Abbas has proven he's a partner for peace

With a series of important, courageous statements, Mahmoud Abbas has made clear that the Palestinians have a pragmatic leader who is offering Israel a chance not to be missed.

Haaretz Editorial | Aug. 25, 2013

The meeting in Ramallah on Thursday between Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and a Meretz party delegation once again underlined the fact that Israel does have a partner for peace talks. With a series of important, courageous statements, Abbas proved that the Palestinians have a pragmatic leader who aspires to a peace agreement and is willing to take meaningful measures in order to create a new and better situation in the region.

Abbas did not avoid any topic; he expressed clear positions on issues that are considered controversial. He emphasized that a Palestinian declaration of the end of the conflict would be part of the peace agreement. “People say that after signing a peace agreement we will still demand Haifa, Acre and Safed,” he said. “That is not true. Signing the agreement will signal the end of the conflict.”

The Palestinian president further clarified that in any peace settlement the Palestinian state would agree to be demilitarized. “We don’t need planes or missiles. All we need is a strong police force,” Abbas said. He even revealed that during earlier negotiations with then Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, there was an agreement to station American soldiers in the West Bank.

Abbas said the Palestinians would accept changes to the 1967 borders as part of land swap agreements, saying, “Let’s lay down a map and start marking the borders.” He also did not reject the possibility that some Jewish settlements could remain under Palestinian sovereignty after the signing of an accord.

Regarding the Israeli desire for an interim agreement, Abbas emphasized that while his goal was to reach a final agreement that would thwart the "various elements looking for ways to sabotage things and derail the process," he was "willing to implement the process in stages ... just as you did in the agreement with Egypt over the withdrawal from Sinai."

The positions laid out by Abbas underline the fact that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu must not treat the entire process as if it were a tax that must be paid to Uncle Sam. "We wanted the meetings between negotiating teams to take place every day or every other day, and not once a week or every 10 days like the Israelis want," Abbas told the Meretz delegation, adding that he had no objection to meeting with Netanyahu and claiming that no progress has been made in the talks so far.

"Without peace there will be tragedies here. There is an opportunity now. Look at what’s happening all around us. Everything is in turmoil. Now is the time to reach an agreement," Abbas said.

Netanyahu's silence must not be the response to these wise remarks of Abbas. The chairwoman of the Labor Party, MK Shelly Yacimovich, is also duty bound to give the prime minister the support needed to advance the peace process. Today there is a unique opportunity to reach a historic agreement.

Just be a human being

How can we reconcile the terror-filled daily lives of Russia's gays and lesbians with the 

celebration of sports?

By Ravit Hecht | Aug. 21, 2013 

The Russian parliament passed a law this year prohibiting “homosexual propaganda” among minors.
 This is a continuation of the aggressive legislation in various parts of Russia, for example a law the governor
of St. Petersburg signed in March, that coming publicly out of the closet as gay is a criminal offense. These
laws, even if they do not sentence gays and lesbians to death or imprisonment, are a crime against human
beings, which no individual or democracy-loving country can stand for. These are laws that crudely and
ignorantly differentiate between one person and the next, which confines masses of people to a limited
 existence, which automatically sentence a certain group whose only sin is the desire to choose who to
live with — to the shame of being second-class citizens.
That same Russia was the recent venue for the World Athletics Championships. The world’s best athletes
 showed off to spectators and viewers around the globe the wonders of the human body and spirit, which
constantly stretch the limits of their abilities. That same Russia is also to host the 2014 Winter Olympics,
which will attract hundreds of athletes and tens of millions of spectators and viewers.
How can the contradiction be resolved between the ordinary, terror-filled daily lives of Russia’s gays and
 lesbians and the extraordinary celebration of sports, which crosses cultures, peoples and countries? Such
 a contradiction cannot be resolved — the hesitant condemnation by U.S. President Barack Obama, who did
 not boycott the Winter Olympics, and the confused attempts of the International Olympic Committee to
 create some sort of compromise with regard to gay and lesbian athletes, show this.
Such a contradiction cannot be resolved because something as damaging as Russian homophobia empties the
 Games of their significance. The pole vaulter Yelena Isinbayeva, who astounded fans when she retired in
perfect style with a gold medal at the World Championships, was asked shortly thereafter about the recently
enacted laws in her country. In broken English and embarrassed body language, she mumbled that in Russia
“we just live boys with women, girls with boys,” and that she supports the laws of her country.
In her response, Insinbayeva exposed the scam: She stands on the podium, tallest of all, closest to heaven
and to God, but she is neither a giant nor an outstanding figure. She is just a young woman who can jump
 higher than other young women.
It was, in fact, the defiant kiss of the Russian team’s relay racers, Kseniya Ryzhova and Tatyana Firova,
 who are less well known and whose achievements have not made them “living legends” in athletic terms,
 which will be remembered from the World Championships in Russia as a wonder of humanity, a symbol
of the human spirit that remains undaunted in immoral human surroundings.
Like the historic salute by athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico
 protesting discrimination against blacks in the United States, an act that would later be said to overshadow
 any of their athletic achievements, the Russian women will be remembered for their kiss of protest against
 the homophobic fascism of President Vladimir Putin. No one will remember Insinbayeva’s pole vault.
It was just a jump.
In a place where people are deprived of their natural rights, one cannot pole vault or figure skate and win
some prize. In a place where fascist principles permit, even indirectly, the protection of the law to be
 withdrawn from a group of people only because of who they are — the greatest human achievement is
simply to be a human being. To show solidarity with others, to fight for their natural rights and to oppose
any initiative, governmental or popular, based on mass, blind injustice. That is true for Russia, and it is
 also true for Israel and any place under the sun. If it doesn’t exist, all the rest is meaningless.

