israel versus

The newest trend in Israeli foreign relations is also the oldest trend, and it boils down to this:

Here, Mr Netanyahu has been clear: he sees no reason to stop the building [of settlements on Palestinian land].

Mr Abbas has been equally clear - he will not sit down with the Israelis until all settlement growth is frozen.

Despite decades now of strenuous efforts at peace-building, we are seriously still at this, the starting point of negotiations. While maintaining this charade of a peace process, Israel continues to do things its own way, insolently continuing to develop illegal settlements, constructing "security" fences to envelope even more Palestinian territory, blocking humanitarian aid efforts and the presence of foreign journalists, and conducting devastating military deployment into civilian areas. Much of this is done in direct defiance of UN resolutions (the same resolutions upon which the U.S. justified its Iraq adventure), and with the tacit approval of U.S. administrations (under the all-encompassing pretext that "Israel has a right to defend itself").

Further insight into the Israeli position can be gleaned from the present tensions between Israel and the EU, which is manifest in the former's "threat" to exclude the latter from its peace negotiations with Palestine, unless it agrees, in principle, to gag its members from making critical comments in public. According to the AP:

The warning came after EU's commissioner for external relations, Benita Ferrero-Waldner, this week criticized Israel's refusal to endorse a Palestinian state. She said an upgrade in Israeli-EU relations would depend on Israel's commitment to the "two-state solution."

It also came ahead of a planned trip to Europe next week by Israel's foreign minister, Avigdor Lieberman — his first official trip abroad. The ultranationalist Lieberman's comments about Arabs and Mideast peace have raised international concerns about the new Israeli Cabinet's intentions.

Foreign Ministry spokesman Yigal Palmor on Thursday called Ferrero-Waldner's comments "very militant" and contrary to understandings with other EU officials.

He said her remarks threatened to undermine understandings with the EU to maintain a "quiet dialogue" until Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu completes the formulation of his foreign policy.

Put in other words, Israel is outraged at the EU's apparent inability to understand the game it has been playing for years: namely, "quiet dialogue" under which nothing gets accomplished while Israel continues to "quietly" implement its own nationalistic solutions to the Palestinian Question. The outrage is understandable, given this policy. The real question, however, is how the U.S. under Barack Obama will handle the situation.

Obama and Netanyahu are scheduled to meet this month; Obama will meet with Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas next month. Stay tuned...

the zeitgeist movement manifesto: part i

In this series I will use individual segments of the manifesto expressed here as seeds for brief discussion from my perspective. Since I am very much attracted to the idea of progressive (nonviolent) change to our social systems, I think it is worth expending the effort and time to consider these ideas critically and practically.

The central foundation of the "movement" is summarized in the following quote:

The central insights of this awareness is the recognition of the Emergent and Symbiotic elements of natural law and how aligning with these understandings as the bedrock of our personal and social institutions, life on earth can and will flourish into a system which will continuously grow in a positive way, where negative social consequences, such as social stratification, war, biases, elitism and criminal activity will be constantly reduced and, idealistically, eventually become nonexistent within the spectrum of human behavior itself.

This possibility is, of course, very difficult for most humans to consider, for we have been conditioned by society to think that crime, corruption and dishonesty is "the way it is" and that there will always be people who want to abuse, hurt and take advantage of others. Religion is the largest promoter of this propaganda, for the "us and them" or "good and evil" mentality promotes this false assumption.

Accordingly, it is critical to address the issue of "human behaviour", as it is the sole underlying determinant of social organization. This point is not exclusive to the Zeitgeist philosophy; it is the essential question in any political philosophy. Thomas Hobbes, for instance, addresses this question in Part I of his book Leviathon, postulating a "state of nature" for human existence, in which all human drives are in conflict; in other words, our "state of nature" is a state of war. Out of this state of nature are born social contracts, under which a man agrees "to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men as he would allow other men against himself".

Hobbes's is, of course, a classical mind, lacking the wealth of scientific knowledge available to us today. His argument, that man requires social contracts and, ultimately, the rule of an "absolute sovereign", is in many ways diametrically opposed to the view espoused by the Zeitgeist movement, which is that it is our present set of contracts and unequal distribution of power which leads to the "morally bad" behaviours we continue to see in society. Crime, for instance, is the breaking of a contract whose terms are skewed. For Hobbes this is the true measure of morality; for Zeitgeist it is a predictable outcome of a human placed in a particular environment.