A newly elected parliament is being seated, and a deposed president is leaving the country. But beyond that, the remarkable thing is that there are any political stories at all. There weren’t, a year and a half ago. The political stories of today are not about the a...dvent of paradise, but about the politics of transitions. It was never acceptable to assert glibly in an op-ed that things have happened “Because Arabs are… ” such and such. It has the form of a racist argument. Arabs are only united, if at all, by a common language (and even it is diverse). Things happen because “Arabs do…”, because of actions they take for reasons of their social interests, not because of what they supposedly “are.” The new Arab world created by the people power movements of 2012 is not suddenly Sweden. No one should have expected it to be. The Arab world had been stuck in a stagnating rut, of dictatorship, family cartels, embezzlement, corr...See More
- The election results for Egypt’s lower house have been announced, and the Muslim religious parties appear to have gained over 70% of the seats. The Muslim Brotherhood is claiming its Freedom and Justice Party took 47% of the 498 seats in the lower house of parliament. The hard line fundamentalist Nur Party won 29%... of the seats contested on a party basis. To have 51%, the Muslim Brotherhood party needs a coalition with another party. Its leaders have at least said that they prefer to make that alliance with a secular party like the Wafd rather than with the hard line Salafis. The other big political news is that Newt Gingrich won the Republican primary in South Carolina. I have noticed a big difference in the coverage of these two events in the US press. American journalists noted that 60-65% of Republican voters in South Carolina are evangelicals. But they did not then add reaction to this statistic. They did not then immediately quote pro-choice women or secularists as...See More
- The Emirates Solar Industry Association says that solar energy is competitive with natural gas already, without the need for more subsidies. Solar panels are rapidly falling in price, making solar ever more inexpensive. It can already compete with Liquefied Natural Gas, ESIA says. This is good news because there are... looming military conflicts over natural gas fields deep under the Mediterranean, which span more than one national border. There is a war of words between Cyprus and Turkey on undersea gas near Cyprus. Likewise, Israel and Lebanon share a big offshore field, and they are squabbling over where to draw the line. These gas field disputes could be avoided if the countries involved turned to solar energy, which the UAE group thinks is perfectly plausible and economical.See More
- As Gen. Martin Dempsey, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, arrived in Israel Thursday, the left-leaning Haaretz newspaper dropped its own atomic bombshell. Israeli intelligence agencies have worked up an intelligence assessment that Iran has not yet decided whether to begin a military program to construct a nuclea...r warhead. Put in other words, Mossad believes that there is no current Iranian nuclear weapons program. Haaretz writes: “The intelligence assessment Israeli officials will present later this week to Dempsey indicates that Iran has not yet decided whether to make a nuclear bomb. The Israeli view is that while Iran continues to improve its nuclear capabilities, it has not yet decided whether to translate these capabilities into a nuclear weapon – or, more specifically, a nuclear warhead mounted atop a missile. Nor is it clear when Iran might make such a decision.” This is the same conclusion to which the 16 US intelligence agencies have come in 2007 and 2010....See More
