From: Marta <marta@endthiswar.org>
Subject: Israeli actors
The Magnes Zionist
A "Fiddler on the Roof" in Ariel? Sounds Crazy, No?
08 Sep 2010 03:20 AM PDT
Jewish Voice of Peace gets a big yasher koah for lining up some of the most
talented theater people in the US and UK to support the decision of Israeli
actors NOT to appear in the Occupied Territories. That decision was backed
also by a list of Israeli academics and cultural icons of the Zionist and
non-Zionist left.
What is interesting about JVP's list that it doesn't include just the usual
suspects. OK, so Vanessa Redgrave is there. But so is somebody who almost
never signs petitions, the great Broadway composer and lyricist, Stephen
Sondheim. In fact, the number of first-time signers demonstrates that every
day more and more people are jumping on the
"No-business-as-usual-in-the-Occupation" bandwagon.
Among the signatories I noticed one of the giants of the Broadway musical
stage, Sheldon Harnick, who wrote the lyrics for the Fiddler on the Roof. Of
course, his approval is not needed to put on the show in Ariel, and the
Cameri Theater may one day bring it there.
But I know one Tevye who won't appear there: the legendary Theodore Bikel,
who has played Tevye more times, apparently, than Topol. He, too, is a
signatory.
Shanah Tovah/Happy New Year!
***
From: Sid Shniad
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2010/sep/07/peace-talks-washington-israel-palestinians
This time in Washington, honest brokerage is not going to be enough
*An intractable asymmetry between Palestinian and Israeli power bases
means the US must intervene. Otherwise, these talks fail*
By Avi Shlaim
The Guardian: 7 September 2010
The pope, according to a no doubt apocryphal story, maintains that there are
two possible solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict – the realistic and the
miraculous. The realistic solution involves divine intervention; the
miraculous solution involves a voluntary agreement between the parties
themselves. The American-sponsored peace talks got under way in
Washington last week may be viewed in this light. It will take nothing less
than a miracle to produce a peaceful settlement of the century-old conflict
between Jews and Arabs over the Holy Land.
The obstacles to peace are formidable. All previous attempts to clear them
have ended in failure, most notably the Camp David
summit<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6666393.stm>of
July 2000. An American-sponsored peace process of some sort has been
going on intermittently since the Madrid conference of
1991<http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/6666393.stm#madrid>,
the mother of all Middle East peace conferences. So direct peace
negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, with or without American
peace processors, are nothing new. In the words of one American, it is deja
vu all over again.
The current negotiators will have to find solutions to all the deeply
sensitive issues that lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
the so-called permanent status issues. These include the right of return of
the 1948 Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem, the future of the
Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and the borders of the Palestinian
entity.
But there is an immediate stumbling block: settlements. A partial and
temporary Israeli freeze on their
expansion<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/jul/05/us-binyamin-netanyahu-settlements>on
the West Bank is due to expire at the end of the month and, if it is not
renewed, the Palestinian negotiators have said they will walk out. And who
can blame them? If Israel persists in its bad old Zionist ways of "creating
facts on the ground", the peace talks will become a charade. It would be
like two men negotiating the division of a pizza with one of them continuing
to swallow chunks of it.
The prospects for reaching a permanent status agreement are poor because the
Israelis are too strong, the Palestinians are too weak, and the Americans
mediators are utterly ineffectual. The sheer asymmetry of power between the
two parties militates against a voluntary agreement. To get Israelis and
Palestinians round a conference table and to tell them to hammer out an
agreement is like putting a lion and a lamb in a cage and asking them to
sort out their own differences.
Third party intervention is clearly indispensable. To put it more simply,
there can be no settlement unless America pushes Israel into a settlement.
Playing the honest broker will not do the trick. In the first place, most
Arabs regard the United States as a dishonest broker on account of its
palpable partisanship on behalf of Israel. Moreover, honest brokerage is not
enough. In order to bridge the huge gap separating the two sides, America
must first redress the balance of power by putting most of its weight on the
side of the weaker party.
