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Not my words. Andrew Sullivan’s. He also claims today, "Joe Biden was kicked in the balls as he came to Israel, with a simultaneous "fuck you" by the Israeli government announcing new settlements – 1600 houses – in East Jerusalem."
No sooner did Biden boldly make Netanyahu wait 90 minutes for Biden to show up for dinner, than Biden totally accommodated the Israelis by delivering a message designed to show our properly deferential role to Israel in dealing with those pesky Palestinians:
United States Vice President Joe Biden warned Israelis in a direct address from Tel Aviv on Thursday that the status quo in the Middle East was not sustainable, and vowed that the United States would do everything in its power to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
He also urged both Israelis and the Palestinians look toward direct negotiations to end the long-standing conflict.
"The demographic realities make it difficult for Israel to be a Jewish homeland and a democratic country," said Biden in his speech to foreign dignitaries, Israeli officials and students at Tel Aviv University. "The status quo is not sustainable."
"To end this historic conflict, both sides must be historically bold," he said.
That’s pretty bold, eh? The Israelis’ answer to Biden’s challenge to be "bold"? This announcement, made early today:
Some 50,000 new housing units in Jerusalem neighborhoods beyond the Green Line are in various stages of planning and approval, planning officials told Haaretz. They said Jerusalem’s construction plans for the next few years, even decades, are expected to focus on East Jerusalem.
Most of the housing units will be built in predominantly Jewish neighborhoods beyond the Green Line, while a smaller number of them will be built in Arab neighborhoods. The plans for some 20,000 of the apartments are already in advanced stages of approval and implementation, while plans for the remainder have yet to be submitted to the planning committees.
The planned construction includes the 1,600 homes in the ultra-Orthodox East Jerusalem neighborhood of Ramat Shlomo that were approved Tuesday. Saying the decision undermines peace talks, U.S. Vice President Joe Biden has publicly condemned the move, which the Interior Ministry announced during his visit to Israel.
Sullivan goes on to write:
I cannot read Netanyahu’s mind. But I can observe Israel’s actions. They intend to occupy and colonize the entire West Bank for ever. [emphasis added] They may allow some parceled enclaves for Palestinians, but they will maintain a big military presence on the Eastern border of West Bank, and they will sustain this with raw military power and force. I certainly cannot see any other rationale for their actions these past few years that makes any sense at all. Many Israeli politicians now use the term "apartheid" for this future.
The Israelis’ bold move may be intended to do more than just kick the Vice President of the United States in the nuts.
Biden mentions "bold." The Israelis accommodate him. But the Palestinians are quite limited in the range of ways they can show "boldness."
It may well be a provocation designed to not only make it impossible for the Palestinian Authority to negotiate at all with the Israelis, but also to force the level of demonstrations in the West Bank to escalate beyond their current relative peacefulness, to levels where the IDF can claim it has to perform a Cast Lead type operation in the regions where the expansionism is already going ahead full bore.
The Israeli government is mounting an intense campaign in the United States to keep Americans from being allowed to stop militant expansionist Zionism. Without even attempting to hide the direct links between the Israeli government and the campaign’s enablers, militant Zionist expansion organizations have pretty much taken over the anti-BDS campaign, with a lot of Israeli (and American) money.
This article at mondoweiss, links to a paper being disseminated now by something called the "BDS Working Group." The pamphlet is called "Delegitimization of Israel: “Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions,” and is credited to Co-Chairs: Dr. Mitchell Bard and Professor Gil Troy.
Go to mondoweiss and read the document. If you teach college, are involved in union activism, or will be participating at upcoming Democratic Party caucuses, you may begin to see the products of the "BDS Working Group" real soon. Mixed in with more rhetoric about bombing Iran.
And just so it is clear, I am not in favor of the BDS campaign as it is now configured.
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“I am here to remind you, though I hope you will never forget, that America stands with you shoulder-to-shoulder in facing these threats.”; sorry Mr. Vice-President, I’m one U.S. citizen that WILL NOT ‘stand shoulder to shoulder’ with the Israeli government.
