Mais uma de Barack

Alguns trechos da matéria do Times que o Diogo não quis postar.

The Arab peace plan received a boost last week when President Shimon Peres, a Nobel peace laureate and leading Israeli dove, commended the initiative at a Saudi-sponsored United Nations conference in New York.

Peres was loudly applauded for telling King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who was behind the original initiative: “I wish that your voice will become the prevailing voice of the whole region, of all people.”

Tem mais

Kurtzer submitted a paper to Obama on the question before this month’s presidential elections. He argued that trying to reach bilateral peace agreements between Israel and individual countries in the Middle East, was a recipe for failure as the record of Bill Clinton and George W Bush showed. In contrast, the broader Arab plan “had a lot of appeal”. A leading Democratic expert on the Middle East said: “There’s not a lot of meat on the bones yet, but it offers recognition of Israel across the Arab world.”

Livni, the leader of Kadima, which favours the plan, is the front-runner in Israeli elections due in February. Her rival, Benjamin Netanyahu, the leader of Likud, is adamantly against withdrawing to borders that predate the Six Day war in 1967.

Ehud Olmert, the prime minister, last week expressed his support for Israel’s withdrawal from the West Bank Golan and east Jerusalem.

Mas costurar o acordo não vai ser fácil, principalmente se o Likud sair vencedor nas eleições. Não só pela fatwa palestina – que é sanguinária e estúpida -, mas também pelo embargo de Israel à Gaza, principalmente com a declaração oficial, em 2007, de que o território era uma “entidade inimiga”. Além disso, o embargo não parece ter surtido o efeito que se esperava.

The US and Europe agreed to the measure on the principle that it would force the people of Gaza to rethink their support for Hamas. The logic was supposedly similar to the one that drove the sanctions applied to Iraq under Saddam Hussein through the 1990s: if Gaza’s civilians suffered enough, they would rise up against Hamas and install new leaders acceptable to Israel and the West.

As AbuZayd said, that moment marked the beginning of the international community’s complicity in a policy of collective punishment of Gaza, despite the fact that the Fourth Geneva Convention classifies such treatment of civilians as a war crime.

The blockade has been pursued relentlessly since, even if the desired outcome has been no more achieved in Gaza than it was in Iraq. Instead, Hamas entrenched its control and cemented the Strip’s physical separation from the Fatah-dominated West Bank.

Obama só pode fazer isso mesmo, sentar e iniciar uma conversa em torno de uma proposta plausível. Porque a coisa só tende a piorar, principalmente com a brutalidade terrorista contaminando o outro lado. Como informa a AP.

HEBRON, West Bank (AP) — Jewish settlers on Thursday spray-painted graffiti on a mosque slurring the Prophet Muhammad and defaced a Muslim cemetery, Israeli military officials said, threatening to worsen tensions in this volatile West Bank city.

Israeli security forces quickly removed the graffiti and were cleaning the cemetery, the army said.

The mosque stands next to a building that has become a flashpoint for tensions between settlers and Palestinians. Settlers say they bought the building from a Palestinian, but the Palestinian denies the claim.

Settlers inside the building have ignored an order from Israel’s Supreme Court to leave while the ownership dispute is settled. Israel’s defense minister has pledged to evict them within 30 days if they don’t leave voluntarily.

Hebron is divided into Israeli and Palestinian-controlled sections. About 500 settlers live in guarded enclaves in the city’s center among 170,000 Palestinians.

Hebron settlers are among the most extreme in the West Bank, and security officials fear violence if the house is forcefully evacuated. Early Thursday, a soldier was lightly wounded by a chemical substance sprayed at him by settlers near the house, the army said. Military vehicles were also vandalized, it said.

Hebron’s Palestinian governor, Hussein al-Araj, urged Israeli authorities to halt the settler violence and carry out the court decision.

“What happened is unacceptable,” he said. “The Israelis have to enforce the law and stop the suffering of the Palestinians who are living next to settlers. They have to take the settlers from this house and protect the Palestinians.”

De qualquer forma a posição está longe de ser uma adesão completa e total ao terror palestino. Isso sim, era mentira.