Where's the Palestinian Hadassah?

Evelyn Gordon wonders:

Clearly, the Palestinian Authority can’t fund its hospitals as Israel does ... : It’s a young, struggling state-in-the-making, while Israel is a 62-year-old, comparatively wealthy state. But Israel had relatively good hospitals even when it, too, was a young, struggling state-to-be, thanks to the generosity of overseas Jews, who built, equipped, and staffed them. Hadassah Hospital, for instance, was founded by the American Hadassah organization, which built six hospitals in Israel before the state’s establishment. Even today, donations from overseas Jews contribute greatly to Israel’s cutting-edge medicine.

Like the Jews, Palestinians have a large Diaspora. Also like the Jews, parts of that Diaspora are well-educated and well-off, with estimated assets of $40-80 billion.

But there the similarity ends — because overseas Palestinians evidently have no interest in doing for the PA what overseas Jews did for pre-state Israel. If they did, their hospitals wouldn’t look as Essa described.

I can almost forgive 'Candle in the Wind'

Even the lachrymose Princess Diana version, thanks to this.

Another fan of collective punishment

Jonah Goldberg:

We’ve been maintaining an embargo against Cuba for half a century. In the lead-up to the Iraq war, the supposed voices of peace and sanity argued for “giving the sanctions time to work” and “keeping Iraq in the box” — the “box” being a stiff sanctions regime. What was so great about the sanctions against South Africa if they too were a form of collective punishment?

Only one blockade is deemed indefensibly beyond the pale: Israel’s blockade of Gaza. Why? Because it imposes “collective punishment.” The U.N. Human Rights Council, which rarely finds time to condemn the barbaric practices of its own members, routinely denounces the blockade as a crime against humanity.

So what if Gaza can't import coriander?

I get it, but there's a double standard when it comes to so-called collective punishment. It's OK to impose sanctions on South Africa for apartheid but it's not OK to impose them on Gaza--or for that matter Iraq.

Maybe it's not a good strategy; it certainly doesn't deliver fast results: The UN first voted for sanctions against SA in 1962. Of course, many western nations talked a good game when it came to opposing apartheid, but they continued trading with her. And the whole Iraqi Oil for Food thing undermined the sanctions imposed on Iraq after Gulf War I. And that's before we discovered how corrupt the program was.

I should say that it's not a good strategy if it's not effectively deployed. If the UN imposes sanctions on South Africa and no one follows the sanctions, not much is going to happen. And if the UN imposes sanctions on Iraq and then gives Saddam a loophole you could drive a truck through, Saddam will remain in power.

But the Union blockade of the Confederacy worked very well. Probably because Lincoln didn't make an exception for peace activists from the North to breach the blockade.

Collective punishment--whether it be in the form of blockades, embargoes, boycotts or sieges--is supposed to bleed a population--or a leader or a party--white. So that they cry uncle and agree to stop doing whatever it is you want them to stop doing. Allowing "peace flotillas" to enter and dispense coriander and flower pots sounds great--harmless really--but it undermines the mission. Israel is basically at war with Hamas and the blockade is a form of economic warfare.

Krauthammer Nails It

Israel and the world.

This is the Obama administration's biggest crime. And calling it "cowardice" is being too kind.

Jordan Claims Dead Sea Scrolls

Wants 'em "back" from Israel.

Not surprising

IDF: 'World duped by Hamas death count.'

While the Palestinian Center for Human Rights, whose death toll figures have been widely cited, reports that 895 Gaza civilians were killed in the fighting, amounting to more than two-thirds of all fatalities, the IDF figures shown to the Post on Sunday put the civilian death toll at no higher than a third of the total.

The international community had been given a vastly distorted impression of the death toll because of "false reporting" by Hamas, said Col. Moshe Levi, the head of the IDF's Gaza Coordination and Liaison Administration (CLA), which compiled the IDF figures.

Via David Hazony.

Lousy food and the portions are so small

A book reviewer pans Jimmy Carter's latest. And yet:

The book, in other words, is unoriginal, inaccurate, poorly written, and proposes precisely what didn’t work before. So what is Gorenberg’s conclusion? He urges Obama, despite the deficiencies of the book, to “take seriously Carter’s advice to pursue peace”:

The Gaza crisis is a reminder, as if another were needed, that ignoring this conflict is equivalent to waiting for it to explode again, with shock waves felt across the entire region. While a peace initiative may look risky, it might actually be the most prudent course the new administration could pursue.

