Newsgroup: it.politica.internazionale
Titolo: per CB

Ecco una posizione di qualcuno che i sacrifici non li vuole fare,
perche' non vede che vantaggio arrecherebbero. Il quotidiano in
questione e' un quotidiano letto soprattutto dagli ultra-ortodossi
ashkenaziti (Litvak - non hassidici). Ma chiaramente l'autore non
parla solo al proprio mondo (non nomina questioni religiose nemmeno
una volta).
E' una posizione dura, ma IMHO abbastanza argomentata - se io fossi
Netanyahu avrei problemi a convincere l'autore di questo articolo
delle mie buone ragioni.
Buona lettura
http://www.cross-currents.com/archives/2011/05/25/obama-tilts-towards-europe/
Obama Tilts Towards Europe
By Jonathan Rosenblum, on May 25th, 2011
In his June 24 2002 Rose Garden speech, President George W. Bush made
clear that the purpose of Oslo was not the creation of a Palestinian
state, but peace. He disabused the Palestinians of the notion that a
Palestinian state is inevitable, and let them know that it must be
earned. That state would have to be based on governmental financial
transparency, freedom of citizens to criticize the government without
fear of repercussions, the rule of law, and division of governmental
power. He made clear that a Palestinian state would not be born from
terrorism.
Bush was not refuting a straw man, but rather the traditional position
of the EU. Western Europe has long viewed the very creation of Israel
as, at best, a mistake creating myriad unnecessary headaches with the
Arab world, and, at worst, a grave injustice inflicted on the hapless
Palestinians. For the Europeans the formation of a Palestinian state
has long been the central goal of the peace process. Israel is always
called upon to take brave steps for peace, and criticized for failing
to do so, whereas the Palestinians are given a complete pass when they
fail to live up to their own commitments.
To further the goal of a Palestine state, the EU has consistently
urged a fixed timetable by which the Israelis and Palestinians should
enter into a final negotiated settlement or a Palestinian state would
be declared. (Such a deadline for the declaration of a Palestinian
state effectively ensures that the Palestinians will not negotiate
with Israel in good faith, just as they are refusing to negotiate at
present in anticipation of a declaration of a Palestinian state by the
UN General Assembly in September.)
At the outset of the Roadmap, President Bush had to stand firm against
the other members of the so-called Quartet in demanding a set of
performance based measures that both sides needed to meet at each
stage of the process before proceeding to the next stage. The other
members of the Quartet favored a deadline for the declaration of
Palestinian statehood.
FROM THE OUTSET, the Obama administration leaned far closer to the
European position that that staked out by President Bush. Thus
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton declared “non-binding” the letter
from Bush to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in which Bush acknowledged
that “new realities on the ground” since 1967 made a complete
withdrawal to the armistice lines as of June 4 1967 unthinkable, even
though the letter was ratified by large majorities in both houses of
Congress.
President Obama’s expressed his conviction that the time was ripe for
the achievement of a final status agreement, and made the appointment
of a special envoy to advance the “peace” process, Senator George
Mitchell, his first major act in office. The President’s confidence
about his ability to succeed where all previous presidents had failed
was predicated on the belief that the final borders of Palestine were
already well-known, and that the rest could be achieved by American
pressure on Israel. That is certainly how the Palestinians read him,
especially after he demanded a halt to all Israeli “settlement”
activity, including building in the new Jewish neighborhoods of
Jerusalem built after 1967. Mahmoud Abbas told the Washington Post
editorial board, after his first meeting with Obama, that he saw no
need to negotiate with Israel, and preferred to simply see what
progress could be achieved through American pressure on Israel.
Israeli security concerns received scant attention from the new
administration. National Security Advisor Gen. James Jones followed
the traditional European prescription to allay Israeli concerns about
weapons and terrorists entering the West Bank via the Jordan River:
international peacekeepers. After its experience with U.N.
peacekeepers in southern Lebanon, under whose watchful eye, Hizbullah
has amassed an arsenal of 50,000 missiles since the end of the Second
Lebanon War, Israel was hardly reassured.
FOR THOSE INCLINED TO BE DOUBTFUL of President Obama’s warmth for
Israel and concern for her existence, there was plenty of cause for
concern in last week’s speech. For starters, there was the timing of
the speech itself. Though nominally a speech about Arab Spring, the
President had little to say of practical consequence on that subject.
It is far too late for the United States to get ahead of the curve or
effect events in any significant fashion. Had Obama responded with
some vigor to the brutal suppression in Iran after the stolen
elections of summer 2009 or when the Assad regime in Syria started
mowing down civilians, he might have had an impact on the course of
events in those two countries. But at this point his potential
