Miliardarul rus Alexander Lebedev urmează să devină acționarul majoritar la cotidianul londonez Evening Standard, ca urmare a achiziționării a trei sferturi dintre acțiuni contra sumei de 1 liră sterlină.

Lebedev este fost spion KGB și și-a făcut averea în sectorul bancar.

Fostul locotenent – colonel KGB în post la Londra a cumpărat cotidianul pe care îl folosea în anii ’80 ca să adune informații solicitate de centrala de la Moscova.

Achizționarea pachetului majoritar la Evening Standard contra sumei de o liră a fost posibilă datorită stării precare a cotidianului de după amiază al capitalei britanice, cauzate de prăbușirea veniturilor din reclamă.

Ziarul are un tiraj zilnic de 280000 de exemplare și pierderi estimate la peste 15 milioane de lire în 2008.

Noul acționar majoritar a declarat că nu urmărește să influențeze politica editorială.

“Suntem mari sprijinitori ai presei libere și independente și admirăm Evening Standard ca o publicație de prestigiu cu tradiția sa de jurnalism de calitate și comentarii”, a declarat Lebedev.

Evening Standard este cunoscut ca un ziar centrist, în care poți găsi opinii din toate colțurile spectrului politic și mai ales expuse pe un ton extrem de civilizat.

Lebedev, a cărui avere este estimată la peste trei miliarde de dolari și-a făcut banii în sectorul bancar, spre deosebire de ceilalți oligarhi ruși, de care are grijă întotdeauna să se delimiteze, care s-au îmbogățit pe seama materiilor prime, mai ales a petrolului și gazelor.

Împreună cu fostul lider sovietic Mihail Gorbaciov, el a devenit acționar la Novaia Gazeta, publicația în care scria și Anna Politkovskaya, jurnalista extrem de critică la adresa liderului de la Kremlin Vladimir Putin, care a fost asasinată în 2006.

Deși este un KGB-ist atipic, convertit aparent la democrație reală și economie de piață, achiziționarea de către Lebedev a cotidianului Evening Standard nu a fost unanim salutată.

Scriind în cotidianul de orientare conservatoare Daily Telegraph, fostul editor al acestui ziar Sir Peregrine Hawthorne spunea că avem de aface cu un nou exemplu al declinului mândriei britanice.

“Vă imaginați cumva că în Franța ar fi fost posibilă cumpărarea unui Le Figaro sau Le Monde de un multi-milionar rus?”, se întreba venerabilul jurnalist. Se parte însă că realitățile economice sunt mai puternice decât mândria națională.

George W. Bush, whose eight years in the White House end tomorrow at noon, leaves the presidency a very unpopular man – very much like President Harry Truman when he left office in 1953. As historians carefully examined the larger Truman presidential record over the next few decades, his legacy changed substantially, and to some extent this could be the case with Mr. Bush.

Some diehards have hated Mr. Bush since his first, cliffhanger, election in 2000, thinking somehow he was and is an illegitimate president, even though a variety of independent post-election studies of Florida votes show he beat Al Gore no matter how the count was conducted or interpreted. Today Mr. Bush’s unpopularity stems from the credit crisis and declining economy; the war in Iraq; and the federal government’s performance in handling Hurricane Katrina in September 2005. But just as it was a mistake to judge Mr. Truman’s presidency based solely on the Korean War or the communist takeover in China, it would be wrong to view the Bush presidency solely through the prism of the credit crisis, Katrina or the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. The credit crisis had many fathers, from laws and policies passed in Democratic administrations to greed and terrible thinking by financial institutions and individual homebuyers alike. Katrina was an unprecedented disaster that overwhelmed all levels of government. Iraq had actually used WMDs in its war against Iran and subsequently defied repeated U.N. efforts to verify compliance with its promises to get rid of its arsenals. In context, Monday morning quarterbacking in these areas is somewhat unfair.

When al Qaeda struck the United States on Sept. 11, 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people, it appeared certain that terrorists would attack the American homeland again. But that has not happened – thanks at least in part to the Bush administration’s vigilance. In the past seven-plus years, U.S. law-enforcement and intelligence agencies foiled numerous terrorist attempts to strike this country. These included plots to blow up skyscrapers in Chicago and Los Angeles; to bomb the military base at Ft. Dix, N.J.; and to blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. The Treasury Department launched an aggressive campaign to cut off U.S. sources of funding for terrorist groups like Hamas, Hezbollah and al Qaeda.

Last summer Mr. Bush won passage of legislation reauthorizing the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) after fending off efforts by congressional Democrats to hamstring U.S. intelligence agencies’ ability to monitor terrorists. Mr. Bush thwarted Democratic efforts to force U.S. intelligence agencies to obtain warrants to listen to terrorists’ overseas telephone calls if they were transferred using switches that were located in the United States. Mr. Bush was also successful in winning retroactive liability protection for telecommunications companies that cooperated with Washington’s requests to wiretap terrorist telephone calls after September 11. The apoplectic concern over waterboarding (simulated drowning) techniques authorized by Mr. Bush that the CIA used against suspected terrorists (which the agency ended in 2006) involved a grand total of three – count ‘em, three – cases.

