If the rest of the world votes to jump off a bridge, AP Reporter Matthew Lee thinks the Obama Administration is under some sort of obligation to agree with international consensus. Here he is last year doing a victory dance heckling the administration on having the gall to be on the losing side of another lopsided vote involving Israel and Palestine.
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on Weekend Plans Post: The Swing of ThingsCool map of the solar system: https://joshworth.com/dev/pixelspace/pixelspace_solarsystem.html
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The overarching point is pertinent, agreed.
That said I think the more specific case of Isreal this go round is troubling in the extreme. I am long past believing that Bibi has any plan at all other than remaining in power as PM at any cost regardless of the devastation he’s wreaking on Israel’s long (or even likely medium term) position.
By all that is holy what does the man think he will accomplish if he discredits and destroys the administration of Abbas and the PA, a group that is quite literally advocating that diplomacy, security cooperation and coexistence with Israel will yield the Palestinians a state on the West Bank? Is the PA collapses who in the holy hell do Israeli wingers think will come to power? Some magic dancing Palestinian Santa who’ll be as materially friendly to Israel as Abbas has while also mouthing the warm fuzzy politically toxic and materially meaningless platitudes that Bibi and co demand?*
And that’s without talking about moving forward with settlements in E1 bifurcating the Palestinian West Bank. The Israeli’s can count on the US, sure, but losing the entire EU and I mean losing in a serious sense like forclosing diplomatic contacts or opening the door to genuine trade restrictions? That is no small damned thing US or no. If only the Israeli electorate comes out of their stupor somehow… if only the Israeli left and middle would coalesce around a set of coherent policies and a leader. Madness, madness and stupidity.
*I’m deluding myself of course. Bibi, Liberman and the Settlers all long for a Hamas like administration they can wage wholesale conflict with/against. The two state solution is toxic to them and it’s beginning to seem that they somehow believe that the demographic time bomb either doesn’t exist or can be resolved with some kind of abhorrent racial cleansing strategy.Report
I have issues with Bibi and wish that someone else were Prime Minister. But Bibi and his cohort are who the Israelis want*, and it’s their arses on the line. I’m not a neutral observer, though, being pretty much in the bag for Israel. (Which is why I tend not to enter the fray – better to listen to conversations with people that have an open mind.)
* – To the best that we can make that determination with the Israeli election system, which I consider a cautionary tale against multi-party parliamentary systems.Report
Why are you in the bag? Historical reasons?Report
To accent WillT here: Israelis feel so threatened they’ve unified behind “right-wing” Netanyahu. Yes, he is “right-wing,” and we Americans have often viewed Israeli politics through our own prism, Likud [GOP] and Labor [Dem].
But these are perilous times—these are times when madness rules—and Netanyahu is the only Churchill they have in sight. “Right-wing.”
Any sane opponent would fear Israel’s nukes, but Israel’s existential enemies are at heart suicide bombers. How do you deter a suicide bomber? Answer that, and OK, I’m in, and so is Israel.Report
Any sane opponent would fear Israel’s nukes
There’s no reason to, any more than Argentina had to fear the UK’s nukes during their Falklands idiocy.. Israel is not going to nuke sizable numbers of innocents.Report
Their survival depends on the fear they might.Report
I thought you were saying they’ve concluded their survival depends not on that, because nukes won’t deter the suicidal (in fact, they won’t even deter any low-impact resistance force, because no one thinks any nuclear power would use nukes for that purpose – they’re not even good for that purpose; nukes are for deterring other nuclear powers: they exist now solely to ensure that no other power has a bigger boom than you and hence puts an asymmetric threat over your head that you can’t answer), but instead that their survival depends on… whatever it is they think Bibi offers them.
Even if you’re talking about Iran here, you’re still wrong (by Israel’s lights); that’s why Israel is so concerned about Iran developing a capability: the fear that Iran thinks like you say, and is not deterrable by equal or greater force.
The only way this statement is right is that you’re saying that Israel is wrong to prioritize that concern about Iran’s rationality to a point of policy-determination, and that you’re right about it, so that Israel’s survival depends on their willingness to use their nukes in the case of being attacked with a nuke (by Iran or anyone else). Well, actually, I think that’s right. But it also makes them different from precisely no other nuclear power on the planet.