influence is negligible.
Only within the context of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit
to the United States the next day and his scheduled appearance before
a joint session of Congress did the timing of the President’s speech
make sense. The impression given was that Obama hoped to constrain
Netanyahu in advance and intimidate him from presenting Israel’s case
too strongly in Congress.
Then there is the matter of President’s vision of a final settlement
based upon the 1967 lines – i.e., the 1949 armistice lines – with
certain border adjustments and land swaps. The President is probably
right that those lines formed the basis of negotiations at Camp David
in 2000 under President Clinton, and that as a practical matter they
might include the settlement blocs alluded to by President Bush in his
letter to Ariel Sharon.
But reference to the 1967 lines as the starting point casts the shadow
of illegitimacy over all Israel building beyond those lines, including
in the new Jewish areas of Jerusalem, and represents a departure from
UN Security Council Resolution 242. Making the 1967 lines the basis
for swaps suggests that those armistice lines reflect the maximum area
Israel may cover, and that compensation must be given for any area
developed beyond that. The drafters of 242, however, explicitly
rejected Arab language demanding a retreat from “all” the captured
territories. They implicitly recognized that the retention of
territory captured from an aggressor, especially when the aggressor
was not an internationally recognized sovereign, could be retained,
indeed had to be retained in order to create the possibility of
“secure and defensible” borders for Israel. Nothing in the resolution
contemplates land swaps or suggests that the 1949 armistice lines
established Israel’s maximum area.
PERHAPS EVEN MORE IMPORTANT than what the President said about the
1967 lines, which sucked up most of the attention, was his treatment
of Israel’s security needs. On the one hand, he committed himself to
preserving Israel’s ability to “defend itself – by itself – against
any threat.” That language is based on President Bush’s April 14 2004
letter to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. According to former National
Security Council official Elliot Abrams, Sharon considered Bush’s
commitment that Israel be given the means to defend itself, by itself,
the most important aspect of the letter. It meant that Israel would
not be asked to rely on the kindness of strangers – in the form of
foreign peacekeepers – to preserve its existence.
On the other hand, the President called for the “full and phased
withdrawal of Israeli military forces” from the entire West Bank. In
short, he envisions no Israeli military presence in the Jordan Rift
Valley, protecting Israel’s eastern flank and guarding the border with
Jordan against the invasion of weapons and terrorists from Jordan.
These two promises cannot be reconciled. Even today, the Palestinian
Authority forces could not maintain their rule in the West Bank were
it not for the continued presence of the IDF. They certainly could not
guarantee a long and porous border, even if they were so inclined,
which they are not. Thus one day before Netanyahu’s visit to America,
Obama deliberately placed himself on a collision course with the
Israeli prime minister, who has insisted many times on the necessity
of an Israeli military presence in the Jordan Rift Valley.
AS USUAL, PRESIDENT URGED ISRAEL to take “act boldly” (modified to
make “hard choices” at the AIPAC convention) for peace. And as always,
the counsel was offered in a spirit of friendship – out of recognition
that the status quo is “unsustainable.” Or, at least, it is
unsustainable for Israel, despite its thriving democracy, vital
entrepreneurial class, and powerful military. The President warned
that without peace Israel would face increasing isolation, about
which, it would appear, there is little that he or the United States
can do.
Apparently, the status quo is not unsustainable for the supposedly
downtrodden Palestinians. They were not asked to make any hard choices
or take bold actions. Quite the opposite. The President argued that
the issue of Palestinian refugees be put off until after borders are
agreed upon. In other words, the Palestinians were not urged to
recognize Israel as a Jewish state. All up-front concessions are to
come from Israel.
By demanding “hard choices” only from Israel, the President in effect,
if not intent, placed the onus on Israel for the failure to achieve
peace. Yet there are no choices Israel could make that would further
peace, absent a Palestinian renunciation of the “right of return” and
the desire to reclaim Israel, something for which no Palestinian
leader has ever educated his people.
The closest the President came to a criticism of the Palestinians was
to label it a “legitimate question” how Israel can be expected to
negotiate with a government made up of Fatah and Hamas, when the
latter does not recognize Israel’s right to exist. It’s a lot more
than a legitimate question; it’s a question to which there is no
answer. Hamas does not confine itself to refusing to recognize
Israel’s right to exist. Its charter calls for the murder of Jews
(Article 7) and the destruction of Israel (Article 12). These are not
political stances, but expressions of theological necessity, and as
such not subject to amendment, something that those who call for Hamas