Thanks to Mr. Bush, more than 55 million people today in Afghanistan and Iraq are freed from brutal dictatorships: the Taliban in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein’s regime in Iraq. In Afghanistan, the Taliban staged a comeback with the help of radical Islamists who re-supplied it from bases in neighboring Pakistan, and in Iraq there was for a time a brutal terrorist insurgency following the fall of Saddam Hussein. After Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld resigned in late 2006 and was replaced by Robert Gates, Mr. Bush made the critical decision that changed the course of the war: bringing in Gen. David Petraeus to head the Multinational Force in Iraq and sending close to 30,000 additional troops there (against intense partisan opposition) as part of a counterinsurgency strategy focused on protecting Iraqi civilians from terrorists. As Mr. Bush leaves office, al Qaeda, the most violent terror group in Iraq, has effectively been defeated. The security situation has improved to such a degree that last month Washington and Baghdad signed an agreement to withdraw all U.S. forces from Iraq by the end of 2011.

Administration officials, in particular former Undersecretary of State John Bolton, pressed relentlessly to force Iran to come clean about its nuclear-weapons programs. But during Mr. Bush’s second term, Mr. Bolton’s tough stance gave way to a much softer policy advanced by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: one that involved working with the European Union to try to reform Iran’s behavior by providing it with „peaceful” nuclear technology and other incentives. But Tehran continued to stonewall, and the administration leaves with little to show for its multilateralist second-term approach beyond a number of flaccid Security Council resolutions condemning Iran.

Equally unsurprising, the administration was unsuccessful in its efforts to persuade North Korea to relinquish its nuclear weapons in exchange for a variety of economic and diplomatic concessions, including diplomatic recognition, removal from the U.S. list of terror-supporting states, and financial assistance. But the Bush administration scored a number of critical successes in areas including nonproliferation and missile defense. Mr. Bush signed agreements with the Czech Republic and Poland to build a missile defense system in Europe that would defend against an Iranian ballistic-missile or nuclear-weapons attack and began to deploy missile defense systems in Alaska and California, and aboard U.S. naval vessels in the Pacific, to deter a North Korean attack. The Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI), a voluntary U.S.-led effort involving more than 90 nations, helped uncover the Pakistan-based A.Q. Khan atomic-weapons network, which was providing nuclear equipment and technical expertise to Iran, North Korea and Libya.

Seven new countries entered NATO during the Bush presidency. But Russia’s August invasion of Georgia served as a reminder about Moscow’s willingness to intimidate an independent, democratic nation that had been left essentially defenseless because it had yet to be granted admission to the alliance.

The Middle East proved to be a political roller-coaster for Mr. Bush, as it has with most presidents of the past half-century. In June, 2002 Mr. Bush announced a major diplomatic initiative aimed at creating an independent, democratic Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza. During the next six and a half years, Israel withdrew from parts of the West Bank and the entire Gaza Strip. In Gaza, the response to Israel’s pullout was a massive increase in the firing of rockets into the Jewish State – which eventually provoked the Israeli military operation now taking place in Gaza. Last week, Mr. Bush overruled Miss Rice’s effort to win support for a U.N. Security Council cease-fire resolution – which would have stopped the Israeli military campaign in its tracks.

When it came to domestic policy, Mr. Bush’s leading achievements included persuading Congress to enact across-the-board tax cuts and standing against efforts by Democrats to increase taxes. Conservatives were cheered by many of Mr. Bush’s judicial nominations, in particular those of Supreme Court Justices John Roberts and Joseph Alito. Mr. Bush was pro-life, and he opposed taxpayer-funded fetal stem-cell research. After his re-election in 2004, Mr. Bush tried to do something that most politicians are afraid to do: to broach the possibility of permitting American workers to establish private retirement accounts in lieu of Social Security. He opposed efforts by Washington environmentalists and congressional Democrats to force the United States to comply with an international climate-change pact that would have wreaked havoc on the American economy. Mr. Bush won plaudits from many conservatives for support of faith-based initiatives (in other words, ensuring that social-service groups would not be barred from receiving government contracts because of their religious orientation). But the jury is out regarding whether the No Child Left Behind educational program, which Mr. Bush touts as one of his top domestic policy achievements, has actually improved student educational performance.

