Category: Israel

Russia, Turkey call for Hamas inclusion

Russia and Turkey have called for the inclusion of the democratically elected Palestinian government of Hamas in Middle East peace talks.

“Unfortunately Palestinians have been split into two… In order to reunite them, you have to speak to both sides. Hamas won elections in Gaza and cannot be ignored,” Turkish President Abdullah Gul said during a joint press conference with his Russian counterpart Dmitry Medvedev in Ankara on Wednesday.

“Undoubtedly, all parties to this problem should be included more actively (in the process) in order to reach a solution. The process should not exclude anyone,” he added.

Medvedev agreed with the idea that no group should be excluded from the peace process.

The Russian president urged the United States to work actively with other nations in the efforts to establish peace in the Middle East.

He also stated that a divided Palestinian administration could not help resolve the conflict.

Medvedev said the division “causes the Palestinians to regress.” He also warned that Gaza was “facing a human tragedy.”

Earlier on Tuesday, Medvedev was in Syria, where he met with Hamas leader Khaled Meshaal and Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.

Medvedev’s meeting with Meshaal and his later comments in Turkey received an angry response from the Israeli foreign ministry.

“The foreign ministry vehemently rejects the call from the presidents of Russia and Turkey to include Hamas in the peace process and expresses deep disappointment over the meeting between the president of Russia and Khaled Meshaal in Damascus,” it said in a statement issued on Wednesday.

However, that was not the only thing about Medvedev’s visits that upset Tel Aviv. In a phone conversation before Medvedev left for Syria, Israeli President Shimon Peres had asked him to convey a message to Assad.

But according to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, Medvedev did not agree because it contradicted Moscow’s stance.

“We did not have a special need to implement this message because this is our position — to live in peace and solve issues on the basis of the international legal framework adopted by everyone and which should now be implemented by everyone,” Lavrov told AFP.

Press TV

May 13, 2010
Erdogan backs sail to Gaza

Turkish leader tells organizers he supports efforts to ‘break oppressive siege on Gaza Strip’

Roee Nahmias

Published: 05.11.10, 15:24 / Israel News

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told organizers of a sail to Gaza Tuesday that he would support them in their efforts to ‘break the oppressive siege on the Gaza Strip’.

The independent Palestinian news agency PNN reported that during the Istanbul meeting with members of the European Campaign to End the Siege on Gaza (ECESG) Erdogan said the breaking of the siege was ‘at the top of Turkey’s list of priorities’.

He said he would also support efforts to rebuild “what the Israeli war machine destroyed 15 months ago”.

Israel’s recentacceptance into the ranks of the OECD also came up. “We must force Israel to lift the siege on Gaza and respect human rights as a condition for its acceptance into any international organization,” Erdogan said.

The website for IHH – the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief – said Sahin had been living in the West Bank since November 28 and was enrolled as a student at Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The website for IHH – the Foundation for Human Rights and Freedoms and Humanitarian Relief – said Sahin had been living in the West Bank since November 28 and was enrolled as a student at Israel’s Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

It said the arrest was an Israeli attempt to stop the sail to Gaza and denied the Shin Bet’s allegations.

ynetnews

May 11, 2010
UK ‘will not allow Mossad representative in London’

By Jessica Elgot, May 4, 2010

A new Mossad representative in London will not be allowed into the United Kingdom, it is claimed, until Israel pledges that British passports will never be used by Mossad agents.

Britain expelled a senior Israeli diplomat over the use of British passports by a team of assassins who killed Hamas terrorist Mahmouh al-Mabhouh in Dubai in January.

Foreign Secretary David Miliband said he was satisfied that Israeli intelligence agency Mossad had forged British passports for the assassins.

A Foreign Office spokeswoman told the JC: “We have had no approach from the Israelis about a replacement. However we look to Israel to rebuild the trust we believe is required for the full and open relationship we would like.

“We have asked for specific assurances from Israel, which would clearly be a positive step towards rebuilding that trust.

“Any Israeli request for the diplomat to be replaced would be considered against the context of these UK requests.”

It is widely believed that the senior diplomat expelled from London was a Mossad representative.

Israel has never admitted any role in the Dubai assassination and therefore has abstained from signing any material which might be construed as a confession.

