This quite excellent article – structured as a moderated chat in which names like “Mazen,” “hakan,” “Jack,” and “Heisenberg”* pose a series of questions – is pretty much a one-stop briefing on what is going on over there and the historical background that has led events to this pass.

Ah, but it’s also exclusively in French – being Le Monde and all that – but I’m glad to help you out with the main points, among which:

• It was always unrealistic to assume that Syria could somehow avoid this wave of unrest sweeping through the Arab world from its origin last January in Tunisia. Indeed, the country probably offers the closest resemblance of all to the 1980s Soviet Union: that the Ba’ath Party is the sole governing party allowed was established back in the 1973 constitution, but today it stands for nothing other than a cynical clientelism – it is merely “a superstructure without true ideological content.” The economy is in a similar state, since everything was nationalized back in the 1960s, so now everything is inefficient, uncompetitive internationally, and staffed on the basis of politics and patronage, not competence.
  
• Added to that, “[s]ince 1963 Syria has lived under a state-of-emergency regime which permits the security services to intervene at all times and with practically no control in the public and private affairs of the population.” Yes – since 1963! Abolishing that state-of-emergency tops the list of the demonstrators’ demands, along with freeing political prisoners and doing something about the widespread corruption.
  
• But note that there’s nothing in there about Islamic-type goals (nor, for that matter, about toppling the regime – at least not as of yet). Further, the demonstrations have occurred not only spontaneously (i.e. not at the instigation of any existing political organization) but uniformly peacefully – at least on the part of the demonstrators themselves, as opposed to the police/military forces that have been sent against them.
  
• Ironically, that state-of-emergency is not likely to be abolished anytime soon, as the regime makes full use of it to try to beat down the protests!
  
• The 1973 constitution does provide for a vice-president who could succeed President Assad – in fact there are currently no less than two of them. But Assad will never step down voluntarily, because his government is essentially a family affair and his family won’t ever let him give up their privileged ruling position in the government and in society.
  
• Daraa – that’s some town down near the Jordanian border that no one had ever heard of previously. Why did the unrest start there? For one thing, Daraa has always been poor, but its economic situation is even worse these days after four years of drought, as it is stuffed with poor farmers whom the drought has driven off of their land in the countryside. Plus Daraa apparently has a larger-than-usual contingent of young men who earlier fought against the American-led occupation forces in Iraq – and whom the Syrian regime has dealt with by throwing them into prison. The regime also threw into prison a bunch of even-younger people (16 and below) whom policemen caught writing anti-government graffiti on the walls – in fact, they were taken all the way to Damascus to a prison notorious for the torture practiced there. Apparently most have now been released and returned to their parents in Daraa, but with plentiful signs of such torture on their bodies.
  
• Allies and enemies: There are all sorts of countries in that area nervous about what they see going on in Syria. That country’s leading ally is probably Iran, which relies on the current Syrian government to allow it to ship weapons to its Hezbollah client in Lebanon. Other allies are Algeria, Libya (i.e. the Qaddafi regime), and Qatar. But Israel is also nervous: although it is by no means Syria’s ally, under Assad the Syrian front has at least been quiet and predictable. The Israelis are very nervous that that could be about to change.
  
• So what is going to happen? The title of this piece gives it away – our answer-man believes that, sooner or later, the Assad regime is toast. However, he is more skeptical that there will ever be any international intervention there, no matter what outrages the government perpetrates against its own people. That is no surprise, considering that Israel is after all a next-door neighbor and occupies territory that used to be Syrian – still, he does not rule intervention out entirely. (You like “no fly zones” and “no drive zones” in Libya? You’ll LOVE them in Syria!)
  

Darn – and they’re such informative answers, too! So do we forget about them? I leave that decision to you.

* Heisenberg, it turns out, stands particularly in need of this sort of expert country assistance, since whenever he thinks he has a good sense of where Syria is now, he completely loses track of where the country is going, and vice-versa!