In other areas, many conservatives found the Bush domestic policy abysmal. He repeatedly tried and failed (fortunately) to win passage of mass amnesty for illegal aliens. Mr. Bush signed into law McCain-Feingold, which imposed draconian restrictions on the ability of people to participate in political campaigns. His biggest black mark, in our view, is that domestic spending exploded, with his acquiescence, encouragement, or fecklessness, and Mr. Bush presided over the largest increase in federal spending since LBJ’s Great Society. This included the Medicare prescription-drug entitlement program enacted in 2003 that added more than $17 trillion to federal liabilities over the „infinite horizon” – an amount greater than the entire annual output of the U.S. economy. The $700 billion bailout program enacted in October that was supposed to alleviate the credit crunch did nothing of the sort. Instead, it set a troubling precedent: the notion that many questionably run businesses are „too big to fail,” and encouraged a „me too” mentality from many sectors of dialing for dollars. By doing so, that bailout laid the groundwork for additional commitments of trillions more during the final months of the Bush presidency.

In the end, the Bush presidency was something of a mixed bag: massive increases in the power of the federal Leviathan was the dark side. But President Bush’s most important legacy is the fact that he kept Americans safe after September 11.

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/jan/19/mr-bushs-mixed-bag/

The Israeli government, through Prime Minister Olmert, foreign minister Livni, or defense minister Barak, seems to agree that Israel’s goal for the ongoing Cast Lead operation is to deter Hamas from continuing its campaign of regular missile bombings of southern and central Israel. If they mean it–and that is still unclear–they are dangerously misguided and misleading their public. Moreover, they are sending Israeli soldiers to their deaths for an illusory goal.

The very concept of deterrence is based on a number of premises, none of which applies to Hamas or any other religion-based terror group. The first is that the Hamas leaders actually care about and/or fear for their lives and those of their families – hence that they will “deal” if in personal peril. That is a doubtful assumption, as demon-strated by senior leader Nazar Rayan, who “appeared to believe him-self invincible. He refused to leave or allow his enormous family to leave their home in the Jabalia camp. The bomb reduced the building to rubble and the death toll was, consequently, dreadful.” Indeed, he made his family a target, with the result that at least two of his wives and a number of his children were killed. When terrorist leaders care little about their own lives, it should be no surprise that they care even less about those of “civilians.”

While a case could be made that once Hamas entered “politics,” al-beit with a peculiar method of ably combining terror and electioneering, that is a weak case. Hamas knows, from experience, that Palestinians, especially Gazans, largely share its goals and methods, and that most are prepared to support its actions, regardless of what others in the Arab, Muslim or wider world think.

Second, as all totalitarian groups–and Hamas is Stalinism with a green banner–know, “peoples” always obey the guys with guns, unless other guys with bigger guns show up. That is why Gazans have noth-ing to say, collectively, about being systematically used as shields.

Thus, when Eyad Sarraj, a psychiatrist who heads the Gaza Community Mental Health Program, claims that “people will join Hamas rather than leave Hamas” as a result of the ongoing conflict, he is correct–just as citizens of Dresden still sup-ported the Nazis after their town’s destruction in February 1945. Fur-thermore, like Hitler, Hamas’ sins do not include lack of sincerity and clarity–the Gazans who voted for Hamas in 2005, giving it control of seven out of 10 councils in the Strip, knew exactly what its ideology and aims are, and the risks those imply. Ever since, they helped Hamas eliminate–mostly through murder–its Fatah rival, provided it with an infinite supply of suicide murderers, and often lent their houses to the organization’s rocket-launching teams seeking to kill Israeli civilians. In fact, as so many liberal observers of terrorism everywhere are always ready to claim, Hamas terrorism could only thrive with (at least some major) popular support–precisely what it has in abundance among the “civilians” in Gaza.

Hamas also understands, as the UN people in Gaza (not to mention the emotional and irrational lefties demonstrating in London, San Francisco, or Paris) do not, that the very concept of “civilians” is largely meaningless. Thus, the “civilian” casualty figures reported by the media, all doubtful since they are coming from Palestinians in Gaza, regularly mention “women and children”–and stay away from any meaningful definition. Are “children” all those under 18 years of age, as Amnesty International pretends? If so, the number of such “children” engaged in suicide bombings should force a rational observer to reconsider the definition. As for “women,” only intentional disregard of reality in the Middle East (and Sri Lanka, Turkey, Iraq, etc.) could consider them ipso facto victims because of their gender. Clearly, some people prefer not to pay attention to the words of this Gaza woman:

“If one of our men dies, a thousand men will set out in his place. We, the women, will set out. We are the granddaughters of Yassin [Hamas’ founder], Al-Bana [the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, of which Hamas is a branch], and Al-Qassam. We are all the daughters of Pales-tine, the daughters of steadfast Gaza. We will set out, booby-trapped. From every home, a bomb will set out, and it will explode among the sons of Zion. We are no less than Fatima Al-Najjar and Rim Al-Riyashi [two Palestinian women who blew themselves up among Israelis]. We will blow ourselves up among those traitors, those apes and pigs.”

Certainly some women, and all in-fants, are innocent victims of the conflict. But Hamas successfully makes all women and all “children”
victims, knowing that the sob sisters/brothers of the West accept this for their own reasons. Those reasons may vary, from cultural anti-Americanism, historic anti-Semitism, or the long-standing European adoration of everything Third World.

