The leading French daily Le Monde today has a striking editorial, in the form of an open letter to Shimon Peres, the Israeli president, from the French writer Jean-Moïse Braitberg. That double first-name amounts to what in English would be “John-Moses,” so this is someone of the Jewish faith, in fact someone whose grandfather died in the gas chambers of Treblinka and of whom other relatives also perished during World War II in various other Nazi camps. The name of his late grandfather, Moshe Brajtberg, is even enshrined at Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial, but now M. Braitberg is publicly writing the Israeli president to have it removed. “I ask you to accede to my request, Mr. President, because what has happened in Gaza, and more generally the fate given to the Arab people of Palestine for sixty years, disqualifies Israel in my eyes as a center for the memory of the evil done to Jews and thereby to all of humanity.”

He goes on:

You see, since my childhood I have lived within an entourage of survivors from the death-camps. . . . It was necessary, they taught me, that these crimes never resume again; that never again could a man, due to his belonging to an ethnic group or religion despised by others, be scoffed at while trying to assert the most elementary rights such as a dignified life in safety, without being shackled but with the light, however distant, of a future of serenity and prosperity.

Nonetheless, all that M. Braitberg writes that he has seen from Israel over decades towards the Palestinians has been “violence, spilled blood, confinement, incessant controls, colonization, [and] despoiling.” But what about the rockets that Hamas incessantly launches at Israel? What about the suicide bombers? “What I will say to you is that my feelings of humanity do not vary according to the citizenship of the victims.”

Then further:

On the contrary, Mr. President, you guide the destinies of a country that claims not only to represent Jews collectively, but also the memory of those who were victims of Naziism. It’s that which concerns me, and which I find intolerable. By preserving at the memorial of Yad Vashem, at the heart of the Jewish State, the name of my nearest relatives, your State keeps my family-memory a prisoner behind the barbed-wire of Zionism to make it a hostage of a self-proclaimed moral authority that each day commits the abomination that is the denial of justice.

So he wants his grandfather’s name removed. It’s all fairly powerfully – and, of course, publicly – expressed, not that Israeli officials will bother to take any notice. Still, together with the new accusatory Internet meme – “The grandchildren of Holocaust survivors from World War II are doing to the Palestinians exactly what was done to them by Nazi Germany” – it is clear that Israel is harvesting the whirlwind that she sowed with her December attacks into Gaza.

So now Israel has unilaterally decided to stop bombarding the Gaza Strip. Gee – why just now? Could it have anything to do with the inauguration of an entirely-new American administration on Tuesday? And could the timing of whole episode from the attacks’ very beginnings on 27 December be somehow connected to a desire to take advantage of the “hands-off” attitude of top American leaders while Israel still could?

For all the evident excitement about Inauguration Day, people need to stay on the alert on Monday, tomorrow: Pardon Day. That is the last day of George W. Bush presidential power, and so surely the day he will issue a set of shocking and unprincipled pardons to protect himself and his underlings from, among other things, war crimes charges. Isn’t this clear? Doing so at any point before would have spoiled the effect of (and probably increased the volume of flying shoes at) his rather pathetic “farewell tour” of self-justifying interviews and press conferences. So stay tuned.

Oh, and Obama has a fresh foreign policy crisis waiting for him as soon as the inauguration euphoria winds down. Yes, it’s Gaza too, but I’m referring more here to North Korea’s new “all-out confrontational posture” towards South Korea (the latter’s military is now on high alert) together with its claims to have procured enough plutonium for four or five nuclear weapons.

UPDATE: Well now, on the question of further pardons it looks like I was wrong!

Hey everybody, remember Joe the Plumber? Of course you do, because ever since Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher of Holland, OH – not a licensed plumber, actually – confronted candidate Barack Obama in October about the effect of his tax plan on small business, you haven’t been able to avoid him. His latest ploy to further elongate his allotted 15 minutes of fame is to get himself hired by Pajamas TV to go report on the Israel-Hamas conflict.

It’s really too juicy of a target for any self-respecting media commentator to refuse. Even Hans Hauert of Germany’s Süddeutsche Zeitung can’t help but issue some remarks, in “Joe the Plumber” becomes war correspondent: A plumber in wartime.

You had thought the Germans could not do irony? Maybe you’ll pardon me an extended translation of Hauert’s first couple of paragraphs: (more…)

Christian or Jew, Moslim or Shinto, the whole world’s 2008 holiday spirit has taken a severe beaten ever since right after Christmas Day itself by the still-escalating violent tit-for-tat being played out in the Gaza Strip between Israel and Hamas. The whole affair seems to be a classic case of escalating rage on both sides spiralling to some ultimate calamity, with little room to try to talk sense to either side to draw them back from the brink. Prospects for any satisfactory resolution are considerably worsened by a political vacuum where the world’s eyes would ordinarily turn for the exercise of some sort of restraint on Israel, namely Washington: at only a little over twenty days to his departure, George W. Bush utterly lacks any more credibility generally, much less on Middle East matters (warning: link leads to rude language!), while President-Elect Obama is sticking with his “one president at a time” mantra.

Could this provide an opening for the EU to try to provide some helpful intervention of its own? Maybe one last hurrah for what has turned out to be an extraordinarily activist six-month EU presidency for France and her president, Nicolas Sarkozy? That is a tempting thought, except that Sarkozy, his wife Carla Bruni-Sarkozy, and various other family are currently on holiday in Brazil. (They had to fly there, where it’s warm at this time of year, for an official state visit, you see. It all amounts to little more than the sort of tacking-on-a-vacation-to-the-end-of-a-company-paid-business-trip in which I wager most of the readers of this weblog have indulged at least once.) Nonetheless, Thijs Bermand and Tineke Bennema of the Dutch daily Trouw offer the proposition that the EU does have a role that it can play by virtue of the Assocition Agreement with Israel that is still pending (EU can make a difference in MidEast conflict). (more…)