Tuesday, June 08, 2010

Regime change - attempt #2

After the first time that the Obama admin flipped out on Bibi (ie. the Ramat Shlomo zoning announcement), some trial balloons went out claiming that Obama's real goal was getting a change of the Israeli government (Might have been Jeffrey Goldberg at the Atlantic).  Right after that was a weird, cooked, and soon debunked Haaretz poll claiming that most Israelis thought Obama was sympathetic to their interests.

It's that strange atmosphere that has returned now. Even though the IHH has apparently distributed pictures of  bloodied and bound IDF soldiers, the MSM seems to still be calling these people "peace activists".  It doesn't make sense that this can still be a major international incident (with calls for a UN investigation etc.) when it is so clear that the dead were part of a known extremist group and that they attacked and subdued lightly-armed soldiers.

Previously Obama tried to rally the Europeans and UN against Bibi for the Jlem building freeze.  So it doesn't seem like such a stretch that this international flipout on Bibi is a slightly more subtle attempt to prod Israelis into wanting to swap him for Tzipi Livni.  If this is correct, we can expect to see more of this extreme (and unjustified) criticism of him on an ongoing basis.

A Mearsheimer-ish weekend NYTimes article suggested that Israel is a strategic liability and the US might throw Israel under the bus if there isn't a "2-state solution" soon.  The effect of articles like that might be similar ie. to frighten supporters of Israel into dumping Bibi and avoiding international pariah-hood.

Of course,  Israelis might return to a more dovish gov't if they actually thought that the "peace process" would lead to peace.  But since Obama is trying not to mediate but rather to impose his "obvious" solution  - when the PA will not even agree to sit down in the same room as the Israelis - there is no way this is going to happen.

Monday, June 07, 2010

Having a decent Google ranking due to some good links in 2002-2003 hasn't brought much traffic.  So I haven't had much enthusiasm for writing here.

The flotilla thing of the past week has added another layer of surreal-ness to the situation here.

What seems unprecedented to me is how the facts of the situation are now known - but the governments and media seem to be carrying on as if nothing was learned since the first (now-obsolete) accounts of the peaceniks were made public.  In particular the NYTimes writers (Ethan Bronner, Robert Mackey) seem to be aware of who the IHH are and what happened on the Mavi Marmara but are doing their best to obscure the situation. 

This is really messing me up personally and getting me unfocused and angry.  In a few days I will have gotten accustomed to this new level of unreality.  Reading the NYTimes today reminds me of listening to shortwave broadcasts of  Radio Moscow when I was a teenager.