All this being said, and concentrated in the simple statement that Hamas is not deterrable and its supporters are seldom real “civilians,” why does anyone–especially the Israeli government, elected to protect its citizenry and territory–pretend oth-erwise?
The answer, and a disturbing one, is that Israel, or at least its elites, are more “Western” than is good for them or their people. The implicit message of the Israeli officials’ claim that “regime change” in Gaza is not an objective of Operation Cast Lead is problematic. If sincere, Tel Aviv is wasting lives– Jewish and Palestinian– for very short-term success. If not, the problem is worse, because it only creates confusion–in Israel, among Palestinians, and elsewhere.
Ultimately, the only solution–itself limited in time because of the per-manency of dysfunctional Palestin-ian political culture–is the physical destruction of Hamas in Gaza, by killing most of its militants and leaders, be they “political” or “mili-tary” (is there a difference, outside Western artificial legalistic and emo-tional circles?)

As it is now, Israel’s claim that the goal is not Hamas’ removal from power in Gaza is either dishonest, a PR statement, or delusional. The destruction of Hamas’ mili-tary/terror capabilities would make it unattractive to Gazans, who like winners (if they kill Israelis). Anything else would convince most Gazans, who are always ready to be convinced, that Hamas is the way to go, electorally or practically.

Ultimately, the total physical destruction of Hamas in Gaza and the introduction of PA elements, even and especially if that means re-newed intra-Palestinian conflict, is the only stable, if not permanent, solution. Since Hamas cannot be deterred, dealt or “negotiated” with it, a fact Hamas itself admits, is a lost cause – it simply has to be de-stroyed. Hence all Euro-pacifist demands or UN pseudo-solutions are inherently irrelevant.
The whole idea, or so-called princi-ple, of total protection of undefined “civilians” promoted by leftists supporting Hamas without the courage to say so (the perennial Bi-anca Jagger, etc.), is not limited to Gaza’s conflict. That is just the latest pretext of a peculiarly irresponsible phenomenon. Thus the government and people of Sri Lanka are on the brink of finally winning their dec-ades-long war against one of the world’s worst terrorist groups – the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), the “inventors” of suicide bombings and responsible of some 70,000 fatalities since 1984. The reaction from Amnesty International and associates? “Too many civil-ians” are being killed or displaced–not the rational question of how many civilians, Tamil or others, would be saved by ending the war.
But no, self-proclaimed human rights or humanitarian NGOs, when not actively encouraging irregular forces by treating them equally with state actors, push for regulations on states, since they cannot do so on Hamas or similar non-state actors. The result is always that the conflict between state and non-state actors, whether in Gaza, Israel, Colombia, Sri Lanka, or elsewhere, is pro-longed — with more “civilians” and innocents, whatever their definition, falling victim to violence.

It may be, or at least appear, cynical or brutal to say that in some circum-stances– the Gaza conflict now be-ing an obvious one– more violence, if correctly targeted, means fewer real civilian victims and better long-term chances of calm, if not peace. If Israel and those who truly seek calm in the Middle East in the long-term are serious, they should support the total military defeat of Hamas, rather than spill tears over the loss of “civilians.” This is a lesson that can be applied to conflicts far away from the Middle East. However, the prospects of this happening are not good, and the result is likely to be more and more “civilians” such as infants sleeping in their cribs being killed from Kyber to Mullaitivu to Gaza. Lack of clarity and reason truly kills.

Michael Radu is Senior Fellow and Co – Chair, Center on Terrorism and Counterterror-ism, at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia.

European Union member states authorised the export of €200 million in arms exports to Israel in 2007, the latest figures from Brussels disclose, with France far and away the Jewish state’s biggest European weapons supplier.

According to the EU’s 2008 report on arms export licences, published in December for the 2007 calendar year and consolidating the accounts that member states must annually submit, 18 member states authorised a total of 1,018 such licences to Israel worth €199,409,348.

Machine guns: the EU sold €200 million of weapons to Israel in 2007 (Photo: wikipedia)
France, Germany and Romania were the top three exporters. France issued export licences worth €126 million, Germany authorised €28 million and Romania €17 million, the EUobserver can reveal.

In response to calls from opposition politicians that the UK government halt its arms exports to Israel and push all other EU member states to do the same, a British foreign office spokesperson said: \”We do not approve any defence related exports if we judge that there is a risk that they will be used for external aggression or internal repression.

\”We routinely refuse export licences where we believe that there is a risk of this. Any application relating to Israel is considered on this basis,\” the spokesperson continued.

EU arms code of conduct

The EU has maintained an arms export code of conduct since 1998, but it is overseen at the member state level, not in Brussels, so if Mr Brown were to push for such a move, he would have to convince the 26 other member states.

In 2007, €12 million in small arms and ammunition were exported to Israel by Bulgaria, Germany, Poland, Romania and the UK.

