Behold, a nice story about an Israeli soccer team that is finding success on the field.

Bonus: It paints Israel in a positive light.

?Flying Pig? bonus: It is from the New York Times

This city is one of Israel?s smallest, a hardscrabble place with a population of 23,000 that is less than two miles from the Lebanese border and through the decades has repeatedly found itself caught in the crossfire of Arab-Israeli strife

In 1974, Kiryat Shmona was the scene of a terrorist attack in which 18 Israelis, many of them children, were killed. Rockets have clobbered the town during cross-border fighting. Underground shelters are as familiar to the city as traffic lights. And jobs can be scarce.

Yet somehow, Kiryat Shmona?s professional soccer team has become the runaway leader of Israel?s top league, has captured a separate tournament that concluded this week and has begun to turn perceptions of this often-beleaguered community upside down.

For now, the king of soccer in this country is a team that plays in a 5,500-seat stadium, has a diverse 23-man roster that includes six Israeli Arabs and is still adjusting to the curiosity it is creating.

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The team?s rise can largely be traced to one man ? Izzy Sheratzky, a millionaire from Tel Aviv who made his money in Global Positioning System devices that help track stolen cars and who founded the club 10 years ago.

Sheratzky, a native Israeli, began investing heavily in Kiryat Shmona after being moved by images of its being pounded by Katyusha rockets 13 years ago. Eventually, he decided to buy two local clubs and merge them with a dream of taking his new team to the highest level of European soccer.

?In 1999, I saw the wars and the Katyushas and many bombs,? he said in an interview last Saturday an hour before his team took the field. ?Many people left Kiryat Shmona. The situation was very bad. There was no work and there was the bombs. I decided to take care of Kiryat Shmona and to help them.?

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It will try to do so with a combination of journeyman players, young prospects, a handful of foreigners ? including a 27-year-old Argentine-American midfielder, ? and, perhaps most significantly, a mixture of Israeli Arabs and Jews.

?For us, this is very important,? Edri said of the roster?s makeup. ?With football you can do peace, the Arab and Israeli living together.

Read the whole thing.

Filed Under: Aussie Dave

Tags: Israel, Kiryat Shmona, Soccer, sports

Israellycool

Fredrik Reinfeldt Freundel Stuart George Abela George Maxwell Richards George Papandreou

By Ted Roberts

Our G-d is a jealous god, as He repeats many times in his book. I intend not to denigrate his mercy. Don’t argue with me – argue with Moses, who wrote Exodus 20:5. And he is a god of punishment. You wanta debate me? Don’t waste your time. Read Isaiah 13:11. “I will punish the world for its evil and the wicked for their iniquity.” It is clear our G-d, contrary to Christianity, is a g-d who is passionate about justice, but dispenses mercy in carefully measured doses. And when I consider the many quotes announcing his celestial disciple – how else can mankind be civilized – I think of the real world from Sodom and Gomorrah to the 40′s of our generation when we fought the evil threat of Naziism. Like Solomon says in Ecclesiastes, “there’s nothing new under the sun”.

Consider Sodom and Gomorrah. Merciful Abraham pleas for a reprieve if even five good people exist in that stew of iniquity. Evidently, they can’t be found. G-d nukes the two cities of the plain. He either couldn’t find five moral people or he ignored his debate with Abraham and eliminated a few innocents with the sinners.

Oddly, World War II – two millennia later – the debate reopened . The highest levels of allied leadership debated the bombing of German cities. (By now, man had almost the destructive power of G-d.) Dresden, Hamburg, and Berlin not only possessed railroad junctions and armament plants, but innocent men, women, and children. The discussion didn’t last long. We pulverized those cities like radiation therapy destroys healthy flesh along with the cancer.

If we believe in the epiphany at Sinai, we must believe that our creator destroyed thousands in the cities on the plain. Qualifications on both sides, though not stated, could be postulated. You might say: He couldn’t find those five righteous people, the basis of his agreement with Abraham. Evil must be eliminated.

