President Barack Obama's administration faces a major dilemma as the toll of protesters killed by the Assad regime in Syria continues to rise. Last week, administration spokespeople were asserting that the difference between the need for intervention in Libya and Washington's relatively restrained reaction to the killings in major Syrian cities was due to the relatively small number of those who were killed in the latter. Not surprisingly, as the protests have gained momentum, so has the ruthlessness of the regime's response. Will the United States do more than issue verbal condemnations? More importantly, should it do more?

Washington already has its hands full in the Middle East. The Libya operation is becoming increasingly demanding on American resources. Should A-10 tank killers be deployed to the Libyan theater, as the press is currently reporting, the United States faces the risk that the Libyans could score a lucky hit against one of these deadly but relatively slow-moving aircraft. Even more important, the potential presence of these aircraft underscores the degree to which "mission creep" has already taken hold of administration planners, just weeks after the operation was launched. After all, it is a very long stretch to argue that A-10s are being called in to protect civilians.

In an environment in which American forces are engaged in three Muslim countries, the last thing Washington needs is to be verbally trap itself in a situation in which pressure for yet more military action begins to mount. It has been suggested that Washington can rid Syria of Assad "on the cheap" -- through even more vigorous condemnations; by getting the Arab League to condemn the Syrian regime; by pressing for sanctions on the part of the European Union; and by referring Bashar al-Assad for prosecution as a war criminal by the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague. None of these suggestions is likely to accomplish very much, however. No amount of condemnation will dissuade the Assad regime from doing whatever it takes to preserve its power. And no such condemnations will come from an Arab League that already shows signs of regret for opening the door for a far broader American and Western military intervention than the conservative Arab leaders had anticipated.

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Moreover, nothing could be more counterproductive than to refer Assad to the ICC. Doing so would give him no option but to fight to the finish, After all, his only other alternative would be a trial in The Hague. Assad has no desire to be another Milosevic, and to share the latter's fate.

More importantly, in the exceedingly unlikely event that Assad were prepared to buckle before the protesters, his Alawi supporters would not permit him to do so. The Alawis who dominate the Syrian regime know full well that the country's overwhelming Sunni majority not only resents their rule, but considers them to be heretics. Recall that Assad's father had to get a special fatwa from a Shiite cleric proclaiming that the Alawis were indeed Muslims. (In fact, Bashar's grandfather actually supported the notion of a Zionist state alongside Maronite and Alawi enclaves along the Mediterranean coast!)

A successful Sunni revolt could well mean a major and bloody purge of the Alawis. At best, there will be civil war; at worst, a massacre. Will Washington's humanitarians then shout for intervention? And, if Alawis are being massacred, on whose side would they wish to intervene?

It is not even clear that the removal of Assad and his henchmen will benefit Israel. Syria was just as implacable a foe of the Jewish state prior to Hafez al-Assad's ascent to power in the 1960s. The only difference was that during the period 1948 until 1971, when the elder Assad formally took control of the country, Syria was an especially unstable country, ruled in rapid succession by a series of military and civilian dictators.

An unstable Syria might be tempted, as neither Assad pere nor fils were, to attack Israel on the Golan front, or to push Hezbollah into a war that Damascus would then widen, and that could involve Jordan, Iran and the Palestinians as well. The resulting conflagration would set back even further the already remote prospects for a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum and an Arab-Israeli peace.

It is high time that Washington realized it simply cannot solve all the problems in the Middle East at one time. It has been hard enough over the years for American administrations to solve any problem in that troubled region. Indeed, administrations of all stripes find it hard to concentrate on more than one foreign policy crisis or contingency at any one time; Obama now has three in the Middle East and Central Asia, with Libya still capable of metastasizing into a full-blown war.

Once that war is over, the demands for "reconstruction" will begin, despite the fact that Libya is drowning in oil. The Europeans, strapped for resources and still suffering from the aftershocks of the E.U. financial crisis, are unlikely to come forward with funds, as are the Gulf Arabs. Will the United States then take on another nation-building role?

Three contingencies and two major nation building exercises, whether in one region or worldwide, are more than enough for any administration to handle. The last thing the United States needs is to get enmeshed in Syria's troubles. We have enough on our plate; it is time to restrain our interventionist appetites.

There are two sides to the refugee story, and the Israeli side is one of the best-kept secrets of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

For a long time now, we have been wanting and waiting to sit down and talk. After all, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not short of talking points that need to be urgently resolved. Unfortunately, however, instead of both sides discussing the problems, the Palestinians seem more comfortable issuing demands.

One of the topics that we could discuss is refugees, what some describe in the familiar mantra as the "right of return". The slogan itself is, of course, a misnomer – a right is a legal function and must be grounded in law to have applicable force. Yet, as with so many of the cliches and familiar refrains surrounding the Middle East, there are two sides to the refugee story, with the Israeli side one of the best-kept secrets of the conflict.

While those Arabs who fled or left mandatory Palestine and Israel numbered roughly 750,000, there were more than 900,000 Jewish refugees subsequently expelled or forced out from Arab lands at around the same time. Before the state of Israel was re-established in 1948, there were almost 1 million Jews in Arab lands; today there are around 5,000.

As opposed to the Arabs in mandatory Palestine, who had been waging a civil war on the Jewish community for decades, the Jews in Arab lands were loyal citizens and residents, and had not been involved in any violence. Sadly, however, the Arab leadership of the time treated them as a "fifth column", and began taking draconian measures to facilitate their expulsion.

On 16 May 1948, two days after the state of Israel was re-established, the New York Times reported that the Arab League had recommended to its member states to freeze all bank accounts belonging to Jews, discharge all Jews in civil service positions and arbitrarily subject Jews to mass imprisonment. Several Arab regimes went further and inspired pogroms and mass murder against their Jewish populations. Just a decade after the Nazi persecution began in earnest, it was now the turn of the Jews in the Middle East to suffer similar edicts.

It is also worth considering how deep-rooted the refugees were in their respective lands. British colonial officials in the early part of the 20th century estimated that the Arab immigration from neighbouring states into mandatory Palestine was "considerable". CS Jarvis, governor of Sinai from 1923-36, said in 1937: "This illegal immigration was not only going on from the Sinai, but also from Trans-Jordan and Syria."

So while many of the Palestinian refugees were newcomers and fresh economic migrants, the Jewish refugees by contrast were being pushed out of the lands that they had lived in for thousands of years, predating even Islam and the subsequent Arab invasion and occupation of the region, which placed on all non-Muslims a dhimmi or subjugated status.

These obvious disparities on the ground were not replicated in the international arena when dealing with the crises. While early United Nations resolutions attempted to be fair and deal with all refugees resulting from the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Arab bloc and its allies trampled on any references or discussions regarding Jewish refugees, while at the same time creating absurd criteria for the Arab refugees, who are still exploited as political pawns to this day. In fact, as early as the 1950s United Nations refugee agency officials claimed that the Jewish refugees fell within their mandate.

After all, with the exception of Jordan, no Arab refugees were given citizenship and the majority still live in overcrowded areas, with few rights afforded them by their Arab brethren. This stands in contrast to the Jewish refugees, who were all immediately provided with Israeli citizenship.

As well as being absurdly unbalanced, the Palestinian demand of "right of return" also flies in the face of modern refugee resettlement. A recent ruling by the European court of human rights declared that due to the time that had elapsed, Greek refugees expelled from northern Cyprus in 1974 would not be allowed to return to their homes.

The negotiations for a final status resolution to the Israeli-Arab conflict are not merely about the creation of two states for two peoples; they are about historic reconciliation, justice, peace and security. There is also the issue of redress, and the Jews who were forced out or expelled from Arab lands are deserving of that.

Unfortunately, there are those who suggest that there is no need to burden the negotiations with another issue. Yet the fact that the Arab majority in multilateral forums have ensured that the Jewish refugee issue was never given a speaking part on the international stage until recently should be of no consequence.

This issue cuts to the heart of a regional solution to the conflict and recognises that a resolution will encompass all claims by all sides.

Israel has cleared the way for negotiations to restart by constantly declaring that all issues will be on the table. The Jewish refugee issue must be one of them.

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“Despite strong Arab opposition, the United Nations votes for the partition of Palestine and the creation of an independent Jewish state.”

No mention is made of the fact that the UN also voted for the creation of an independent Arab State.

Again the inclusion of just nine words “and an independent Arab state which the Arabs rejected” would have clearly indicated that the UN had not only offered the Jews a state but also offered the Arabs one as well – which the Arabs rejected.

The failure to insert those missing words carries the innuendo that only the Jews were offered a state in 1947 but the Arabs missed out and begs the question – isn’t it time the UN now rectified that injustice in 2010?

“The modern conflict between Jews and Arabs in Palestine dates back to the 1910s, when both groups laid claim to the British-controlled territory.”

Actually the conflict had started about thirty years earlier – so that chunk of history is either unknown to the History Channel’s researchers or was deliberately overlooked.

The territory was not “British-controlled” until the conclusion of World War 1. It was part of the Ottoman Empire until then.

Pity the poor students who use this material in their projects – and their teachers – who rely on this material as being accurate and reliable.

“The native Palestinian Arabs sought to stem Jewish immigration and set up a secular Palestinian state”

Really? Are the history buffs at the History Channel unaware of the following facts?

“The three main political organizations in Palestine-the Arab Club, the Literary Club, and the Muslim-Christian Association (the lack of mention of Palestine in their names is revealing) — all worked for union with Syria. The first two went farthest, calling outright for rule by Prince Faysal. Amin al-Husayni was president of the Arab Club; the extremism which later made him notorious as the leader of Palestinian separatism (and an ally of Hitler) already showed itself in 1920, when he instigated riots for union with Syria. A member of the Arab Club, Kamil al-Budayri, co-edited from September 1919 the newspaper Suriya al-Janubiya (“Southern Syria”) which advocated Palestine’s incorporation into Greater Syria.

Even the Muslim-Christian Association, an organization of traditional leaders-men who expected to rule if Palestine became independent-demanded incorporation in Greater Syria. Its president insisted that “Palestine or Southern Syria-an integral part of the one and indivisible Syria-must not in any case or for any pretext be detached.” The Muslim-Christian Association held a Congress in early 1919 to draw up demands for the Paris Peace Conference. It declared that Palestine, a “part of Arab Syria,” is permanently connected to Syria through “national, religious, linguistic, natural, economic, and geographical bonds,” and resolved that “Southern Syria or Palestine should not be separated from the independent Arab Syrian government.” Musa Kazim al-Husayni, Head of the Jerusalem Town Council (in effect, mayor) told a Zionist interlocutor in October 1919: “We demand no separation from Syria.” The slogan heard everywhere in 1918-19 was “Unity, Unity, From the Taurus [Mountains in Turkey] to Rafah [in Gaza], Unity, Unity.”

“Beginning in 1929, Arabs and Jews openly fought in Palestine”

Staggeringly the History Channel seems to be unaware of the 1920 riots which saw four Arabs and five Jews killed, while 216 Jews were wounded – 18 critically – and 23 Arabs wounded – one critically.

“Radical Jewish groups employed terrorism against British forces in Palestine,”

Since when is fighting the armed forces of your adversary – not its civilians – described as “terrorism”? The History Channel’s biased slip is surely on display for all to see.

“At the end of World War II, in 1945, the United States took up the Zionist cause,”

The United States had taken up the Zionist cause on 30 June 1922 when both Houses of Congress unanimously endorsed the Mandate for Palestine.

On 21 September 1922 President Warren Harding signed the joint resolution of approval to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine

“The Jews were to possess more than half of Palestine…,

It is a pity the History Channel could not have added: “more than 70% of which was the arid and sparsely populated Negev Desert”

“The Palestinian Arabs, aided by volunteers from other countries, fought the Zionist forces”

Strange that the History Channel should be unaware that these “volunteers” comprised the “Arab Liberation Army” set up in Damascus under the command of Fawzi Kaukji. Seven of these detachments with a strength of about 5000 had made their way into Palestine by March 1948. They were divided into four commands.

“The next day, forces from Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded.”

Oops – the History Channel forgot to include Saudi Arabia – a small oversight.

The History Channel then has the gall to state at the end of this outrageous release:

“Fact Check. We strive for accuracy and fairness. But if you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us! “

Creating myth instead of stating fact is one of the greatest impediments to securing a resolution of the conflict between the Arabs and Jews.

The next time you watch the History Channel (if you ever do so again) – don’t take what you hear and see as the truth. There are apparently a lot of dunderheads employed there or – perhaps more insidiously – persons deliberately bent on misleading the public.

It's 62 years since the UN passed a resolution on the rights of Palestinian refugees – rights Israel must recognise for peace

Before his murder in 1948, Lord Folke Bernadotte, the first UN mediator to the Arab-Israeli conflict, stated: "It would be an offence against the principles of elemental justice if these innocent [Palestinian] victims of the conflict were denied the right to return to their homes, while Jewish immigrants flow into Palestine." Lord Bernadotte paid for his candour with his life as Jewish militants assassinated him under the direction of Yitzhak Shamir, the man who would later become prime minister of Israel.

Less than three months after his death, as the war of 1948 ground to a close, and nearly three-quarters of the entire indigenous Palestinian population had been displaced by Israeli forces, the UN passed general assembly resolution 194, calling for the return of Palestinian refugees to their homes and to be awarded compensation for their losses.

On Saturday, 62 years will have passed without this historic resolution being implemented despite being upheld by the UN with nearly universal consensus ever since. In fact, Israel's own admission as a member to the United Nations was contingent on its adherence to the principles of UNGA 194, something it proceeded to disregard once membership was granted.

Contrary to what Israeli political figures would like the world to believe, the issue of Palestinian refugees is not an academic matter, the solution of which is somehow rendered moot by the passage of time and by the creation of Israeli "facts on the ground." Palestinian displacement continues to this day through the revocation of residency cards, land confiscation, home demolitions and evictions. At the same time, Israel has barred Palestinians displaced between 1947 and 1949, and again in 1967, from returning to their homes or receiving restitution for their lost property, making Palestinian refugees the oldest and largest refugee community in the world today.

The fact that Israel bears responsibility for the creation of the refugees is beyond argument. Even if the state still claims amnesia for its deeds, Israeli historians have debunked the traditional Zionist mythology and shown how Zionist leaders prior to 1948 formulated plans to displace the indigenous Palestinian population in order to create a Jewish majority state. Such a state would have been impossible without the mass expulsion of Palestinians, given that Palestinians constituted a majority in every district of historic Palestine prior to 1948 and also owned over 90% of the land.

Even if we accept the Israeli narrative that refugees left voluntarily – which has been proven false for the vast majority – there is no doubt about the fact that when refugees attempted to return according to their legal right, they were blocked by newly drafted Israeli legislation and declared infiltrators on their own property.

This period of dispossession, known to Palestinians as al-Nakba or "the catastrophe", is the seminal Palestinian experience and source of our collective identity. In fact, the current Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, is himself a refugee displaced from the city of Safed during the 1948 war when he was only 13-years-old.

Today, Palestinian refugees constitute more than 7 million people worldwide – 70% of the entire Palestinian population. Disregarding their legitimate legal rights enshrined in international law, their understandable grievances accrued over prolonged displacement, and their aspirations to return to their homeland, would certainly make any peace deal signed with Israel completely untenable.

In accordance with past Israeli-Arab agreements based on UN resolutions – most significantly the Egypt-Israeli Camp David Accords based on UN resolution 242's formula of land-for-peace – resolution 194 must provide the basis for a settlement to the refugee issue.

Return and restitution as the remedy of choice has a strong international precedent. For example, in the context of the Dayton Accords, concluded under the auspices of the United States, the return of Bosnian refugees to their homes and restitution of their property was considered a "non-negotiable" right that was critical to crafting a durable solution. American leaders such as Madeleine Albright, then the secretary of state, openly called on Bosnian Muslim refugees to return en masse to their former places of residence.

In Bosnia and in Palestine, the return of refugees has been considered absolutely necessary for the stability of peace. Any deal that does not respect the rights of refugees has been viewed as bearing the seed of its inevitable failure.

When negotiations resume once again, the world must not abandon the refugees of Palestine, nor attempt to coerce their representatives to do so either.

Israel's recognition of Palestinian refugee rights and its agreement to provide reparation and meaningful refugee choice in the exercise of these rights will not change the reality in the Middle East overnight, nor will it lead to an existential crisis for Israel. What it will certainly do is mark the beginning of a new reality that will no longer be rooted in repression, denial of rights, and discrimination. In other words, it will lead to a lasting peace – the kind of peace envisaged by Lord Bernadotte and hoped for by Palestinians and Israelis alike.

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Old-school foreign correspondent who reported on the Middle East for the Daily Telegraph and the Independent

John Bulloch, who has died aged 82, epitomised the classic foreign correspondent of the last half of the 20th century: tough, acerbic, commanding, not averse to a drink or eight, and utterly professional and reliable in his street-craft, writing and reporting, whatever the circumstances, which were often threatening.

