Bird’s-Eye: We set the stage with a rap song by a Jew and a Muslim who – hilariously and painfully – trash each other. Meanwhile, on the main stage, Hamas and Hezbollah (!) move to non-violent resistance, Abbas makes the peace offer many had been waiting for, and Bernard Avishai despairs of the free press decline in Israel.
* Mazzi and Sneakas: Talkbacks Set to a Hip-Hop Beat Roi Word
My brother is a rapper by the name of Sneakas. He is also part of a Jewish and Muslim Hip Hop duo “Mazzi and Sneakas.” A few days ago they released their outstanding video for the song “Fuck You”, directed by the legendary Va$htie Kola. The song & vid explore the hateful and irrational attitudes/perceptions Jews and Muslims have of each other. In light of recent events and all the toxic nonsense that is out there, the vid and its message are very timely. But a word of warning: the lyrics are not for the PC or fainthearted. If Tarantino was a Jewish-Muslim rapper, he’d probably sound like this.
* Foes of Israel Adopt New Protest Measures Wall Street Journal
Hamas and Hezbollah, groups that have long battled Israel with violent tactics, have begun to embrace civil disobedience, protest marches, lawsuits and boycotts—tactics they once dismissed. For decades, Palestinian statehood aspirations seemed to lurch between negotiations and armed resistance against Israel. But a small cadre of Palestinian activists has long argued that nonviolence, in the tradition of the American civil rights movement, would be far more effective. Officials from Hamas, the militant group that controls the Gaza Strip, point to the recent Israeli raid on a Gaza-bound flotilla, in which Israeli troops killed nine activists, as evidence there is more to gain by getting Israel to draw international condemnation through its own use of force, rather than by attacking the country.
* Abbas agrees to Israeli control over Jewish holy sites in Jerusalem Haaretz
Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas has given U.S. special envoy George Mitchell a list of written proposals for reaching a peace agreement with Israel, which includes leaving the Jewish Quarter in Jerusalem and Western Wall under Israeli control, Arabic-language daily Al-Hayat reported on Saturday.tAccording to the report, Abbas offered Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu a set of concrete proposals for a peace deal, including proposals on borders and security arrangements.
Abbas is said to have proposed the creation of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders, but with a land swap encompassing 2.3 percent, which would leave larger settlement blocs such as Gush Etzion, Pisgat Ze’ev and Modi’in Ilit in Israel’s hands, along with a swathe of land overlooking Ben-Gurion International Airport. In return, the Palestinians would get land bordering the southern West Bank in addition to land for a passageway between the West Bank and Gaza.
* Israel’s Press’ Political Leukemia Bernard Avishai Dot Com
I’ve had four or five conversations over the past couple of weeks in which people volunteered, without prompting, that they feel they now know what it was like to live in countries on the verge of fascism during the 1930s. You ask them why and they talk about… an education ministry that mandates a history curriculum in which the Oslo Agreements are effaced, a high school mock election in which Lieberman triumphs, the mayor of Jerusalem threatening to displace Arabs to build a Jewish tourist park, a Sami Smooha poll that shows a precipitous decline in Israeli Arab faith in Israel as a democracy “for Arab citizens as well” (from 63.1 percent in 2003 to 50.5 percent today) while the minority that supports using “all means, including violence” to achieve political ends is growing (5.4 percent to 13.9 percent)….
How will the mainstream press, now, resist the claims of 700,000 ultra Orthodox, 500,000 settlers, a political class infused with military leaders, Russian immigrants looking for their Putin, Mizrahim looking for the big warm family, young people eager to prove bravery and fidelity, and so forth, when ordinary notions of individual liberty seem at odds with the Jewish national privileges and grievances that are taken to be the reason for the state? How do you fall back on principles of civil society which have come to be called merely “leftist” or even anti-Zionist?
