Perhaps Thomas Friedman has fallen off the flat earth because recently there have been some rather sensible mutterings over at the New York Times. Such as this one:

Op-Ed Columnist – From Tehran to Tel Aviv – NYTimes.com

Still, this much is clear to me: Obama’s new Middle Eastern diplomacy and engagement will involve reining in Israeli bellicosity and a probable cooling of U.S.-Israeli relations. It’s about time. America’s Israel-can-do-no-wrong policy has been disastrous, not least for Israel’s long-term security.

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BBC NEWS | Olmert: Israel withdrawal needed

Outgoing PM Ehud Olmert says Israel must withdraw from almost all the land it occupied in 1967 if it wants peace with Syria and the Palestinians.

He said this would include parts of East Jerusalem, which Palestinians want as the capital of their future state.

Mr Olmert also said any peace deal with Syria would require an Israeli withdrawal from the Golan Heights.

He gave few further details, but said he was prepared to go beyond previous Israeli leaders to achieve peace.

“We have to reach an agreement with the Palestinians, the meaning of which is that in practice we will withdraw from almost all the territories, if not all the territories,” Mr Olmert said.

“We will leave a percentage of these territories in our hands, but will have to give the Palestinians a similar percentage, because without that there will be no peace,” he added.
He said the withdrawals would include Jerusalem, the eastern part of which Israel occupied and annexed after the 1967 war, but which it has long proclaimed as its “eternal, undivided capital”.

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That (the subject of this post) is the New York Times’ characterisation of desperate Palestinians, under a new burst of Israeli terrorism, attempting to obtain basics from Egypt:

Palestinians used a bulldozer to knock down another portion of the wall, originally built by Israel just inside Gaza, to continue their shopping spree.

At this point, I think we can safely take all the Holocaust literature and replace Jews with Palestinians, to obtain the narrative, of future historians and generations, wondering what went wrong… how did we permit such horror?

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Without any hint of irony, Daniel Mendelsohn writes an Op-Ed in the NYT about the recent discovery of letters from Otto Frank:

A Family History Like Too Many Others – New York Times

Above all, such letters demonstrate movingly the overriding preoccupation that nothing was as important as saving the children. “It is for the sake of the children mainly that we have to care for,” Otto Frank wrote. “If only the world were open and I’d been able to send a child to America or Palestine, it would be easier,” my great-uncle mourned as he started losing hope.

[...]

[T]he fact that this latest and unexpected addition to the Frank file was casually found in a relatively neglected American archive reminds us, too, that there are many thousands of similar stories on this side of the Atlantic still waiting to surface, if only we bothered — or knew — to look for them[.]

We would not need to look much farther than the very Palestine that remains closed today, to its own inhabitants.

Crooks and Liars has video of Chuck Hagel (R-NE) laying it out to the Senate on Iraq and the [non-binding] Hagel, Biden, Snowe, Levin resolution against escalation. I guess it takes a Republican to say the things he does, such as point out that the reputation of the U.S is shot in the Middle East. Here is a rough transcript (by me) of a part that I found particularly surprising:

When people have no hope, when there is despair, little else matters. And this is not about terrorists don’t like freedom. Tell that to the Palestinian people who have been chained down for many, many years.

Will someone notify Dershowitz, please?

Juan Cole notes in a blog entry today that:

[...]
Ayman al Zawahiri today made a change in both policies. He wants al Qaeda to pile on in Gaza and to defend Hizbullah in Lebanon.
[...]

From Al Jazeera:

While western analysts are describing Hezbollah as merely an extension of Iran, and therefore "Shia interests," the people of Cairo and Amman, predominantly "Sunni cities" took to the streets carrying pictures of Hasan Nasrallah the Shia Arab leader, defying the "Sunni-Shia rift," described by Peretz.

Most western observers have conveniently ignored widespread Sunni support for Hezbollah throughout the Arab and Muslim world.

Consider also that Nasrullah has extended support to Sunni Palestine. As Juan Cole notes:

As usual, Israel is radicalizing the Muslim world. The US, too, will suffer.

Here is part 2 of the Guardian 3 part series on Israel and apartheid. You can click on the title of the article to view the original piece.

Guardian Unlimited | Brothers in arms – Israel’s secret pact with Pretoria

During the second world war the future South African prime minister John Vorster was interned as a Nazi sympathiser. Three decades later he was being feted in Jerusalem. In the second part of his remarkable special report, Chris McGreal investigates the clandestine alliance between Israel and the apartheid regime, cemented with the ultimate gift of friendship – A-bomb technology

Guardian (UK) is running a three part series on the criticism of Israeli treatment of Palestinians as apartheid, comparing the situation in Palestine/Israel with South Africa. The first part is linked to below. It is fairly meticulous and provides data, anecdotes and quotes to illuminate the issue.

As Noam Chomsky has pointed out multiple times, it is worthwhile to note that criticism of Israel within the country itself is well and alive (as it should be in any nation that claims to be a democracy) in contrast to the blind faith or apologism/defense of all Israeli action within the US, by the administrations and by many Jewish organizations, and even otherwise liberal Jews (multimedia). [Also see: Finkelstein's Beyond Chutzpah].

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Worlds apart
[...]

Some Jewish South Africans and Israelis who lived with apartheid – including politicians, Holocaust survivors and men once condemned as terrorists – describe aspects of modern Israel as disturbingly reminiscent of the old South Africa. Some see the parallels in a matrix of discriminatory practices and controls, and what they describe as naked greed for land seized by the fledgling Israeli state from fleeing Arabs and later from the Palestinians for the ever expanding West Bank settlements. “Apartheid was an extension of the colonial project to dispossess people of their land,” said the Jewish South African cabinet minister and former ANC guerrilla, Ronnie Kasrils, on a visit to Jerusalem. “That is exactly what has happened in Israel and the occupied territories; the use of force and the law to take the land. That is what apartheid and Israel have in common.”

Others see the common ground in the scale of the suffering if not its causes. “If we take the magnitude of the injustice done to the Palestinians by the state of Israel, there is a basis for comparison with apartheid,” said the former Israeli ambassador to South Africa, Alon Liel. “If we take the magnitude of suffering, we are in the same league. Of course apartheid was a very different philosophy from what we do, most of which stems from security considerations. But from the point of view of outcome, we are in the same league.”

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