We frankly haven't done enough reading on the UAE port deal to be able to speak confidently on its consequences (although to be honest at first blush the security-based objections seem a touch over-wrought). On the other hand, the UAE's shameful participation in the Arab boycott on Israel seems like a far more difficult objection to answer:

But it's OK - the Arab boycott has all but collapsed! Sure, the government is still endorsing the public Jew-hating part of the boycott, but they're willing to look the other way when Israeli goods arrive at their ports (just as long as the boxes don't have all those Jewish-looking Israeli stickers).
This spectacle is overwhelming in its sheer shamefulness. The United States claims that Israel is its "close ally and friend" - yet it is unwilling to act with anything approaching propriety when this close ally and friend is subjected to institutionalized, racist humiliation. The Arab boycott of Israel is first and foremost the expression of the idea that Jews are inferior and abnormal - that they should not be allowed to work and live like other human beings. To aid those who target a friend with this kind of hatred is an unseemly abrogation of self-respect and decency.
Above and beyond the shamefulness of the act, it's not hard to guess its material consequences will be. The academic blog Language Log (where they don't like Strunk and White, Dan Brown, or George Bush), recently passed on this passage from a preface to the translated works of Roman aristocrat Sidonius:

What is it they say about history and those too dumb or weak to learn from it? Letting one of the conduits of Al Qaeda take over the US's ports may or may not be a security risk. But when that country is also committed to racist laws meant to exclude and humiliate a close ally - then, at that point, basic decency obligates that the US reevaluate the deal.

While the Arab Boycott of the Jewish State is collapsing, Jew hating is still in vogue. Or as the Jerusalem Post says, the Arab boycott is now just lip service:

So the Arab world still gets the daily, psychological rush of their vicious anti-Semitic hatred without any of the costs that could be incurred by their rejectionism. That's nice. And that's what we're calling success nowadays. Awesome. So is this a good strategy? Turns out, not so much:

We're skeptical that a "comprehensive peace deal" will make the the average Arab and Muslim consumer feel more comfortable touching all those "Jewish" products. The kind of pathological anti-Semitism that would cause someone not to drink a beverage because Jews touching it made it dirty is obviously so irrational as to be beyond being effected by argument.

Last year, Princeton University ethicist Harry Frankfurt put out a nuanced little book on the notion of bullshit. We quote directly:

If you're having difficulty wrapping your mind around this, please consider the recent, shall we say 'thin', EU justifications for giving money to terrorists that we passed on yesterday:

We think it would be a mistake to assume that Douste-Blazy is just doing something vulgar like lying. It's not that the Europeans know that Hamas will not evolve - although of course they know that. And it's not that the Europeans know that Hamas will get hold of the money that's supposed to go to this much-vaunted caretaker government - although of course they know that:

It's that they just don't care. They'll say whatever will get them through the short-term press conference after a meeting - they'll go through the motions of mouthing the appropriate platitudes about responsibility, evolution, etc - and then they know that nobody will point out a month from now that, yet again, everything they promised turned out to be wrong. It's not a lie. It's just bullshit (in a technical sense, of course...)

News came this weekend that Lebanon has admitted to allowing Syria to delivery (presumably Iranian) arms to Hezbollah:

Don't try to figure out how exactly Hezbollah is "resisting" anything. It's not supposed to make sense - it's what Arab governments always say when justifying violence against Israeli civilians.
More importantly, this act of giving weapons to terrorist militias would seem to be in tension with Lebanon's obligations under UNSC Resolution 1559, which binds Lebanon to taking away weapons from terrorists. That brings us to: how the practice of international law is used to undermine Israeli security.
Of course, not fulfilling signed agreements and obligations with Israel is par for the course for its enemies - even Abbas is shocked at how blatantly Hamas is violating treaties that the Palestinian government is ostensibly bound to. We're not sure why he's shocked - pocketing Israeli concessions and then demanding more before fulfilling Palestinian obligations is something that Arafat did for the better part of a decade. At least Hamas and the Lebanese government are honest about it (which we don't actually think is as much of a virtue as much of the right side of the blogosphere, but so it goes...)

Two very brief points as we get back into the swing of things:
(1) AK Sommer is right that Kadima has a corruption problem. Especially with Olmert now being investigated for some sort of real estate something or other, Likud and Labor should be well-placed to accuse Kadima of being rotten. But from a political standpoint, this risk is overblown for one very good reason: no matter how crooked Olmert looks, he will always be less of a crook in the eyes of most Israelis than Bibi or Peretz. Scandals swirling around him are far more likely to make Israelis shrug and conclude that all Israeli politicians are corrupt (which they are) than to make them go to another party.
(2) What might actually hurt Kadima is any perception of internal weakening. Ha'aretz runs a story about discontent regarding the coming shakeup of the Prime Minister Bureau. Now normally we wouldn't trust Ha'aretz to accurately report the colors of Likud or Kadima's campaign posters - let alone to give accurate, not-lying-to-help-Labor information about internal party politics - but this one does have the ring of truth to it. We've commented that Olmert inherited the best political operatives in Israeli politics from Sharon - he'd do well not to alienate them. Of course, here, as in the case of corruption, hatred for Netanyahu and Peretz probably overwhelm anything Olmert can do - Sharon's advisers aren't going to let either of those two off the hook.