Another €23.5 million in \”light weapons,\” meaning those that require two to three people to operate them, such as bombs, torpedoes and explosive devices, were supplied by the Czech Republic, Germany, Romania and Slovenia.

Belgium, France and Romania also sent Israel €18.5 million worth of aircraft and related material. Paris is responsible for €10 million of this sum.

In a fourth, very broad category of armaments in the EU’s consolidated report, \”electronic equipment\” – referring to electronics specifically modified for military use, navigation and guidance equipment, and satellite jamming systems, some €94 million was exported by France (€89 million) and Germany (€5 million).

The rest of the €200 million consists of weapons that fall into other minor categories beyond small arms, light weapons, aircraft and electronics.

Italy, traditionally a major arms exporter, only supplied Israel with €0.5 million in weapons in 2007. Spain, also a leading trader in the sector also sold Tel Aviv just €4.5 million worth of armaments.

Sweden, another major European weapons producer, along with eight other EU member states, delivered nothing to the Jewish state.

Across the EU, only 28 export licences were refused as a result of human rights, internal security or regional stability reasons.

Kaye Stearman, of the UK-based Campaign Against Arms Trade, told this website: \”The UN and impartial observers have regularly documented how Israeli military actions have violated international humanitarian law.

\”Although the UK’s own Consolidated EU and National Arms Export Licensing Criteria is supposed to assess the impact of arms sales on regional peace, security and stability, and the country’s human rights record, it seems that this is ignored in the case of Israel.\”

\”Britain must immediately stop selling arms, including arms components, to Israel and also stop buying arms from Israeli companies – arms that have been ‘tested’ in the laboratories of the occupied territories.\”

http://euobserver.com/19/27359

To my Arab brothers: The War with Israel Is Over – and they won. Now let’s finally move forward.

With Israel entering its fourth week of an incursion into the same Gaza Strip it voluntarily evacuated a few months ago, a sense of reality among Arabs is spreading through commentary by Arab pundits, letters to the editor, and political talk shows on Arabic-language TV networks. The new views are stunning both in their maturity and in
their realism. The best way I can think of to convey them is in the form of a letter to the Palestinian Arabs from their Arab friends:

Dear Palestinian Arab brethren:

The war with Israel is over. You have lost. Surrender and negotiate to secure a future for your children. We, your Arab brothers, may say until we are blue in the face that we
stand by you, but the wise among you and most of us know that we are moving on, away from the tired old idea of the Palestinian Arab cause and the \”eternal struggle\” with Israel.

Dear friends, you and your leaders have wasted three generations trying to fight for Palestine, but the truth is the Palestine you
could have had in 1948 is much bigger than the one you could have had in 1967, which in turn is much bigger than what you may have to settle
for now or in another 10 years. Struggle means less land and more misery and utter loneliness.

At the moment, brothers, you would be lucky to secure a semblance of a state in that Gaza Strip into which you have all crowded, and a small part of the West Bank of the Jordan. It isn’t going to get better. Time is running out even for this much land, so here are some facts, figures, and sound advice, friends.

You hold keys, which you drag out for television interviews, to houses that do not exist or are inhabited by Israelis who have no intention of leaving Jaffa, Haifa, Tel Aviv, or West Jerusalem. You shoot old guns at modern Israeli tanks and American-made fighter jets, doing virtually no harm to Israel while bringing the wrath of its mighty army down upon you. You fire ridiculously inept Kassam rockets that cause little destruction and delude yourselves into thinking this is a
war of liberation. Your government, your social institutions, your schools, and your economy are all in ruins. Your young people are growing up illiterate, ill, and bent on rites of death and suicide, while you, in effect, are living on the kindness of
foreigners, including America and the United Nations. Every day your officials must beg for your daily bread, dependent on relief trucks
that carry food and medicine into the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, while your criminal Muslim fundamentalist Hamas government continues to fan the flames of a war it can neither fight nor hope to win.

In other words, brothers, you are down, out, and alone in a burnt-out landscape that is shrinking by the day. What kind of struggle is this? Is it worth waging at all? More important, what kind of miserable future does it portend for your children, the fourth or fifth generation of the Arab world’s have-nots?

We, your Arab brothers, have moved on.
Those of us who have oil money are busy accumulating wealth and building housing, luxury developments, state-of-the-art universities and schools, and new highways and byways. Those of us who share borders with Israel, such as Egypt and Jordan, have signed a peace treaty with it and are not going to war for you any time soon. Those of us who are far away, in places like North Africa and Iraq, frankly could not care less about what happens to you. Only Syria continues to feed your fantasies that someday it will join
you in liberating Palestine, even though a huge chunk of its territory, the entire Golan Heights, was taken by Israel in 1967 and
annexed. The Syrians, my friends, will gladly fight down to the last Palestinian Arab.

