Justin's Political Corner

Barack Obama is due to land at Tel Aviv airport on Wednesday for a three-day visit to Israel and Palestine that the White House – anxious to set low-to-zero expectations of tangible outcomes – has billed primarily as a listening exercise.

Talks between the US president and the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, are expected to focus on Iran, Syria and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The president will also travel to Ramallah to meet Palestinian leaders.

Israeli air space will close for about an hour for the arrival of Air Force One. Obama will be greeted by Netanyahu, who was sworn in this week as leader of the new Israeli government; President Shimon Peres; other senior politicians and dignitaries; a contingent of Israeli soldiers; and a military orchestra.

The US president’s first task is to inspect an Iron Dome mobile missile defence unit – funded by the US – that has been brought to Ben Gurion airport. He will then fly to Jerusalem by helicopter, though most of his entourage of 600 will travel by road, requiring the closure of the main Tel Aviv-Jerusalem highway.

The day will be dominated by at least five hours of talks between Obama and Netanyahu. Despite the lack of personal warmth between the two leaders it will be the tenth time they have met face to face since both took office in early 2008. No other world leader has clocked up as many meetings with Obama.

Some US and Israeli officials say the trip is also aimed at recalibrating the tetchy relationship between the two leaders at the start of their second terms and building trust on both sides.

The White House has said it is a “chance to connect with the Israeli people”, who are largely distrustful of Obama. A poll published last week in the Israeli newspaper Ma’ariv found that only 10% of Israelis had a favourable attitude towards Obama, with 17% defining their attitude towards the US president as “hateful”.

As part of his overture, Obama will deliver his keynote speech of the visit to an invited audience of Israeli university students at the International Convention Centre in Jerusalem on Thursday.

He will travel to Ramallah to meet the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, and the prime minister, Salaam Fayyad. The seven-mile journey will be made by heliicopter, thus avoiding crossing the 24ft-high concrete separation wall that snakes through Jerusalem, separating off parts of the east of the city and the West Bank. However, the president will have a bird’s-eye view of the barrier and some of the 130-plus Jewish settlements that punctuate the West Bank landscape.

Many Palestinians are hostile to Obama, believing he failed to live up to early pledges to halt Israeli colonisation of the West Bank and tried to obstruct their quest for recognition of a Palestinian state at the United Nations. On Tuesday, scuffles broke out between anti-Obama protesters and police near the Muqata, the presidential compound in Ramallah where Thursday’s meeting is due to take place. Many posters bearing Obama’s face have been torn or painted over.

Both Israelis and Palestinians are sceptical about the chances of any real movement on the decades-old conflict. A poll published in the Jerusalem Post on Tuesday suggested eight out of 10 Israelis do not believe that Obama will succeed in brokering a peace deal in the next four years.

Obama’s itinerary for his 50-hour visit includes visits to the Israel Museum to view the Dead Sea Scrolls, Israel’s haunting Holocaust memorial Yad Vashem, and the graves of Theodor Herzl, the father of Zionism, and the assassinated Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Obama will make a second trip – again by helicopter – to the Palestinian territories on Friday to visit the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.

His entourage has taken over the historic King David hotel, which overlooks the walls of Jerusalem’s Old City.

h/t: The Guardian

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council, made an interesting observation on his radio show yesterday. Speaking about the confirmation of Chuck Hagel, Perkins mused about the ‘irony’ that Hagel, whom he considers to be anti-Israel, was backed by Democratic senators who are “mostly aligned with a lot of the Jewish lobby” and “enjoy the money coming from the Jewish community.” Hmmm, “Jewish lobby,” where have I heard that before?

Hagel has been savaged in recent weeks for having used the phrase in a 2006 interview. He has since apologized and said he should phrased his comments differently. In case it isn’t obvious, the ADL’s Abe Foxman explains the many problems with saying “Jewish lobby.”

Notwithstanding Hagel’s apology, Sen. Lindsey Graham grilled him about his use of the phrase during his confirmation hearing. FRC also cited Hagel’s use of “Jewish lobby” in its background document opposing his confirmation. Meanwhile over at the website of the American Family Association, which broadcasts Perkins’ show, David Limbaugh railed against Hagel’s “bigoted accusation” about the “Jewish lobby” and said he failed to provide a “satisfactory explanation for his disgraceful terminology – because there is none.”

