The inevitable reaction

"What, exactly, is a decent person supposed to think?" That was Bradley Burston's question in an emotional piece published on the website of Ha'aretz shortly after an Arab resident from the southeast Jerusalem neighborhood of Sur Baher killed three and injured dozens in a bulldozer rampage on Jaffa Road last Wednesday. A day later, a Jerusalem Post editorial critically reviewed what the international media were suggesting their readers should think about this terrible attack.

Among the reports and commentaries highlighted in the editorial was a piece that had been published just a few hours after the attack on the Guardian's website under the title "The inevitable overreaction." Once you start to read this piece, you quickly realize that, just a few hours after the carnage, the verdict was already clear: any Israeli reaction to the attack would be an "overreaction", because if Israelis found themselves "targeted by terrorist killers", there was an obvious reason: "Occupation breeds terror" - and if this was not a good enough explanation for terrorist attacks, there was still another one on offer: "the relentless oppressive tactics employed by successive Israeli governments since the very foundation of the state." As the first comment posted in response to this article aptly noted: "Before the dead are cold and buried their murder is 'explained' away. How sad."

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Rewriting history for the "nakba"

"I wish Israel the very best on its 60th . . . And to be fair to the Palestinians, I wish them a very happy Nakba day." This sarcastic comment (#1356747) by a reader of the Guardian's "Comment is Free" site was clearly meant to mock the all-out media effort to provide an "even-handed" coverage of Israel's 60th anniversary celebrations by adopting the "nakba" narrative that postulates that the establishment of Israel was inevitably a "catastrophe" for the Palestinians.

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Peres's vision: succint and memorable

It was just the right title for a holiday interview with Israel's President: "Peres looks forward to tomorrow".  While the politician Shimon Peres certainly has his detractors, it is only appropriate to highlight on Israel's 60th anniversary that the indefatigable Peres can rightly claim to be one of the founding "generation of giants" who is still actively shaping Israel's fate. His memories of a lifetime of service span the country's history, and his visions for the future are bright and creative.

Looking back in his interview with the Jerusalem Post, Peres understandably preferred to focus on achievements - both his own and the country's -, and the one mistake he emphasized is therefore all the more noteworthy: "One of our greatest mistakes was in not exploiting the Jordanian option." The "Jordanian option" refers to an agreement that Peres, serving as Israel's Foreign Minister, had reached in April 1987 with Jordan's King Hussein on plans to hold an international peace conference that was meant to lead to a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict by returning the West Bank to Jordanian sovereignty.

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Gaza grotesque

It was hardly surprising to read reports that, as the Arab League summit got under way in Damascus this weekend, Hamas was organizing a rally in Gaza to glorify their "resistance" and to call on Arab leaders to withdraw the Saudi-sponsored peace initiative that was re-launched at last year's Arab summit in Riyadh. For Hamas-leader Mushir al-Masri the Arab peace initiative was a "burden" on Palestinians because "Hamas is defending the honor and dignity of this nation on the [Arabs] behalf."

Some Arabs clearly beg to differ. "Hamas Must Stand Down" was the straightforward title of a recent article in the Saudi English-language daily Arab News, which argued:

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The birthday bashers

There is something sad and pathetic about the efforts of pro-Palestinian activists to hijack events celebrating Israel's 60th anniversary. These activists insist that, instead of focusing on what was achieved by those who accepted the UN partition sixty years ago and ever since invested all their energies into building a successful state, the world should be transfixed by the misery of those who rejected the partition plan and for decades invested all their energies into turning back the clock.

The false premise underlying the appeals that the plight of the Palestinians should be in the center of everyone's attention is the notion that Palestinians never had a choice: Israel's establishment had to become their "naqba" and thus the focal point of a Palestinian identity that centers on victimhood and a sense of resentment and grievance. And often enough, the very same people who are most vociferous when it comes to accusing Israel of focusing too much on the Holocaust will insist that the "naqba" is the most natural point of reference for anything and everything to do with the Palestinians. 