to renounce terrorism or recognize Israel’s right to exist
consistently ignore.
Nor is the distance between Fatah and Hamas so wide on this point.
Only by comparison to Hamas does Fatah look moderate. Yet Fatah has
always rejected out of hand any recognition of Israel as a Jewish
state and had never indicated the slightest willingness to compromise
on the right of return. Just last week the Palestinian National
Assembly voted to provide monthly stipends to the terrorists held in
Israeli jails – the more heinous the crimes (i.e., the longer the
sentence), the higher the stipend. And the Palestinian Authority
continues to name schools, summer camps, and town squares, and
celebrate such arch-terrorists as Samar Kuntar, George Habash, the
pioneer of air hijacking, and Dalal Mughrabi, the leader of the
coastal highway massacre of 37 Israelis.
Official Palestinian Authority schoolbooks and media continue to
portray the entirety of Israel as Palestine. Not surprisingly, every
Palestinian poll shows a large majority rejecting anything resembling
the peace outlined by Obama, which is why the Palestinians prefer
unilateral declarations of Palestinian statehood over any negotiation
process. It is also why no “hard choices” Israel could make would
bring peace any closer.
Obama’s speech was typically long on generalities and short on
specific actions that the United States might take. Rather than just
admit that the Israelis have a “legitimate question” about the Fatah-
Hamas pact, it would have been more reassuring to Israel to hear that
the United States is cutting off funding to the Palestinian Authority,
in light of its partnership with a recognized terrorist organization,
i.e., Hamas.
THOUGH THE PRESIDENT’S remarks on the Palestinian-Israel conflict were
offered in the context of much longer speech on the current turmoil in
the Arab world, he failed to draw any of the lessons of the latter for
the former. True, he did not claim, as he has done so many times
before, that resolution of the Palestinian-Israel conflict is the
magical key to peace and prosperity in the region.
But neither did he admit how irrelevant the Palestinian-Israel
conflict is to the larger regional picture. Israel is now surrounded
by three failed states. The streets of Egypt are barely policed; the
writ of the Lebanese government does not extend in any fashion to the
Hizbullah-controlled south (though the opposite is not the case); and
in Syria, the Assad regime has no choice but to gun down civilians
daily or give up power and witness the slaughter of the Alawite
minority. In addition, two Iranian-proxy terrorist mini-states, sit on
Israel’s northern and southern borders – Hizbullah-land to the North
and Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip to the South.
Syria and Egypt are dirt poor, and the large parts of the population
face near starvation due to the rise in world wheat prices. An Israeli-
Palestinian peace agreement would not enable the Syrian or Egyptian
governments, or any imaginable succesors, to feed their people, nor
end the endemic second-class status of women in Muslim lands, or the
raise rates of literacy.
Somehow calls for Palestinian “self-determination” ring increasingly
hollow in a region where the citizens of no Arab state enjoy
democratic rights, particularly the right to criticize the government
as they want without fear of reprisals. Only Israeli Arabs enjoy that
right. Nor is the urgency of Palestinian statehood self-evident given
that the Palestinians could have had a state in 1948 had they accepted
partition, or in 2000 had Arafat accepted the Clinton parameters at
Camp David, or again in 2009 had Mahmoud Abbas not walked away from
negotiations with Prime Minister Olmert. Palestinian claims pale
compared to those of Kurds and Tibetans, two linguistically distinct
people with ancient histories.
A Palestinian state would inevitably be a failed state. About one
thing Fatah and Hamas agree: Neither want technocrat Palestinian
Authority prime minister Salam Fayaad nor anyone like him running the
show. Their goal is not building a state but claiming another. Three
years ago, Fatah and Hamas forces were busy throwing one another off
of roofs, and they would soon be back at it. Whatever state came into
being would not exercise a monopoly on weapons within its borders. Nor
would it be able to secure those borders from the infiltration of arms
and terrorists.
Failed states provide the haven that terrorist organizations need. And
those organizations would flock to a newly created Palestine,
especially if, as envisioned by Obama, Israeli security control were
absent. Rather than serving as the beacon of peace described by
President Obama such a state would be the trip-wire for all-out Middle
East war.
This article first appeared in Yated Ne’eman, May 25.

 ashkenaziti (Litvak - non hassidici)
Una volta, con calma, mi spieghi quante correnti formano l'ebraismo?
PP

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non appena finisco di contarle.

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a me basta saperne quante ce ne sono di ragionevoli. Trattandosi di
religione monoteistica, direi nessuna

 a me basta saperne
Chi si contenta gode, e nel tuo caso godi con poco.

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intelligenti pauca, come dicevano quelli che si intendevano di
trattamento dei sionisti

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aha. E che trattamento era?