Reality star Kim Kardashian apologized for tweeting about the Gaza conflict, and media mogul Rupert Murdoch slammed the “Jewish-owned media” for its “anti-Israel coverage” in a tweet.
At the same time, Twitter suspended three accounts held by an Orthodox Jew from New York after he tweeted an offensive anti-Obama cartoon from one of them.
Kardashian apologized after two tweets in which she first told her followers she was “Praying for everyone in Israel,” and then tweeted that she was “Praying for everyone in Palestine and across the world!”
Kardashian later deleted both tweets and issued an apology: “(A)fter hearing from my followers, I decided to take down the tweets because I realized that some people were offended and hurt by what I said, and for that I apologize,” the statement, published on her blog, said in part.
The statement continued: “I should have pointed out my intentions behind these tweets when I posted them. The fact is that regardless of religion and political beliefs, there are countless innocent people involved who didn’t choose this, and I pray for all of them and also for a resolution. I also pray for all the other people around the world who are caught in similar crossfires,”
Media mogul Rupert Murdoch on Saturday blasted what he called the “Jewish-owned press” for their “anti-Israel” coverage.
“Why Is Jewish owned press so consistently anti- Israel in every crisis?” tweeted Murdoch, who has positioned himself as a supporter of Israel.
In a second tweet he added: “Middle East ready to boil over any day. Israel position precarious. Meanwhile watch CNN and AP bias to point of embarrassment.”
Meanwhile, Twitter late last week suspended three accounts held by Benjamin Reisman, 25, of New York City, The Daily Caller reported.
The suspensions came after Reisman tweeted a cartoon which graphically showed an arm reading Obama plunging a bloody knife into a man's back, which depicted an Israeli flag. “Don’t worry Israel, Obama has your back,” Reisman tweeted last week, linking to the image.
Twitter did not warn Reisman that it was suspending his accounts, and would not tell the Daily Caller whether the cartoon was the reason for the suspension.
The suspended accounts were called @RealGazaPeace, @RealGazaPeace1 and @GazaRealStory.
The Daily Caller reported that at least 12 other Twitter accounts tweeted the cartoon, but were not suspended.
Reisman also pointed out that tweets reading “Death to Jews” and other equally offensive tweets have not led to the suspension of those Twitter accounts. He said three of his four grandparents were interned in Nazi concentration camps.
With an Israeli flag wrapped around him, Rabbi Dov Elkins stood with a crowd outside the Federal building in West Los Angeles on Sunday to participate in a pro-Israel rally.
“We’re here to support Israel,” Elkins, 75, said, joined by his wife, Maxine. Residents of Princeton, N.J., the couple were in L.A. visiting their children and grandchildren; they had attended Shabbat services at the Pico-Robertson shul the Happy Minyan on Saturday, and when the rabbi announced that a pro-Israel event would be taking place the next day, they decided to attend.
“We wouldn’t be anywhere else,” Maxine Elkins, 65, said, adding, “I’m a Jew, and this is the least American Jews can do — to come here and support Israel.”
As many as 1,400 demonstrators turned up on the afternoon of Nov. 18 to support Israel, according to police on the scene. They came in the wake of the recent violence between Israel and Palestinians living in the Gaza Strip. For approximately one week, Israel has responded to ongoing, indiscriminate Palestinian rocket fire with targeted air strikes aimed at killing Hamas military leaders and destroying weapons caches.
Story continues after the jump.
Video by Jay Firestone
The demonstration was organized by the pro-Israel organizations Stand With Us, the Israeli-Leadership Council (ILC) and the Zionist Organization of America-Western Region (ZOA). Jews of all denominations came out for the rally, staged outside the Westwood Federal Building at the intersection of Wilshire Boulevard and Veteran Avenue, including Americans, Israelis and Jews of Iranian heritage.
About 100 pro-Palestinian supporters held a counter-demonstration across the street, on the north side of Wilshire Boulevard.
For the most part, the three-hour event was peaceful, but during the final hour, the situation became heated when a fight reportedly broke out between a pro-Palestinian protestor and pro-Israel protestor. Police officers from the Los Angeles Police Department, the Los Angeles County Sherriff’s Department and California Highway Patrol officials were on scene.
In response, pro-Israel supporters charged over to the Palestinian side of the street. Police officers stepped in to bring the Israel protestors back to their side.