“Bigoted” and “disgraceful” sounds about right, but don’t hold your breath waiting for conservatives to denounce Perkins’ comments.

Perkins seems mystified as to why most American Jews support Democrats, but his right-hand man thinks he knows the reason. FRC’s Executive Vice President Jerry Boykin has argued that Hitler was “an extraordinarily off the scale leftist” but “many Jews in America, for example, can’t identify with the Republican Party because they’re called the party of the Right, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth.”

This is the same Boykin who was rebuked by the ADL in 2003 and believes that the “Jews must be lead to Christ.” And this is the same FRC – a certified hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center – that warned yesterday that Hagel’s confirmation may bring God’s judgment on America. So I guess we shouldn’t be suprised.

- See more at: RWW

For the vast majority of readers who tune into Israel every so often but are not obsessive about it, the country’s election on Tuesday appears to have delivered a rare moment of mild encouragement. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, deservedly cast as a peace rejectionist, has been weakened and the overall right-wing bloc unexpectedly lost seats, creating the narrowest margin of victory of the right over the non-right of 61–59 (down from 65–55 in the previous Knesset), when polls had predicted the margin to grow further (although describing the split this way is not a helpful guide, of which more later).

Moderate Israel has also found itself a new champion in the staggering success of newbie centrist party leader Yair Lapid, whose Yesh Atid (There Is a Future) party claimed nineteen seats. If one counts Labor as being left (despite its protestations to the contrary), then the Meretz-Labor left camp has scored an impressive revival, from sixteen to twenty-one seats. By this accounting, Israel’s rightward march appears to have been stalled, at least for the time being, itself quite a feat given Israeli demographic trends (higher ultra-Orthodox and national-religious birthrates) and the debilitating disunity among the non-rightist opposition, which failed to agree on an alternative candidate to Netanyahu in this election.

This is where a pause from breathless optimism (or a read of Max Blumenthal’s take on the election) is very much in order. First of all, the right may have shrunk slightly, but the remaining and significant cohort has veered appreciably rightward. Far more of the Knesset’s now forty-three Zionist-right MKs take an overtly anti-democratic approach toward Israel’s non-Jewish minority and dissenting voices, prioritize settlement expansion and support annexation of a large part or all of the occupied territories. These views are represented in both the much-enlarged national religious Jewish Home party, led by Naftali Bennett, and within the Likud faction itself.

More important still, it is the Zionist right that will form the next government and be a clear majority of Netanyahu’s next coalition—yes, that Netanyahu. He will still be PM. But if the Zionist right is again not a majority and has lost seats, and the non-right beats the right by forty-eight seats to forty-three, why is it that a non-right government is so inconceivable?

At this point, a word of explanation is required regarding Israel’s political camps. In addition to the Zionist right and the non-right, the remaining seats needed to form a governing majority are split between the other two blocs in Israeli politics: the ultra-Orthodox, or Haredim (Knesset seats: eighteen), and the largely Palestinian Arab parties (eleven).

The ultra-Orthodox parties (Shas and United Torah Judaism) make for more natural partners of the Zionist right—a discourse of universal rights is alien to them, certainly as applied to Palestinians, and they are socially very conservative. But the ultra-Orthodox can also switch sides. Their economic outlook more approximates that of the left—they see a role for government and social safety nets, and their greatest focus is financial benefits and allowances and a degree of autonomy for their own community (for instance, running their own education system). Anyone willing to pay that price is a potential ally. The ultra-Urthodox parties are also, strictly speaking, not Zionist. Their interpretation of Jewish law makes for an uneasy relationship with the idea of a sovereign Jewish state in pre-messianic times; this is partly why their rabbinical leaders vehemently oppose military service for their community. Other than a (not unproblematic) tendency toward intolerance and racism, and the fact that the two largest settlements (Betar Ilit and Modi’in Ilit) provide cheap housing near Jerusalem for the ultra-Orthodox, ideologically they are not really part of the settlements and Greater Israel camp. Territorial pragmatism and peace overtures have been justified by Haredi rabbinical authorities in the past—mostly predicated on the command to save lives and even on the need to avoid confrontation with the world—and there’s no reason why they couldn’t do so in the future.

