I recent months, we have had some strong views expressed, by people who have real knowledge of the situation, about the potential consequences of a military strike by Israel and/or the United States against Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. Former Mossad head Meir Dagan says it is “The stupidest…
I am a little late to this but a great posting by Gary Sick featuring Leon Panetta arguments against attacking Iran.
The spectre of Iran overhangs the Egyptian crisis, the Iran of Ayatollah Khomeini’s bearded visage, frustrated street protests, nuclear ambition and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s denunciations of Israel. But this is the wrong Iran. The right comparison is with the Iran of 1979-1980, which saw Cairo-like street demonstrations topple a dictator and endorse a makeshift revolutionary government. And which saw the Carter administration invite the ailing shah and his family to seek refuge over here.
Rashid Khalidi, one of the globe’s leading scholars on the modern Middle East, and arguably among the most knowledgeable people in the world on the Israel\Palestine conflict spoke yesterday with Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! about the leaked PA documents that recently have come to light in the Guardian and Al-Jazeera. It is a short interview and certainly worth your time.
…the revelations are quite striking. The most important, I think, is the degree to which not only Palestinian negotiators were forthcoming, but the degree to which the Israelis were unwilling to accept concessions. It seriously casts into doubt the idea that Israel would accept anything but complete capitulation by the Palestinians to absolutely everything they’re demanding on every front. We’ve heard about Jerusalem. There is presumably more to come.
But another thing that comes out very strikingly from these documents is the degree to which the United States is twisting the arm of the Palestinians, the degree to which American diplomats, whether Hillary Rodham Clinton or Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during the previous administration, are unsympathetic to the Palestinians and are in cahoots, in Aaron David Miller’s words, our lawyers for Israel—it’s actually worse than Miller, who was involved in the negotiations for many years, says, from these documents.”
The Guardian is reporting today that they have in their possession some 1600 internal PA documents, NOT FROM WIKI LEAKS, that reveal loads of not so nice things about the so called Israel-Palestine “peace process.”
The paper reports that the juicier documents discuss:
• How Israeli leaders privately asked for some Arab citizens to be transferred to a new Palestinian state.
• The intimate level of covert co-operation between Israeli security forces and the Palestinian Authority.
• The central role of British intelligence in drawing up a secret plan to crush Hamas in the Palestinian territories.
• How Palestinian Authority (PA) leaders were privately tipped off about Israel’s 2008-9 war in Gaza.
I would not be surprised to see Tunisian style blow back in the streets of the West Bank and Gaza in the coming days as a result of this news…which can only lead one to wonder, who leaked the documents to begin with?
Jon Stewart, aka the only newsman who matters on TV, has just interviewed the producers of the Persian language equivalent of the Daily Show, “Parazit.”
Rock legend and hipster icon, Elvis Costello has canceled his planned concert in Israel giving hope to the Boycott Divest Sanction (BDS) movement within the pro-Palestinian camp in the ongoing Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Sometimes a silence in music is better than adding to the static and so an end to it.
I cannot imagine receiving another invitation to perform in Israel, which is a matter of regret but I can imagine a better time when I would not be writing this.
It is our hope that Qbash becomes your go-to blog for all things related to the Middle East and other Muslim societies. With any luck qbash will bring out the 16th century militant Sufi mystic in you (in a peaceful way)!