Demonstrators waved Israeli and American flags along with signs with slogans such as: “Israel Deserves Security;” “Hamas is the Enemy of Peace;” “Gaza Children Deserve Education Not Military Training” and more.
Community leaders supporting Israel included Los Angeles County Supervisor Zev Yaroslavsky, Los Angeles City Councilman Dennis Zine and Los Angeles City Controller Wendy Greuel, a 2013 mayoral candidate. Also present were Rabbi David Wolpe of Sinai Temple, Rabbi Shlomo Cunin, West Coast director of Chabad-Lubavitch, Rabbi Stewart Vogel of Temple Aliyah, Rabbi Avi Taff of Valley Beth Shalom, Rabbi Jason Weiner, a chaplain at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center and Rabbi Morley Feinstein of University Synagogue.
“We are here to protest the necessity of peace, the danger of those who would seek to destroy us and our determination to live both in strength and with justice and with peace,” Wolpe said.
“Am Yisrael Chai,” he added.
Other speakers included Israeli actress Noa Tishby, ILC chairman Shawn Evenhaim, Roz Rothstein, CEO of Stand With Us and Orit Arfa, executive director of the ZOA-West.
Sam Yebri, president of 30 Years After, a nonprofit that organizes Iranian-American Jews in political, civic and Jewish life, was among a group of Iranian-American Jews in attendance. In addition, the Israeli Scouts of Los Angeles, a youth group from the San Fernando Valley, brought 47 teens.
All ages attended to show support for Israel. Chloe Bismuth, a 20-year-old UCLA student who said she travels to Israel every year, showed up with her knuckles painted to spell out “Israel” and tiny Israeli flags painted onto her cheeks. Israel is a “country all of us as Jews should rely on,” she said, “all of us who believe in democracy.”
Pinhas Avgani, 63, Israeli and a Woodland Hills resident, was among the dozens who gathered on the sidewalk at the southwest corner of Wilshire-and-Veteran to chant and wave flags, standing as close to the street as police officers would allow.
“When [Palestinians] put weapons down, there will be peace. If Israelis are going to put their weapon down, Israel will disappear,” Avgani said.
Naz Farahdel, a 24-year-old Iranian American Jew and a law clerk at the city attorney’s office, turned out with two friends, also Iranian American Jews.
The pro-Israel side aimed for a broad celebration of Israel. Upbeat Israeli music played loudly; people came together for Israeli dancing, and the crowd sang the Hatikva.
Until the pro-Israel charge across the street, the pro-Israel side stayed on the southwest and southeast corners of Wilshire-and-Veteran. A line of hundreds of demonstrators began at the southwest corner of the intersection, extending eastward, halfway down the block toward Sepulveda Boulevard. People led Israel chants, speaking into bullhorns. Passing cars honked horns and waved Israeli flags out of the windows. Meanwhile, LAPD helicopters circled overhead.
On the Palestinian side demonstrators carried signs expressing support for Palestinians and also denouncing Israel and the United States: “Resist Zionism and Imperialism;” “Let Gaza Live: Free Palestine” and “Stop U.S. Aid to Israel.” One banner read: “It’s not a war. In Palestine, it’s genocide.”
When the pro-Israeli group crossed the street after the disruption began, Rothstein called the Israel protestors back to their side. Soon, nine California Highway Patrol and Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department vehicles parked in a line in the center of Wilshire. Police officers stationed themselves on foot at all four corners of the intersection, keeping the crowds to the sidewalk. Officers stood by the parked vehicles.
Chants turned ugly. When the Palestinian side chanted, “Free, free Palestine,” a man on the Israel side yelled back, “Bomb, bomb Palestine.”
Angering many on the Israel side, a pro-Palestinian demonstrator tied an Israel flag to his leg and let it drag in the street. A group of male teenagers, a middle-aged man and two elderly women on the Israel side responded by yelling out insults and curses.
Around 3:45 p.m., Rothstein, in cooperation with law enforcement, told demonstrators on the Israel side to go home. Rothstein had initially told law enforcement that the event, which began at 1 p.m., would end no later than 3:30 p.m. By this time, attendance of both sides had dwindled, but a sizable Israel group and a small Palestinian group remained.
LAPD officers accompanied the Palestinian protestors as they crossed to the pro-Israel side to walk toward their cars in the Federal building parking lot, where most of the demonstrators from both sides had parked. “We want to get those folks safety out of here,” a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department official told Rothstein.
