Among early Zionist writers, Ze'ev Jabotinsky stood out for the cruelty and compete amorality of his arguments.  His position was simple:  we want territory in Palestine, there is an indigenous Palestinian people living in that territory, we must crush them by violence until they surrender to our will. "As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people makes such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups."  Jabotinsky was forthright about the nature of Zionism:  it was "colonialism," a program to be carried out behind "a wall of bayonets."  

There was almost something bracing about his brutal honesty:  that Zionism was an essentially imperialist enterprise, that Jews simply should not care about non-Jews, that "right" is determined by reasoning backwards from what we want to what is required to achieve it.  "We hold that Zionism is moral and just," he wrote.  "And since it is moral and just, justice must be done . . . There is no other morality."  Jews should make no other kinds of claims (Jabotinsky was particularly contemptuous of the Jewish religion, which he described as "a preserved corpse" in the Diaspora:  it is interesting that today it is in Israel that Judaism most obviously fits his description.)  Israel was not to be a center of Jewish culture or learning or the inculcation of virtue, it needed no justification beyond "we want it and we have bayonets."

To bolster his arguments later, however, Jabotinsky also made an argument based on "justice":  "The soil does not belong to those who possess land in excess but to those who do not possess any.  It is an act of simple justice to alienate part of their land from those nations who are numbered among the great landowners of the world, in order to provide a place of refuge for a homeless, wandering people."  The weird perversity of this notion of justice becomes apparent (if it isn't already) as soon as one tries to apply it in any other context.  Catholics have a country in Southern Ireland - therefore Northern Irish Protestants should be entitled to drive out all Catholics from the area?  There is no Romany state, nor a Breton state nor a Druze state nor a Kurdish nor a Basque state; therefore it would be justifiable to drive Americans, Frenchmen, or Spaniards, Turks, Lebanese or Israelis out of their homes in order to create a new state for each of these peoples?  There is no Bahai state nore a Wiccan state nor a Sufi state.  Therefore it would be justifiable to drive Christians, Muslims and Jews out of their homes to create space for these new states?  Jabotinsky's answer was, effectively, a shrug.

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Itamar: as seen from above Labels on the plastic bottles of Giva’ot Olam’s (admittedly delicious) goats milk yogurt describe the farm’s location as ‘The heart of the Shomron’, the Hebrew name for the northern West Bank. What the labels don't say is that the farm is completely illegal: one of over 100 settlement outposts erected without authorization from the Israeli government. The farm’s ‘mother’ settlement—Itamar—was authorized by the Israeli government, but is considered illegal under international law because it's built on occupied territory. Both Giva’ot Olam and Itamar are partly constructed on land privately-owned by Palestinians (and that’s according to data from the Civil Administration in the West Bank).

Giva’ot Olam is nothing short of a green oasis. Surrounded by rocky hilltops, and an arduous hike from the nearest built-up area (itself home to less than 700 people), the farm is run according to organic principles of environmental sustainability and motivated by a strong Jewish faith. The lush green grass that carpets the hill is home to free-range chickens and calm, happy goats whose pens are free from the nauseating stench that typically emanates from Israel’s intensive dairy farms.

On the surfaHappy Goats: make good milkce, Giva’ot Olam is a peaceful place where the still air is only disturbed by the sounds of the sheep or birdsong. It is also one of the biggest producers of organic yogurt and eggs sold in Israel (although I didn’t see a single hen roaming outside when I visited—apparently they get let out to exercise at certain times of the day). But these hilltops aren’t those of the Galilee or the Judean Hills: They are in the middle of the West Bank, lying just east of Nablus, the largest Palestinian city (or “the largest Arab city in Israel”, as the American rabbi leading our propaganda tour described it.)

“A guy called Avri just took his trailer there and started living here, he did the same thing in other places too. People came to live with him and then he moved on to settle other hilltops,” explained Moshe, an American-born settler who was one of the first Jews to settle a nearby hilltop over 20 years ago which became known as Itamar. Moshe, with his M16 strapped tightly to hAll Along The: organic watchtoweris back, described the farmer, Avri Ran, as a ‘pioneer’ and the ‘father of the hilltop movement’.

