(no subject)
Dec. 9th, 2005 07:59 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yuccaКто-то из моих френдов грозился выкидывать всех, кто помещает в журнале длинные статьи на английском. Но это короткая и под катом, может, меня простят.
The Pragmatist
The New Republic editorial, 12/12/05
King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud is the sixth monarch of Saudi Arabia and the fifth son of Ibn Saud (born in 1880 and founder of the country) to ascend the throne. It is unlikely that he knows or cares much about elections. If he did, it is unlikely he would have declared his support for Amir Peretz, the new head of Israel's Labor Party and a challenger to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In Israeli politics, after all, Saudi endorsements do not confer much blessing. But the king's endorsement--which he announced on Monday--is the least of Labor's problems. More important is its unwillingness to abandon the fantasies of the Oslo peace process: the delusion that there is, in the near future, a formula that would persuade the Palestinians to give up their death struggle with Israel. On the Israeli and American left, plenty of people remain who would turn the slightest sign of Palestinian goodwill into a rationale for an Israeli return to the precarious armistice lines of 1949, which are the lines from which the Six Day War began in 1967. On the tenth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination last month, for example, Bill Clinton came once again to Israel to rekindle the flickering candle and the very plan that drove Yasir Arafat and the Palestinians to five years of the most self-destructive violence in the admittedly quite brief history of their national idea.
Sharon is not a believer in this hoary "peace process." Yet he is also not a believer--at least no longer--in the equally fanciful notion of a "greater Israel" from the Jordan to the sea. He has become, instead, a very practical man who wants to take practical steps that will secure Israel's future as both a democratic and Jewish state. This means that he is willing--even eager--to let as many Palestinians as possible now under Israel's control go free with their houses and their land and do as they wish, so long as their state, such as it is, does not endanger Jewish life. He will not cling to the many dozens of sparsely populated and scattered Israeli communities surrounded by historic Arab districts in the West Bank, and he is prepared to endure the abuse of the far right for uprooting them. In any case, he grasps fully that they would be very difficult to protect.
This is clearly not the case with the Israeli towns clustered east of the armistice lines or hugging Tel Aviv or, for that matter, those neighborhoods like Gilo, which have become part of Jerusalem (and which the European Union mischievously continues to call "settlements," as if such petulant phrasing would put them on the negotiating table).
The truth is that Israel has won the terrorism war. It won it by internal checkpoints in the West Bank; by superior intelligence; by targeted assassinations; and by the long, winding, even arbitrary and sometimes downright ugly separation barrier between what is, mutatis mutandis, Palestine and Israel. Had Israel to do without any one of these weapons, the relentless Palestinian war against innocent Israeli life would still be going on, with its martyrs being celebrated from Jenin to Gaza. Aside from some toothless mouthings, the Palestinian Authority has done virtually nothing to curb these random warriors. So the long bloody victory is that of the Israeli army, the secret services, and the prime minister.
Sharon's decision to leave the Likud has liberated him and the Israeli public from the blackmail of the Jewish irreconcilables. And, loosed from them, he is attracting a whole range of reasonable politicians and public figures to his new party and platform. (Even the head of the Islamic Movement in Israel is flirting with Kadima, Sharon's new party.) This is, then, a movement of the center in both spirit and substance. It will move a bit to the left on domestic issues, which is good: In the end, Zionism cannot accommodate itself to widespread and permanent Jewish poverty.
As for Amir Peretz, he does not represent New Labor, à la Tony Blair, as his friends try to lull the Israeli public into believing. He is an old trade union statist and a doctrinaire socialist. More important, he knows little about Israel's foreign and defense policies. What he has uttered on these matters is dense but not deep. Still, since Sharon's party is likely to need coalition partners to win a majority in the Knesset, he will be a part of the next government.
The new government will finish the fence that separates Israel from Palestine. The Palestinians will have self-determination, and they will make of it what they can. There will be practical matters on which the two governments will consult and maybe even cooperate. There are, after all, some matters on which they have common interests. But the safety of Israel and its citizens is no longer up for grabs. That is, through pain and through pride, Ariel Sharon's achievement.
