Yourish.com

1) The language of concessions

The Washington Post reports Kerry presses Israel and Palestinians for concessions to pave way for peace talks:

Kerry first visited Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, who has resisted new talks for most of the past four years. His government had sought to file a complaint against Israel with the International Criminal Court over home-building in Jerusalem but put the plan on hold shortly before Kerry arrived.
Kerry was expected to ask Abbas to drop or suspend the complaint as a way to build confidence among Israeli leaders that talks can be fruitful, Arab officials said.

and

Israel and Turkey must stick to their agreement to end a nearly three-year estrangement as a building block for wider Middle East peacemaking, Kerry said Sunday.

Kerry did not sugarcoat concern that politics in Turkey could delay or derail the deal struck last month among Obama and the volatile leaders of the two key U.S. allies. Kerry added stops in Turkey and Israel to an unrelated trip to shore up that agreement.
…
“The foreign minister has expressed very clearly to me, in response to an inquiry by me, that they have taken steps to try to prevent any kind of sense of triumphalism,” Kerry said.

In the first case, what exactly is the Palestinian concession? The Palestinians under the leadership of Mahmoud Abbas violated the premise of bilateral negotiations by pursuing cases against Israel in international fora. This was a policy consciously adopted by Abbas and specifically spelled out in a New York Times op-ed nearly two years ago. Abandoning a violation of an agreement is hardly a concession, but the reporter (apparently reflecting Secretary Kerry’s view) calls this a “confidence building measure.” If that’s a confidence building measure then the Palestinians have hit upon an excellent strategy: violate other terms of their agreements with Israel and offer to stop the violation in return for some concrete Israeli action.

In the latter case note the parallelism of the reporter. While he mentions “politics in Turkey” he also refers to the “volatile leaders” of Israel and Turkey. But the “volatile leader” of Turkey is responsible for those pplitics; what is the “volatile leader” of Israel responsible for. It’s good that Secretary Kerry brought up the issue of tone with Davutoglu, but will he push him? Will Kerry tell Turkey that the country’s leadership is squandering a chance to repair relations with Israel and further American interests and that the United States will hold the government responsible for this failure?

It would appear that the United States has the possibility of using an opportunity here. But will it allow its enemies – I’m including Turkey as an enemy – to dictate the terms of the future of the Middle East, or will it assert itself? Unfortunately, there is little in this article to suggest that the former is true.

2) The language of destruction

Remember the flap a few years ago if Mahmoud Ahmadinejad really said that he intended to wipe Israel off the map? It was treated by many as a curiosity. Surely has statement was exaggerated was due to a bad translation or a misunderstanding of Iranian culture and idioms.

Prof. Joshua Teitelbaum and Lt. Col. (ret.) Michael (Mickey) Segal have put together a comprehensive look at statements and threats (.pdf) made by Iranian leadership over the years. Their conclusion:

It is manifestly clear that the statements of Iran’s leaders continue to constitute incitement to genocide of the people of Israel. They remain alarmingly similar to the coded statements of
incitement that preceded the Rwandan genocide of the Tutsis in 1994, and should therefore alarm all peace-loving people.
There is ample legal basis for the prosecution of Ahmadinejad and other Iranian leaders in the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court for direct and public incitement
to commit genocide and crimes against humanity.

Perhaps it would be better not to describe Erdogan’s statements about Zionism as a mere “flap.”


3) The meaning of a selection

Jonathan Schanzer analyzes the recent selection of Hamas.

Notably absent in this leadership selection process was Turkey, which has become a rather outspoken champion of Hamas in recent years. Last year, Ankara reportedly provided $300 million to Hamas. It continues to export goods to Gaza and help with costly reconstruction projects after the 2012 conflict with Israel. Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan recently announced he would visit Gaza, too. Yet, Turkey does not figure prominently in the new leadership structure (that we know of).

Nor is Sudan’s role reflected in the new make-up, but Meshal is a frequent visitor to Khartoum, where the Bashir regime coordinates closely with the regime in Tehran. While Iran-Hamas-Sudan ties have been documented for years, Haniyeh’s selection, to some extent, reinforces the importance of Hamas’ close ties with both Sudan and Iran, which furnishes short-and long-range rockets and other weaponry to the Palestinian terrorist groups.