He also wrote for ordinary people – for most of his life readers of the Daily Telegraph, the newspaper which he first joined in 1958. Just below the ordered Fleet Street prose, one could detect his concern for the downtrodden and his estimation of their prime importance in the mainly Middle Eastern upheavals he covered. For Bulloch, the Lebanese civil war, for example, was, as he repeatedly stressed, as much about social upheaval and laissez-faire capitalism, and its helpmates colonialism and imperialism, as it was about regional or tribal hostilities.

Above all, he was a straightforward reporter and explainer. Bulloch's implacably dismissive manner with idiots and flunkeys, his height, his shock of white hair and industrial horn-rims, his lumbering gait, his slightly abrasive South Walian drawl and his basilisk stare and monosyllabic unhelpfulness when confronted with roadblocks or recalcitrant guerrillas, or naive young journalists, are how I remember him, a field man to the core and a reassuring man to be with.

In August 1976, he was sitting in front of me in a taxi in an unfamiliar part of Christian east Beirut when a machine-gunner in a Palestinian emplacement on the other side of the lines chose our street for a few bursts. I was shot through the arm and Bulloch, exasperated as ever, pointed out that I had applied my thumb to a pressure point below the wound. He pressed the correct vein, meanwhile berating our dullard of a driver for taking us down a sniper alley.

An ex-Reuter man and later Independent colleague, Harvey Morris, remembers entering one of the few restaurants open in west Beirut during the intense Israeli bombardment of the summer of 1982. The gunfire was loud. Bombs were dropping. Normal people were in their basements. The streets were empty. But Bulloch was in the well-protected Myrtom House behind a beer and a wiener schnitzel. "What are you doing here?" Morris asked him. "I'm having lunch," came the stern reply. It was Bulloch all over: ask a silly question ...

As another former BBC colleague, David McNeil, told me: "I was asked by the BBC when John applied for a job with us if he drank too much. I told them, he may have often been last man at the bar, but he was always first on parade." Bulloch did serve a few months at Bush House, in 1977, but found it too tame and soon returned to the Telegraph, where he stayed until joining the new Independent newspaper in 1986. He was a Fleet Street man, par excellence. He knew his stuff better than most and he applied ruthless common sense in a region where it was a commodity notable for its absence.

He was born John Angel Bullock in Penarth, near Cardiff – his name was misspelt on an early byline and never changed back. After Penarth county school for boys and the training decks of HMS Conway in the Menai Straits, Anglesey, he served as a teenager in the merchant marine, between 1944 and 1948. His wartime ship's missions took him to Basra port, then a louche watering-hole at the head of the gulf, a place he would revisit more than 20 years later as a foreign correspondent for the Telegraph. During his career, he covered the Congo and southern Africa, inter alia, but his main focus was on the Middle East, where he covered three Arab-Israeli conflicts, the Lebanese wars, the ever-present quest for Palestinian self-determination, and its regional repercussions, Iraq under Saddam Hussein – whom he interviewed over a bottle of Scotch – the Iran-Iraq war and the allied intervention against Iraq after its invasion of Kuwait, in 1990.

Bulloch wrote 13 books: on intelligence matters in the early 1960s, for which he had early on developed a keen nose; two books written at daunting speed, on Lebanon's civil war in the mid-1970s and the Israeli invasion of 1982; The Gulf War (1989) and Saddam's War (1991), with Morris; and Water Wars (1993), with Adel Darwish, another Independent reporter, on this largely unremarked casus belli in the Middle East.

Bulloch was a founding member of the Independent, with other refugees from the Daily Telegraph, such as Andreas Whittam Smith, the Independent's co-founder and first editor, in 1986. It was perhaps a more amenable home for a man who held stern views about capitalism, about Israel's depredations against its Arab neighbours, and about imperialism in all its forms. He became Middle East editor of the daily, then, when the Sunday was formed a few years later, diplomatic editor there.

In his later years he regrouped with his young family in Oxford, grappling with an allotment and characteristically cocking a snook at local developers. He never lost his fascination with and expertise on the Middle East and his connections with the many friends and colleagues he had helped, and often outshone, across the generations.

Bulloch married three times, most recently to Jill, whom he met in the early 1980s on assignment in the Middle East, and who survives him, as do two sons, Adam and James, and two daughters, Jilly and Oya.

• John Angel Bulloch (Bullock), journalist, born 15 April 1928; died 18 November 2010

• This article was amended on 6 December 2010. The original made mention of Bulloch's "obelisk stare"

Robert Capa (October 22, 1913 – May 25, 1954), born Endre Ernő Friedmann[1], was a Hungarian combat photographer and photojournalist who covered five different wars: the Spanish Civil War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, World War II across Europe, the 1948 Arab-Israeli War, and the First Indochina War. He documented the course of World War II in London, North Africa, Italy, the Battle of Normandy on Omaha Beach and the liberation of Paris. His action photographs, such as those taken during the 1944 Normandy invasion, portray the violence of war with unique impact. In 1947, Capa co-founded Magnum Photos with, among others, the French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson. The organization was the first cooperative agency for worldwide freelance photographers.

In the early 1950s, Capa traveled to Japan for an exhibition associated with Magnum Photos. While there, Life magazine asked him to go on assignment to Southeast Asia, where the French had been fighting for eight years in the First Indochina War. Despite the fact he had sworn not to photograph another war a few years earlier, Capa accepted and accompanied a French regiment with two other Time-Life journalists, John Mecklin and Jim Lucas. On May 25, 1954 at 2:55 p.m., the regiment was passing through a dangerous area under fire when Capa decided to leave his jeep and go up the road to photograph the advance. About five minutes later, Mecklin and Lucas heard an explosion; Capa had stepped on a landmine. When they arrived on the scene he was still alive, but his left leg had been blown to pieces and he had a serious wound in his chest. Mecklin called for a medic and Capa was taken to a small field hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. He died with his camera in his hand.

Magnum Photography

By Dr. Joseph S. Maresca

The Nobel Prize is awarded to individuals and sometimes groups who have contributed significantly to an ideal relating to the betterment of the human condition, progress toward disarmament, the reduction of longstanding armies or significant humanitarian efforts. The Prize is awarded for Peace, Physics, Chemistry, Medicine, Literature and Economics. 

Traditionally, the award is presented at a major ceremony on December 10th of each year, although the Nobel Lecture may be given earlier by the award winners. The Nobel Lecture generally amplifies the major work of the award winner, although sometimes there may be a Marie Skłodowska–Curie, 1898; Photo Credit: Wikipediaslight departure depending upon the emphasis placed by the speaker. Some known and not so well known award winners will be listed below alongside their major contributions. This article will concentrate on the not-so-well known winners. 

Ralph Bunche, the 1950 Nobel Peace Prize winner, was involved with the Arab-Israeli conflict. He served as assistant to the United Nations Special Committee on Palestine, and thereafter as the principal secretary of the U.N. Palestine Commission. In 1948 he traveled to the Middle East as the chief aide to Sweden's Count Folke Bernadotte, who had been appointed by the U.N. to mediate the conflict.

Sir Joseph Rotblat, the 1995 Nobel Peace winner formed the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs organization in 1957. The group promoted nuclear disarmament and greater collaboration between scholars worldwide to prevent or mediate significant global conflict.  In 1995, Rotblat and the Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, "for their efforts to diminish the part played by nuclear arms in international politics and, in the longer run, to eliminate such arms." In his acceptance speech, Rotblat noted that the group's goals were entirely doable, noting the close-knit structure of the European Union, "within which war is inconceivable."

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen ( March 1845 - February 1923) was a German physicist, who, on  November 8, 1895, produced and detected electromagnetic radiation in a wavelength range today known as X-rays or Röntgen rays. This achievement earned him the first Nobel Prize in Physics in 1901.

Marie Skłodowska Curie ( November 1867 -  July 1934) was a physicist and chemist of Polish upbringing and subsequent French citizenship. She was a pioneer in the field of  radioactivity and the first person honored with dual Nobel Prizes-in Physics and Chemistry. She was also the first female professor at the University of Paris.

Wilhelm Ostwald was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria and reaction velocities. He received honorary doctorates from several universities in Germany, Great Britain and the USA, and was made an honorary member of learned societies in Germany, Sweden, Norway, the Netherlands, Russia, Great Britain and the USA. In 1899 he was made a "Geheimrat" by the King of Saxony.

Sir Ronald Ross (1857-1932) was a British bacteriologist who received the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1902 for his work on malaria. His discovery of the malarial parasite in the gastrointestinal tract of the Anopheles mosquito led to the realization that malaria was transmitted by Anopheles, and laid the foundation for combating the disease, as well as understanding the intricacies of the gastrointestinal tract more concretely. 

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1953 was awarded to Sir Winston Churchill "for his mastery of historical and biographical description as well as for brilliant oratory in defending exalted human values.” He published 43 books. including My African Journey, India, Great Contemporaries, The Unrelenting Struggle, The Sinews of Peace, A History of the English Speaking Peoples and many others. Churchill's Nobel departed slightly from other awards which tend to emphasize poems, belles lettres literature and stories which typify the ideal or ideal tendencies of the human condition. i.e. William Golding's story entitled Lord of the Flies. William Golding was the 1983 Literature Prize Winner. (1)

Wassily Leontief earned the Nobel Prize in Economics in 1973 for his work on input-output tables. Input-output tables analyze the process by which inputs from one industry produce outputs for consumption or for inputs regarding another industry. With the input-output table, one can estimate the change in demand for inputs resulting from a change in production of the final good. The analysis assumes that input proportions are fixed. Therefore,  the use of input-output analysis is limited to approximations rather than predictions per se. Leontief used input-output analysis to study the characteristics of trade flow between the U.S. and other countries. This led to Leontief's paradox; "this country resorts to foreign trade in order to economize its capital and dispose of its surplus labor, rather than vice versa."

A number of very talented people might have won the prize and didn't. One such person is George Washington Carver.  Much of Carver's fame is based on his research into and promotion of crops as alternatives to cotton, such as peanuts and sweet potatoes. He wanted poor farmers to grow alternative crops both as a source of their own food and as a source of other products to improve the quality of life.  The most popular of his 44 practical bulletins for farmers contained 105 food recipes that used peanuts.  He also created or disseminated about 100 products made from peanuts that were useful for the house and farm, including cosmetics, dyes, paints, plastics, gasoline, and even nitroglycerin.  His work spanned 235 patents.

Leo Tolstoy (1828 - November, 1910), was a Russian writer widely regarded as one of the greatest novelists. His masterpieces War and Peace and Anna Karenina represent in their scope, breadth and vivid depiction of 19th-century Russian life and attitudes, the peak of realist fiction. Since the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901, he simply did not live long enough to be awarded the prize. 

Rosa Parks, the "mother of the civil rights movement" was one of the most important citizens of the 20th century as was Coretta Scott King.  Their work merited a Nobel Peace Prize at some point. 

Frederick Douglass was another potential winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. Simply put, he did not live long enough to be awarded the prize.  Frederick Douglass (born Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, circa 1818 – February 20, 1895) was an American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman. Frederick Douglass was one of the foremost leaders of the abolitionist movement, which fought to end slavery within the United States. (2)

President Franklin Roosevelt might have won the Nobel Prize for his work in ending the Great Depression which displaced millions in the streets throughout the United States. His efforts helped to cement a solid middle class instead of a growing Proletariat of poor. His diplomatic efforts were extensive and these certainly mobilized Europe and the USA to secure the peace. Again, he did not live long enough to be awarded the Prize. Other American Presidents could have won the prize for various notable achievements.

1) http://www.winstonchurchill.org/learn/writings

2) www.history.rochester.edu/class/douglass/home.html

Joseph S. Maresca Ph.D., CPA, CISA, MBA: His significant writings include over 10 copyrights in the name of the author (Joseph S. Maresca) and a patent in the earthquake sciences. He holds membership in the prestigious Delta Mu Delta National Honor Society and Sigma Beta Delta International Honor Society.  In addition, he blogs and reviews many books for Basil & Spice. Visit the Joseph S. Maresca Writer's Page.

Copyright © 2006-2010, Basil & Spice. All rights reserved.

An intractable asymmetry between Palestinian and Israeli power bases means the US must intervene. Otherwise, these talks fail

The pope, according to a no doubt apocryphal story, maintains that there are two possible solutions to the Arab-Israeli conflict – the realistic and the miraculous. The realistic solution involves divine intervention; the miraculous solution involves a voluntary agreement between the parties themselves. The American-sponsored peace talks that got under way in Washington last week may be viewed in this light. It will take nothing less than a miracle to produce a peaceful settlement of the century-old conflict between Jews and Arabs over the Holy Land.

The obstacles to peace are formidable. All previous attempts to clear them have ended in failure, most notably the Camp David summit of July 2000. An American-sponsored peace process of some sort has been going on intermittently since the Madrid conference of 1991, the mother of all Middle East peace conferences. So direct peace negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, with or without American peace processors, are nothing new. In the words of one American, it is deja vu all over again.

The current negotiators will have to find solutions to all the deeply sensitive issues that lie at the heart of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the so-called permanent status issues. These include the right of return of the 1948 Palestinian refugees, the status of Jerusalem, the future of the Jewish settlements on the West Bank, and the borders of the Palestinian entity.

But there is an immediate stumbling block: settlements. A partial and temporary Israeli freeze on their expansion on the West Bank is due to expire at the end of the month and, if it is not renewed, the Palestinian negotiators have said they will walk out. And who can blame them? If Israel persists in its bad old Zionist ways of "creating facts on the ground", the peace talks will become a charade. It would be like two men negotiating the division of a pizza with one of them continuing to swallow chunks of it.

The prospects for reaching a permanent status agreement are poor because the Israelis are too strong, the Palestinians are too weak, and the Americans mediators are utterly ineffectual. The sheer asymmetry of power between the two parties militates against a voluntary agreement. To get Israelis and Palestinians round a conference table and to tell them to hammer out an agreement is like putting a lion and a lamb in a cage and asking them to sort out their own differences.

Third party intervention is clearly indispensable. To put it more simply, there can be no settlement unless America pushes Israel into a settlement. Playing the honest broker will not do the trick. In the first place, most Arabs regard the United States as a dishonest broker on account of its palpable partisanship on behalf of Israel. Moreover, honest brokerage is not enough. In order to bridge the huge gap separating the two sides, America must first redress the balance of power by putting most of its weight on the side of the weaker party.

The negotiations in Washington will be face to face but they will also be back to back, with each leader constantly watching his domestic constituency. President Mahmoud Abbas, popularly known as Abu Mazen, is the most moderate partner for peace Israel could hope for. But his domestic position is rather precarious. He is the leader of the mainstream party Fatah, a democratically elected president, and the head of the Palestinian Authority. But he faces a formidable rival in Hamas, the Islamic resistance movement, and other splinter groups like Islamic Jihad.

Hamas won a free and fair election in January 2006; it moderated its rejectionist stand once in power, and formed a national unity government with Fatah in March 2007. In June of that same year, however, it seized power violently in Gaza to pre-empt a Fatah coup. Since then Gaza has become an open-air prison camp because of the brutal and illegal Israeli blockade.

Today the Palestinian camp is deeply divided between the West Bank, ruled by the Fatah-dominated PA, and the Gaza Strip, ruled by Hamas. Hamas is vociferously and violently opposed to the peace talks with the Jewish state. It maintains that Abbas has no mandate to represent the Palestinians. Its military wing reinforced the message by killing four Jewish settlers in Hebron on the eve of the talks. Hamas's capacity to play the spoiler should not be under-estimated. Even in the highly unlikely event of Abbas reaching a peace agreement with Israel, it is difficult to see how he would impose it on Palestinians in the teeth of such strong opposition.

Binyamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister and leader of the Likud party, enjoys a more solid power base at home but he, too, is subject to severe constraints on his freedom of action. His coalition partners are the Labour party, Yisrael Beitenu, and Shas. Together they command a comfortable majority of 66 seats in the 120-member Knesset, Israel's parliament.

Confronted with painful choices over the future of the West Bank, however, the coalition is likely to fall apart. Likud used to regard Judea and Samaria, the Biblical names for the West Bank, as an integral part of the land of Israel. Yisrael Beitenu and Shas still do. Labour, with only 11 seats in the Knesset, carries little weight. This is the most rightwing, chauvinistic and racist government in Israel's history. The ideological makeup of the government militates against a peace deal with the Palestinians.

Netanyahu is not a dove who has fallen among hawks. On the contrary, he is a rightwing nationalist, a believer in Greater Israel and a proponent of the strategy of the iron wall, of dealing with the Palestinians from a position of unassailable military strength. He grew up in a nationalistic Jewish home. His father, Ben-Zion Netanyahu, who at 100 years old is still a force to be reckoned with, was the secretary of Ze'ev Jabotinsky, the spiritual father of the Israeli right. Netanyahu junior belongs to the hawkish wing of the Likud. He denounced the 1993 Oslo Accord between Israel and the PLO as incompatible either with Israel's security or with the historic right of the Jewish people to the whole land of Israel. The policy guidelines of his first government, when the Likud came to power in 1996, amounted to a declaration of war on the peace process. Netanyahu spent his three years as prime minister in a largely successful attempt to destroy the foundations for peace with the Palestinians that his Labour predecessors had built.

