Israel to World: "Suck It."

The Tehran Green protestors all have legit grievances, and I'd like to believe I'd be brave enough to join them had I been born in Tehran. But the political parties in Iran are no more likely to be born of grass-roots dissent than they are in the U.S. Moussavi was seen as the lesser of evils by a majority in Tehran, Ahmadinejad elsewhere.

Project Syndicate thought I might particularly enjoy this columns:
Why Do Jews Succeed?
Is Pornography Driving Men Crazy?
and A Nation of Vidiots

I'm sure there's lots of good stuff there, but I lol'd.

(Answers: Because of their familial traditions, yes it is, and the vidiots are in the United States.)

I don't think there's much evidence that the 2009 elections were stolen.

I'm not so sure of that, there were statistical analyses of the published 2009 voting results that seemed to convincingly argue that they were very unlikely to be a true reflection of voter preferences.

I'm very skeptical of any claim that posits the Democratic protestors in the Green Revolution as secret pawns of pro-Shah old guard Iranian forces and Ahmadinejad as actually a misunderstood liberal hero-of-the-people.

Not so much commenting on the first part as the second. Ahdmadinejad did win his first election on a vague sticking-it-to-the-man champion-of-the-plain-folk-of-Iran ticket, taking advantage of a perception that there was a corrupt establishment (somewhat epitimoised by Rajsanjani) in Iran who had things all sown up. I do not consider him a misunderstood liberal or leftist - he largely failed to deliver on his election promises and turned to clownish foreign policy pronouncements as a way of deflecting attention away from his administrative and economic failures.

we could perhaps do with an Iranian politics thread separate to this one, but such is life.

LOL Iran. I've heard of being caught with your pants down but caught with your legs blown off?

u a Spengler fan sanpaku?

speaking of chavez: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/feb/15/chavez-smear-campaign-capriles-presidential

max: a pal on a finance forum introduced me to Spengler in 2001. Can't say I've read him regularly for the past 5 years, as like most op-columnists he's long exhausted his reserve of insights and is on the retreadmill.

Ahmadinejad as actually a misunderstood liberal hero-of-the-people

Not liberal but he plays rural culture war politics well. The Green Movement was very urban as I recall.

this is how ahmadinejad operates

the presidential motorcade rolls through the town of bumfuck, egypt
ahmadinejad suddenly stops the motorcade and gets out to talk to a farmer sitting on a pile of dirt
"what ails you, old man?"
"ain't got a shovel"
the very next day, the old man had a new shovel, as did all of his neighbors

if you watch iranian state news, shit like this happens on a weekly basis

he also spends a TON of time burnishing the myths of the iraq war and the revolution, paying tribute to the martyrs and the revolutionary guard

ie he is not a leftist or a liberal, he is an ultra-populist

i don't know much about chavez but i think the comparison is apt - both spend a lot of time catering to the least educated / most reactionary parts of the population, who may or may not have a strong understanding of how gov'ts and economies work on a national or international level, and spend a lot of framing things in manichean terms (it's either nuclear weapons OR be slaves of israel!) and a lot of time "speaking truth to power"

Off-topic, about NYT new Jerusalem Bureau chief:
http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/91408/somebody-tell-jodi-rudoren-to-stop-tweeting/

what a weird piece

Rafsanjani's daughter was a Mousavi supporter, I thought.

I kinda get what Marc is saying. She's not an op-ed writer, so a lot of that source collection stuff (I understand the pragmatic necessity of buddying up to ppl you may find reprehensible if you're going to be covering them) should probably stay off the record? Maybe she sees twitter as a networking platform and Marc is saying that she needs to realize ppl will be reading into her own beliefs thru it?

i just dont really get the tone there. feels very concern troll-y

very!

it's not 'the times should not have hired someone so friendly to the dove side of this conflict', it's 'boy she should be quiet if she doesn't want people to hate her!'

Ppl are likely to hate her regardless

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,816491,00.html

SPIEGEL: So we should admit to ourselves that the two-state solution is dead?

Nusseibeh: Mathematically speaking, a two-state solution is an excellent solution. It causes minimum pain and it is accepted by a majority on both sides. Because of this, we should have brought it into existence a long time ago. But we did not manage to do so.

