Month: August 2014

Israeli PM Shamir didn't want to withdraw, either – he said it in 1988

An interesting blog post this week [August 25 ] by MJ Rosenberg on something that happened when he worked as “a foreign policy aide to Sen. Carl Levin (D-MI). One February day, Levin called me into his office to say that he was disturbed at a quote he saw in that day’s New York Times. An article quoted Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir saying that he rejected the idea of withdrawing from any of the land Israel captured in the 1967 war”… This blog post can be read in full here.

I highlighted the interesting points on Twitter:  @Marianhouk · NYTimes 1988: “Mr. Shamir said in a radio interview, ‘It is clear that this expression of territory for peace is not accepted by me’.”

MJ Rosenberg wrote, in his blog post, that:

“Levin instantly understood what Shamir was saying. He was repudiating U.N. Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338 which provided for “withdrawal of Israeli armed forces from territories occupied in the recent [1967] conflict” in exchange for peace and security. Those resolutions represented official U.S. and international policy then, and they still do.

But, in 1988, Shamir tried to declare them null and void.

Levin asked me to draft a letter to Secretary of State George Shultz stating that it was the view of the Senate that the U.N. Resolutions remained the policy of the U.S. whether Shamir liked it or not. Of course, the letter wasn’t written in that kind of language. It was more than polite. Additionally, Levin wanted it addressed to Shultz, not to Shamir, to avoid ruffling too many feathers in Israel”…

Continue reading Israeli PM Shamir didn't want to withdraw, either – he said it in 1988

Netanyahu rejects a Palestinian State because it would 'violate' Israel's 'security'

Where to begin? With this:

Yarden Katz, a post-doctoral fellow at Broad Institute of Harvard and MIT, has written an analysis of Israeli media coverage of the war on Gaza,  entitled “Israel’s Iron Dome For Information”.  It’s published on the Mondoweiss website, here.  Here is an excerpt:

“The inability of the Israeli press to criticize the government in a time of war is exploited by Israeli leaders. Israeli television’s Channel 2 covered a press conference with Prime Minister Netanyahu on July 11, where Netanyahu described his goal of ‘restoring peace’ to Israeli citizens who are under rocket attack — and vowed to ‘strike Hamas’ until peace is restored. Netanyahu’s main points were not new, and were summarized in Channel 2’s report.

What went unreported, and uncontested by journalists in the room, was Netanyahu’s strong rejection of a Palestinian state. In response to a question from a journalist, Netanyahu argued that disengagement from Gaza was a mistake whose consequences are now dealt with by IDF.

Netanyahu said that Israel will not, under any condition or agreement, give up ‘security control’ of the area ‘west of the Jordan river’ (i.e., the West Bank). He warned that relinquishing this control would create another front of war, a situation of ‘twenty Gazas’ and ‘thousands of tunnels’ in the West Bank (which he referred to as the biblical ‘Judea and Samaria’). Netanyahu revealed a simple policy: Israel will not allow Palestinian autonomy in Gaza or the West Bank, much less a Palestinian state, as this would violate Israel’s ‘security’.

The English-language right-wing newspaper Times of Israel, glowing about Netanyahu’s promise to forever occupy the territories, did report this part of the press conference. But the mainstream Israeli press let Netanyahu’s most informative statement escape unnoticed…”

– See more at: http://mondoweiss.net/2014/08/israels-information-dome.html#sthash.yOvv4gF8.dpuf