Opposing view: isn’t it possible that some of the evil would change; eventually mend their ways? Were the children evil? Consider also some 2-3 millennia before. The flood obliterated mankind. Remember HE wiped out humanity except righteous Noah and his brood and a few animals so we’d have a zoo to amuse us.

These are difficult ethical conundrums for biblical scholars to reconcile with the goodness and mercy Judaism now believes G-d to possess. Do we dare ask: Did HE change or did WE change? Or must we painfully accept that our G-d, who provides goodness, not only hates, but stands ready to enthusiastically eliminate evil as we eradicate the malaria germ. This is a question not for me or three millennia of rabbis to answer. It is beyond our ken. But the question still hangs in the air like a cloud over Guantanamo, where innocent thousands were saved by merciless punishment to a few. But those harsh methods must have punished some small measure of innocence. What’s the rationalizing arithmetic? 10,000 saved – 4 “innocents” put to pain? Let’s face it, the Chumash would never hesitate on that tradeoff.

Israeli missiles often destroy the terrorist home or car, even if his pals or family go with him to that libidinous Islam heaven. There’s nothing new under the sun, said Solomon – even convoluted moral questions. is there a calculus? Or even a simple arithmetic? One potential killer and three innocents require death to save the lives of fifty other innocents. Is that the deal? Or is it twenty – or a thousand? Who knows?

I would say the faithful believers of G-d’s lecture on Sinai would destroy 10,000 sinners – some innocent – to save five of his people. Do you think the Maloch Hamoves, cruising the skies of 1350 BC Egypt checked the ethical character of his victims? No, says the book. He only looked for the lamb’s blood on the door. He has mercy, but also a plentiful supply of wrath.

After consideration of the flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the plagues, even Guantanamo; that saved thousands of our fellow citizens, we mourn the innocents, but do not let their peril paralyze our defense of goodness.

Again consider World War II. Military leaders of US and Britain, along with their Air Force chieftains, sat in a highly secured meeting room in London. Their topic was Genesis, especially the Creator’s decision of Sodom and Gomorrah. An awesome decision – made more for G-d than man – faced them. Whether to punish the innocent with the guilty or prolong indefinitely the struggle with the current evil, Nazi Germany. Whether to pinpoint by aerial bombardment tactical military targets or the cities of Berlin, Hamburg, Stuttgart, Dresden, Cologne, which contained military targets as well as women and children who did not build aircraft, tanks, or artillery. But the decision makers followed the theme of Genesis and pulverized the German cities. Man has always been less merciful than his creator. The same could be said of the Strategic Air Command – when G-dlike – they chose Hiroshima and Nagasaki for destruction.

We know nothing of G-d. I choose my woods carefully because we do know his desires of us. A thousand rabbis (and clergymen, too) tell you of his book and prattle of his desires. But he, himself, tells us his ways are hidden to us. “Who”, “what”, “why”, even “when”, are as obscured in the same smoke with which he crowns his mountaintops. Metaphorically, he tells us as much in the Chumash. Our Book abounds in mystery of good and evil, justice and mercy. According to his book, he will shelter us in the palm of his hand and obliterate us with a clench of that palm if he chooses.

He hates evil. That’s clear even to Sunday School children. And he punishes those that harm his people, as he repetitively states in his book. Therefore, I await the earthquake that will devastate the nuclear labs of Iran. Believe Torah? Then believe that. You say innocents will die. Remember the flood. Remember Sodom and Gomorrah. The calculus is unknown.

Israpundit

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HuffPost’s QuickRead…

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The Blog

Heinz Fischer Hifikepunye Pohamba Hosni Mubarak Hu Jintao Hubert Ingraham

In the United States, we rightly pride ourselves on many things. Yet it turns out that the United States is behind countries such as Namibia, Mali, Estonia, and Papua New Guinea in one very important area.