Rothstein joined a police officer in a police car and using the car’s loudspeaker asked everyone on the Israel side to leave, as the car inched slowly in front of the pro-Israel crowd. “Thank you for your cooperation. Thank you for being here,” she said.
By 4 p.m., most demonstrators on both sides departed.
Rothstein acknowledged that the pro-Israel side had engaged in some bad behavior. “It is kind of why I sometimes worry about putting these things on. You never know who is going to show up,” she said. “But it’s a community and we have a tapestry.”
While the Palestinian side was small compared to the Israel side on Sunday, on Nov. 15, hundreds of pro-Palestinians had rallied outside the office of the Consulate General of Israel in Los Angeles, near Wilshire and Barrington avenue. There, one attendee blamed Israel for the recent violence. “It’s saddening but it’s not shocking, and if you’ve been following the news today [Nov. 15] it had been reported that Israel had broken the cease-fire first. Unfortunately Western media has not been quick to follow up on that regard,” she said.
“But regardless I support neither Hamas or Israel. What I support is the liberation of the Palestinian people,” she added.
In addition to Sunday’s rally, local initiatives are showing solidarity with Israel, including a project organized by the Jewish Federation of Greater Los Angeles that enables people to post messages onto the Federation website in support of the children of Israel.
Hostilities between Islamist militants and Israel entered a sixth day on Monday as diplomatic efforts were set to intensify to try to stop rocket fire from the Gaza Strip and Israeli air strikes on Gaza.
International pressure for a ceasefire seemed certain to mount after the deadliest single incident in the flare-up on Sunday claimed the lives of at least 11 Palestinian civilians, including four children.
Three people, including two children, were killed and 30 others were injured in the latest air strike before dawn on Monday on a family home in the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City, medical officials said. The Israeli military had no immediate comment and was checking.
United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon was due to arrive in Cairo to add his weight to the truce efforts. Egypt has taken the lead in trying to broker a ceasefire and its officials met the parties on Sunday.
Israeli media said a delegation from Israel had been to Cairo for talks on ending the fighting, although a government spokesman declined to comment on the matter.
Egyptian President Mohamed Mursi met Khaled Meshaal, the political leader of Hamas, which runs the Gaza Strip, and Ramadan Shallah of Islamic Jihad as part of the mediation efforts, but a statement did not say if talks were conclusive.
Izzat Risheq, a close aide to Meshaal, wrote in a Facebook message that Hamas would agree to a ceasefire only after Israel “stops its aggression, ends its policy of targeted assassinations and lifts the blockade of Gaza”.
Listing Israel's terms, Vice Prime Minister Moshe Yaalon wrote on Twitter: “If there is quiet in the south and no rockets and missiles are fired at Israel's citizens, nor terrorist attacks engineered from the Gaza Strip, we will not attack.”
Israel withdrew settlers from Gaza in 2005 and two years later Hamas took control of the impoverished enclave, which the Israelis have kept under blockade.
The 11 Palestinian civilians were apparently killed during an Israeli attack on a militant, which brought a three-storey house crashing down on them.
Gaza health officials have said 78 Palestinians, 23 of them children and several women, have been killed in Gaza since Israel's offensive began. Hundreds have been wounded.
GRAVE CONCERN
Ban expressed grave concern in a statement before setting off for the region. He will visit Israel on Tuesday.
“I am deeply saddened by the reported deaths of more than ten members of the Dalu family… (and) by the continuing firing of rockets against Israeli towns, which have killed several Israeli civilians. I strongly urge the parties to cooperate with all efforts led by Egypt to reach an immediate ceasefire,” he said.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said he had assured world leaders that Israel was doing its utmost to avoid causing civilian casualties in the military showdown with Hamas.
Gaza militants launched dozens of rockets into Israel and targeted its commercial capital, Tel Aviv, for a fourth day on Sunday. Israel's “Iron Dome” missile shield shot down all three rockets.
In scenes recalling Israel's 2008-2009 winter invasion of Gaza, tanks, artillery and infantry have massed in field encampments along the sandy, fenced-off border with Gaza and military convoys moved on roads in the area.
Israel has authorized the call-up of 75,000 reservists, although there was no immediate sign when or whether they might be needed in a ground invasion.
Israel's operation has so far drawn Western support for what U.S. and European leaders have called its right to self-defense, but there have also been a growing number of appeals to seek an end to the hostilities.
Netanyahu said Israel was ready to widen its offensive.
