Blood money

Israel, U.S. formally sign new defense agreement – Haaretz

Israel and the United States signed Thursday the Memorandum of Understanding on the new American defense package for Israel. Under the new aid agreement, the U.S. will transfer $30 billion to Israel over 10 years, compared with $24 billion over the past decade.

Israel is slated to receive the first pay out in October 2008, amounting to $2.550 billion. That sum will grow each year by $150 million, until it reaches $3.1 billion in 2011.

In addition, the agreement permits Israel to convert into shekels 26.3 percent of the aid money, thereby enabling it to procure defense equipment from Israeli companies. The rest of the aid must be used to purchase equipment from American military industries.

That last part, about being able to purchase from Israeli companies, shows the extent to which the lobby works in favor of Israel, not the United States. Most military aid deals, while they may have valid strategic or diplomatic reasons, are supported in Congress because they generate business for the armaments industry and create jobs and economic activity in a wide range of states. That is probably the most important facet of the recent $20 billion aid program for Arab Gulf states. But in this case, American taxpayer money is not even going to be spent on American firms, with a sizable chunk going instead to Israel’s military-industrial complex, one of the backbones of the occupation.

Incidentally, the fact that this agreement went through today meant that Egypt has already agreed to the changes in ratio in US military aid to Cairo and Tel Aviv. When was this done? When Omar Suleiman went to DC several weeks ago, separately from Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit? When Condoleeza Rice was in Sharm al-Sheikh as part of her military aid tour? Egyptians, you can ask yourself why your government has not told you that the Camp David agreement was amended.

“Hamas is ready to talk”

Hamas’ Mousa Abu Marzouk has an op-ed responding to a British parliamentary committee’s support for engaging with Hamas:

Guardian Unlimited | Comment is free | Hamas is ready to talk:

While Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is busily courting Fatah’s Mahmoud Abbas as a “partner for peace”, successive voices continue to speak out against efforts to sideline the democratically elected Hamas government. As the Britain’s Commons foreign affairs committee concluded on Monday, this strategy is counterproductive and doomed to fail, for the simple reason that the support of the Palestinian people is unmistakably lacking. Abbas’s party does not democratically represent the Palestinians, yet what is in effect now a dictatorship in the West Bank is being welcomed by Israel and its western allies. The duplicity of this situation is shameful. Israel and its allies were quick to dismiss Hamas and the national unity governments and isolate both, and are now equally as quick to welcome an illegally formed self-proclaimed government for the Palestinians. Is this democracy?

It concludes:

Hamas welcomes dialogue. If the international community is serious about peace in the Middle East, there need to be non-partisan efforts to achieve it. It is not sufficient for Israel or its allies to continue to dismiss Hamas as “extremist”, as we are made up of every part of Palestinian society.

Those who demand the boycott of Hamas repeat flimsy accusations that cannot withstand non-partisan scrutiny. They do so because they want a Palestinian “peace” partner who will not endanger Israel’s expansionist aspirations. This is not diplomacy; this is bigotry.

The Palestinians have been abandoned by the international community. The cruelty of this treatment will go down in history. It is time to create a new history for the region, and to recognise the real representatives of the Palestinian people.

I would have liked to see a more specific call to Fatah and the return to a unity government, but it’s spot on in the sentence that “they want a Palestinian peace partner who will not endanger Israel’s expansions aspirations.” Fatah better do some weeding in its ranks soon and get rid of collaborators, or there will not be anyone but Hamas, Islamic Jihad and al-Qaeda to deal with in the Occupied Territories.

Update: On a related note, Le Figaro reports that Mahmoud Abbas is currently considering banning Hamas from participating in future Palestinian elections by passing a law (how, I’m not sure) that would require any party to “respect the PLO charter” and “agree to existing accords with Israel.” Hamas has rejected the move and called, to its credit, for “dialogue and national unity.” The article also points out that in March 2005 Hamas agreed to the PLO as the only representative of the Palestinian people, but only after it carries out reforms, which it still hasn’t done. Egyptian and other Arab diplomats are currently encouraging Abbas not to exclude Hamas, but you have to wonder whether the Israelis and American agents of Israel in the White House such as Elliott Abrams are pushing for this.

A question to Lebanon watchers

This may be rather naive, and considering the vitriol being thrown around on the issue of Lebanon these days I want to tread carefully: but how come analysts have such detailed knowledge of the voting patterns according to sectarian affiliation in the recent Metn by-election? Are these published in official records? Are they based on exit polls? To see what I mean, see for instance this analysis which takes to task a recent Hassan Fattah article in the NYT (as many March 14 supporters have been doing, which for Hassan must be a change from being attacked by March 8 supporters):

In 2007, Michel Aoun’s candidate won the seat by a razor-thin margin – 418 votes, or 50.2%. Overall, Metn voters were split down the middle in the by-elections. This is a far cry from Aoun’s dominant showing in 2005, where he claimed to have won 70% of the Christian vote in Mount Lebanon. In addition, Gemayel was the clear choice of the Maronite community, winning 58.6% of Maronite votes to the FPM’s 40.7%. Contrary to Mr. Fattah’s assertion that the Metn by-elections showed that the Christians are “increasingly alienated” from the March 14 coalition, the actual breakdown of results shows the exact opposite.