Reporters Without Borders have recently released their Press Freedom Index for 2011-2012, and the U.S. is 47^th, just below Taiwan and tied with Argentina. For a country that gave birth to the Bill of Rights this ought to be at the very least embarrassing, and at the worst, shameful.

The report cites the response to protests in 2011 as justification for the United States? poor ranking. In the space of two months more than 25 journalists were  arrested, escorted off premises, or beaten for ?inappropriate behavior?, ?public nuisance?, and lacking accreditation.  Instances like this are now easy to document thanks to modern technology, and some of the videos of such instances are depressing and bemusing in equal measure. These infringements would be worrying enough for First Amendment advocates, but the recent fiasco with SOPA and PIPA are also cause for concern.

The last decade has seen an unacceptable number of abuses of U.S. citizen?s rights. The right to privacy and the protection against unreasonable searches and seizures as codified in the Fourth Amendment is being slowly chipped away through invasive legislation such as the Patriot Act (renewed by President Obama) and NDAA. The right to keep and bear arms is being turned into an almost prohibitive bureaucratic nightmare in some parts of the country, as Emily Miller of the Washington Times has been chronicling. The Fifth Amendment has seen its own fair share of wear and tear, being ignored or treated as an obstacle by overbearing politicians in the name of security.

The Constitution of the United States is a piece of political genius, and it is a shame to see the rights it establishes being so brazenly reduced. Countries that until recently were ruled by dictators that often killed journalists are considered a more open environment in which to practice journalism than the U.S. Perhaps we should be doing a better job at reclaiming our intellectual and political heritage, and reminding the politicians of the document they swore to uphold and protect.

Image from Shutterstock/Scott Rothstein

The American Conservative

Islam Karimov Ismail Haniyeh Ismail Omar Guelleh Ivan Gasparovic Iveta Radicova

Long before Facebook made it possible to share photos of your breakfast with hundreds of friends and let them know just how you feel about your latest parking ticket, humans were forming social networks with essentially the same structure people use today.

A team of researchers has mapped out the relationships among a remote group of 205 hunter-gatherers in Tanzania who live as humans did about 10,000 years ago and found that their social networks are very much like ours, even in the absence of the complicating factors of megacities, cellphones and the Internet.

The researchers found that individuals who are willing to cooperate prefer the company of other cooperative people and that free riders tend to stick to their own kind as well. The results appear in Thursday’s edition of the journal Nature.

“These networks of primitive cultures are not that different from the kinds of networks that exist in modern society,” said Stanley Wasserman, a statistician at Indiana University who was not involved in the study. “This is great stuff.”

The findings offer an answer to the much-debated question of why humans cooperate with one another.

Natural selection would dictate that free riders in a community ? those selfish individuals who take advantage of other people’s generosity ? would outcompete their more selfless brethren. Social networks may have been very useful in making sure that the cooperative individuals were able to work together successfully.

Recent work linking genetic variation to social network structure lent further credence to the idea that social networks may have evolved for purposes of survival. For instance, scientists have found that the social networks of identical twins are more similar than those of fraternal twins, suggesting that genes play a role.

“If these properties are written in our genes, is this something we would find in humans who lived like we would have lived thousands of years ago?” asked UC San Diego social scientist James Fowler, one of the study’s coauthors.

To test the theory, Harvard Medical School researcher Coren Apicella traveled to remote regions of Tanzania to study members of a tiny group of hunter-gatherers known as the Hadza. The Hadza live as ancient humans in the Pleistocene are thought to have lived: no agriculture, carrying few or no possessions, setting up camp to forage and hunt, and relocating every four to six weeks after stripping the bushes and baobab trees within walking distance.

“They provide a kind of window into the past,” said study senior author Dr. Nicholas Christakis, a physician and social scientist at Harvard University who studies how social networks affect health.

