Amen, MJ, Amen.

And I agree, the question is well put.

Very clever, in the GOOD sense of the term.

and then maybe bash Walt-Mearsheimer and Jimmy Carter for good measure

mcs,

as far as I see it, "Annapolis" was a dog and pony show.

Why?  What were your expectations, and how did the conference fall short of them?

Fair enough.  I could agree with you about the dog-&-pony aspect of the conference, at least where Bush & Co. are concerned.  But at the same time, I believe that the principal parties take it all very seriously.  My greater hope tends toward the Arab League delegations' willingness to enable the Israelis' sense of confidence in their security with real policies that normalize relations with Israel.  I am confident that such tangible efforts would create the political atmosphere for Olmert's government to succeed in meeting their obligations, and also motivate the Palestinians to build and maintain the civil infrastructure necessary to emerge as a functional state.

MJ says "talking is better than not talking". Under current circumstances, the opposite is true. Starting with Oslo in 1993, each time there have been "negotiations", progress, optimism", there has been an INCREASE in violence. Violence was minimal when there was NO "progress". Oslo was signed in 1993, and was followed by the first wave of suicide bombings. Oslo II was signed shortly before Rabin was assassinated. Israel then pulled its forces out of the Arab towns and then a bigger wave of suicide bombings occurred which had Arafat's explicit approval (this was revealed in the Knesset by Peres in response to a question by Benny Begin). It was this wave that caused Peres to lose the 1996 election. Netanyahu's election slowed "progress" down and there was a significant decrease in violence. Barak in 2000 tried to wrap up a final agreement at Camp David and later at Taba and this led to the biggest wave of terrorism Israel had ever seen, with over 1000 murdered and thousands more wounded. Sharon replace Barak and finally, after the Pesach Night massacre in Netanya in 2002, Sharon was finally forced to move against the Palestinians, and their towns were reoccupied, and after eight years, Israel was able to begin regular anti-terrorist operations in addition to locking Arafat up in his Mukata HQ in Ramallah, which led to a major improvement in the security situation. Sharon then decided to throw away all the advantages this had brought
and to destroy Gush Katif. This brought the big increase in rocket fire from the Gaza Strip and the kidnapping of Gilad Shalit and killing of IIRC another soldierthere, in addition to encouraging HIZBULLAH to attack across the northern border killing and kidnapping more soldiers.
Thus, we see here that negotiations with terrorists (I am including the whole Palestinian Authority and Abbas in this category) simply encourages them to attack. Their policy is to negotiate and kill at the same time. They view Israel's pushing for negotiations and willingness to make concessions as weakness and this encourages the violence. When Israel stands fast, they lose the motiviation to attack, seeing that it doesn't help. Thus, the way to make peace is not through nonsensicle theatrics like Annapolis, but by Israel REFUSING to make concessions, and by putting off INFORMAL talks about improving the lives of the Arabs in an economic and security sense
until the Arabs prove they are willing to live as civilized human beings and reject the cult of death they have adopted.