                          

You’ll get no credible answer asking the parties directly involved: each was quick to blame the other and to warn of “consequences” should anything further of this sort occur. Israeli officials even spoke of their troops being caught in an “ambush.”

No, the best bet for establishing further facts would seem to be finding some report from an on-the-scene but neutral observer. And we have one, from the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, namely Ulrike Putz and her article Observers puzzle over the background of Mideast firefight. I mean, “Ulrike Putz” sounds like a name you can trust, right? She’s a female, and of course she’s German, and I think those two things combined amount to a mark of journalistic objectivity as good as any other.

Plus, you don’t have to scroll down too far in her article to find bullet-points that lay everything out as clear as it can presently be ascertained:

• Where exactly was that infamous tree at the center of all this: on Israeli or on Lebanese territory? A UN spokesperson is willing to confirm that it was on the Israeli side.
  
• So who opened fire first? We get UN testimony again on this: the Lebanese did. Then the Israelis naturally reacted, but by throwing in everything but the kitchen sink, e.g. artillery, combat helicopters. But I understand Israelis tend to do that in the face of a provocation.
  
• OK then: Why did all this happen? Well, there are some clues. You’ll note that among the casualties was a Lebanese journalist – well, what was he doing there just at the right place and time to watch something interesting happen? Also, according to Israeli sources the Lebanese brigade commander responsible for that sector is a Shi’ite with rather extreme anti-Israeli attitudes. So the suggestion is that he had just been waiting for an excuse to open fire on the IDF, operating entirely under his own authority. (Yes, I realize that with this analysis Frau Putz seems to go over to the Israeli side. But assessing motivations is the hardest task of all, and that’s the only source where she can get her information.)
  

Similarly, Frau Putz reports that the Israelis also seriously considered reacting to the incident by unleashing a general bombing campaign against Lebanese Army positions, but then decided not to. But don’t sit back and relax yet: this piece in today’s L’Express (with a couple interesting pictures of deployed IDF equipment) reports that both sides (meaning Israeli and Lebanese) are moving more troops up to the border.

                          

Oooooh, looks pretty good! (Feel free to write me to ask how to do it!)

Anyway, the immediate point of that piece is contained in its title: Israeli government announces that it wants to relaunch construction in East Jerusalem. The Netanyahu government had previously conceded a brief suspension of such construction, but only as a sort of fig-leaf measure in response to heavy pressure it was getting from the US – because, of course, any such construction in East Jerusalem, territory conquered in battle that the rest of the world will not concede is owned by Israel in any way, sounds the death-knell for what are supposed to be peace negotiations with Palestinian representatives.

Well, there’s no more need for any of that, or at least that seems to be the calculation of the Israeli cabinet. The main protagonist here according to the Le Monde piece is Interior Minister Elie Yishai, leader of the Shas party – that’s the ultra-Orthodox party, governing in coalition with Netanyahu’s party and some others, which advocates “Greater Israel.” So no surprise there. What is surprising, though, are some of the official statements accompanying this announcement, at least for those unacquainted with the time-honored Yiddish concept of chutzpah. Here’s Yishai:

I intend to convene as rapidly as possible the commission for planning and construction in Jerusalem to relaunch construction at Ramat Shlomo [an East Jerusalem neighborhood, mostly inhabited by Orthodox Jews]. But this time the discussions will not take place during visits to Israel by American officials.

Here Yishai is clearly referring to the visit to Israel at the beginning of March by US Vice President Joseph Biden, which was what caused all that annoying trouble about this construction work and the Israeli government’s decision to briefly suspend it, and all the rest. See what I’m saying about chutzpah? Who does Biden think he is?

Yishai went on:

The Israeli government has never yielded and will never yield in the face of the United States and will continue to construct everywhere in Jerusalem, the capital of the Jewish people for eternity.

Okaaay . . . Uh, hello? Are there any grownups there? Anyone?