Before you got stuck with this Hamas crowd, another cheating, conniving, leader of yours, Yasser Arafat, sold you a rotten bill of
goods – more pain, greater corruption, and millions stolen by his relatives – while your children played in the sewers of Gaza.

The war is over. Why not let a new future begin?

Youssef M. Ibrahim, a former New York Times Middle East Correspondent and Wall Street Journal Energy Editor for 25 years, is a freelance writer based in New York City and Dubai in the United Arab Emirates.

Indifference to criticism of the bombing and invasion of Gaza is the result of indulgence by the West

When Lord Derby asked Sir Lewis Namier, the great historian of Georgian England, why he, as a Jew, didn’t write Jewish history, Namier replied: \”There is no modern Jewish history, only a Jewish martyrology, and that is not amusing enough for me.\” It might be said that the underlying purpose of the Zionist project – which Namier passionately supported – was to reject Jewish martyrology, and to turn the Jews from passive victims to active makers of their destiny.

That has been accomplished to a fault, many would say as they watch the news from Gaza, where one image after another has caused deep revulsion. But then that rejection of martyrdom and victimhood may also explain what has puzzled as well as dismayed onlookers – the fact that Israel seems to be quite oblivious to international opinion.

In Muslim countries there is, of course, intense hostility to Israel, which, in return, has long since followed the Latin principle oderint dum metuant towards her neighbours: Let them hate us, so long as they fear us. Since there’s no point in even trying to win their hearts and minds, they should be taught to respect brute force, a precept which, it should be admitted, has enjoyed considerable practical success.

The West is different, and European sentiment can be changed by events, as indeed it has been. Israel and Zionism were once very popular causes in Europe, not least on the liberal left, until the 1967 Six Day War and after. Since then, European sympathy has steadily ebbed away as Israel attacked Lebanon in 1982, and again in 2006, with the suppression of the intifadas between. And yet Israel shrugs off all strictures and rebukes. No criticism from relief agencies or the Red Cross makes any difference.

Even more strikingly, Israel has ignored the Security Council resolution calling for a ceasefire. One reason for this is that the only Western country that really counts is the United States, and Israel has for many years been able to rely on unconditional American support. Having threated to veto previous draft resolutions, the US took part in drafting the security council resolution calling for a ceasefire, and was evidently going to vote for it.

Then late on Thursday the American representative shocked other council members by abstaining. This volte face came on direct orders from the White House, after president Bush had spoken to Ehud Olmert, the Israeli prime minister, and the Israelis have taken abstention as permission to continue their action. \”Israel is not going to show restraint,\” Tzipi Livni, the Israeli Foreign Minister, told The Washington Post yesterday, understandably enough in the circumstances.

Although Israel is sometimes described as an American client state, which receives huge financial subsidy from Washington, she is unique as a client state: she can do exactly as she likes in the knowledge that she will never be seriously restrained by her sponsor. Even when the White House is privately irritated by Israeli actions, Congress is absolutely reliable, never knowingly outbid in its unswerving loyalty. During the bombardment of Lebanon in the summer of 2006, the House of Representatives passed a resolution of total solidarity with Israel by 410 votes to eight, and the Senate has just passed another on a hand vote, not even bothering to take a formal tally.

Anyone who thought that there would be a change of heart and direction after the last American election hasn’t been concentrating. The Senate in question is the newly elected, strongly Democratic one, which has just met for the first time. During the presidential campaign Barack Obama went out of his way to endorse Israel. He has appointed in the form of Hillary Clinton perhaps the strongest supporter of Israel ever to serve as Secretary of State, not excluding Henry Kissinger, a Jewish refugee from Hitler, though even she is surpassed in her commitment by Rahm Emanuel, Obama’s chief of staff.

But there is more to it, and Israeli intransigence or indifference to outside opinion goes back before the birth of the state. As it happens, Emanuel has something in common with Ehud Olmert and Tzipi Livni: their fathers all served in the Irgun. This was the intransigent Zionist militia – described as terrorists by Isaiah Berlin among others, and as fascists by Albert Einstein among others – which waged a campaign of violence against the British, and the Palestinian Arabs, in the last years of the British Mandate in 1946-48. Its exploits included the bombing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, with great loss of life, the hanging of two captured British sergeants in reprisal, and the massacre of villagers at Deir Yassin.

Behind that brutality lay something else. Men take revenge for small wrongs, Machiavelli said, unable to avenge the larger, and the Irgun was avenging an incomparably and unimaginably greater crime just suffered by the European Jews. The Jews had tried to be nice to the goyim, Zionism said in effect, and see where it had got them. A Jewish state would now be created and guarded with all necessary force, indifferent to what the outside world thought. If need be, Israel will borrow the old chant of the Millwall fans, \”No one likes us, we don’t care\”– and no more Jewish martyrology.