MJ,

Just wanted to offer props on the mention in last week's Economist article "Cinderella at Annapolis." Fourth graf, nicely done. 

~~~~~~~~~~~

Come visit PROJECT: Lucidity
Where everybody knows your name...
unless you use a pseudonym

Apparently the Jewish Lobby knows no bounds.

From Haaretz.com:

ALGIERS - France's Foreign Ministry expressed surprise Wednesday about an Algerian government minister's remarks about a "Jewish lobby" being behind French President Nicolas Sarkozy.

TDaniel A. Greenbaum

Why would having Israel govern the Israeli Arabs in perpetuity be any different than ruling Arab parts of Jerusalem? Arabs in Jerusalem are entitled to full Israeli citizenship if they want it, and even if they don't, they get National Insurance benefits.

"Even though I have no idea as to what is going on, am not a party to the negotiations, do not know the parameters or metrics of the talks nor am I privy to any discussions, promises, guarantees or rewards promised to the participants, have no access to private discussions, conversations and negotiations and have not personally assessed the situation and having no personal involvement whatsoever,I wholeheartedly support and endorse PM Olmert in whatever is going on at Annapolis because no matter how ignorant or in the dark I am as to the details or process some people want me to throw prudence and caution to the wind and utter a blind, uneducated endorsement as a litmus test of leadership."

Yours truly,
The candidate

DanielGree said:

Walt-Mearsheimer and Carter express anti-Semitic views over and over.

Rosenberg never fails to support these bigots.

If someone told me Jesse Jackson supports
David Duke I doubt if I'd believe them.

MJ you point out the one positive thing that I have seen come out of Annapolis and that is to open a discussion in national politics for the creation of a Westbank Palestinian state. The conference itself was designed, perhaps out of Rice's sheer incompetence, to fail. We could even be in a worse place today than before.

There is one thing that has emerged that may have set back future talks. This is the new demand, so enthusiastically endorsed by Pipes, that the Palestinians must now recognize Israel as a Jewish state, not just recognize Israel as a state which has already been done. Possibly Olmert made this demand simply to appeal to the Israeli right and it can be forgotten. But if not it is a deal killer.

Has any country in the world recognized Israel as a "Jewish" state? What does that mean? Someone provide a definition. Then will rest of the world be required to recognize this new entity? By what definition can one come up with that would not relegate Christian and Moslem Israeli citizens to second class status? How could any Palestinian accept such a demand? Just asking these questions and thinking a few seconds about their implications shows the utter and total bad faith on the part of Israel to even place this demand on the table.

What other country in the world demands that other states formally recognize the perpetual right to dominance of its dominant ethnic group? This is just another moving goalpost.

syvanen,

You are making the common mistake of limiting Jewish identity strictly to its religious component.  To whatever extent that certain national components of Jewish identity may be rooted in ancient and medieval religious traditions is by now beside the point.  Israel is a Jewish state the same way 23 member nations of the Arab League are Arab states.

Thanks, Eric. By the way, I'm on Bill Moyers Journal Friday tonight on PBS discussing the Christian Zionists.
MJ

But do these states require other states to recognize this? Is there even a formal mechanism by which other states recognize the right of Ireland to exist as an "Irish state"?

Ireland's right of return requires that the prospective Irish returnee be able to demonstrate at least one grandparent born in Ireland. Much as I find meaning in the Celtic tradition of the Tuatha de Danann, as much as I find appealing the archetype of Lugh Ildanach and the exchange between Lugh and Nuada's doorkeeper, there's no recognition of ancient rights, of an identity more than two generations old.

I believe Germany and several other countries have roughly the same rule for right of return as a citizen: one grandparent born in a place that was part of the nation at the time of birth.

These are reasonably objective standards. Ironically, even the Nuremberg Laws of the Third Reich essentially went back two generations, although far further for such dubious honors as being qualified to join the SS.

Not all of these states, incidentally, recognize dual citizenship. If you want to claim citizenship when you return, you commit to it, much as certain people affixed their signatures to a document pledging their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. No reserve citizenship if things aren't what you expected.

I know we disagree about Jewish identity being other than religious. Still, the idea of establishing personal descent within a verifiable historical period, and restricting return to those, strikes me as reasonable.

Luckily, I can prove I was born in the miasma of Newark, New Jersey. I happened to work on the first automated version of the US immigration system, and, as part of our orientation, the INS people offered us the option tracing our ancestry. Even though I knew the names of the vessels on which my grandparents arrived, the approximate date, and the port of entry, there was no record in the archives. For that period, they were ledgers from Ellis Island, and also ship manifests. Couldn't find anyone, even when we got my grandmother on the phone to help in narrowing it down.

One of the things that really bothers me is the idea of a Biblical right to land, somehow beyond the UN partition resolution.

--
Howard

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