SPIEGEL: Who is to blame for that?

Nusseibeh: First of all, it took Israel a long time to accept that there is a Palestinian people. It took us, the Palestinians, a long time to accept that we should recognize Israel as a state. The problem is that history runs faster than ideas. By the time the world woke up to the fact that the two-state solution is the best solution, we had hundreds of thousands Israelis living beyond the Green Line (ed's note: the 1949 Armistice Line that forms the boundary between Israel and the West Bank). There is a growing fanaticism on both sides. Today, the pursuit of a two-state solution looks like the pursuit of something inside a fantasy bubble.

Great interview - but Nusseibeh's idea of "a joint single state, Palestinians should be given civil rights, but no political rights" seems really problematic to me, especially since self-determination has been at the root of the matziv.

Palestinians should be given civil rights, but no political rights

It's a total Trojan horse. Nothing would more deligitimize Israel in most of the world's eyes than actually codifying the accusation of 'apartheid'. Ironically, it might improve the lot of many Palestinians.

Also re assassinated nuclear scientist: http://english.farsnews.com/newstext.php?nn=9010175602

"Mostafa's ultimate goal was the annihilation of Israel," Fatemeh Bolouri Kashani told FNA on Tuesday.

Bolouri Kashani also underlined that her spouse loved any resistance figure in his life who was willing to fight the Zionist regime and supported the rights of the oppressed Palestinian nation.

Iran's 32-year-old Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Behdast, a chemistry professor and a deputy director of commerce at Natanz uranium enrichment facility, was assassinated during the morning rush-hour in the capital early January. His driver was also killed in the terrorist attack.

Roshan was killed on the second anniversary of the martyrdom of Iranian university professor and nuclear scientist, Massoud Ali Mohammadi, who was also assassinated in a terrorist bomb attack in Tehran in January 2010.

The method used for Roshan's assassination was similar to the 2010 terrorist bomb attacks against the then university professor, Fereidoun Abbassi Davani - who is now the head of Iran's Atomic Energy Organization - and his colleague Majid Shahriari. Abbasi Davani survived the attack, while Shahriari was martyred.

Man, I never know what to make of this kind of stuff. Is it true? Is it to counter the dissuasive effect of Mossad assasinations? Does it matter? Heck, he could have been totally lukewarm about the whole issue except for the whole threat of Evin so it may be a moot point.

What never fails to kind of weird me out about the ideological reality of Iran is how much it's old school, anti-colonial, romatic chic married to a really repressive version of an already repressive religion. In a religion where there's no really established church, this is about as closed and established a politico-religious authority as you can get yet they pay homage to the anti-West leftism of the 50's and 60's.

A good Fareed Zakaria op-ed:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/history-could-be-a-deterrent-to-iranian-aggression/2012/02/15/gIQA6UVcGR_story.html

If I posted every time Sullivan said something stupid I would never get anything done but I had to share this:

Matt Duss reports on how Israel's border restrictions have reshaped society in the Palestinian enclave:

The result of the policy of closure ... has been the development of a sizable black market economy based upon illegal tunnel trade. This has been accompanied by the growth of influential constituencies in both Egypt and Gaza that oppose any effort to shut down the tunnels, and will lobby hard against the creation of a more open, regulated border. By empowering a large new merchant class that profits from the tunnels, the closure policy has effectively created another stumbling block to normalization of relations between Israel and the Palestinians.

And that wasn't the point?

Sullivan believes that Israel instituted a policy of closure in order to create a new black market merchant class so as to make normalization of Israel/Palestinian relations more impossible. It's like there's something wrong in his brain where if X leads to Y, it must be that Y was the intended result of X. He must believe the Israelis responsible for the policy are genius psychohistorians who could somehow predict exactly what would happen years down the line.

I believe he was implying less possible, Mordy, but I'm with you on the whole improbable stretch of logic there.

What do you mean he was implying less possible?

i think all sullivan is saying is that the intent of the closure policy was to make normalization more difficult in general, not that it was intended to create a black market in specific

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2012_03/bibis_blblical_politicsand_sar035886.php#

Bibi Netanyahu presented President Obama with a scroll version of the Book of Esther from the Hebrew Scriptures.

