Browsing Posts in Politics

Hamas’s demand for 450 prisoners, some with blood on their hands, in return for Gilad Schalit, has provoked soul-searching in the highest reaches of the Israeli government. On one hand, Israeli military policy has always emphasized the necessity of freeing captured Israeli citizens. However, Hamas’s list of prisoners includes Abdallah Barghouti, Hassan Salameh, and Nail Bargouti, together responsible for the deaths of over 130 Israelis, and Marwan Barghouti, serving 5 life sentences for the murders of Israelis. The mathematical inequalities and the high-profile names Hamas has demanded has led many to question how far the State of Israel should compromise on behalf of one of its own.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3485938,00.html

As part of the week long political jubilee known as the UN GA, usually the most interesting and important meetings take place behind the scenes, and this week has been no exception. Here we have some exclusive footage courtesy of Israel’s Channel 10, of our Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni, meeting with the Emir of Qatar to discuss many important things.

We here at Politik feel that it is important to remind our readers of the ideaology of Hamas as it is written and articulated by them. At a time when people are increasingly contemplating the embrace of the most radical and extremist elements of fundamental Islam if only to produce short term positive political results, we should take pause and remind ourselves of these groups true intentions.

As written by Hamas in 1988 and still their standing covenant (we took the time to highlight some of the most glaring examples of hate):

The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement
18 August 1988
In The Name Of The Most Merciful Allah

“Ye are the best nation that hath been raised up unto mankind: ye command that which is just, and ye forbid that which is unjust, and ye believe in Allah. And if they who have received the scriptures had believed, it had surely been the better for them: there are believers among them, but the greater part of them are transgressors. They shall not hurt you, unless with a slight hurt; and if they fight against you, they shall turn their backs to you, and they shall not be helped. They are smitten with vileness wheresoever they are found; unless they obtain security by entering into a treaty with Allah, and a treaty with men; and they draw on themselves indignation from Allah, and they are afflicted with poverty. This they suffer, because they disbelieved the signs of Allah, and slew the prophets unjustly; this, because they were rebellious, and transgressed.” (Al-Imran – verses 109-111).

Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it” (The Martyr, Imam Hassan al-Banna, of blessed memory).

“The Islamic world is on fire. Each of us should pour some water, no matter how little, to extinguish whatever one can without waiting for the others.” (Sheikh Amjad al-Zahawi, of blessed memory).

In The Name Of The Most Merciful Allah

Introduction
Praise be unto Allah, to whom we resort for help, and whose forgiveness, guidance and support we seek; Allah bless the Prophet and grant him salvation, his companions and supporters, and to those who carried out his message and adopted his laws – everlasting prayers and salvation as long as the earth and heaven will last. Hereafter:

O People:
Out of the midst of troubles and the sea of suffering, out of the palpitations of faithful hearts and cleansed arms; out of the sense of duty, and in response to Allah’s command, the call has gone out rallying people together and making them follow the ways of Allah, leading them to have determined will in order to fulfill their role in life, to overcome all obstacles, and surmount the difficulties on the way. Constant preparation has continued and so has the readiness to sacrifice life and all that is precious for the sake of Allah.

Thus it was that the nucleus (of the movement) was formed and started to pave its way through the tempestuous sea of hopes and expectations, of wishes and yearnings, of troubles and obstacles, of pain and challenges, both inside and outside.

When the idea was ripe, the seed grew and the plant struck root in the soil of reality, away from passing emotions, and hateful haste. The Islamic Resistance Movement emerged to carry out its role through striving for the sake of its Creator, its arms intertwined with those of all the fighters for the liberation of Palestine. The spirits of its fighters meet with the spirits of all the fighters who have sacrificed their lives on the soil of Palestine, ever since it was conquered by the companions of the Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, and until this day.

This Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement (HAMAS), clarifies its picture, reveals its identity, outlines its stand, explains its aims, speaks about its hopes, and calls for its support, adoption and joining its ranks. Our struggle against the Jews is very great and very serious. It needs all sincere efforts. It is a step that inevitably should be followed by other steps. The Movement is but one squadron that should be supported by more and more squadrons from this vast Arab and Islamic world, until the enemy is vanquished and Allah’s victory is realised.

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Wow, this is a long one, but we think essential reading regarding our Foreign Minister, Tzipi Livni.