In other words, the Hamas leadership selection reflects absolutely no changes in the group’s approach to terrorism or rejectionism. Meshal, during a visit to Gaza in December, vowed that Hamas would continue its strategy of violence against Israel. With a new four-year term, it’s reasonable to expect more of the same.

This attachment to Iran is important, because Egypt – acting out of its own self-interest – has not been the most reliable ally for Hamas recently. A few days ago Egypt seized an Iranian ship apparently bringing arms to the Sinai.

@phillipsmyth Quite! Additional point: #Egypt is pursuing interest-based policy towards #Gaza, so #Hamas still needs #Iran. #pt

— Aymenn J Al-Tamimi (@ajaltamimi) April 7, 2013

1) Casting the first stone – and all the subsequent ones too

What’s the difference between assault with a deadly weapon – a shooting – and assault with rocks that hit cars at potentially lethal speeds? Why should teenagers think of rock-throwing as something fun to do – and not as a crime?
Excerpt from Beltway Rocks: Police Responses The Washington Post [Washington, D.C] 05 June 1990: A24.

Earlier this week, the Washington Post and New York Times reported on allegations that Israel allowed a Palestinian prisoner die. Never mind that the prisoner in question had a terminal disease or that the Palestinian Authority politicians making the charges had no basis for their claims, both papers treated the charges uncritically.
But if trumped up charges are news, apparently real attacks are not.
The Muqata reports that Magen David Adom ambulances in Judea and Samaria are regularly being attacked by stone throwing Arabs. One of the attacks occurred near Neve Tzuf. There’s a sad irony to that.
It isn’t just ambulances that have been targeted. Passenger cars have been too.
A few weeks ago a young girl was critically injured by rocks thrown at the car she was riding in. (Ironically, the paramedic who saved her was Palestinian.)
Unfortunately not everyone survives a rock attack. Recently two Palestinians were convicted of killing a father and his young son in a rock attack in 2011.
The inattention of much of the media to this violence is disturbing. But it isn’t as disturbing as an article recently published in the extreme left wing Israeli paper, Ha’aretz, which, actually, encouraged stone throwing.

2) On Benghazi and Syria
At the end of Flash! Threat from Rebel Syria Becomes Clear and What Really Happened in the Benghazi Murders, Barry Rubin notes that MANPADS that had been in possession of Gaddafi had fallen into the hands of Libyan rebels and were being sold to Islamist Syrian rebels.

This weapons system might be the most technologically impressive arms ever to fall into the hands of terrorists. Once Libya’s regime fell (another U.S. foreign policy production), these weapons were grabbed by the Libyan rebels and sold to the Saudis and Qataris, who supplied them, respectively, to the Syrian Salafists and the Muslim Brotherhood.
According to reliable sources, Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens was in Benghazi trying to get those MANPADS back and was negotiating with radical militias toward that goal. Stevens was doing something good—trying to take weapons out of the hands of terrorists—and not running weapons to terrorists.
Yet that doesn’t mitigate the mess unleashed by the administration’s policy. At any rate, Stevens and these efforts failed. The money was too good for the Libyan insurgents to pass up, not to mention helping fellow Islamists and anti-Americans. And now thousands of advanced, easily launched anti-aircraft systems are in the hands of anti-Jordanian, anti-Iraqi, anti-Israeli, and possibly anti-Turkish terrorists.

The failure to secure Gaddafi’s weapons could turn out to be a major foreign policy disaster for the administration.

3) Post-mortem of the Israeli election

At the GLORIA Center, Jonathan Spyer presents a comprehensive report on The Nineteenth Israeli Elections. He concludes his analysis with:

