RUTHFULLY YOURS

http://mosaicmagazine.com/supplemental/2014/03/two-state-minus/?utm_source=Mosaic+Daily+Email&utm_campaign=2ecf3a11ca-2014_3_10&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_0b0517b2ab-2ecf3a11ca-41165129

Oh Puleez!…Hillel Halkin is an articulate writer….In the most erudite and elegant prose he straddles every fence….and remains stranded in blatherdom because he always returns to the “legitimate needs” of the Arabs. rsk

I agree with Yoav Sorek that we should look forward to the day when there are no signs in the Land of Israel forbidding Jews to travel in parts of their historic homeland. But we should also look forward to there being no walls, fences, and roadblocks preventing and encumbering Palestinians from traveling in far more extensive parts of their historic homeland. However justified these may be at the present moment by considerations of security, they are surely more of an inconvenience and humiliation to Palestinians Arabs than the ban on travel in Area A is to Israeli Jews.

I point this out not because I wish to engage in the who’s right/who’s wrong debate that has characterized most discussions of the Israeli-Palestinian issue and that characterizes much of Yoav Sorek’s essay. Although I’m an Israeli and happen to think, if not in terms as black-and-white as Sorek’s, that my side has been more right than wrong, that’s not something I expect to convince the other side of. I point it out because any discussion of the problem that does not take into account the legitimate needs of both sides will just keep going around in circles.

Sorek is one of a growing number of people in Israel and elsewhere to argue that the conventional two-state solution for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict cannot be implemented because it does not satisfy these legitimate needs and it must therefore be abandoned in favor of its one-state alternative. With the first half of that proposition, I once again agree. Dividing the territory between the Mediterranean and the Jordan into an Israel and Palestine that will, like Israel and Egypt, live with little contact on either side of a sealed border requiring passports and visas to cross is not possible. Israelis and Palestinians are not separable like Israelis and Egyptians. They are irreversibly scrambled together, with over a million Palestinians Arabs now living in Israel and over a half-million Israeli Jews in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. Moreover, a majority of each people thinks it has a right—if not necessarily an exclusive one—to the entirety of this territory. No approach to the problem that fails to take these facts and feelings into account can work.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/articles/other-russian-crackdown_784284.html On February 24, while Ukrainian protesters were still reveling in their victory over corrupt pro-Russian president Viktor Yanukovych, eight Russians stood in a Moscow courtroom to hear their sentences in a blatant show trial stemming from the last of Moscow’s massive street protests two years ago. Seven men convicted on trumped-up charges of rioting […]

http://www.weeklystandard.com/articles/obama-s-fantasy-based-foreign-policy_784266.html?page=1

On February 23, five days before Russia invaded Ukraine, National Security Adviser Susan Rice appeared on Meet the Press and shrugged off suggestions that Russia was preparing any kind of military intervention: “It’s in nobody’s interest to see violence returned and the situation escalate.” A return to a “Cold War construct” isn’t necessary, Rice insisted, because such thinking “is long out of date” and “doesn’t reflect the realities of the 21st century.” Even if Vladimir Putin sees the world this way, Rice argued, it is “not in the United States’ interests” to do so.

It was a remarkably transparent case of pretending the world is what we wish it to be, rather than seeing it as it is.

On February 28, Russian troops poured into Ukraine. As they did, Secretary of State John Kerry spoke to Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov, his Russian counterpart. Kerry briefed reporters after their talk, plainly unaware of the developments on the ground. Kerry said that Russia wants to help Ukraine with its economic problems. Lavrov had told him “that they are prepared to be engaged and be involved in helping to deal with the economic transition that needs to take place at this point.”

Hours later, television screens across the world displayed images of Russian soldiers infiltrating Crimea and Russian artillery rolling through Sevastopol. Obama administration officials told CNN’s Barbara Starr that the incursion was not “an invasion” but an “uncontested arrival” and that this distinction was “key” to understanding the new developments.