From the perspective of centrist Zionist Israeli Jews, the non-Zionism of Israel’s Palestinian citizens is apparently much harder to accept than the non-Zionism of the ultra-Orthodox. Yair Lapid, the new face of moderate Israel, used his first post-election appearance in front of the TV cameras to rule out forming any kind of parliamentary bloc with the Arab parties, even one that might put him in the prime minister’s seat. This reality of exclusion also helps suppress Palestinian voter turnout (up to 15 percent lower than turnout among Israeli Jews), another factor that, if it were to change, could add a handful of seats to the non-right camp.

Rabin was indeed the last Israeli prime minister to achieve overall progress with the Palestinian leadership (then led by Yasir Arafat’s PLO) and to advance equality for the Palestinian citizens of Israel—and his premiership was the last time Israel was governed from the center-left. Rabin led by forming a blocking alliance with the non-Zionist Palestinian parties and a governing coalition with the non-Zionist ultra-Orthodox of Shas. It was Rabin’s government, of course, that produced the 1993 Oslo Accords with the PLO. There have been negotiations since then, but never a government of the non-right that produced and implemented peace deals (the Lebanon and Gaza withdrawals, under Ehud Barak in 2000 and Ariel Sharon in 2005, respectively, were both unilateral); that governed without a strong pro-settler coalition presence; that avoided bouts of war and harsh military escalations; and that addressed domestic inequality in a serious way.

First, the ideological change. The fact that other than the small and proudly leftist (and growing) Meretz party, the non-right parties (Yesh Atid, Labor, Tzipi Livni’s Hatnua and the now-shrunken Kadima, led by Shaul Mofaz) all insist on defining themselves as center parties, not left, and have ruled out adopting a new branding—progressive or liberal or democratic—already hints at the problem. The Zionist center too often sounds and acts like a less vicious, more huggable version of the Zionist right, bereft of its own vision or beliefs, still undemocratic for its non-Jewish citizens, and still indulgent of settlements, occupation and injustices vis-à-vis the Palestinians beyond the Green Line. It should not be surprising, for example, that Kadima MKs supported anti-democratic legislation in the outgoing Knesset.

And finally, one cannot absolve the United States, Europe and other outside powers from their responsibility for having pursued policies that indulge Israeli violations of international law and that fuel Israeli escapism. Handwringing in Western capitals about continued pro-settlement Israeli policies is an evasion. Alongside the failures of the Israeli non-right, the other key reason the right has been winning the argument in Israel is because there have been no negative consequences for the steady expansion of Israel’s grip on the West Bank and East Jerusalem. If Yair Lapid—and the large centrist, urban-based middle-class sector that he represents—is to make the switch and escapist Israel is to wake up, it will be the result of smart and targeted international pressure and the fear of international isolation. Western signals of impunity and indulgence toward the occupation are the oxygen of escapism, and the off-switch for that oxygen needs to be found rather urgently.

H/T: Daniel Levy at The Nation

Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman has resigned after prosecutors decided to charge him with breach of trust.

Mr Lieberman has also resigned as deputy prime minister, and said he would fight to clear his name of the charges.

The case against him relates to a financial scandal dating back more than a decade.

His resignation comes five weeks before Israel’s general election.

“Though I know I committed no crime… I have decided to resign my post as foreign minister and deputy prime minister,” Mr Lieberman said in a statement released by his office.

He also said he would waive his parliamentary immunity and suggested he hoped to settle the case before the elections, due on 22 January, allowing him to stand as a candidate as planned.

Mr Lieberman is the leader of Yisrael Beitenu, the second largest party in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud-led coalition government.

The two parties were due to run together in January’s general election, with polls suggesting they were on course to win before the charges against Mr Lieberman were announced.

Police had been investigating allegations of money laundering and bribery against Mr Lieberman, but prosecutors instead announced plans to charge him with the lesser offence of breach of trust.

