Monthly Archives: November 2010

"The fact is, Palestinians are haggling over much less than what the UN decision initially granted it, including a Jerusalem that would have maintained special international status. Israel has swallowed up far more land than what the partition originally proposed and is violating international law by continuing to build settlements on occupied Palestinian land – land, it might be added, from which the UN has called on it to withdraw."

"At work here is a set of global forces that the US, in its hubris, believed it could tame and dominate in its own cynical interests. By the early 1990s that arrogance manifested itself in the claim of the “end of history”: the world’s problems were about to be solved by US-sponsored corporate capitalism....The new Wikileaks disclosures will help to dent those assumptions. If a small group of activists can embarrass the most powerful nation on earth, the world’s finite resources and its laws of nature promise a much harsher lesson."

"By its own account, the U.S. government has been at war for more than nine years now and there’s no end in sight. Like the Pentagon, the State Department is serving the overall priorities of the warfare state. The nation’s military and diplomacy are moving parts of the same vast war machinery....Such a contraption requires a muscular bodyguard of partial truths, deceptions and outright lies. With the USA’s ongoing war efforts at full throttle, the contradictions between public rationales and hidden goals -- or between lofty rhetoric and grisly human consequences -- cannot stand the light of day."

So is the logic here that Israel will go through this "agonizing" internal debate (sweetened with incentives) to agree to stop doing what they should not have been doing all along, and then put the ball in the Palestinian court, forcing them to accept what they were never a party to in the first place, or appear to be the "spoilers"?

"By the beginning of the 20th century, Britain had started to cultivate its own independent links with the sharif in an attempt to undermine Turkish authority....The British plan proceeded apace with a number of its agents — T.E. Lawrence, Captain Shakespear, Sir Henry McMahon, Sir Percy Cox, et al — bribing Arabian chiefs with money and promises to make them rulers of the Arabian Peninsula if they would help Britain defeat the Ottomans. They found willing accomplices in Sharif Husayn ibn ‘Ali (of the Hashemite clan), Abdul Aziz Aal Saud and others. All of them were put on the British payroll and paid 20,000£ annually plus guns to attack Turkish troops in the Arabian Peninsula. At the same time, the British pledged to create a homeland for the Jews in Palestine under the now infamous Balfour Declaration of November 1917."