The Pragmatist
The New Republic editorial, 12/12/05
King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz Al Saud is the sixth monarch of Saudi Arabia and the fifth son of Ibn Saud (born in 1880 and founder of the country) to ascend the throne. It is unlikely that he knows or cares much about elections. If he did, it is unlikely he would have declared his support for Amir Peretz, the new head of Israel's Labor Party and a challenger to Prime Minister Ariel Sharon. In Israeli politics, after all, Saudi endorsements do not confer much blessing. But the king's endorsement--which he announced on Monday--is the least of Labor's problems. More important is its unwillingness to abandon the fantasies of the Oslo peace process: the delusion that there is, in the near future, a formula that would persuade the Palestinians to give up their death struggle with Israel. On the Israeli and American left, plenty of people remain who would turn the slightest sign of Palestinian goodwill into a rationale for an Israeli return to the precarious armistice lines of 1949, which are the lines from which the Six Day War began in 1967. On the tenth anniversary of Yitzhak Rabin's assassination last month, for example, Bill Clinton came once again to Israel to rekindle the flickering candle and the very plan that drove Yasir Arafat and the Palestinians to five years of the most self-destructive violence in the admittedly quite brief history of their national idea.
Sharon is not a believer in this hoary "peace process." Yet he is also not a believer--at least no longer--in the equally fanciful notion of a "greater Israel" from the Jordan to the sea. He has become, instead, a very practical man who wants to take practical steps that will secure Israel's future as both a democratic and Jewish state. This means that he is willing--even eager--to let as many Palestinians as possible now under Israel's control go free with their houses and their land and do as they wish, so long as their state, such as it is, does not endanger Jewish life. He will not cling to the many dozens of sparsely populated and scattered Israeli communities surrounded by historic Arab districts in the West Bank, and he is prepared to endure the abuse of the far right for uprooting them. In any case, he grasps fully that they would be very difficult to protect.
This is clearly not the case with the Israeli towns clustered east of the armistice lines or hugging Tel Aviv or, for that matter, those neighborhoods like Gilo, which have become part of Jerusalem (and which the European Union mischievously continues to call "settlements," as if such petulant phrasing would put them on the negotiating table).
The truth is that Israel has won the terrorism war. It won it by internal checkpoints in the West Bank; by superior intelligence; by targeted assassinations; and by the long, winding, even arbitrary and sometimes downright ugly separation barrier between what is, mutatis mutandis, Palestine and Israel. Had Israel to do without any one of these weapons, the relentless Palestinian war against innocent Israeli life would still be going on, with its martyrs being celebrated from Jenin to Gaza. Aside from some toothless mouthings, the Palestinian Authority has done virtually nothing to curb these random warriors. So the long bloody victory is that of the Israeli army, the secret services, and the prime minister.
Sharon's decision to leave the Likud has liberated him and the Israeli public from the blackmail of the Jewish irreconcilables. And, loosed from them, he is attracting a whole range of reasonable politicians and public figures to his new party and platform. (Even the head of the Islamic Movement in Israel is flirting with Kadima, Sharon's new party.) This is, then, a movement of the center in both spirit and substance. It will move a bit to the left on domestic issues, which is good: In the end, Zionism cannot accommodate itself to widespread and permanent Jewish poverty.
As for Amir Peretz, he does not represent New Labor, à la Tony Blair, as his friends try to lull the Israeli public into believing. He is an old trade union statist and a doctrinaire socialist. More important, he knows little about Israel's foreign and defense policies. What he has uttered on these matters is dense but not deep. Still, since Sharon's party is likely to need coalition partners to win a majority in the Knesset, he will be a part of the next government.
The new government will finish the fence that separates Israel from Palestine. The Palestinians will have self-determination, and they will make of it what they can. There will be practical matters on which the two governments will consult and maybe even cooperate. There are, after all, some matters on which they have common interests. But the safety of Israel and its citizens is no longer up for grabs. That is, through pain and through pride, Ariel Sharon's achievement.
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(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-10 04:36 am (UTC)But it made sense.
So you are forgiven for today. :)))))))))
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-10 04:59 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-10 12:07 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-10 03:38 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-10 03:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-10 03:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-10 03:57 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-10 10:33 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-10 10:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-11 01:03 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-11 01:34 am (UTC)To think about it, in MA TNR is considered a rather conservative reading, but in CO it probably sounds quite centrist if not liberal, so you are all right :-)
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-11 05:13 am (UTC)I'm in CO only in name, the town is actually nicknamed People's Republic of Boulder - you can hardly find anything to the left of it, Berkeley maybe.
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-11 05:19 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-11 05:22 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-11 06:09 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-11 10:02 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-11 02:55 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-11 05:19 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-12 04:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-12 07:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-12 08:11 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-12 08:37 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-12 08:53 pm (UTC)А уровень вменяемости может быть отрицательным?
(no subject)
Date: 2005-12-12 09:23 pm (UTC)