The Hadza travel in wandering bands spread out around Lake Eyasi. If individuals don’t like their current band, they can leave and join another one, setting up an interesting opportunity for the researchers to probe their social network.

First, Hadza in 17 different bands were shown what could be considered a primitive version of Facebook ? a printout with head shots of all the Hadza in all bands ? and asked to identify who they’d like to be with in the next band they joined. (Men were shown only men and women shown only women, so that romantic aspirations would not complicate the results.)

The Hadza were also given three sticks of honey, a prized possession, and asked to choose three people to whom they would give each honey stick. These two tests enabled the researchers to map out the Hadza’s social networks.

For the third exercise, the Hadza were given four honey sticks. They could keep all four, but they were told that each stick they contributed anonymously to a common pile would be tripled by the researchers and redistributed later. This game was a test to see which individuals were more cooperative and which were free riders, opting to secretly keep their sticks while also benefiting from the redistribution of sticks in the common pile.

When the researchers put this information together, they found that Hadza who contributed more to the common good were more likely to be friends with other cooperative people. These connections formed clusters that were often near the center of the social networks. That, in turn, made the group more successful and better able to compete with other groups for scarce resources, Christakis said.

The researchers were surprised to find that the free riders were more likely to be friends with other free riders, and they aren’t quite sure why that is. It could be that those who cooperate choose to be friends with people like themselves, leaving no space for free riders, or that the former influence those around them to become more cooperative. Another possibility is that free riders actively prefer the company of other free riders because they’re less likely to be sanctioned for their behavior, said Joseph Henrich, an evolutionary researcher at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver who was not involved in the study.

amina.khan@latimes.com

World – latimes.com

Ellen Johnson Sirleaf Emil Boc Emmanuel Nadingar Emomalii Rahmon Emperor Akihito

The Security Council could vote as early as next week on a Western-Arab draft resolution, council diplomats said.

A group of Arab monitors planned to visit the troubled Damascus suburb of Irbin, one of them said. It would be their first outing since Friday. The mission had put its activities on hold until Arab foreign ministers met to decide its future.

Gulf Arab states have since withdrawn their 55 observers from the 165-strong team, saying they were sure “the bloodshed and killing of innocents would continue”. Arab League officials said they would be replaced and work would go on.

An Algerian observer in the team heading to Irbin said he was nervous because some opposition groups had said they would not co-operate with the mission. “We don’t know what to expect,” he told Reuters, declining to be named.

Another monitor said he was confused about the purpose of prolonging the mission for another four weeks. “The report has been written and the (Arab League) decisions have been taken, so another month to do what? We are not sure,” he said.

Syrian opposition groups have accused the observer mission, which deployed on Dec. 26, of giving Assad diplomatic cover to pursue a crackdown on protesters and rebels in which more than 5,000 people have been killed since March, by a UN tally.

The head of the Syrian Arab Red Crescent in the northern town of Idlib was shot dead on Wednesday, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) said, in an attack which Damascus blamed on “terrorists”.

The Arab League has suspended Syria and called for Assad to hand over to his deputy, pending the formation of an unity government, constitutional and security reform, and elections.

World news

King Carl XVI Gustaf King George Tupou V King Harald V King Juan Carlos I King Letsie III

How life imitates art — or graphic art, at least. In DC Comics’ new series, Justice League International, governments are going bankrupt, the masses are out in the street protesting, terrorists are blowing up state institutions, and the United Nations’ credibility is in tatters.

Sound familiar? It’s only natural that comic strips reflect the real world, or at least our worst fears about it. This comic version of life at Turtle Bay provides a glimpse of a future where the world’s declining superpower, the United States, appears to have lost its seat on the Security Council and a triumvirate headed by Britain, China, and Russia are calling the shots — but the rest of the world isn’t listening.

Even the superheroes follow a moral compass that routinely swerves off course. “People have lost faith in their own governments, and by extension, us,” Andre Briggs, the comic strip head of U.N. intelligence, tells the Global Security group — a three-person Security Council headed by Chinese, Russian, and British officials.