That relates to him receiving confidential documents concerning the investigation against him from the former Israeli ambassador to Belarus, who he later promoted to another post.

The more serious charges of bribery and money laundering relate to allegations that Mr Lieberman received millions of dollars from businessmen with interests in Israel, and laundered the money through shell companies and bank accounts.

Israeli prosecutors said they had been forced to close the case due to a lack of evidence.

Mr Lieberman has denied any wrongdoing, and described the investigations as a witch hunt.

He is seen as one of Israel’s most outspoken politicians. Born in Moldova, he is one of the million Israelis who immigrated from the former Soviet Union.

Seen as to the right of Mr Netanyahu, Mr Lieberman has been a harsh critic of the Palestinian Authority and its leader Mahmoud Abbas. He lives in an Israeli settlement in the West Bank. 

h/t: BBC.co.uk

CAIRO (Reuters) - Egypt announced on Wednesday that a ceasefire had been reached to end the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, starting later in the day.

Egyptian Foreign Minister Mohamed Kamel Amr made the announcement in a joint news conference with U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. The ceasefire would come into effect at 15:00 EDT, said Amr, whose country has been at the heart of efforts to broker an end to the conflict.

“Egypt has made great efforts … since the start of the latest escalation in the Gaza Strip,” Amr said.

h/t: Yahoo! News

News Corp. chairman and CEO Rupert Murdoch criticized the “Jewish owned press” for its coverage of the conflict in Gaza in a November 17 tweet:

The Anti-Defamation League writes of the “anti-Semitic lie” that “Jews control the banks, the media, and the government”:

This myth originates with The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, a proven forgery. The forgery continues to promote the stereotype that Jews own the banks and control the media. The reality is, in societies, like the United States, individuals who identify as Jews have succeeded. But in almost every other country where Jews have lived, they have been a small minority and experienced centuries of persecution.

The Daily Beast’s Peter Beinert writes that Murdoch’s comment is offensive to journalists as well as to Jewish people and suggests that Murdoch believes reporters for his publications should conform their reporting to his political views:

It’s offensive to journalists because it implies that institutions of the “press” should reflect the ideological biases of their owners. Reading Murdoch’s tweet, it would be logical to conclude that he believes that any newspaper he owns should reflect his right-wing views, even in its news coverage. The FCC might want to consider that when evaluating Murdoch’s reported bid to buy the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times.

h/t: MMFA

The Christian Broadcasting Network’s terrorism analyst Erick Stakelbeck has no credentials to report on security issues (he is a sports reporter), but that hasn’t stopped him from playing the role as “expert.” Stakelbeck appeared on The Janet Mefferd Show to repeat right-wing talking points to claim that President Obama is a failed leader. He said Obama is “using the bin Laden raid as his sole, only foreign policy talking point,” arguing that it doesn’t reflect “foreign policy” and that “anyone in their right mind” would have made the call to go into Pakistan to find bin Laden (unless you’re Mitt Romney). But then Stakelbeck claimed that mission didn’t really matter since bin Laden “was basically isolated and neutralized at that point anyway.”

He went on to talk about how Obama is “empowering and emboldening the Muslim Brotherhood,” “throwing Israel under the bus” and “appeasing the Iranians,” and even said that Obama may pull of an “October surprise” by making a deal with Iran or sending troops into Libya. “Who knows what else they have up their sleeve, I have to say these are people who are leftist ideologues, they are hell-bent in their words ‘fundamentally transforming America,’ and I don’t think they’re going to go quietly,” he said.

Stakelbeck also discussed with Mefferd the non-scandal in Benghazi, arguing that the President has turned into “Imam Obama” over his UN speech where he said: “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. But to be credible, those who condemn that slander must also condemn the hate we see in the images of Jesus Christ that are desecrated, or churches that are destroyed, or the Holocaust that is denied.” Stacelbeck decried the speech and lamented, “This is an American president saying that in front of the UN? This is madness,” apparently forgetting that President George W. Bush made similar statements during the Muhammad cartoon controversy. He concluded that Muslim countries can never have democracy because “Islam and true democracy are not compatible.”

h/t: Brian Tashman at RWW

NEW YORK—Exactly six weeks before Election Day, President Barack Obama stood on the world stage Tuesday and warned Iran that the United States will “do what we must” to stop Tehran from getting a nuclear weapon.