To his second term as prime minister Netanyahu brings the same old ideological baggage and the same dogged determination to deny the Palestinian people the same right to national self-determination that Israel exercised back in 1948. His rhetoric has changed, but his policy can still be summed up in one ominous word: politicide – to deny the Palestinian people any independent political existence in Palestine. This world view identifies him not as a genuine partner to President Abbas on the road to peace but as the proponent of permanent conflict.

Yet the possibility of a change of heart cannot be entirely ruled out. Maybe Netanyahu will surprise us all by moving on from the relentless rejectionism of the past to become a peacemaker. And maybe the pope will start smoking pot.

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As a sitting member of a democratic government, it might appear strange to declare that I am a refugee. However, my father, his parents and family were just a few of the almost one million Jews who were expelled or forced out of Arab lands. My father and his family were Algerian, from a Jewish community thousands of years old that predated the Arab conquest of North Africa and even Islam. Upon receiving independence, Algeria allowed only Muslims to become citizens and drove the indigenous Jewish community and the rest of my family out.

While those Arabs who fled or left Mandatory Palestine and Israel numbered roughly 750,000, there were roughly 900,000 Jewish refugees from Arab lands. ...

An important distinction between the two groups is the fact that many Palestinian Arabs were actively involved in the conflict initiated by the surrounding Arab nations, while Jews from Arab lands were living peacefully, even in a subservient dhimmi status, in their countries of origin for many centuries if not millennia.

Financial economists have estimated that, in today’s figures, the total amount of assets lost by the Jewish refugees from Arab lands, including communal property such as schools, synagogues and hospitals, is almost twice that of the assets lost by the Palestinian refugees. Furthermore, one must remember that Israel returned over 90 percent of blocked bank accounts, safe deposit boxes and other items belonging to Palestinian refugees during the 1950s.

EVEN THOUGH the number of Jewish refugees and their assets are larger than that of the Palestinians, the international community only appears to be aware of the latter’s plight.

There are numerous major international organizations devoted to the Palestinian refugees. There is an annual conference held at the United Nations and a refugee agency was created just for the Palestinian refugees. While all the world’s refugees have one agency, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the Palestinians fall under the auspices of another agency, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA).

UNWRA’s budget for 2010 is almost half of UNHCR’s budget.

Equally impressive is the fact that UNHCR prides itself on having found “durable solutions” for “tens of millions” of refugees since 1951, the year of its establishment. However, UNRWA does not even claim to have found “durable solutions” for anyone.

If that is not distorted enough, let’s look at the definitions and how they are applied: normally the definition of a refugee only applies to the person that fled and sought refuge, while a Palestinian refugee is the person that fled and all of their descendants for all time.
WITH DIRECT negotiations about to resume between Israel and the Palestinians, the spotlight will be returned to this issue. The so-called Palestinian ‘right of return’ is legal fiction. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 194, the supposed source for this ‘right’ does not mention this term, is not legally binding and, like all other relevant United Nations resolutions uses the intentionally ambiguous term ‘refugees’ with no appellation.

United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, still seen as the primary legal framework for resolving the Arab-Israeli conflict asserts that a comprehensive Middle East peace settlement should necessarily include “a just settlement of the refugee problem.”

No distinction is made between Arab refugees and Jewish refugees.

In fact, one of the leading drafters of the resolution, Justice Arthur Goldberg, the United States’ Chief Delegate to the United Nations, said: “The resolution addresses the objective of ‘achieving a just settlement of the refugee problem.’ This language presumably refers both to Arab and Jewish refugees.”

In addition, every peace conference and accord attended or signed between Israel and its Arab neighbors uses the term “refugees” without qualification.

During the famous Camp David discussions in 2000, president Clinton, the facilitator and host of the negotiations said: “There will have to be some sort of international fund set up for the refugees. There is, I think, some interest, interestingly enough, on both sides, in also having a fund which compensates the Israelis who were made refugees by the war, which occurred after the birth of the State of Israel. Israel is full of people, Jewish people, who lived in predominantly Arab countries who came to Israel because they were made refugees in their own land”.

In 2008, the US Congress passed House Resolution 185 granting, for the first time, equal recognition to Jewish refugees, while affirming that the US government will now recognize that all victims of the Arab-Israeli conflict must be treated equally.

Before 1948 there were nearly 900,000 Jews in Arab lands while only a few thousand remain. Where is the international outrage, the conferences, the proclamations for redress and compensation? While the Palestinian refugee issue has become a political weapon to beat Israel, the Arab League has ordered its member states not to provide their Palestinian population with citizenship; Israel absorbed all of its refugees, whether fleeing the Holocaust or persecution and expulsion from Arab lands.

People like my father, the hundreds of thousands who came to Israel and the millions of Israelis descended from these refugees are entitled to redress. It is vital that this issue return to the international agenda, so we don’t once again see an asymmetrical and distorted treatment of Arabs and Jews in the Israeli-Arab conflict.

El-Abed notes that prior to Israel’s independence in 1948 there were approximately 75,000 Palestinians living in Egypt. Most had settled in Cairo and Alexandria and lived close to other Palestinians, and were from the middle and upper classes, and some had acquired Egyptian citizenship. Their residency was considered temporary, and many believed, with the encouragement from Arab governments, that they would return to Israel. However, after the first Arab-Israeli War in 1948, Egypt became responsible for the welfare of two separate Palestinian communities; the Palestinians living in Egypt proper, which numbered approximately 87,000 and the 200,000 Palestinians living in the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip, a small, densely populated territory seized by Egypt during the war. Palestinian living conditions in the Gaza Strip were harsh. They remained stateless, their travel was restricted, and an Egyptian governor ruled the territory with an iron fist.

President Gamal Abdel Nasser attempted to improve the quality of life for Palestinians in the Gaza Strip by granting them free education in public schools and many worked as businessmen, merchants, mechanics, farmers, and fishermen. He also allocated subsidies for students to enter Egyptian universities and helped create the Palestine Liberation Organization in 1964, although the latter was more out of his desire to control Palestinian affairs than out of benevolence.

After the 1967 War, the Gaza Strip fell under Israeli control and approximately 13,000 additional Palestinians entered Egypt. Their stateless condition persisted after Nasser’s death in 1970, and new, harsh measures enacted by President Anwar Sadat sought to draw clearer distinctions between Palestinian and Egyptian identities. Sadat revoked some privileges Palestinians enjoyed under Nasser and in 1978, he enacted a law which banned Palestinian children from free public schools, forcing them to switch to costly private schools. He also imposed Law 48, which prohibited Palestinian workers from the public sector. Palestinians were also viewed with suspicion and persecuted, particularly after Egyptian Minister of Culture Yusuf al-Sibai’s assassination by the Palestinian terrorist group Abu Nidal in 1978.

For the Palestinian population in Egypt, the turning point—repeatedly cited in our interviews—was the 18 February 1978 assassination in Nicosia, Cyprus, of Egyptian culture minister Yusif al-Siba‘i by the notorious Palestinian Abu Nidal faction. Though Abu Nidal had been expelled from Fatah and the PLO with much fanfare in the early 1970s and was widely known to be their sworn enemy, the Egyptian government and media did not hesitate to stigmatize the Palestinians in general for the assassination. At al-Siba‘i’s funeral, Egyptian prime minister Mustafa Riyad declared, “No more Palestine after today.” The fallout of the assassination was immediately felt within Egypt’s Palestinian community, with a flurry of arrests, surveillance, and detentions. Although the research for this book did not yield specific information on the number of Palestinians arrested after al-Siba‘i’s death, some interviewees reported that Palestinian houses were regularly searched for young men to bring in for questioning.

The police made intensive arrest campaigns against Palestinians after the death of al-Siba‘i. That day, the police came to the building where I live and asked about a Palestinian officer in the army, which was my rank then. My Egyptian neighbors spoke highly of me and I was lucky that they did not come again. (P1, Giza, Cairo, 10 May 2002)
---
After the killing of al-Siba‘i, Egyptians considered Palestinians as Jews [an allusion to Palestinian perceived economic power], although we are Arabs like them. One day the front window of my shop was broken. Of course, it was an Egyptian who did it. Why? What have I done to them? Is it only because I am Palestinian, like those who killed al-Siba‘i? (P9, Wailey, 24 June 2002)

The al-Siba‘i assassination triggered a spate of anti-Palestinian editorializing, which further inflamed popular opinion. “Disloyalty” became a trait frequently attributed to Palestinians. Another endlessly repeated charge—mentioned by a great number of our interviewees as a standard and deeply ingrained idea about Palestinians—is that they “sold their land to the Zionists” of their own accord and therefore got what they deserved. Not atypical is the following passage from the popular Egyptian daily al-Akhbar:

Each one of the thousands of people who participated in the funeral asked himself: Is this what we get for having waged four wars for those who killed him? For having deprived ourselves of bread in order to recover their lost land? . . . for having deprived our children of the places in the university that were their due so they [Palestinians] could have them? . . . for having tasted death so they could live? Are those the words we sacrificed ourselves for so that Gaza and the West Bank would be liberated before Sinai? Our people do not deserve such ingratitude. (Mustafa Amin, al-Akhbar, 20 February 1978)

It was also during the period following the assassination that reports of Palestinian wealth increased, which sharpened resentments among poor Egyptians and fueled the Palestinians’ reputation for having “taken over” the Egyptian economy. As an example of the kind of journalistic writing that encouraged such notions, a 13 May 1979 article headlined “All These Fortunes for Palestinians Living in Egypt!!!” appeared in Egyptian Weekly Magazine. Among the article’s claims were that 60 percent of the shops in Central Cairo and Port Said were Palestinian-owned and that 12,000 private import-export offices and 40 farms were run by Palestinians. Exaggerating Palestinian economic power in this way suggested to the local population that the Palestinians in their midst were vampires sucking the blood of the Egyptian people.

Of far more lasting practical consequence, however, were the legal changes that followed al-Siba‘i’s killing. On 28 February 1978, a mere ten days after the assassination, the authoritative al-Ahram reported the prime minister’s announcement that the government would “reconsider all procedures that treated Palestinians as nationals. The purpose [was] to rank Palestinians with other Arab nationals and to safeguard national rights for Egyptians.” Indeed, the threat was soon carried out, with President Sadat issuing administrative regulations 47 and 48 of 1978 decreeing that all regulations treating Palestinians as nationals were to be annulled. Ministries hastened to apply the regulations: “The Ministry of Labor warned against issuing foreigners, including Palestinians, permits for business or for creating offices for export/import. Exceptions [were] made for those who had been married to Egyptian women for the past five years” (al-Ahram, 7 August 1978). More specifically, Law 48 concerned work in the public sector. Section 1 of Article 16 of the law stipulated that employment of Arab nationals should be on a “reciprocal basis.” This meant that the government of Egypt would hire citizens only of countries that hired Egyptian nationals. Needless to say, the stateless Palestinians were excluded under this law.

The dismantling of Nasser’s legislation favoring the Palestinians continued for the remainder of Sadat’s regime, further tightening restrictions on employment and extending the restrictions to other spheres, especially education, where Palestinians saw themselves progressively deprived of their access to free education and to university study.

An often overlooked aspect of the cancellation of the regulations treating Palestinians as nationals is that it did not concern solely the Palestinians in Egypt. The measures had far-reaching consequences for Palestinians across the Arab world, at least with regard to education. For more than twenty years, Palestinians could be educated in Egyptian universities free of charge, and tens of thousands took advantage of the offer: From the mid-1960s until 1978, an average of 20,000 Palestinian students per year were enrolled in Egyptian universities. 

In this sense, then, what ended with the legislation following the al-Siba‘i assassination was the lingering legacy of Nasser’s “sponsorship” of the Palestinian people. By enacting these measures, Sadat was signalling that Egypt was no longer the patron of the Palestinians nor the primary Arab defender of their cause.

Islamophobes the world over like to claim that Islamic people are enemies of freedom and must be stopped in their tracks. It's a clever, convenient argument, and one that has sparked massive amounts of xenophobia since 9/11, when the nation was raw and itching for a collective "enemy." Arab editors in Israel, however, are about to blow that myth out of the water.

Alaa Hlehel and a dedicated staff of wordsmiths just launched a new web-based literary journal that has made a point of including the LGBT set. Called Qadita, named after Hlehel's hometown, destroyed in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, the journal will include video, fiction, commentary and a very special gay page. Could this be the tool gay people need to help break down long-standing sociopolitical barriers?

To say that there exists a division between Islamic and queer communities would be an understatement. Though certainly not all Arab people, the majority of whom are Islamic, are homophobic, many state leaders around the world have helped drill anti-gay attitudes into their people, or, at least, their politics. Who could forget, for example, when Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed there were no gay people in his nation?

Gay people aren't necessarily better: over my years as a gay editor, I have seen countless comments on how Arab and/or Islamic people "hate" gays, and the porn producer Michael Lucas has turned anti-Arab attitudes into a pet project. Qadita may be just the ticket to changing the Islam-Arab-Gay debate, and ones more universal than just identity politics.

"Rebellious or 'non-conservative' writing should not fall victim to erasure just because its dissemination angers some people or offends 'sensitivities,'" said Hlehel of his project. "We believe the margin of freedom in Arabic-language publishing is under siege, because of political and social tensions and various groups."

Though gays fit firmly into his ultimate mission, they're hardly the pinnacle. The site wants to move beyond partisanship and create a publication that includes all voices, even those that are opposed to one another. In a world of exponential social and political division, Qadita turns out to be a ray of sunshine. Asserted Hlehel: "We are doing this to allow gays to speak out, to leave their ghetto and to become a natural part of Palestinian and Arab culture." So, those who think that Arabs and Islamists want to curtail free speech, I suggest you brush up on your reading.

Photo credit: PictureNewYork LG's Flickr

Answers from Mr. Verhagen, Minister of Foreign Affairs, to questions of members Wilders and Fritsma (PVV) on ‘the co-financing by the Netherlands of a mosque on Ground Zero’.

Question 1: Is it true that Dutch taxpayers’ money is used for the support of the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA), the organization Imam Faisal Abdul Rauf, who wants to build a mosque on Ground Zero?

Answer: No, the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA) is not involved in the construction of a mosque at Ground Zero in the United States. For that reason, therefore, there is thus no Dutch tax money used.

However, the American Society for Muslim Advancement does receive subsidy from the Dutch MDG3 Fund to implement the program of the Women’s Islamic Initiative in Spirituality and Equity (WISE) Compact program. […]

Abdul-Rauf founded the American Society for Muslim Advancement (ASMA) in 1997, which has been run by his wife, Daisy KHAN since 2005. According to a review of financial statements, ASMA is the fiscal agent for the Cordoba Initiative. The Cordoba Initiative and the American Society for Muslim Advancement share the same infrastructure, space, and other operational assets, making them virtually one in the same, except on paper.

Women’s Empowerment (WISE): Coming Soon: The Women’s Islamic Initiative wisemuslimwomen.org in Spirituality and Equality (WISE) Portal is Currently in development. Following the feedback Received at the WISE conference in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, we are working hard to complete the portal and launch AIM to consistently Ramadan.

2003 June: Córdoba Bread Fest: The Children of Abraham Break Bread Together. Organized by Daisy Khan and the ASMA Society, the Cordoba Bread Fest convened over three hundred Christians, Jews and Muslims to break bread, dine together and share stories about the historic role of bread in the different Abrahamic religions and cultures.

WISE has as its aim the self-determination and full participation of Muslim women in their communities. To achieve this goal, activities focus on among other things the reform of existing legislation, the design of new legislation, and training for women, activities that are oriented towards increased equality between women and men.

It is my dream that 2009 will be a watershed year for Muslim women’s activism and organizing. To achieve this goal, WISE will offer lectures, panel discussions, and training sessions on effectively promoting women’s human rights within an Islamic legal framework [=sharia] at its 2009 conference. With these initiatives, WISE will continue to create a space where Muslim women from every field, branch of Islam, and region of the world can dialogue, debate, and collaborate.

They do this primarily in Afghanistan, Egypt and Pakistan.

Many countries are Islamic, but some may be more Islamic than others. Now moves are afoot to rate nations according to how closely they adhere to the principles of Islam.

Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, founder and President of Cordoba Initiative briefed a select group of scholars and IIIT [International Institute of Islamic Thought] staff ^[3] on Friday, December 19, 2008 on the Shari’ah Index Project, a pioneering effort which aims at developing an index based on Maqasid al Shari’ah for the purpose of measuring the performance of Muslim countries in relation to the implementation of Shari’ah.

My message to the Christian community in Malaysia is that using the word Allah to mean the Christian God may be theologically and legally correct, but in the context of Malaysia, it is socially provocative. If you want to have influence with people in Malaysia, you must find a way to convey your message without provoking this kind of response.

If you want to reach the Malays, then use the Malay word for God, which is Tuhan.

For Muslims, respect for the Prophet Muhammad is much more sacred than respect for elders. In fact, Muslims would not insult Jesus or Moses because they were prophets of God and demand respect. The same is true on the issue of the burqa, which covers the entire body and face, leaving just a slit for the eyes. In the Western world now, the right to wear almost anything has become a symbol of freedom. It is an expression of women’s equality. In the Muslim world, men and women dress so they are not provocative to one another.