What? For the last 15 years - from the handshake on the White House lawn to Condoleezza Rice’s two-year effort to create a Palestinian state - no conflict has been less ignored than this one. Nor, despite the attention, has any conflict exploded more often - usually after a formal Israeli two-state proposal, or a withdrawal from strategic land so Lebanese or Gazans could live “side by side in peace and security.”

I've often thought that benign neglect was the policy we should pursue vis-à-vis Israel and the "peace process."

Israel Kicks Ass

From a captured terrorist: “Hamas took a gamble. We thought, at worst Israel will come and do something from the air - something superficial. They’ll come in and go out. We never thought that we would reach the point where fear will swallow the heart and the feet will want to flee. You [Israel] are fighting like you fought in ‘48. What got into you all of a sudden?”

via Instapundit.

Johann Hari's shitty little story

Looking ahead to Israel's 60th anniversary:

When you hit your 60th birthday, most of you will guzzle down your hormone replacement therapy with a glass of champagne and wonder if you have become everything you dreamed of in your youth. In a few weeks, the state of Israel is going to have that hangover.

She will look in the mirror and think – I have a sore back, rickety knees and a gun at my waist, but I'm still standing. Yet somewhere, she will know she is suppressing an old secret she has to face. I would love to be able to crash the birthday party with words of reassurance.

...

But I can't do it. Whenever I try to mouth these words, a remembered smell fills my nostrils. It is the smell of shit. Across the occupied West Bank, raw untreated sewage is pumped every day out of the Jewish settlements, along large metal pipes, straight onto Palestinian land. From there, it can enter the groundwater and the reservoirs, and become a poison.

HonestReporting responds.

In a modern day "poisoning the wells" libel, Hari accuses Israel of sole responsibility for polluting West Bank groundwater supplies. It is no secret that Israel has a chronic water problem and lags behind many other developed nations in environmental protection. However, the Palestinians are equally to blame for polluting the environment in the West Bank, which has, in turn, also caused damage to Israel's own water supplies. The West Bank mountain aquifer is one of the largest freshwater sources supplying both Israelis and Palestinians. Indeed, Israelis and Palestinians have jointly tackled such pollution and Israel has used its own expertise to provide Palestinian population centers with sewage treatment facilities. Why would Israel purposely destroy its own limited water supply?

Continuing his sewage analogy, Hari simplisticly accuses Israel of punishing Gaza's population for voting "the wrong way". Has Hari forgotten the continuing terrorism and missile attacks on Israeli population centers such as Sderot? Or the refusal of Hamas to conform to the international community's demands to renounce terror, recognize Israel and adhere to previously signed agreements?

Get over it

Mahatma Gandhi's grandson has some advice for the Jews.

Jewish identity in the past has been locked into the holocaust experience -- a German burden that the Jews have not been able to shed. It is a very good example of a community can overplay a historic experience to the point that it begins to repulse friends. The holocaust was the result of the warped mind of an individual who was able to influence his followers into doing something dreadful. But, it seems to me the Jews today not only want the Germans to feel guilty but the whole world must regret what happened to the Jews. The world did feel sorry for the episode but when an individual or a nation refuses to forgive and move on the regret turns into anger.

Just like grandpa, who didn't think a war against Germany was necessary in 1938.

The calculated violence of Hitler may even result in a general massacre of the Jews by way of his first answer to the declaration of such hostilities. But if the Jewish mind could be prepared for voluntary suffering, even the massacre I have imagined could be turned into a day of thanksgiving and joy that Jehovah had wrought deliverance of the race even at the hands of the tyrant. For to the god fearing, death has no terror. It is a joyful sleep to be followed by a waking that would be all the more refreshing for the long sleep.

Both Gandhis agree that the Jews are to blame for the violence in the Middle East. Grandpa thought a Jewish homeland an affront to the Arabs.