The negotiations in Washington will be face to face but they will also be
back to back, with each leader constantly watching his domestic
constituency. President Mahmoud Abbas, popularly known as Abu Mazen, is the
most moderate partner for peace Israel could hope for. But his domestic
position is rather precarious. He is the leader of the mainstream party
Fatah, a democratically elected president, and the head of the Palestinian
Authority. But he faces a formidable rival in Hamas, the Islamic resistance
movement, and other splinter groups like Islamic Jihad.
Hamas won a free and fair election in January 2006; it moderated its
rejectionist stand once in power, and formed a national unity government
with Fatah in March 2007. In June of that same year, however, it seized
power violently in Gaza to pre-empt a Fatah coup. Since then Gaza has become
an open-air prison camp because of the brutal and illegal Israeli blockade.
Today the Palestinian camp is deeply divided between the West Bank, ruled by
the Fatah-dominated PA, and the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas. Hamas is
vociferously and violently opposed to the peace talks with the Jewish state.
It maintains that Abbas has no mandate to represent the Palestinians. Its
military wing reinforced the message by killing four Jewish
settlers<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/aug/31/israelis-shot-dead-west-bank>in
Hebron on the eve of the talks. Hamas's capacity to play the spoiler
should not be under-estimated. Even in the highly unlikely event of Abbas
reaching a peace agreement with Israel, it is difficult to see how he would
impose it on Palestinians in the teeth of such strong opposition.
Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister and leader of the Likud
party, enjoys a more solid power base at home but he, too, is subject to
severe constraints on his freedom of action. His coalition partners are the
Labour party, Yisrael
Beitenu<http://www.knesset.gov.il/faction/eng/FactionPage_eng.asp?PG=101>,
and Shas <http://www.knesset.gov.il/faction/eng/FactionPage_eng.asp?PG=2>.
Together they command a comfortable majority of 66 seats in the 120-member
Knesset, Israel's parliament.
Confronted with painful choices over the future of the West Bank, however,
the coalition is likely to fall apart. Likud used to regard Judea and
Samaria, the Biblical names for the West Bank, as an integral part of the
land of Israel. Yisrael Beitenu and Shas still do. Labour, with only 11
seats in the Knesset, carries little weight. This is the most rightwing,
chauvinistic and racist government in Israel's history. The ideological
makeup of the government militates against a peace deal with the
Palestinians.
Netanyahu is not a dove who has fallen among hawks. On the contrary, he is a
rightwing nationalist, a believer in Greater Israel and a proponent of the
strategy of the iron
wall<http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jan/07/gaza-israel-palestine>,
of dealing with the Palestinians from a position of unassailable military
strength. He grew up in a nationalistic Jewish home. His father, Ben-Zion
Netanyahu, who at 100 years old is still a force to be reckoned with, was
the secretary of Ze'ev
Jabotinsky<http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/biography/jabotinsky.html>,
the spiritual father of the Israeli right. Netanyahu junior belongs to the
hawkish wing of the Likud. He denounced the 1993 Oslo Accord between Israel
and the PLO as incompatible either with Israel's security or with the
historic right of the Jewish people to the whole land of Israel. The policy
guidelines of his first government, when the Likud came to power in 1996,
amounted to a declaration of war on the peace process. Netanyahu spent his
three years as prime minister in a largely successful attempt to destroy the
foundations for peace with the Palestinians that his Labour predecessors had
built.
To his second term as prime minister Netanyahu brings the same old
ideological baggage and the same dogged determination to deny the
Palestinian people the same right to national self-determination that Israel
exercised back in 1948. His rhetoric has changed, but his policy can still
be summed up in one ominous word:
politicide<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politicide>– to deny the
Palestinian people any independent political existence in
Palestine. This world view identifies him not as a genuine partner to
President Abbas on the road to peace but as the proponent of permanent
conflict.
Yet the possibility of a change of heart cannot be entirely ruled out. Maybe
Netanyahu will surprise us all by moving on from the relentless rejectionism
of the past to become a peacemaker. And maybe the pope will start smoking
pot.
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