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The terrorists' calculus

The sense of shock and overwhelming sadness, the heartbreak of families and friends gathering at yet another funeral for a victim of a terrorist attack are all too familiar emotions for Israelis and Jews around the world. But beyond the shared grief, there is the deeply divisive question of how to react. Revenge and retaliation, or restraint and careful reasoning about how to proceed, about how best to put an end to the recurrence of yet another terrible tragedy? When it comes to answering this question, it is perhaps best to first ask another question: what did the terrorist want to achieve beyond the killing of as many of his chosen victims as possible?

There is little reason to disagree with Calev Ben-David's analysis that "the goal was to outrage the general public and to inflame that particular segment of it most skeptical of the possibility of Israel one day coming to terms with its most immediate Arab neighbors".  And sadly, judging from the Sunday papers, it looks as if the terrorist might well have achieved this goal. As the British Observer already reports: "Israel's far-right settler movement has set itself on a renewed collision course with the government of Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, declaring that last week's massacre in a Jewish religious school had targeted them directly and vowing to build a new illegal outpost in the West Bank for every one of the killed students."

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'Hasbara' in the real world

Against the backdrop of the recent escalation of rocket and missile attacks from Hamas-controlled Gaza, the Jerusalem Post reported that the Israeli Foreign Ministry "began preparing the grounds for a large hasbara campaign" designed to explain that Israel had a right to defend itself. Obviously, that is a right that everybody else can take for granted, and thus there is clearly a reason why Israelis and their friends and supporters complain often enough that the government's "hasbara" efforts are woefully inadequate.

What is often overlooked when Israeli "hasbara" is criticized as not effective enough is that, while the Hebrew word literally means "explanation", there are plainly quite a few people who don't want to listen to any explanation of Israeli concerns and viewpoints. For them, "hasbara"is nothing but propaganda. Thus, the ostensibly objective SourceWatch site claims with an unabashed lack of objectivity: "Hasbara refers to the propaganda efforts to sell Israel, justify its actions, and defend it in world opinion. [...] Israel portrays itself as fighting on two fronts: the Palestinians and world opinion. The latter is dealt with hasbara. The premise of hasbara is that Israel's problems are a matter of better propaganda, and not one of an underlying unjust situation."

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Inventing new Nazi victims

A week ago, the Israeli branch of the German Friedrich-Ebert-Foundation and Netanya College organized a debate on a manifesto published in the wake of the 2006 Lebanon war by a group of 25 German social scientists, most of whom work on conflict resolution and peace research. According to the Ebert-Foundation website, the manifesto calls for a re-evaluation of Germany's relationship with Israel, arguing that the friendship between the two countries has become mature enough to allow for criticism. That sounds like a rather reasonable argument, because there is indeed little justification for the notion that German history should oblige Germans to be completely uncritical of Israeli policies. But the manifesto does more than just claim a right to criticize Israel - it also attempts to rewrite history.

Consider this report, which, when checked against the original German text of the manifesto, is indeed quite accurate: "According to the manifesto, German responsibility toward the Palestinians is 'one side of the consequences of the Holocaust which receives far too little attention.' It [i.e. the manifesto] went on to argue that it was the Holocaust which Germany perpetrated that brought about 'the suffering that has persisted [in the Middle East] for the last six decades and has at present become unbearable.'" 

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The time for peace has come

Given that anything that sounds like "Wahabi" usually triggers associations with Saudi Arabia, it was perhaps somewhat startling to see a recent Jerusalem Post article entitled: "Whbee to Arab states: Stop vilifying Israel". But it was of course no Saudi official who urged the Arabs to recognize that the "time has come [...] to cease using international forums to vilify Israel and to [stop] indulging in point-scoring, which merely serves to postpone confidence-building in the region; and to publicly condemn those forces of hatred and violence which, ultimately, undermine everything they stand for". These words were part of a speech given by Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Majalli Whbee at the Mediterranean Seminar held in mid-December in Tel Aviv by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.
 
Because the annually held meeting was hosted this year by Israel, several of the Arab member states - Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco - preferred not to attend, while Jordan and Egypt sent only two junior representatives. Openly challenging this attempt to once more use an international meeting to boycott Israel, Whbee suggested that the countries of the region should "ask themselves what is the greatest threat to their future. Is it Israel, which has no designs on any of them, or is it the hatred and viciousness propounded by those who strive to drag them into a backward world order."

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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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