From the NYT:

July 8, 2007
Her Jewish State
By ROGER COHEN
Soon after our first meeting in her Spartan office in Jerusalem, Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, called me. Something was on her mind. A lawyer by training, she does not like to leave loose ends. I had asked her if the four years she spent in Mossad, the intelligence service, made her a disciplined person. Livni had seemed taken aback by the question, which interrupted the cascade of her pronouncements on Israel and its Palestinian nemesis. After a long hesitation, she said: “I don’t like this phrase, a disciplined person. I don’t know. I don’t know.”

Now, an hour later, she wanted to set the record straight. “I was thinking about this idea of me as a disciplined person,” she began. I perched myself on a stone wall near the King David Hotel and listened through a blustery desert wind. “There are other parts of me that are different. I prefer jeans to a suit, sneakers to high heels, markets to malls. You’ve just returned from Paris: I prefer the Quartier Latin to the Champs Elysées. In general, I don’t like formality at all. It is just part of what I do. You know, when I was young, I went to the Sinai and worked as a waitress.”

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From the Washington Post:

A Shadow on the Human Rights Movement

By Jackson Diehl
Monday, June 25, 2007; A19

Where does the global human rights movement stand in the seventh year of the 21st century? If the first year of the United Nations Human Rights Council is any indication, it’s grown sick and cynical — partly because of the fecklessness and flexible morality of some of the very governments and groups that claim to be most committed to democratic values.

At a session in Geneva last week, the council — established a year ago in an attempt to reform the U.N. Human Rights Commission — listened to reports by special envoys appointed by its predecessor condemning the governments of Cuba and Belarus. It then abolished the jobs of both “rapporteurs” in a post-midnight maneuver orchestrated by its chairman, who announced a “consensus” in spite of loud objections by the ambassador from Canada that there was no such accord.

While ending the scrutiny of those dictatorships, the council chose to establish one permanent and special agenda item: the “human rights situation in Palestine and other occupied Arab territories.” In other words, Israel (or “Palestine,” in the council’s terminology), alone among the nations of the world, will be subjected to continual and open-ended examination. That’s in keeping with the record of the council’s first year: Eleven resolutions were directed at the Jewish state. None criticized any other government.

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This article, as recently published in the Wall Street Journal, addresses a central point to the current state of affairs amongst the various Palestinian factions, clans and tribes: if a people truly want a state they must build it from the ground-up through hard work and compromise. As Mr. Stephens states in the article, “…the experience of an unoccupied Gaza Strip has shown is the Palestinians’ unfitness for political sovereignty.” President Abbas is now receiving hundreds of millions of dollars to hopefully begin to build the semblance of a state. Let us all keep our fingers crossed.

From the WSJ:

Who Killed Palestine?
By: Bret Stephens
June 26, 2007; Page A14

Bill Clinton did it. Yasser Arafat did it. So did George W. Bush, Yitzhak Rabin, Hosni Mubarak, Ariel Sharon, Al-Jazeera and the BBC. The list of culprits in the whodunit called “Who Killed Palestine?” is neither short nor mutually exclusive. But since future historians are bound to ask the question, let’s get a head start by suggesting some answers.

And make no mistake: No matter how much diplomatic, military and financial oxygen is pumped into Mahmoud Abbas’s Palestinian Authority, it’s oxygen flowing to a corpse. Palestine has always been a notional place, a field of dreams belonging only to those who know how to keep it. Israelis have held on to their state because they were able to develop the political, military and economic institutions that a state requires to survive, beginning with its monopoly on the use of legitimate force. In its nearly 14 years as an autonomous entity, the PA has succeeded in none of that, despite being on the receiving end of unprecedented international good will and largesse.

Hamas’s seizure of the Gaza Strip this month — and the consequent division of the PA into two hostile, geographically distinct camps — is only the latest in a chain of events set in motion when Israel agreed, in September 1993, to accept Arafat and the PLO as the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. An early indicator of what lay ahead took place on July 1, 1994, when Arafat made his triumphal entry into Gaza while carrying, in the trunk of his Mercedes, four of the Palestinian cause’s most violent partisans. Among them were the organizers of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre and the 1974 Ma’alot school massacre. If ever there was an apt metaphor for what Arafat’s rule would bring, this was it.

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Today we’d like to feature an editorial by Amir Hanifes a member of the Druze community in Israel.

As published on Judeoscope:

Exposing the bigotry of UK anti-Israel boycotters
Amir Hanifes
As a holder of two degrees from the University of Haifa and a PhD student at the University of London, I traveled to Bournemouth for the meeting of the British University and College Union (UCU) as an Israeli delegate on behalf of the Israeli Council for Academic Freedom.

The discussions at the meeting regarding the imposition of a boycott on Israeli academia took place in a hostile environment while ignoring all the facts we presented regarding freedom of expression and academic freedom at Israeli institutions of higher learning.

