AxisMundi Jerusalem
Inside Israel and the Palestinian Territories
Big Government
Usually the only hammering heard on the floor of Israel’s parliament is the banging of the Speaker’s gavel during noisy debates. But hours before right-winger Benjamin Netanyahu was to take over from outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert at the head of a coalition government, carpenters were busy at work installing an additional bench to accommodate some of the 30 ministers who will serve in his cabinet.
That’s one out of four members of parliament.
Israel is no stranger to “big government”. The number of cabinet ministers in past governments over the last 20 years averaged 26.
But with Israel feeling the pinch of the global economic crisis and an incoming prime minister who has led the charge in the past against high government spending and bloated ministries, at least one Israeli newspaper chided Netanyahu with a headline reading “Size does matter”.
The additional, horeshoe-shaped government bench will be inserted into the open space in front of the current bench pictured above.
Captured Israeli soldier’s parents take protest to Olmert’s doorstep
Dubbed Israel’s most polite protesters by one Israeli newspaper columnist, the parents of captured soldier Gilad Shalit have set up a protest tent outside Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Jerusalem residence to press for his release.
Shalit, 22, has been held since 2006 by militants from Hamas and two other groups who tunnelled into Israel from the Gaza Strip. Hamas has demanded Israel release hundreds of its members held in Israeli prisons in exchange for the soldier.
Some of those Hamas men have been convicted of carrying out attacks that have killed Israelis, and the prospect of their release has set off a heated debate in Israel.
Israeli leaders have agreed to numerically lopsided swaps with Arab enemies in the past in exchange for captured soldiers or their bodies. Those in Israel opposed to a similar deal to get Shalit back argue it would only strengthen Hamas’s resolve in its fight against Israel.
Foreign Affairs
Israeli newspapers are abuzz this morning as they mull over the possibility that ultranationalist Avigdor Lieberman could be appointed foreign minister in the government that Benjamin Netanyahu is working to stitch together.
The strong showing by Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu (Israel our Home) party in last month’s election – where it won the third most Knesset seats ahead of the Labour Party - has put the Moldovan-born former nightclub bouncer turned bureaucrat in a strong position in the lobbying for top ministerial posts in the new government.
With Israel’s coalition building process such a tortuous and drawn-out affair, speculation, much of it wild, about who will get what job is inevitably rife in the local media.
As we reported yesterday – Netanyahu has ruled Lieberman out as a future defence minister, one of the top jobs in an Israeli government.
Lieberman is also understood to be interested in other key jobs for himself and his people including Justice, Interior and Internal security.
His aides, though, play down talk of all this horse-trading and deal-making.
“He has said he wants the defence portfolio, but he has also said cabinet positions are not a deal-breaker. What’s really important is that we agree on basic policy lines,” Yisrael Beiteinu spokeswoman Irena Etinger said.
‘ultranationalist’? Lieberman is a psychopath. His comments on the Palestinians are too obscene to repeat here. Only in Israel would a person of his stature be considered a statesman. To everyone else, he’s simply a terrorist in a cheap suit.
This vile racist needs a straight jacket, not a ministerial post.