In what could be his last speech to the annual U.N. General Assembly, Obama also told Arab Spring countries groping their way uncertainly toward democracy that they have a friend—and a role model—in America. But, he said, they must battle the forces of intolerance and extremism threatening what should be “a season of progress.”

“The United States of America will always stand up for these aspirations, for our own people, and all across the world. That was our founding purpose,” he said.

The president, under fire from Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for his handling of Iran’s atomic ambitions, dedicated part of his 30-minute address to warning the Islamic republic that he cannot live with a nuclear-armed Tehran.

“Make no mistake: a nuclear-armed Iran is not a challenge that can be contained,” Obama said.

“It would threaten the elimination of Israel, the security of Gulf nations, and the stability of the global economy. It risks triggering a nuclear-arms race in the region, and the unraveling of the non-proliferation treaty,” Obama continued. “That’s why the United States will do what we must to prevent Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon.”

The president’s stern comments closely echoed his past warnings, and stopped short of drawing the clear “red line” Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has sought from Washington.

(Romney has at times taken a tougher stance. In a July speech in Jerusalem, he declared that “Iran’s pursuit of nuclear weapons capability presents an intolerable threat to Israel, to America, and to the world.” The key word there was “capability”—not an actual nuclear weapon, but the ability to build one. That lined the Republican up more closely with Netanyahu.)

Obama also paid tribute to the slain U.S. ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, killed along with three colleagues in what his administration has designated a terrorist attack on the anniversary of 9/11.

Stevens “embodied the best of America,” the president said. “Today, we must reaffirm that our future will be determined by people like Chris Stevens, and not by his killers.”

Obama also delivered the kind of vigorous defense of his foreign policy that would not be out of place in his stump speech.

“The war in Iraq is over, American troops have come home. We have begun a transition in Afghanistan, and America and our allies will end our war on schedule in 2014,” he said. “Al Qaeda has been weakened and Osama bin Laden is no more.”

Images of anti-American riots—and the dramatic assault on the U.S. compound in Benghazi, Libya—have helped degrade Obama’s once-imposing advantage over Romney on foreign policy.

h/t: Yahoo! News

On Monday and Tuesday Mother Jones published exclusive video that captured Mitt Romney speaking to donors at a May 17 fundraiser, which was held at the home of private equity mogul Mark Leder. Responding to a question about the “Palestinian problem,” Romney said peace in the Middle East is not possible and a Palestinian state is not feasible, telling donors that Palestinians have “no interest whatsoever in establishing peace and that the pathway to peace is almost unthinkable to accomplish.” At another point, the GOP presidential nominee told attendees of this $50,000-a-plate dinner that 47 percent of Americans—those who back President Obama—are “victims” who are “dependent upon government” and “pay no income tax.” He noted: “my job is is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.” These comments set off a media firestorm and generated headlines around the world.

Romney’s remarks, denigrating nearly half of the electorate, sent the Romney campaign—already roiled by infighting—into panic mode. The campaign hastily convened a late-night press conference to address his controversial statements, and Romney stood by his “off the cuff” comments, while conceding that they were “not elegantly stated.” He claimed his comments where merely a “snippet” and not the “full response.” That was not true; his comments were shown in full. He added, “I hope the person who has the video would put out the full material.”

h/t: David Corn at Mother Jones

Mitt’s in even bigger trouble.

Mitt Romney argued that the Palestinian people ultimately don’t want a peaceful settlement with Israelis and that pursuit of such a peace process would ultimately be feckless during a private fundraiser last May.

The video of his comments is the latest to emerge from a talk the Republican nominee made before a crowd of donors at the home of Marc Leder a wealthy private equity executive. The first to emerge had Romney accusing 47 percent of the country of being tax-avoiding, government-dependent, self-identified victims who would he could ignore because they would never support his candidacy. The latest, uncovered by Mother Jones, has Romney offering similarly blunt assessments with respect to foreign policy.