URL to article: http://pjmedia.com/claudiarosett/truth-lies-and-iranian-weapons-shipments/

For Iran’s foreign minister and chief nuclear negotiator Mohammad Javad Zarif, it had to be an awkward moment. There he is, the “moderate” face of Iran, fluent in English, educated in the U.S., jetting around the world telling everyone that Iran will never give up its nuclear facilities — but don’t worry because Iran’s nuclear program is “nothing but peaceful.”

And then the Israelis go and fracture Zarif’s “nothing but peaceful” narrative by interdicting yet another of those big illicit Iranian weapons shipments. On March 5, Israeli commandos board a freighter in the Red Sea, which is heading for Port Sudan after taking on cargo at ports including Iran’s Bandar Abbas.

Onboard they find crates of Syrian-made M-302 rockets, hidden by bags of made-in-Iran cement. They release statements and videos [1], showing the rockets and explaining that they had been tracking this shipment for months — as the rockets were flown from Damascus to Tehran, transported to the Iranian port of Bandar Abbas, and loaded onto the freighter, a Panama-flagged ship called the Klos C. The Israelis say these rockets were meant to be smuggled overland from Sudan across Sinai and into Gaza, where they would have provided Palestinian terrorists with a game-changing range covering almost all of Israel.

That doesn’t sound peaceful at all. Even worse for Zarif, it comes just as AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, is wrapping up its annual meeting in Washington — where Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has just given a speech warning about the dangerous, aggressive agenda of Iran (read Bridget Johnson’s report here [2]). It illustrates the point.

http://pjmedia.com/andrewklavan/2014/03/09/mitch-mcconnell-beclowns-himself/?print=1

I have plenty of misgivings about the GOP and the oldies versus the new guys…..but when a Republican joins the baying against the Tea Party and sounds nastier than the Dems…he should have a good look at the average age of those who attended CPAC….the vast majority were young and eager and spirited unlike the old guard in its dotage…..rsk

Politics requires a sense of humor. On the one hand you have your sacred principles. On the other hand, you have the legion of Bozos, criminals, dirtbags and lowlifes whom you expect to enact those principles into law. If that’s not a recipe for comedy, I don’t know what is.

So we conservatives stand for liberty, the inalienable rights of man, the equality of all people in the eyes of their Creator. And to realize these principles we have the Republicans. If you’re not laughing by now, you’re probably rocketing off the padded walls of your cell. Trust me on this: laugh — you’ll live longer.

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, under apparently zero real threat from primary challenger businessman Matt Bevin, has boldly announced to the New York Times that Tea Party candidates don’t stand a chance in the upcoming midterms. “I think we are going to crush them everywhere,” McConnell blithered to his Timesian pals. ”I don’t think they are going to have a single nominee anywhere in the country.”

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372980/print

In a state by state election survey that I am doing for Family Security Matters (see http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/,http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/publications/detail/texas-2014-candidates-for-congress-where-they-stand)it is astonishing what a hot button issue repealing Obamacare has become among incumbents and challengers….RSK

The American people realize that Obamacare is a very bad policy. But more and more conservatives agree that we need to offer a solid alternative before voters reject Obamacare root and branch. Recently, three prominent Republican senators — Richard Burr (N.C.), Tom Coburn (Okla.), and Orrin Hatch (Utah) — unveiled an alternative proposal. In this article, I would like to outline my own.

The proposal I suggest would achieve four remarkable things: It would be more progressive than Obamacare, because it would involve more distribution from higher- to lower-income households. It would provide genuine protection for people who have a preexisting condition, as opposed to the bait-and-switch promises of Obamacare. It would provide genuine access to care for everyone, as opposed to leaving 30 million uninsured, as Obamacare does. And it would work in practice, primarily because it would confine the role of government to setting a few simple rules of the game, leaving individual choice and the marketplace to do the heavy lifting.

