I have noticed over the years that every incident, every data point, every fact, and certainly every news story is interpreted differently by Israelis and Palestinians, each time suspecting bias against them. Here is a study that explains the psychology behind the perceived partisan bias towards the other side.
Interesting article about an investment scandal in Lebanon that has tarnished Hezbollah’s reputation.
As this article illustrates, looks like OneVoice could be a positive and missing ingredient in Lebanese soil.
The New York Times reports about (OneVoice/PeaceWorks Foundation Board member) Dennis Ross’s move from the State Department to the White House. It offers a lot of theories for the move, many of them probably on target. But it fails to mention one of the most important likely factors: the interplay between all these Mideast conflicts, and the need for an integrated broad approach and appreciation when tackling them.
It does not mean that solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict will fix the Middle East! (Ross would plainly disagree with that, as the article points out). But it does mean that Iran’s arming of Hezbollah and Hamas deeply handicaps efforts at Israeli-Palestinian peace, and that lack of Israeli-Palestinian progress hampers US national interests - as well as Israeli and Palestinian and Arab progress itself.
When President Obama was elected, many Israelis fretted that he would side with Palestinians, while the majority of Palestinians were elated.
When Obama selected Rahm Emmanuel as his Chief of Staff, Palestinians were devastated and paralyzed in fear, while Israelis celebrated Rahm’s service in the Israeli Defense Forces.
And so on, with every appointment or every announcement by the Obama Administration, Middle Easterners have interpreted the signals as a game of ping-pong - a score for this side or the other.
If Obama is to score a historic agreement among Israel and Palestine, and between Israel and the Arab and Muslim World, his task first and foremost is to do to the Middle East what he did to the American landscape - i.e., to Obamize the Middle East.
Obama was elected because he rejected false paradigms of division and helped people celebrate their human commonalities.
And so in the Middle East, Obama’s philosophy has been to show that if we work together, it will not be for the benefit of one side at the expense of the other, but humanity’s benefit and that of both sides.
Obama’s transformation is moving at a faster pace than anyone anticipated.
This week, moderates in Lebanon rejected the charismatic but divisive policies of Hezbollah’s Sheikh Nasrallah, instead reaffirming a parliamentary majority for the pro-Western government.
Obama may be in for yet another influential game-changer, after his poignant speech in Cairo, if next week Iranians elected a reformer to dethrone Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as President. Yes, the Iranian President may not be the Supreme Leader of Iran. But he certainly wielded enormous (negative) global influence and a rebuke of his vision will be refreshing and encouraging to the world order.
Now hopefully Israelis and Palestinians will also press their governments to stop dillydallying and once and for all deliver a realistic agreement for a two state solution.
Ethan Bronner of the New York Times wrote an interesting - and sobering - article about the dwindling numbers of Christians in the Middle East.
His face is so calm
Full of love and tranquility
How blessed we are
to have warm shelter and peace for him.
How hard and how painful
for the millions upon millions
who lack peace, or water or heat,
who may not have bread or milk to give their children.
How hard and how painful
for the parents who’d lose a baby to a missile
or the babies who’d lose a parent to a bomb
and the nations who’d lose their innocence along the way.
That juxtaposition gives me anxiety:
the peaceful nap of our little baby
against the horrors and hatred brewing around our world,
whether a few blocks up, or 7,000 miles away.
For my baby’s peace cannot be guaranteed
his Spring cannot be counted upon
so long as babies anywhere else in our globe
are suffering, being targeted or killed.
It is for our baby here
that peace must be waged there.
Read the entire article pasted below or in this link about Hezbollah’s Boy Scouts - to appreciate the challenge before society: the institutionalized hatred and seriousness of the threat posed by Hezbollah, its backers, and other movements with such nihilistic visions. It is chilling. We have no alternative but to counteract this in a smart and tenacious way.
To defeat absolutism and terrorism, force is only a partial answer. Far more important than force is a better ideology that can trump and expose dark movements as unworthy of the young people they prey upon. It is not easy, but it can be done.
Like we are doing through OneVoice for millions of Israelis and Palestinians to reframe the conflict and understand the enemy is not each other but violent extremism and militant absolutism that denies the rights of both peoples to a State and Freedom and Security, we need to also build a countervailing movement and philosophy that moves the Mideast (and other regions) away from the us-vs-them hatreds and into the post-Obama world of globally shared human values.
If we are to tackle the challenges that the 21st century will present to humanity – from climate change to nuclear proliferation, from resource scarcity to nihilism and militant absolutism – we need to ensure that new generations worldwide share this recognition that they have to work together – realizing their shared humanity.
More on this soon - but in the meantime read this article…
Generation Faithful
Hezbollah Seeks to Marshal the Piety of the Young
New York Times, November 21, 2008, By ROBERT F. WORTH
RIYAQ, Lebanon — On a Bekaa Valley playing field gilded by late-afternoon sun, hundreds of young men wearing Boy Scout-style uniforms and kerchiefs stand rigidly at attention as a military band plays, its marchers bearing aloft the distinctive yellow banner of Hezbollah, the militant Shiite movement.
They are adolescents — 17 or 18 years old — but they have the stern faces of adult men, lightly bearded, some of them with dark spots in the center of their foreheads from bowing down in prayer. Each of them wears a tiny picture of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the Shiite cleric who led the Iranian revolution, on his chest.
“You are our leader!” the boys chant in unison, as a Hezbollah official walks to a podium and addresses them with a Koranic invocation. “We are your men!”
This is the vanguard of Hezbollah’s youth movement, the Mahdi Scouts. Some of the graduates gathered at this ceremony will go on to join Hezbollah’s guerrilla army, fighting Israel in the hills of southern Lebanon. Others will work in the party’s bureaucracy. The rest will probably join the fast-growing and passionately loyal base of support that has made Hezbollah the most powerful political, military and social force in Lebanon.
As reported earlier in The Real Axis, a major threat that is not sufficiently explored or countered is the alliance between drug gangs, terrorists, and the authoritarian regime of Hugo Chavez. Now Colombia has uncovered a Hezbollah-linked drug ring that was trafficking drugs and laundering cash.
Hezbollah-led drug stashes seized in Colombia
If you are struggling to understand why Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, both Shiite, are so popular among Arab masses from Egypt to Palestine and Saudi Arabia, where the predominant religion is Sunni, think of it through a different prism: the culture of Resistance.
The culture of Resistance trumps the schisms of religion, as well as other divisions like nationality, ethnicity, and political persuasion.
The Arab world has been so impregnated with an anti-West, anti-colonialist, anti-occupation, anti-invasion, anti-globalization, anti-Israel ethos, that anything or anyone who stands at the vanguard against these modern suppressors will be greeted with enthusiasm.
The challenge for the good of the Arab Middle East and the world at large is how to channel all of these very real frustrations, that have only been deepened by lack of political accountability and continued authoritarian rule seen as imposed by the West on the Arab population, into a constructive path for progress within the Arab Middle East and outside.
It is not an easy challenge to overcome. If anyone figures it out, they will hold the key to progress and popularity.
At present, you either drive for revolution and cry against oppression in the name of "resistance", or you are part of the establishment and hence seen with suspicion by ordinary Arabs that are not part of the elite.
Great leaders like Palestinian Prime Minister Fayyad or Jordanian King Abdullah, who are bringing economic progress to the poor in their country, will have difficulty getting credit, because they are seen as agents of the West.
Democracy and other concepts that should ordinarily appeal to the human quest for freedom similarly have difficulty because they are seen as Western impositions, and part of a cultural colonization.
