Daniel Lubetzky

Some will criticize this as Shimon Peres’s much-discounted "New Middle East" vision, but I love it, and I am confident that if Israelis and Palestinians get their act together and accept the historical compromises necessary to a comprehensive permanent agreement, this will only be the beginning. Check out this vision for the future of the Arava, intersecting Israel, Jordan and Palestine.  It fits nicely within OneVoice’s Imagine 2018 Project.

Jerusalem Post Editor David Horovitz’s interview with Barack Obama is one of the most to-the-point expositions of Senator Barack Obama’s stances on Mideast issues.  Horovitz asked strong and straightforward questions, and Obama replied with earnest answers.  Anyone who truly cares about understanding the "real" Obama on these issues should read this interview.

One example:

Horovitz: You’ve said on this trip that you want to work for an Israeli-Palestinian accommodation from the minute you’re sworn in, so let me ask you about the thesis that there is no prospect of Palestinian moderation prevailing and enabling a peace process to really move forward until Iran’s nuclear drive has been thwarted – that so long as the Teheran-backed extremists of Hamas and so on feel that they are in the ascendant, the moderates can’t prevail and that the whole region is now in this kind of holding mode.

Obama: I think there is no doubt that there is a connection between Iran’s strengthening over the last couple of years, partly because some strategic errors have been made on the part of the West. And [the same goes for] the increasing boldness of Hizbullah and Hamas. But I don’t think that’s the only factor and criterion in the lack of progress.

Hamas’s victory in the [Palestinian Authority] election can partly be traced to a sense of frustration among the Palestinian people over how Fatah, over a relatively lengthy period of time, had failed to deliver basic services. I get a strong impression that [PA President Mahmoud] Abbas and [Prime Minister Salaam] Fayad are doing everything they can to address some of those systemic failures by the Palestinian Authority. The failures of Hamas in Gaza to deliver an improved quality of life for their people give pause to the Palestinians to think that pursuing that approach automatically assures greater benefits.

You know, look, I arrive at this with no illusions as to the difficulty in terms of what is required. But I think it’s important for us to keep working at it, frankly, because Israel’s security and peace in the region depend on it.

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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.

Can policy makers and strategists be really so naive?

The Ahmedinejad regime has turned Iran’s right to nuclear development into a national mantra.  Only its Islamic fundamentalism and its ideology of spreading their revolution stand above their nuclear ambition.

And yet diplomats seem to think they can sway Iran into a set of incentives to cease its nuclearization path?

The Iranians have made it all too apparent that they use the negotiations as a way to stall and buy time, to the point of embarrassing the negotiators, as an excellent article from Elaine Sciolino of the New York Times painfully pointed out. 

Studies from Iran "appear to show as yet undisclosed uranium-related work, high-explosive testing of triggers for nuclear bombs, a plan for an underground nuclear-test shaft and efforts to redesign the nose-cone of Iran’s far-flying Shahab-3 rocket to accommodate a nuclear warhead."

And yet Fareed Zakaria, who is otherwise a pretty smart guy, seems to assume on his TV show that these negotiations have a chance to work.  How? 

Nobody points out the foolishness of trying to get Iran to stop its nuclear race.  Condoleezza Rice says Iran is vulnerable on its nuclear ambitions.  Otherwise smart Senator Biden, chair of the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, writes an op-ed encouraging pressure to change Iran’s behavior and give up weapons. What are these people thinking?!

No amount of sticks or carrots will make Iran drop its nuclear plans.  At best, like with North Korea, the West can play a game that will slightly slow down the regime’s path, and it can certainly extract a high cost for Iran’s efforts, isolating and weakening it.

But the only true path to end Iran’s drive to acquire nuclear weapons is for the government to change.  If policymakers can’t stomach that undertaking, they should just accept and brace themselves for a nuclear Iran.

What are the options?

• Regime Change
• accept inevitability of Iranian regime working to develop nuclear weapons but make it very painful to the point that regime will be unpopular enough to fall
• Military attacks and counterinsurgency (applied in the same manner that Iranians do in Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine) to undermine the Iranian regime

What is not in the cards is to expect this regime to drop its quest for nuclear weapons, overtly or covertly!

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James Montague from The Guardian newspaper just posted an article about Eytan Heller’s vision for Israel and Palestine to co-host the World Soccer Cup in 2018, an idea which so far has already spawned OneVoice’s Imagine 2018 Campaign.

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Two articles recently posted on PeaceWorks and OneVoice and our efforts…

JEWCY.COM: Peace Through Pesto: Daniel Lubetzky Schools Us on Building Bridges and Empowering Moderates,  by Helen Jupiter, July 11, 2008

and

JERUSALEM POST, Don Quixote comes to Israel, Jul 24, 2008, by Heather Robinson

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The walls between old allies on either side of the Atlantic cannot stand. The walls between the countries with the most and those with the least cannot stand. The walls between races and tribes, natives and immigrants, Christian and Muslim and Jew cannot stand. These now are the walls we must tear down.

- SENATOR BARACK OBAMA, speaking in Berlin.

In OneVoice form, he also said:

This is the moment when we must defeat terror and dry up the well of extremism that supports it.  This threat is real and we cannot shrink from our responsibility to combat it.

If we could create NATO to face down the Soviet Union, we can join in a new and global partnership to dismantle the networks [of terror]

If we could win a battle of ideas against the communists, we can stand with the vast majority of Muslims who reject the extremism that leads to hate instead of hope.

As painful as it is to bear this in mind, Shlomo Avineri agreed with the view that negotiating with Hezbollah to get the bodies of fallen soldiers in exchange for convicted terrorists, and creating an obsessive cry in the public arena for the release of Gilad Shalit at all costs only plays into Hamas’s hands and is against Israel’s interests.  It incentivizes extremism.  The logic may be cold, but it is logical:

Shalit’s return is not a primary strategic challenge for Israel.

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From an interesting article in Ha’aretz by Michalis Firillas

[T]he concept of hegemony . . . is almost comical in the era of globalization. The sheer number of real or imaginary powers vying for the limelight has made international political maneuvering so complex that real power is hard-pressed to manifest itself in historically familiar ways. Suddenly, "statesmen" are a dime a dozen, and what really matters is whether you are invited to a conference, not what you can actually achieve there.

Firillas goes on to ponder on how civil society and multilateral organizations will somewhat fill that void.

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China seems intent on using its veto at the UN to minimize any interference with national sovereignty, even at the expense of basic human rights and values, to the point of again vetoing a UN resolution against Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe’s atrocious dictator, and seeking to fight an ICC warrant against Sudan’s genocidal President.  Howard French just wrote an excellent article on this issue.

But what seems to also be missing from most analyses on this topic, is that China is not just trying to limit ‘foreign interference’ in national affairs but also just plainly trying to avoid having to pay any commercial price for being a global citizen.  The United States and other Western countries incur a tangible cost for taking certain moral stances.  Sometimes these principles are worth more than trade.  It is truly immoral to pursue trading interests at all costs. The policy-making community, and CONSUMERS, have not weighed in enough on this issue.

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