It is with great sadness I write this - I am sorry to let you know our friend Joan Peters Caro has passed away.
Funeral services are Thursday, Jan. 8, 2015 at 10AM at Anshe Emet, 3751 North Broadway Street, Chicago.
I do not yet have Shiva information.
Joan's amazing book From Time Immemorial, The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict over Palestine, was published in 1984. To quote another friend, Richard Baehr, "It would be fair to say that no book in the last 30 plus years, has caused greater unhappiness and psychiatric disturbance among the large number of Israel haters around the world than this book."
She was a personal friend (to many of us) and a champion for our beloved Israel.
I will miss her passion and wisdom, her great stories, her calls and emails and dinners with her and Bill.
Why John Kerry keeps beating his head against the wall and why he's going to continue to fail anyway
If you're wondering why US Secretary of State John Kerry keeps banging his head against the wall after five trips in four months, Raphael Ahren has some speculation.
Why is Kerry subjecting himself to failure
after failure, even observers sympathetic to his goals are asking
themselves. Is he heroically allowing himself to become discredited,
wonder some (as they cast around desperately to explain the otherwise
inexplicable), in the cause of keeping the contacts ongoing, because to
admit defeat would be to leave a vacuum that extremists would rush to
fill?
Solving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a
laudable goal, and Kerry might initially have been forgiven a belief
that he was somehow uniquely qualified to break the deadlock. But visit
after visit should surely have long since underlined a few simple
truths: The two sides mistrust each other. Each is more concerned with
avoiding blame for failed talks than prepared to take risks in the faint
hope of success. Netanyahu and Abbas are also both looking over their
shoulders at rivals and bitter opponents poised to capitalize on any
missteps. And the unchanging bottom line: The most that Netanyahu might
conceivably offer Abbas, were they ever to actually get to the table, is
less than Abbas might conceivably accept — less than Ehud Olmert
offered in his unrequited bid for an accord in 2008.
Those
inescapable truths are hard to reconcile with Kerry’s insistent
assertions at the airport that a breakthrough is “within reach,” and
that all it needs is “a little more work.”
Kerry’s boss, president and Nobel peace
laureate Barack Obama, also tried to tackle the conflict at the
beginning of his first term, but backed away fairly rapidly, and
subsequently focused his efforts on other areas.
Word from Netanyahu’s office after the talks
collapsed in late 2010 was that the prime minister was willing to extend
the 10-month settlement freeze that had briefly brought Abbas to the
table then, but that the administration did not believe there was much
point. Since then, Netanyahu has dug in against preconditions, while
offering to discuss all issues at the table, and expressing a readiness
for releases of pre-Oslo Palestinian prisoners — phased releases, so
that Abbas cannot simply come back to the table, secure the freedom of
the pre-Oslo veterans, and walk away again. Abbas, for his part,
evidently remains unmoved in his demands for a settlement freeze and a
commitment that the talks would focus on a Palestinian state based on
the pre-1967 lines.
For Abbas, the option of battling Israel in UN
forums is plainly more attractive than negotiating with a Netanyahu
constrained by senior coalition partners from the far-right Jewish Home party, and key officials in his own Likud party, who are staunchly opposed
to territorial compromise. For Netanyahu, the goal in these latest
talks would appear to have been to convince Kerry that he’s really,
honestly, truly interested in a two-state solution, if only Abbas would
step up.
But Kerry just refuses to be discouraged.
And David Horovitz talks about why Kerry will ultimately fail and what it ought to be doing instead.
The path to Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation
does not run along the route much traveled by the well-intentioned
Secretary Kerry between Jerusalem and Ramallah. Pulling Abbas and
Netanyahu back to the table will only presage another failure — and the
Second Intifada demonstrated how catastrophic the consequences can be.
Where the United States should be placing its
energies, and its leverage, and its money, is in encouraging those
frameworks that will create a climate in which the Palestinians actually
recognize an interest in making true peace on terms that Israel can
reasonably live with (terms that do not leave Israel vulnerable to
military threat, and do not seek to alter the country’s demographic
balance), because the Jews aren’t going anywhere, and Palestinian
independence can only be attained in partnership with the Jewish state.
The US should be supporting educational programs, and grass-roots
interactions, and media channels that offer an honest perspective on the
history of our conflict, and that promote a mutually beneficial future
of co-existence. It should neither fund, nor encourage others to fund,
institutions and organizations that perpetuate false narratives and
consequent false grievances.
Change the climate. Gradually create an
atmosphere of mutual respect, and a shared, fervent desire for an
accommodation. Then you won’t have to be cajoling reluctant leaders back
to the peace table.
...
But as the elections in 1992 and 1999
underline, the Israeli middle ground has elected would-be peacemakers
when it sensed that hard-line prime ministers were missing genuine
opportunities. There is no such sense today, no consensual feeling that
Netanyahu — kicked out of office in 1999, remember — is blowing it; that
a deal is there to be done if only we had a different prime minister.
That’s how successful Arafat, Hamas, Fatah’s military wing, Abbas’s
disingenuity, and the chilling Arab Spring have been in shattering
Israeli confidence.
In a region where instability is now the norm
pretty much everywhere bar Israel, and where Iran has thus far
outmaneuvered the West as it speeds toward a nuclear weapons capability,
this is a pretty discouraging time for a tiny country to be
contemplating high-risk territorial compromise — especially when Hamas’s
quickfire violent takeover from Fatah of Gaza in 2007 constituted a
profoundly worrying precedent for what might occur were Israel to
withdraw from the West Bank.
Kerry’s unfathomable enthusiasm
notwithstanding, there are no short cuts. The only source of potentially
justifiable optimism lies in a process of changed atmosphere and
changed attitudes — a gradual process — in a Middle East, moreover,
where Iran has been successfully faced down and relative moderates
consequently emboldened.
But it's not going to happen. First, because the 'Palestinians' don't have an interest in starting that process nor the patience to wait for it, and never will so long as they believe they can destroy Israel. Second, because a two-state solution is not what the 'Palestinians' want. They want to destroy Israel. Always have and always will. And third, because too many Israelis know the truth. The 'Palestinians' are an invented people - invented to undermine Israel's existence. Ignoring all the evidence presented by Joan Peters and others is not going to change the truth. And deep down, even the 'Palestinians' themselves know it.
Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad: Who are the 'Palestinians'?
This isn't the first time we've had some straight shooting from Hamas Interior Minister Fathi Hamad. In this video, he tells us who the 'Palestinians' really are.
Let's go to the videotape (Hat Tip: Elihu S).
Gee, when Joan Peters wrote the same thing in From Time Immemorial, she was lambasted by the Left. Newt Gingrich had it right when he called the 'Palestinians' a fictional people. Just ask Fathi Hamad.
I am an Orthodox Jew - some would even call me 'ultra-Orthodox.' Born in Boston, I was a corporate and securities attorney in New York City for seven years before making aliya to Israel in 1991 (I don't look it but I really am that old :-). I have been happily married to the same woman for thirty-five years, and we have eight children (bli ayin hara) ranging in age from 13 to 33 years and nine grandchildren. Four of our children are married! Before I started blogging I was a heavy contributor on a number of email lists and ran an email list called the Matzav from 2000-2004. You can contact me at: IsraelMatzav at gmail dot com