There is one party in recent Israeli political history that ran on a similar (in fact, almost identical) orientation to that of Lapid. This was the Shinui party, when it was led by none other than Lapid’s father, the late Yosef “Tommy” Lapid. The elder Lapid, also a journalist, won 15 seats as head of Shinui in the 2003 elections.[20] Shinui’s platform was in all essentials identical to that of Yesh Atid–supporting a secular, centrist outlook and with a particular focus on reducing benefits to ultra-orthodox communities. The elder Lapid had a more confrontational style than his son, but the content was much the same. The elder Lapid’s party all but disappeared in the 2006 elections, following the foundation of the centrist Kadima (which itself all but disappeared in the 2013 elections, losing many votes–to the party of the younger Lapid). So Lapid’s orientation and his success are not without precedent.
Still, it is undoubtedly the case that internal social and economic issues have acquired greater centrality in Israeli elections and political discussion in recent years. In this regard, Shelly Yachimovich’s leadership of the Labor Party in the 2013 elections provided an additional example of this. The growing consensus in Israel on matters of national security appears to be clearing space for divisions to emerge on internal issues. This was notable in Yachimovich’s first speech to the Knesset following the swearing in of the new government, in which she focused on what she saw as the nature of the new government as representing the privileged sections of society. Whatever one thinks of the merits of this description, it is noteworthy that this element formed the basis of the Labor leader’s critique. Indeed, following the nineteenth Knesset elections, one might even discern a certain ideological or at least sectoral coherence to both the government and the opposition blocs, which was previously absent.
The governing coalition consists of the entire center, right and national religious bloc (with the exception of the rump Kadima party, with 2 seats, which has not entered). The opposition consists of the left, the Arab parties, and the ultra-orthodox. Since a broad consensus on national security issues stretching from the center right to the center left pertains, fractiousness in the next Knesset is likely to focus on domestic issues. This is not to say, of course, that issues of profound importance in the national security sphere do not still exist. Iran, Syria, the rise of Sunni Islamism to power, the future of the West Bank and Gaza all present enormous challenges. However, the new Israeli government is likely to experience less vociferous internal opposition to its positions on these issues, than on domestic matters.

4) Israel’s natural gas

Earlier this week it was reported that Israel had started pumping natural gas from the Tamar field off the shore of Haifa. What does it mean?

David Wurmser’s The Geopolitics of Israel’s Offshore Gas Reserves discusses many of the implications of the find but ends on a cautionary note:
While self-sufficiency in energy – and by extension in water resources and in economic vitality – which Israel’s discoveries allow will represent a substantial improvement in its strategic strength, eventual export of its hydrocarbon resources will involve far more weighty and complex considerations. Yet, even at this early date, several key themes emerge.

Attempts to employ these resources for the sake of advancing peace between Israel and its Muslim neighbors will be the greatest temptation at the policy level. Yet the historical record suggests that increasing co-dependency between Israel and its neighbors and using development efforts to anchor rapprochement among populations are quixotic cul-de-sacs. Such efforts in the past only increased Islamic resentment against Israel and played into their ideologues’ anti-Semitic imagery of Jewish control of their economies. Furthermore, they have left Israel more strategically vulnerable. While some in Israel hope that anchoring Israel’s export system to Turkey and becoming an answer to Turkey’s energy gap will help reverse the strategic foundering of the bilateral relationship, Israel’s experience with Egypt and the Palestinians suggests that such hopes, while well-intended, will meet with great disappointment.

The introduction of any additional party to Israel’s export system will add – likely geometrically – to the strategic complexity and difficulty of realizing and maintaining that structure. While at first glance Cyprus and Jordan may appear to be elegant solutions to the difficulties and dangers of emplacing major facilities in Israel, the emerging instability of these two countries, as well as their indigenous military weakness and darkening strategic positions, will be far more threatening than the situation in Israel in the coming decades. They are both far more vulnerable and far less capable of managing the shifting strategic realities of the Middle East and eastern Mediterranean than Israel. In short, Israel’s export structure should be as direct, bilateral, and independent as possible. The temptation to encumber it with regional hopes and diplomatic missions should be resisted, no matter how promising they appear.

1) Palestinian prisoners protest

The New York Times reported Palestinians Jailed in Israel Protest After Inmate Dies:

The office of Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, said in a statement that it held the Israeli government “fully responsible” for Mr. Hamdiya’s death, which it said stemmed from a policy of “deliberate medical negligence.”

Salam Fayyad, the prime minister of the authority, also accused the Israeli prison authorities of a “policy of medical negligence,” saying in a statement that the delay in treating Mr. Hamdiya “was a primary reason for his martyrdom.” He called for international monitoring of the conditions inside Israel’s prisons.