But if the Pahang Syariah court insists on establishing a penalty for the mere consumption of alcohol, why not replace the current law — a maximum penalty of a RM5,000 fine and six lashes of the rotan — with spending RM5,000 on feeding the poor and fasting for six days? Wouldn’t that be more in keeping with the letter and spirit of the Quran and the Prophetic Sunnah?

It is about programs to prevent genital mutilation, counteracting violence against women, and organizing training of women (including media, leadership).

[…] the Muslim leaders of Tomorrow also includes radicals like Yasir Qadhi — a favorite speaker at conferences of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), and Dhaba “Debbie” Almontasser, who works closely with Hamas’ U.S. arm — the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), itself an unindicted co-conspirator in terror financing.

ASMA promotes jihad through da’wa and the Islamisation of the West by grooming “Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow” (MLT). At the Saudi backed 2006 MLT conference in Denmark “moderate” Islamists discussions of how to increase Muslim political and social influence was euphemistically termed “bridge building”.

The duration of the project is from 13 October 2008 to June 30, 2011.

Question 2: If yes, do you acknowledge that it is absurd to build a mosque right at Ground Zero and that this is also an insult to (the families of) the victims of 9-11? If not, why not?

Answer: See question 1

Question 3: If so, are you, given the offensive plan to build said mosque, willing to immediately withdraw the subsidy to ASMA? If not, why not?

Answer: No. Because there is no question of support for the construction of a mosque.

The withdrawal of the subsidy to ASMA, which focuses on promoting equal rights for women in countries such as among others Afghanistan, Pakistan and Egypt, is therefore not being considered.

In February, Obama named a Chicago Muslim, Eboo Patel, to his Advisory Council on Faith-based and Neighborhood Partnerships. Patel is the founder and executive director of Chicago-based Interfaith Youth Core, which says it promotes pluralism by teaming people of different faiths on service projects. Patel is listed as one of 15 “Muslim Leaders of Tomorrow” (MLT) on the website for the American Society for the Advancement of Muslims, or ASAM (ASMA), which is led by Rauf. In Patel’s 2007 book, “Saving Each Other, Saving Ourselves,” he recounts discussing with Rauf the future of Islam in the U.S. Rauf “understood the vision immediately and suggested that I visit him and his wife, Daisy Khan, at their home the following evening,” Patel recalled. Khan founded the ASAM with her husband and has aided him in his plans for the mosque near Ground Zero. “The living room of their apartment on the Upper West Side was set up like a mosque, with prayer rugs stretched from wall to wall,” wrote Patel in his book.

Such, then, is the dual significance of the Cordoba Initiative: What appears to many Americans as a gesture of peace and interfaith dialogue, is to Muslims allusive of Islamist conquest and consolidation; mosques, which Americans assume are Muslim counterparts to Christian churches — that is, places where altruistic Muslims congregate and pray for world peace and harmony — are symbols of domination and centers of radicalization; the numbers of the opening date, 9/11/11, appear to Americans as commemorative of a new beginning, whereas the Koranic significance of those numbers is suicidal jihad. Of course, the two faces of the Cordoba House should not be surprising considering that the man behind the initiative, Feisal Abdul Rauf, also has two faces.

Special to My Catbird Seat

Defenders of Israel right or wrong continue to assert that the absence of peace is all the fault of the Palestinians.

In one sense they are right. When the Palestine file was closed by Israel’s victory (ethnic cleansing and all) on the battlefield in 1948, the Palestinians were supposed to accept their lot as the sacrificial lamb on the altar of political expediency. That was according to the script written by Zionism and effectively endorsed by all the major powers and, behind closed doors, the regimes of a divided and impotent Arab order. Nobody in power anywhere wanted the Palestine file to be re-opened because, if it was, a confrontation with Zionism in all of its awesome manifestations would one day be inevitable. So it could be said if the Palestinians had been prepared to be the sacrificial lamb, the first Arab-Israeli war would also have been the last.

By such cruel and mad logic the Palestinians are to blame for the sustaining and escalation of the conflict.

But let’s now leave fantasy land and acknowledge that the hallmark of Zionism in action is saying one thing to the world and doing the opposite.

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert warned that Israel has no future unless there’s a two-state solution, but the colonization of the occupied West Bank went on. Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu let the word’s “two states” pass through his lips and, under pressure from President Obama, he even declared a moratorium on settlement building for 10 months, but the colonization went on. (And will no doubt be speeded up when the phoney moratorium ends in September).

So a question. Is there now case for saying that the time has come for the Palestinians to call Israel’s bluff?

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The truth is that it is Israel -- not the Arabs -- that never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to conclude a real peace with its neighbors. And this has been true since the outset. Claims, like that of Abba Eban's, about Arab intransigence are usually buttressed with a reference to the founding act of the creation of Israel in international law: the UN General Assembly's vote on the partition of Palestine in November 1947, at a time when the majority of UN member states were western and western-dominated countries. The Arabs and the Palestinians are blamed for having rejected this partition, which would have granted them a larger portion of Palestine than the one they -- more accurately the Jordanian accomplice of the Zionist movement, King Abdullah -- ended up controlling after the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. In other words, the Arabs are blamed for having rejected a deal that granted 56% of the territory of Palestine west of the Jordan River to Jewish inhabitants, who constituted one-third of its total population -- most of them immigrants/refugees who had arrived from Europe during the previous fifteen years.

A la fin de l'année dernière, un superbe ouvrage en 10 volumes a été publié en édition limitée, en l'honneur d'un chef-d'œuvre qui n'a jamais été réalisé et ne le sera jamais: Napoléon, de Kubrick. 2.974 pages et presque 11 kg: c'est la seule consolation que des fans pourront retirer de l'épopée biographique que Stanley Kubrick rêvait de faire après 2001: l'odyssée de l'espace.

Pendant plusieurs années Kubrick a, dit-on, compulsé près de 500 livres sur Napoléon. Il serait allé en repérage sur de multiples sites et aurait rassemblé 17.000 diapositives d'images napoléoniennes. Le coffret de 10 volumes paru chez Taschen illustre à quel point Kubrick s'est impliqué dans ce projet: analyse de photos, étude des costumes de l'époque, retranscription d'interviews d'experts réalisées par Kubrick, et même version finale du script. Le réalisateur avait assuré à ses sponsors que ce serait «le meilleur film jamais réalisé». Ce qui a presque été repris textuellement dans le sous-titre de cet ouvrage: Le plus grand film jamais réalisé.

Tous les films non réalisés n'ont pas droit à un «monument» en leur honneur (le prix de ce coffret: 700 dollars (570 €) au Etats-Unis, limités à 1.000 exemplaires, déjà épuisés). L'histoire cinématographique est pleine de grandes idées qui n'ont jamais réussi à se matérialiser en œuvre. Voici une liste de 10 projets de films très ambitieux - sans doute menés «à mal» -, qui n'ont pas vu le jour en raison de financements insuffisants, de problèmes de casting, de bases inadaptées ou, bien souvent, des trois à la fois.

La vie du Christ

Orson Welles recèle une série de projets restés lettre morte qui excite toutes les curiosités. Elle a fait l'objet d'un livre publié en 2009: Orson Welles and the Unfinished RKO Projects [Orson Welles et ses projets RKO inachevés]. Ces projets comprennent Don Quichote (dont il voulait situer l'intrigue dans l'Espagne moderne), The Other Side of the Wind [L'Autre face du vent], qui aurait raconté l'histoire d'un réalisateur de cinéma en fin de carrière qui travaille sur son ultime œuvre, et La vie de Jésus-Christ , monté sous forme de western. Son scénario reprenait des dialogues provenant entièrement des évangiles de Marc, Mathieu et Luc.

Au début des années 40, Welles a tenté de mobiliser le soutien de chefs religieux américains, avec un certain succès. Il est ensuite parti en repérage au Mexique en compagnie du grand cinéaste Gregg Toland. C'est sur un point surprenant que ce projet a achoppé: Welles voulait incarner lui-même le rôle du Christ. Comme l'universitaire Marguerite Rippy l'a fait remarquer: «le personnage de Welles, tellement imposant, est à la fois humain et plein de défauts». Or, Jésus n'était pas complètement humain et n'avait pas de défaut. La voix tonitruante du réalisateur semblait également contraster avec la douce voix qu'on prête traditionnellement au Christ. D'abord, les studios n'étaient pas très chauds. Et, pour ne rien arranger, les tournages de Welles en Égypte dans les années 50 n'ont pas été concluants.

Adam et Eve

En 1947, après deux films sur des prêtres qui ont fait recette (La Route semée d'étoiles et Les Cloches de Sainte-Marie), le très dévot Leo McCarey voulait remonter aux origines de l'humanité. Il commanda un script sur le Jardin d'Eden à Sinclair Lewis dont l'action se déroulait au temps de la Bible. Le script n'était, parait-il, absolument pas parfait. Mais, plusieurs années après la mise en suspens de ce projet, McCarey s'est dit que le problème venait du casting. «Plus on fouille, plus c'est difficile de trouver Adam», avait confié le réalisateur à Peter Bogdanovich. «Eve, c'est bien plus simple. (...) Mais pourquoi donc? J'ai soulevé la question dans des fêtes, et les réactions sont très variables.». Jimmy Stewart et Ingrid Bergman auraient pu décrocher les rôles. Mais Jimmy Stewart rechignait à jouer nu, avec pour seul vêtement une feuille de figuier recouvrant ses parties - aussi, Ingrid Bergman était plus grosse que lui. «Plus j'y repensais, plus je me disais qu'il avait raison, avait conclu McCarey, il est trop mince».

Le Seigneur des anneaux - avec les Beatles

Il est de notoriété publique que le chemin vers le tournage du Seigneur des anneaux - initialement publié en 1954 - fut presque aussi long et sinueux que celui emprunté par Frodon dans son voyage vers le Mont du Destin. Tolkien avait exprimé sa préférence pour une version animée, qui équivaudrait à une «vulgarisation» plutôt que l'«idiotisation» d'un film avec des acteurs. Dans The Beatles at the Movies, on apprend qu'il a un temps été question que les Beatles participent au film (John Lennon était prêt à incarner Gollum; Paul McCartney, Frodon; George Harrison, Gandalf et Ringo Starr, Sam). En collaborant avec le réalisateur John Boorman, le scénariste Rospo Pallenberg s'est dit que les Beatles devraient jouer les quatre hobbits (il était d'accord avec McCartney que ce dernier incarnerait à merveille Frodon). Difficile, quoiqu'amusant, de s'imaginer les Fab Four métamorphosant leur personnalité pour interpréter l'histoire fantastique de Tolkien. Mais la société de production United Artists décida de ne pas donner suite au projet, avec ou sans les Beatles.

Genèse 1948

En 1970, Otto Preminger a racheté les droits d'adaptation cinématographique de la chronique non romanesque de plus de 800 pages The First Arab-Israeli War [La Première guerre israélo-arabe], souhaitant apporter une suite à son épopée de 1960, Exodus. Dans une conférence de presse, il a déclaré: «Nous montrerons ce conflit sur les champs de bataille et dans les arènes politiques de Washington, de Moscou, des Nations unies et du Moyen-Orient». Il a exprimé le souhait de «n'offenser ni les Arabes, ni les Juifs» dans son film, sans reconnaître qu'Exodus avait certainement offensé les Arabes. En tout cas, les parents israéliens avaient de quoi se méfier des prises de vue en extérieur. Au cours du tournage d'Exodus, il rencontra des difficultés sur une scène dans laquelle une douzaine de jeunes israéliens devaient pleurer au moment où les Arabes attaquent leur maison. La consigne qu'avait donnée Preminger à ses assistants dans le cas où les enfants ne laisseraient pas échapper des larmes, était de conduire leur mère sur une colline, hors de leur vue. Alors le réalisateur leur disait: «Vous ne les reverrez plus jamais. Plus Jamais!». Là, naturellement, les enfants éclataient en sanglot... Mais au lieu de Genèse 1948, il fit un film sur les disputes conjugales: Des amis comme les miens.

Je crois que j'ai abattu le Baron rouge

A 86 ans, Cliff Robertson a eu une carrière longue et variée. Il a interprété un grand nombre de personnage, de John F. Kennedy dans Patrouilleur 109 à l'oncle Ben Parker dans Spider-Man et Spider-Man 2. Il a été au cœur d'un scandale à Hollywood, raconté dans le livre Indecent Exposure de David McClintock, à la suite de quoi il a été placé sur liste noire pendant quatre ans. Ce que l'on sait moins, c'est qu'après avoir été oscarisé pour son rôle dans Charly (1968), Robertson, passionné d'avions, s'est mis à écrire un scénario, à réaliser un film (dans lequel il a joué) avec des avions de la Première guerre mondiale (il avait au préalable eu accès à une collection de répliques très convaincantes). Il a ensuite voulu faire une parodie dans laquelle il incarnerait un pilote de chasse qui attaquerait le Baron rouge, un homosexuel habillé en rose. Mais cela ne faisait pas rire, à l'époque. Et puis, les images n'ont pas bien vieilli, de sorte que les financements ont cessé après les prises de vues aériennes réalisées en Irlande... Le film n'a donc jamais été achevé.

Tucker, la comédie musicale

A l'instar d'Orson Welles, Francis Ford Coppola a envisagé tout un tas de projets, avant de les abandonner, de On the Road (finalement, c'est Walter Salles qui dirigera le tournage de ce film en août) à une version de 3 heures et en 3D des Affinités électives de Goethe (qu'il a, durant une brève période en 1979, envisagé de porter à l'écran). Les comédies musicales signées Coppola n'ont jamais été de francs succès. Il semble donc y avoir peu de raisons de regretter l'inexistence du musical biographique qu'il avait prévu de faire sur le constructeur d'automobiles anticonformiste Preston Tucker. Pour le rôle principal, il avait - curieusement - jeté son dévolu sur Marlon Brando, alors que les seuls rôles de ce dernier où il était amené à chanter remontaient à 20 ans et n'étaient pas très convaincants au niveau de l'harmonie musicale. A un moment donné, le projet devait se transformer en une comédie musicale plus ambitieuse, dont la musique serait composée par Leonard Bernstein. On y verrait Tucker et d'autres inventeurs américains. Mais cette idée s'est finalement concrétisée, en 1988, sous la forme d'un film «classique» et agréable: Tucker.

Noriega

En 1990, Oliver Stone était très désireux de s'attaquer au dictateur déchu du Panama: «Noriega donnerait un excellent film. Graham Greene aurait pu le créer. (...) Si Shakespeare était vivant, il tenterait de le mettre en scène. J'adore l'Amérique centrale comme toile de fonds». Quatre ans plus tard, alors qu'Al Pacino devait incarner le dictateur panaméen¸ Oliver Stone a dû reconnaître qu'il faisait face à des problèmes de budget et de scénario. Noriega a «des aspects négatifs» et «on ne le cerne pas facilement», avait expliqué le réalisateur. Et d'ajouter: «Pour avoir passé trois heures avec lui en prison, je le connais». Dans un décevant élan de modestie, Stone confessa: «La vraie histoire est probablement trop compliquée [pour faire un film]. Si [le procureur spécial] Lawrence Walsh n'a pas réussi à résoudre l'affaire Iran-Contra, comment Oliver Stone pourrait-il y arriver?». Le réalisateur décida donc de nous éviter un film fade. Le script axé autour de Lawrence Wright fut adapté pour un téléfilm bien accueilli : Noriega: L'Elu de Dieu (réalisé par Roger Spottiswoode).

Les Vikings

John Milius aurait certainement su restituer la violence des Vikings dans ce film, dont il avait achevé le scénario et qu'il comptait tourner début 94. Un film en puissance à gros budget, à tel point que Mel Gibson s'est vu proposer 12 millions de dollars (près de 10 millions d'euros) pour un rôle. Mais Milius, le réalisateur de Conan le barbare et de L'Aube rouge, et celui qui a inventé des répliques impérissables, telles que: «J'adore l'odeur du napalm au petit matin», semble avoir pensé que les Vikings n'étaient pas assez violents! Il aime les brutes, c'est pourquoi il avait créé le personnage de Mel Gibson pour accroître le grabuge: «C'est un moine anglais dont s'emparent les envahisseurs; et il finit par se ranger dans leur camp», avait-il déclaré au magazine Variety. «Ce gars est encore plus Viking que les Vikings.»

Bien que ce film n'ait jamais pris naissance, l'engouement de Mel Gibson pour les Scandinaves durs et old-school n'a pas décru. A présent, il prévoit de diriger une épopée sur les Vikings avec comme comédien Leonardo DiCaprio et comme scénariste William Monahan (Les Infiltrés). «En ce moment, on est à fond sur le scénario», avait déclaré Gibson au Los Angeles Times au mois de mars. (Vous parlez le vieux norrois par hasard?) En attendant, Le Guerrier silencieux, Valhalla Rising avec Mads Mikkelsen est sorti en mars. Par ailleurs, John Milius se prépare à tourner un biopic de Genghis Khan avec dans le rôle principal Mickey Rourke.