Israel and the Constancy of Change

Israel and the Constancy of Change

In our everyday discourse the belief that change is possible, that people's characters and attitudes can fluctuate with time, is an attribute usually associated with naïveté. The wise and seasoned among us know better.

What is astonishing is that the pull of determinism remains strong even when evidence of change is all around us. As parents, our children grow and change before our eyes, and yet at each stage of their development we can find it hard to imagine them transitioning to the next. We are often drawn to seeing our current job, or our family life, or our emotional state, as fixed in stone even if our own very life experience points to the contrary.  

When we look at the Middle East the same dynamic is often at play. In the last years we have watched the region undergo unprecedented change, and yet many find it hard to accept that more is yet to come. With each transition, many quickly persuade themselves that things have settled permanently into place.

Not too long ago Bashar Assad was considered the unquestioned and stable ruler of Syria. Today, the civil war that threatens his rule is seen by many as a tragic and fixed part of the landscape. In Egypt, few predicted the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, fewer still its fall from power in such short order. Hardly anyone anticipated these changes. And yet, amazingly, there are still those who speak with conviction about the nature of the Middle East when the only thing that it seems possible to say with certainty is that we do not know what will come.

Our discourse and understanding of Israeli society can be similarly distorted by our pre-conceptions about the (im)possibility of change. In parts of the Jewish world the sense that Israel's democracy is imperiled is seen as a constant. But despite the insistence that "it was always thus" it is hard to deny the evidence that Israeli society has become more democratic and pluralistic with each passing decade.

We forget too that Israel's search for peace and security has known different phases. There have been times of utter despair, but also moments of justified hope; there have been times of more and of less security. The pollsters tell us that many in Israel have grown deeply skeptical about the prospects of peace, but in years to come this may be described as a period through which we passed, not a permanent state of being. After all, pollsters give us a glimpse of what people think today, but they tell us little about how they may change tomorrow.

This is not to say that everything changes all the time, that change happens quickly or that it necessarily occurs in a positive direction. Some features of our existence are deeply entrenched and exceedingly difficult to uproot. Hostility towards Israel is one of these features. But while the nature of Israel's challenges can be similar over time, the way we adapt and respond to them does not have to be.

Our resistance to embracing the unpredictability and frequency of change may come in part from the fact that there are elements in our environment that can appear immovable. But it also stems from a psychological need to feel in control, from a basic human yearning for stability. Perhaps also by discounting the possibility of change we can avoid responsibility for our role in directing events. Ultimately, though, permanence is an illusion. And we need to be aware of how our attraction to it can warp what we see, what we think, and the decisions we take.

What we must resist is the view that real change is impossible; that somehow Israel's present predicament is also its permanent one. This is a particularly dangerous illusion for it prevents us from asking the right questions. How does change happen? How can we identify the signals that it is coming? How can we shape events in our favor? And how do we influence hearts and minds? If we are trapped in the mindset that there is nothing new under the sun, we forfeit the capacity to be agents of change ourselves, and we hand it to others.

In our Jewish calendar, we have just entered the month of Elul: the period leading up to Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur where our focus is on Tshuva - on the opportunity to renew and re-create ourselves. A tradition in which the concept of Tshuva is so central, is a tradition which rejects determinism. It is a tradition which recognizes that being blind to the reality and possibility of change is immeasurably more dangerous and more impoverishing for our individual and collective existence, than is the fear and volatility associated with change itself.

Our Judaism, not just our lived experience, tells us to be conscious of the pitfalls of the chimera of permanence. It tells us to leave a space for the possibility of the presently unimaginable. It tells us that change is coming, the only question is whether we will be a part of it.

Doctor Tal Becker, is a research fellow at the Hartman Institute, Jerusalem and Deputy Legal Adviser of the Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs.