The bunker busters wouldn’t really be useful for Israel against the Palestinians… but Iran is another matter.

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This is a watershed moment. Palestinian violence, Palestinian anti-Semitic incitement and jihadist infiltration of the Palestinian national movement all undermine peace efforts. They are unacceptable; Biden was right to “ironclad” the U.S. commitment to Israeli security. But it’s past time that Palestinian failings cease to serve as an excuse for Israel’s remorseless, cynical scattering of the Palestinian people into enclaves that make a farce of statehood. That is “an affront” to America.

In this sense, Biden’s foray has been salutary. It brought U.S. “vital interests” to the surface. It challenged Israel’s ostrich-like burrowing into polices that, over time, will make one divided, undemocratic state more likely than “two states for two peoples.” It asked again the question posed recently by David Shulman of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem: Are Israelis, cocooned, still able “to see, to imagine, and to acknowledge the suffering of other human beings, including those aspects of their suffering for which we are directly responsible?”

Also, Richard has been awesome, as usual.

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Greenwald makes the case that we are at an inflection point in US-Israeli relations.

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In response to this story, Aziz tweeted:

Israel has a far freer press than the US

In other words, such an opinion could not be expressed in an open and frank manner in an American newspaper, whereas it can in a major Israeli newspaper.

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http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2010/03/100303_mosab_hassan_yousef.shtml

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lately, successive Israeli governments seem to act with impunity, and they are shocked when the rest of the world reacts with condemnation. Part of this is a function of what Leon Hadar has identified as the “moral hazard” created by the expectation of unconditional U.S. backing.

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Without asking its people, without a second thought, Israel, at its highest level, has taken an executive decision. Unable to beat the forces who want to see Israel as one of the world’s primary pariah states, it has resolved to join them.
(…)
We should have known that something like the Dubai assassination debacle was going to happen. The process of de-legitimizing Israel from within was going too slowly.
(…)
There are times when I envy the people who hate Israel. There is no sense of betrayal, not a tinge of loss. Only simhah la’ed, a vengeful joy in our sorrow.
(…)
I have come to envy the people who hate Israel, because they cannot feel the tragedy in the phenomenal possibility, the depth and breadth of humanity that is going to waste here.

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Ahmad Hasnin and Anwar Shekhaiber are reported by the Dubai police to have arranged hired cars and hotel rooms in Dubai for the Mossad hit squad. And one of them met chief assassin Elvinger.

They, too, escaped after al-Mabhouh’s murder but have been extradited to Dubai from Jordan.

So was this a joint Mossad-Fatah operation to decapitate Hamas?

In the Middle East anything is possible.

(Thanks Angry Arab)

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Abdullah writes that there has been some speculation that this is an effort to create a distraction from the developing negative media frenzy over Mossad’s recent assassination of a Hamas leader in Dubai.

A very good point:

Observers have rightly noted that while the European Union maintains its proscription of Hamas as a “terrorist organisation”, they are yet to produce any evidence that the organisation has carried out a single military operation outside Occupied Palestine.

This is in stark contrast to the Israeli government, which threatens, attacks and occupies the lands of neighbouring countries, and assassinates its opponents in other sovereign nations.

Related: Dubai has now named 26 suspects in the assassination of Mahmoud al-Mabouh, the Hamas figure.

Israel’s use of counterfeit foreign passports led one Australian reporter to worry about “terrorists” ability to do the same thing. Richard remarks:

Doesn’t this tell you heaps about western prejudices in favor of our own and against the unwashed hordes, that this reporter would not have realized that any nation that carries out an assassination on foreign soil while abusing the security of numerous erstwhile allies is engaging in terrorism. Why can’t these Mossad agents be called terrorists too?

If Israel would lift one finger to make a genuine effort toward peace and resolution I’d be happy to promote it, but everything Israel does seems to go in the other direction.

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