Not that Namier was the only Zionist to use \”Jewish\” in a derisive sense. When someone mentioned Trotsky’s phrase \”No war, no peace\”, David Ben-Gurion said that it was \”some stupid Jewish idea\”, and there is a well-known Israeli story about Moshe Dayan, the military hero of the Six Day War. When he taught at the Israeli staff college, Dayan used to expound a problem, ending with the words, \”And I want no Jewish solutions here.\”

He meant that, on the sand table or the field, he expected his battles to be won by dash and ferocity, rather than than by the traditional Jewish virtues of subtlety and patience. Zionist toughness has worked for a long time, but it could be that Israel will one day discover that there’s something to be said for Jewish solutions.

Geoffrey Wheatcroft’s books include ‘The Controversy of Zion: Jewish Nationalism, the Jewish State, and the Unresolved Jewish Dilemma’

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/geoffrey-wheatcroft-how-israel-gets-away-with-murder-1299401.html

Cântăreața britanică Annie Lennox, alături de alte celebrități a cerut sfârșitul \”masacrului și uciderii sistematice a arabilor din Gaza\” de către Israel.

Cotidianul Jerusalem Post a publicat o scrisoare deschisă de răspuns semnată de Yoram Dori.

I cannot claim that I am familiar with music in general, and with British music in particular. Therefore, regretfully I must note at the outset of my letter that until two days ago, I did not exactly know who you are.

When I saw the fervor with which you demonstrated at the anti-Israeli demonstration in London and your interviews in which you slandered my people and my country in their efforts to defend the lives of our citizens in the southern part of our nation, I decided to write to tell a short story about what is happening in our country.

No, I do not intend to recall the efforts of your government during World War II to prevent Jews – the brands snatched from the fire – to reach their homeland, Israel. I have not come to settle the account of my father who, fleeing from Austria when the Nazis entered that country, was caught at sea by a British destroyer and who, with great initiative, threw all his documents into the sea and thereby foiled their intention to send him back to the killing fields. To be fair, I’ll not salute your people for the Balfour Declaration, although you deserve it.

I ONLY want to introduce to you to a sweet Israeli child, joyful and full of life, whom I got to know when I accompanied President Shimon Peres on a visit several days after his having been injured.

Let me introduce you to Osher Tewito – an eight-year-old child, like any other child, British, French or Palestinian. He lives in Sderot, a small town in the south of the country. Osher, like most children his age, is a fervent soccer fan. Although I did not visit his home, I assume that photographs of David Beckham, John Terry or Wayne Rooney hang on the wall of his room, and his life’s dream, surely, is to meet one of these stars in person. I learned that Osher was good at playing soccer (sometimes – as children go – he preferred it to lessons) and that he had an even greater dream in his heart: to become at least like Yossi Benayoun from Dimona, who stars for Liverpool.

The life of Osher Tewito changed in a day. It was the 45th birthday of his father Rafi. Like every good child, Osher went with his older brother, Rami, to buy a gift for their dad. Rami and Osher, who discovered on their way to withdraw money from the bank that they had forgotten their credit card at home, returned to get it, and on their way back their world was shattered. Suddenly from nowhere and for no reason, a Kassam rocket exploded near them. Osher was severely wounded and Rami was also wounded, but less severely. Osher, the soccer player and fan, lost his left leg and his right one was severely injured.

You can understand the significance of losing a leg, in general, and for a boy who plays soccer in particular. By the way, the psychological harm is no less than the physical, which is in itself difficult – we Israelis are no different than anyone else in that regard, though you might have thought otherwise.

OSHER IS undergoing a long and painful rehabilitation. We are all hoping that we will see him run and scamper again in youthful exuberance. The surgeon who operated on him is optimistic and, immediately after the operation, said to Osher: \”The day is not far off when we will see you again on the green soccer field.\” In the meantime, Osher has moved with his family from Sderot to another town 40 kilometers away from the border. (We are, after all, a small country and 40 km. is almost the center of the country.) There, he is undergoing the rehabilitation process, distanced – so he thought – from the shelling, and far from Hamas.

But that turned out not to be the case. During the past two weeks Hamas decided that it was not interested in continuing the quiet along the border and opened fire with Grad missiles on a million Israeli citizens.

For your information, there are civilians also in Israel. There are women and there are children. Not all are soldiers. Osher’s new town has also absorbed indiscriminate firing. A Katyusha rocket hit a kindergarten. Fortunately we had evacuated the children in time. Another hit a school. Osher, with an amputated leg, now has 15 seconds to reach a shelter. A little complicated, don’t you think, Annie?

And the child asks, as one of your songs is titled: \”Why?\”

By the way, although I do not wish to go into politics but only to deal with the human angle, it would nevertheless be worthwhile to remind you that Israel left Gaza, withdrew all its soldiers from there, dismantled its settlements, and left the vegetable and fruit hothouses from which they made their livelihood. At the same time, we provided and continue to provide electricity and water to the residents of Gaza.

What have we received in return?

A rocket on Osher Twito.