Looks like there’s nobody. The best supplementary statement to this that Le Monde’s/AFP’s reporters were able to get was from Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon of the Yisrael Beitenu party, also in coalition with Netanyahu and also rather hard-line: what Yishai said in fact is “the official position of the government: no one can stop construction in Jerusalem.”

There you go, Barack Obama and Mahmoud Abbas. I know you gentlemen have a lot on your plates these days – particularly you, Mr. President – but what are you going to do about this?

                          

Well yes, the word now is that that cargo did indeed include weapons, specifically Russian-made S-300 anti-aircraft missiles – reportedly a very sophisticated defense system against invading enemy airplanes and even ballistic missiles – which were to be delivered to Iran on behalf, not of the Russian state, but rather certain Russia-based mafia interests. I was first alerted to this revelation by an on-line article in the French newsmagazine Le Point (The Arctic Sea supposedly carried S-300 ground-to-air missiles for Iran), but that piece in turn based all its reporting on an account from the Austrian newspaper Salzburger Nachrichten (The rocket-smugglers on the “Arctic Sea”).

The Salzburger Nachrichten, of all papers! It does seem a bit strange to learn of the secret details behind contraband cargo on an ocean-going ship from a journal based somewhere that is, oh, about 250 km from the nearest open water, eh? (And that BTW is to the South: Salzburg is closest to the sea if you proceed through NE Italy to the Adriatic.) The key variable enabling the scoop, however, seems to have had nothing to do with closeness to water, but rather closeness to Israeli intelligence sources, as the piece itself carries the by-line “Gil Yaron Jerusalem” [sic].

So here’s what Gil Yaron writes:

• Iran approached certain rather dodgy rogue elements of the Russian military in Kaliningrad – that’s the Russian enclave on the Baltic, northwest of Poland – to arrange for the S-300 rockets to be loaded onto the Arctic Sea two months ago, when it conveniently was due to be there to undergo some repairs. These were hidden under the ship’s ostensible cargo of wood.
  
• A “Western intelligence service” – no further details – let Moscow know what was going on. The Russian authorities immediately recognized the potential great embarrassment this could cause them, for if anyone is going to deliver S-300 missiles to Iran, it naturally has to be the Russian authorities, according to proper signed contracts, and not something like this out of left field.
  
• As a result, those “hijackers” who boarded and took control of the ship shortly after it set sail and was in international waters were actually agents from the FSB – basically the successor to the KGB. And the reason they then kept sailing the ship all the way to a spot off the West African coast was to put it in as inaccessible a spot to any Western journalists as possible before letting their navy “recapture” it and bring the episode to a close.
  
• Oh, and naturally NATO and most of the world’s intelligence services were perfectly aware of where the ship was at all times as it made its way out into the Atlantic, but they were willing to let the Russians set up their little cover-story as long as they made sure that the S-300′s never got anywhere near Iran.

Chief among the intelligenge agencies monitoring the situation was of course the Mossad, Israel’s highly-regarded version – naturally, because any S-300′s deployed in Iran would immensely complicated Israel’s task should it decide it needed to strike with its air force to destroy Iran’s nuclear installations. It wasn’t necessarily the Mossad which first discovered what was going on in Kaliningrad – or maybe it was; we don’t know – but Yaron does claim that the Israel authorities even canceled an arms deal they had arranged with Georgia as a further incentive to get Moscow to act to do something about the “Arctic Sea.” What’s more, Israeli president Shimon Peres paid an unscheduled visit to Moscow shortly after the Russian navy “recaptured” the ship. According to official word, while there he provided “concrete proof that Iran and Syria are providing weapons to Hamas and Hizbollah.”

By the way, to tie up some other loose ends here, the American government (as well as Israel, of course) has long urged Russia not to act on the contract it does have with Iran to deliver official S-300s. Assuring cooperation on this matter could very well be one of the main motivations for the apparent turn-around in the Obama administration’s decision to station an anti-missile system in Poland and the Czech Republic, which I discussed here a few days ago.