He went on:

I look at the Palestinians not wanting to see peace anyway, for political purposes, committed to the destruction and elimination of Israel, and these thorny issues, and I say, “There’s just no way.” And so what you do is you say, “You move things along the best way you can.” You hope for some degree of stability, but you recognize that this is going to remain an unsolved problem. We live with that in China and Taiwan. All right, we have a potentially volatile situation but we sort of live with it, and we kick the ball down the field and hope that ultimately, somehow, something will happen and resolve it. We don’t go to war to try and resolve it imminently. On the other hand, I got a call from a former secretary of state. I won’t mention which one it was, but this individual said to me, you know, I think there’s a prospect for a settlement between the Palestinians and the Israelis after the Palestinian elections. I said, “Really?” And, you know, his answer was, “Yes, I think there’s some prospect.” And I didn’t delve into it.

An even fuller transcript is available at Mother Jones’ website.

The comments aren’t exactly that far removed from conservative talking point with respect to the Middle East peace process, though the cynicism and directness is not usually what you get from Romney on the stump. The candidate had gotten in trouble for declaring that “culture” was what made Israeli’s more successful that Palestinians. This seems to affirm his dim view of the Palestinian people.

h/t: Sam Stein at HuffPo

WASHINGTON — GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan accused the Obama administration Friday of treating Israel with “indifference bordering on contempt,” the latest in a series of jabs on the president’s foreign policy after attacks on U.S. embassies abroad this week.

“Look across that region today, and what do we see?” he said at the Values Voters Summit, an annual gathering of 2,000 social conservatives, at the Omni Shoreham hotel in Washington. “The slaughter of brave dissidents in Syria. Mobs storming American embassies and consulates. Iran four years closer to gaining a nuclear weapon. Israel, our best ally in the region, treated with indifference bordering on contempt by the Obama administration. Amid all these threats and dangers, what we do not see is steady, consistent American leadership.”

Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney and Ryan have responded to attacks on the U.S. embassies in Egypt and Libya, where an ambassador and three other staffers were killed, with a critique on what they say is President Barack Obama’s weakness. Ryan said earlier this week that “adversaries … tempted to test us need to know that America is strong militarily.”

But some polling indicates that a majority — if slight — thinks Obama is dealing with foreign policy just fine. Democrats have also polled evenly with Republicans on who is best to prevent terrorism, according to a poll released by Gallup on Thursday.

Ryan then turned to the economy, which he and Romney have tried to make the major focus of their campaign. “Values voters are also economic voters,” he said. “The Obama economic agenda failed, not because it was stopped, but because it was passed.”

Ryan was interrupted by three hecklers, who shouted “corporations are not people,” then were shouted down by the crowd’s “USA” chants. Two of the hecklers were quickly taken out of the room by security.

“Everyone knows that President Obama inherited a bad economy. And four months from now, when Mitt Romney is sworn in as president, he will inherit a bad economy,” Ryan said. “But here’s the difference. When a Romney-Ryan administration takes office, we will also take responsibility.”

Ryan also attacked Obama for his recent defense of government, saying the president “looks to government as the great benefactor in every life.”

“Our opponents even have a new motto. They say, quote, ‘Government is the only thing that we all belong to’,” Ryan said. “I don’t know about you, but I’ve never thought of government as something I belong to. As a matter of fact, on the seven occasions I’ve been sworn in as a member of Congress, I have never taken an oath to the government.”

His speech had few mentions of social conservatism, largely focusing on the economy, limiting government and foreign policy. He did, however, criticize the president for requiring employers to provide contraception as part of insurance, which many Catholic organizations and social conservatives oppose.

“Never mind your own conscience, they were basically told, from now on you’re going to do things the government’s way,” he said. “… As Governor Romney has said, this mandate is not a threat and insult to one religious group — it is a threat and insult to every religious group. He and I are honored to stand with you — people of faith and concerned citizens — in defense of religious liberty.”

Ryan said Obama “has chosen to pander to the most extreme elements of his party” by supporting abortion rights and opposing against pro-life Democrats. He called for a law against abortion.

h/t: Huffington Post