Keeping the oldest hatred young

Anti-Semitism may be "the oldest hatred", but there is absolutely nothing old-fashioned about the way it is 'marketed' to appeal to the youngsters of today. The Hamas-version, or rather perversion, of "Sesame Street"  - a children's program entitled "Tomorrow's Pioneers" - made international headlines last year and even "earned" a lengthy Wikipedia entry when a Mickey Mouse look-alike named Farfour glorified "resistance", "jihad", and the killing of Jews. It was probably the unexpected international outcry that got Farfour "martyred" after just two months on the screen, but in the show he is beaten to death by a cruel and greedy Israeli official who wanted to "steal" Tel Aviv from the hapless Hamas mouse.

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Hitler's heirs

Before President Bush left Israel last Friday to continue his trip to several countries in the region, he visited Yad Vashem. In the international press, this visit was widely described as "an emotional tour of Israel's Holocaust memorial", and reports highlighted that Bush "stopped in front of an aerial photo of Auschwitz  [...] and told his secretary of state that the US should have bombed the death camp to stop the extermination of Jews there". Bush described Yad Vashem as "a sobering reminder that evil exists, and a call that when evil exists we must resist it."

Whether it would have been indeed feasible to bomb Auschwitz is still a controversial question; but what is striking to note in the context of our own times is that, as one expert explained, the Jewish leadership "was afraid to ask publicly for the Allies to bomb the death camps, believing that would turn the conflict into a war for the Jews". This can hardly fail to bring to mind that fantasies about wars being fought "for the Jews" have remained quite popular - whether among respected academics, pundits and commentators who worry about the "Israel Lobby", or among the wider public that shares such concerns. And when it comes to the Middle East, it is of course entirely acceptable to assert that there "was no war that broke out anywhere without their fingerprints on it" - and in the context of the Hamas Charter's Article Twenty-Two there is no need to ask whose "fingerprints" it is all about.

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A revealing proposal

Expectations for the meeting in Annapolis were low enough to forestall disappointment: the meeting was only meant to re-launch Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that had failed so disastrously seven years ago. But now it seems there is an urge to make up for all the cautious commentary in the run-up to Annapolis, and the hope that this conflict could be settled within a year is considered by some as entirely realistic.

The International Herald Tribune recently featured an article that came up with a rather unconventional idea about how to cut through the Gordian knot of the difficult negotiations. The two authors of the piece suggest that President Bush should do away with the "received wisdom" of viewing negotiations as "the art of give-and-take". Instead, he should boldly "delineate new parameters in the relationship: Palestinians as sole recipients, Israelis as sole providers."

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