Hey, we can't be hateful all the time. This is great:

Just to round out our "who wants Israel to fund its murderers" list for this afternoon, we bring this "of course they did" non-news story:

"Premature" is the new buzzword. Israel is expected to give Hamas money, until we can all be sure that Hamas definitely will not budge on their commitment to destroy Israel. Apparently just having Hamas say as much over and over again isn't enough. The UN and the EU want to be really, really sure. Which is why the UN is condemning Israel for not giving this openly terrorist organization money, while the EU is doing one better - actually going back on previous promises not to fund a Hamas government (there's a shock) and releasing funds:

Want to bet what will happen to the funding if Hamas doesn't moderate its radical policies (note, incidentally, that open genocidal intentions are now "policies", albeit "radical" ones - they're on the spectrum)? Nothing.

Earlier this week, China's state newspaper urged the United States to forgo the option of sanctions and give aid to the Palestinian government:

"Even" former US President Jimmy Carter is not even the amusing part of this editorial. The really amusing part (echoes of Meryl's "Israeli Double Standard Time") comes earlier:

It is a phenomenon worth pondering that China - a country that on principle opposes any sub-national group because of the precedent international support could set viz their Tibet policies - feels confident enough to side with the purported right of Hamas, an organization with explicitly genocidal goals, to engage in violence. China won't support international action anywhere if it risks weakening the control of a central government.
It makes an exception in the case of Israel, however, because China's leaders know that international actions toward Israel have no relationship to either international norms or to the expectations brought to bear on other countries. Absurd, disproportionate demands can be made against Israel with the confidence that such demands will never be turned against any other country. So China can feel quite safe demanding that Israel actually go so far as to fund Israel's sworn enemies, while knowing that the "right of military resistance" that they are supporting will never be taken seriously if asserted by, for instance, Tibetans.

United States Policy, 1/27/06:

US Policy, 2/27/06:

We won't abuse your patience by linking to the myriad of bloggers who predicted this shameful US back-peddling as soon as Hamas was elected. OK, maybe a little. Anyway, there you have it.

Russia is trying to argue that their high-level contacts with the most radical branches of Hamas are aimed at moderating the unrepentant terrorists. As proof of their good will, they're even demanding that Hamas renounce the whole "Jew killing" thing:

This is a transparent lie, and the Russians know that it's a transparent lie. Egypt has been pulling this trick for five years. Under the guise of trying to arrange a ceasefire, constant Egyptian contacts served to both legitimize and strengthen Hamas - so much so that many pretty smart people think that it was this single regional dynamic that convinced Hamas that the world would accept a terrorist government. Hamas figured - correctly it turns out - that if the world was willing to let Egypt mouth only the barest pretenses when treating terrorists like an elected government, then certainly if they really were an elected government their legitimacy could only increase.
During the Cold War, there were rumors that Israel had targeted some of their nuclear weapons towards Moscow. If it ever came to pass that the Jewish State was on the verge of being destroyed by Soviet created tanks, planes, and mortars, Israel's leaders were not about to let the enables of the certain ensuing genocide go unpunished. Whatever the condition of Israel's current foreign policy, it's reasonably clear that Russia's hasn't changed much in the last decades.

Through AK Sommer, we find the latest iteration of the "no need to worry - Hamas wasn't elected because they're terrorists" argument. The motives of those who make this argument would be suspicious under any circumstances: why, given the choice between erring toward or against advocating a climate in which Israel is safe taking risks for peace, would one take a political position in favor of concessions just right now? Such suspicions are aggravated because the arguments for why the Hamas victory was anything but a result of Palestinian support for terrorism are just so bad. It's not a matter of weighing evidence on both sides - it's a matter of outright ignoring counter-arguments that don't have rejoinders.
This "everything is ok" meme has been made in two ways. One way, tried out by centrists very early, is that Hamas won not because of popular support but because of electoral complications. That argument was mostly abandoned when the results came back and demonstrated that Hamas had actually won a plurality of national votes. The other way, linked to above, is that Hamas won because people were lodging a protest vote against Fatah incompetence.
Now, it's impossible to know with complete certainty what's in another person's mind - which is why analysts are so much safer making up Palestinian motives than asserting that Hamas didn't "actually" win the election. But there are two ways of guessing about other people's motives - we can either make reasonable assumptions or we can just go ahead and ask them. Regarding what's reasonable - if there's one thing we know about Hamas's public image, it's that they stand for the eradication of Israel through genocidal violence. It's in their charter, it's in their speeches - it is their public persona. To imagine that a Palestinian voter wouldn't have that image in the forefront of his mind strains credulity.
And when pollsters just out-right ask Palestinians what they think of violent confrontation, they get the same answer: an overwhelmingly number of Palestinians support violence - as if we needed polls to tell us that about a society in which people are not afraid of censure when they dress up their 2 year olds as suicide bombers.
So you have a party that stands for terrorism and a population that supports terrorism - and yet for some analysts it seems more reasonable that Hamas was elected for something having nothing to do with terrorism. It's not unfair to ask what would drive people to ignore the most readily available and seemingly obvious explanation in search of deeper, contrary motivations. Why jump through the mental hoops necessary to believe that Hamas was elected for any reason other than their support for violence? To do so requires ignoring a lot of evidence on one side and making some very tenuous claims on the other side - and so it's fair to ask what someone thinks they're going to accomplish by going through all that work.
Incidentally, Jerusalem is administered by Israel and has plenty of schools and hospitals. And yet the Arabs there also overwhelmingly voted for Hamas. But maybe, if we all try really hard, we can find a way to convince ourselves that the Palestinian public favors peace or that Hamas will moderate - even though the Palestinian public actually favors violence, and even though Hamas rode that platform successfully to victory.

