Arafat: The Symbol of What?

Exhuming Yasser Arafat -Jonathan Kay 

The body of PA leader Yasser Arafat was exhumed as part of a dubious campaign to determine his cause of death.
    
By the time he died in 2004, many Israelis simply didn't care that much about Arafat - who had become haggard, agitated, and increasingly irrelevant to Palestinian politics.
    
He had gambled and lost in the second intifada, and it is doubtful that Israel would have risked international censure and humiliation by killing this aging terrorist.
    
The sight of Arafat's exhumation provides an apt symbol of the backward-looking obsessions that define the Palestinian condition. The Palestinian people he once led remain prisoners of their hatred of the Jewish state.  
(National Post-Canada)


UN Votes to Recognize Palestine -C. Lynch & Joel Greenberg

The UN General Assembly voted 138 to 9, with 41 abstentions, to recognize Palestine as a "non-member observer state," a status that falls well short of independence.
(Washington Post)


The "Palestine" Vote at the UN -Elliott Abrams

Moves in the International Criminal Court will gain Abbas one day's notice, but two can play the same game: Israel can ask why "Palestine" is committing acts of aggression against it week after week with rockets out of Gaza, which the PA claims as part of its sovereign territory.
(Council on Foreign Relations)


How Not to Create Palestine -Yossi Klein Halevi

No stateless people has rejected offers of statehood as often as the Palestinians. And no other national movement seeks to empower its people on the ruins of another people's state. Instead of forcing Palestinian leaders to face reality and negotiate with Israel in good faith, the international community encourages Palestinian fantasies, such as Abbas' latest initiative at the UN.
(Globe and Mail-Canada)


Falling for Hamas' Media Manipulation -Michael Oren

Media also emphasize the disparity between the number of Palestinian and Israeli deaths, as though Israel should be penalized for investing billions of dollars in civil-defense and early-warning systems and Hamas exonerated for investing in bombs rather than bomb shelters.
    
The imbalance is also of language. "Hamas health officials said 45 had been killed and 385 wounded," the New York Times' front page reported."Three Israeli civilians have died and 63 have been injured."

The subtext is clear: Israel targets Palestinians, and Israelis merely die.
The writer is Israel's ambassador to the U.S. 
(Washington Post)
*