“Confidence in every level of authority is at an all-time low. Every government, and by extension, every law enforcement agency and security forces, is woefully under-funded and lacking resources,” says Briggs. “We believe it’s time for the United Nations to assemble its own team, representing select nations, uniquely equipped to overcome those issues.”

The United Nations has had a long, though intermittent, history in the world of action heroes, providing comic book artists with a symbol for breaking with the propagandistic and nationalist themes that marked the Golden Age of war comics during World War II, says Laura Hudson, the editor in chief of ComicsAlliance, a major online magazine on comic culture. “Modern comic book writers tend to be a progressive lot, and less inclined to infuse superhero books with the idea of American exceptionalism.”

The U.N. formed a backdrop for many of the themes of nuclear holocaust at the height of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry and the post-Cold War proliferation of nuclear weapons. In the late 1980s, the Batman’s nemesis, the Joker, acquired a nuclear weapon and sold it to Arab terrorists. He then established contact with the Ayatollah Khomeini, who appointed him as his U.N. envoy, granting him diplomatic immunity for his crimes. “He subsequently gives a speech to the General Assembly about how the world fails to show enough respect for Iran while filling the room with toxic laughing gas,” said Hudson. “His plan is foiled by Superman and Batman, and he later disappears. I am making none of this up.”

But it was The Justice League International, which got its start in the late 1980s as an offshoot of the Justice League — the latter led by All-American superheroes like Superman (though he was born in Krypton), Batman, and Wonder Woman — that placed the U.N. at the center of the action. Acting under the auspices of the United Nations, a new multinational corps of superheroes tapped into the possibilities for international cooperation unleashed by the demise of the Soviet Union. It even included a Soviet superhero, Rocket Red.

Foreign Policy

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Malam Bacai Sanha Manmohan Singh Manny Mori Marcus Stephen

Obama?s State of the Union Speech: My Response Discovers Some Curious Insights and Strange Formulations

By Barry Rubin

In his State of the Union message, President Barack Obama began by wrapping himself in the flag, patriotism, and love of the armed forces while trying to highlight his foreign policy achievements. Among his points:

??The United States [is] safer and more respected around the world.?

Presumably, a lot of Americans will believe this. The United States may be said to be safer in terms of facing direct terror attacks but that was basically true in 2002. As for ?more repected??a phrase no doubt chosen to seem more statesmanlike than saying ?more popular,? that is a joke. If there?s one thing that should be obvious (and this is often revealed even by international public opinion polls) the United States is not more respected at all.

Moreover, while individual Americans may be relatively safe from terrorist attacks in their homes, neighborhoods and workplaces within the territory of the United States?a perception partly reinforced by redefining terrorist attacks as something else?U.S. interests abroad are far less safe.

Continue reading Obama?s State of the Union Speech: My Response Discovers Some Curious Insights and Strange Formulations

Barry Rubin is director of the Global Research in International Affairs (GLORIA) Center and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs (MERIA) Journal. His latest books are The Israel-Arab Reader (seventh edition), The Long War for Freedom: The Arab Struggle for Democracy in the Middle East (Wiley), and The Truth About Syria (Palgrave-Macmillan). His latest book is Israel: An Introduction, to be published by Yale University Press in January 2012. You can read more of Barry Rubin’s posts at Rubin Reports, and now on his new blog, Rubin Reports, on Pajamas Media

Technorati Tag: Election 2012 and Obama and State of the Union.

Daled Amos

Jigme Thinley Joan Enric Vives Sicilia Johanna Siguroardottir John Atta Mills John Key

Silly things like jobs, the economy, energy, and so forth rate a bit higher

(The Hill) The nation?s economy and its job market remain Americans? top concerns, a new poll has found.