from Global News Journal:
Gaza shows Kosovo “doctrine” doesn’t apply
Protesters staged large demonstrations in Western capitals 10 years ago to urge governments to intervene to stop Serb forces killing civilians in Kosovo.Despite having no United Nations mandate, NATO went to war for the first time and bombed Serbia for 11 weeks to stop what it called the Yugoslav army's disproportionate use of force in its offensive against separatist ethnic Albanian guerrillas."We have a moral duty," said then NATO Secretary-General Javier Solana as bombers took off on March 24, 1999 to "bring an end to the humanitarian catastrophe".The intervention helped launch a doctrine of international "Responsibility to Protect" civilians in conflicts. Advocates of "R2P" proposed humanitarian intervention in Myanmar in 2007 and military force in Zimbabwe in 2008.But it never happened and the likelihood of this doctrine being adopted universally now in a UN declaration is slim, as was shown by the Gaza war that began two months ago.On Dec. 27, Israeli bombers went into action over Gaza. As reports of civilian deaths grew, protesters staged rallies in Western capitals to demand leaders act to end the offensive against Islamist Hamas militants in the Palestinian enclave.Critics accused Israel of using "disproportionate" force, just as many said Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic had done.But intervention in Gaza was impossible politically and militarily unimaginable. Unlike Serbia, Israel is not seen in the West as a rogue state and widescale ethnic cleansing was not under way in Gaza.Solana visited the enclave on Friday as foreign policy chief of the European Union, which seeks to foster peace in the Middle East through "soft power" -- diplomacy and aid, not intervention of the kind he advocated as head of the NATO alliance.NATO never embraced the "responsibility to protect" concept, arguing that Kosovo, which most allies have subsequently recognised as an independent state, was a unique case that should not set a precedent.Soft power may eventually mean encouraging talks with Hamas -- which is now shunned by the West. In an open letter published this week, a group of former foreign ministers urged a change in that policy, saying peace depends on talking to the militants.But with rockets from Gaza again being fired daily into Israel, the prospect of a breakthrough soon seems bleak as right-wing prime minister designate Benjamin Netanyahu tries to form a government.Viewing war damage in Gaza on Friday, Norwegian Foreign Minister Jonas Gahr Store spoke of "senseless destruction." He blamed Hamas for starting the conflict, but said Israel's response "goes beyond what international law allows."Serb forces in the 1998-99 Kosovo war ignored the idea of "proportionality" on the battlefield. They were sure no army would willingly tie its own hands in the face of insurgency. They mortared, burned and raided "guerrilla" villages to driveoff civilians and deprive the rebels of cover.On Thursday, the U.N. tribunal in The Hague sentenced two Serbian generals to 22 years in jail for war crimes in Kosovo. Serbia handed them over under Western pressure.Israel openly assured its soldiers during the Gaza offensive that they would not face such prosecution. Discussing tactics for a future conflict, one senior Israeli general also dismissed "proportionality" as a deterrent."We will wield disproportionate power against every village from which shots are fired on Israel, and cause immense damage and destruction," said Northern Command chief Gadi Eisenkot."This isn't a suggestion. This is a plan that has been authorised," he told daily Yedioth Ahronoth ast October.Defending Israel's action in Gaza, President Shimon Peres reminded NATO chief Jaap de Hoop Scheffer that NATO's own bombing of Serbia killed "hundreds of civilians".Prime Minister Ehud Olmert mocked the idea that he should ask soldiers to fight an evenly-matched battle in which a few hundred might be killed simply to win international approval for a war in which Hamas was fighting in heavily populated areas.But scholars of international law say proportionality does not mean a "fair fight" or balanced death toll, let alone making sure no civilian dies. It requires belligerents to use weapons that distinguish civilians from military targets and combatants.According to Gaza figures -- which Israel says are suspect-- some 600 of 1,300 Palestinians killed in Gaza were civilians. Of 13 Israelis killed during the 22-day war, 10 were soldiers.Human Rights Watch, the U.N. Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, the International Committee of the Red Cross, and Israeli rights group B'Tselem have called for investigations.
Thirty years ago, the Israel state took part in my country, Guatemala, supporting the guatemalan army in our genocide, to crush the marxist insurgency. Here, died about 250,000 civilian people. Like others latinoamerican genocides, the guatemalan militaries responsibles of this mass killings are free, although the criminal prosecution has begun. Likewise, the jews military chiefs are sure of avoid the justice. USA is the main responsible for every barbaric actions, because its double standard and hipocresy. Otherwise, the latinoamerican and jews genocides were in jail, much time ago.
The music stops for ‘Waltz’
In one of the biggest surprises on Oscar night, the animated Israeli documentary Waltz with Bashir did not walk away as many expected with the famed statuette in the Foreign Film category, which instead went to Japanese film Departures.
Even the star of Departures acknowledged he was expecting Waltz with Bashir to win the Academy Award.