“We are exacting a heavy price from Hamas and the terrorist organizations and the Israel Defence Forces are prepared for a significant expansion of the operation,” he said at a cabinet meeting on Sunday, but gave no further details.
The Israeli military said 544 rockets fired from Gaza have hit Israel since Wednesday, killing three civilians and wounding dozens. Some 302 rockets were intercepted by Iron Dome and 99 failed to reach Israel and landed inside the Gaza Strip.
Israel's declared goal is to deplete Gaza arsenals and force Hamas to stop rocket fire that has bedeviled Israeli border towns for years. The rockets now have greater range, putting Tel Aviv and Jerusalem within their reach.
The southern resort city of Eilat was apparently added to the list of targets when residents said they heard an explosion thought to be a rocket, but it caused no damage or casualties, police said.
Eilat is thought to be well out of the range of any rocket in possession of Hamas or any other Gaza group. But Palestinian militants have in the recent past fired rockets at Eilat and its surroundings, using Egypt's Sinai desert as a launch site.
SWORN ENEMIES
Hamas and other groups in Gaza are sworn enemies of the Jewish state which they refuse to recognize and seek to eradicate, claiming all Israeli territory as rightfully theirs.
Hamas won legislative elections in the Palestinian Territories in 2006 but a year later, after the collapse of a unity government under President Mahmoud Abbas the Islamist group seized control of Gaza in a brief and bloody civil war with forces loyal to Abbas.
Abbas then dismissed the Hamas government led by the group's leader Ismail Haniyeh but he refuses to recognize Abbas' authority and runs Gazan affairs.
While it is denounced as a terrorist organization in the West, Hamas enjoys widespread support in the Arab world, where Islamist parties are on the rise.
Western-backed Abbas and Fatah hold sway in the West Bank from their seat of government in the town of Ramallah. The Palestinians seek to establish an independent state in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip with East Jerusalem as its capital.
Writing by Ori Lewis; editing by Christopher Wilson
Gracing us with the gift of her wisdom and honesty, Harriet Rossetto has given us a sneak peek into her book, Sacred Housekeeping, A Spiritual Memoir. The official release will be in March of 2013.
Sacred Housekeeping…It’s All In The Details
I hated routine for many years, but now I perform my rituals and routines with missionary zeal so I don’t lose my footing. These are my “mitzvot,” sacred acts. They are personal, not communal; chosen, not commanded. They remind me to be grateful to God for life: to “eat, be satisfied and bless.”
I have the same conversation with myself every morning when one part of me wants to sleep an extra hour and the other one wants to get up and work out, and every night when one of me wants to drop my clothes on the floor and the other one is committed to hanging them up. Leave the dish in the sink? Wash it and put it away. It builds spiritual muscle.
All these years later, it’s still a daily battle. I still get lazy and busy with distractions and acquisitions. I buy new underwear at Costco and don’t bother to throw out the old. I keep things that I don’t wear for over a year, a gross violation of The Organizer’s Manifesto. I buy things I don’t need because they’re a bargain, another violation. But what’s different is that now, from time to time; I force myself to face down the monster and to weed the overgrowth.
I no longer view my defects of character as evidence of my failure or as enemies to be vanquished. They are evidence only of my humanness. My daily spiritual struggle is to own them and “invite them in for tea,” as Ram Dass taught.
During group sessions at Beit T’Shuvah, I began to notice that residents were adapting my evolving insights and epiphanies. A sweet and sardonic 24-year old girl who had been in eight rehabs lit up when I told my story about housekeeping as an antidote to existential despair: “I finally did my laundry after putting it off forever,” she said. “I was folding the towels when I got that it’s not about finding God in the Burning Bush… it’s about doing your laundry. God really is in the details.”
I received an email today from a young woman away at college who I have known for most of her life. She is a strongly identifying Jew, smart, open-minded and open-hearted. She asked me for help in addressing the following statement made to her by a college friend:
“Israel is the aggressor. Israel won't compromise. Israel needs to be stripped of its military because it is using it too liberally. Israel is the bully.”
About five years ago it became clear to me that college students, in particular, and adult Jews as well, do not have the background necessary to respond effectively to the kinds of statements that my friend shared with me. And so, I wrote and compiled a document entitled “Facts, Responses and Perspectives on the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict” that offers, to the best of my ability, a concise history of the conflict drawing on facts and modern scholarship from a variety of sources.