Half Way House

Après le triomphe de Will Hunting, Matt Damon et Ben Affleck ont rencontré beaucoup de succès en tant qu'acteurs, producteurs et, dans le cas d'Affleck, réalisateur. Mais ils n'ont pas encore tourné de film mettant en scène le duo Damon-Affleck. Quelques mois après la sortie de Will Hunting, ils avaient déjà monté un projet avec la société de production Castle Rock. Affleck a expliqué que Half Way House était un film qui se passe dans un foyer pour handicapés mentaux. Il a d'abord été question que le duo interprète des employés du foyer. «Damon a fait savoir à Affleck qu'il voulait finalement jouer le rôle d'un des handicapés», révélait le magazine Variety en 1998. La même année, Entertainment Weekly a interviewé Matt Damon: «Nous avons 150 pages, et environ 5 sont bonnes». Fausse modestie ou non, ce projet tombe aux oubliettes.

ISOBARE

Avec un début ridicule (résumé ainsi: «Alien dans un train») et un titre comme ISOBARE (qui, malheureusement, sonne un peu comme Ishtar), que pouvait-il y avoir de pire? Le terme «isobare», qui désigne une «ligne sur une carte météorologique reliant des points d'égale pression atmosphérique» ou des «nucléides ayant même nombre de masse, mais différant par leurs numéros atomiques» n'est, a priori, ni accrocheur, ni lié à une intrigue de film. Pourtant, le producteur Joel Silver adorait sa phonétique. Le scénariste Jim Uhls (Fight Club) en a fait un acronyme [en anglais], comme pour ajouter à la lourdeur de la chose: «Intercontinental Subterranean Oscillo-magnetic Ballistic Aerodynamic Railway» [Voie ferré aérodynamique balistique oscillo-magnétique souterraine intercontinentale]. L'équipe de production avait pensé à Sylvester Stallone et Kim Basinger, mais la faillite de la société de production indépendante Carolco en 1995 mit fin au projet juste avant le lancement de la construction des décors. Ne perdez pas tout espoir pour autant: il se peut encore que Dean Devlin remette ce train sur ses rails.

Abby McGanney Nolan
Traduit par Micha Cziffra

Photo: Orson Welles - Citizen Kane, via Wikimedia Commons

The Guardian's new Jerusalem correspondent gives her first impressions of the bitterly divided yet beautiful city

There is a point on a hill looking out over Jerusalem, right on the 1948 armistice line, known as the Promenade, where both Jewish and Arab families can be found picnicking in the warmth of the late afternoon sun. It's a good spot. Straight ahead is the Old City, the honey stones of its walls absorbing and reflecting the sun's rays. The golden Dome of the Rock, the revered and iconic Muslim site from where the Prophet Mohammed began his ascent to heaven, gleams high above the Wailing (or Western) Wall, the equally revered and iconic Jewish site where the devout bury prayers in the cracks between stones and mourn the destruction of their ancient temple.

To the left is modern West Jerusalem, green with trees and parks, whose towering cranes indicate the development of another luxury hotel or smart shopping mall. To the right is parched and dusty East Jerusalem, the Arab part of the city that is now dotted with Jewish settlements. Here and there you can glimpse sections of the bleak 8m-high concrete wall – slicing through Arab neighbourhoods, cutting roads down the middle, dividing neighbour from neighbour – which has become a symbol of the division and conflict that characterises Jerusalem.

Spread out before me is the city that will be my home for the next few years: the most divided city in the world, the epicentre of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a city claimed by both sides as their capital and their historic right. It is also the most awe-inspiring and beautiful city I have ever been to, central to the three great monotheistic religions of Islam, Judaism and Christianity and where the centuries of history, sacredness and violent discord still weigh in the air.

Up here on the Promenade, a few weeks into my new life as the Guardian's Jerusalem correspondent, I try to untangle the medley of impressions that have crowded into my head. Making sense of this place won't be easy – I know from previous visits that it's contentious, confusing, exhilarating and exhausting; that just when you think you understand it a little better, something happens that makes you realise you understand it less than ever.

As I leave the Promenade I'm surprised to come across a "monument to tolerance" – a quality that does not seem to be in abundant supply in this city. The sculpture, depicting two halves of a broken column linked and shaded by an olive tree, is dedicated to a peaceful resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Not for the first time, I feel a sense of unreality.

Just past the sculpture, a huge roadside hoarding advertises the new Jewish settlement of Nof Zion, built illegally on territory that Israel occupied and annexed in 1967. The smart apartments, largely complete though far from fully occupied, have sensational views across to the Old City. Pleasant landscaping marks out the settlement: newly planted saplings, decorative iron railings, a children's playground.

As I continue down the hill, something curious happens. The pavement abruptly ends, the road becomes potholed, the street lighting sporadic, the rubbish uncollected. It's like going from a first world country to a developing country in the space of a few metres and without any formal demarcation. Goodbye, planet Israel; welcome to Arab East Jerusalem.

That fundamental divide is the defining characteristic of this place. But, as I am soon discovering, Jerusalem is not just divided into two, but into multiple, complex layers.

In my first week, I get lost in my car trying to find a downtown cafe where I am to meet a man about – prosaically – my worldly goods, stuck on the dock in Ashdod. In impossibly narrow backstreets, where nervously and repeatedly I'm forced to reverse and perform multiple-point turns, I encounter visibly poor Jewish children whose parents yell and gesticulate admonitions, the precise details of which I can't understand but whose universality is clear.

A few days later I meet a charming and sophisticated middle-aged Palestinian woman who shows me round her neighbourhood, dressed in white jeans and jewelled sandals, offering asides in flawless English on her latest divorce and recent trip to Paris.

Impoverished Israelis and affluent Palestinians challenge stereotypical expectations, but they don't mask the city's central breach. While the nationalistic, political and religious divide seems as unbridgeable as ever, the geographical separation is blurring, to the detriment of the Palestinians.

They are bitter about what they describe as the "Judaisation" of East Jerusalem. Ever since the six day war in 1967, when Israel forcibly took control of the Arab sector, successive governments have pursued a policy of building settlements in the east, creating a Jewish ring around the city, cutting off Palestinians in the West Bank from Jerusalem and making an East Jerusalem capital an unrealisable dream.

Some of the settlements are huge. Ma'ale Adumim, home to almost 40,000 Israelis, is a mini-city in its own right. It feels like an enormous American gated community transported to the Middle East. Lavish municipal flowerbeds are tended and watered by Palestinian gardeners; there are 40 synagogues and seven high schools; huge areas of nearby land spreading towards the Palestinian city of Jericho are earmarked for expansion. Like most settlements, it's built on a hill with commanding views and dominance over Palestinian villages in the valleys.

But some of the most recent settlements are tiny – for now. Rather than new towns complete with service infrastructure, they are the first toe-holds of what these fundamentalist settlers hope will grow into a permanent presence – and they are right in the heart of Jerusalem, as opposed to on its outlying hills.

In Sheikh Jarrah – a historic Palestinian neighbourhood where many of the spacious stone villas, draped with gorgeous bougainvillea, have been leased to foreign consulates and NGOs – a number of families have been evicted from modest homes assigned to them by the UN in 1948. Settler groups wanting to establish a presence there have brought legal challenges – through the Israeli courts, of course – to the ownership rights and turfed the families out.

Among a jumble of homes, I find a few proudly – and provocatively – flying Israeli flags. New paving stones have been laid outside the front door; wall-mounted cameras monitor passersby; security men sit in booths, refusing to answer questions about who pays their wages. These are now Jewish homes, but the occupants, glimpsed through the windows, are reluctant to engage in conversation about their presence in an Arab neighbourhood.

The evicted families, who spend their days on a battered sofa and cracked plastic chairs in the shade of a tree on Sheikh Jarrah street, have no such reticence. Pouring glasses of chilled water for their hot and thirsty visitors, their voluble bitterness at their sudden homelessness does not eclipse their charm and hospitality. These unwilling neighbours eye each other with mutual hostility and incomprehension.

A short distance away is the Old City, 800 square metres of packed winding alleys just on the eastern side of the Green Line, where young Palestinian men barrel their way through the crowds delivering goods on handcarts to shops outside which an older generation sits on stools sipping tiny porcelain cups of strong sludgy Arabic coffee or glasses of sweet mint tea.

Thirty-seven thousand people live in the Old City, making it one of the most densely populated places on earth. Thousands more come to work, worship and wonder. The sound of the muezzin – the Muslim call to prayer – mixes with church bells, chants and song. Greek orthodox clerics brush past Catholic nuns; Jews stride through the souks on their way to pray at the Western Wall; Muslims flock to the magnificent mosques at Haram al-Sharif in the south-eastern corner, known to Jews as the Temple Mount.

Here, too, Israeli flags are increasingly hung in the Muslim quarter as Jewish families take over Palestinian homes. The tension is often palpable, and the presence of young Israeli border police with rifles slung over their shoulders on almost every corner only adds to the uneasy mix.

It's hard to see how Jerusalem can be unscrambled; how the Palestinians can ever regain a definable half of the city as the capital of any future state. That, of course, is Israel's intention in building and encouraging settlements both big and small in the eastern sector; it claims Jerusalem as its "indivisible and eternal capital" and is creating facts on the ground to make its claim a reality. Forty-five per cent of the population of the eastern half of the city is now Jewish, I'm told by the Jerusalem Institute.

But the city is changing in other ways, too. In a separate dimension from the Arab-Israeli, Muslim-Jew divide is an increasing gulf between Jew and Jew – the religious and the secular. The ultra-orthodox – or Haredim – community is growing, both absolutely and in proportion to secular Jews, many of whom are packing up and heading off to the more relaxed and liberal coastal towns and cities. The ultra-orthodox made up about 10% of Jerusalem's population in the 1960s; now they are around a third.

A political scientist from Jerusalem's Hebrew University told me that the secular-religious divide was the new "culture war". The ultra-orthodox were seen as "parasites", he said, for their refusal to do paid work, devoting themselves to biblical study. These people have six, seven, eight children, another Israeli analyst told me. They have changed the atmosphere in Jerusalem, he went on; people are afraid they are taking over. I was taken aback at the enmity with which both men spoke.

Traditionally the ultra-orthodox have been based around Mea Shearim, an area of the city centre redolent of pre-Holocaust eastern Europe. Whole families walk together beneath washing hanging from the balconies of dilapidated buildings: women with hair covered by scarves or wigs, wearing thick dark stockings despite the June heat; men in their monotone ultra-orthodox uniform; children dressed as miniature versions of their parents clinging to adult hands or hanging on to a younger sibling's pushchair.

Anyone foolish enough to drive through there on Shabat – the Jewish Sabbath – will be at best vigorously berated; more likely their car will be pelted. Pasted on the stone walls are countless religious tracts. A huge billboard in English reads: "To women and girls. We beg you with all our hearts: Please do not pass through our neighbourhood in immodest clothes." Specific instructions follow regarding length of sleeves and tight-fitted garments. Non-Jews and secular Jews are not made to feel welcome. In recent months there have been regular evening disturbances involving young men setting fire to rubbish bins and stoning police officers in protest at infringements of religious observance.

But the influence of ultra-orthodox spreads beyond Mea Shearim. The area of west Jerusalem in which I live has a prosperous main street lined with cafes and eclectic small shops. The previous tenant of my apartment told me that when he moved in four years ago, Shabat was barely different to any other day of the week. Now the place is eerily deserted from sundown on Friday until sundown on Saturday: shops are shuttered, cafes closed, relatively few cars appear on the normally clogged road. Secular businesses have apparently succumbed to pressure from the religious lobby.

The lighter traffic on Shabat is, however, a boon for me: it gives me the chance to try to find my way round this city without being tailgated, honked at and shouted at by fellow motorists. Jerusalem's baffling one-way systems, indecipherable road markings and minuscule street signs are currently exacerbated by a massive project to build a light railway through the city. Once complete – allegedly by next year, though nobody here believes that for a moment – it should relieve the burden of traffic thundering past fragile historic sites. But this, too, has a political dimension. The city authorities say the railway will be open to all, except when "security considerations" require the stations in Arab parts of the city to be closed. We shall have to wait to see just how often that happens.

At least the stop-start nature of the traffic gives me the opportunity to stare in wonder at the sights and views; from the beautiful golden stone of the Old City ramparts to the ugly dull grey concrete of the imposing separation wall. At some point, I assume, all this will become the routine backdrop to my life, but I hope I never take Jerusalem's extraordinariness for granted.

And the people? Each side is passionate about their unassailable right to the land. Each side has suffered terrible injustices and inhumanity over their history. Each side is exhausted by conflict. And each side wants to welcome me to their country. "Baruch haba, shalom," say the Israelis. "Marhaban, salam," say the Palestinians. And, they all add: "Good luck."

Penned in 1969, "Return to Haifi" is the story of two couples — one Israeli, one Palestinian — that ignites during the Arab-Israeli war in 1948, and it involves the Jewish couple raising a Palestinian baby, abandoned and forlorn in the wartime strife, as their own. In the play, the Palestinian couple returns to Haifa after the opening of the borders, following the Israeli victory in the Six Day War in 1967. They find their child fighting in the Israeli army, as well as the Jewish couple who were once themselves refugees and who surely saved the child's life.

Southerland insisted that American practice was to announce a title and then get the rights. "Foundations," he wrote, "need a long time to approve funding for projects." He suggested that he announce the show for the Next Theatre season "subject to final approval from the Kanafani estate." And that's what he did.

Gaon was appalled. "I cannot grant permission to any production," he wrote, "until I hear from the Kanafanis." In his e-mails, he started using all capital letters: "YOU DO NOT HAVE THE RIGHTS."

Southerland replied that Gaon was not understanding "how it works quite often in the U.S." He told Gaon he had talked to New York producers interested in an off-Broadway production — and that he already had been given a grant to go to Israel to work on the project.

[...]

Southerland had put "Return to Haifa" on the Next Theatre season. Initially, the announcement included Gaon's name as adapter. But after Gaon's protestations, Southerland turned to another tack. He hired an Evanston writer, Margaret Lewis, to pen her own version of "Return to Haifa."

"We are not currently staging an adaptation of Mr. Kanafani's story," he told the estate in an e-mail. "(Lewis) wrote an original work inspired by the idea but also by dozens of other works. The play bares little resemblance to Mr. Kanafani's story."

That was hardly the case.

Negotiating in good faith

Abba Eban, the most sophisticated foreign minister Israel ever had, is said to have declared in 1973, after the aborted Peace Conference that was convened in Geneva in December of that year: “The Arabs never miss an opportunity to miss an opportunity.” The saying accords with Eban’s speech at this conference when, after emphasizing that “a new opportunity is born,” he declared: “We have no way of knowing whether this opportunity will be fulfilled or wasted. … Israel for its part is resolved to seize the chance.”

Those were the times when Israel could present itself as a seeker of peace confronted by Arab governments and political forces that were still reluctant to negotiate with it, let alone conclude a peace. Syria indeed boycotted the Geneva Conference, although the gathering was cosponsored by its patron, the Soviet Union. Its attitude was not altogether negative, however, and soon after, in May 1974, Damascus signed a military disengagement agreement with Israel. In the following years, the boldest initiatives in seeking a Middle East peace agreement were indisputably taken by Arab leaders.

Whereas a maverick Abie Nathan had flown from Israel to Egypt on February 28, 1966, requesting to meet President Gamal Abdel-Nasser only to be deported back to Israel and arrested there, it was Nasser’s successor himself, President Anwar El-Sadat, who flew from Egypt to Israel on November 19, 1977, extending the hand of peace to the Israeli Knesset and power elite in scenes that looked almost unreal. The world watched Sadat descending the staircase from his plane in the same state of stupefaction, if not more, with which it had watched a few years earlier the first man walking on the moon.

And it was with similar astonishment that the world learned of PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat’s secret negotiations with the Israeli government of Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres in Oslo, Norway, and their conclusion of a peace deal signed in Washington in October 1993 - in another surreal ceremony that raised much hope. In both cases, Israel conceded none of its fundamental interests: it gave back to Egypt the Sinai that it had occupied in 1967, while making sure that this vast stretch of semi-desert land remained under surveillance and devoid of Egyptian army troops. Sadat, for his part, broke with all Arab states as he violated their principles of collective negotiations and collective peace, undercutting fellow Syrians, Jordanians, Lebanese and Palestinians.

Likewise, Arafat concluded the Oslo deal behind the backs of most members of the PLO executive committee. He recognized Israel officially and accepted an outcome that did not provide for any of the basic demands of the Palestinians - not even a freezing of Zionist settlements in the Occupied Territories, let alone their dismantlement. The Israeli concessions that he obtained in return were only implementing the plan that Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Yigal Allon had designed for the perpetual control of the West Bank, shortly after Israel invaded it in June 1967. It was indeed during the early negotiations on the implementation of the Oslo accords, in 1994, that Rabin’s government started building what would become the Separation Wall.