Prisoners in Israeli custody hold an honored place in Palestinian society, with many Palestinians regarding even compatriots convicted of deadly terrorist acts as political prisoners and fighters for the Palestinian cause.

The New York Times earlier referred to the death of Arafat Jaradat earlier this year as occurring under “disputed circumstances.” Is there any evidence that the Palestinian claims then were true? “Disputed” suggests that each side’s arguments were equally valid. That’s simply not true and example of deceitful reporting.

Similarly, the Washington Post reported Death of Palestinian prisoner in Israeli custody sparks protests:

Abu Hamdiya’s death drew sharp responses from Palestinian leaders, who have sought to highlight the Palestinian prisoner issue after a recent wave of street protests in the West Bank in support of hunger-striking inmates and in response to the death of another prisoner under interrogation.

Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas condemned what he called the “arrogance” of Israeli authorities, who he said had rejected attempts by Palestinian officials to secure Abu Hamdiya’s early release for medical treatment.

The Palestinian prime minister, Salam Fayyad, denounced “the continued policy of medical negligence of Israeli prison authorities” and called for international monitoring of Israeli jails.

In both instances the newspapers give credibility to the dubious Palestinian claims. I inadvertently found an item from the time of Gilad Shalit’s release from Ynet:

Communication with the world: Gilad only sent one videotape, one audiotape, and three letters (largely dictated by his captors.) Meanwhile, Palestinian prisoners are entitled to meet lawyers and Red Cross representatives and can mail up to four letters each month.

Medical treatment: Gilad, who requires eyeglasses, arrived in Israel following his captivity without his glasses. Some experts said his vision may have been hampered had he been without glasses for years. Shalit’s father, Noam, added that his son is suffering from shrapnel wounds that were not treated by Hamas. Meanwhile, Palestinian inmates are entitled to regular medical treatments, including dental work and eye exams.

Had the Red Cross visited Hamdiyeh? If they did, had they noticed anything wrong? Did American reporters make any effort to assess the validity of the Palestinian claims?

Yarden Frankl framed the story in Medical Care for terrorists:

Despite being caught trying to murder dozens of Israeli cafe-goers, Hamdiya (like thousands of other Palestinians) was receiving care at an Israeli hospital. Most people don’t know about how many Palestinian civilians are being treated at Israeli hospitals (much of which is paid for by Israeli taxpayers.) Every day, Israel facilitates the passage of men, women, and children from Gaza who are treated at the superior medical facilities in Israel. One could make the case that this is extremely generous of Israel.

But this is a case of an actual terrorist who tried to murder Israelis and had been receiving Israeli medical care. The charge trumpeted in the headlines was that the care for this man who suffered from a terminal disease wasn’t good enough.

Khaled Abu Toameh calls PA grandstanding on prisoners self-defeating:

The strong attacks on Israel are primarily aimed at showing the Palestinian public that the PA leadership does care about the prisoners.

But these attacks are also intensifying tensions between Israel and the Palestinians and paving the way for violence.

By making serious allegations against Israel, the PA is further radicalizing Palestinians and even driving some of them into the open arms of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.

Similarly Amos Harel wrote in Ha’aretz:

The Palestinian Authority knows full well that the prisoner Maysara Abu Hamdiya, who died of cancer on Tuesday, did not become ill because of Israel. Yet PA President Mahmoud Abbas publicly accused Israel of playing a part in his death. The PA leadership sees a need to maintain the popular struggle in the West Bank, and there has been a continuous increase in the number of “populist” incidents (the throwing of rocks and petrol bombs, demonstrations) over the last six months.

The claims of the Palestinian Authority are cynical and damaging and yet the American news outlets treated them with a credulousness they do not deserve.

The New York Times article is worse because of the paragraph about the meaning of prisoners in Palestinian society. If the reporter is going to add pathos to her reporting of a jailed terrorist, she has an obligation to give the full meaning of the issue of prisoners.
In the Oslo Accords prisoner releases were mentioned as “confidence building gestures.” That made some sense. If Israel no longer considered Fatah a terrorist organization, people who had been arrested for belonging to Fatah should have been released. Political activists, if that’s all they were should have been released, but not terrorists. And certainly not terrorists with blood on their hands.

