Ramallah after the vote, December 2012. Photo from France24.com

The Obama administration’s refusal to support Palestine as a symbolic “observer state” in the United Nations sends a strong signal that all will be business as usual during the second term.  Worse, with its latest and most shameful capitulation to AIPAC and the pro-Israel lobby in the U.S., the United States has essentially endorsed a No State Solution between Israel and Palestine.

Official U.S. policy has long been in support of a negotiated settlement that would produce two states, Israel and Palestine, existing side by side in peace.  But during the “peace process” of the last twenty years, Israel’s actions have undermined that goal.   Since the famous Rabin-Arafat handshake on the White House lawn in 1993, which marked the beginning of the Oslo process, settler population in the West Bank has rocketed from 109,000 to more than 350,000.  One of the largest settlements, Ariel (20,000) has been absorbed into “greater Israel” by a separation wall that veers deep inside the West Bank; plans are in place to thus incorporate a second settlement, Ma’ale Adumim (34,000).  A ring of Jewish settlements all but surrounds East Jerusalem, crippling the dream of making the Holy City the future capital of Palestine.  Settlements, checkpoints, roadblocks, settlers-only roads, and Israel’s full military occupation of 60 percent of the West Bank: all have combined to carve a would-be Palestine into disjointed cantons, not the “viable and contiguous” land that the U.S. officially seeks for Palestine.  Rockets from Gaza or, in past years, suicide bombers from the West Bank have clearly undermined the Palestinians’ own case.  But the Israeli seizure of Palestinian land has continued apace, regardless of the level of violence.

Slur in the eyeblack. Photo by James G., via Flickr

Three hurtful words, scrawled in black circles under the eyes of a ballplayer named Yunel Escobar: Tu ere[s] maricón.  The message, conveyed in the eyeblack of the Toronto Blue Jays shortstop during a recent game, means, You’re a faggot.  That’s hate language, and reaction was swift and stern.  Major league baseball launched an investigation, the Blue Jays suspended Escobar for three games and enrolled him in “sensitivity training,” and he gave the obligatory apology in front of the microphones. Few if anyone publicly complained that, hurtful or not, homophobic or not, Escobar’s free speech rights trumped the concerns of others wounded by his words.  No one said Escobar should be able to continue displaying the slur.

“Given the reaction of the offended community, Escobar’s punishment was absolutely justifiable and necessary to maintain order in society,” wrote Stacie Brown on policymic.  In other words, the community came together and shut Escobar up, due to a collective sense of mutual respect for the rights of others not to be hurt by hateful speech.  Society has forged standards of respect and unacceptability about racial, ethnic, anti-Semitic and homophobic slurs.  Rightly or wrongly, the message is:  use certain hateful words in public, and you’ll pay the price.  So why is there a different set of values at work when it comes to the hurt caused Muslims by hateful, Islamophobic characterizations of the Prophet Mohammed, or denigrations of Islam?  Go to Salon…

Anthony Shadid, at work in Cairo. Photo by Ed Ou. Used with permission.

Rare is the day when the death of a journalist merits a national period of mourning.  But that’s how the passing of New York Times correspondent Anthony Shadid feels from here.

Shadid, who won two Pulitzer Prizes while with the Washington Post, was well known for his courage, having survived a shooting in the West Bank (most likely by an Israeli sniper), a kidnapping in Libya, harassment and intimidation by Mubarak cronies in Egypt, and, as an unembedded Post correspondent, the American invasion of Iraq. “After anthony shadid’s unauthorized trip into Syria, the Gov put him on television and called him a spy,” tweeted Shadid’s Times colleague, David Kirkpatrick. “He went back again.”

Among the many things ultimately at stake in the first democratic elections in Egypt in decades is the price of food. High prices — for bread, in particular — helped fuel the protests in Tahrir Square back in January. Experts say that if Egypt’s going to have any chance at feeding its 85 million people, it needs a food policy do-over. Food for 9 Billion, a collaboration between Marketplace Radio (US), the PBS Newshour (US), the Center for Investigative Reporting and Homelands Productions, is about the global challenge of feeding a growing world.    Click here for Sandy Tolan’s report from Marketplace, on the market realities of food independence, produced with Charlotte Buchen.  Click here for PBS Newshour piece by Tolan and Buchen.  And click on “view full post” below for their analysis of the issue of food sovereignty in Egypt.

A masterpiece on display at a tiny art academy in Ramallah

The two-year odyssey of Picasso’s “Buste de Femme” goes far beyond the art itself:  it’s about protocols, “peace” agreements, ports and checkpoints.  And it demonstrates how art can play a role in the nationalist vision of an occupied people struggling for some normalcy while forging the nascent institutions of a state. Read more, from Al Jazeera English…

A secret meeting 44 years ago could have changed the course of Middle Eastern history. But it never happened.

Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970)

In this part of the world, carrying tragic dates around in your head is kind of like breathing: you do it automatically, without thinking. This time of year, for Palestinians, June 5 marks the 44th anniversary of their occupation by Israel. June 6, in the evening, evokes the darkness when Ramallah fell, and finally people realised that the tanks rolling into town were not Iraqis sent to the aid of the local people: they belonged to the army of Israel.

It’s always bizarre to watch the cheering throng of US congressmen, their pockets lined with AIPAC contributions, fawn over a visiting Israeli leader as if he were a conquering war hero of their own.  But seen on YouTube from the West Bank, Binyamin Netanyahu’s fanciful walk through Middle East diplomacy, and his disingenuous endorsement of peace and democracy – accompanied by an estimated 55 standing ovations – was truly surreal. Read more, from Al-Jazeera English…

A just and durable peace need not be based on love or appreciation. But it must be based on dignity, equality, and mutual respect.

With a revolutionary spirit in the Middle Eastern air, with momentum building for unilateral recognition of Palestinian statehood at the United Nations this September, and a virtual certainty of a coming Palestinian majority on the lands “between the river and the sea,” plans discarded long ago are reemerging.  Read more, from the Christian Science Monitor…

Most Americans, Jew and Gentile, grew up with the Leon Uris history of the struggle for the Holy Land. Exodus chronicles the heroic birth of Israel out of the ashes of the Holocaust. There the story ends; there is no other narrative.  This politically convenient and magnificently incomplete version of history remains the dominant American narrative of the tragedy known as Israel and Palestine. Despite the cracks in that narrative in recent years, the über story of Exodus – Uris’ 1958 mega-bestseller, and the subsequent Hollywood film starring Paul Newman – still holds a tremendous grip on the American imagination.  Read more, from Al-Jazeera English…

Uncle Sam to his shrink:  “For six decades I’ve been pretending to be the honest broker — but I’m here to tell you: It’s all lies!”

Scene: A psychiatrist’s office in a nondescript strip mall in suburban Virginia. Dr. Weller, a clean-shaven, balding man in his sixties, wearing horn-rimmed glasses, khaki pants and a loose knit sweater with suede elbow patches, moves across the carpeted floor to greet his new client. At the doorway stands a tall, rangy senior citizen with a pointed white beard and top hat with red and white stripes and a white star on a blue background. Dr. Weller extends his hand.  Read more, from Salon…

The wounds of its people’s tragic history have trapped Israel in a cycle of violence

Why does Israel continue to act against its own interests?  Over the years, and especially since 2006, the Jewish state’s deadly, over-the-top military actions in response to provocations from Hamas and Hezbollah — and now from a flotilla ferrying humanitarian aid to Gaza — have backfired. And in each case, the Jewish state has grown less secure by increasing its international isolation and fueling fury much closer to home. Read more, from Salon…