As for the only spectacular Israeli so-called peace initiative of all those years, the evacuation of Gaza ordered by Oslo-opponent turned into Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, in 2005, it was part of a ‘unilateral disengagement’ purposely avoiding striking a deal with the Palestinian Authority headed by Mahmoud Abbas. Sharon did not want a precedent that could be invoked for the West Bank. Indeed he never hid the fact that he was willing to concede to the Palestinian Authority much less of the occupied West Bank than the area his Laborite predecessors were willing to give up. In the same year as the unilateral Gaza disengagement, he revised the route of the Separation Wall, annexing de facto a larger portion of the West Bank to Israel. After consigning Yasser Arafat to forced residence under siege from 2002 until the Palestinian leader’s death in 2004, Sharon did his best to undermine the credibility of Abbas, thus facilitating the electoral victory of Hamas in January 2006 - the month Sharon went into a coma.

The truth is that it is Israel - not the Arabs - that never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity to conclude a real peace with its neighbors. And this has been true since the outset. Claims, like that of Abba Eban’s, about Arab intransigence are usually buttressed with a reference to the founding act of the creation of Israel in international law: the UN General Assembly’s vote on the partition of Palestine in November 1947, at a time when the majority of UN member states were western and western-dominated countries. The Arabs and the Palestinians are blamed for having rejected this partition, which would have granted them a larger portion of Palestine than the one they - more accurately the Jordanian accomplice of the Zionist movement, King Abdullah - ended up controlling after the first Arab-Israeli war in 1948. In other words, the Arabs are blamed for having rejected a deal that granted 56% of the territory of Palestine west of the Jordan River to Jewish inhabitants, who constituted one-third of its total population - most of them immigrants/refugees who had arrived from Europe during the previous fifteen years.

The UN 1947 partition resolution could not have been reasonably accepted by any Arab leader - or by any people in their shoes, for that matter. Accepting it would have amounted to capitulation without battle and relinquishment of fundamental rights. As for sympathy for the plight of Jewish Holocaust survivors, the Arabs, let alone the Palestinians, could legitimately say that they had already accommodated much more than their fair share of them, compared with the rest of the world, especially the victors of World War II. On the other hand, the League of Arab states had made a peace offer that is hardly mentioned in the propagandistic literature that prevails on this topic. Their proposal was summed up by the UN Special Commission on Palestine in September 1947:

            (a) That Palestine should be a unitary State, with a democratic constitution and an elected legislative assembly,

            (b) That the constitution should provide, inter alia, guarantees for (i) the sanctity of the Holy Places and, subject to suitable safeguards, freedom of religious practice in accordance with the status quo; (ii) full civil rights for all Palestine citizens, the naturalization requirement being ten years' continuous residence in the country; (iii) protection of religious and cultural rights of the Jewish community, such safeguards to be altered only with the consent of the majority of the Jewish members in the legislative assembly,

            (c) That the constitution should provide also for (i) adequate representation in the legislative assembly of all important communities, provided that the Jews would in no case exceed one-third of the total number of members [that is, the proportion of Jews in the Palestinian population in 1947, regardless of the date on which they immigrated]; (ii) the strict prohibition of Jewish immigration and the continuation of the existing restrictions on land transfer, any change in these matters requiring the consent of a majority of the Arab members of the legislative assembly; (iii) the establishment of a Supreme Court which would be empowered to determine whether any legislation was inconsistent with the constitution.

This proposal was congruent with the perspective of a binational state in Palestine as advocated by pacifist “cultural” Zionists - the likes of Martin Buber and Judah Magnes - and, officially at least, by leftwing Zionist organizations such as Hashomer Hatzair. It was flatly rejected by the Zionist leadership, dedicated to the project of a Jewish State in Palestine. In reality, the Ben-Gurion Laborite leadership of the Zionist movement was always much closer to its rightwing rivals of Revisionist Zionism founded by Vladimir Jabotinsky than to the “cultural Zionists” and the radical left. In essence, the statist project of Ben-Gurion matched Jabotinsky’s aspiration, albeit in a more ‘realistic’ and tactical fashion. Thus Jabotinsky said openly and loudly what the others thought as well, but did not want to proclaim lest it spoil their Machiavellian manoeuvering.

The iron wall

The most commented-on essay by Vladimir Jabotinsky is certainly his 1923 piece entitled “The Iron Wall.” It is rightly regarded as a premonitory statement of what actual Zionist policies in Palestine/Israel would become and why they missed no opportunity of missing an opportunity to make peace with the Palestinians. While affirming that the Arabs are culturally “500 years behind us,” the man whom Laborite Zionists denounced as a fascist teased them by expressing more respect for the Arabs than he attributed to them:

Any native people - it is all the same whether they are civilized or savage - views their country as their national home, of which they will always be the complete masters. … And so it is for the Arabs. Compromisers in our midst attempt to convince us that the Arabs are kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains. I flatly reject this assessment of the Palestinian Arabs... Individual Arabs may perhaps be bought off but this hardly means that all the Arabs in Eretz Israel are willing to sell a patriotism that not even Papuans will trade. Every indigenous people will resist alien settlers as long as they see any hope of ridding themselves of the danger of foreign settlement.

Hence, Jabotinsky’s assertion of the Iron Wall doctrine:

Zionist colonization, even the most restricted, must either be terminated or carried out in defiance of the will of the native population. This colonization can, therefore, continue and develop only under the protection of a force independent of the local population – an iron wall which the native population cannot break through. This is, in toto, our policy towards the Arabs. To formulate it any other way would only be hypocrisy.

Eventually, added Jabotinsky, the Arabs will come to peace under Zionist conditions, when they have no other choice left:

All this does not mean that any kind of agreement is impossible, only a voluntary agreement is impossible. As long as there is a spark of hope that they can get rid of us, they will not sell these hopes, not for any kind of sweet words or tasty morsels, because they are not a rabble but a nation, perhaps somewhat tattered, but still living. A living people make such enormous concessions on such fateful questions only when there is no hope left. Only when not a single breach is visible in the iron wall, only then do extreme groups lose their sway, and influence transfers to moderate groups. Only then would these moderate groups come to us with proposals for mutual concessions. ... But the only path to such an agreement is the iron wall, that is to say the strengthening in Palestine of a government without any kind of Arab influence, that is to say one against which the Arabs will fight. In other words, for us the only path to an agreement in the future is an absolute refusal of any attempts at an agreement now.

This view informed the action of Jabotinsky’s heirs in the Likud toward the Palestinians, ever since they took the helm of the Israeli state in 1977. Having secured Egypt’s neutralization, Menachem Begin thought he could force the Palestinians to capitulate by occupying their last stronghold in Lebanon in 1982. The occupation of Lebanon proved a very costly undertaking for Israel, which was compelled to complete the evacuation of the country 18 years after, in 2000. Meanwhile, squeezed financially by its traditional Arab backers among the oil states and facing what, after 1991, looked like a solid US hegemony in the Middle East, a Yasser Arafat who was both hopeless and naively hopeful seemed willing to make the “enormous concessions” that Jabotinsky foresaw. He had become hopeless about his goal of securing a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza as part of a regional deal under international auspices; and he lured himself into believing that his Israeli interlocutors would grant him such a state if he showed them, and showed their sponsors in Washington above all, how compliant he could be.

Successive Israeli cabinets from both Labor and Likud - Rabin, Peres, Netanyahu, Barak - took advantage of the Oslo framework and the end of the first Intifada in order to considerably intensify the building and expansion of settlements in the West Bank, thus enforcing on the ground a situation that they could present as irreversible in order to justify Israel’s annexation of a substantial part of that remaining 22% of Palestinian territory. As a result, the number of Israeli settlers on the West Bank - excluding the Jerusalem area, the largest settlement of all - which had build up to 112,000 in the 26 years from the beginning of the occupation until 1993, doubled in the six years between 1994 and 2000, the year the Oslo process came to its explosive end; and has increased to 305,000 since then. At the same time, these successive cabinets were building the Separation Wall, thus fulfilling literally Jabotinsky’s Iron Wall vision.

When Likud’s foremost firebrand Ariel Sharon came to power in February 2001, he reversed the Oslo process by bloodily reoccupying the territories under Palestinian control, and accelerated the construction of the wall while revising its route in order to expand the amount of territory annexed. This policy continued under Ehud Olmert, Sharon’s successor at the head of Kadima, the party that Sharon founded out of a split from Likud, and then under Likud’s Netanyahu, now heading a cabinet that brings together Zionist parties ranging from Labor to the racist far-right party of Avigdor Lieberman. Simultaneously, the Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza have been facing the most tragic period in their history, enduring the most desperate conditions since they came under Israeli occupation in 1967. The cruel assault on Gaza in December 2008-January 2009 moved the world’s conscience - a conscience that Judge Richard Goldstone admirably embodied, thus provoking the fury of Israel’s rulers.

Oslo contradictions

For all that, the Palestinians are not any closer to accepting Israel’s land grab in the West Bank and the less-than-Bantustan “state” that Israel’s rulers are offering them. If any of them were willing to make such ‘enormous concessions’, however, they know that they would be isolated and repudiated by the overwhelming majority of their people. That is where Jabotinsky got it wrong indeed: his vision foreshadowed the Zionists’ policies, but not the Palestinians’ stance. For behind the apparently higher consideration in which Jabotinsky held the Arabs, he still despised them too much to understand that their self-pride and sense of justice would never allow them to accept demeaning surrenders. His lack of realism combined with his racist view of the Arabs prevented him from facing the truth: given the sheer fact of numbers and geographic extension, there is no way by which Israel could subjugate the Palestinians and the Arabs to the point of getting them to accept its inflexible conditions.

Oslo was based on contradictory calculations. Israel’s rulers seem to have tried to test whether the Palestinians are “some kind of fools who can be tricked by a softened formulation of our goals, or a tribe of money grubbers who will abandon their birth right to Palestine for cultural and economic gains.” Confronted with the failure of this expectation, they increased their repression of the Palestinians - to little avail. Even the extremely ‘moderate’ Mahmoud Abbas - who is seen as a traitor by part of his people - proved unable to deliver what the Israelis wanted from him without substantial Israeli concessions in return. The increasing violence of Israel’s rulers in applying the Iron Wall doctrine, far from reaching its goal, only succeeded in increasing resentment and the desire for revenge among Palestinians, and beyond - far beyond.

Over the last decades Israel has managed to antagonize a formidable range of forces that were not part of its enemy spectrum until then. It has already lost quite a few teeth in attempting to subdue Lebanon, where it faced the firm resistance spirit of Hezbollah combatants resorting to their  ‘asymmetric’ advantage as guerrilla fighters in defending their land against a conventional army. The increasing levels of hatred sown in the whole Middle East by western invasions, as well as by Israeli violence, are fostering the rise of an ‘apocalyptic terrorism’ that contemplates resorting to weapons of mass destruction as another ‘asymmetric’ means of offsetting the overwhelming military superiority of its enemies. Last but certainly not least, Israel is now facing the prospect, in the short or medium term, of a nuclear-armed Iran - a development that would bring the region dangerously close to a nuclear holocaust if Israel keeps threatening to launch military strikes.

Coda

Jabotinsky should have remembered that the image of the wall is associated in the Jewish tradition with bad omens. His present disciples would be well advised to anticipate the impending catastrophe, before it is too late: they would be well advised to reverse their colonizing and aggressive policies, stop trying to dictate to the Palestinians who should represent them, and renew the kind of attitude that Israeli negotiators displayed in the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations that were held in Taba in early 2001. And, they should completely lift their criminal blockade on Gaza to start with. For they do not need a new interpreter of the writing on the wall that they are building on the West bank with so much hubris: the biblical Daniel’s interpretation has become relevant again.

Mene, Mene, Tekel u-Pharsin: the days of your kingdom are numbered; you have been weighed and found wanting; your kingdom will be divided and lost. The last word Pharsin carried a dual meaning: it was interpreted as referring also to the Persians, who took over Babylon when King Belshazzar was assassinated little after the writing appeared on the wall. Persia, of course, is the former name of Iran.

Elia Suleiman makes tender, funny films about Palestinian life. Why has his latest caused outrage? Steve Rose finds out

We're in a street in occupied Ramallah. A young Palestinian man is taking out his rubbish. An Israeli tank is parked nearby, its gun barrel pointed right at the man's head. As he walks to the bin and back, the tank turret tracks him in whirs and clanks, the barrel dipping when he steps off the pavement. The man is about to go inside when his phone rings. He starts talking to a friend about a party, pacing back and forth, ignoring the tank, which is still noisily following his every move. When he goes back inside, the gun swivels to point directly at the camera.

This is a scene from Elia Suleiman's latest film, The Time That Remains, and it encapsulates the director's keen eye for the absurdities of Palestinian life – last seen in his Divine Intervention, which won the jury prize at Cannes in 2002. Rather than make politicised portrayals of his people's trauma, Suleiman offers something closer to silent comedy: his films are collections of stylised episodes, precisely framed and choreographed, often including himself as a character, usually a mute, impassive spectator.

In real life, he's the opposite: animated, voluble, passionate – a rather chic 49-year-old. Although Suleiman aims to be more of an observer, The Time That Remains is possibly his most inflammatory film yet. Like Divine Intervention, it's a collection of sketches, this time based on his own family history. Taking the 1948 Arab-Israeli war as its starting point, the film follows Suleiman's late father's resistance activities, defending what was then Palestine against the Haganah, the Jewish paramilitary group that would soon defeat them and declare the independent state of Israel. We see scenes of combat, of Jewish soldiers looting and occupying Palestinian homes, taking prisoners, carrying out executions, murdering innocents. Such incidents have never before been depicted in a major film.

"I heard these stories from my father," Suleiman says. "When he fell sick, I asked him to write them down. But I didn't think I was mature enough to handle them: it's a thin rope to walk along without falling into all kinds of aesthetic and political traps."

He also gathered evidence from his mother's letters and the recollections of friends. Then, when he came to shoot the film, in the actual homes where his family once lived, the older residents of Nazareth added more details. The scene of Israeli soldiers looting, for example, was based on the testimony of a woman from whose balcony they were filming. "She showed me bullet holes in her house," Suleiman says. "She had brought stuff from Beirut on her honeymoon, and then the Haganah arrived and started to take it. I said, 'I'm gonna take revenge for you.'"

Over the rest of the film's 60-year storyline, we see Suleiman's young alter ego singing patriotic Zionist songs at school, being told off for calling America "colonialist", and fleeing the country after being charged with tearing an Israeli flag. Then the grown-up Suleiman, played by himself, returns to present-day Nazareth and the West Bank to find those clear-cut polarities and identities of 1948 have blurred into a more confused, globalised landscape. So is the film autobiography, documentary or fiction? "I refuse linear histories," he says. "I depart from a certain grounding of truth into an aesthetic dimension."

The tank episode is based on a true story. "A guy in Ramallah told me a tank parked outside his house during the second intifada and followed him down the street. I told him, 'You're going to act that scene.' It's the same guy. I added the phone – a little bit of burlesque."

The tank is becoming something of a trademark. In Divine Intervention, there's a moment where the director throws a peach stone out of the window while driving past a tank and the tank explodes. The idea came to him, he says, while driving past a tank one day. He pulled over and jotted it down. "I never start from the position of what the film is about," he says. "I spend time wandering around and staring, going through certain accidents that produce a tickle or potential static, which I write in my notebooks."

When The Time That Remains was released in Israel, one politician attempted to have Suleiman declared an enemy of the state and have his (Israeli) passport taken away. But others leapt to his defence. "A lot of people don't want to talk about 1948," he says. "But some are willing to take the pain of what happened – and not just accept some kind of dream sequence of the creation of the Israeli state, which is a nonsensical story. It's a big lie."

One might also detect this change in recent Israeli cinema. In 2007, there was the liberal-minded Beaufort, in which Israeli soldiers questioned their futile occupation of a fort in Lebanon. Waltz With Bashir, in 2008, successfully excavated a former soldier's repressed memories of massacre. This year saw Lebanon, a thriller set inside an Israeli tank, featuring its terrified crew.

Suleiman thinks this shift echoes Hollywood's post-Vietnam war movies, in that these stories all emerge from a very particular point of view. "We are only talking about the psychology of the white soldier," he says. "We are not talking about the masses he is slaying – we are talking about him when he cries." The descendants of Lebanon's terrified soldiers could well be inside the tank in The Time That Remains, observing the Palestinians outside getting on with life, the two sides locked in a seemingly endless rhythm.

Although full of regret and compassion, Suleiman's films are not despairing. "You think I sit at home and think about the conflict?" he says. "I think about it existentially, about how we could procure togetherness. I don't think despair is necessary – otherwise I wouldn't be making films. If I stop, you can conclude that I gave into despair."

The Time That Remains (15)
(Elia Suleiman, 2009, UK/Ita/Fra/Bel) Elia Suleiman, Saleh Bakri, Samar Tanus, Shafika Bajjali. 110 mins

As he did in 2002's Divine Intervention, Suleiman fashions Middle East tensions into something resembling a deadpan arthouse sketch show at times, but the stylised comedy is folded into 60 years of family history this time. The first portion is particularly striking, dealing with the 1948 Arab-Israeli war and Suleiman's father's part in it as a Palestinian resistance fighter. As time and relatives move on, the story becomes more reflective and fragmented, but elegant choreography and tender observation hold it together.