The Jewish Chronicle

May 4, 2010
Armenian Genocide Bill Again On Israel Parliament Agenda

Israel – Knesset building, undated

28.04.2010

Artyom Chernamorian

Israel’s parliament agreed on Wednesday to again consider a draft resolution recognizing the World War One-era mass killings and deportations of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey as genocide.

The Knesset decided by 12 votes to 8, with one abstention, that one of its standing committees will discuss the resolution and determine whether it should be put to a full parliament vote.

Speaker Reuven Rivlin was among those who voted for the decision. Significantly, a representative of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu also backed a parliament debate on the bill drafted by Haim Oron, the leader of the left-wing opposition Meretz party.

Most of the lawmakers voting against its inclusion on the parliament agenda were from the Yisrael Beiteinu party, a junior partner in Netanyahu’s coalition government that mainly represents Jewish immigrants from Soviet republics and Azerbaijan in particular. One of them, the Baku-born Yosef Shagal, said Israel should not pass judgment on what he described as a Turkish-Armenian dispute.

It is not yet clear which Knesset committee will pick up the measure. Oron wants it to be debated by the Education Committee, having failed to push similar bills through the Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee in 2009 and 2008. But both Rivlin and Netanyahu’s representative said that the latter panel should again deal with the matter.

The Defense Committee did not even vote on the Armenian genocide resolutions in the past, despite clearance from the Knesset. It thus highlighted successive Israeli governments’ reluctance to antagonize Turkey, a rare Muslim partner of the Jewish state.

The Netanyahu government did not back a parliament debate on Armenian genocide recognition on the previous occasion, in May 2009. Commentators might link the apparent shift in its position on the highly sensitive issue to recent months’ worsening of Turkish-Israeli relations.

https://www.azatutyun.am/a/2027278.html

April 28, 2010
The Jewish vote really does count

History suggests British Jewish leaders are wrong to shy away from the notion of distinctive voting patterns among Jews

Geoffrey Alderman

In the early 1970s, as I researched a textbook on the British electoral system, I became aware of a very significant gap in the then existing literature on voting habits among the British electorate. A great deal of material existed, naturally, on socio-economic class and its electoral impact. There was some material – not as much as there might have been – on the relationship between religion and voting. And some research had been carried out into the Irish vote – research that was principally an offshoot of the much greater body of research into “the Irish question”. But on the relationship between ethnicity and voting there was very little indeed. I was determined to repair this omission, and began polling Jewish voting intentions in selected London constituencies.

A phone call reached me from an organisation calling itself the Board of Deputies of British Jews. I was invited to lunch with its so-called defence department. And at that lunch I was ordered – repeat ordered – to cease forthwith my investigation of Jewish voting habits. Jews, I was told, voted just like everyone else. To poll a sample of Jews was to poll a sample of “ordinary” voters – no more and no less. So what was the point of my efforts? Besides, my hosts added, to ask how Jews were going to vote, or had voted, was to plant in the minds of the non-Jewish community, among whom we British Jews lived, the idea that Jews were not fully integrated into British society. I was told that Jews, in fact, were fully integrated. There was, therefore, no “Jewish dimension” to an election, and to suggest otherwise was to place the entirety of British Jewry in some (ill-defined) jeopardy.

I did not pay attention to these strictures. Or rather, I did pay attention to them, but only as evidence that could help me answer the question why the Jewish vote in British politics had been so poorly researched. Within British Jewry, image is everything. And the fact was that for generations, the fathers of the community had decreed that there must be no hint of a special, distinctive “Jewish” vote in the British body politic.

History, however, tells a different story. The votes of Jewish electors played a pivotal role in the epic struggle of Lionel de Rothschild (1847-58) to enter the House of Commons as a professing Jew, because the constituency for which he repeatedly stood – the City of London – contained several hundred Jewish businessmen who qualified for the property-related franchise. The parliamentary career of Samuel Montagu, a Yiddish speaking banker, was built on his relationship with his Jewish electors in that most Jewish of constituencies, Whitechapel, for which he sat as Liberal MP 1885-1900. The near-defeat of the Labour candidate at the Whitechapel by-election of November-December 1930 was a major factor in the decision of Ramsay Macdonald’s minority Labour government to ditch its anti-Zionist policy in Palestine.