Otherwise, Israel’s (defined as it wants to define itself) survival depends primarily on successfully establishing a separate state for the Palestinians.Report
I’m not so certain of that as you are.Report
Suicide bombers are indeed terrible. People will always find a way to strike at their enemies if they want to so you can’t end the threat of suicide bombers. But they will not defeat Israel. Suicide is a desperate tactic that is meant to cause pain, not defeat a foe.
There is plenty of disagreement in Israel. Israelis are not united behind Bibi like the Brits were with Churchill. There also did come a day for Churchill when he beliefs were out of step and wrong headed. He wanted to keep the Empire after WW2 even though the Brits didn’t have the money, desire or strength to do so and the rest of the empire wanted out.Report
Exactly. The minute Hitler was off their doorstep, the ingrates threw Churchill out. So it goes. But at the moment, this is not that moment, hence Bibi.
Suicide bombers are indeed terrible.
Uh huh.Report
Churchill was the right man for the war and the wrong man for the post war.
BTW shouldn’t you be singing Obama’s praises for the help Israel received with Iron Dome?Report
Israel has quite a few existential enemies, but the ones with bomb vests are the last of their problems.
It’s a surreal day when I link to Jeffrey Goldberg approvingly, but his take on this matter is spot on.Report
Yes I’m entirely with Goldberg on this. Though I think I started reading him after he wrote whatever my fellow liberals find abhorrent because he’s always seemed pretty on target in what he’s written since I’ve begun reading him.Report
My problem is not with Netanyahu being right wing. He can wing about all he wants. My problem is with him blatantly prioritizing continuing his career as PM over Israel’s long term interests.
My ancillary problem is that his wing has no answer to the most pertinent questions regarding their suicidal settlement policies. The Palestinians within the territory Israel controls are predictably going to outnumber the Jews within same said territory in the midterm future. The settlements are logistically hard and politically harder to remove and chain Israel to those non-jewish population centers. The more they expand the worse those problems become. At some point the Palestinians are going to logically conclude that the two state solution is a dead letter and begin campaigning for citizenship in Israel at which Israel can either become a non-Jewish majority state or an apartheid state.
To this the Israeli right wing typically claps their hands over their ears and lalala’s or they say that once they’ve taken as much of the west bank as they want they can pile the unwanted Palestinians onto the scraps that are left and force Jordan to take them (aka soft ethnic cleansing) which of course is magical thinking of an astonishing order.Report
The settlements will be traded for the Palestinians yielding “the right of return.” Israel has already demonstrated the blueprint.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Israel's_unilateral_disengagement_plan
Peace when they want it. Behave yourselves for a few years instead of launching rockets at us daily, and show you’re a partner in peace. But the problem is the Palestinians can create no government strong enough to discipline its crazies. It cannot become a partner in peace as Egypt and Jordan did.Report
That’s the centrist and left wing plan but it’s been adamantly opposed by Bibi (he’s even on the record bragging about how he undermined Oslo in the late 90’s. How many rockets have been flying out of the West Bank? And if the settlements are so blasely going to be traded away then why expand them and create more of them? Bibi’s entire current administration survives on the basis of support for the settlements. He’d be out on his keister if he crossed that constituency and he knows it. Hell he’s on the record
Sure trading the settlements is the idea, but they get harder and harder to remove every day and the entanglement with the West Bank gets worse with every new one put in.Report
Bibi only had to keep his mouth shut to undermine Oslo; Arafat did it for him the week after the signing when he went on PA radio and announced Oslo was “the greatest deception”, a part of the Phased Plan of 1974 only.
The problem with the whole scenario is that there is no, and has not been, a valid partner for creating peace ever since the pan-Arabists stole the land that was supposed to be Palestine in 1949.Report
Arafat opened his mouth: this is how you know Arafat was lying. He lied about that too, it’s important not to cherrypick with him.Report
Oh I agree Arafat was a crook and a shyster but he had an ally in the Israeli right which adamantly didn’t want the deal and Bibi actively frustrated the Israeli side of it.
Be that as it may Abbas is no Arafat and the Israeli’s will discover to their enormous woe just how much of a friend Abbas was if Bibi’s clowns succeed in destroying the PA and all that security cooperation vanishes.Report
So, apparently the solution is to THROW GOBS OF MONEY at Palestine’s military wing? Ala Egypt?Report
How did Russia deter the suicide bombers? By giving them what they wanted, of course.
Now we need not give people EVERYTHING, but it’s been a long time since we’ve had political suicide bombers in America either.
