🔵 Karen Kwiatkowski with Kim Iversen: US and Israel have lost the war

🔵 Please watch this very pleasant interview of Karen Kwiatkowski with Kim Iversen, providing unbelievably candid, incisive analysis of current US and Global reality, filtered via the current US-Israel war against Iran.

 

 

🔵 Is The U.S. Military Secretly Struggling? 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y3z2uBtmEZE

🔵 Karen Kwiatkowski is a retired U.S. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel. Her assignments included duties as a Pentagon officer, and various jobs for the National Security Agency (NSA). She served as a Pentagon analyst on sub-Saharan Africa policy. At her office, she survived the Pentagon attack on September 11, 2001. From 2002 to 2003 she served in the Pentagon's Near East and South Asia directorate (NESA) as the North Africa Desk Officer. 

🔵 Here are some excerpts from her interview.

🔵 "I think we'll thank Trump for...  we won't thank him for the murder that he has conducted and the destruction and the cost and the illegality of this war. We won't thank him for those things, but I think we will thank him for shifting the entire globe in terms of who has power, what power looks like, how it's exercised, and America will not be the superpower. We're not actually the superpower now.  
[...] 
That's the whole point. You know, we're a broke-ass nation, right? 
[...] 
There's certain things that have been destroyed that will take five years to bring back online. And we're still fighting. So the ramifications of this are very painful and that will go on for some time. Mm-hmm. But the end result of it is that we will be out of the Middle East. Ideally this is going to happen sooner or later. We don't know when. Israel will be kicked out of this country in terms of [being] our -as our political foreign policy manufacturer they will be gone. 
[...] 
The US relationship with Israel is on a path of a breakup. Which is good. That's healthy. It's what it should be. That's what George Washington said. It's what Jefferson said. You know you don't want entangling alliances and that's one that has really harmed us. 

But that's ending. Now the question is will it end demographically as these new generations take power, or will it end more abruptly? And I think we will thank Trump for ending it abruptly with this war. Um we're losing it. 

We're losing the war. Um it's predictable that we would. 

You can't you can't win a war against a dug-in defense  of 92 million people halfway around the world if you don't have the resources to compel that war. Um unless unless somebody pulls a nuclear fuse. 

If somebody hits the button that is, that is a dangerous risk that that could happen and I don't know, I can't say that ...that it's obviously in the background line that's one option but if it if it stays conventional we've lost the war. And so has has Israel. 

Israel has lost the war too and the whole world will be different after this yeah we you know and it'll be better. It'll be better for free trade, it'll be better for the vast majority of the populations around the world and it will be harder for Americans.

Yeah, in the long run this is positive and I have to say you know I root for Iran to preserve their country and I root for Iran to do what it can.  Obviously I don't want them to kill people I don't want us to kill them. That's still happening but we are all going to wake up to a different security architecture in the Middle East. And a different set of alliance in Washington and I do see a break. I do see a break with Israel ...and I think because of this war it's going to change faster than it would have on a natural basis." 

 
Petros Evdokas, petros@cyprus-org.net

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An incredibly honest and politically surprising article published by the New York Times. (Below the article you can find the internet address of the original, and a printable version of it.)

Palestinian Refugees Deserve to Return Home. Jews Should Understand.

May 12, 2021

 

Palestinians from Gaza leaving the occupied West Bank to go to Jordan in 1968.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

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By Peter Beinart

Mr. Beinart, a contributing Opinion writer who focuses on politics and foreign policy, is an editor at large of Jewish Currents, where a version of this essay appeared.

Why has the impending eviction of six Palestinian families in East Jerusalem drawn Israelis and Palestinians into a conflict that appears to be spiraling toward yet another war? Because of a word that in the American Jewish community remains largely taboo: the Nakba.

The Nakba, or “catastrophe” in Arabic, need not refer only to the more than 700,000 Palestinians who were expelled or fled in terror during Israel’s founding. It can also evoke the many expulsions that have occurred since: the about 300,000 Palestinians whom Israel displaced when it conquered the West Bank and Gaza Strip in 1967; the roughly 250,000 Palestinians who could not return to the West Bank and Gaza after Israel revoked their residency rights between 1967 and 1994; the hundreds of Palestinians whose homes Israel demolished in 2020 alone. The East Jerusalem evictions are so combustible because they continue a pattern of expulsion that is as old as Israel itself.

Among Palestinians, Nakba is a household word. But for Jews — even many liberal Jews in Israel, America and around the world — the Nakba is hard to discuss because it is inextricably bound up with Israel’s creation. Without the mass expulsion of Palestinians in 1948, Zionist leaders would have had neither the land nor the large Jewish majority necessary to create a viable Jewish state. As I discuss at greater length in an essay for Jewish Currents from which this guest essay is adapted, acknowledging and beginning to remedy that expulsion — by allowing Palestinian refugees to return — requires imagining a different kind of country, where Palestinians are considered equal citizens, not a demographic threat.