The Pew Research Center found that strengthening the economy (86 percent) and the job market (82 percent) were the only two issues that at least seven out of 10 Americans called a top priority.

Those two areas have been Americans? top concerns throughout President Obama?s time in the Oval Office, Pew reported.

Well, it’s no wonder they come up on top, because Obama and Congressional Democrats took an economic downturn, something that happens, and made it much, much worse.

A quarter of Americans now find climate change a top concern, down from almost four in 10 in 2007. More than half of Americans named illegal immigration a priority that same year, a figure that has now fallen to 39 percent.

Let’s look at the breakdown (graphic via Watts Up With That?)

It’s actually a shame that the environment has taken a hit, which I blame on Warmists folding real world environmental issues under the banner of “climate change”, causing many people to turn off and tune out. As Anthony Watts writes

It appears that only the zealots care much about global warming anymore, yet it doesn?t stop them from making grand pronouncements of gloom and doom or taking fossil fueled publicity stunt boat trips to Antarctica.

Perhaps all the Warmists should go live in sustainable communities which rely on no modern conveniences that put out CO2. Which pretty much means freezing to death in caves.

Pirate’s Cove

Manmohan Singh Manny Mori Marcus Stephen Mari Kiviniemi Mark Rutte

From DG:

1) What the Diehl? 

Lately Jackson Diehl has been one of the better analysts of the Middle East. His most recent, Turkey’s government is the new normal in the Middle East, unfortunately, was disappointing. Diehl started off by blasting former Republican presidential candidate, Gov. Rick Perry of Texas.

Perry responded: ?Well, obviously when you have a country that is being ruled by what many would perceive to be Islamic terrorists .?.?.? 

Islamic terrorists? This, mind you, is about a government that has just stationed an advanced radar on its territory that could be used to track and shoot down missiles from Iran; that joined the NATO operation against Moammar Gaddafi in Libya; that has become the host of the opposition to Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad; and that, having repeatedly won free democratic elections, amended Turkey?s constitution to expand rights for women, ethnic minorities and unions.
…

The reality is that, like it or not, ?Islamist-oriented? governments are about to become the new normal in a region dominated for decades by secular autocrats and pro-American generals. So the crude bias about Muslim movements that is baked into the worldview of many U.S. conservatives ? that they are inevitably fundamentalist, anti-democratic, anti-Israel and anti-American, if not explicitly ?terrorist? ? has become a serious liability. If heeded, it will make it impossible for this administration and future ones to navigate the region?s new politics and preserve crucial alliances.

Left out, of course, is that Turkey aided the IHH, an international terrorist organization  with the Mavi Marmara, which led to  a clash with Israel. Here’s how the The Meir Amit Intelligence and Terrorism Information Center describes the relationship between the government of Turkey and the IHH. (.pdf)

1) In the political-strategic realm, the Erdogan regime collaborates closely with IHH.Their collaboration is based on a common Islamic worldview, the concept that IHH can be used as a tool to implement Turkish foreign policy and IHH’s readiness to serve the current government’s strategy of turning Turkey into an influential regional power, including at the expense of its relations with Israel. That strategy was manifested by the political and practical support received by Hamas (the transfer of funds and other aid to Hamas, support for convoys and flotillas, and hosting Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood activities on Turkish soil. 

2) In the realm of internal Turkish politics, IHH is a socio-political powerbase for the AKP, Turkey’s ruling party and, according to several reports, helped it get elected. Their close relations have led to the AKP’s appointing senior members of IHH to government positions, (about a quarter of the IHH senior leadership holds or held positions or were candidates for AKP positions!). The AKP gave the flotilla propaganda and moral support and the Turkish media also reported that AKP parliament members intended to board the Mavi Marmara. However their participation was canceled at the last minute. 

3) On the personal level, IHH leader Bülent Yildirim maintains close relations with the heads of the Turkish regime and is warmly supported by Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan. According to statements from passengers aboard the Mavi Marmara, corroborated by ITIC information, the flotilla set out with Erdogan’s full knowledge and agreement, despite the fact that it was clear Israel would not allow the flotilla to reach the Gaza Strip.