Iran is threatening to attack Israel if the United States attacks Iran:

In the past, Israel has been explicit that it would treat any attack on Dimona as a non-conventional attack and respond accordingly (that is, with its own non-conventional assets). Not that technicalities would matter - if Iran is really serious about attacking an Israeli population center like Haifa, the number of causalities would leave Israel no choice but to qualitatively escalate the conflict. In other words, this is a threat to ignite a nuclear war in the Middle East - which we're not sure is the best rhetorical strategy that one can take if one is trying to convey one's ability to responsibly be a nuclear state.

There's something else about this new Iran threat that bears comment: how routine it's become for Islamofascists to threaten Israelis or Jews in response to things that Israelis or Jews have nothing to do with.
The West threatens Iran? Muslims threaten to bomb Haifa.
Christians offend Muslims? Muslims mock the Holocaust.
Muslims bomb other Muslims? Muslims burn Israeli flags.
The point isn't so much any more that whenever anything bad happens to Muslims, Muslims respond by threatening to eradicate Jews - such behavior seems to have become the norm from radical Muslims in Europe, Africa, and Asia. It's that nobody is commenting on how insane the world has become precisely because this behavior is routine and expected.

One last comment on this newest stunt. Imagine for a minute that the opposite had happened: that Israel, in response to threats by Russia stemming from Israel's nuclear program, had threatened to murder tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Newspapers would scream about Israeli saber-rattling; the UN General Assembly would convene an emergency session to issue condemnation upon condemnation; riots would sweep the Muslim world; every pipsqueak humanitarian and self-styled activist in the West would take to the streets in solidarity; Chris Hitchens would find a way to work the phrase "Gen. Sharon" into his next Slate article; 24 hour cable coverage of the "road to war" in the Middle East. Most of these things already happen even when Israel is entirely innocent of trumped up accusations (cf. Jenin) - imagine the din if Israelis were actually guilty of atrocities.
But Iran, mutatis mutandis, issued precisely such a threat. And world outrage is not so much muted as non-existent. The generous reading is that everyone already knows that Iran is pushing the Middle East into an abyss, and so genocidal threats against Israel are noted as part of a trend. But that can't be right - polls routinely show that a plurality of Europeans consider Israel, not Iran, to be the greatest threat to peace in the Middle East. So this blase dismissal of targeted, genocidal threats isn't something new - it's not as if Ahmadinejad has created a climate in which threatening to murder millions of Israelis because of actions committed by non-Israelis is something new. Making genocidal threats against Israel has always been within the spectrum of what can be said aloud - Europeans have just wearied of going through the motions of pretending otherwise.

We want to reassure our readers from the right that, although we haven't been quite as responsive as we'd like, we have indeed been reading your gloating, anti-disengagement correspondences. We're not sure why the fact that Palestinians aren't willing or able to make peace with Israelis is a justification for a bilateral settlement, but there is one particular flavor of the anti-disengagement gloating that we want to address even though it's a couple of weeks late. Specifically: this absurd idea that a majority of Israelis regret disengagement:

There are at least two errors in this analysis:
(1) The assumption that "contributing towards peace" is the same as being "safer".
(2) The assumption that what Israelis wanted out of the disengagement was to move "towards peace."
The disengagement plan was not supposed to help the Israelis get along with the Palestinians. Exactly the opposite - it was supposed to create a situation in which Israel could tolerably exist even in light of the realization that the Palestinians are not going to give up on their terroristic ambitions for a long, long time.
Anyway, that's irrelevant - this analysis is flawed on its face. If Israelis were turning in any large numbers away from the idea of unilaterally setting Israel's boundaries, Kadima wouldn't be doubling up Labor and Likud in most polls.

We’re back in the United States and hoping to get caught up on blogging in the next few days (and on all the rest of life - school, bills, laundry, etc). Thanks to everyone who sent along kind words, wishes, and prayers. One small plea: please stop sending us email in Hebrew. We appreciate them, but Thunderbird’s filters treat foreign fonts unkindly and your mail is getting moved to Junk. Thanks again.

We apologize for the lack of blogging over the last week and a half. As they are unfortunately wont to do, immediate events and responsibilities have recently made themselves felt. Blogging will be irregular to nonexistent until the middle of February, at which point we will resume our normal schedule of outrage and snark.