                          

That hardly means that German government officials are not welcome to conduct official visits to Israel, of course, and Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier did that earlier this week on Monday. Because Steinmeier is at the same time SPD candidate for Chancellor in the upcoming September elections, this was probably the last time he is to visit Israel (and Syria, and Lebanon) in that capacity. Still, in retrospect, the timing for the visit seems most unfortunate: on the one hand the topics for discussion could not help but include Israeli settlements on the occupied West Bank, which the US and Europe want Israel to put a much-tighter leash on (and that for starters), while on the other Netanyahu has lately been acting like the pressure is really getting to be too much for him – for example, as recounted in a report picked up on Andrew Sullivan’s The Daily Dish, calling both Rahm Emanuel (President Obama’s chief-of-staff) and David Axelrod (his senior political adviser) “self-hating Jews.”

Sure enough, as we learn in an account in Der Spiegel by Yassin Musharbash (How Netanyahu startled Steinmeyer with a Nazi concept), the explosion duly arrived.

Granted, it only occurred in closed, private discussions, so we only know about it from comments to Reuters by what Der Spiegel terms an Ohrenzeuge, i.e. a witness who at least heard the exchange, but it was still a rather ugly incident nonetheless. Netanyahu, while arguing with Steinmeier over the West Bank settlements, is said by this witness to have declared that “Judea and Samaria [the preferred right-wing Israeli terms for the West Bank] cannot be judenrein.” Oooh, bad move: judenrein is a very loaded term, straight from Nazi times, meaning “cleansed of Jews” and it is what the Nazis publicly aspired to make all of Europe. How did Steinmeier react? He kept his cool: as the Witness puts it, “What could he do? He basically nodded.” But, as the Spiegel author makes clear, you could really tell something had gone wrong when the two men emerged after that meeting to talk to the press: the atmosphere and body-language between them was cold in the extreme.

Soon, however, word got out, and many Israelis were rather shocked by this transparent attempt to equate Palestinian-Israeli relations to the Nazi treatment of the European Jews. Ex-Foreign Minister Shlomo Ben-Ami told Der Spiegel that he considered any such comparison “fundamentally false and simply unnecessary.” Salman Schoval, former Israeli ambassador to the US (and also N.B. a member of Netanyahu’s Likud Party) said “I don’t like transferring Nazi-concepts onto others, even if they are our enemies.” On the other hand, an anonymous diplomat (the article doesn’t say whether he is Israeli or not) maintained that Netanyahu needs to use “drastic rhetoric” like this in order to appease those in his governing coalition who are even more hard-line about the settlements, for whom he has already gone to far in conceding the concept of a Palestinian state.

The thing is, this Witness also let Reuters know that Netanyahu has instructed his cabinet to employ this same “concept” (Begriff) when called upon to defend the West Bank settlements in the future. Did he mean the specific, loaded word judenrein? Are we going to encounter that again – and/or other Nazi-type language – so that this sort of scandal will shortly reappear and escalate even more? Has the Netanyahu government already adopted such an obstinate and shameless attitude as that (including, mind you, towards its friends and allies, led by the USA which pays from $3-5 billion to Israel each year)?

                          

Andreas Relster, writer for the Danish opinion newspaper Information, certainly has no idea. Still, at least he has that forum in which to raise the subject, and can resort to a strategy of canvassing the opinions of every Iran-expert out there whom he can get to respond to his inquiries. This is essentially the method behind his current piece, Iranian mirage.