Maybe it’s just a favorite of Bibi’s (though I don’t know that he’s renowned for personal piety). Maybe it’s an allusion to the Jewish Feast of Purim (which began tonight), commemorating Queen Esther’s success in foiling a plot by a Persian schemer to exterminate Jews. Or maybe it’s something else, as Jeffrey Goldberg (among others) has suggested:

The prime minister of Israel is many things, but subtle is not one of them. The message of Purim is: When the Jews see a murderous conspiracy forming against them, they will act to disrupt the plot. A further refinement of the message is: When the Jews see a plot forming against them in Persia, they will act to disrupt the plot, even if Barack Obama wishes that they would wait for permission.

fuck a netanyahu

obv with his meeting coinciding with purim there's no way bibi could resist the allusion.

Commence operation Trojan Hamentashen

I don't know why they refined it further tho. In the Purim narrative the Jews get permission from the King to kill Haman and his sons.

Everything has gotta be 300% more salacious tho, I guess. Ramp it up.

I don't know why they refined it further tho. In the Purim narrative the Jews get permission from the King to kill Haman and his sons.

― Mordy, Wednesday, March 7, 2012 2:54 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right and the jews have friends in high places -- the king has a jewish wife. let the conspiracy theories begin.

http://www.newyorker.com/humor/issuecartoons/2012/03/19/cartoons_20120312#slide=8

Nice.

Saw some of the interivew with the ex-Mossad guy on "60 Minutes" Sunday

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ex-mossad-boss-meir-dagan-israeli-attack-iran-stupidist-article-1.1037219

I have had a hunch all along about an Israeli bluff tactic here, and if so this guy is not helping their bluff. Although maybe he has his own agenda to advance, who knows.

60 Minutes touched on the allegations why he was forced out of the Mossad (but I missed most of that part). He insists that he's not trying to just push his own agenda in retaliation.

no discussion on ilx yet about beinart boycott proposal but it seems ridiculous to me for following reasons:

1. humanitarian crisis is in gaza, not west bank, but boycotting settlements will do absolutely nothing for gaza
2. even if it helped (or even if we said it didn't matter), dead sea cosmetics and gush wine are not large enough industries that a boycott would have any impact on settlement economies and that's primarily bc
3. settlements exist bc the real estate is very cheap + affordable, and bc it is in close proximity to jerusalem. unless the boycott includes a provision to airlift the westbank somewhere else, it won't solve those issues. even if it bankrupts the few settlement companies, they'll continue to settle and just commute to work in israel proper.
4. everyone agrees that some of these settlements (particularly the established ones that would be most targeted by a boycott) will be a part of a final land swap! the settlements you want to impact are the small, new, hilltop ones that have no industry to speak of and can't be effected by a boycott.

putting aside all the other discussions about beinart and the boycott, i think that unless i'm missing something, the above points should pretty much disqualify his plan from serious conversation. it's just fantasyland absurd.

Do the settlements export much outside Israel? My impression was this boycott would be mainly something for anti-occupation Israelis.

They don't even export a lot to Israel, but even if they did, the entire op-ed was explicitly speaking to American Jews and what they can do to impact the settlements.

I remember when there was a big stink at my local co-op about whether or not they should sell Israeli products (this was back during the second intifadeh iirc) and all I could think of was "uh, what Israeli products...?"

There are substantial Israeli fruit exports to Europe, but aside from cut diamonds (not a big co-op category) there's very little consumer input on their main exports to the U.S. (figures from 2007):

Gem diamonds … US$9.5 billion
Dental, medical and pharmaceutical preparations … $2.7 billion
Telecommunications equipment … $746.8 million
Complete civilian aircraft … $685.9 million
Other hospital, medical and scientific equipment … $655 million
Electric apparatus and parts … $385.6 billion
Civilian aircraft engines … $370.5 million
Measuring, testing and control instruments … $337.1 million
Other military equipment … $271.3 million
Computer accessories, peripherals and parts … $254.6 billion

Those numbers are from Israel, fyi. We are discussing specifically settlement exports.

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2012/03/on-the-settlement-boycott-plan-contd/254953/

If Israel's uncritical supporters are so against the settlement boycott then there must be something to it.

You might want to double-check that heuristic. I can think of about a dozen reasons why it doesn't work.

Obv more symbolic than anything else.