A few weeks ago I met another American-born settler living in Bat Ayin who was keen to extol the ecological virtues of his small, religious community, oblivious to the irony within the ethical contradiction of his choices. How can one be ‘environmentally sustainable’ whilst living on occupied territory? As tasty as their yogurt might be, buying products from Giva’ot Olam or other West Bank settlements inevitably means buying into the ideology of eternally conquering territory regardless of the cost to the Jewish State.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a great thing that more Israelis are going organic: Side effects of the Zionist dream to ‘make the desert bloom’ have turned farm animals into chronically-sick meat machines, and resulted in the pollution of the country’s scarce water and soil. Sales of organic food rose by 30% in Israel last year, and organic systems now account for almost 5% of the country's total agriculture. There's no question that Israelis needs more organic farms, but they should build them in their own country and not in the West Bank.

Birthright Palestine: the trip of a lifetimeBirthright Israel has a doppelgänger called Birthright Palestine. The Palestinian program aims to "gather first-generation, western-born Palestinians (over the age of 18-years old) in their ancestral homeland, so that they can reunite and witness firsthand how their brethren are living under illegal Israeli military occupation."

Birthright Palestine participants are offered opportunities to volunteer in Bethlehem, take daily Arabic language classes, engage in cultural events, and party hearty. Although the program mimics the structure of its Jewish, Zionist counterpart almost exactly, there are some fundamental differences between the two. Shocking, I know.

One major difference is that Birthright Palestine doesn't support a two-state solution. Another is that they describe some of their destinations as the "1948 territories, which some people refer to as 'Israel.'" (Emphasis mine.)

Other differences: The Birthright Israel trip is a 10-day gift that covers roundtrip airfare, hotel, transportation, most meals and other associated land costs, while Birthright Palestine requires participants to cover their own airfare and pay approximately $1,000 to $3,000, depending on the length of their stay.

Though the site describes Birthright Palestine as a "concept created by the Palestine Center for National Strategic Studies (PCNSS)–a new non-profit, non-governmental Palestinian organization," the Birthright Palestine domain name is actually registered to Palestinian-American Nader Muaddi at an address in good ol' Pennsylvania, and Muaddi is an alum of the Palestine Summer Encounter–a strikingly similar program.

The first annual Birthright Palestine Program is launching this summer, and in case you're not convinced, more details about the experience can be found here.

The project "Seen in Behlehem" takes art to the walls and streets of the West Bank. More photos from this series can be found at the Wooster Collective website.

• House votes 223-201 to withdraw troops from Iraq by next spring. [The Huffington Post]
• DFLP leader could enter West Bank for the first time since the Six Day War. [The Jerusalem Post]
  
• With GOP defections, many Republicans calling for withdrawal. [The Week Magazine]
• What atheists and theists can and can't agree on. [The Washington Post]
  
• Hillary Clinton and John Edwards talk of paring down debates to only "serious" candidates. [WLUC]
• Kucinich pissed that Hillary and John in cahoots. [Yahoo]
• Celebs, like hot rod Mr. Kilmer, who can't seem to keep their girlish figures. [TMZ]

Shmuel Rosner worries that Abu Mazen is too old to change his stripes:

He didn't make a decision; he was pushed into it. And this decision cannot endure for very long. "While Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has declared an end to the national unity government, I have little doubt that he will be talking to Hamas in the relatively near future," wrote Dennis Ross, former special U.S. envoy for the peace process who knows Abbas as well as anyone in the West. "We should not be fooled by Abbas' rhetoric. Sooner or later he will be forced to pursue new power-sharing arrangements between Hamas and Fatah and restore unity among Palestinians," wrote Robert Malley and Aaron David Miller, two other former members of the Clinton team, who rarely agree with Ross.