But prisoner releases have morphed into something else entirely. People who committed terrorist acts since Oslo show that they rejected the peace accords. If they are considered political prisoners by Palestinian society, Palestinian society, by valuing them so highly, shows that it rejects peace with Israel. The same is true of the Palestinian leadership that cynically manipulates the issue for its own ends. The media is enabling this by portraying this pathology as some sort of admirable cultural value.

Or consider the case of Ahmed Jbarra, the “refrigerator bomber.” True he committed terror well before Oslo. But he was immediately made a “special adviser” to Yasser Arafat. This wasn’t because he was political prisoner. It was because he was an unrepentant murderer.

In unrelated media bias news, Meryl Yourish and Honest Reporting show how the media reversed cause and effect in the recent escalation of rocket attacks from Gaza.

2) The incurious administration

In his review of the first term of Barak Obama’s presidency, Barry Rubin observed:

The final point is that there are good people around him, the huge force of advisers who—hopefully or presumably, you choose the word—will warn him that his thinking is very out of touch with the world. They, if not he, will be capable of evaluating the administration’s experience and urging a course correction. [The choice of John Kerry as secretary of state; John Brennan as head of the CIA; and Chuck Hagel as secretary of defense has removed any possibility of Obama having good advisers–BR]

Max Boot in his lament How America lost its four great generals (David Petraeus, Stanley McChrystal, John Allen, and James Mattis) notes that in three cases, cites conflict with the administration as playing a role in the general’s departure.

True, in the United States we have civilian control of the military, so the President’s word is the final authority and military leaders serve at his pleasure. But its hard to avoid the feeling that President Obama doesn’t much care for dissent, not even constructive criticism. The media loved to portray President Bush as “incurious,” someone unwilling to challenge his deeply held beliefs. If they applied any level of scrutiny to President Obama, they would see that failing as his defining quality.

1) Meanwhile in Egypt

The New York Times is reporting Egyptians Struggle as Wary Tourists Stay Away:

Tourism plummeted in 2011 with the fall of President Hosni Mubarak and the unrest that followed. Some tourists have started to return, but officials say they are mostly beachgoers rather than the more lucrative cultural tourists who spend 10 days or more in Egypt, and spend accordingly during once-in-a-lifetime vacations.

Every headline about a riot in Egypt deepens the crisis. Cairo has been the hardest hit, with hotel occupancy falling to below 15 percent or worse in parts of the city closest to protests, according to Hani el-Shaer of the Egyptian Hotel Association. From Cairo, the hardship ripples across the country, affecting taxi and horse carriage drivers, boat operators, tour guides and store vendors.

“If something goes wrong in Cairo, tourists cancel the whole trip,” said Hisham Zaazou, Egypt’s minister of tourism.

There is no direct mention in the article that the repressive nature of the Muslim Brotherhood government might be deterring tourists.

An editorial in the Washington Post warns New laws would cripple Egyptian democratic institutions:

The former, autocratic government of Hosni Mubarak sporadically sought to repress NGOs, and the military regime that ruled the country in 2011 brought a criminal case against dozens of NGO employees, including a number of U.S. citizens. The flare-up in U.S.-Egyptian relations was defused when the Americans were allowed to leave the country, but the criminal case has continued, with a verdict now set for June. While saying that it is “determined to ensure that civil society is empowered,” President Mohamed Morsi’s government has done nothing to stop the criminal case; and now the legislative Shura Council, which is dominated by the ruling party, is considering restrictions on NGOs that go much further than those of the Mubarak government.

The editorial board of the Washington Post was originally supportive of the government, seeing anything to be better than Mubarak or the military. It’s good to see, however belatedly, that they’re recognizing the nature of the new government.

So what’s important for Egypt? Prosecuting a comedian. The New York Times reports Diplomatic Incident Arises Over Egyptian Comedian:

The comedian, Bassem Youssef, is being investigated by Egyptian prosecutors for statements he made on his popular television program, in which he was accused of insulting President Mohamed Morsi, denigrating Islam and disturbing public peace. On Sunday, prosecutors questioned him for hours, releasing him after he posted bail.

