Open Letter to Israel

                     

I am an American woman and U.S. citizen – a staunch supporter of Israel. 

I’ve admired the Israeli people for years -- long after I got over my teenage infatuation with Ari ben Canaan (Exodus, 1958).  For years, I fervently believed in the courage and fearlessness of the early underground, Haganah (IDF), the inherent romantic ideal of the Sabra and the immensely sensible structure of the Kibbutzim.  

Your people brought forth a veritable garden from the dry and rocky Negev Desert.  You elected the miraculously astute Golda Meir as your Prime Minister long before most countries would take their women seriously as political leaders.  And, you allowed your women to fight.  This is a country to be proud of, I remember thinking – you were resourceful, brainy and courageous.

But then, you elected Benjamin Netanyahu as your Prime Minister and I began to doubt.  Netanyahu appears to have no desire for the peace process.  I believe that he hates the Arabs and thinks the only thing they understand is force; to wit, the long-standing wars and the continued illegal settlements. He is pompous, he is arrogant; he is a destroyer, not a builder.  

I have come to despise his muscle-flexing and his interminable fear-mongering over Iran.

And now, after his duplicitous behavior in concert with our Speaker of the House of Representatives, I believe he is not only careless, by his reckless interference in our political system, but is a danger to our country as well as yours.

Bradley Burston in a recent piece in Ha’aretz, says of your prime minister  “. . . he has poisoned his country. Israel is broken and battered and weak with fear... His legacy is decay."

If you re-elect Benjamin Netanyahu, he and his bellicose defense minister, Avignor Lieberman could take us ALL to war with Iran, as we Americans will never be far from our greatest ally -- you. However, I do not want more war and I do not believe that the majority of your people want war. 

And that is why I feel I must speak to you.  I do not wish to interfere in the internal politics of Israel – I speak only because your decision has a direct bearing on my life and the lives of my children.

Please do not allow Benjamin Netanyahu and his war-mongering party this opportunity. Please remind me and the rest of the world that Israel is made of sterner stuff.  Show us the gutsy, courageous and dynamic people you have always been.    

Make the change!      

Chuck Hagel for Defense

I am very confused and more disappointed in our Congress than ever when I hear reasonably intelligent senators like Lindsay Graham say that Chuck Hagel would be “very antagonistic toward the state of Israel” if he becomes Secretary of Defense.  How does he come to this point of view? 

Well, it seems, that in a 2006 interview, Mr. Hagel made the comment that the "political reality" in Washington was that "the Jewish lobby intimidates a lot of people up here," presumably a statement that reeks of anti-Semitism.  Jewish lobby is a politically incorrect statement to the conservative right, as no one wants to admit that the current bellicose Netanyahu government controls a lot of what does go on in Washington.  So perhaps Israeli lobby would have been a more appropriate term. But the Netanyahu goverment is loved neither by all Israelis, nor all Jews and is farther right in the conservative sense than most of the tea party in our own House of Representatives.  They worked furiously with the help of Sheldon Adelson’s billions and other wealthy Americans to elect Mitt Romney for president in November.  If this is not lobbying, what is? 

We have hundreds of lobbies and lobbyists in Washington; why is Jewish lobby such a controversial term anyway?  In a recent article by Richard Cohen in The Washington Post, he discusses Anita Shapira’s new book, “Israel:  a History” in which she freely uses the term, Jewish lobby. “Shapira is professor emeritus at Tel Aviv University,” writes Cohen. 

 I had believed Lindsay Graham to be less partisan than he’s shown himself to be.  But then, look what happened to McCain whose petulant attitude towards all things Obama, began to take shape after the election in 2008. As I think about it, perhaps that is why Graham is so virulent in his opposition to Hagel:  he (Graham) is and has always been a McCain supporter and Hagel (a Republican) supported Obama instead of McCain in 2008.  In my opinion this is even more evidence that his view of the world would be less partisan and more thoughtful. 

Aside from the issue of anti-semitism which some claim disqualifies Mr Hagel,  he is a fully qualified candidate, not only by virtue of his senate career, but by virtue of his combat experience as a grunt during the war in Vietnam during which he earned not one, but two Purple Hearts. He has the experience and understanding of the enlisted man and will  not only be unwilling to send them in to battle unnecessarily but support them when they return home.  

He will counsel diplomacy – another dirty word to some – and will attempt to bring sanity to the manic leader in the Middle East, who is twitching to drop a bomb on Iran and then wait for the U.S. military to clean up his mess.  Additionally, he urges talks with Hamas, the despised Palestinians, and others in that Middle Eastern caldron of hate.   

That Mr. Hagel will not be a puppet to Benjamin Netanyahu is evident in a statement he made in 2008: “I am not an Israeli senator; I am a United States senator.”  This is not a statement made by an anti-Semitic, dear readers, this is a statement made by a true patriot whose own country is his primary concern. And if Mr. Graham truly believes that former Senator Hagel as Secretary of Defense will be antagonistic towards the state of Israel because he believes there is an Israeli Lobby in Washington, he should wake up.  It exists -- now, during the campaign and will continue to exist after Netanyahu gains another term as Prime Minister (as is expected) on the 22nd of this month.  

Ahmadinijad's Last Visit to the UN

The president of Iran has been interviewed ad infinitum by almost every major electronic news source out there – most recently, today on Fareed Zakaria’s GPS on CNN.  
 

He’s a bit contentious, and circular in his answers.   He seems to enjoy putting his interviewers down while smiling wisely and condescendingly, as the interpreter drones on. But make no mistake: this man is a rational being with a weakness, I think, for the Big Apple.

In his interview with Fareed, he discussed the fact that while in New York, he spent most of his time riding from the UN building to his hotel and back again and even apologized for inconveniencing the people of NYC for having to wait as his motorcade passed by.  Charming.

 

Perhaps he felt magnanimous, riding on a phantom wave from a “news” story out of FARS this past week, (the “official” news source of Iran), which quoted verbatim a spoof from The Onion, that President Ahmadinijad was preferred over President Obama by a large segment of our southern population in a recent poll. The almost entirely plagiarized piece quoted a make believe West Virginian as saying, “he (Ahmadinijad)  takes national defense seriously and he’d never let some gay protesters tell him how to run his country like Obama does.”  

 

FARS has since apologized for falling for satirical piece in The Onion and publishing it.

 

Ahmadinijad knows he is virtually a “lame duck” with Iranian elections coming along in 2013 and the mullahs back home issuing mysterious comments that iran will be moving to a more moderate regime soon.

 

I’m happy he had all the attention he craves here in the States.  But since the demographics in Iran run toward a youthful, more educated  and sophisticated population, I don’t think we’ll see the likes of him again. 

 

I can dream, can’t I?

Voices from Tahrir

My heartfelt congratulations to the people in Tahrir Square. Now that Mubarek is gone, what next?

Will the U.S. be happy with the results of a free democratic election, no matter who becomes the next Egyptian leader? Even if the Muslim Brotherhood gains seats in the newly formed Parliament, it does not mean it is not a democratic process. The Brotherhood, as I understand it, represents no more than 25 or 30 percent of the population, but that is a significant minority which must be heard.

The fear is of course that a new Egyptian democracy will be hijacked as it was in Iran June a year and a half ago or back when the Shah was removed from his throne during the Iranian Revolution in 1979. The people of Egypt are not going to let this happen: theirs is an educated and intelligent movement and they have history to learn from.

The U.S. can not support democratic elections in the middle east and then quarrel with the results.