Doom and Gloom Hovers Over "Peace Talks". How or When Will It End?

NEW YORK — Associated Press photographer Oded Balilty has won The Pulitzer Prize for breaking news photography for his picture of a lone Jewish woman defying Israeli security forces in the West Bank. It’s the 49th Pulitzer for the world’s oldest and largest news cooperative and the 30th awarded for AP photos.The Reuters headline sums up yesterday’s meeting with President Obama, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas: Doubts loom large after Obama’s Mideast summit.

Quoting from Reuters:

“The gap between the positions is unbridgeable in the foreseeable future,” Dov Weisglass, a former Israeli negotiator under right-wing premier Ariel Sharon, wrote in Yedioth Ahronoth daily. “One’s maximum does not approach the other’s minimum.”

Both Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and President Mahmoud Abbas were too beholden to internal pressures to make deals, he said, noting the Israeli leader’s alliance with settlers and the challenge Abbas faces from the Hamas Islamists who control Gaza.

Protected by the Israeli Army as well as US policy? Jewish settlers march to the evacuated settlement of Homesh near Jenin with the intent of resettling it, 26 March 2007. (Anat Zakai/MaanImages)

We include two videos, one from AljazeeraEnglish (read also US urges Middle East peace push) and the other with Prime Minister Netanyahu on CNN. 

I will post shortly an article from The Atlantic’s Robert D. Kaplan, which could get us all run out of Dodge: “Why I Love Al Jazeera”. I’m also a fan of what I believe is some of the best reporting in the world today. Kaplan correctly states that Al Jazeera would give the PBS’s “News Hour” a run for its money.

The Al Jazeera video is thoughtful and insightful. Yes, I understand that many Americans would call it a propaganda piece and me unAmerican for posting any video produced by Al Jazeera. I find it informative.

Marwan Bishara on Trilateral Middle East Talks Sept 23, 2009

Looking for an equivalently-thoughtful Israeil-media video on yesterday’s meeting, I discovered the GlobalPost’s Obama needs to do his homework on Israel-Palestine. No video but a summation of my personal viewpoint on the intractable situation between Israel and the Palestinians.

After watching a news video on Israel’s Haaretz, there’s no comparison to the Al Jazeera video. You can watch it here: Obama strongly expressed his impatience to Natanyahu and Abbas.

I give you Prime Minister’s CNN video in which he spends over four minutes — not talking about the issues — but about what good friends the US and Israeli are; how we have few friends in the Middle East but we can count on Israel.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on CNN

In fact, I am personally committed to Israel, as well as the Palestinians.

As an American or Swede or Italian — as a member of planet Earth — I do resent the above patronizing CNN interview with Prime Minister Netanyahu, designed to subvert my desire to connect with all the people’s of the Middle East.

Talk about a piece of propaganda, and CNN gave him the airwaves. A quick blitz of the blogosphere indicates that I’m not alone in my reaction. There is no discussion of facts from either side. Just propaganda, propaganda, and more propaganda.

My future funding is coming from Jewish investors. I have the highest regard for the intellectual values of Jewish culture and Jewish entrepreneurialism. I would be proud to be a Jew.

BUT, I totally resent crazed Jewish settlers — another global patriarchy — demanding that we allow arguments about two thousand years ago, and four thousand years ago, to dictate the realities of NOW.

These people don’t care about us. They don’t care about global warming and global hunger. These men wouldn’t even shake my hand. They believe that a woman’s voice singing is totally corrupting. These people are dictating the future lives of our children?

They are just another group of isolationists who believe that they are the chosen people, another group of reactionary fundamentalists, on a course to take down with whole world with them.

Hamas Not Living in the Modern World Either

The Palestinian leadership made the right move today in distancing itself from a virulent example of Anti-Jewish bigotry. After a protest from the Anti-Defamation League, the Palestinian Authority deleted the hateful “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” from the Palestinian Ministry of Information Web site. The Protocols are an ancient forgery that pretends to reveal clandestine plans by a sneaky Jewish cabal to take over the world. It has been used for centuries to fan the flames of Anti-Semitism. via WayneBesen.comArmageddon excites Hamas, too — just as ferverently as Christian and Jewish Fundamentalists. A big blow out is exactly what all this folks seek. They want us all dead. Period.

I would like to see politicians once and for all frame this situation for what it is — the thirst for global annihilation, grounded in religious fervor.

I never thought that in the pursuit of understanding contemporary political realities in the world, I would have to call in a Bibilical scholar, and Koran scholar, and all sorts of other religious scholars, but I see that rational thought has little relevance in these proceedings.

This is exactly the “knowledge base” that I now demand of myself.

Words are not required to explain the mission of this Palestinian suicide bomber.To the extent that I’m an accurate trendmeister, growing numbers of moderate Americans, and citizens of the world, have “had it” with the intransigence of both the Israelis and the Palestinians.

When I read recently that Hamas denies the Holocaust, I shook my head. What a ludricrous situation!

Does Saudi Arabia also deny that the Holocaust happened? Could someone talk the facts of history into these people?

How do we allow people to negotiate from these perspectives?  Is it true that not Saudi Arabia or Egypt or any Muslim country has the “clout” to make a proclamation that the Holocaust happened?

If these boys were children — which is how they are behaving — mom would send them for a timeout. My mother would have slapped my face for insulting her and lying to her in this way.

Unfortunately, we have no women — except for Hillary’s arm’s length relationship — involved in digging our way out of yet another global patriarchal disaster.

I resent the presumptions among all the parties that the world can continue on this route indefinitely. What’s 100 years to these folks, when they are focused on events in the dawn of civilization, as if they happened yesterday?

People like us are trying to apply rational decision-making and rational arguments on a totally irrational, unfactual, unscientific situation. This is one of the grandest examples of mental masturbation in the history of the world!

And yes, I’m not too impressed with President Obama or Congress either on our handling of this situation. Talk is cheap and I’m tired of words. I do not see any light at the end of this tunnel. It is a BLACK HOLE! Anne