Global News Journal
Beyond the World news headlines
from Tales from the Trail:
Mideast peace veterans and handshake diplomacy
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton repeatedly referred to them as "veterans" of the Middle East peace process.
That description is probably one thing everyone can agree on. The process to bring Israelis and Palestinians to a lasting peace agreement has been going on for decades and every U.S. president hopes he's the one who will finally achieve what those before him tried and failed.
President Barack Obama is the latest to take up the baton. He's already won the Nobel Peace Prize, but will he be The One to triumph on Middle East Peace?
"We are under no illusions," Obama said on Wednesday when he met with leaders ahead of today's talks. "Passions run deep. Each side has legitimate and enduring interests. Years of mistrust will not disappear overnight."
That last sentence is another thing that probably everyone can agree on.
But if the Israeli-Palestinian leaders' handshakes over the years are any kind of indicator, perhaps there is a glimmer of hope.
Seventeen years ago in September 1993, President Bill Clinton practically forced Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to shake hands at the White House while observers held their collective breath wondering will they or won't they?
from Tales from the Trail:
How to ease traffic tie-ups in Washington: hold a nuclear security summit
There's nuclear security, and then there's street security.
High-level delegations from nearly 50 countries gathered in Washington to talk, talk, talk, and talk some more about keeping the world safe from nuclear terrorism at the Nuclear Security Summit hosted by President Barack Obama.
That in turn required Washington to cope with ensuring the safety of the world leaders gathered to mull world security.
Ripple effect: Plenty of local scare talk about street closings, traffic tie-ups and nightmare commutes that kept many people off downtown streets on Monday, the first day of the two-day summit.
Side effect: an easier commute, lighter traffic, no typical morning gridlock. (Hey maybe there's an answer to Washington's nightmare rush hour traffic jams).
A massive security cordon surrounded the summit site with camouflage-wearing National Guard troops and a heavy U.S. security presence.
Barricades sprung up around the Convention Center and along sidewalks near potential motorcade routes, 10-foot wire fences were erected, the closest Metro train stop was closed, buses were rerouted, and parking was forbidden on surrounding streets.
Peace is no kiss, Israeli aide says
A top adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu used an odd turn of phrase to explain what some see as a puzzling demand put to Palestinians by the right-wing leader as a condition for any any Israeli agreement to establishing a state in the occupied West Bank.
Netanyahu wants Palestinians to recognise Israel explicitly as a Jewish state, in addition to their having recognised Israeli sovereignty as part of an interim peace deal in 1993. He feels this would symbolise an historic end of conflict, his aides have explained.
At a briefing summing up Netanyahu’s first 100 days in office, advisor Uzi Arad and several other officials rejected criticism from centrist Kadima party leaders who accused the Israeli leader of achieving little on the diplomatic front since his government was sworn in late in March.
Netanyahu had clearly laid out the terms for any future peace deal, they said. Arad emphasised what he saw as the importance of seeking further Palestinian acceptance of Israel’s existence, before Israel would agree to Palestinians achieving statehood in territory Israel captured in a 1967 war.
“Palestinian recognition of Israel as the state of the Jewish people, which they have so far refused to do, is not a matter of a kiss on the forehead, but a declaration of intent,” Arad said.
“If they don’t do it, they will have a serious problem, something everyone understands,” Arad added, alluding to what would be Israel’s refusal to reach the two-state deal the United States and Europe have been seeking, unless the condition were met.
Palestinians dismiss Netanyahu’s condition as inconsistent with international law and say it isn’t up to any nation to define the nationality of another.
The IDF is not indoctrinated to casually murder non-jewish children. They operate according to the laws of war.
But Hamas does indoctrinate children to casually murder Jewish people. That is a proven fact, and something Hamas boasts about. Watch “tomorrows pioneers”.
from AxisMundi Jerusalem:
Tzipi Livni – man of the moment?
Sex has rarely been far from centre-stage in an otherwise low-key campaign for Israel's election on Tuesday. The fact that the ruling Kadima party leader Tzipi Livni is a woman has, however, been largely debated by allusion and suggestion, often in a far from gentlemanly way in the still macho world of Israeli politics. So it's striking then, in the campaign's final days, to see Livni herself, bidding to become the country's first woman leader since Golda Meir in the 1970s, putting the issue front and centre. Take a look at this poster, photographed in Jerusalem by my colleague Jerry Lampen. It reads, in French, "Tzipi Livni - Man of the Moment", or perhaps "The Right Man for the Job". It looks like a direct response to repeated attacks from right-wing opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu especially that "she" is not ready to lead a country facing threats on numerous fronts. "She's not up to the job," runs one ad from Netanyahu's Likud party. It shows Livni, slumped, with her head in her hands.