Along the way, he does manage to unearth some unconventional points-of-view. The most remarkable one comes from one Ali Alfoneh, a Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen’s Department of Political Science. You’d expect Alfoneh to be well-versed in political theory and history, and his take on the current troubles in Iran bear that out: he sees Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as aspiring to follow in the power-politics footsteps of Mao and Stalin, through engineering a crude electoral swindle that deliberately provokes his regimes opponents to come out onto the streets in protest – so that he can identify them all the more easily, brutally eliminate them under a state of martial law (this includes eventual show-trials and executions of all the opposing electoral candidates), and so consolidate his hold on state power for quite some time to come. In this perspective, the presidential election was for sure stolen, indeed obviously so, but the “obviousness” – and so the implicit “insult to the intelligence of the Iranian electorate” that so many other commentators have inferred from that – was entirely the point.

Alfoneh adds that all of this was something that Ahmadinejad was not in a position to pull off back in 2005, when he did manage to win the Iranian presidency for the first time in a run-off against Ayatollah Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani. But in the interim, he claims, the president has managed to stock much of the government with his supporters: “half of the parliament consists of former Revolutionary Guards,” and the same is apparently true of the government itself. (Note that this is a base of power in the military, not in the Shiite mullah establishment.) So basically Ahmadijenad could be confident that he could approach the 2009 presidential election not really needing to worry about actually submitting his performance to a popular referendum – he could regain his office and keep his power in better, longer-lasting way.

Wait! They Really Do Love Ahmadinejad!

But then, in the middle of his article, Relster throws us a curve ball by bringing up the controversial opinion-piece in the Washington Post a week ago in which authors Ken Ballen and Patrick Doherty claimed that their polling research showed that it was in fact quite plausible that the 62% election-result officially attributed to Ahmadinejad was true and fair. (This view has in the meantime been disproved by a number of analyses, the latest of which is a Chatham House study reported on in Juan Cole’s Informed Comment weblog, but maybe Relster hasn’t yet gotten this memo.) So what harm does this twist in the scenario do to Alfoneh’s argument? Actually, not much: while a really, truly valid 62% would not have been something Ahmadinejad planned to include for carrying out his purported conspiracy, in the end it didn’t matter anyway, because the opposition rose up in revolt nevertheless.

In any event, Andreas Relster is nothing if not an assiduous surveyor of Iran-experts; if you want another commentator willing to accept the Ballen/Doherty argument that that 62% level of support for the current president was real, you got it, in the form of one Abbas Barzegar, himself a Ph.D. student (but at the Institute for the Study and Practice of Religion at Emory University in Atlanta, GA), who also is described as “the Guardian’s” man [i.e. the British newspaper the Guardian] in Iran,” who was visiting there the very week before the 12 June election. Barzegar pooh-poohs the very thought that the current regime in Tehran is in any trouble; “intellectuals, academics and other so-called experts” have been predicting its fall ever since the 1979 revolution, all in vain. But in fact, Iran is not just only Tehran, President Ahmadinejad still commands the support of a large majority of the population, and Mir Hussein Mousavi’s big protest movement is based upon nothing more than delusions.

In fact, take a good look at this Mousavi fellow, Barzegar urges us, and with good reason: he was Iranian prime minister after the Revolution, for most of the 1980s. So he was both very involved in that Revolution (including some of its after-events, like the American-hostage affair – so that, although Ahmadijenad himself is widely thought to have been a student at the time actively involved in storming the embassy and guarding the hostages, Mousavi was actually involved with a more responsible role) and very close afterwards to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Why, Mir Hussein Mousavi is much more representative of that original 1979 Islamic revolution – which made Iran into the country with the unique theological-political government that it is today – than Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could ever be! The only reason the former has now metamorphosed into the people’s champion is that everyone conveniently forgotten that past political history – he took 20 years off starting in the late 1980s (when the post of prime minster was abolished) to lie low for awhile!