Maybe Israel might want to take a think?Report
CHURCHILL?
This the same bibi that told his fucking sugar daddy that he was such a pussy he wouldn’t dare make any consequences for bibi’s meddling in another country’s politics??
Seriously, CHURCHILL? Churchill would never have bit the hand that feeds him.
When you’re a fucking welfare state, you don’t piss off your sugar daddy.Report
Will, I’m similarily in the bag for Israel, they’re a modern western state and I have friends who live there so of course I’m partial. That said one cannot help but be exasperated at how badly they’re undermining their own position with this. If one looks at someone sitting on a branch sawing through it and says “Good lord man, you’re going to plummet if you keep going” does that make them against that man?Report
Pissing off the diving board is the standard Yiddish metaphor.Report
http://972mag.com/obama-victory-israeli-memes-poke-fun-at-bibi/59294/Report
In as much as its in Israel’s interests to have as much international support as possible recent developments are bad for them. It behoves the US to tell its good buddy Israel that everybody else thinks they have a giant piece of food stuck in their teeth. Now to us of course we are always going to think Israel looks great no matter what they look like. But friends need to be honest with each other. Some people will make the point that that a client state, the US, shouldn’t mouth off to our patron, Isreal, but still bros need to be their for each other.Report
I… think that there is a reason that they have ceased caring all that much what the rest of the world thinks. The US could, of course, would have much to gain internationally by no longer taking the side that it does. But I don’t consider “but the rest of the world is voting against you” to be a compelling argument beyond that. Certainly not a compelling moral argument.Report
Israel needs one country to support it. I suppose a U.S.-friendly Egyptian government wouldn’t hurt, but really, it needs one country.
Also, 350+ thousand settlers in the West Bank have more pull in Israeli Politics than Europe does.Report
Well, Europe might actually think about supporting Israel, if it didn’t have America to hide behind.
Israel needs one country with veto power in the UN to support it.Report
From a strategic point of view having allies is better. Israel has put itself in the position of being completely dependent on US being a tame servant. There are good reasons to think that isn’t going to change. In the medium to long term though it leaves them vulnerable to a change in our policies, which does happen every now and then.Report
Perhaps. If they lose the US, though, I’m not sure how much it matters whether they have a tiny amount of international support or if they work there way up to a marginal amount. I think those are the possibilities they’re looking at.Report
Israel is the only state in the world whose existence is at question, and is subject to annihilation. [Tibet, now dead and dead.] The rules and mores of the rest of the world do not apply.
If you would not cheat this stupid and dishonest game to save your life and the life of your family and your people, well, you would, unless you’re some alien freak.
I must say that although AP “reporter” Matthew Lee doesn’t even bother to hide his antipathy toward Israel, I liked his hard edge vs. the administration’s spokesman. If only the press were that tough across the board.
But did he ever pull that shit with Arafat, or the mullahs or the terrorists? That I’d like to see that, big man. Punking some gal from the admin who can’t hit back [and I thought she held her own, all things considered] is bullying and it is bullshit until you do it to everybody who’ll smack you back.Report
Yes, the nation with nukes is totally at risk of existence from a bunch of guys with slightly souped up model rockets.Report
Israel is safe from losing a war. They have nukes and the most powerful conventional army and air force in the region. Demographics are their enemy. Without a long term solution to their demographic problem their are in deep do do.Report
Taiwan? Tangent.Report
Tibet. Probative.Report
Tibet. Probative.Report
Georgia? Belarus? Iraq? Afghanistan?
A handful of African countries are threatened from within, though occasionally with outside support for the threatening rebels/insurgents/whatever.Report
Also, “Israel is the only [insert convenient classification here]” gets really old as an argument tactic. It’s almost always false, and it distorts the issues.Report
Insofar as threat to existence as a nation-state is concerned, Belgium is probably much higher on the list than Israel.Report
Moldova and Transnistria are a fun situation, too.Report
The easiest way to wipe Israel off the map is to make it cease to be a Jewish majority democracy.Report
You mean the existence of the Palestenian state is not subject to even more question?Report
There already is one; it’s called Jordan. The British divided the “Mandate of Palestine” in 1923 into 2 zones, “Palestine” and “Transjordan”, with Jews henceforth restricted to only immigrate to “Palestine.”