Human rights advocates and critics of Mr. Morsi’s framed the investigation as a part of a wider crackdown on free expression, and questioned why, given the long list of Egypt’s post-uprising crises, the government was wasting resources investigating comedy skits. Mr. Morsi has said the public prosecutor, whom he appointed, was acting independently after citizens complained about Mr. Youssef’s show.

On Monday, Victoria Nuland, the State Department spokeswoman, called the arrest warrant served on Mr. Youssef and other activists “evidence of a disturbing trend of growing restrictions on freedom of expression.”

Jon Stewart, mentioned later in the article – for comments made here – ties things better than I could hope to.

2) What deaths are worth acknowledging

Recently the New York Times ran an obituary of Mariam Farhat, known as “mother of martyrs.” The obituary, written in plain, antiseptic English tells of Farhat’s greatest accomplishments:

Ms. Farhat was elected to the Palestinian Legislative Council in 2006. Four years earlier, her 17-year-old son, Mohammad, was shot to death after he stormed an Israeli settlement with an automatic rifle and explosives, killing five students. Shortly before the attack, Ms. Farhat made a video in which she appeared with Mohammad to show support for what he was about to do.

“I wish I had 100 boys like Mohammad,” she once said. “I’d sacrifice them for the sake of God.”

Two more of Ms. Farhat’s sons, Nidal and Rawad, were later killed in clashes with Israel.

Is this why she was deemed worthy of an obituary? Her distinction is promoting death and violence. Lacking in this obituary in any sense of moral outrage or judgment about this woman’s views and actions.

The outrage is compounded by a death that the New York Times failed to acknowledge. In response to the New York Times Magazine article that called for a third “intifada,” Frimet Roth wrote a letter to the New York Times correcting the impression the article made about the non-violent nature of the town that was the article’s focus. Mrs. Roth wrote (h/t Daled Amos):

Ahlam Tamimi, the villager whom Ehrenreich described as a woman who “escorted a suicide bomber”, is in fact the self-confessed engineer and planner of a bloody terrorist attack. By her own account and after several scouting forays, Tamimi selected a target: the Sbarro restaurant in the heart of Jerusalem, on a hot August afternoon in 2001.

Tamimi has said she chose it because she knew it would be teeming at the appointed hour with women and children. She transported the bomb, enhanced with nails and bolts to maximize the carnage, from Ramallah across the Qalandia security checkpoint and into Israel’s capital. Israeli soldiers still waved females through without inspection in those days.

Tamimi and her weapon, the bomber, both dressed in Western garb and chatting in English to appear as tourists, strolled through the city center. At the entrance to Sbarro, she briefed him on where and when to detonate, instructing that he wait 15 minutes to allow her a safe getaway. Fifteen men, women and children were murdered that afternoon. My teenage daughter Malki was among them. Ehrenreich, who writes warmly about Nabi Saleh’s children, displays a cold detachment when relating to the bombing’s victims, the youngest of whom was two years old: “Fifteen people were killed, eight of them minors.”

Apparently a priority of the New York Times is to celebrate the life of a remorselessly evil woman. Correcting a portrayal of a conscienceless terrorist is not so important.

3) Miftah responds

After smearing Elder of Ziyon, the Palestinian NGO, Miftah, finally, sort of, appologized. Elder of Ziyon writes:

Indeed, Miftah has previously happily published the modern equivalents of the blood libel, parroting false claims that Israeli Jews targeted and stole organs from Palestinian Arabs, Ukrainians and Haitians. And Miftah itself ridiculed the idea that such accusations are in any way anti-semitic.

In other words, this apology rings hollow. But it was necessary, not because Miftah cares about doing the right thing, but because it was clearly under pressure from its donors to do something so as not to embarrass them.

There’s on Miftah from The Algemeiner, Powerline, Free Beacon and memeorandum.

Thus far neither New York Times
nor Washington Post have bothered to cover this story.
CNN which often has Miftah founder Hanan Ashrawi on as a guest, also hasn’t covered the story.

This is from Miftah’s apology:

It has become clear to us after investigating this incident that the article was accidentally and incorrectly published by a junior staff member. The said staffer has been reprimanded and all our staff has been informed as to the disgusting and repulsive phenomena of blood libel or accusation, including its use against Jews. Dr. Hanan Ashrawi, as founder, has nothing to do with the day to day management at MIFTAH and was no way involved in this incident.