And this from your speech ,”And my father — my father’s support for Israel is outrage for what had happened in the ’30s and the failure of the world to act, his support for the creation of the state of Israel. It generated a feeling for Israel that began in my gut and went to my heart, and the older I got matured in my mind.” I find to be the truth behind Israel existing at all, and that is plain old guilt from the nations of the world-and ,yes, the U.S. WAS complicit- for not speaking and acting on the killing of jews,roma,and other ‘undesirables’ by Hitler’s regime.
True, the policy of gradual annexation of the West Bank with an occasional pogrom in Gaza (de rigueur during election years) is unsustainable. Eventually the West Bank will be entirely annexed and there will be no Palestinians left alive in Gaza.
Over at naked capitalism there was a commenter NotTimothyGeithner who said he felt like he was living in the Middle Ages where whenever there was a problem the alchemist or priest was called, and their solution was always to drown the cat or something equally insane.
This is the way I feel about our Middle East policy. Whenever a “new” initiative is begun we send over some schmuck who tries to peddle a return to the two state solution, the US version of the drowned cat. The two state solution died 15 years ago. We can even date its demise to the assassination of Yitzhak Rabin on November 4, 1995. Of course a fascist like Netanyahu is going to kick us in the balls. That is how fascists act. It’s great theater and it distracts from the overall dismal functioning of his government. That Obama and Biden were too stupid not to see this coming speaks volumes about how dismal our own government is.
The thing that strikes me the most about Netanyahu’s coalition government’s “fuck you” to Biden and Obama, is how weak it exposes Obama to be. Domestically, no one has taken Obama seriously since about mid-last-year. Israel is supposed to be our staunchest ally, and they do this. It’s getting scary to think what our real enemies must be thinking about Obama.
I’m a progressive against the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and am generally of the mind that we should be scaling back our industrial military complex and reallocating the treasury to more productive investments. But Obama’s weakness is getting to be so obvious it scares me to think what countries that would like to do us harm or at least take advantage of us might be contemplating given Obama’s demonstrated spinelessness.
March on Washington on the anniversary of the Iraq war, March 20. Protest our endless wars. See answer.pephost.org for details.
Joe Biden has expressed his BFF towards Israel for years now.
At this point TelAviv must be bored stiff listening to Biden express how much he admires Israel,will support Israel and wants a strong Israel.
Needless to say Israel will suffer no consequences for giving Joe the take a hike response regarding his two state boilerplate despite his being VPOTUS.
A big message in there. A real big message.
As an American who pays taxes I resent how Israel treats it’s sugar daddy and find this disrespectful treatment of an American VPOTUS way out of line.
So where was the NYTimes today regarding Joe Biden and Israel?
Care to guess?
The NYTimes seems to forget which country New York City is located in.
And where is the WaPo with a scalding Op-Ed piece about this spit in your face TelAviv behavior towards an American VPOTUS?
And then where is the POTUS regarding how his VPOTUS was treated in TelAviv? Hey Barack Obama — buy a can of spine.
Iran gets kicked in the ass over and over these days easily enough which much of the time seems about as legitimate as Iraq’s WMD wrapsheet BS was.
As an American getting really tired of being kicked around by Israel.
Really tired. TelAviv is way off the reservation these days.
Way fucking off the reservation.
Getting really sick of these Israeli pricks. Lets make the West Bank and Gaza American Protectorates. We can give them billions and they may well appreciate it better than these TelAviv pricks ever seem to.
As I said a long long time ago, Israelis are crazy.
Really tired of hearing about the holocaust every time Israel needs an excuse. Wasn’t even born then.
:rolleyes:
Great post. thanks for noticing Sullivan’s piece that nails the Israel’s “kick” in Biden and Obama’s and the U.S. in the cajones.
Israel clearly does not give a rats ass about U.S. national security. They do not want peace. It is crystal clear. More land, more territory. Securing the realm.