I call this reform a “consensus reform” because it draws not just on such right-of-center think tanks as the Heritage Foundation, the Cato Institute, and the American Enterprise Institute but also on such left-of-center think tanks as the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, and various scholars including President Obama’s former and current economic advisers, Peter Orszag and Jason Furman. It takes the best ideas these folks have offered and combines them with an important principle: No plan designed by those at the top can ever work unless people at the bottom have an economic incentive to make it work.

Further, the ideas presented here are consistent with the health-care plan John McCain endorsed when he ran for president and with health-care-reform legislation introduced by Senator Tom Coburn, Representative Paul Ryan (Wis.), and other Republican members of Congress. So it could easily be adopted as the Republican alternative to Obamacare.

Here are the essential elements.

Choice. People should be able to choose a health-care plan that fits their individual and family needs, rather than a plan designed by bureaucrats in Washington. This means no mandate. Men shouldn’t have to buy maternity coverage; women shouldn’t have to buy coverage for prostate-cancer tests; teetotalers shouldn’t have to buy substance-abuse insurance; etc. And no one should have to buy coverage for preventive procedures that health researchers have known for years are not cost-effective.

It is commonly believed that, without a mandate, people will game the system — waiting until they get sick to enroll. But we have found a way to handle this problem in Medicare Part B, Medicare Part C, and Medigap insurance without any mandate. In all three cases, the insurance is guaranteed-issue (no one can be turned down) and community-rated (no one can be charged a higher premium because of a health condition). But people are not permitted to game the system. If you don’t enroll when you are first eligible, you will be charged a penalty, and, in the Medigap market, you may be charged a premium that does reflect your health status.

Had we accepted the principle of choice in designing a health-care reform, we would not face the prospect of up to 10 million individual policyholders’ losing insurance they were promised they could keep. We would also not face the prospect of millions of additional people’s fearing the loss of their employer plans.

http://www.nationalreview.com/node/372988/print

PULEEZ! BECK WAS GREAT AT POLITICS…EVEN EDGY…BUT CULTURE? ….RSK

Glenn Beck is tired of politics.

“I think politics is a game, and I think people watch politics as a game, like they watch the NFL,” he tells me, leaning back in his chair. He once thought Washington politicians “actually believed in something.” Now, he says, “I don’t think they do.”

Beck hasn’t lost respect for all politicians, just most of them. On the right, he likes Utah’s Mike Lee, Texas’s Ted Cruz, and Kentucky’s Rand Paul. He respects anybody who goes to Washington and sticks to his principles — even the socialist senator Bernie Sanders. “I’m sure Bernie would disagree, but Bernie and I could be fast friends because he’s doing what he said he’d do,” he says. “ Same with Dennis Kucinich, aliens and all.”

Beck’s disenchantment with news and politics aren’t just for show. Though best known for his flame-throwing political commentary, he is turning his attention to cultural projects like plays and movies. His years in TV, he says, have taught him that news is secondary to culture. “News,” he says, is simply “what the culture allows.”

http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=7629

When U.S. President Barack Obama wants the Jewish community to sit up and listen to what he thinks about Israel and the Middle East, he regularly does two things. One is to call in Jeffrey Goldberg, a writer for Bloomberg View and The Atlantic, to interview him on the subject. The second is to let The New York Times know what’s fit to print in their news stories and especially their op-eds and editorials about the subject. Of course, the White House need not issue directives to writers or editors at The Times, though for all I know it might. An interview with Jeffrey Goldberg will convey the message and do the trick. So too will comments the president makes in public. One thing you will never find is any space between Barack Obama’s stated views on Israel and those of the staff of The New York Times opinion pages in the days and weeks that follow.

Last week, just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was flying to the United States to meet with Obama, and speak at the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee convention, the White House invited Goldberg back in to set the stage before Netanyahu might seize it from him. The text of the conversation was released as the AIPAC conference was starting up.

Even Goldberg, a fan of the president, and a journalist more than happy to see and present the president in the best light as a true friend of Israel (one who knows better than Israel’s elected leaders and the Israeli voters what is really best for them), seemed to think the president stepped over the line this time.

http://yeoldecrabb.com/

The real “red line”

Recorded history is generally a straight-line narrative, often written with prejudice, and as the cliché has it, by the victors.

Only those involved in writing it, or more importantly, living through it, know the many cross-currents that because they do not present a clear picture of events defy immediate balanced analysis. These truths apply to any moment in history but particularly to those when violent events or revolutionary technology changes the pattern of life for everyone.

We are obviously in one of those periods on several scores by any calculation.

But while history may or may not repeat itself, there are permanent aspects of the relationships among nations. And we live with contemporary manifestations of the intricate nature of those liaisons.

Among those which is of ultimate importance is the integrity of the national state as a cornerstone of international law.

With the expansion of the concept of the European nation-state after the NapoleonicWars, its further consolidation in the 19th century, and Woodrow Wilson’s blessing – if failure of implementation — after World War I, conquest, international acceptance and treaty obligations have made national boundaries sacrosanct.

When they have been violated deliberately by a rogue power, it has led to even more bloodletting on the Old Continent where they had been enshrined to prevent just that very catastrophe, and now expanded however unfittingly to a vast new world in Latin America, Asia and Africa.

http://www.nysun.com/foreign/the-glick-plan/88613/Please read at the site

President Obama will meet a week hence with the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas. Israel’s premier, Benjamin Netanyahu, says he is prepared to make a “historic peace.” The White House reckons his choice is limited. “What is his long-term answer for Israel,” asks the New York Times in an editorial, “if not a two-state solution?”

How about the Glick Plan?

No one is calling it that — yet. It is being advanced by one of Israel’s most brilliant journalists, Caroline Glick, in a new book, “The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan for Peace in the Middle East.” It sketches an alternative to America’s pursuit of a two-state plan in a region where only one state has managed a real democracy.

Ms. Glick’s idea is for Israel formally to incorporate the West Bank into its sovereign territory and govern it as part of a single state. It’s a radical proposal advanced in time’s nick for those who doubt the framework Secretary of State Kerry is seeking for talks about a two-state solution. She lays the arguments out beautifully, and her plan deserves attention on Capitol Hill.

No doubt it will be attacked as a flirtation with bi-nationalism, a movement that would end Israel’s existence as a Jewish state and establish a secular state that, in theory, has no religious identity. Bi-nationalism in recent decades has been embraced by scores of foes of Zionism, including Edward Said, John Mearsheimer, and Tony Judt.

Ms. Glick’s vision is different. She is for a single Jewish state. She calls the two-state solution — the idea of a Palestinian Arab state beside Israel — “among the most irrational, unsuccessful policies the United States has ever adopted.” She counts more than a dozen efforts to advance it over the past 90 years. Between 1970 and 2013, she reckons, America alone presented nine two-state peace plans.

One part of Ms. Glick’s book reprises how the movement for Palestinian Arab statehood was poisoned by the collaboration of the Jerusalem mufti, Haj Amin el-Husseini, and Hitler. I’ve long thought this element of the story is too little appreciated. Why should the Palestinian Arabs be the only ally of Hitler to be shielded from the consequences of the Nazi defeat?

Another part of Ms. Glick’s book focuses on the demographic argument for a two-state compromise. Caviling about population trends has always struck me as a pernicious line, presupposing, as it does, that the Jewish people, so ingenious at so many things, cannot compete in going forth and multiplying.

This assumption is even eating at Mr. Obama’s confidence in the Jews. That jumps out from Jeffrey Goldberg’s latest — and now famous — interview with the President. Mr. Obama pointedly warned of what Mr. Goldberg characterizes as a “demographic disaster,” in which Israel could lose its Jewish majority……READ AT THE SI