To avoid this reckoning, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies insist that Palestinian refugees abandon hope of returning to their homeland. This demand is drenched in irony, because no people in human history have clung as stubbornly to the dream of return as have Jews. Establishment Jewish leaders denounce the fact that Palestinians pass down their identity as refugees to their children and grandchildren. But Jews have passed down our identity as refugees for 2,000 years. In our holidays and liturgy we continually mourn our expulsion and express our yearning for return. “After being forcibly exiled from their land,” proclaims Israel’s Declaration of Independence, “the people kept faith with it throughout their Dispersion.” If keeping faith that exile can be overcome is sacred to Jews, how can we condemn Palestinians for doing the same thing?

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In addition to telling Palestinians they cannot go home because they have been away too long, Jewish leaders argue that return is impractical. But this too is deeply ironic because, as a refugee rights advocate, Lubnah Shomali, has pointed out, “If any state is an expert in receiving masses and masses of people and settling them in a very small territory, it’s Israel.” At the height of the Soviet exodus in the early 1990s, Israel took in about 500,000 immigrants. If millions of diaspora Jews began moving to Israel tomorrow, Jewish leaders would not say taking them in was logistically impossible. They would help Israel to do what it has done before: build large amounts of housing fast.

When most Jews imagine Palestinian refugees’ return, they probably don’t envision it looking like Israel’s absorption of Soviet Jews. More likely, they predict Palestinians expelling Jews from their homes. But the tragic reality is that not many Jews live in former Palestinian homes, since it is believed that only a few thousand remain intact. Ms. Shomali estimates that more than 70 percent of Palestinian villages that were destroyed in 1948 remain vacant. And the Palestinian activists and scholars who envision return generally argue that large-scale eviction is neither necessary, nor desirable. Asked in 2000 about Jews living in formerly Palestinian homes, the famed Palestinian literary critic Edward Said declared that he was “averse to the notion of people leaving their homes” and that “some humane and moderate solution should be found where the claims of the present and the claims of the past are addressed.”

None of this means refugee return would be simple or uncontested. Efforts at historical justice rarely are. But there is a reason the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates ends his famous essay on reparations for segregation and slavery with the subprime mortgage crisis that forced many Black Americans into foreclosure in the first decade of the 21st century. The crimes of the past, when left unaddressed, do not remain in the past. That’s also the lesson of the evictions that have set Israel-Palestine aflame. More than seven decades ago, Palestinians were expelled to create a Jewish state. Now they are being expelled to make Jerusalem a Jewish city. By refusing to face the Nakba of 1948, the Israeli government and its American Jewish allies ensure that the Nakba continues.

Perhaps American Jewish leaders fear that facing the crimes committed at Israel’s birth will leave Jews vulnerable. Once the Nakba taboo is lifted, Palestinians will feel emboldened to seek revenge. But more often than not, honestly confronting the past has the opposite effect.

After George Bisharat, a Palestinian-American law professor, wrote about the house in Jerusalem that his grandfather had built and been robbed of, a former Israeli soldier who had lived in it contacted him unexpectedly. “I am sorry, I was blind. What we did was wrong, but I participated in it and I cannot deny it,” the former soldier said when they met, and then added, “I owe your family three months’ rent.” Mr. Bisharat later wrote that he was inspired to match the Israeli’s humanity.

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“Just that response, writ large, is what awaits Israel if it could bring itself to apologize to the Palestinians,” he wrote. In that moment he saw “an untapped reservoir of Palestinian magnanimity and good will that could transform the relations between the two peoples.”

There is a Hebrew word for the behavior of that former soldier: “teshuvah.” It is generally translated as “repentance.” Ironically enough, however, its literal definition is “return.” In Jewish tradition, return need not be physical; it can also be ethical and spiritual. That means the return of Palestinian refugees — far from necessitating Jewish exile — could be a kind of return for us as well, a return to traditions of memory and justice that the Nakba has evicted from organized Jewish life.

“The occupier and myself — both of us suffer from exile,” the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish once declared. “He is an exile in me and I am the victim of his exile.” The longer Jews deny the Nakba, the deeper our moral exile becomes. By facing it squarely and beginning a process of repair, both Jews and Palestinians, in different ways, can start to come home.

Peter Beinart (@PeterBeinart) is professor of journalism and political science at the Newmark School of Journalism at the City University of New York. He writes The Beinart Notebook, a weekly newsletter, and is editor at large of Jewish Currents, where a version of this essay appeared.

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Originally published at:
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/12/opinion/israel-palestinian-refugees-right-of-return.html

Your own copy to save, or print:

http://cyprus-org.net/NYT.Palestinian.Refugees.Deserve.to.Return.Home.Jews.Should.Understand.pdf

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Forest fires across Palestine (aka "Israel")

Forest fires across Palestine (aka "Israel")
http://cyprus.indymedia.org/node/5083

Fifteen years of September Elevens

Fifteen years of September Elevens
http://cyprus.indymedia.org/node/5073