Evidence that Israeli lecturers who hold pro-Palestinian views are able to express their positions uninterrupted both in their research work and lectures, as well as in the media, had no effect whatsoever on the discussions.

Even when we presented a list of organizations and research centers that operate in the framework of Israeli universities and boast Israeli-Palestinian or Israeli-Arab cooperation, with the promotion of ties between the peoples their top agenda, it did not make a difference.

The same was true when it came to calls by Palestinian lecturers and figures, including al-Quds University President Sari Nusseibah and Minister Raleb Majadele urging the UCU to refrain from boycotting their Israeli colleagues.

Boycott leaders in Bournemouth ignored the figures I presented to them regarding the University of Haifa and the fact that close to 20 percent of students there are members of minority groups in Israel – apparently, we will also be subjected to the boycott.

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This is a very interesting and informative interview with the Wall Street Journal and former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, specifically the the bit about Iran.

Dealing With Iran
Israel’s former–and future?–prime minister talks about the threats to peace.

BY JAMES TARANTO
Saturday, May 26, 2007 12:01 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK–Benjamin Netanyahu runs a few minutes late for our Monday afternoon meeting. When he arrives in his midtown Manhattan hotel suite, he explains that he has just received word from home of the latest Palestinian war crime. “Hamas fired 15 rockets into Israel today. One of them hit a car, killed a woman,” says Mr. Netanyahu, the former Israeli prime minister and now leader of the opposition. The victim, 32-year-old Shirel Friedman, was on her way to see her mother.

For the 57-year-old Mr. Netanyahu, there is a sort of grim vindication in such attacks. He quit the government of then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon in August 2005, objecting to Mr. Sharon’s plan for unilateral withdrawal from Gaza. “I had a very big argument with him on this,” Mr. Netanyahu recalls. “He thought that we would have the right of free action–that we would garner international support for any reaction. I thought that is a very thin sheet of ice–the international community can turn against you as quickly as it turns for you–but the overwhelming fact is that the Muslim militants and Iran will find a new base, a few miles from Tel Aviv, with the ability to cover the south of the country and the center of the country with rockets.”

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Israel has sometimes been accused of being too democratic, and it seems that once again recent events have reinforced that charge. The recent vote for the Labor party chairmanship was too close to call and will have to be decided in a run-off on June 12th. What does this mean? Why is it important?

Israel has a parliamentary democracy consisting of three branches of government and lots of political parties (currently 12) and operates on the basis of coalition forming. Often times, these coalitions are tenuous and short lived resulting in elections being held on average every two years, hence the accusation.

Labor is one of the larger coalition partners in the current government so a change at the top will certainly have ramifications for the entire government. For more analysis we defer to the Jerusalem Post:

Barak defeats Ayalon but will have to face him in 2nd round
By GIL HOFFMAN

Former prime minister Ehud Barak and MK Ami Ayalon will face off in a June 12 runoff race to determine who will become Labor Party leader, according to the final count of votes announced Tuesday morning.

As counting the last votes finished, Barak led with 35.6 percent of the vote, followed by Ayalon with 30.6%, Defense Minister Amir Peretz with 22.4%, MK Ophir Paz-Pines 8% and MK Danny Yatom 2.7%.

For an analysis go here

Although our critics like to think that the problems besetting the Middle East are simple– it’s simply Israel’s fault– even a slightly more thorough examination of the situation reveals the complexity of the region. Case in point, Zvi Barel dissects the recent crisis in Lebanon for Haaretz:

Meshal learns that life is no picnic

By Zvi Barel

Khaled Meshal didn’t expect that his most significant cooperation with Fatah would have to occur in Lebanon and not in Gaza. Nor did he believe that from his secure location in Damascus, where he resides under Assad’s patronage, he would have to argue with the Lebanese prime minister. But on Tuesday he realized that Lebanon was his key diplomatic front and that he’d better send his representative in Lebanon, Osama Hamdan, to sit like a scolded child next to the Fatah representative in Lebanon, Abbas Zaki, and the representatives of the other Palestinian factions, in order to take a drubbing from Lebanese Prime Minister Fouad Siniora.

And not just like a scolded child, but like one even Hezbollah was furious at, because the Palestinian leadership in Lebanon was unable to calm the situation. It thereby made Syria and Hezbollah appear responsible for the deterioration in the country – all this just when Hezbollah was seeking to exert its control over the course of events and look good in the eyes of the Lebanese public, ahead of the possible establishment of an international court to judge those responsible for the assassination of former prime minister Rafik Hariri.

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