Where is the proof that Walt-Mearsheimer are anti-Semitic except you saying so? And is that all it takes? I also question the utility of ethnic lobbies on foreign policy. I guess that means I hate Jewish-, Cuban-, Irish- Armenian- Pakistani- and Indian-Anericans, among so many others.

Or...it could mean your libel of Walt-Mearsheimer is just that: libel.

Andrew Weakland,

My reaction to this is why can't Israel just ask to be recognized as a Free Democratic State with equal rights for all, that just happens to have a lot of Jews?

Israeli non-Jews in fact are enfranchised within the electoral system, and there are Arab parties represented in Israel's parliament (Knesset).  Israel is ruled by civil law, not rabbinic law (halacha).  Admittedly, Israel's society needs to catch up with the spirit of its civil law, and that is why there is a body of case law before its independent civil judiciary (again, not a rabbinic court [beit din]) regarding issues like land ownership.  Israel is a democratic state with a Jewish character, much the same way Ireland is a democratic state with a Celtic character, or Lebanon struggles to be a democratic state with an Arab character.

Ireland and Germany determine who gets to be Irish and German.  If it is to be considered somehow nefarious that Israel determine who gets to be Israeli, then that consideration appears to be discriminatory.

The status of Israeli Arabs is altogether different from that of the Arabs in the Palestinian territories, because there was a war launched against Israel from the Arab countries that had been occupying those territories before Israel was.  Israel needs to end the occupation, for its own sake if not for the sake of the people of the territories.  Meanwhile, you keep imposing a bogus limitation on Jewish identity depending on the religion of Judaism.  That is arrogant and it is wrong.  So, you should stop that.

Than if Arab (or any other) states recognize Israel diplomatically, what would be the need for a separate recognition of "Israel's right to exist as a Jewish state"?

It is not a "separate recognition" as long as only three out of 23 member nations of the Arab League recognize Israel diplomatically.

But if you say Israel not only is a Jewish state, but "has the right to exist as a Jewish state" what would this imply, in a hypothetical situation where Israeli Arabs, as a result of differing rates of population growth, have become the majority of the Israeli population? Would preserving Israel's Jewish character justify depriving Arabs of the franchise or even expelling them from the country? And if the "right to exist as a Jewish state" doesn't imply that, what does it mean?

Ok, do those three states then have the obligation for the second recognition? Why in the case of Israel and not in that of Ireland? And before you say that Israel has enemies and Ireland doesn't, I will point out that if recognition of the ethnic character of states were a part of formal diplomacy, Ireland would be strongly motivated to extort such recognition from the United Kingdom.

Okay, well let's look at this way...

Should a Palestinian state be founded, what will it be called?

The State of Palestine.

A Free Democratic State with equal rights for all that just happens to have a lot of Palestinians in it.

Will the state have the right to restrict who moves there? Will they have the right to have immigration quotas? Do you think they will be open to a lot of non-Palestinians moving there?

The Palestinians are seeking the right of return. If the right is attached to the new state, will there be room for all other peoples who might want to move there? Will any other people have the right to move there?

Israel is a Jewish state the way the State of Palestine will be a Palestinian state. Their whole quest for a state is to have a state FOR the Palestinian people, not just any old people who wish to live there.

Somehow, we accept the idea that a Palestinian state would be (at least primarily) for Palestinians. But that same idea doesn't seem to flow so naturally when we are talking about the Jewish people and their state. Maybe because Jews also are attached to a religion, whereas Palestinians are both Christian and Muslim. But what if they were only Muslim?

Besides which...

Israel, and Zionism as such, emerged as a reaction to overwhelming anti-Semitism. I think it's safe to say that had the Holocaust not occurred, Jews themselves would not have moved to the region as they did. Of course, there were many positive aspects to the founding as well; but I'm not sure they would have been enough.

Now, I agree, we've had it "up to here" with the Holocaust. But really, for Jews, it's a recent event, much the way the naqba is a recent event for Palestinians. Living people's brother, sisters, and fathers and mothers died there. Some people don't have grandparents because of the Holocaust. And there was the expulsion from many Arab countries after 1948...

So I think until the memory of the Holocaust becomes distant...until anti-Semitism really becomes a chapter of history and not something that periodically recurs in, say, France, or Argentina or Russia...and perhaps until OTHER groups, such as the Muslims in Saudi Arabia say, "You're right, let's have the Free Democratic State of SA where all can come and live and worship as they please without fear...and anyone can become a citizen with full rights...until that time, a lot of Jews (though hardly all) will just feel better about having a Jewish state.

And really, it hardly takes up any room at all--certainly not compared to its neighbors.

When you look around the world, it isn't as big an anomaly as you might think, living here.

Now, I already feel Howard breathing down my neck...so, gotta go!

syvanen,

I am saying that insisting on the Palestinians to recognize Israel as Jewish state is to ask them to officially acknowledge that her non-Jewish citizens will have secondary status.