Yet that same Dennis Ross sounds a more hopeful note in USA Today:

[T]o prevent the West Bank from becoming dominated by Hamas as well, it is time for Fatah to carry out reform and remake itself. In talks I recently held in Ramallah, Abu Dis and East Jerusalem, I saw a readiness for the first time to organize Fatah at the grassroots level and respond to the social and economic needs of the Palestinian public. In effect, the younger generation of Fatah appears committed to showing it can embody social justice and fight the corruption that has plagued the movement. With Salaam Fayyad as the new prime minister, the donor community — including specifically the Saudis — needs to focus on a strategy for working with Fayyad to bolster those who will provide services and programs and who will enhance the credibility of Fatah. If the Saudis don't want Iran to be able to exploit the Palestinian conflict, they need to ensure that Hamas does not come to dominate the cause in a way that guarantees enduring struggle.

The "poodle" who manages to bark loud enough about Palestinian statehood to get the U.S. president listening is now being called in to administer the dispensation of aid to the Abbas government.  Will the pro-Hamas left color Tony Blair another hapless ditto of shameful Israeli interests?  Of course it will:

Blair's role would be an expanded version of the position held by former World Bank president James D. Wolfensohn, who resigned in May 2006 out of frustration at the deadlock over aid to the Palestinians following the January election of Hamas, U.S. officials said.

Concerns about nullifying a democratically elected government are negligible in the face of civil war when almost half of a legislature is ranged against the other half and basic public services have been halted. The lessons of Algeria are instructive, and now that millions of dollars of denied funds are finally being sent to the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah, Fatah looks to be the political winner after a week of blood and misery. Abbas can also now claim credit for reviving his government's legitimacy.

“We are going to support President Abbas and what he wants to do,” Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said on Monday in announcing the change in policy. She said the United States would work to “restructure” and unfreeze $86 million in aid that was originally set out to help Mr. Abbas build up his security forces. It was frozen because Hamas would not renounce violence, was considered a terrorist group and did not believe Israel had a right to exist.

This of course yields the sound of one hand clapping from Ari Berman at The Nation's blog:

The US operation received surprisingly little scrutiny in this country. Few pundits noted the irony of the Bush Administration attempting to undermine the democratically-elected (though hardly moderate) Hamas government while preaching the virtues of democracy in Iraq.

Given that The Nation doesn't support democracy in Iraq, why it should be so perturbed by electorally iffy developments in Palestine is, I guess, part of its inimitable editorial charisma. The "operation" Berman refers to is the U.S.'s arming of Fatah to counter Iran and Syria's arming of Hamas. (Under the Palestinian constititution, the president of the PA is in charge of domestic security, which fact of course never stopped Haniyah's gang from maintaining their own private militia outfitted by men in ski masks.)

More interesting in Berman's post, however, is where his link attached to that wily neocon Elliot Abrams takes you -- to a site called "Conflicts Forum," which features the following subhead: "listening to political Islam, recognizing resistance." [Italics mine.]

Founded in the mid-80s by two Brits -- Alastair Crooke and Mark Perry -- Conflict Forum has this to say on its About page:

Our encounters with political Islam - with both non-violent and armed resistance groups - leads us to conclude that Islamism is above all political. The overwhelming majority of Islamists are striving to create just societies and bring about political reform in a region entrenched with inequity, that has long suffered the overbearing influence of foreign powers.

The sweet justice of sharia law, which I'm sure Crooke and Perry look on with as much equanimity as the Nation gang does when the philosopher-kings are Shia sectarians in Baghdad. And Hamas is plenty influenced by foreign powers -- above all autocratic and theocratic.

Michael Hirsh's only point in this Newsweek editorial on last week's Hamas seizure of Gaza hinges on what has become the conventional wisdom about Palestine: It's not ready for democracy. Isn't the Bush administration to blame for angling for legislative elections when everyone in the know and on the ground  said it would lead to the ascendancy of the Islamists?  Further, how does that stunning catastrophe make relevant again the old question of what to do when the democcratic process yields un-democratic results? Sometimes known as the "bullet or the ballot" dilemma, it came up previously in Algeria in the mid-90's, and one can still keep score of a person's politics by his take on how the Islamic Salvation Front should have been dealt with. 

