Rick's Café American: 16 Jul 2009

The Sharon family has wisely decided that they do not want Ariel Sharon's legacy - he's been in a coma since suffering a stroke in January 2006 - to be the expulsion of Jews from Gaza in the summer of 2005. According to the mayor of the city of Ariel, Ron Nachman, the family has asked that the city officially be named after Ariel Sharon. The city of Ariel is located in Samaria.

Ariel Mayor Ron Nachman told IMRA today that the city council decided to honor the request of Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's family and is naming the city after Ariel Sharon.
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Human Rights Watch Hopes No-one Is Watching

David Berenstein, a law professor at George Mason University, writes in the Wall Street Journal that an official of Human Rights Watch used the organization's anti-Israeli positions as a fund-raising pitch in Saudi Arabia.

Finally, some would defend HRW by pointing it that it has criticized Saudi Arabia's human rights record rather severely in the past. The point of my post, though, is not that HRW is pro-Saudi, but that it is maniacally anti-Israel. The most recent manifestation is that its officers see nothing unseemly about raising funds among the elite of one of the most totalitarian nations on earth, with a pitch about how the money is needed to fight "pro-Israel forces," without the felt need to discuss any of the Saudis' manifold human rights violations, and without apparent concern that becoming dependent on funds emanating from a brutal dictatorship leaves you vulnerable to that brutal dictatorship later cutting off the flow of funds, if you don't "behave."

Jeffrey Goldberg found the allegation hard to believe, since if it was true it would severely compromise HRW. So he did what fine journalists used to do but don't always anymore: he asked Kenneth Roth, the boss of HRW. And then asked again. And again. Quite persistently, and not allowing Roth to weasel out of the issue. He presents most of the correspondence, and eventually admits that, yes, HRW is essentially guilty as accused.

Read the whole thing, as Glenn Reynolds often says.

taken from Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

September 13th

September 13 1993 was the day on which the first Oslo Agreement was signed, on the lawn of the White House, amid great hopes for a better future that were eventualy to lead to great suffering and widespread death of innocents. How symbolic, then, that it was a September 13th, this time 2008, on which Israel's Prime Minster offered the Palestinian President more than he was mandated to offer; and the Palestinian turned him down.

I've written about this before, as the story has been coming to light over the past few weeks. Aluf Benn, however, has the most detailled description I've seen so far, and it should be widely read.

Political debate aside, the essential lesson from Olmert's proposal is that the parties' stances have hardly changed since the failures of Camp David and Taba. Nine years of war, diplomatic standstill and thousands killed on both sides have not softened them. The Palestinians have not given in and Israel has not broken. Apparently a compromise can be reached on borders, but Israel does not want Palestinians to return to its territory and the Palestinians want the Temple Mount. Neither side is prepared to give up its national symbols and tell its people that the pledges of the past - "we will return to our villages in Palestine" and "united Jerusalem in Israel's hands forever" - were just illusions.

Benn is not being accurate. Israel - or rather, Olmert, speaking within his legal brief but well beyond any public one - did change Israel's position. He was willing to relinquish Israeli control over any part of the Old City in Jerusalem, a position taken by no one previously. The Palestinians, on the other hand, are still exactly where they were when they rejected having a sovereign state in the summer of 2000: There has to be a Right of Return (=no Jewish Israel), and they must be in full control of the Haram al-Sharif because it isn't the Temple Mount (=no Jewish historical legitimacy, and rejection of the fundamental tenet of Zionism).

Clarity.

taken from Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations

The CIA Kills People (or not, actually)

There seems to be a new issue for folks to get worked up about: the CIA wilingness to discuss assassinations of Al-Qaeida leaders after 9/11.

I admit to being a bloodthirsty barbarian. Having said that, it seems to me the whole discussion is an exercise in hypocrisy. As even the summary in the NYT correctly notes, such assassinations aren't necessarily so horrible:

Current and former officials said that the program was designed as a more “surgical” solution to eliminating terrorists than missile strikes with armed Predator drones, which cannot be used in cities and have occasionally resulted in dozens of civilian casualties.

I liked that euphemism: drone attacks have "occasionally" resulted in "dozens of civilian casualties". As regular readers will know, the numbers are more likely to be thousands, and not so occasionally, either. Still, the reality of war is far removed from most people's world, while theorizing about it can be done by anyone with a propensity to chatter:

But any targeted killings make many international law specialists uneasy. Hina Shamsi, an adviser to the Project on Extrajudicial Executions at New York University, said that any calculation about inserting a kill team would have to consider: the violation of the sovereignty of the country where the killing occurred; the different legal status of the C.I.A. compared with the uniformed military; and whether the killing would be covered by the law of war.
“The issue is a complex one under international law, and it encompasses all
of the contentious issues of the years since 2001,” Ms. Shamsi said.

International law. The ultimate arbiter of human relations.

taken from Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations