Queen Rania of Jordan: Hardliners are now the face of Israel

"What do chocolate, cookies, A4 paper, potato chips, cumin, toys, jelly, nuts, dried fruit, nutmeg, and goats have in common? It´s a tricky one. If you´re a moderate, they have nothing in common. But if you are a hard-line Israeli politician, they are all potentially dangerous goods that could threaten Israel´s security. It seems that side of the political spectrum has won the argument, as all the above are items that the Israeli government has prohibited from entering Gaza.

It´s understandable. I mean, you can inflict a lot of damage on your oppressors with a chocolate biscuit. And those paper cuts, boy, they can really hurt. But I don´t want to over-dramatize the situation, because it´s not all doom and gloom down in Gaza. Many items are allowed in: mops, sponges for washing, egg cartons, glass cleaner, hair combs, plastic chicken cages, and lentils, for example. So what exactly are the 1.5 million Gazan people complaining about? What could possibly have been on the Freedom Flotilla that Israeli commandos attacked early last Sunday morning in international waters, in yet another assault that has appalled our global community?

By most accounts, on the flotilla were 10,000 tonnes of, not guns, but vital humanitarian aid. The people of Gaza desperately need it to survive the 1,000 days of illegal blockade which has crippled Gaza and reduced it to a barely functioning, open-air prison. This is aid like cement to rebuild homes, which have lain in rubble and ruin since the monstrous attacks on Gaza last year; school supplies; and medical equipment, like water purification tablets and wheelchairs.

The attack stunned the world because of its blatant and absurd disregard for anything resembling international law, human rights, and diplomatic norms. Its glaring outrageousness stunned, but didn´t surprise, me. It cannot be viewed in isolation. It is another upshot of a dogma long fermenting on Israel´s political landscape.

It is a doctrine that lives for itself and off others. It survives by tapping into the subliminal and cognisant levels. It implants into public consciousness a set of tenets that see Israeli´s very existence as eternally under threat, to be defended through any means (preferably through use of force to show the enemy who´s boss). It is best served through the adoption of an "us against the world" mentality. By its very nature, hardline ideology is self-serving and self-perpetuating. Its primary goal is to survive – and that precludes everything. If to exist it must redefine what is acceptable, redraw the lines of international law, and re-imagine what weapons are appropriate – so be it. Assigning themselves authority and immunity, Israel´s leaders feel licensed to do whatever they like and not expect an international outcry.

But this hardened path is fraught with dangers for all of us. These radical policies debar Palestinian value and, by extension, human value. Harsh measures then become more palatable. Inflicting violence upon an innocent majority to punish the guilty few now seems necessary. Every day the blockade continues is another day our humanity remains under siege.

The effect is a people trapped between a rock and a hardline policy. The product is desperation; the reaction, more hardline policies, attempting to defend previous hardline policies. After all, did this outrageous attack take place to preserve Israel´s security, or to sustain the blockade itself?

What is most frustrating is Israel´s defence of its actions. By attacking criticism as part of an anti-Israel, anti-Semitic propaganda war, Israel, yet again, fails to understand that the problem is policy, not PR. Now and always, hardline policy and those who embrace it are vessels for darker forces that are at once self-cannibalising and combustible. No good can come of them. They are unsustainable because their sense of righteousness denies human worth. Apart from other hardliners on all sides who now have been gifted the fuel to invigorate their fanaticism and circulate it far and wide, everyone else loses out. The people of Gaza lose out: 80 per cent of them live below the poverty line. The children of Gaza lose out: one third of their schools, destroyed during the attack on Gaza last year, still haven´t been rebuilt. The newborns of Gaza lose out: 95% of Gaza´s nitrate-full water fails the World Health Organization´s standards, leaving thousands of babies at risk of poisoning.

The people of Israel lose out: rejected by a third of the countries in the United Nations, shunned by much of the global community, ordinary Israelis find themselves persona non grata outside their "borders". Living defensively isn´t a way of life; people only thrive on secure foundations. Is the Israeli government really prepared to condemn its own people to the shaky foundations of rule-by-fear, and its consequences?

Israel´s leadership needs to ask itself some tough questions. "Is our long term strategy to rule by fear? Is our long term outlook for the Israeli people one of constant defence? Are these horizons of hopelessness what we want for our people?". And moderates around the world lose out: people like me, who dared to believe that the road to peace doesn´t have to be a lonely and desolate one. That a two-state solution is not the figment of a naïve idealist´s imagination. And those whose ethical responsibility it is now to deal with the science of reality, to form a coalition of humans that question and confront the assumptions of those on their far right, and to reaffirm the ethos of moderation. After all, isn´t moderation where most of the living is done?

Speaking as a moderate, I fear if the tides don´t turn in our region, moderation will be amongst the most painful casualties of continued aggression and hardline policies. As someone who lived through the late King Hussein´s fight for peace, until his very last breath, and watches his son, my husband, King Abdullah, continue that fight, it actually breaks my heart to see us moving further and further away from peace.

Peace. People. Moderation. I would have thought that those were too heavy a price to pay for sustaining a hardened stance. So, when flotillas came to break the blockade, they came to help the people of Gaza. But, just as important, they came to break the blockade on the Israeli mind".

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/queen-rania-of-jordan-hardliners-are-now-the-face-of-israel-1993157.html

Robert Fisk: The truth behind the Israeli propaganda

"I have, of course, been outraged at armed men boarding ships in international waters, killing passengers on board who attempt to resist and then forcing their ship to the hijackers´ home port. I am, of course, talking about the Somali pirates who are preying on Western ships in the Indian Ocean. How dare those terrorists dare to touch our unarmed vessels on the high seas? And how right we are to have our warships there to prevent such terrorist acts.

But whoops! At least the Israelis have not demanded ransom. They just want to get journalists to win the propaganda war for them. Scarcely had the week begun when Israel´s warrior "commandos" stormed a Turkish boat bringing aid to Gaza and shot nine of the passengers dead. Yet by week´s end, the protesters had become "armed peace activists", vicious anti-Semites "professing pacifism, seething with hate, pounding away at another human being with a metal pole". I liked the last bit. The fact that the person being beaten was apparently shooting another human being with a rifle didn´t quite get into this weird version of reality.

Turkish family protests that their sons wanted to be martyrs – something which most Turkish family members might say if their relatives had been shot by the Israelis – had been transformed into confirmation that they had been jihadis. "On that aid ship," a Sri Lankan texted me this week, "I had my niece, nephew and his wife on board. Unfortunately Ahmed (20-year-old nephew) got shot in the leg and now treated (sic) under military custody. I will keep you posted." He did indeed. Within hours, the press was at his family´s home in Australia, demanding to know if Ahmed was a jihadi – or even a potential suicide bomber. Propaganda works, you see. We haven´t seen a frame of film from the protesters because the Israelis have stolen the lot. No one has told us – if the Turkish ship was carrying such ruthless men – how their terrible plots to help the "terrorists" of Gaza were not uncovered in the long voyage from Turkey, even when it called at other ports. But Professor Gil Troy of McGill University in Montreal – in the rabid Canadian National Post, of course – was able to spout all that gunk about "armed peace activists" on Thursday.

I wasn´t personally at all surprised at the killings on the Turkish ship. In Lebanon, I´ve seen this indisciplined rabble of an army – as "elite" as the average rabble of Arab armies – shooting at civilians. I saw them watching the Sabra and Shatila massacre of Palestinians on the morning of 18 September (the last day of the slaughter) by their vicious Lebanese militia allies. I was present at the Qana massacre by Israeli gunners in 1996 – "Arabushim" (the equivalent of the abusive term "Ayrab" in English), one of the gunners called the 106 dead civilians, more than half of them children, in the Israeli press. Then the Israeli government of Nobel laureate Shimon Peres said there were terrorists among the dead civilians – totally untrue, but who cares? – and then came the second Qana massacre in 2006 and then the 2008-09 Gaza slaughter of 1,300 Palestinians, most of them children, and then...

Well, then came the Goldstone report, which found that Israeli troops (as well as Hamas) committed war crimes in Gaza, but this was condemned as anti-Semitic – poor old honourable Goldstone, himself a prominent Jewish jurist from South Africa, slandered as "an evil man" by the raving Al Dershowitz of Harvard – and was called "controversial" by the brave Obama administration. "Controversial", by the way, basically means "fuck you".

There´s doubts about it, you see. It´s dodgy stuff.

But back to our chronology. Then we had the Mossad murder of a Hamas official in Dubai with the Israelis using at least 19 forged passports from Britain and other countries. And the pathetic response of our then foreign secretary, David Miliband? He called it "an incident" – not the murder of the guy in Dubai, mind you, just the forgery of UK passports, a highly "controversial" matter – and then... Well, now we´ve had the shooting down of nine passengers at sea by more Israeli heroes.

The amazing thing in all this is that so many Western journalists – and I´m including the BBC´s pusillanimous coverage of the Gaza aid ships – are writing like Israeli journalists, while many Israeli journalists are writing about the killings with the courage that Western journalists should demonstrate. And about the Israeli army itself. Take Amos Harel´s devastating report in Haaretz which analyses the make-up of the Israeli army´s officer corps. In the past, many of them came from the leftist kibbutzim tradition, from greater Tel Aviv or from the coastal plain of Sharon. In 1990, only 2 per cent of army cadets were religious Orthodox Jews. Today the figure is 30 per cent. Six of the seven lieutenant-colonels in the Golani Brigade are religious. More than 50 per cent of local commanders are "national" religious in some infantry brigades.

There´s nothing wrong with being religious. But – although Harel does not make this point quite so strongly – many of the Orthodox are supporters of the colonisation of the West Bank and thus oppose a Palestinian state.

And the Orthodox colonists are the Israelis who most hate the Palestinians, who want to erase the chances of a Palestinian state as surely as some Hamas officials would like to erase Israel. Ironically, it was senior officers of the "old" Israeli army who first encouraged the "terrorist" Hamas to build mosques in Gaza – as a counterbalance to the "terrorist" Yasser Arafat up in Beirut – and I was a witness to one of their meetings. But it will stay the same old story before the world wakes up. "I have never known an army as democratic as Israel´s," the hapless French philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy said a few hours before the slaughter.

Yes, the Israeli army is second to none, elite, humanitarian, heroic. Just don´t tell the Somali pirates".

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-the-truth-behind-the-israeli-propaganda-1991803.html

[Diary of an Expat Bride] Dollar Days

"[...]A few months after my wedding a Turkish friend of mine invited me to her “gün.” After living in Turkey for several years I was familiar with the gün concept but had yet to attend one personally. Before attending I asked several friends and their mothers how this interesting tradition started in Turkey. “Gün” means day in Turkish. My friend’s mom, Ayşe Teyze, theorized that the concept began before telephones were common in every household. In the past, in her small city near Balıkesir, each woman of the house reserved one day each month where she was home to receive visitors [...]"

"[...]In Turkey, as in many Asian tea-drinking nations, the aesthetic standard for good tea is that it must be sweet and fragrant. Many housewives make up their own mixtures of tea from the different leaves available. There is standard Black Sea tea, mostly grown around Rize. Then there is Ceylon tea. Also there are flavored teas such as bergamot. One of my neighbors taught me her secret of five parts Rize tea to two parts Ceylon to one part Bergamot.

Much pride is taken in serving the tea as well -- whether it’s the tea flavor, tea sets or tea-serving techniques[...]"

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/columnists-203633-tea-ceremonies.html

[Diary of an Expat Bride] Dealing with the ex factor "[...] Marriage is not easy at any age, as each partnership brings different things to the table".

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-202765-132-diary-of-an-expat-bride-dealing-with-the-ex-factor.html

"Turkish mothers-in-law fall into two easily defined categories. Group One is composed of all powerful matriarchs. When their children marry, they involve themselves in every aspect of the new spouse’s life and tend to feel it’s appropriate to dictate how their homes, children and existence in general are run.They have sharp tongues and eagle eyes. They often employ a cleaner to deal with the more mundane tasks in life.

Group Two members are a cross between Wonder Woman and slave. Their homes are spotless, their kitchens always have a surplus of delicious food. Perfectly capable family members become unable to fend for themselves when they’re around, and they do their best to provide for them all. They perform all their duties happily and rarely seem either downtrodden of resentful. [...]"

 http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-202504-132-expat-voice-a-mother-in-law-like-no-other.html

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-201785-132-expat-voice-individualism-vs-the-all-for-one-and-one-for-all-approach.html

"[...] Like the archetype Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams’ classic play, “A Streetcar Named Desire,” I can say that in Turkey, “I’ve always depended on the kindness of strangers.” I don’t worry too much about being stranded in a place where I’m lost, unable to access money and no one speaks English, because my experience tells me the Turks will take care of me. They’ll lead me by the hand to someone they know who speaks English, stay with me until I’ve found my way or even spring for the cost of a cab or bus ride until I’m able to access cash. Such hospitality “is part of our national character,” one student told me [...]"

"The Western world may know it as Noah’s pudding. Turks simply call it aşure, while Malaysians call it bubur asyura".

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-198223-132-expat-voice-asure-celebrate-the-sharing.html

[Diary of an Expat Bride] Baby dreams

http://www.todayszaman.com/tz-web/news-197940-132-diary-of-an-expat-bride-baby-dreams.html

"[...] Having a baby is not as easy as it sounds, especially the older you get. Not only biological but emotional obstacles stand in the way. My friends who married young and had babies right away rarely thought, “Is this the right time?” or “Next April would be the best time to have a baby, after such and such is paid off.” However, the older we get the more we want things to be specifically planned in an almost obsessive way, and mother nature doesn’t always agree. While Can and I knew we wanted to have a baby, we thought it would be best for our respective schedules to wait at least a year before trying, when we would be in a “better position” to have a baby [..]"

"An Egyptian soldier has been killed and at least eight Palestinians hurt in clashes at the Egypt-Gaza border. 

International activists have been trying to take 200 aid trucks into the blockaded Gaza Strip, but Egypt has refused some of the vehicles access.

Dozens of activists were hurt during protests over the convoy on Tuesda [...]"

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/8442758.stm