Andreas Relster has really come up with some live ones here, has he not? To be sure, he cites some other people in his article as well who express views which are a bit closer to the accepted narrative of the Iranian protestors coming out to risk life and limb in a quest for democracy, like Rasmus Christian Elling, an academic at the University of Copenhagen specializing in the Middle East and Central Asia. Elling, while not quite yet ready to characterize what is happening in Iran as a “revolution,” is clear in his mind that the actions the government took in the immediate wake of the election – shutting down the telephones and the Internet, sending security forces out into the streets, arresting opposition politicians and journalists – do constitute a political coup. Still, he also offers the following further caution: “It’s important to keep in mind that it is not only Ahmadinejad who is accused of trying a coup. Many Iranians regard the present demonstrations as the real attempt at a coup, with Rafsanjani the man behind it, holding the reins” – and so with Mousavi apparently as only Rafsanjani’s tool or even puppet.

But What If Democracy Wins?

Anyway, dear readers, there is your healthy serving of some quite alternative views of what is going on now in Iran, all thanks to Andreas Relster and Information – which is indeed known for both its high intellectual level and its defying of conventional wisdom (yes, usually from a leftist perspective). I hope it all wasn’t too disillusioning for the Iran-as-American-Revolution picture many of you might have had in your heads up to now. Especially if you have read this post down this far, you deserve a little intellectual relief, a little good news about what is happening there, so I’d like to discuss as well a remarkable commentary from the German newspaper Die Welt, What happens if Democracy wins in Iran?, by Hannes Stein (and I don’t know whether that’s a man or a woman’s name: maybe someone can enlighten me with an e-mail). Placed just above an inspiring photo of a banner bearing the hand-written words for Freedom in both Farsi and English, here is the piece’s lede:

Let’s imagine that the democratic revolution in Iran meets with success. What then? WELT ONLINE dares to undertake that thought-experiment: The entire MidEast could experience freedom and prosperity. Iranians and Israelis would love each other, and Iranian whiskey would be a sales-hit.

Sounds pretty wild, doesn’t it. But, like I wrote, that’s just the lede; here is how things would work out in a little more detail, according to the rest of Stein’s article, if (as s/he rather poetically puts it) things ultimately work out the way they did twenty years ago in Leipzig and Dresden and East Berlin:

• An Iran is born that actually reflects the educated and cultured Iranian people, where tolerance, art, and science can bloom. Tourists flock there; the leading national money-earner is no longer oil, but rather the industry and innovation of Iranians themselves, so that the world soon gets to choose among top-class mobile phones, laptops, and autos labeled “Made in Tehran.” (And, yes, there arises first-class Iranian whiskey, too.)
  
• More importantly, though, with the rise of a new Iran the Middle East now becomes a much more peaceable region since, as Stein maintains, it was never the Israeli-Palestinian stand-off but rather that between hard-line Shiite Iran and the region’s Sunni Arab regimes that was always the fundamental problem in the first place. Now “the Near East could awake out of its fevered fundamentalist dream”; radical groups like al-Qaeda and Hezbollah wither on the vine as their support was cut off, and Syria finds itself politically isolated.
  
• Meanwhile, Iran extends a friendly hand to Israel; mutual embassies open up on Teheran and Tel Aviv, while both El Al and the Iranian national airways begin flights the other way and citizens exchange vacation-visits in each other’s land. Further from Stein: “Young men from Isfahan and Golbahar will get to know the night-life on Shenkin Street [that's in Tel Aviv]. Young Israeli women will plunge into amorous adventures in Shiraz and Mashad.” The Iranian president – whoever he is – visits the Wailing Wall wearing a yarmulke – and, Stein again, “suddenly the union [?] of Israel with the Palestinians will no longer seem so utopian.”
  
• Of course, Stein saves the best for last: Iranian-American relations. S/he sees President Obama attending a fancy ceremony reopening the same American embassy that was subject to such fierce attack back in 1979, as the US of course resumes full diplomatic and commercial relations. And Iran’s nuclear ambitions? According to Stein’s scenario, in secret talks Obama lets Iranian leaders know that the US is prepared to accept an Iran with nuclear weapons, under the condition that such weapons can never be directed against allied states – most especially Iran’s shining new ally, Israel. Oh, and America’s dependence on Arab oil becomes a thing of the past – replaced by plentiful supplies coming from Iran.

