10 thoughts on “Haaretz cover page, Jan 11

  1. My God, it’s truly difficult to convey the fresh horror of facing the fact that the United States is represented on the world stage by this simpering, subhuman missing link. While the message to End the Occupation crafted by his handlers is, indeed, reason for celebration, it would still be similarly gratifying to read the following: “Olmert to Bush: Why Don’t You Eat A Goddamn Banana and Shut the Fuck Up!”

  2. Nice headline. I wonder what the Hebrew print edition said. Did Bush actually use the word occupation? That would certainly be newsworthy.
    Also, check out the box in the top right. Even in Olmert does take the lead in ending the occupation, he is going to have a tough time of it, from folks in Israel, and from the Jewish establishment in America.
    I personally have little hope that I will see an end of the occupation in my lifetime (and I’m young), but who knows. If the pattern continues and every eight years lame-duck American presidents push for peace, maybe, just maybe, one of them will be successful.

  3. Definitely a tough time, Chorus of Apes. On Friday there was a protest and anti-Bush campaign, opposing his two-state-and-soon position. These posters went up all over town: it doesn’t take much to realise that folks who would call Palestine “Hamastine” aren’t in favour of an amicable, peaceful solution.

  4. Yup, it’s in the Hebrew print edition too. The headline says:
    áåù áñéëéí äáé÷åø: ìñééí àú äëéáåù
    (Bush at the conclusion of the visit: End the occupation)
    And there are no ads at the top of the page (only teasers for articles inside). Below the fold, instead of a quarter-page ad from Peace Now, there is a quarter-page ad from the university presidents calling on Olmert to find a solution to the university crisis.

  5. Melanie Phillips
    January 13, 2008
    Jewish Chronicle, 11 January 2008
    Among the Israeli intellectual elite, the instinct for national self-destruction reaches near-hallucinatory levels.
    A recent research paper by doctoral candidate Tal Nitzan, which wondered why unlike other armies Israeli soldiers did not rape women under their occupation, claimed that this was because IDF troops viewed Arab women as sub-human. This absurd piece of malice was awarded a teachers’ committee prize by the Hebrew University.
    Clearly, Nitzan should have interviewed Ha’aretz editor-in-chief David Landau, who was reported as telling US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at a dinner last September that the Israeli government wanted ‘to be raped’ as it was a ‘failed state’ that needed a US-imposed settlement.
    Israeli intellectuals [have] swallowed the fiction that the Middle East impasse is over the division of the land and that Jewish possession of that land is illegitimate.
    It is no accident, therefore, that this pressure to divide Jerusalem comes at a time when the Jewishness of Israel is being openly called into question. Arabs themselves have now ruled out a Jewish state altogether.
    Why doesn’t [Israel’ remind the world of that same world’s conclusion back in 1920 that the Jews had a unique claim to the entire land of Israel, including Jerusalem? Why doesn’t it recall how, when Jordan illegally occupied east Jerusalem until 1967, it desecrated Jewish holy sites, ripping up Jewish gravestones on the Mount of Olives to use them for latrines?
    It doesn’t [because] much of its intellectual class has come to believe the mendacious propaganda of Israel’s enemies.
    In Israeli schools and on campus, there is widespread ignorance of Jewish history and of the indissoluble bond between the religion, the people and the land which constitutes Jewish identity. When Israel’s Education Minister issues a textbook for Israeli Arab children that teaches them the Arab propaganda line that the 1948 War of Independence was a naqba, or catastrophe, something has gone badly wrong with the foundations of Israeli self-belief.
    When the Israel government refuses to stop the Muslim authorities in charge of the Temple Mount from destroying countless excavated artefacts from the Temple in order to obliterate the evidence of the historic Jewish claim to Jerusalem, one has to conclude that Israeli diplomacy has morphed into pathology.
    The real reason Israel doesn’t fight the battle of ideas to defend Jewish history and identity is that increasingly it is repudiating them. The Arabs thus don’t need to do much to bring about the end of the Jewish state. The Jews will do it for them.

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