Sex And The City 2 (15)
(Michael Patrick King, 2010, US) Sarah Jessica Parker, Kim Cattrall, Kristin Davis, Cynthia Nixon. 146 mins

US-Arab relations get a stiletto in the eye, as the foursome descend on Abu Dhabi in this overlong but doubtless unstoppable sequel, adding Islamophobic cultural challenges to their perpetual relationship/ageing/wardrobe issues.

The Losers (12A)
(Sylvain White, 2010, US) Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Zoe Saldana, Idris Elba. 97 mins

Big explosions, macho comedy and one-note characters make for a guilt-inducing ensemble actioner that's too busy working on its swagger to remember we're supposed to actually like these people.

Rec 2 (18)
(Jaume Balagueró, Paco Plaza, 2009, Spa) Manuela Velasco, Jonathan Mellor. 85 mins

Set mere minutes after the original camcorder horror, this sequel sensibly takes the Aliens route, sending a SWAT team of zombie-fodder into the infested apartments and orchestrating the multi-player shoot-'em-up violence with enthusiasm.

The Happiest Girl In The World (15)
(Radu Jude, 2009, Neth/Rom/Fra/Jap) Andreea Bosneag, Doru Catanescu. 90 mins

Sharp little consumerist satire in which a rural Romanian teen wins a car that becomes a poisoned chalice (or should that be Yaris?) when her parents and the competition organisers advance agendas of their own.

Fish Story (NC)
(Yoshihiro Nakamura, 2009, Jap) Ito Atsushi, Kora Kengo, Hamada Gaku. 112 mins

Agreeably eccentric Japanese yarn in which an obscure punk single has something to do with a giant comet heading for Earth. It takes the entire film to establish exactly what, but it's well worth the watch.

Kites: The Remix (12A)
(Anurag Basu, 2010, Ind) Hrithik Roshan, Bárbara Mori. 92 mins

This recut Bolly/Hollywood adventure, set in the southern US, is custom-built to break into western markets, and with its absurdly lavish action, handsome lovers-on-the-run and unaffected cheesiness, it deserves to succeed.

Tooth Fairy (PG)
(Michael Lembeck, 2010, US) Dwayne Johnson, Ashley Judd, Julie Andrews. 101 mins

The Rock fills the family-movie cavity again as an ice hockey pro drafted into fairy duties for a week. Strictly for the dentally challenged.

Space Chimps 2 (U)
(John H Williams, 2010, US) Zack Shada, Stanley Tucci. 76 mins

More half-term family product. The full title – Zartog Strikes Back – probably tells you all you need to know.

OUT FROM FRIDAY

Kicks

Two Liverpool girls kidnap their footie idol.

4.3.2.1

Girls meet diamonds in hip crime caper.

Out on Wednesday

Brothers Bloom

Con-men comedy led by Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz.

Death At A Funeral

US remake of a Brit family farce.

Out on Wednesday

Girl On The Train

French drama from André Téchiné.

The Killer Inside Me

Controversially violent thriller from Michael Winterbottom.

She's Out Of My League

Jay Baruchel leads a teen loser comedy.

Shrink

Kevin Spacey plays a celebrity therapist who needs therapy.

Videocracy

Documentary on Italian celeb culture.

COMING SOON

In two weeks … Ben Stiller seeks his lost mojo in hip comedy Greenberg … Sean Bean leads medieval thriller Black Death …

In three weeks … Ashton Kutcher and Katherine Heigl star in Killers … Harmony Korine wallows with the Trash Humpers …

In a month … Russell Brand gets to be a rock star at last in Get Him To The Greek … Francis Ford Coppola revives himself with Tetro …

The Palestinian Exile, also known as Al Nakba (Arabic for “The Catastrophe”), refers to the ethnic cleansing of native Palestinian peoples … all » during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.

From December 1947 until November 1948, Zionist forces (namely the Irgun, Lehi, Haganah terrorist gangs) expelled approximately 750, 000 indigenous Palestinians–almost 2/3 of the population–from their homes.

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For many the Nakba,or “day of catastrophe”, is an unknown event; misunderstood, rarely acknowledged by Western media outlets or ignored en masse.

‘Al Nakba‘ is the term with which Palestinians refer to the refugee flight of the Palestinian Arabs during the 1948 Arab-Israeli War – the Palestinian exodus. This exodus remains a central and controversial topic in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians.

The total 2008 population of Palestinian refugee’s (including descendants): 4.62 million with the most significant populations found in the Gaza Strip, Jordan, the West Bank,Lebanon, Syria.

WRH permalink

Jerusalem is a closed city. It has been for years. Every conqueror and occupier has restricted access to the city to certain people considered enemies.

The Ottomans did it. The Jordanians did it. And now Israel is doing it. Except that Israel is lying about it.

Israelis insist that Jerusalem is "finally" an open city. Yes, open to Jews from anywhere around the world and to most non-Arabs. But not to Arabs and especially not to Palestinians of the Christian and Muslim faiths.

Jerusalem under Israeli occupation is a closed city and the worst part about it is that most Israelis have closed their eyes and they don't care.

Israel's high powered propaganda machine - something the Arabs may not understand because they have no real professional communications at all - insists the "big lie" that Jews were banned from entering East Jerusalem after the cessation of fighting in the 1948 war and until Israel conquered it in their invasion in 1967.

That is an outright lie, of course. Jordan had the same policy that Israel has today. Exactly. Precisely. There is not a difference. During this Arab-Israeli conflict, ALL Arab countries banned Jews who had Israeli passports or who had visited Israel from entering their countries. They also banned pro-Israel activists. And that included East Jerusalem.

The Israelis focus on that fact without the accuracy, of course.

NOT BANNED, however, were Jews who did not travel to Israel and were from other countries who wished to visit East Jerusalem's Wailing Wall for religious, not political, reasons.

Jews prayed at the Wailing Wall all the time during the Jordanian occupation of East Jerusalem.

The difference is that Jordan didn't spend any time with clever public relations spin or professional communications explaining what they were doing.

And there is the Wailing Wall, where the Jews may come no longer, barred now, as Christians or Moslems were from other shrines in ages past...

There is only silence to-day at the Wailing Wall, which is the western end of the great platform on which stood the Jewish Temple.

A frank recognition of its past in the Middle East can give Britain a unique role in the peace process

The reprimand of Israel by David Miliband, the foreign secretary, resonated sharply in an already difficult week for Israel. But Britain can do more to influence the Middle East than register a complaint, expel a Mossad officer, or sit on the sidelines as Washington pursues its Sisyphean efforts to renew the peace process.

Of all the western powers it is Britain that has a unique responsibility to Israelis and Palestinians, and something unique to offer both parties. After all, Britain was the original third party to the Palestine triangle. From the beginning of the British Mandate in 1922 to their great escape from Palestine in 1948, it was the British who lived in suffocating proximity to the parties – an intimacy that neither the US nor any other nation has experienced.

It was the British who were present at the birth of the clash between the Zionists and the Arabs of Palestine, and witnessed the conflict unfold. Britain was the first European power to be presented with each party's litany of demands, and to be at the receiving end of their threats and manipulations. It was the first that each side relied upon to fulfil its aspirations, and that each accused of betrayal. And it was the first to express exasperation at what it saw as both parties' insufferable behaviour.

Indeed, Britain was not simply a bystander. Having made promises to each side during the first world war, enshrined its incompatible "dual obligations" in the Balfour declaration of 1917, and implemented contradictory policies for some 30 years, it shared responsibility for the conflict's shape and evolution.

A decision to openly address Britain's role could have an impact on the most unbridgeable gap between Palestinians and Israelis: the question of ultimate responsibility for the conflict.

The responsibility issue – and its twin, recognition – has only become more intractable in recent years. The Palestinians insist that Israel acknowledge its responsibility for the 1948 nakba and the refugee problem. For Israelis this is unacceptable because they believe it corners them into confessing to "original sin" and ultimately delegitimises Zionism and Israel. They have thus upped the ante recently by requiring that Palestinians recognise Israel "as a Jewish state", which the Palestinians consider as tantamount to putting a stamp of approval on the loss of their homeland.

This is a circle that seemingly cannot be squared. So what could Britain possibly do about it? Without validating the tactics of blame and breast-beating (or inviting a renewed debate about the nature of its wartime promises), Britain might consider making an important public speech that would address the problems of recognition and accountability directly.

Acknowledging its own role in the origins of the conflict might afford Britain the opportunity to speak to the parties from a position of humility and even complicity: not as an outsider trying to impose its will, but as a former party to the conflict, one that has a moral and historical stake in its resolution, in a way that even the US can never have.

Should Britain admit past failures, Israelis might feel that they can acknowledge their own role in the nakba without getting entangled in a web of exclusive culpability. Palestinians may interpret this as a diffusion of Israel's responsibility; but they would receive the additional acknowledgment that long before 1948 their quest for independence was undermined by a British policy predicated on building, in their land, a home for the Jews.

Britain could also recall its original pre-Holocaust moral support for Zionism as a movement that sought to address the escalating threats to Jewish minorities from exclusivist forms of European nationalism. Israelis might see this as a more powerful form of recognition than any statement the Palestinians may be forced to utter under duress.

Of course, the fundamental matters that define the conflict today will not be magically assuaged by symbolic gestures. In fact, an excessive focus on existential issues has often provided a convenient stalling tactic for those who want to avoid moving forward on a peace process. But these issues are not likely to go away, and progress towards defusing the issue of responsibility now can help provide a more secure way forward, should there be movement beyond the current impasse.

While the US struggles to invent its future as an honest broker, Britain might find its relevance in the Arab-Israeli conflict merely by recalling its past: and to tap into its historical knowledge and reclaim its role as a member of the original Palestine triangle.

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In a speech to the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies on 21 May 2009, David Miliband, the British foreign secretary, argued that the future of the west’s relations with Muslim-dominated countries lay in the building of broad coalitions based upon consent among citizens—not just ruling elites. Prior to making his case, he acknowledged the elephant in the room of Anglo-Muslim relations:  Britain’s colonial record in the middle east and south Asia, and its legacies. As part of this rare confession of culpability, he noted ‘the failure – it has to be said not just ours - to establish two states in Palestine’.

This admission, as rare as it may be, gives only a very partial picture of what is a largely unacknowledged story. With a mandate from the league of nations, Britain governed the Holy Land from the end of the first world war until 1948. During this time, the political landscape of Palestine was completely transformed. Whilst Arabs and Jews played a fundamental role in the unfolding drama of mandate Palestine, the driving force was imperial Britain. The old myth that Britain was merely ‘holding the ring’ — trying to keep the peace between two irrational, warring parties — is a gross misunderstanding of history.

In November 1918, Palestine did not exist as a political entity. What became mandate Palestine was carved out of four districts of the Ottoman empire, which had ruled the roost since 1516. In the Jewish world, only a small, though growing, minority were members of the Zionist movement by the end of the Great War. Many Jews were virulently opposed to the idea, though most were indifferent to what was viewed as a utopian movement. In 1918, approximately 10% of the population of the Holy Land were Jewish, of whom many were not Zionist. Amongst the Arab population, there was a growing sense of Palestinian identity before 1914. But this was just one of many competing loyalties at the time. Just after the war, the predominant aim of Arab nationalists in Palestine was to establish independence for Greater Syria—incorporating today’s Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Palestinian territories, and Jordan.

But by the end of British rule in May 1948 there had emerged a powerful Zionist movement. It had succeeded in forging the institutions for statehood and independence. Palestinian nationalism had also become deep-rooted in Arab society. But the Arab population suffered from under-development, debt, widespread illiteracy, disillusionment, and the after effects of Britain’s decimation of the Palestinian Uprising of 1936 to 1939. These seeds of Zionist victory and Palestinian defeat were the direct outcome of Britain’s drafting, interpretation, and implementation of the league of nations mandate for Palestine.

On the rare occasions when Britain’s record in Palestine is discussed critically outside of academic circles, many emphasise the mistake of issuing the Balfour Declaration of 2 November 1917. It often has been thought that this statement committed Britain to supporting Zionism, come what may. As a result, the British were forced to make the best of a bad job. They could not abandon Zionism, as it would undermine Britain’s honour and prestige—the perceived beating heart of imperial authority. But this version of events lets the British empire off the hook. It suggests that the Balfour Declaration, the act of a short-sighted government embroiled in the Great War, was the only problem. The Declaration, however, committed Britain to doing very little in Palestine.

The text of the Declaration stipulated that the British government viewed with favour, and would ‘facilitate’, the ‘establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people’. This statement was followed by the caveat, ‘nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities’. As I argue in a forthcoming book edited by Rory Miller, Palestine, Britain and Empire: The Mandate Years, there was no attempt by the government to define what was meant by these promises. There was no serious consideration by the cabinet or the foreign office as to what was meant by the term ‘national home’, or how exactly Britain would ‘facilitate’ its establishment. Also, no thought was given to how the rights of the so-called ‘non-Jewish communities’ might be affected by the ‘national home’, or how they would be protected.

The principal reason for this oversight is that the government was not focused on the future of Palestine when it issued the Declaration. Their primary objective was to rally world Jewry behind the Allied war effort, especially in Russia and the United States. This policy was pursued because of a mistaken belief in Jewish power and commitment to Zionism.

By the end of the war, the government had failed to clarify its policy in Palestine. As Britain struggled to cope with the immediate challenges of the post-war peace, the inertia on Palestine continued. The chief concerns were to avoid further alienating the Palestinian Arabs, whilst also satisfying the imagined bogey of Jewish power. Into this policy vacuum stepped the Zionists. With their own plans for Palestine, they persuaded the government to go further than the vague Balfour Declaration. The text of the league of nations mandate for Palestine was based on Zionist proposals. The preamble stated Britain’s obligation to put the promise of the Declaration into effect. It also recognised the Jewish people’s historical connection with Palestine, and the ‘grounds for reconstituting their national home in that country’. The articles of the mandate went much further. As a legally binding document, it obliged Britain to secure, not facilitate, the establishment of the Jewish national home. To that end, the British administration was to cooperate with, and be advised by, the Zionist Organisation. In addition, the British had to facilitate Jewish immigration and settlement. There were also commitments to safeguarding the rights of all inhabitants, not just Jews, and to develop self-governing institutions.

The mandate for Palestine did not clarify, however, what the Jewish national home would look like. Nor, like the Balfour Declaration, did it state how the rights of the Arab majority were to be protected. There was no clear picture crafted in Whitehall as to what the outcome of British rule in Palestine would be. Neither was there consideration of how self-governing institutions for all of Palestine could be developed, whilst also establishing a Jewish national home.

This lack of planning was, in large part, due to the British intention to stay in Palestine for as long as possible, so as to protect strategic interests in the middle east. As a result, no exit strategy was developed by the British. This was despite the fact that the declared aim of the mandate system in the middle east was to help nations to become independent.

Instead of a carefully defined strategy for the future of Zionist-Palestinian relations, the British relied on a series of flawed assumptions that shaped their governance of the Holy Land. First, it was thought that Zionist development, as quasi-European development, would benefit the Arab population, and thus bring them round to the idea of Zionist settlement. Second, the government wrongly believed that the moderate Zionist leadership, as they were viewed, were not interested in the creation of their own state, or dominance of Palestine. Third, the Palestinian Arabs were not thought to constitute a nation. They were seen as a motley crew of religious communities. Finally, those responsible for the administration of Palestine considered that the Palestinian Arab population could be managed by co-opting the Palestinian elite. If these individuals could be kept on side, then they would moderate Arab society.

In reality, the Palestinian political elite favoured by the British were placed in an impossible position. They had to satisfy the British of their commitment to moderation and peace, and their willingness to play the game of liberal international politics. They could not push the British too hard for substantive changes to the status quo. If they did, they would have been considered dangerous extremists. But at the same time this elite had to assuage the Palestinian masses, who increasingly demanded an end to British support for Zionism. With the Empire’s continuing backing of Zionism in the 1920s and 1930s, much of the Palestinian elite focused on the liberal path of advocating constitutional change. The constitutional path failed, however, in March 1936, after a Legislative Council, which was to include significant Arab representation, was defeated by a pro-Zionist majority in the house of commons. The Palestinian population erupted, and the first intifada began.

This uprising finally led to a British plan for an endgame to the conflict. The Palestine royal commission reported in July 1937 that the only solution was the partition of the Holy Land into two separate, sovereign states (though areas of strategic interest were to remain in British hands). For fear of alienating the Arab world with an impending war, this option was, however, shelved by the British government. Instead, they attempted to pacify the Arab population with a combination of violence and political concessions. Using tactics such as house demolitions and collective punishments, they crushed the uprising with tremendous force. Most of the Palestinian leadership was arrested or went into exile. In an effort to sweeten the pill, in May 1939 the military campaign was followed by sharp restrictions on Jewish immigration and the prospect of Palestinian independence with an Arab majority in ten years time. But these promises could not mitigate the effects of the violence that had preceded them—nor were they meant to. The Palestinian national movement, which had tried to resist colonial rule, had been fatally wounded. And the Palestinian leadership was no longer viewed by the British as a viable partner. Even in the partition proposals of 1937, the suggested Arab state was to come under the authority of the reliably pro-British King Abdullah of Transjordan.