Perhaps Perry overstated the case a bit, but he wasn’t far off. The problem is that just because Islamists are the “new normal” doesn’t make that development a good thing. It’s one thing saying that the government needs to deal with a new reality; it’s another to do as President Obama did and embrace that reality as a positive development.

Yesterday Robert Satloff and Eric Trager outlined How the U.S. Should Handle the Islamist Rise in Egypt.

Yet Washington has assets to preserve its equities in Egypt. At $ 1.2 billion, U.S. military assistance is essentially the procurement budget for the Egyptian armed forces. While the Islamists may want the military out of politics, they also don’t want to be accused of materially weakening the country. Direct U.S. economic support is much smaller, at $ 250 million, but America has a substantial voice in international financial institutions to which Egypt almost surely will turn for help. In the coming period, when Egypt’s Islamist politicians will test just how far the U.S. will bend to accommodate a new political reality, the U.S. should be willing to use both these tools to advance its interests. 

Washington’s message to Cairo’s emerging leaders should be that U.S. support — both direct and indirect — is conditional on their cooperation in maintaining peace with Israel and preserving political pluralism and religious and minority rights. America should determine its relationship based on what Egypt’s new rulers actually do on these issues, not the cooing sounds that their English-language spokesmen offer visiting American journalists, diplomats and politicians.

It isn’t clear that this will work, but Satloff and Trager tell the administration to take a skeptical approach to the Islamists. That’s a far cry from what Obama has done as he (if Turkey is any guide) embraced them uncritically.

2) The continuing Palestinian diplomatic war against Israel

In his op-ed in the New York Times last year, The long overdue Palestinian state, Mahmoud Abbas clearly expressed his intent for dealing with Israel.

Palestine?s admission to the United Nations would pave the way for the internationalization of the conflict as a legal matter, not only a political one. It would also pave the way for us to pursue claims against Israel at the United Nations, human rights treaty bodies and the International Court of Justice.

Abbas’s attempt to get support for statehood from the UN fizzled. However his effort to use the UN to wage diplomatic war against Israel is continuing. Jonathan Schanzer and David Barnett write in The Palestinian Campaign to Delegitimize Israel:

Specifically, Abbas is threatening to form a political union with rival faction Hamas, the terrorist group that controls the Gaza Strip. Palestinians view unity as a necessary step toward independence, so his rhetoric has been very popular on the “Palestinian street.” But the likelihood of a merger is unlikely. Rather, the PLO is using the prospect of a government partially constituted by unrepentant terrorists to pressure Israel into making concessions. 

The message is simple: If the Israelis don’t give the PLO what it wants, it could join hands with Hamas, which repeatedly refuses to renounce “armed resistance,” making it virtually impossible for Israel to achieve the peace that it craves.
…
With all of these moving parts, it’s easy to lose sight of the big picture: Palestinian leaders seem to have no interest in talking to Israel this year. Instead, they may be gearing up for a full-scale diplomatic campaign to delegitimize it.

What’s astonishing is that Abbas is carrying out a campaign – that he publicly outlined in a prestigious American newspaper – to avoid negotiations with Israel and it has elicited no outrage. Netanyahu is still the obstacle to peace and to the Secretary of Defense, both sides won’t come to the “damn table.”

Abbas’s refusal to negotiate is exacerbated by his embrace of Hamas, which is a rejection of the PLO’s disavowal of terror, a premise of the very peace negotiations that are now “stalled.” Peace won’t come to the Middle East as long as Abbas’s obstructionism is tolerated and encouraged.

Technorati Tag: Israel and Abbas and Media Bias and Turkey.

Daled Amos

Joseph Kabila Juan Manuel Santos Julia Gillard Jurelang Zedkaia Kamla Persad Bissessar