Then came the pogroms, when the pan-Arabists were beginning to gain power in Arab society; Hebron 1929, the 1936-39 “Arab Revolt” against the British were some of the worst. And then came World War 2, including the Grand Mufti allying with Hitler to recruit Arabs for the SS brigades.
The ugly truth, spelled out plain:
“The Palestinian people does not exist. The creation of a Palestinian state is only a means for continuing our struggle against the state of Israel for our Arab unity. In reality today there is no difference between Jordanians, Palestinians, Syrians and Lebanese. Only for political and tactical reasons do we speak today about the existence of a Palestinian people, since Arab national interests demand that we posit the existence of a distinct “Palestinian people” to oppose Zionism. For tactical reasons, Jordan, which is a sovereign state with defined borders, cannot raise claims to Haifa and Jaffa, while as a Palestinian, I can undoubtedly demand Haifa, Jaffa, Beer-Sheva and Jerusalem. However, the moment we reclaim our right to all of Palestine, we will not wait even a minute to unite Palestine and Jordan.” – Zahir Muhsein, PLO leader of the as-Saiqa faction.
The pan-Arabists pulled one of the dirtiest tricks in the world; not only did they steal the land that was supposed to be “Palestine” from the 1947 partition plan, the pan-Arabists then stuffed the “Palestinians” the extant villagers, into concentration camps on the land that was supposed to be theirs in the first place.
60+ years of propaganda later, here we are, arguing as if that didn’t happen.Report
Apart from the quote, which is by a pan Arab-ist within theBaathist (pan Arabist) faction of the PLO, (which while not necessarily small is still smaller than Fatah the dominant faction which is not pan Arabist) you don’t really have a case for Jordan being the real palestenian state. Or for Palestenians being some artificial creation of a Pan Arab-ist conspiracy.
Of course a pan-Arabist who is part of a Syrian Baathist faction will say that Palestine is not real and is merely tactical. Otherwise all you have is Pan-Arabists from Jordan and elsewhere oppressing Palestenians in a number of ways and further appropriating their land.
Edit: How is it again that you’ve got an uncontested Palestinian state?Report
Eritrea. Basque. Half a dozen regions in Spain.
“existence”. Ha,.
Oh, should I start in on China next? I mean, we WERE just talking suicide bombers.
Or don’t you bother to read about anything the press doesn’t bother reporting on?
How about ICELAND, for that matter? It’s basically been sold off by now, hasn’t it?Report
Punking some gal from the admin who can’t hit back [and I thought she held her own, all things considered] is bullying and it is bullshit until you do it to everybody who’ll smack you back.
I may be wrong and maybe the foreign policy specialists here can back me up, but the US Ambasador to the UN is not some girl in Admin who can’t fight back. The fact is, regardless of the mis-steps of Matthew Lee with his other countries think so stuff, the US doesn’t have a moral leg to stand on here.Report
I support Israel because Israel is pro-choice.Report
They also got some good socialism and none of that damned separation of synagogue and state.Report
Out of curiosity, if I were most concerned with issues of “separation of church and state”, would I find myself leaning more toward support for the Palestinians?Report
For supporters of the separation of Church and State, the entire Middle East is a nightmare.Report
Hrm, better pick a different yardstick, then.
Who’s better on weed? Where can I buy a copy of Playdude? Let’s say I get a wild hair up my butt and want to print a pamphlet criticizing the government for being jerks and want to distribute it in front of City Hall. Am I likely to be shot? Let’s say that my domestic partner put his hands on me and I want to complain to the government. Am I likely to get a fair hearing?
Let me ask again: WHO IS BETTER ON WEED?Report
Green Leaf.Report
While I myself haven’t tries weed, people who have tried and told me say that they are better thinkers when they are on weed.Report
No, it’s more that weed makes you dumb in some very, very specific areas. So a thought that would normally flit through your head and be dismissed immediately becomes a shining gem of wit and insight.
“Whoa. What if they mixed ferrets with cats, you could have kittensnakes!!!”Report
I once did the Atlantic puzzle (the British-style crossword they don’t have anymore) in two hours that way, when it usually took me a week. I never repeated the experiment, so maybe it was just a really easy one.Report
I’m told most philosophy departments are crawling with weed fiends. Something about weed helping you sit back and think.
Most research on teh subject shows that weed kills “motivation” more than actual thinking (People get slower at solving relatively mundane problems, probably due to lack of caring).