So, again, the question is: how is it that such detailed info on what I had assumed was a secret ballot is available, and how reliable is it?

Update: I left a comment on the NOW Lebanon site linked above asking the same question. The site’s staff pointed me to the chart below, which does offer a breakdown by community. Hover on the bars to get the community information. There is no sourcing or methodology info here, however, so I’d still appreciate it if someone can confirm that these statistics come from officials and that this is routine dissemination in Lebanon.

Daniel Pipes’ racist campaign marks a victory

Daniel Pipes’ fascist-style campaign against an Arabic-language school in Brooklyn and its principal is succeeding:

The Evening Bulletin – Stop The NYC Madrassa:
When Dhabah (“Debbie”) Almontaser resigned on Aug. 10 as principal of the Khalil Gibran International Academy, her action culminated a remarkable grass-roots campaign in which concerned citizens successfully criticized the New York City establishment. But the fight continues. The next step is to get the academy itself canceled.

Remember, his main objection is that “the more basic problems implicit in an Arabic-language school: the tendency to Islamist and Arabist content and proselytizing.”

Perhaps someone can start a campaign against the Lycée Français in New York, where French-language education will have a tendency to pro-France content and will encourage cheese-eating and surrender-monkeying.

U.S. Weighing Terrorist Label for Iran Guards – New York Times

U.S. Weighing Terrorist Label for Iran Guards – New York Times:

WASHINGTON, Aug. 14 — The Bush administration is preparing to declare that Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps is a foreign terrorist organization, senior administration officials said Tuesday.

If imposed, the declaration would signal a more confrontational turn in the administration’s approach to Iran and would be the first time that the United States has added the armed forces of any sovereign government to its list of terrorist organizations.

In other words, the government of Iran will be officially designated as a terrorist organization, a decision that has myriad consequences and will probably limit diplomatic solutions to the current crisis.

At the zoo

Charles Levinson unearths this disturbing-but-funny-but-disturbing MEMRI clip from Hamas TV about getting children to behave better with animals. It is truly bizarre, but I wouldn’t draw any wider conclusions from it aside from wondering whether there can be a worse place for animals than Gaza zoo (look at how small the lion’s cage is), which is not surprising considering Gaza itself has been turned into an open-air prison for humans.

Update: PETA is shocked, shocked at how animals are treated in a place where humans receive worse treatment.

LRB: The Middle East Peace Process Scam

LRB | Henry Siegman : The Middle East Peace Process Scam:

Both Bush and Olmert have spoken endlessly of their commitment to a two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict, but it is their determination to bring down Hamas rather than to build up a Palestinian state that animates their new-found enthusiasm for making Abbas look good. That is why their expectation that Hamas will be defeated is illusory. Palestinian moderates will never prevail over those considered extremists, since what defines moderation for Olmert is Palestinian acquiescence in Israel’s dismemberment of Palestinian territory. In the end, what Olmert and his government are prepared to offer Palestinians will be rejected by Abbas no less than by Hamas, and will only confirm to Palestinians the futility of Abbas’s moderation and justify its rejection by Hamas. Equally illusory are Bush’s expectations of what will be achieved by the conference he recently announced would be held in the autumn (it has now been downgraded to a ‘meeting’). In his view, all previous peace initiatives have failed largely, if not exclusively, because Palestinians were not ready for a state of their own. The meeting will therefore focus narrowly on Palestinian institution-building and reform, under the tutelage of Tony Blair, the Quartet’s newly appointed envoy.

. . .

The Middle East peace process may well be the most spectacular deception in modern diplomatic history. Since the failed Camp David summit of 2000, and actually well before it, Israel’s interest in a peace process – other than for the purpose of obtaining Palestinian and international acceptance of the status quo – has been a fiction that has served primarily to provide cover for its systematic confiscation of Palestinian land and an occupation whose goal, according to the former IDF chief of staff Moshe Ya’alon, is ‘to sear deep into the consciousness of Palestinians that they are a defeated people’. In his reluctant embrace of the Oslo Accords, and his distaste for the settlers, Yitzhak Rabin may have been the exception to this, but even he did not entertain a return of Palestinian territory beyond the so-called Allon Plan, which allowed Israel to retain the Jordan Valley and other parts of the West Bank.

This is the fundamental truth of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: as long as the Israelis are strong and supported by the major powers, they will not concede anything of real value.