The writer is a senior adviser to President Shimon Peres

It breaks my heart to see Israel’s stupidity
It has a right to respond to attacks, but will not achieve its ultimate aim – peace – until it stops thinking in military terms
Michael Lerner

Israel’s attempt to wipe out Hamas is understandable, but stupid. No country in the world is going to ignore the provocation of rockets being launched from neighbouring territory day after day. If Mexico had a group of anti-imperialists bombing Texas, imagine how long it would take for America to mobilise a counterattack. Israel has every right to respond.

But the kind of response matters. Killing 500 Palestinians and wounding 2,000 others (at the time of writing) is disproportionate. Hamas can harass, but it cannot pose any threat to the existence of Israel. And just as Hamas’s indiscriminate bombing of population centres is a crime against humanity, so is Israel’s killing of civilians (at least 130 so far in Gaza, not to mention the thousands in the years of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza).

Hamas had respected the previously negotiated ceasefire except when Israel used it as cover to make assassination raids. Hamas argued that these raids were hardly a manifestation of a ceasefire, and so as symbolic protest it would allow the release of rocket fire (usually hitting no targets). But when the issue of continuing the ceasefire came up, Hamas wanted a guarantee that these assassination raids would stop. And it asked for more. With hundreds of thousands of Palestinians facing acute malnutrition, Hamas insists that the borders be opened so that food can arrive unimpeded. And in return for the captured Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, it asks for the release of 1,000 Palestinians imprisoned in Israel.

Hamas has made it clear that it would accept the terms of the Saudi Arabian peace agreement, though it would never formally recognise Israel. It would live peacefully in a two-state arrangement, but it would never acknowledge Israel’s “right to exist”. This position is unnecessarily provocative, and is deeply self-destructive for Palestinians who believe it is the only symbolic weapon they have left.

How do we get out of this destructive spiral? The first step is for the world to demand an immediate ceasefire. That ceasefire should be imposed by the United Nations and backed unequivocally by America. Its terms must include the following:

— Hamas stops all firing of missiles, bombs or any other violent action originating from the West Bank or Gaza, and co-operates in actively jailing anyone from any faction that breaks this ceasefire.

— Israel stops all bombing, targeted assassinations or any other violent actions aimed at activists, militants, or suspected terrorists in the West Bank or Gaza, and uses the full force of its army to prevent any further attacks on Palestinians.

— Israel opens the border with Gaza and allows free access to and from Israel, subject only to full search and seizure of any weapons. Israel allows free travel of food, gas, electricity, water and consumer goods and materials including from land, air, and sea, subject only to full search and seizure of any weapons or materials typically used for weapons.

— Israel releases all Palestinians in detention and returns them to the West Bank or Gaza according to the choice of the detainees or prisoners. Hamas releases Gilad Schalit and anyone else being held by Palestinian forces.

— Both sides invite an international force to implement these agreements

— Both sides agree to end teaching and/or advocacy of violence against the other side in and outside mosques, educational institutions, and the media.

— This ceasefire would last for 20 years. Nato, the UN, and the US all agree to enforce this agreement and impose severe sanctions in the event of any violations.

These steps would make a huge difference, isolate the most radical members of each side from the mainstream, and make it possible to then begin negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians on a broader and deeper set of issues.

The basic condition for creating peace is to help each side feel “safe”. A first and critical step is to speak in a language that is empathic toward the suffering of each people in a climate of discourse in which both sides’ stories are heard and understood.

Yet Israel, as the militarily superior power, ought to take the first steps: implementing a massive Marshall Plan in Gaza and in the West Bank to end poverty and unemployment, rebuild infrastructure and encourage investment; dismantle the settlements or make settlers become citizens of a Palestinian state; accept 30,000 Palestinian refugees annually back into Israel for the next 30 years, apologise for its role in the 1948 expulsions and offer to co-ordinate a worldwide compensation effort for all that Palestinians lost during the Occupation; and recognise a Palestinian state within borders already defined by the Geneva Accord of 2003.

This is the only way Israel will ever achieve security. It is the only way to permanently defeat Hamas and all extremists who wish to see endless war against Israel.

The most significant contribution the new Obama administration could make to Middle East peace would be to embrace a strategy that homeland security is best achieved not by military or economic domination but by generosity and caring for others. If this new way of thinking could become a serious part of US policy, it would have an immense impact on undermining the fearful consciousness of Israelis who still see the world more through the frame of the Holocaust and previous persecutions than through the frame of their actual present power in the world.

It breaks my heart to see the terrible suffering in Gaza and in Israel. As a religious Jew I find it all the worse, because it confirms to me how easy it is to pervert the loving message of Judaism into a message of hatred and domination. I remain in mourning for the Jewish people, for Israel and for the world.

Rabbi Michael Lerner is editor of Tikkun magazine. (rabbilerner@tikkun.org)

Articolul a apărut în cotidianul Times http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/comment/columnists/guest_contributors/article5446519.ece