My goal in writing this piece was to state the most common myths and distortions made against Israel and then to offer the true history behind the claim. (Note: I have not added to this document since April, 2010).
This past year I published another piece in the CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly entitled “The International Delegitimization Campaign Against Israel and the Urgent Need of a Comprehensive, Two-State, End-of-Conflict Peace Agreement” (Winter, 2012).
I referred my college student friend to both of these pieces which can be accessed on The Temple Israel of Hollywood Website under “About Us” and “Clergy.” http://www.tioh.org/about-us/clergy/aboutus-clergy-clergystudy
If you yourself need more information, or you feel your high school and college student children and grandchildren could benefit, then I ask you to refer them to these pieces as a beginning to gaining greater understanding.
My five-year-old daughter Yael just called from Tel Aviv to say that she’s doing fine. She’s a bit scared, but that’s only because I’m not there to watch her — if I were home, she would not be afraid. The brave soul: it was her first time in a bomb shelter. Until yesterday, for our family rocket fire was a troubling part of life but not a personal experience: the last time that Tel Aviv was under fire was during the first Gulf War, back in 1991.
I got my first lesson about Middle East instability at about the same age as Yael… Not much has changed since then…
Not that it matters much now, when debate in Washington over Susan Rice’s possible candidacy for Secretary of State rages well beyond the small world of Israel-related policies. But it is worth mentioning that among the many people and groups opposing such candidacy – see Dana Milbank for all the gory details – one can also count our Israel Factor panel of experts.
In our latest survey we asked the panel to rank possible candidates for the top State job. It was before the election so candidates of both Obama and Romney were lined up for the panel to rank. The question was framed thus: “On a scale of 1 (poor candidate) to 10 (great candidate), please rank the following candidates for secretary of state in the next Obama (O) or Romney (R) administration”. The outcome for Obama candidates shows that there’s truly one candidate that our panel doesn’t consider a very good idea – that’s Rice. Take a look:
Tom Donilon
6.67
John Kerry
6.17
Ambassador Susan Rice
5.33
Ambassador William Burns
6
C. Netanyahu, before and after Gaza
This might become irrelevant as the Gaza operation changes the political landscape as well. But not wanting a good story to go to waste, here’s a link to another IHT-NYT article from last week. An article in which I explained why Netanyahu might have miscalculated by merging his Likud Party with Israel Beiteinu:
His merger with Lieberman pushed him further to the right. Having to make do with the hawkish [former Netanyahu chief of staff and long-time critic Naftali] Bennett will push him even farther right. And, for some, Netanyahu’s bet on Romney will undermine the special relations between Israel and the United States. Netanyahu should have run as Israel’s one viable centrist leader, its only responsible adult. But by rushing to protect himself from rivals who stood very little chance of defeating him, he only made their case stronger.
In his Friday column, Yossi Verter explains (from behind a pay wall) that Ehud Olmert was about to announce that he intends to run against Netanyahu when the Gaza operation began. His true motivation though, as Verter explains, is not to be the next prime minister – there’s very little chance of that – but rather to become the only alternative in the next round that he hopes will come soon.
D. Presbyterians against Israel
This piece could have been on our Must Read daily feature, but we missed it and more pressing things make it unlikely that it will get a mention in the coming days. Since I was late to read it, I’m also late to link to it. But it is a worthy read on the motivation behind liberal Christian harsh criticism of Israel – and the critical letter that was sent to Congress by leaders of most of the major mainline Protestant denominations and the National Council of Churches:
If anti-Semitism is not lurking behind the letter to Congress, then what motivated it? There are some not very profound explanations: These individuals probably believe (mistakenly, I think) that the unsolved Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the root cause of all problems in the Middle East and that US pro-Israel policy is a negative factor for the quest of peace—and, as mentioned above, they believe that this letter may help to bring about a “reset” of the policy. Also, for many years there have been strong ties between American churches and the (alarmingly shrinking) small community of Arab Protestants in the Holy Land, so that there is a particular empathy with the plight of this community.
However, I think that there is a more profound explanation: Since the 1970s mainline Protestantism has been strongly influenced by every progressive ideology that came down the pike—anti-capitalist neo-Marxism in economic and social perspectives, anti-Americanism and pacifism in world affairs, and every variety of “victimological” identity politics. For some years the pronouncements rolling off the presses of the World Council of Churches, the National Council of Churches and mainline Protestant denominations read like reprints of manifestos composed by rioting students on the Berkeley campus.