Palestine belongs to the Arabs in the same sense that England belongs to the English or France to the French. It is wrong and inhuman to impose the Jews on the Arabs. What is going on in Palestine today cannot be justified by any moral code of conduct. The mandates have no sanction but that of the last war. Surely it would be a crime against humanity to reduce the proud Arabs so that Palestine can be restored to the Jews partly or wholly as their national home.

His grandson sees the Jews as the world's foremost killers.

We have created a culture of violence (Israel and the Jews are the biggest players) and that Culture of Violence is eventually going to destroy humanity.

Thanks to David Hazony, who wonders: "At what point does this qualify as anti-Semitism?"

The media's annual Christmas tradition

Michael Gove:

Eggnog lattes on sale at Starbucks? Feature-length M&S commercials? There’s one invariable sign that Christmas is almost upon us – a story about how Bethlehem is suffering at the hands of wicked Israel.

It has become almost as much a feature of seasonal journalism as stories about how Nativity plays are being subverted and commentaries on how commercialism is snuffing out the true meaning of the festival.

This year we’ve already had our first exercise in demonising Israel for its treatment of Bethlehem with the graffiti artist Banksy enjoying extensive coverage for his trip to decorate the security barrier near the town with his work. The message of Banksy’s work and the coverage it has generated is the same: oppressive Israel has snuffed the life out of the town where the Prince of Peace was born. Herod’s spirit lives on, even as the spirit of Christmas is struggling to survive.

Via HonestReporting.

Off their nut

Christopher Booker laments the planet-saving madness exhibited by politicians.

The scare over global warming, and our politicians' response to it, is becoming ever more bizarre. On the one hand we have the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change coming up with yet another of its notoriously politicised reports, hyping up the scare by claiming that world surface temperatures have been higher in 11 of the past 12 years (1995-2006) than ever previously recorded.

This carefully ignores the latest US satellite figures showing temperatures having fallen since 1998, declining in 2007 to a 1983 level - not to mention the newly revised figures for US surface temperatures showing that the 1930s had four of the 10 warmest years of the past century, with the hottest year of all being not 1998, as was previously claimed, but 1934.

On the other hand, we had Gordon Brown last week, in his "first major speech on climate change", airily committing his own and future governments to achieving a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050 - which is rather like prime minister Salisbury at the end of Queen Victoria's reign trying to commit Winston Churchill's government to achieving some wholly impossible goal in the middle of the Second World War.

Ah well, politicians believe in a lot of improbable things, like the efficacy of holding Arab-Israeli peace talks.

Israeli neo-Nazis

Just what Israel needs.

MK Zevulun Orlev (NU-NRP) is expected to present the Knesset plenum with a bill calling to revoke the suspects' citizenship. MK Effi Eitam (NU-NRP) said he would present the plenum with a recommendation to amend the Law of Return.

According to Eitam, people who harbored a hatred of Jews and a hatred of Israel in their hearts find a safe haven in Israel by taking advantage of a loophole in the Law of Return.

In the past, NU-NRP members have tried to advance bills that would revoke parts of the Law of Return but have failed.

The Law of Return, which states that one only has to have one Jewish grandparent to immigrate as a Jew, has allowed thousands of non-halachicly Jewish descendants of Jews to immigrate to Israel with the same benefits as Jewish immigrants.

Cabinet members on Sunday viewed videos presented by police that showed the alleged gang members, faces covered, kicking and punching helpless citizens, as well as posing with IDF-issued weapons and displaying "heil Hitler"-style salutes.

Via Gabriel Malor.

British Medical Journal debates Israel boycott

To that end the journal is conducting a survey. You can make your feelings known here.

Tom Hickey supports a boycott.

No Israeli college or university has publicly condemned what is being done in the Occupied Territories in the name of every Israeli citizen. Some Israeli educational institutions have established campuses for settlers on illegally confiscated land; others conduct archaeological digs on land from which Palestinian farmers have been expelled.

Some Israeli colleagues have spoken out against the occupation. But these are the heroic few. They risk their professional careers and being ostracised.

Our boycott debate is accused of infringing academic freedom. It does so, and that is to be regretted. The pursuit of scientific and artistic advance without hindrance is indeed crucial for human improvement. But academic freedom is not an absolute value taking precedence over all else. The values of human life and dignity are the ultimate objectives, and sometimes these may not be entirely compatible with the principle of untrammelled academic freedom.