Anyway, Hirsh sheds no new light on the subject:

Why does the disaster in Gaza matter? In part because the defeat of the secular—and more moderate—Fatah forces could, along with the insurgents' success in Iraq, inspire Islamist radicals in the region and around the world. Hamas is not the Taliban, and it knows that an uptick in rocket attacks against Israel will be met with a harsh response. But, as Bush said in his second Inaugural, the whole point of promoting freedom is to blunt the hopelessness and anger that breed radicalism. Gaza faces 50 percent unemployment in the best of times. Qaeda-like splinter groups that have carried out kidnappings of foreigners have already begun to appear. Further isolating the territory is not likely to fill its residents with faith in the future.

Well, Hamas is already a Qaeda-like splinter group, likewise descendent of the Muslim Brotherhood and with an ideology formulated by middle-class university students, so that nightmare's already real. But now that the group retains total responsibility for the governance of Gaza, it may yet have fashioned a rod for its own back.

One of the longstanding concerns of Hamas's so-called "inner wing" was that it would one day be in charge of the region and have no one else to blame for the problems there. Fatah was an easy foil as an opponent, and it remained so all throughout Hamas's win in 2006  since Arafat's party still controlled security and other key services of state.

All that's changed, however, accountability for the continuing squalor and misery of Gazans shall belong to Haniyah and company and to them alone. Call it the blessings of unilateralism.

Humanitarian aid -- in the form of food, water, electric generators -- should of course be provided to the people of this clerically ruled islet on the Mediterranean, but it should be made clear to them, and to Hamas, that such aid is dependent on the largesse of external actors and NGOs.

Hamas's victory may prove to be Pyrrhic in the short term and, what is more encouraging, a complete failure in the long term.

I think Martin Indyk has got it exactly right:

Over the past year when Hamas would stage attacks in Gaza, Fatah forces would retaliate in the West Bank, where they were stronger. When fighting began this time, Fatah did little in the West Bank to counter Hamas's onslaught. Abbas's passivity further confirms that the fix was in. Abbas and Fatah have in effect conceded Gaza to Hamas while they hold on to the West Bank. Hamastan and Fatahstine: a "two-state solution" -- just not the one that George W. Bush had in mind.

"Give Hamas enough rope and it'll hang itself" may not be an especially attractive option when human lives are stake and the short-term yield is an Islamist statelet that enslaves women and secularists, but what options are left to Fatah?  The Quartet has failed at every turn to take Hamas seriously enough to let its democratic mandate expire of natural causes. The irony of this may be the satisfaction of the Quartet's signal demand: one Palestinian leader is taking responsibility for its own people by forcing them to confront their own demons. (Gaza relies for electricity and water on Egypt and Israel, two countries that are not likely to provide either to Hamas.)

If sane Palestinians can the isolate theocratic fascists in their own back yard, then all the better.

NYT: 

Hamas responded by saying it would keep up the rocket attacks, which have killed one Israeli civilian and damaged property in recent weeks. “Our strikes against the enemy will continue — we have freed the hand of all our cells to strike the enemy everywhere in Palestine,” the Hamas armed wing said in a statement, according to Reuters.

I lost an hour last night, sometime between 1:30 and 2:30 AM to be exact. The US government decided Spring should come three weeks early this year, and came it did. But research proves that little energy will actually be saved in the long run, albeit evening joggers might get more of a reprieve. Don't scoff about the prospect of avid sports enthusiasts pushing our clocks forward and never underestimate the correlation between golf and our country's policymakers.

Not to say all of our nation's leaders are the same. During WWII, President Franklin Roosevelt did away with daylight saving time completely and it didn't plunge the country into another Depression, just a whole lot of confusion until roughly the late '60s.

It's not so much that I mind parting with my precious hour of sleep or the internet issues that ensueas a result of the phenomena which no can actually properly label, it's more so that I resent that the whole weekend becomes monopolized with talk of this blessed event. And it doesn't simply stay buried in the weekend. It trumps even the weather as the most popular water cooler Monday morning chat-time fodder.

