False Dichotomies

Dear Friends of IPCRI

We would like to thank once again the several hundred of you who answered our emergency appeal for support and made a contribution to IPCRI.  That positive response enabled us to continue our work in full force over the past several months.  Now, following the aftermath of the war in Lebanon and the continuation of the freeze of the official Israeli-Palestinian diplomatic process, the international community is unable to come to our assistance and provide support for IPCRI. Those donors that were planning to support IPCRI for the remainder of the year are now diverting any available funds for humanitarian assistance to Lebanon. As a result IPCRI must scale down and we are very sorry to bid farewell to the two co-directors of IPCRI Strategic Affairs Unit Dr. Yossi Ben Ari and Khaled Duzdar.  Both of them have made very significant contributions to the work of IPCRI and towards building bridges of understanding between Israelis and Palestinians. IPCRI can no longer afford to pay their salaries. We will surely miss their physical and intellectual presence and we hope that we will be able to re-employ them in the future.

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Another General is promising our salvation. “The best defence is a good offence, not a fence. The best way to deal with terrorists is to arrest them or kill them in their beds…what we are doing is leaving a legacy for the next generation that will [have to] deal with Palestinians who believe that terrorism pays, that Israel cuts and runs under pressure…we must stop getting used to these constant missile attacks as if they are rain…I do not see any prospect for peace and reconciliation on the Palestinian side. I needed no sophisticated intelligence to reach this conclusion; I only had to look at their textbooks, posters and so on.” This week, former IDF chief of staff Moshe ‘Bogey’ Yaalon returns to Israel, fresh from a stint at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He is due to begin a fellowship at the Shalem Centre in Jerusalem. His name has also been whispered as Likud leader Benyamin Netanyahu’s candidate for Defence Minister.

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(From Haaretz) A business development center that works under the auspices of the Industry, Trade and Labor Ministry has offered special loans for small businesses in the north, but it is making the special offer only to those businesses that are owned by Jews and former soldiers in the Israel Defense Forces. Continue Reading »

Bradley Burston in Haaretz: “Here is a man who addresses social welfare needs head-on. He doesn’t wait to help home-owners rebuild residences destroyed by aerial attacks. He hands out literal lump sums, immediately, in cash. Here is a man who delivers medical care to the needy, affordable housing to the homeless, food and even clothing to society’s disadvantaged. Here is a man who cares deeply about, and puts major emphasis on, education and youth [even if the message is one of incitement, hatred, and anti-Semitism].” Check it here.

“The great author Naguib Mahfouz passed away from a bleeding ulcer aggravated by a fall he took several weeks ago. The only Arab to win the Nobel Prize for Literature (1988), Mahfouz inspired literary movements in the Arab world and told stories on universal relevance.” Read on over at kabobfest.

(Cheers to Laith - Demons and Strawmen - for the heads up)

“One supported the war, one vehemently opposed it, and a third never made up her mind. But what the three Jewish-American seminary students living here agreed on was that something should be done to help the war’s victims - on both sides of the border.” Read on here.

Amira Hass in today’s Haaretz: “Let us leave aside those Israelis whose ideology supports the dispossession of the Palestinian people because ‘God chose us’. Leave aside the judges who whitewash every military policy of killing and destruction. Leave aside the military commanders who knowingly jail an entire nation in pens surrounded by walls, fortified observation towers, machine guns, barbed wire and blinding projectors. Leave aside the ministers. All of these are not counted among the collaborators. These are the architects, the planners, the designers, the executioners. But there are others.” Read on.

Survey conducted by Mada al-Carmel centre finds that 32 per cent of Arab public believes Israel responsible for starting war in Lebanon; 43 per cent speculate that soldiers’ kidnapping was excuse for starting war. Only 3 per cent believe Israel won war. Read more here.

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Tali Fahima was born in 1976 in Kiryat Gat, a development town in the northern Negev. A few years ago, she read an interview in Haaretz with Zakaria Zubeidi, the commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade in Jenin. After reading the interview, she decided that she had to meet him. Somehow, she obtained his phone-number. She visited him in Jenin, and ended up spending a number of months there. In March 2004 she declared that she was prepared to act as a human shield in order to protect him from IDF attack. Continue Reading »