I'm still busy with things.

Rte. 443 goes thru the West Bank and takes a few minutes off the trip from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv. At the northern (mostly perfunctory) IDF-manned roadblock there's now a large sign that says (approximately) "Welcome to Unit such-and-such - winning fighters."

Open thread (for general discussion)

Last night T. and I went to a bonfire with some friends at the treed area adjacent to the Jerusalem theater. Lots of other groups there with their own fires; also a lot of very wholesome looking teenagers.

Anne Bayefsky on Reed Brody and Human Rights Watch:

...What HRW did do was substitute the voices of alleged victims for universal human rights standards.

If leading international human rights organizations such as Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights/Human Rights First, chose not to apply those standards when anti-Semitism stared them in the face, there is little reason to believe their claims that they now apply those standards to Israel in the same way they apply them to every other state.

Bret Stephens on the Israeli left:

...For those of my readers who politically are somewhere on the Left, here's what the Right thinks of you: Deep down, you have no red lines. You'd rather go down as the morally spotless victim than the morally encumbered victor. You'll sell your birthright not for a mess of potage, but for less: the retrospective pity of future generations.

I know this because it reflects my own suspicions. Because when Rabin and Peres and Barak spoke of red lines, the Right knew they weren't really red lines - and they were right. Because Beilin won't shut up about how close he was at Taba. Because I watched Avraham Burg sucking up to Yasser Abd Rabbo at Davos by cracking anti-Israeli jokes and pleading with his hosts to be invited to future conclaves of the great and good....

Bonfire for Lag B'Omer



Lag B'omer, the Hebrew calendar date which marks the anniversary of the passing of Kabbalist R. Shimon bar Yohai (and falls out next Saturday night), is observed by lighting bonfires.

In my largely yuppified Jerusalem neighborhood, there is a group of Hasidim that take the centuries-old tradition very seriously - and build a huge fire in a vacant lot.

A while back an acquaintance tried to enlist me into the Likud. I've lost touch with said acquaintance, but I'm sure that he opposes the disengagement proposal as he's a heavily ideological fellow.

Open thread (for general comments/discussion)

They put up roadblocks on Emek Refaim road tonite. That might mean a "specific warning".

Recently a number of blogs (British ones in particular) have gotten Draconian about comments.

I've thought about this a fair amount - my new criterion is that I will delete comments that in my view encourage discussions of the sort that most people won't want to read.

Update:

I have realized that I opened a real can of worms by considering comment moderation, and that I don't have the time or will to deal with it. Hence the new blurb at the top of the comment box says that comment moderation is up to you the commentor.

I'm grateful to the person who suggested open threads for ongoing general debates, and hope that as a consequence there will be informative on-topic discussion on the regular threads.

Sounds like the Likud rank & file is leaning away from the "disengagement" plan. On the radio this morning Roni Milo (former MK who rejoined Likud after cofunding a defunct centrist party) was making predictions of economic chaos if the plan is rejected. That's a sign of desperation on Milo's part.

If the plan is defeated then the Likud would be likely replace Sharon somehow (though Sharon has not said that he would resign). Netanyahu seems to played his cards pretty well recently by exhibiting lukewarm pseudo-tough-guy support for the disengagement.

A lot of people think that once the Likud has "voluntarily" accepted the plan, the US will be free to gradually water down its statements regarding Palestinian refugee campees and borders (eg. this very Haaretz-y article which mentions that European leaders have been uttering the words "right of return" a fair amount lately, incidentally demonstrating that siding with the Palestinians is the only guiding principle of their policies).

Take a look at how Reed Brody of Human Rights Watch tries to defend his group's actions at the 2001 Durban conference (here).

This article says that the US is now "soft-pedaling" Bush's stance on refugees and borders in discussions with Arab and European nations. But an anonymous source claims that the US is telling Israel that such talk is just "marketing". Cynics think that there will be gradual backpedaling on the part of the US.

A CNN crew was briefly detained for filming in the "no photography zone" near the Dimona nuclear reactor (report).

The billboard advertisements against the Sharon disengagement plan are well-done - in particular the one that says "You vote 'for', you get Peres" definitely strikes a chord. People do believe that Sharon is not Peres, Beilin, or Barak; but the ad makes you think twice about whether you really know for sure.

On Army Radio this AM, far-left MK Avraham Burg was going on and on about how the Rantisi hit would just create more Palestinian radicals, and how the real problem is that PM Sharon has no program (though Sharon's program is now crystal clear if you ask me).

Burg's every word exudes pompousness, but his most pompous remark was something about how there needs to be a US gov't that will "tell Israel what it needs" - ie. force Israel to do what Avraham Burg wants because Burg can never get elected.

This conference is titled "The Politics of Humanitarianism in the Occupied Territories" and has Huwaida Arraf - the evil queen of the ISM - chairing one panel and appearing in another. Peter Hansen, the baldfaced liar who runs the UN organization responsible for Palestinian "refugee" camps is appearing too.

The list of topics and speakers demonstrates yet more conflation of humanitarian concerns with political activism and sympathy for terrorism (and it's topped off with boring "post-modernist" jargon provided by Prof. Adi Ophir).