The Jewish vote was pivotal to the 1945 victory of Britain’s last Communist MP, Phil Piratin, at Stepney, but it was equally pivotal to the defeat of Maurice Orbach (a self-proclaimed Labour Zionist who had conspicuously failed to support Israel during the Suez crisis) at East Willesden in 1959. In February 1974, his Jewish electors saved John Gorst, a gentile Zionist, from defeat at Hendon North. Four years later, on the other side of London, the Jews gave the Conservative candidate a resounding victory at a dramatic by-election at Ilford North, where Sir Keith Joseph had openly – and most successfully – campaigned for his Jewish brethren to support Thatcherite economic and immigration policies.

What of the present electoral contest? Jews, however defined, form no more than half of one percent of the UK population, but they are heavily concentrated in London and Manchester. Of the constituencies in which Jews account for at least 10% of the population, seven are Labour held. One of these – Finchley & Golders Green – is so highly marginal that it seems bound to be lost to the Conservatives irrespective of any special Jewish factor.

But in another, the adjacent Hendon seat, which could fall to the Tories on a swing of about 3.8%, there is an ongoing battle for the Jewish vote.Andrew Dismore, who has held the seat for Labour since 1997, has impeccable Zionist credentials (he would not otherwise have become MP for Hendon), but his constituency standing has been undermined by the Labour’s government’s failure to amend the “universal jurisdiction” law, which currently permits private citizens to apply for the arrest of prominent Israeli politicians who set foot on British soil, and by David Miliband’s recent condemnation of Israel over the use of fake British passports in the Dubai assassination of a senior Hamas terrorist. To add to Dismore’s woes, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee is encouraging its supporters in Hendon to vote for anyone but him. So a curious combination of Jewish votes and Muslim votes for Matthew Offord, his Conservative challenger, could hand the seat to the Tories.

But in a nationwide political contest as knife-edge as the present one appears to be, it isn’t only in recognisably “Jewish” constituencies that Jewish votes count. Jewish voters might prove critical to outcomes in seats as far apart as “Jewish” Bury South (where Ivan Lewis, Miliband’s second-in-command, is facing a very strong challenge from Michelle Wiseman, chief executive of Manchester Jewish Community Care) and East Renfrewshire, Glasgow, in which the comparatively tiny Jewish community may be persuaded to save Jim Murphy, the Scottish secretary, who is, naturally, a leading light in Labour Friends of Israel.

Whatever the present Anglo-Jewish leadership may wish, the Jewish vote, in other words, is very much alive and well.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2010/apr/19/jewish-vote-really-does-count, 19 April 2010

April 20, 2010
To achieve Mideast peace, Obama must make a bold Mideast trip

By Zbigniew Brzezinski and Stephen Solarz

More than three decades ago, Israeli statesman Moshe Dayan, speaking about an Egyptian town that controlled Israel’s only outlet to the Red Sea, declared that he would rather have Sharm el-Sheikh without peace than peace without Sharm el-Sheikh. Had his views prevailed, Israel and Egypt would still be in a state of war. Today, Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, with his pronouncements about the eternal and undivided capital of Israel, is conveying an updated version of Dayan’s credo — that he would rather have all of Jerusalem without peace than peace without all of Jerusalem.

This is unfortunate, because a comprehensive peace agreement is in the interest of all parties. It is in the U.S. national interest because the occupation of the West Bank and the enforced isolation of the Gaza Strip increases Muslim resentment toward the United States, making it harder for the Obama administration to pursue its diplomatic and military objectives in the region. Peace is in the interest of Israel; its own defense minister, Ehud Barak, recently said that the absence of a two-state solution is the greatest threat to Israel’s future, greater even than an Iranian bomb. And an agreement is in the interest of the Palestinians, who deserve to live in peace and with the dignity of statehood.

However, a routine unveiling of a U.S. peace proposal, as is reportedly under consideration, will not suffice. Only a bold and dramatic gesture in a historically significant setting can generate the political and psychological momentum needed for a major breakthrough. Anwar Sadat’s courageous journey to Jerusalem three decades ago accomplished just that, paving the way for the Camp David accords between Israel and Egypt.

