Yes it's fascinating to watch the same people who got upset that Obama bowed to a Japanese leader and decry him apologizing for the US dropping nukes on Japan, or ever admitting any fault from the US to foreign leaders now believe Obama has to play second fiddle to Bibi Netanyahu.
You ever hear any of the Nixon tapes? If it were me I'd tell the man to his face: fence the green line if you want, the rest is Palestine, Jerusalem should be Disney but in lieu of that, independent, council Palestine/Israel/Switzerland. And you're not bombing anybody.
And I still say give the Jews Texas. Kills two birds with one stone. Removes the Middle East problem and quadruples Israeli land mass. I mean you guys wanna have yer own country right?
Recognize the West Bank and only the West Bank . Rewards the PLO for not blowing up rockets. Hopefully it puts pressure on Gazans to reject Hama.
I think we should give the Palestinians Michigan instead-- or at least make immigration to Michigan an option. Green cards and free houses (should be plenty of them around, just buy them off foreclosure, I think they cost something like $20K a pop in Detroit, can probably get bulk discount) for every Palestinian who would sign a contract to live in Michigan for at least 10 years. First, the Israelis, like it or not, have set up shop there and are pretty comfortable. The Palestinians are slumming both the PLA territories and as refugees elsewhere. Seems the Palestininans should be more amendable to moving. Even Michigan should be a step up. Second, Michigan is the perfect place: There is already a good-sized Arab population there. More important: God know we need more people willing to live in Michigan. Texas, on the other hand, has a net population growth. We can tweak the program a little, too, and allow other states that need people, like Ohio, to get their own Palestinians.
What really gets me about Netanyahu's son, he went on the record(on facebook no less) calling Muslims the religion of violence, pure evil, yada yada. This is when the kid is 17, so as we know they are well aware and pretty much at adulthood. This is the President's son, if he feels so strongly about that, where does this mentality come from? That thought process is what is supposed to bring peace? Give me a break. His response was along the lines of his son being just a child and its ridiculous to bring attention to it....
I'd be wiling to give them all or a portion of the King Ranch. Unlike Palestine the King Ranch it is very sparsely populated. They could probably just buy it outright from the King Ranch Corporation and then they could ask the small number of people there to move. The King Ranch of course is much much bigger than Israel. They would be safer there. WE could give them the same billions per year we do now for say 10 years to help with the transition.
http://972mag.com/up-close-and-personal-getting-lied-to-by-bibi/27313/ Up close and personal: Getting lied to by Bibi Unaware that their microphones were still on after a G-20 press conference in Cannes last week, French President Nicolas Sarkozy and U.S. President Barack Obama were overheard expressing their true opinion of Binyamin Netanyahu on a personal level. The author had the same impression during a 1993 interview with Netanyahu. So now Sarkozy says Netanyahu is a “liar” and that he “can’t stand” him, and Obama moans that that’s nothing, he has “to deal with him every day.” Join the club, fellas. Tony Blair and his team considered Netanyahu an “armor-plated bull****ter,” according to his aide Alistair Campbell; Bill Clinton couldn’t stand him, and if it hadn’t been for the Holocaust, imagine what Angela Merkel would be saying about Netanyahu now. Our Bibi is a piece of work. It’s not his right-wing politics; Sharon was right-wing, certainly in his first term, Shamir was right-wing, Begin was right-wing, and foreign leaders didn’t talk about any of them like they talk about Netanyahu. Some said Begin was stubborn and argumentative, Shamir was a brick wall (I don’t remember anybody badrapping Sharon personally) – but I don’t recall any world leader complaining that they were intolerable, that they were liars like they do about Netanyahu. And with the exception of Ehud Barak –a different sort of piece of work, even more arrogant than Netanyahu and a physically violent bully, but much less of a liar – no Israeli prime minister ever alienated his political allies at home like Netanyahu did in his first term. (Though it must be said that he’s gotten over that problem in his current term.) What is it about this guy? Besides the lying, what is it that makes foreign statesmen, not to mention his opposition at home, find him intolerable – “revolting,” as I put it in an August 2005 Jerusalem Post column that looked at this question. To help answer it, I told a personal anecdote: I was interviewing Netanyahu in his Jerusalem office for a profile in summer 1993, a couple of months after his book, A Place Among the Nations – Israel and the World, came out. After awhile I started asking him various policy questions, and he started replying, ‘Read my book.’ Finally I told him, ‘I did.’ He looked at me sideways, skeptically, and asked, ‘Did you read it or just skim it?’ I told him, ‘No, I read it.’ Jerusalem Post editor David Horovitz has written of Netanyahu’s technique of ‘giving the voters those extra two seconds of full-on, ultra-sincere eye contact to lock up their support.’ A few minutes after telling Netanyahu I’d read his book, I got my two seconds. Sitting behind his desk he paused, fixed me with the look and said, ‘Larry, I think you understand my vision better than any Israeli journalist.’ I recall lowering my eyes and trying to make the wince on my lips look like a smile of appreciation, and went on to the next question. This was nothing new, a politician feeding a journalist some flattering nonsense in the hope of getting sympathetic coverage. But what nonsense! He didn’t know me from Adam, I’m sure he’d never read anything I’d ever written, I’d been talking to him for all of an hour and he tells me he thinks no Israeli journalist has plumbed his depths like I have. He was telling me a lie, but it was such a bad lie, such a ridiculous one. How could he expect that it would work, that it would get me on his side? Later I thought about that, and I asked myself: What sort of person tells ridiculously bad lies? A stupid person. But stupid is one thing Netanyahu definitely isn’t. So what sort of intelligent person tells really bad lies? Answer: One who thinks the person he’s lying to is stupid, stupid enough to believe him. I don’t think I gave Netanyahu any reason to think I was stupid. I think he just naturally assumes that about everybody – that he can tell anybody anything and get away with it, that everybody’s a gullible simpleton except him. And that, finally, is what makes Netanyahu so uniquely offensive to watch: It’s not just the preening that shows he has such a high opinion of himself, it’s the outrageousness of his bull**** that shows he has such a low opinion of his audience. The funny thing is that this guy is considered Israel’s Great Communicator – and he is, but with a very, very narrow audience. Republicans, AIPAC-owned Democrats, right-wing Zionists and the uninformed. Everybody else thinks he’s a liar and can’t stand him. A piece of work, our Bibi.