Thanks to Stuart.

Israeli exports 'field-tested on Palestinians'

That's Naomi Klein's take.

Israel went from inventing the networking tools of the "flat world" to selling fences to an apartheid planet. Many of the country's most successful entrepreneurs are using Israel's status as a fortressed state, surrounded by furious enemies, as a kind of 24-hour-a-day showroom, a living example of how to enjoy relative safety amid constant war. And the reason Israel is now enjoying supergrowth is that those companies are busily exporting that model to the world.

...

And that is why the chaos in Gaza and the rest of the region doesn't threaten the bottom line in Tel Aviv, and may actually boost it. Israel has learned to turn endless war into a brand asset, pitching its uprooting, occupation and containment of the Palestinian people as a half-century head start in the "global war on terror".

My congratulations to Klein for working in that apartheid reference, too.

Here they go again

British academics call for Israel boycott.

Delegates at the first conference of the new University and College Union in Bournemouth voted by 158 to 99 for "a comprehensive and consistent boycott" of all Israeli academic institutions, as called for by Palestinian trade unions in response to Israel's "40-year occupation" of Palestinian land.

The union's leadership must now circulate calls from Palestinians for a boycott of Israeli universities to all branches throughout the country.

Not kosher for Passover

Marijuana.

Biblical laws prohibit eating leavened foods during Passover, replacing bread with flat crackers called matza. Later injunctions by European rabbis extended those rules to forbid other foods like beans and corn, and more recent rulings have further expanded the ban to include hemp seeds, which today are found in some health oils - and in marijuana.

Green Leaf is a small political party that supports the legalization of marijuana. Although it is by no means a Jewish religious authority, the group decided to warn its observant supporters away from the drug on Passover.

"You shouldn't smoke marijuana on the holiday, and if you have it in your house you should get rid of it," [party spokesperson Michelle] Levine said.

Thanks SMP!

Oops!

Israeli Defense Minister Amir Peretz inspects the troops with the lens cap still on his binoculars.

The photographer said Peretz gazed through the capped binoculars three times, nodding as Ashkenazi explained what he was looking at, the British Broadcasting Corp. said.

Thanks SMP.

Stop the madness

Andrew McCarthy takes the Bush administration to task for its repetition of the Fatah-is-moderate meme.

Hamas is proudly unyielding in its announced intention to vaporize the “Zionist entity.” By contrast, Fatah is cagier but no less determined. In the Arafat style, it feints every now and again toward negotiation with Israel. There is, after all, a trough of Western billions for any Palestinian leadership willing to affect aspiration toward the Clinton/Bush nirvana: two states, Israel and “Palestine,” living side-by-side in peace. Fatah needs those billions to keep its operatives loyal. Historically, it is a pervasively corrupt, creakily socialist outfit — a former Soviet client averse to elementary economic development.

But the act is just that, an act. The Fatah constitution still calls for the “eradication of Zionist economic, political, military and cultural existence[,]” through an “armed revolution” which is to be the “decisive factor in the liberation fight and in uprooting the Zionist existence” — a revolution that “will not cease unless the Zionist state is demolished and Palestine is completely liberated.”

Consistent with this overarching plan, the U.S.-led “peace process” has been a 14-year sham — hence, the intervening Intifada and related terror gambits. Fatah may occasionally say it will live with Israel, but it has demonstrated, repeatedly, that it will never agree to the commonsense requirements of coexistence: It not only demands land and Jerusalem as its national capital; it refuses to disarm terrorist militias and insists on a refugee “right of return” — an influx of well over a million Palestinians that would effectively destroy the tiny Jewish state from within.

By our State Department’s lights, this qualifies as “moderation” — perhaps because Hamas’s direct approach is bereft of diplomatic nicety, while the savvier Fatah seems willing to attrit Israel to death. (Such new gloss on the withering Bush Doctrine is also on display in Baghdad, where the administration now regularly consults with Abdul Azziz al-Hakim, or, as the White House describes him, “His Eminence,” leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq — a creation of Iran).

I've been pretty disappointed with Condi Rice's recent reanimation of the "peace process," which the Bush administration seemed to have let fall by the wayside until recently.