How so?  Israel's non-Jewish citizens are Israelis.  Politically, non-Jewish Israelis are fully enfranchised, if unfortunately they remain socially contrained.  But I like to think that once the conflict is on its way to resolution, the civil and human rights circumstances in Israel will begin to sort itself out.  Don't you think Palestine's non-Arab citizens will enjoy equal rights within the Palestinian legal structure?

William Burns,

And if the "right to exist as a Jewish state" doesn't imply that, what does it mean?

It means that the Jewish people has national rights equal to the national rights that Arab peoples assert in states that heve the right to exist as Arab states.

hcberkowitz,

I would really like to know if Israel's definition is generally consistent with those major nations that claim an ethnic identity.

I believe the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs can provide the details.  They have a website, I don't know the URL off the top of my head, but a Google search will get you there.

But does national legitimacy really depend so much upon a matter of degree?  Have we redefined the idea of national sovereignty so that some aspect of international law requires consistency of citizenship requirements for, say, membership in the UN General Assembly?

Such a silly issue

The Moscow initiative on the front page of the Wapo today strikes me as positive--even if it is just Russia trying to keep her hand in.

Rosenberg never fails to support these bigots.

Notice how, once again, MJ reflexively blames Israel and misses the main point to boot.  If it's such a silly, trivial issue, why are Arabs making such a big deal out of it?  They could easily issue a statement saying something like "We recognize that the goal of negotiations is two states living side by side in peace, one Jewish and one Arab."  It would go a long way to shoring up support in Israel for concessions.  The fact that they refuse is significant.  This isn't like the demand that they "dismantle the terror infrastructure" something that probably isn't even possible even if Abbas wanted to do it.  This is a simple statement. 

It just exposes the Palestinians for what they are: duplicitous hucksters who will bank any Israeli concession and continue the fight indefinitely.

There is no reason that a means can't be devised to keep Jerusalem physically undivided but administratively separate

Well, we also have the reverse arguments being made, i.e., that certain land is "Palestinian" land. That never seems to cause a problem.

But does national legitimacy really depend so much upon a matter of degree?

Have we redefined the idea of national sovereignty so that some aspect of international law requires consistency of citizenship requirements for, say, membership in the UN General Assembly?

*equal opportunity offense to both extremes*

"Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" [George Santayana]

It causes problems every day of the week and both sides do it.

"It just exposes the Palestinians for what they are: duplicitous hucksters...."

I guess the only people on earth it is acceptable to make racist statements about is the Arabs, Palestinians, in particular.

Just imagine if someone wrote: "It just exposes the Jews for what they are: duplicitous hucksters...."

Sickening stuff.

Politically, non-Jewish Israelis are fully enfranchised, if unfortunately they remain socially contrained.

Sort of like American blacks were socially constrained in the South up until recently. Like real estate covenants that restrict Arabs from buying land. The use of live bullets to suppress Arab street demonstrations but complete nonviolent techniques to deal with Jews. Arabs can vote but their representatives are barred from serving in government. Citizenship rights for Jews living in the Westbank but not for the Arabs.

I don't care how you cut it, this sounds like second class citizenship. That is the facts on the ground today. However, the Palestinians will not officially agree to accept these facts. If that is what you demand, then do not expect an agreement with them.

And while we have been discussing the Annapolis conference and the issues that came with it, the bluebell family turkey and corn casserole didn't come up at all here either.  Go figure.

See, that is why there is a peace process happening, and why I support it.

Arabs can vote but their representatives are barred from serving in government.

That's bullshit.  Raleb Majadele is the Israeli Minister of Science, a cabinet portfolio.  If you have a real argument, you shouldn't have to make shit up.

I can imagine, you wrote some many racist statements about religious and Russian Jew, that I don't think you should so shocked by such statements.

Yeah, but the women cooking the turkey and the corn casserole get to caucus on January 3rd.

Now for what did come up over the stuffing - jobs, manufacturing, Asian competition, real estate prices, farm prices, college tuition, taxes, Iraq, and the stock market.

My point is that it is stupid. I don't care if it is Serbian, Croat, Israeli or Palestinian. People using religion to rationalize and justify cruelty and misery intentionally inflicted upon each other.

Zionista - Is Israel going to require every country in the world to recognize it as a Jewish state? Is Israel willing to have diplomatic relations with countries who insist Israel is JUST a "country".

Please drop the "poor abused Israel" meme. It doesn't befit you or Israel. The Jewish state enjoys worldwide economic and social ties, it has a powerful military and it's citizens enjoy first world benefits. If you want to feel sorry for someone, how about the poor sucker who was unlucky enough to have been born in the Congo.

Israel and Jews already have dignity - there are a few billion others who do not.