The hype in Israel surrounding the movie- which won a Golden Globe earlier in the year – had provided a spark of optimism in the country where politics, regional relations and the economy have been weighing heavily on the public mood.
Some are already suggesting the failure of Waltz on Hollywood’s biggest night was some form of censure for the recent Israeli offensive in Gaza.
An editorial cartoon in the Israeli press made the connection - showing Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert presenting director Ari Folman with a consolation prize and saying “We made you a statuette out of Cast Lead”. Operation Cast Lead was the Israeli code name for the Gaza offensive launched late last year with the stated aim of countering militant rocket fire from inside Gaza. It provoked much international criticism of Israel, notably over hundreds of civilians killed and wounded.
Echoing the glum mood elicited by Waltz’s failure – another cartoon in Israel’s leading Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper has a man reacting to the headline “Disappointment at the Oscars” saying “There’s another failure of the Lebanon War” – a reference as much to the broadly unpopular and inconclusive 2006 battle with Hezbollah in southern Lebanon as to the 1980s invasion of Lebanon that is the subject of Ari Folman’s astonishing animated flashback.
i have to agree with sidney. departure just seems to be the much safer option.
Israeli rhetoric on Iran can lack consistency
Veiled threats require calibration. Too explicit, and they risk spilling over into uncontrolled confrontation. Too elliptical, and their impact might be lost entirely.
When it comes to Israel’s regular hints that it could attack Iranian nuclear facilities to prevent them producing a bomb, there’s another liability: boredom and incredulity at all the repetition.
In what seems to have been an attempt to vary the message, outgoing Prime Minister Ehud Olmert made two sets of public remarks this month which held seeds of self-contradiction.
Addressing a visiting French delegation ahead of Israel’s Feb. 10 election, he said no Israeli government would “tolerate” a nuclear-armed Iran. The implication was that, no matter what the political stripe of the next ruling coalition, it would be willing to undertake all action, including go-it-alone air strikes, against the Iranians.
While the no-tolerance theme reappeared in a speech Olmert gave a North American Jewish group on Sunday, this time he sounded far more solicitous of Western efforts to talk Iran — which denies seeking nuclear weapons — into curbing its uranium enrichment.
“I have no doubt that new American President Barack Obama will stick to the position, that had been confirmed to me many times by the (former U.S.) president and vice president, that America will not tolerate a nuclear Iran. I am sure America will do everything it can to prevent this, together with Israel,” Olmert said.
why is that izrael complains about the UN being worthless and ineffective when its the UN who gave izrael the green light to start its apartheid of palestine to begin with. its the UN that continously ignores the fact that izrael is a terrrorist state armed with WMDs and an extremist government equivalent of the taliban that openly talks about ethninc cleansing and is violating its own “peace agreements” by stealing land. izrael is the cause of all problems in the middle east and with the U.S breast feeding it, there needs to be a counter to get izrael back in line. a nuclear iran would help keep izrael in check and tighten up the leash on them, which need done very badly. for the sake of their own people.
It ain’t over
A lesser blog than this one might resort to some trite cliche about how ‘it ain’t over until the fat lady sings’.
We will refrain – but it is tempting.
Despite taking the most Knesset seats according to exit polls after Israelis went to the polls – Tzipi Livni is still a long way from being anointed as Israel’s new Prime Minister.
Israeli exit polls – like tonight’s that give Livni a two seat lead over her rival Benjamin Netanyahu - have foxed us in the past.
In the primary elections for Livni’s Kadima party last year – the first exit polls had her leading her rival Shaul Mofaz by a significant margin. As the night wore on it became evident that the two were much, much closer than originally thought to the extent that there were some calls for a recount.
Thanks SHJ. The blog was posted early on election night so,while we knew Livni had a slight edge, there were conflicting figures on the actual distribution of seats. Those different tallies were mentioned in the story I linked to from the blog. The final tally of seats should be made public when the election commission announces results later today (Thursday). Thanks again for your interest.