As with its rule of Palestine, Britain’s response to Palestinian resistance was driven by a number of flawed assumptions. If the Palestinian elite would not accede to British demands, then it would have to be replaced by a more pliant party. In addition, resistance had to be crushed before any conciliatory steps could be made. Britain’s reputation as a tough actor in the region had to be protected at all costs.

There was little consideration of the long-term effects of these policies on the sentiments of the general Palestinian population. The main concern was with political elites, especially those in strategically significant countries such as Saudi Arabia, Iraq, and Egypt. Unsurprisingly, there was little enthusiasm for Britain amongst Palestinians after 1939. There was certainly no acceptance of Britain’s past support for the Zionist project.

The two-state solution of 1937 was the one proposal offered by the British government that it was believed could be acceptable to both Palestinians and Zionists. But even here, there was blatant disregard for its impact on the average Palestinian. The Palestine royal commission had suggested that there should be a substantial transfer of Arabs from the Jewish state.

The partition idea, without population transfers, was taken up in 1947 by the United Nations, after Britain had handed it the Palestine problem. This plan promised independent Jewish and Palestinian states. But a bruised and battered Palestinian population had no incentive to accept this agreement, which was decided upon by the UN general assembly. Neither were the Zionists, in the aftermath of the holocaust, about to give in to a defeated Palestinian population, who were opposed to a Jewish state. As a result, Britain’s departure was preceded by the outbreak of a civil war in Palestine, and was followed by the first Arab-Israeli conflagration.

The assumption that state-sponsored violence followed by agreements between political elites can make peace lives on to this day. It betrays the old assumptions of British colonialism — that a reputation for being firm must be maintained at all costs, that colonial state violence prevents future anti-colonial violence, and that peace can be achieved by elites re-drawing maps, and making constitutional agreements.

The British government did not understand, nor did they want to understand, the concerns of the average Palestinian. Neither did they comprehend the post-holocaust sensibilities of rank and file Zionist Jews. But suffering cannot be undone by academic agreements crafted by politicians and officials. And it is precisely the experiences and expectations of regular people, be they Palestinian or Israeli, that will make or break peace in the long-term.

Leader of Syria's first Ba'athist regime

Amin al-Hafez, who has died aged 88, ruled Syria's first Ba'athist administration with a genial smile and an iron fist during the turbulent years from 1963 to 1966. He was also the last genuine president from that country's Sunni Muslim majority, since his successor was just a Sunni figurehead for two Alawite officers.

Although Hafez cemented Ba'ath party rule over Syria, he was more a military opportunist than a dedicated ideologue. Ultimately his dictatorial tendencies did not prevent his downfall, and his ties to an Israeli spy proved particularly embarrassing. Syria experienced stability, albeit of a nervous sort, only after Hafez al-Assad became president in 1970.

Al-Hafez's first taste of politics came in 1958 as part of a Syrian army delegation that visited Gamal Abdul Nasser, the Egyptian president. The 14 officers beseeched the "hero of Suez" to rescue their coup-ridden nation. The two states duly merged into one United Arab Republic in February that year, and Hafez was posted to Cairo.

Soon formerly enthusiastic Ba'athists grew to loathe Nasser for banning their party and turning Syria into a virtual satrapy. The union crumbled after another Syrian uprising in September 1961, and the resultant secessionist regime banished the troublesome Hafez to Argentina as Syria's military attaché.

Hafez returned to join the Ba'athist-led cabal that toppled Damascus's pro-western government on 8 March 1963, a month after other Ba'athists had taken Iraq. Suddenly allied radicals were steering two of the region's most powerful countries.

While Iraq's Ba'athists were ousted within nine months, in Syria the party's civilian founders cleverly used the bluff Major General Hafez as their military shield. In May 1963 he became interior minister. And after viciously crushing a pro-Egyptian rebellion on 18 July, submachine gun in hand, he was appointed president of the ruling National Council.

Hafez declared a state of emergency that still exists, and nationalised all Arab-owned banks and oil resources. He also improved ties with the Soviets, bankrolled Yasser Arafat's Palestinian Fatah guerrillas, and ordered engineers to divert two rivers that fed Israel's share of the Jordan. The ensuing artillery exchanges across the Israeli-Syrian border almost certainly led to the 1967 six-day war. By then, however, Hafez had been toppled by a bloody coup on 23 February 1966.

Hafez was born in humble circumstances in Aleppo, northern Syria. The son of a policeman, he graduated from Syria's military academy in 1946, the same year French troops left his country. Hafez gravitated towards the secular, anti-imperialist, pan-Arab Ba'ath party after fighting in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Yet he remained at heart a Nasserist, and forlornly dreamt of reuniting Syria, Egypt and Iraq – even when his idol called him a fascist.

While in Buenos Aires, Hafez befriended a supposed Lebanese trader named Kamal Amin Thaabet, in reality an Egyptian-born Jewish Mossad agent, Eli Cohen. The spy arrived in Syria in early 1962, a year before Hafez's return, and soon began relaying reports and photographs about Syrian military plans to Israel.

As president, Hafez groomed his friend to be a future defence minister, possibly even his successor. He invited him to banquets, thanked him for giving his wife a $1,000 fur coat and led him on tours of secret Golan Heights fortifications. When Cohen was caught red-handed in January 1965, Hafez personally interrogated him and arrested 500 of his high-placed friends. Brushing aside international pleas for clemency and his own qualms, Hafez ordered Cohen's public execution, by hanging, in Damascus.

Hafez proved as ruthless when he crushed a Sunni uprising in 1964. He authorised the aerial bombing of the Sultan mosque in Hama and awarded himself new titles, including prime minister. But 15 reshuffles from 1963 onwards and numerous army purges eroded his limited support base. Most imprudently, he sacked Salah Jadid, the dynamic leftist general, as chief of staff in September 1965.

In the end, as the historian Sami Moubayed has noted, Hafez fell victim to his stubborn refusal to arbitrate between feuding Ba'ath factions. He seemed startled when Jadid and Assad, of the clandestine Ba'ath military committee, dared to challenge him.

Wounded in a three-hour shootout during their 1966 assault, Hafez was jailed in Damascus's Mazza prison, then spirited away to Lebanon in June 1967, before relocating to Baghdad in 1968. Damascus sentenced Hafez to death, in absentia, in 1971. Yet Saddam Hussein treated him and his fellow exile, Ba'ath founder Michel Aflaq, like royalty. After the fall of Saddam in 2003, Hafez was allowed home. He received a state funeral. He is survived by his wife, Zainab, and their five children.

• Mohammed Amin al-Hafez, soldier and politician, born 1921; died 17 December 2009

They're at it again. Our future parliamentarians,  jurists, and all round bankers are busy stifling free speech at one of our top Universities. Voltaire's  maxim  is all but forgotten.

This time it's Cambridge, home of radical thinkers pretending to be from 'the working class' before turning into Harriet Harperson.

The Cambridge University Israel Society (IS) has cancelled a talk by Israeli historian Benny Morris, a man who has written extensively about the expulsion of Palestinians in 1948.

Why? Because the leading scholar on the Arab-Israeli Wars has been accused of  Islamophobia. The IS commitment to free speech crumbled in the face of denunciations from a few students, most of them in the Islamic Society which has 40 members. A few of the faculty joined in. Publicity stunt? Misguided? Whatever - it's a mess.

The Israel Society apologised for any 'unintended' offence it may have caused and mumbled something about placing the feelings of those who might be offended above the right of the speaker to be heard. That is an interesting position given that just about everyone can be offended by something, so we better all be quiet.

The mind of Mr Morris does indeed contain highly disagreeable views, some of them almost on a par with such bastions of pluralism as Abu 'Push Homos Off A Cliff' Usamah who was quite wrongly invited to speak at UCL, and then quite wrongly banned.  Morris has written about 'caging' Palestinians so they 'won't murder us', and clearly suggests that Muslims have 'different values' when it comes to the value of life. He has uncovered new evidence about how Palestinians were driven from their homes in 1948, and gone on to justify these actions. 

You can make the argument that the IS should not have invited Mr Morris, but that is to miss the point. A hate campaign against all things Israeli has infected the campuses of Britain and in turn is in danger of engendering a climate in which Voltaire's maxim is changed to 'I will defend to the death your right to say something as long as I agree with it'. The anti-Israel crowd frequently resorts to bullying tactics.

I wouldn't invite David Irving to speak, I wouldn't go and see him speak, but I would defend his right to be a
Holocaust Denier. Let the demonstrations and the debate take place. The line crossed by the 'Kill Rushdie' mob
is that they incite murder and should be arrested. You could make the arguement that Abu 'Crucify Apostates' does the same. But Irving and Morris and many other people, with whom I may or may not agree, do not call for people to be murdered. For students to argue in favour of censorship even when laws are not being broken is a shame.

For most of us these intra undergraduate shrieking matches appear irrelevant and we hope they all grow out of it, but its not that simple. These active students go on to many of the places where public opinion  is formed.  Oxbridge , and handful of other Universities are still from where the establishment is drawn, just look at the Cabinet and Shadow Cabinet. 

It's good to talk. Im not so sure about shrieking shut up.

Success stories of state-building in the Middle East have been few. The United Arab Emirates has certainly been one. Qatar, and to an extent Bahrain and Jordan, are now featuring high on good governance indexes. Yet the most impressive of all has been Iraqi Kurdistan.

Less than 25 years ago, Iraqi Kurds suffered one of the Middle East’s worst genocides of modern history. In 1986, Iraq’s former president Saddam Hussein ordered Operation Al Anfal, killing close to 150,000 Kurds over the course of three years. That number exceeds all the deaths resulting from more than 60 years of conflict between the Arabs and Israel, which has seen at least half a dozen wars. [Actually, it is about triple the numbers killed in Arab-Israeli wars. - EoZ]

In the aftermath, Iraqi Kurdistan has emerged from civil war to become one of the Middle East’s most promising regions. One can only hope that the way Iraqi Kurds did it might inspire the Arabs.
...
The Kurds understood that the international status quo would force them to reconnect with Baghdad. Thus, they moved to their second best option: they rejoined Iraq but made sure it would be a federal union that would give their northern region enough cultural, economic and political independence.

Since then, the Kurds have not wasted time in crying foul over surrendering their historic quest for independence. Instead, they founded a new formula: Iraqi Kurdistan would remain part of Iraq as long as Baghdad has democratic rulers. The emergence of a dictator would force the Kurds to go their separate way, fair and square. This position won the Kurds further kudos in the capitals of the world.

More importantly, unlike some Arab leaders and their signature policies of double talk about Israel – promising peace in English and talking war in Arabic – Kurdish leaders have preached to their people that the autonomy or rights they had earned, whether in Iraq or Turkey, were the best they could get.

Meanwhile, the Kurd’s quest for an independent state has all but vanished. This means that Kurds would not be blowing themselves up, and that their leaders would not be insisting on independence in a populist manner like several Arab and Iranian leaders often do regarding Palestine.

This newfound Kurdish wisdom has penetrated all the way into Kurdistan, as Iraqi Kurds held free and fair elections for their regional parliament last year, when a considerable opposition bloc emerged. Mr Barzani himself was re-elected Kurdistan’s president with 68 per cent of the vote, a percentage that makes many Arab presidential elections, with poll numbers exceeding 90 per cent, look silly.

Democracy, still not ideal, is now taking root in Iraqi Kurdistan.

And with democracy comes good governance and economic prosperity. For that, the Kurds have been tapping their human capital assets from their diaspora. Again, compare that to most Arab countries where brain drain has become an unstoppable trend.

The Kurdistan state-building experiment in northern Iraq, even if only within the limits of autonomy, is far from perfection. Yet it is one of the most impressive in the Middle East. It should certainly serve as a model for several Arab countries to emulate.

However, this argument makes sense to Palestinian Arabs only if the point of a "Palestinian state" is to protect the lives of PalArabs, to end decades of misery,to build institutions and preserve an identity and bring freedom.

But given the negotiating pre-requisites of the "moderate" Palestinian Arab leaders, it is clear that their real goals have little to do with helping their people. Their goal, as it has been since 1948, is really only to destroy Israel, and as a result the wise advice that is given here will fall on deaf ears.

Mahmoud Abbas says an Israel-Palestine deal could be reached in six months. But too many issues remain under the carpet

In recent months, veteran Middle East experts such as Hussein Agha and Robert Malley or Aaron David Miller have done a good job explaining why peace between Israelis and Palestinians is likely a long way off. But it seems that the Palestinian president, Mahmoud Abbas, begs to differ: Haaretz reported that Abbas declared negotiations could be completed "within six months" if Israel halted all settlement construction.

This is clearly meant as a challenge to the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, who has been repeating for months that he is ready for serious negotiations. However, except for critics and opponents on the right, few seem willing to believe Netanyahu – though Haaretz readers were in for a big surprise last month when Aluf Benn, one the paper's senior columnists, declared that Netanyahu had convinced him that his desire to achieve a peace agreement was indeed sincere. Apparently, this turned out to be the most controversial column Benn has ever written.

In a subsequent article in early December, Benn argued that Netanyahu had never been a strong ideological supporter of the settlements, and that he had become convinced that Israel's long-term interest was best served by a two-state solution that would include serious security guarantees for Israel.

Benn's colleague Ari Shavit endorsed this analysis and argued that "Netanyahu has crossed the Rubicon, on both ideological and practical levels, and reinvented himself as a centrist", but Shavit complained that Abbas "isn't giving Netanyahu anything he can use to put the centrist worldview he has adopted into action".

If one accepts the view that Netanyahu has indeed moved to the centre, it's time to revisit the situation his predecessor Ehud Olmert was in last autumn when he presented his proposals for a Palestinian state – that would comprise all of Gaza and, through land swaps, the equivalent of the pre-1967 territory of the West Bank, with East Jerusalem as capital and a guaranteed safe passage to Gaza. Olmert has given a fairly detailed account of his proposals in an interview during a recent visit to Australia and he suggested that the Palestinians should still be asked to respond to his proposals.

To some degree, Abbas has done this now by revealing some of the details of the negotiations. According to Abbas, the Palestinians offered 1.9% of land for swaps, while Israel wanted 6.5%; Abbas also confirmed that the negotiations included proposals for the division of Jerusalem, solutions for refugees and security arrangements, but he stressed that no final agreements were reached. It is noteworthy that Abbas described the gaps as "wide" in an interview with the Washington Post in May; now, however, he seems to believe these gaps could be bridged in six months of negotiations.

This timetable would of course require the Netanyahu government to simply pick up where Olmert left off – and this is hardly Netanyahu's intention. There is no good reason to reinvent the wheel, particularly since the conventional wisdom that the outlines of a solution are well known has been repeated so often in the wake of the negotiations in Camp David and Taba in 2000 and 2001. But Netanyahu's coalition would hardly hold together if it was clear that he continued negotiations on the basis of Olmert's offers.

A recent Haaretz report on a planned new initiative by the US, Egypt, and France to restart the negotiations early next year provides a glimpse of the wrangling behind the scenes, noting that Netanyahu and Abbas disagree "on the very definition of the negotiating process".

Netanyahu demands the process be defined as 'starting' negotiations, aiming to disregard understandings reached in talks between the Palestinians and his predecessor, Ehud Olmert. Abbas insists the process must take those understandings into consideration, and demands it be defined as a 'resumption' of negotiations.

While the Americans have reportedly come up with the obvious compromise formula by suggesting a "relaunching" of the negotiations, this rhetorical placebo can hardly distract from the fact that if negotiations got under way, the public on both sides would have a relatively clear picture of the proposals on the table. There is no doubt that on both sides, the opponents of an agreement resembling Olmert's offers would mobilise a vociferous and even violent opposition; by contrast, the proponents of peace would probably find it much harder to mobilise similar passions to cheer an agreement that would involve considerable uncertainties and risks and require the so often invoked "painful compromises".

Those willing to give peace a chance would be greatly helped if the Arab states gave up their convenient place on the sidelines and stepped forward to shoulder the responsibilities they have due to their role in opposing Israel's establishment. In his widely praised speech in Cairo, President Obama expressed his conviction "that in order to move forward, we must say openly to each other the things we hold in our hearts and that too often are said only behind closed doors".

One of the things supposedly often said behind closed doors in the Middle East is that the millions of Palestinians who have been told for decades to hold out for a "right of return" to the homes their parents or grandparents left in 1948 will have to make do with a "return" to a future Palestinian state or alternatives such as naturalisation in their current country of residence.

Another issue that is too often mentioned only behind closed doors is the fact that the Arab-Israeli conflict resulted not only in hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, but also in a roughly equal number of Jewish refugees who were forced to abandon their ancient communities in Arab countries. Indeed, when Obama spoke in Cairo, some Egyptian-born Jews hoped he would mention the fact that just like Palestinians, hundreds of thousands of Jews in Arab countries suffered displacement and dispossession.

Agha and Malley are doubtlessly right to emphasise that a peace agreement between Israelis and Palestinians must address the problems created in 1948, but it is obvious that these problems can only be solved when all the parties that created them are ready to do their part.

Update: Haaretz has just published details and a map of the Olmert proposals.

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