I doubt Ben Franklin knew the ruckus he was causing way back when while on a trip to France and first conceiving of the idea of daylight saving time. If he imagined that candy lobbyists would push back the end of DST till after Halloween to make an extra buck and in the process help contribute to a future generation of decaying mouths. Or better yet that in 1999, daylight saving time would account for the early self-detonation of suicide bombersin the West Bank and save a busload of passengers.

Hippos like to demarcate their terrority by releasing dung. I guess the US government isn't all that dissimilar. They simply defecate hours instead.

Photographs of a haredi couple engaging in sexual acts were distributed over the internet in February.

The 11 photographs, which were taken by the young man seen in them, have caused quite a controversy in the hardei community. The photos show a young haredi woman performing oral sex on her partner while exposing her private parts.

The couple in the pictures was identified as haredi by their clothing. The pictures show the young woman wearing a Bet Yaakov Seminary top, while the man wore a typical Hasidic sweater.

“It has become the talk of the town in the haredi community. Everyone sees the pictures, is shocked by them, passes them along, and erases them. A haredi girl needs a lot of guts to be photographed in this way,” a haredi journalist said.

According to Ynet, Israeli settlers in the West Bank are producing three times the amount of offspring as those on the other side of the green line. As the Israeli government has taken action to decrease the number of outposts, the number of caravans in the area has increased to accomodate for the growing population.

Peace Now, an organization committed to establishing peace in the Middle East, compiled the statistics, which also attributed the growing birth rate to the number of Orthodox families moving to haredi communities in the West Bank.

Egged bus destroyed by terroristsFirst, the background: There was a law in Israel that granted citizenship to Palestinians from the territories who married Israeli Arabs. In 2003, a law was passed that stopped that, due to the hundreds of terrorist attacks that Israel was undergoing as a result of the second "Intifada." This law, in fact, is one of the things that people (like, say, Jimmy Carter) use to accuse Israel of human rights abuses. Never is the context given: That this law was passed as a direct result of Palestinians from the territories marrying Israeli Arabs and then creating terror cells or committing acts of terror themselves.

Now we have the numbers.

38 of the 272 suicide bombings in Israel (roughly 14 percent) were carried out by terrorists that had received Israeli citizenship in the context of family reunification, a Shin Bet official told the Knesset Internal Affairs and Environment Committee on Monday.

The committee met Monday in order to discuss the extension of a temporary law that prevents family reunification between Palestinian residents of the West Bank and Gaza and Israeli Arabs due to security reasons.

The Shin Bet official said the figures show it is imperative that the government extend the temporary law, which will expire January 16.

Remember this the next time you hear Israel accused of human rights violations, and remember that much of the so-called violations are simply an attempt to defend Israeli citizens from terror.

Don't be surprised when you hear opponents argue that "only" 14% of the Palestinians turned out to be terrorists, so the law is still unjust because 86% of them do not. The world puts a very low price on the lives of Jews.

A 2,000-year-old toilet was among the recent archeological discoveries in Qumran, West Bank. Researchers believe that the toilet proves that the people inhabiting the area were in fact, the Essene, the same sect that penned the Dead Sea Scrolls since the ancient latrine was found at the proper distance from the inhabited area, in accordance with the Essene's laws of ritual purity.

Adds The Tribune:

Thanks to an Israeli anthropologist, an American textual scholar and a French paleo-parasitologist, researchers can now add another find: human excrement. The discovery is more significant than it may seem. The nature of the settlement at Qumran is the subject of a lively academic debate.

Zias and Tabor identified an area behind a rock outcropping, took soil samples and sent them to Stephanie Harter-Lailheugue, a French scientist specializing in ancient parasites. The samples tested positive for pinworms and two other intestinal parasites found only in human feces. Samples from locations nearer the settlement tested negative.

The excrement traces were found underground--meaning the feces had been buried, as required by Essene law--a nine-minute walk uphill from the settlement.

"A lot of people were concerned with what went into the body, but the Essenes were perhaps the only group in antiquity concerned with what came out," Zias said. "No one else would have gone to the trouble of walking this far."

Consequently, a latrine was also found within the confines of the Essene's living area, but researchers believe this was used in cases of emergency, only. Like when cholent was served on Friday nights, perhaps.