Durban Redux?

The names of certain cities take on special meaning.

Munich was the site of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain's third and final meeting with Adolf Hitler, in a two-week span, in September 1938. On his return, the British leader, speaking from 10 Downing Street, promised "peace with honour" and "peace for our time," only to be faced with a full-fledged war less than a year later.

In other words, Munich became synonymous with appeasement.

Or take Yalta, the location of the 1945 summit involving US President Franklin Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and Soviet dictator Josef Stalin. Though much else was discussed, including the Soviet Union's entry into the war against Japan, Yalta will long be remembered as the venue where Poland's future in the Soviet sphere of influence was essentially decided.

In other words, Yalta became synonymous with sellout.

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Israel at 60: reasons to celebrate

Israel is about to mark its sixtieth anniversary.

Some friends say they're in no mood to celebrate. The timing isn't right, they complain. The country's political circuitry is overloaded. Danger lurks on the Gaza and Lebanon borders. Iran's nuclear ambitions - and annihilationist threats - loom large. Disputes over the current peace talks with the Palestinian Authority are daily fare. Israel continues to take a beating in UN forums. The drumbeat of anti-Zionism grows louder. A fractious social climate creates long-term and seemingly insoluble fissures between Arab and Jew, not to mention Jew and Jew. And global market volatility spells trouble for the Israeli economy.

All true, perhaps. But the story mustn't end there. Milestone anniversaries offer the chance to step back, however briefly, from the news of the moment and take stock of the larger picture.

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What happens when the shoe's on the other foot?

A small  but influential chorus of American voices has made a mantra out of the notion that criticism of Israel is stifled by the pro-Israel community.

Indeed, when NYU professor Tony Judt's lecture at the Polish Consulate in New York was canceled in 2006 by the consul general, because Poland did not subscribe to Judt's view of a one-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a group of intellectuals rushed to his defense.

In a widely-publicized petition, they asserted that "We are united in believing that a climate of intimidation is inconsistent with fundamental principles of debate in a democracy. The Polish Consulate is not obliged to promote free speech. But the rules of the game in America oblige citizens to encourage rather than stifle debate."

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A Tale of Two Leaders

What a week!

Two European leaders made headlines. As it happened, both were women, born in the postwar era. Both led pathbreaking visits to the Middle East. But they couldn't have struck a greater contrast.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel traveled to Israel. It was not her first visit, but it was surely her most historic. She was accompanied by eight Cabinet ministers, an unprecedented number. She planned the visit in connection with the celebration of Israel's sixtieth anniversary. And she left no doubt that Germany was committed to elevating its special relationship with Israel to a still higher level.

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Hamas: words and deeds

There's the story of the mother determined that her five-year-old wunderkind should be well-educated and one day headed for a top university. She decided to pump him with new vocabulary words each day. When little Charlie came home from school, his mother promptly said, "Charlie, what's the difference between ignorance and indifference?" To which he, totally uninterested in the exercise, shrugged his shoulders and muttered, "I don't know and I don't care."

At times, that's the sense I get from the world about Hamas.

It's as if there is an ignorance, perhaps a willful ignorance, about what Hamas, which rules Gaza, really means.

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'Give me a break, please'

Not a day passes that I don't encounter another Israel-directed lecture on the imperative of peace.

Sometimes it comes from diplomats. Or from editorial writers. Or from columnists. Or from scholars. Or from human-rights groups.

Frankly, it makes my blood boil.

First, it assumes that Israel wants peace for itself less than others do.

Second, it displays an arrogance that what may not be immediately apparent to Israel is abundantly obvious to those on the outside sitting in their ministries, offices, ivory towers, or vacation spots.

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Top ten good news stories of 2007

Amidst all the Sturm und Drang, some positive things did happen in the past 12 months. They're worth recalling, if only to remind ourselves that the landscape is not unremittingly bleak.

Here's my top ten list:

First, at long last, the United States Congress passed, and President George Bush signed, a comprehensive energy bill. In this case, better late than never. The bill may not be perfect, but it's a big step in the right direction. America's dependence on imported oil from hostile countries is the nation's Achilles' heel. It undermines national security big time, because our addiction inevitably leads us to kowtow to someone and send massive sums of petrodollars into the wrong hands. This bill alone won't solve the problem, but it serves as a wake-up call for a nation that slept far too long. Its provisions for increasing fuel economy standards and other measures are designed to help wean us from that addiction.

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'Intelligence? Or lack thereof?'

When the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iran was released earlier this month, I was in Israel. Without exaggeration, it caused an earthquake there that registered a nine on the political Richter scale.

The questions were many: How could US intelligence have come up with such an implausible assessment, reversing years of confident assertions that Iran was hell-bent on acquiring nuclear weapons? Were President George W. Bush;s hands being tied by those who feared a US confrontation with Iran, just weeks after he referred to the possibility of "World War III" if Teheran didn;t heed the will of the international community? Why the emphasis on the reported end of weaponization, and not on the more critical findings of continued uranium enrichment and missile development? And why wasn;t there a more prominent acknowledgment that it is impossible to know everything going on in a country as large and closed as Iran?

Israelis felt abandoned, their own intelligence findings rejected. Many concluded that they would be left to face the Iranian threat alone, having earlier allowed themselves to believe that the world, led by Washington, embraced its own assessment that Iran was a global, not just an Israeli, challenge.

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Et tu, Mr. Erekat?

Let me see if I get this straight. Saeb Erekat, the Palestinian chief negotiator, summarily dismissed the prospect of recognizing Israel as a Jewish state.

His reasoning? "No state in the world connects its national identity to its religious identity." That, of course, is utterly preposterous. What, for example, do Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Brunei, Comoros, Indonesia, Iran, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Libya, Malaysia, Maldives, Mauritania, Morocco, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, and Yemen have in common? You guessed it. Islam is the official religion, though many, such as Malaysia, have significant non-Muslim minorities.