The game here is to protect the “moderate” reputation of Ashrawi. After denying any wrongdoing, blaming a “junior staffer” is might convenient. The problem is that despite here carefully cultivated image – aided and abetted by international news organizations – Ashrawi is hardly moderate.

In an e-mail, Barry Rubin pointed out to me that she had opposed changing the Palestinian charter in 1996. Later that year, in a column, Charles Krauthammer wrote:

Two years later, upon signing the implementation accords (Oslo II) with Shimon Peres, he promised he was really going to do it this time. He didn’t.

Things were getting embarrassing. With the Israeli elections approaching last May and Shimon Peres needing to show that he was not being taken for a fool, Arafat called a meeting of the Palestine National Council to change the charter. Despite what you might have read in the press, it still didn’t.

What the PNC did was vote to establish a committee that would report back in six months with changes to the charter. (Hanan Ashrawi, America’s favorite Palestinian “moderate,” voted against even this farcically modest step. Has anyone in the fawning American media ever asked her about this vote?) That was April 24. It’s been two months now since the deadline passed, and not a word has been heard about this committee.

Here a “junior staffer” has taken the fall and Ashrawi has been distanced from the incident, helping to maintain the illusion of her moderation. Of course the main reason Miftah receives thousands of dollars in international funding is because of its association with Ashrawi.

But then Miftah itself isn’t moderate and its apology is transparent buck passing. If Miftah was really concerned about blood libels it would be busy fighting those libels that appear regularly in the Palestinian media.

Elder of Ziyon has provided an important service. If nothing else he forced Miftah to worry about its ill gotten largesse.

1) The counter-intuitive truth

David Ignatius, recently peddling conventional wisdom about President Obama’s recent Middle East, Obama’s Pragmatic Approach, trip listed three accomplishments of that trip. Two of them were:

Obama breathed a little life back into an Israeli-Palestinian peace process that had all but expired. He did this largely by the force of his March 21 speech in Israel. What he accomplished was the diplomat’s trick of riding two horses at once: The speech was a love letter to Israel, as one commentator noted, and it was also a passionate evocation of the Palestinians’ plight, and the need to “look at the world through their eyes.”
…
Obama brokered an important reconciliation between Netanyahu and Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan. With the region in turmoil, this was a matter of vital national interest for both Israel and Turkey, but it took Obama to provide the personal link that made it happen. This was a payoff for Obama’s cultivation of Erdogan since 2010, and for his “reset” with Netanyahu.

Contrary to these claims, Charles Krauthammer and Barry Rubin have argued that President Obama has acknowledged that the peace process is going nowhere.

Now Lee Smith argues that Netanyahu’s apology to Erdogan was not Obama’s coup, but Netanyahu’s:

Clearly Erdogan’s three conditions were not met, a disappointment that he apparently came to terms with last month, when Turkish and Israeli negotiators hammered out the exact terms of the deal that came to pass last week. As the Turkish newspaper Radikal explained, Israel would apologize for “operational mistakes,” pay compensation, and Ankara would drop the demand that Israel lift the blockade. Thus, the stage was set for Obama’s entrance as mediator and his exit as peacemaker. In pocketing the deal until Obama’s visit, Netanyahu’s timing was perfect: He handed an American president a truly wonderful souvenir of his all too brief stay in the Holy Land.
…

First, while Erdogan is reportedly one of the world leaders closest to Obama, the reality is that Bibi comes off as the helpful partner in this case—not Erdogan. Any more noise out of the Turkish prime minister and he may find out what’s like to have chilly relations with an American president, which, as Netanyahu can tell him, is not where you want to be.

Second, and perhaps more important, Erdogan’s support of Hamas will expose him to criticism from his domestic rivals. Why is the prime minister of Turkey so eager to show his love for an Iranian client in Gaza when his opposition to Iran’s ally in Syria threatens Turkey’s security?