On Tuesday at 10 p.m. (2000 GMT) we should know if Livni has been able to turn around Netanyahu's opinion poll lead. Even if she does, it is not guaranteed that she can form a coalition government. The reason this election is being held over a year early is because Livni, taking over from the corruption-hit Ehud Olmert, was unable to cobble together a workable coalition. As my colleague Jeffrey Heller had predicted when she took over her party's leadership, many believed the former soldiers running the other leading parties found it hard to accept her. Some saw the refusal of the ultra-Orthodox Shas party to join her cabinet as a reflection of religious sexism. That wasn't the official reason. But Livni, a secular denizen of liberal Tel Aviv, did go out of her way, unsuccessfully as it turned out, to appeal to religious tradition. She donned monochrome clothing and swapped her favoured pant suits for long skirts when meeting Shas leaders. Even so, the Orthodox press would not even print her picture. They would airbrush her out of group photos. Or, as for other women, they might photoshop her into "a tree, or something", one journalist at an ultra-Orthodox paper told my colleague Dan Williams.
Livni seems to have been reluctant to "play the woman card" early in the campaign, focusing on her record. But observers have detected a clear strategy to play the men at their own game. Both Netanyahu and Labour party leader Ehud Barak were commandos, Barak indeed is Israel's most decorated soldier. Livni has pushed her family credentials - her parents were famed guerrilla fighters against the British and Arabs in the 1940s - and her own shadowy past in the Mossad intelligence agency. This TV ad showing a pixellated figure intones a list of career highlights down the years: "... he served in the Mossad ... he served as foreign minister..." and so on. "No one would doubt he could lead the government." Then the figure is revealed as Livni and the narrator says, "If only he wasn't... a woman." Hitting back at snide chauvinistic comments that, as a Mossad agent in Paris in the early 1980s she did only menial chores, Livni told an audience in Tel Aviv last week: "I make decisions, not coffee."
With the poll gap narrowing sharply in the final days, the gender issue could be crucial. Rina Bar-Tal, chairwoman of the Israel Women's Network, told my colleague Allyn Fisher-Ilan that Likud's poster jibe at Livni that "the job is too big for her" - with clear emphasis on the final pronoun - could backfire on Netanyahu. Bar-Tal said: "There are women who pass by these posters and say, 'I wasn't going to vote for her but I certainly will now.'"
So is Tzipi Livni the man of the hour? If she makes it through, she can always recall what Israel's founding father David Ben-Gurion said of Golda Meir: "She's the only man in the cabinet."
http://blogs.reuters.com/global/2008/09/21/tzipi-livni-as-israels-next-golda-meir-well-not-so-fast/
The real issue is not so much of whether Livni is a man or woman, that is superfluous. It is her policies, experience, and strength of character. Ability to negotiate with foes, and make tough decisions for war and peace.
In many ways, she is more qualified that Ehud olmert, who had little security experience, and jumped form Mayor of Jerusalem to PM. And decision making skills are also important.
Israeli populus veer from peace to security. They try peace, see it fails, then are cocnerened with their lack of security. Noone has yet reached a formula to acheive both.
from AxisMundi Jerusalem:
A yawning gap
With just two days to go before Israel's general election, opinion polls show more than a quarter of the electorate is still undecided.
Call it the yawning gap in an election race that's largely been one big snooze.
Israelis could be forgiven for failing to be energised by a lacklustre campaign waged by familiar faces and interrupted by a 22-day offensive in the Gaza Strip. Political positions are well-known and well-entrenched.
Big campaign rallies have become a tiresome thing of the past in a country that has held five national elections in the past 10 years. But the leading candidates have been hitting the campaign trail harder in recent days.
Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, head of the ruling, centrist Kadima party, played DJ during a visit to a dance club in Tel Aviv.
Too many human lives have been sacrificed for a peace which was all the time at the door step, but both the party pretended to be blind and acted to have overlooked it, not only that the broker of peace were but fake the worst was the Ex-President who ensured one side to go on a killing spree.
For some Peace was a desert mirage. For some it is God gifted. Particularly to those who respected what God asked humankind to obey and do even amidst obstruction and threats.
There will always be devils to divert people set to make deal for peace. It all depends on sincerity and determination to stick to belief on God particularly when both the party is of God gifted sister religious followers. Both these people have their own homegrown enemies who are averse to any peace between them.
Those who are trying to obstruct the peace can be dealt with with the support of God Almighty Himself later but first get the peace to enter the home and then together get the obstructionist never to be devilish again.