The United States needs to deploy a high-level envoy, like former President Bill Clinton, to help negotiate a peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians, a top U.S. politician said on Sunday.
Senator John McCain, the ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee who lost his 2008 presidential bid to President Barack Obama, said Washington needed to show it was serious about wanting peace in the Middle East and sending someone as senior as Clinton would help.
“The United States of America has got to push as hard as we can to resolve this Israeli-Palestinian issue,” McCain said on CBS's “Face the Nation” program. “So many events are hinged on making that process go forward.”
“I'd find someone even as high ranking as former President Bill Clinton to go and be the negotiator,” McCain said. “I know he'd hate me for saying, that but we need a person of enormous prestige and influence to have these parties sit down together as an honest broker.”
In 2000 during his second term as president, Bill Clinton made a high-stakes Middle East peace push that ultimately failed. But he is widely perceived to have credibility with both Israelis and Palestinians.
Obama, traveling in Asia, said on Sunday he would prefer not to see an Israeli ground invasion of Gaza but put the onus on Egypt and Turkey to get Hamas to halt cross-border rocket fire.
Obama also warned those in the Middle East who support Palestinian aspirations for statehood that any peace deal would be pushed off “way into the future” if the Gaza conflict escalated.
Like other top U.S. Republicans, McCain said the United States needed to be “as heavily involved as it possibly can” in the latest conflict, which has been escalating in five days of Palestinian rocket attacks on Israel and Israeli air strikes on the Gaza Strip.
But he said he did not know how much influence the Obama administration would have, following failed efforts in 2009 to help bridge differences between Israelis and Palestinians.
“We have a lot of work to do to regain some credibility because we're crumbling all over the Middle East,” McCain said.
The BBC issued an apology to British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks after a presenter asked him about the Gaza operation while he thought he was off the air.
Sacks presented the “Thought for the Day” on BBC Radio 4 Today on Friday. After the segment, presenter Evan Davies asked the rabbi's opinion on the conflict between Gaza and Israel.
Sacks responded, “I think it's got to do with Iran, actually,” and then issued a call for “a continued prayer for peace, not only in Gaza but for the whole region. No one gains from violence.” He then was told he was still on the air.
Sacks was said to be angry about the incident, the Guardian reported, citing BBC sources.
“The Chief Rabbi hadn't realized he was still on-air and as soon as this became apparent, we interjected,” the BBC said via a spokesman. “Evan likes to be spontaneous with guests, but he accepts that in this case it was inappropriate and he has apologized to Lord Sacks. The BBC would reiterate that apology.”
Neri Zilber of Foreign Policy takes a look at how Israelis try to maintain normal life under rocket fire.
In a sports kiosk in the southern Israeli city of Ashdod, a few hardy regulars watched the basketball game on one television. A second television had the news on, providing running updates about the war taking place less than 20 miles to the south (“In the past hour the IDF bombed 70 targets in Gaza” read the headline at the bottom of the screen). Outside, the streets of Ashdod — one of the primary rocket targets in recent years and especially in recent days — were mostly quiet. The kiosk was one of the few places open in the city of 200,000 people, serving up coffee, beers, and betting forms to a trickle of customers.
Writing in Christian Science Monitor, Steven A. Cook examines the struggle for dominance among the Muslim and Arab world leaders.
The issue of leadership is critical for the region. States with prestige and financial, diplomatic, and military resources can drive events in the Middle East – hopefully for good, but potentially for bad. In the 1950s and ’60s, for example, Egypt’s leadership under Gamal Abdel Nasser shaped regional politics around the myths of Arab nationalism, which led to intra-Arab conflict and regional war. The Arab Spring provides an opportunity for a power or group of powers to usher in a new era of peace, prosperity, and perhaps democracy.
Israel should treat Turkey's enemies in the same way Turkey is supporting the Hamas regime in Gaza, writes Michael Rubin in Commentary Magazine.
Maybe it is time that Israel fight diplomatic fire with fire. Israeli officials might argue that the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) today is fighting a military insurgency and no longer engages in terrorism. The group is overwhelmingly popular in southeastern Turkey. After all, the Kurdish areas of Turkey are not doing well; life expectancy throughout Turkey is lower than in Gaza. Given Turkey’s support for Hamas, perhaps the Israelis might begin a public debate about recognizing Kurdistan with Diyarbakir as its capital.