Smith’s analysis has the advantage of being somewhat more plausible even if counter-intuitive to conventional wisdom. For the mainstream media, Netanyahu is a right wing ideologue. Smith shows him to be diplomatically adroit and pragmatic. Has Obama ever convinced any ally or friend to do something he didn’t want to? At the spur of the moment? This suggests that the terms of the apology and its acceptance were set before the “stage managed” phone call. This accords with Smith’s report that Israel and Turkey had reached an agreement (no matter how much Erdogan might deny it) earlier.

The Washington Post hailed the apology in Israel and Turkey let bygones be bygones:

Both governments, however, have powerful incentives to cooperate. As Mr. Netanyahu explained on his Facebook page, his decision to deliver an apology he had long refused was driven by the growing threat that Syria’s chemical weapons and other advanced arms may fall into the hands of the Hezbollah militia in Lebanon or an al-Qaeda offshoot in Syria. The two governments can now pool intelligence — and they will need to communicate in the event that one or the other is compelled to take action to prevent the transfer of dangerous weapons. Israel can also take satisfaction over the alarm the accord prompted in Iran, which will worry that one constraint on Israeli military action against its nuclear facilities has been eased.

2) The Islamists of Syria

On March 19, Liz Sly reported in the Washington Post, Islamic law comes to rebel-held areas of Syria. After explaining how the Islamists have earned the respect of average Syrians, Sly writes:

Among those who have fallen afoul of the authority is Othman al-Haj Othman, a respected activist and physician renowned for his role in treating those injured in the shelling and airstrikes that persist on a daily basis. He was detained last week by armed men dispatched by the Hayaa after he removed a poster from the wall of his hospital inscribed with the Muslim declaration of faith and was held overnight in a cell at the former Eye Hospital.

More than 50 people were held in the same cell, he said on his release the following morning, adding that he saw at least three other cells containing a similar number of people. Calling Othman’s detention a “mistake,” Abu Hafs’s spokesman said the authority apologized to him — after an outcry by activists in Aleppo and beyond.

But Othman didn’t seem mollified. “They think the same way as Bashar. There is no difference,” he said, in reference to the Syrian president, as he stepped out of the hospital gates to be greeted by supporters, who had staged a small demonstration to demand his release.

On March 23 Rania Abouzeid reported How Islamist Rebels in Syria Are Ruling a Fallen Provincial Capital. Again Abouzeid is careful to note everything the Islamists are doing to govern effectively and how they are gaining respect but then she reports:

But the Jabhat has distributed other pamphlets too, including one a few days ago that called for replacing the tri-starred revolutionary flag with the Islamist black one: “Yes to choosing that the [black] banner … be the flag of the Syrian revolution and Syria.” It upset a fair number of people, some of whom simply want a civil state. Others feared that it would serve as an excuse for the regime to brand the city’s residents as extremists, or place Raqqa on a list of Islamist targets in Syria that the U.S. is allegedly putting together for potential drone strikes.

At least a few hundred publicly protested against the raising of the black flag in the square outside the governorate, while others complained inside the privacy of their homes. “We all pray, we all say, ‘There is no god but God,’ but I will not raise this flag,” an older man said. “Are they trying to break away from Syria? From the country of Syria? That [black] flag doesn’t represent me,” said another. “This is an insult to people who died for the revolutionary flag,” one young man said.

Another pamphlet pictorially depicts what is considered appropriate dress for Muslim women. Some of the Muslim women in the city wear jeans, tight shirts and hijabs although most wear abayas out in public. According to the pamphlet, trousers are out, as are wrist-to-ankle abayas (or black cloaks) that come in at the hip, or buttoned-up wrist-to-ankle overcoats that suggest a hip or shoulders. The only form of dress with a green tick beside it is an amorphous cloak of black material and a waist-length headscarf that also completely covers a women’s face. On a recent afternoon, five women passed around the pamphlet, before derisively dismissing it. “I won’t cover my face regardless of what happens!” said one. “This is our clothing,” said another, pointing to her long-sleeved, ankle-length, emerald green dress and lilac headscarf. “What’s wrong with this?”

Remember that Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood were portrayed as being devoted to good governance before they achieved power. But being better organized than any other group doesn’t mean that they are devoted to liberalism, freedom or transparency.

Meanwhile …

More Syrians treated by IDF #israel wp.me/p34Gj3-2gn

— The Israel Link (@TheIsraelink) March 31, 2013