The conference is happening up the hill from here at the Van Leer Institute on Tues.-Wed., and will be viewable online. Perhaps someone who is set up with TotalRecorder can record it.

Particularly I'd like to know whether representatives from organizations like Machsom Watch (who seem to sensibly agitate for maximally-humane occupation) or B'Tselem will respond to the likes of Arraf.

My instant response to the Bush-Sharon summit: Bush's stance on Palestinian "refugees" is basic common sense; the vague statement about settlement blocs will make sense to anyone who has travelled from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv on Route 443.

What's truly revolutionary is the way in which Palestinian maximalism and violence are actually setting them back diplomatically. Finally.

Update: jsinger notes in the comments:

Incidentally, remember all the fuss about whether the Geneva Accord conclusively renounced the right of return? As though the fact that the Palestinian signatories claimed it didn't wasn't a plain demonstration that it didn't?

So now Yossi Beilin's counterparts are all on CNN screaming that the right of return may never be given up. Is there any question remaining about what ratifying that treaty would have brought?

This is about the only article I've seen that takes a serious look at the EU investigative report that failed to find any evidence of PA funds reaching terrorists.

The EU should put the report up on the web.

Anne Bayefsky records the stance of Human Rights Watch at the 2001 UN Durban conference:

As we arrived at our meeting the chief Durban representative of Human Rights Watch, advocacy director Reed Brody, publicly announced that as a representative of a Jewish group I was unwelcome and could not attend. The views of a Jewish organization, he explained, would not be objective and the decision on how to vote had to be taken in our absence. Not a single one of the other international NGOs objected.

Update: Reed Brody responds here, but doeson't contradict Bayefsky's basic points:

....In Durban, and its year-long run-up, we campaigned to ensure that the WCAR would be about more than the Middle East. ..... A great achievement of the WCAR process was the unprecedented mobilization of victims of racism from communities around the world, such as the so-called untouchables of South Asia, the Roma of Europe, and blacks in Latin America.

With over 3,000 victims groups present in the pre-WCAR forum of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), organizations like Human Rights Watch and Amnesty International had limited ability to moderate the language of chapters for the NGO declaration. Each chapter was drafted by the affected community, including not only Palestinians but also such groups as Tibetans, Kurds, and Dalits. Many of these chapters were factually supported, powerful documents, but others were not. Our refusal to participate in the voting on the statement and its chapters, and our failed attempt to cast the document as a collection of the "voices of the victims" rather than as a text endorsed by all, was intended precisely to avoid giving a stamp of approval to all parts of the document.

Bayefsky, however, claims that we "said nothing" as the final NGO statement was put together on September 2, 2001, and lent legitimacy to its inflammatory statements about Israel. In fact, as the Post (and virtually every other newspaper in the world) reported on September 3, "The New York-based Human Rights Watch condemned the resolution." The Post quoted me as saying, "Israel has committed serious crimes against the Palestinian people, but it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide and wrong to equate Zionism with racism."

Prior to the declaration's adoption I personally spent hours trying to persuade Arab and Palestinian colleagues to amend this and other language. ....

Brody doesn't address Bayefsky's claim that he announced that her Jewish group was "not objective" and could not participate in the NGO meeting. So we can regard the account as confirmed. And Brody's condemnation of the resolution was made afterwards and not during the proceedings as Brody tries to suggest:

The declaration, adopted by a majority of the 3,000 delegates from 44 regions to the World Conference's Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) forum -- a broad-based summit of groups from around the world involved in human rights issues -- shocked Jewish participants, and many walked out of the meeting.
Some other international human rights groups who were part of the NGO forum, including Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, moved to distance themselves from the declaration.
...
Reed Brody, executive director of the New York-based Human Rights Watch, said: "Israel has committed serious crimes against Palestinian people but it is simply not accurate to use the word genocide and to equate Zionism with racism ... it is now a matter of damage control."

I'm thinking of giving the reader comments a hiatus.

It won't surprise anyone that the EU's conclusion that they haven't been funding Palestinian terrorist activities looks like a farcical whitewash from here.

All reports that I've seen are quite vague as to the actual ponderings of the commission, but they seem to have worked hard to find doubts that they can give the PA the benefit of; commissioner Emma Udwin can't even feign comfort with its efforts:

We are not soft on terrorism. We have checked out every allegation that has been brought to our attention. We have not been able to establish a direct link between our money and terrorism. We welcome the fact that the parliamentarians wanted to look at it. There isn't any form of financial assistance that is 100 percent risk-free. That is as true in the Palestinian territories as it is in Cornwall

These days it seems that PA apologists are increasingly impervious to rational arguments; to the small number of sensible lefties out there, I would emphasize how it's totally insane to compare the situation here to familiar situations in Europe ("Cornwall"?). A reasonable starting point assumes that everything is different.

Separately: Sounds like Jpost editor Bret Stephens is looking for a new job. Perhaps he finds that the news here has gotten too repetitive, or maybe he doesn't like working for a funny-shaped paper that needs to make the text of its daily Wall Street Journal page really skinny.