Pretty fantastical, I must say. All that dismisses the intractable, sixty-year-old struggle between Israelis and Palestinians over the lands “of Judah and Samaria” a bit too easily, no? Note also that the new Iranian embassy is posited in this narrative to open in Tel Aviv; the Israelis would no doubt prefer to put it in Jerusalem, as yet another token of recognition of that city as Israel’s official capital, but even a new, enlightened Iranian state would likely have problems with that. And of course there is little evidence so far of anything similar happening – at the economic level, which is most relevant – in present-day Leipzig or Dresden or (East) Berlin.

It’s a nice daydream though, isn’t it – and to think that it was rather that other article, the Danish one in Information, whose title was “Iranian mirage”!

                          

Whether the Israeli Armed Forces Radio broadcast in question is an explicit advertisement or not is unclear, but its point is to announce the opening of registration to purchase one of twenty new houses in Maskiot, a Jewish settler colony in the occupied West Bank. In fact, as we learn from its very own Wikipedia article, Maskiot is so deep into the West Bank – it’s way over on the other side from Israel, right on the Jordan river, for Heaven’s sake – that past attempts to expand it have drawn the publicly-expressed ire of UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, the British government, and even George W. Bush’s Secretary of State, Condoleezza Rice.

Where is the public anger now? Clearly this sort of thing, in addition to being a direct slap in the face to the Palestinian Authority, is tremendously counter-productive to the sort of two-state solution and peace negotiations which are the main elements of the desired American approach to achieving an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement. Does Netanyahu really remain unaware of this as he heads to meet with President Obama over precisely such measures, or is he just breathtakingly cynical?

                          

On the other hand, for some reason Livni’s billboard is in French, and reads Tzipi Livni: L’homme de la situation, which means “Tzipi Livni: The man of the situation”! Remarkable, even if the expression is the equivalent to the English “The man for the hour.”

                          

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.

                          

You might ask, why wouldn’t Israel start preparing for a visit by Pope Benedict XVI if that is to come in May? Well, just to refresh your memory, just over the weekend the Pope withdrew the previous excommunications of four bishops, one of whom – a certain British-born Richard Williamson – is on record as recently as just last week as denying that millions of Jews were killed in the Nazi gas chambers.

And this is by no means the first incident tending to estrange world Jewry with the Vatican under Benedict XVI’s stewardship. For a couple of years now there has been a dispute over Pius XII, who was Pope during the Second World War. There have been indications from within the Roman Catholic Church that it would like to declare him a saint. On the other hand, his behavior during the war was at the least rather controversial, particularly when it came to his reluctance to take any steps (including mere public denunciations) in response to the reports he received, early and often, about Germany’s murderous actions towards Jews. And then, only earlier this month, the cardinal who is president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace, a certain Cardinal Renato Martino, publicly termed the Gaza Strip a “big concentration camp” in the wake of the Israeli military offensive there. Now, this weblog is certainly willing to admit that Cardinal Martino’s characterization is probably accurate, but you can also see how it strikes the completely wrong tone with many partisans of Israel. And now it looks like the rabbis in Italy – the highest-profile rabbis when it comes to the Vatican – are withdrawing in protest from certain planned inter-faith celebrations.

If you are aware of this background, then it’s really somewhat surprising that the current Pope’s planned visit to Israel in the Spring is still on. Frankly, this pattern of recent events strongly suggests that there is yet more to come in this baleful syndrome of mutual alienation, so that betting on that visit to go through after all may still not be a wise thing to do. The shine might be off of it already for Benedict XVI; the highlight of John Paul II’s visit to Israel in 2000 was his visit to the famous Yad Vashem Holocaust memorial, but Rzeczpospolita reports that the Yad Vashem Institute itself issued an outraged condemnation of Williamson’s return to the Vatican fold, so that same invitation may not be forthcoming in May.