Phillip Weiss also nailed it
Netanyahu steals more land, so Biden is late for dinner
http://mondoweiss.net/2010/03/netanyahu-steals-more-land-so-biden-is-late-for-dinner.html
While all genocides should have the spotlight on them and be remembered. The WWII genocide has received a disproportionate amount of attention in our media and our news. Along with only the 6 million Jews who brutally perished being mentioned. The millions of others are seldom to never mentioned.
I have noticed for quite some time when NPR reports the truth about the I/P conflict, the history of how Israel came about, human rights abuses right now they always off set that piece by a piece about the 6 millions Jews (NPR NEVER mentions the others who perished when they cover their asses by doing this later in that same program) that perished during Hitler’s killing rampage.
When you listen to NPR listen closely. Refer to Hamas as terrorist, but never the IDF. Many subtle and manipulative uses of words on NPR when they report about the conflict
Unfortunately I have to agree with you. Except I don’t think it is the enemies of the U.S. that is the problem. It is our so called allies. As long as we have the right wingers out there no other country will dare try us. But with friends like Israel, who need enemies.
You said it ubet.
I love the polls they give like most Israelis favor a two state solution, but the right wing Israeli Gov does not.
3 Billion in a year in US taxpayer money for them, and they constantly refuse to follow the law and rules.
Just a bunch of greedy ass pricks.
Right, because they are totally biased and have been for years. Everyone is so used to it, they assume it is perfectly normal.
This is the same game the Israelis have been playing for decades: they play shell games with the “peace process”, constantly complaining of increased Palestinian militants while provoking exactly that situation, all the while slowly expropriating the West Bank.
Look, its time for America to be honest about the Israeli nation. They do not want peace. They do not want a viable Palestinian state. They want the West Bank. They want the Palestinians either expelled into Jordan, Syria, and Egypt, or forced to live in tiny, impoverished ghettos a la Gaza. Americans can certainly support this truly wrenching Apartheid regime if Americans choose, but Americans should be honest with themselves and each other about what they back. The expropriation of the West Bank is a racist, colonial enterprise underway.
Viktor Frankl, holocaust survivor, had a few things to say about that.
from http://www.bukisa.com/articles/249873_a-commentary-on-viktor-e-frankls-book-mans-search-for-meaning
(To make it clear, I am a proponent in general of Boycott-Divest-Sanction, and have been for a long time. In the very least, the US *must* cease all forms of “military aid” to the Israelis, and bar any American military or “defense” corporation from selling to the Israelis. Given the fact that they flout more UN resolutions than Saddam Hussein ever did, that they will not acknowledge their nuclear arsenal, that they engage in grotesque internationally recognizable crimes against the Palestinians and Lebanese, given the way that they destabilize the region they are in with constant militarism – it is completely fair to stop arming the Israelis.)
We need to be clear: the Zionist movement predates the Holocaust hugely. It predates the 20th century. The Zionist movement was based in Western and Northern Europe in the late 19th century starting with Theodore Herzl, a journalist. The Holocaust was certainly a lever in the creation of the original partition before the 1948 UN recognition of Israel in the pre-1967 borders, but widespread and ugly anti-Semitism across Europe combined with fanatical or fundamentalist elements of the European Jewish population, in my opinion, to start the Zionist project.
I dislike the way the Holocaust is used as a fig leaf behind which to hide modern Israel’s worst acts, but I think we all need to understand that Zionism itself was a long time brewing and is the result of an ugly clash of cultures in which racism, xenophobism, and all the rest produced modern Israel.
This is so difficult because of my Jewish father’s heritage, but we finally need to separate the interests of the United States from the interests of Israel.
Israeli interests and the interests of the USA are not one in the same despite Mr. Biden’s assertions otherwise. Now, once the master, holding the mad dog Israel on a tight chain, we are the dog, on a chain Israel has devised.
Now, the Israeli’s have the same problem we had as anyone who raises big dogs knows, you need to keep the chain short and tight otherwise the dog may be able to turn and bite you.