Hi-profile Lawyers don’t use the stuff when they’re on the job, but they do use it to relax.Report
You’ve got me. Some nightmares are worse than others. Until now, I was thinking all nightmares were the same (except that one I had in a kid in which the Statue of Liberty was after me… that one was the worst).Report
Was it a weeping angel?Report
Eh, it’s more that I’m applying Presidential Election logic to the problem.
“One of these two jerkfaces will win. Which one is better? I should support that one, then.”
I wish there were a third party that didn’t feel like I was throwing my support towards the Palestinians.Report
Yeah, I saw that. I just don’t think it gets us very, just like I don’t think it gets us very far with the President. Both parties are nightmares too.Report
I think we’re in “I’d vote for Obama, if he were running against Santorum” territory.
The Palestinians are Rick Santorum on steroids.Report
Would you vote for Gingrich if he were running against Santorum? because I don’t think Israel counts as Obama here.Report
Let me ask again: WHO IS BETTER ON WEED?
Everyone, duh.
Well, except Phish. They still suck.Report
Dude. Bob Ross.Report
They’re not bad on “The Gays” either. Which is why I’m so adamantly annoyed by their suicidal policies. If they were just another antideluvian social hell hole I wouldn’t give a damn.Report
Eh. I still think we should bring all of the Israelites to South Beach and let the Palestinians have the whole country.
After the Palestinians finish burning the Jewish Water Treatment Plants, maybe we can finally stop talking about them.Report
You’re not familiar with the Israeli right wing then. You’d hate them, they have all the religious quackery that the American right wing has coupled with the fact that they live on a special state welfare program that pays them to have lots of kids and study the Torah all day. Take the worst of the American left and right and merge it together. They’re a libertarian nightmare.Report
At least they read.Report
only the men read Torah.Report
this is an exaggeration. please do not argue with the exaggeration.Report
I still think we should bring all of the Israelites to South Beach
JB, did you ever read Chabon’s “Yiddish Policeman’s Union”? It’s an alt-hist detective novel, in which Jews settled in Alaska rather than Palestine after WWII. Good book.
There are days when this does not look like this would have been a terrible solution to me. Or maybe North Dakota. We’ve got plenty of room in the US.Report
Are there any Indian Reservations that we could relocate? Put Israel *THERE*.
Edit: I realize that that joke was in poor taste. I regret making it.
To answer your question, I haven’t read that but Maribou has. I will ask her about it.Report
One of the bits in the novel is tension between Alaska’s Native American population and the Jewish (perceived) interlopers.Report
I like the Moon, personally.
That’s reasonably defensible.
Plus, with all the money we spent…Report
For years now, that was going to be the Coen brothers’ next movie. Maybe some day they’ll actually make it.
The Chabon novel I’d recommend to JB is Kavalier and Clay (it’s all about comic books.)Report
Yeah, Maribou told me to read that one too.Report
I was telling a friend about it, and explained that it began with the Golem of Prague. He said “Yesssssss, my precious.” I just about fell down laughing.Report
Kavalier and Clay is pretty great. So’s Wonder Boys. I also have an essay collection of his called “Manhood for Amateurs” that makes a great gift for any father, son, brother or dude you may know.Report
They’re not bad on the gays. their policies towards women are, on the other hand, really, really backward.Report
Would Hamas provide the step in the right direction or would we instead turn to Fatah if we wanted to be more progressive?Report
Oh. I was just talking Israel, not Palestine at all. Having relatives there, i get to claim a touch of insider knowledge.
No comment on Palestine, other than to say that the kippah sweatshops employ Muslim women (and women only).Report
When whites feel guilty about being white, they take it out on low-status whites. When the west feels guilty about being the west, well we can always take it out on that struggling Jewish country in the middle east. Somebody must pay for our guilt.Report
don’t look at me. i have a dog to kick.Report
150 countries on the planet would kill to be in Israel’s position.Report
I know, right? People with iPhones should STFU about being poor.Report
If it’s struggling, it’s struggling from self-inflicted wounds. And expanding settlements in East Jerusalem and continuing an occupation policy that’s not gotten it anywhere isn’t really gonna make things less bad for them.
Unless you mean the guilt should really be backed by something tangible. Perhaps all the Arabs in Greater Israel should be removed by one means or another?Report
If only they’d be more reasonable. Then nobody would hate them.Report
Demography is a much bigger problem than hatred.Report
And oh, the tears we will shed when they die for our sins.Report
So what’s your solution in lieu of a two-state one or for that matter or a unitary state?