BTW, Buck, expand your horizons. One can be against Bibi, right wingers in Israel and even Zionism without being anti-semitic.
You have no idea how vast my horizons are. And just for the record I should spell this out for you ... i w a s j u s t j o k i n g a r o u n d
Personally, I think Netenyahu has the tools to be a good president, but he is a liar (as are most other politicians), and more importantly he seems to have made too many soft promises/commitments to too many people who have too many goals, none of which is peace. Now he has to tell those people that their Sugar Mama has said they won't attack Iran, to resist settlement activities, Hosni Mubarak is gone, Syria is erupting, etc. There is no unity in the government right now, just back-scratching IMO. More importantly, I think the government barely ever acts according to what its people want (the people seem to be screaming peace) in conflict situations. Then again, Israel has gotten geographically larger since he became President, so has he failed or has he succeeded?
I read an op-ed in Foreign Affairs, the author was saying that the Ultra-Orthodox have become the key demographic in federal elections in Israel, and that as such politicans try to cater to them (giving them funding to study religious text, having a stricter interpretation of what it means to be the "Jewish State", backing support for an Israel with Biblical borders) it's interesting if true, especially because he also claimed that this is alienating the secular and intellectuals, causing them to emigrate and only further aggravating the situation. I'm not too familar with Israeli politics or Israeli soceity in general, can someone who perhaps is a bit more familar verify what the author said?
It's an unholy (pun intended) alliance of ultra-Orthodox, religious settlers, and the nationalist right (who are also settlers and supporters of settlers), all of which alone are marginal, but in any coalition, hold a lot of sway. For a center-right and more-or-less secular party like Likud they need these guys to hold power. The Ultra-Orthodox live in very isolated communities, generally NOT the settlements and generally don't work and expect the taxpayer to support their poverty-laden lifestyle of studying religious texts and NOT joining the army. The TRUE Ultra-Orthodox want little to do with the state of Israel itself (and largely do NOT celebrate non-religious holidays like Independence Day or Veterans Day), and as a voting bloc go with whomever will give them the most taxpayer money. The ultra-Orthodox have almost always been in a coalition, dating back to the very socialist governments at the founding of the state, which is why even under staunch atheists like David Ben-Gurion, offices like the Chief Rabbinate and the domain of control of religious conversions and other religious matters have always been given up to include their participation. Lately they've been emboldened by the political Judaisation of Israel being done by the settlers (who often aren't that religious - but are all very ethnocentric and nationalistic). So in places like Jerusalem, ads depicting women are defaced, rocks thrown at cars of Shabbat, and people unwilling to rent apartments to people who aren't kosher and shabbat-observant Jews is becoming more commonplace. The nationalist-settler wing, on the other hand are stepping up attacks on Arabs, arson on Arab-owned businesses, building illegal outposts in the West Bank, provoking the Palestinians that live there, and not least, defacing Christian and Muslim Cemeteries with graffiti. They also demonize NGOs and anyone that questions them, the Occupation, or any war the country gets into. And when I say demonize, I mean draft laws that limit free speech. Examples include, making it illegal to express the Palestinian narrative of 1948 (Statehood for Israel - but the Nakba (tragedy) for them), outlawing foreign NGO's and NGO's with foreign funding (though suspiciously organizations like AIPAC are not on the list, and orgs like Amnesty International are). This group DOES work and does do army service, and in the last decade or so has been much more politically active and push their flock to join combat units and change the character of the army to be more religious and nationalistic. The army traditionally is associated with the secular left, and that is changing as more and more of these troops are refusing to be in an audience when women sing in army-sponsored events, break orders and pass on information to settlement leaders when the army is going to evacuate illegal outposts, and so on. So in short, yes, the Ultra-Orthodox are a problem, but they are a subset of a much bigger problem. They would still have some power and some say even in a Left-wing government, but in the current coalition (very much to the RIGHT of Netanyahu) they are exercising their power. The biggest of all is the Ministry of the Interior (a Shas MK is the minister), which is in charge of immigration. Immigrants, foreign workers, asylum seekers and others not deemed sufficiently Jewish enough are not made to feel very welcome, and on many occasions, have been deported. Kadima won the last election and couldn't build a large enough coalition...so the #2 party got a chance to do it. Likud sided with the ultra-right and managed to build one. The rest is history.