Similarly, President Obama should travel to the Knesset in Jerusalem and the Palestinian Legislative Council in Ramallah to call upon both sides to negotiate a final status agreement based on a specific framework for peace. He should do so in the company of Arab leaders and members of the Quartet, the diplomatic grouping of the United States, Russia, the European Union and the United Nations that is involved in the peace process. A subsequent speech by Obama in Jerusalem’s Old City, addressed to all the people in the region and evocative of his Cairo speech to the Muslim world in June 2009, could be the culminating event in this journey for peace.

Such an effort would play to Obama’s strengths: He personalizes politics and seeks to exploit rhetoric and dramatic settings to shatter impasses, project a compelling vision of the future and infuse confidence in his audience.

The basic outlines of a durable and comprehensive peace plan that Obama could propose are known to all:

First, a solution to the refugee problem involving compensation and resettlement in the Palestinian state but not in Israel. This is a bitter pill for the Palestinians, but Israel cannot be expected to commit political suicide for the sake of peace.

Second, genuine sharing of Jerusalem as the capital of each state, and some international arrangement for the Old City. This is a bitter pill for the Israelis, for it means accepting that the Arab neighborhoods of East Jerusalem will become the capital of Palestine.

Third, a territorial settlement based on the 1967 borders, with mutual and equal adjustments to allow the incorporation of the largest West Bank settlements into Israel.

And fourth, a demilitarized Palestinian state with U.S. or NATO troops along the Jordan River to provide Israel greater security.

Most of these parameters have been endorsed in the Arab peace plan of 2002 and by the Quartet. And the essential elements have also been embraced by Barak and another former Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert.

For the Israelis, who are skeptical about the willingness of the Palestinians and Arabs to make peace with them, such a bold initiative by Obama would provide a dramatic demonstration of the prospects for real peace, making it easier for Israel’s political leadership to make the necessary compromises.

For the Palestinians, it would provide political cover to accept a resolution precluding the return of any appreciable number of refugees to Israel. Palestinian leaders surely know that no peace agreement will be possible without forgoing what many of their people have come to regard as a sacred principle: the right of return. The leadership can only make such a shift in the context of an overall pact that creates a viable Palestinian state with East Jerusalem as its capital — and that is supported by other Arab countries.

For the Arabs, it would legitimize their own diplomatic initiative, embodied in the peace plan put forward by the Arab League eight years ago. Moreover, their support for Obama in the effort would be a vital contribution to the resolution of the conflict.

Finally, for Obama himself, such a move would be a diplomatic and political triumph. Bringing Arab leaders and the Quartet with him to Jerusalem and Ramallah to endorse his plan would be seen as a powerful example of leadership in coping with the protracted conflict. Since it is inconceivable that the Israeli government would refuse Obama’s offer to bring Arab leaders and the Quartet to its capital, most of the American friends of Israel could be expected to welcome the move as well.

Of course, the proposal could be rejected out of hand. If the Israelis or the Palestinians refuse to accept this basic formula as the point of departure for negotiations, the Obama administration must be prepared to pursue its initiative by different means — it cannot be caught flat-footed, as it was when Netanyahu rejected Obama’s demands for a settlement freeze and the Arabs evaded his proposals for confidence-building initiatives.

Accordingly, the administration must convey to the parties that if the offer is rejected by either or both, the United States will seek the U.N. Security Council’s endorsement of this framework for peace, thus generating worldwide pressure on the recalcitrant party.

Fortunately, public opinion polls in Israel have indicated that while most Israelis would like to keep a united Jerusalem, they would rather have peace without all of Jerusalem than a united Jerusalem without peace. Similarly, although the Palestinians are divided and the extremists of Hamas control the Gaza Strip, the majority of Palestinians favor a two-state solution, and their leadership in Ramallah is publicly committed to such an outcome.

It is time, though almost too late, for all parties — Israelis, Palestinians, Americans — to make a historic decision to turn the two-state solution into a two-state reality. But for that to happen, Obama must pursue a far-sighted strategy with historic audacity.

Zbigniew Brzezinski served as national security adviser for President Jimmy Carter and is a trustee at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Stephen Solarz, a former U.S. congressman from New York, is a member of the board of the International Crisis Group.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/04/09/AR2010040903263_pf.html, April 11, 2010

April 19, 2010