Genocide? Forced relocation?Report
The solution is that we all decide in advance that it’s their fault.Report
I appreciate this sterling example of how the Israeli right argues this point. Loud kvetching and pithy sound bites about how everyone is mean to Israel. If they get it loud enough you can almost not hear the ticking of the demographic clock. Almost.
Look I don’t give a damn if Israel is popular with the cool kids in the west. I give a damn that they’re sinking themselves into a morass and are busily piling bricks into their backpack to make themselves sink more quickly and intractibly.Report
+1 North.
I have relatives there, Mr. Blue. and your attitude is endangering their lives. Forgive me if I am a touch less civil than normal.Report
North,
I respect the fact that you genuinely have Israel’s best interest at heart. Just as I am sure (I mean that unsarcastically) that you and Kim are really concerned for the future of Israel, the same is probably true of a good many of those Israelis that disagree with you tactically.
My own view is more nihilist than right-wing. Israel is screwed no matter what it does. It has no good options and it’s not clear that the cyanide is all that much less desirable than the hemlock.
The first world – most of which doesn’t care about Israel in any positive way because its existence is a reflection of our collective sin – would just as soon it go quietly into the night.Report
Mr. Blue,
you have little faith. I have more…
The first world would stand up, if it didn’t have
the USA as a convenient foil.Report
Ending Apartheid might be a good start to reasonableness, yes.Report
Yes, because non-voting member status to a state that everyone (ostensibly including the US government) think should eventually be a nation-state and have self-determination is the equivalent of jumping off a bridge.Report
Lee certainly didn’t phrase everything well, and I agree that he has a tone of “how dare the U.S. take a different stance. But I thought the following was a perfectly legitimate, even an important, question:
doesn’t this ever give anybody any pause that your ‘principled stance’ isn’t seen as a principled stance by the rest of the world, it’s seen as an obstacle.Report
Until the last three words, I thought this post was going to be about the War on Drugs.Report
I kinda thought the whole world except for a few eurostates were rather insane on the war on drugs issue?Report
That’s my view of it, anyway. They’re jumping off a bridge, and the Obama administration is too. I suppose you need to substitute “wrong” for “losing” to make it really work.Report
Arguably the Obama admin is especially annoying about it because they know that jumping off the bridge is a horrible idea but they’re afraid to try and stop it because they’d get killed on the politics.Report
@Shazbot and James Hanley:
I am continuing the thread here because nesting is getting to be a bitch
@Shazbot:
Listen to the Podcast. Nozick is not representative of academic libertarianism
@James
Justice as it is used nowadays refers to the sum total of moral constraints as they apply to social and political institutions. Given that moral and political philosophy is fundamentally theoretical (at the Normative side of enquiry) a lack of theory amounts to a lack of evidence in empirical matters.Report
Sorry, not amounts to, but is equivalent toReport
Oh wait, wrong post.Report
At least it’s in the weed thread.Report
I am of Jewish descent, so my sympathies lie with Israel. That said, I agree that Bibi is awful for Israel. The settlement expansion should have stopped decades ago.
I’m not too much in favor of “land for peace” — After getting one peace, the Palestinians can start up again until they get the next peace and so on. “Right of return” is also out, for reasons stated above. That somewhat leaves me baffled as to what to do — but the current policies (at least for Hamas and Israel) are nonsensical.
But US policy should be to at least diminish (but not necessarily stop) the flow of funds to Israel. Tie future funding to positive steps toward peace. I guess that makes me an anti-Semite. Sigh.Report
Oooh! you should have SEEN my jewish history class, when I mentioned that I knew a Jew who wasn’t a Zionist. “Self-hating” was the consensus. (damn the dirty bastards for propagandized twits).Report
I’m pretty much in agreement with William Saleten’s column in Slate on this issue:
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/frame_game/2012/12/how_did_israel_lose_the_palestine_u_n_vote_by_insulting_everyone_s_intelligence.html
It takes real effort to alienate so many countries on such an important issue. Netanyahu’s brinksmanship is not making friends, and small countries surrounded by enemies do not have the luxury of friendlessness. Who was it who said that the Palestinians never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity? (I think it was Edward Said but am not sure.) Well, if the Palestinians start learning from their mistakes and getting smarter and more creative, Israel’s current strategy is going to become an even bigger problem than it already is.Report