Author: subir

Hint: Most of them have to do with naughty stuff using the Taptic interface.

The world is awash with analysis of the Apple Watch. The best round-up is probably Hoodinke’s review from a watch guy’s perspective, Anandtech hasn’t done a teardown, so we don’t know what exactly goes into the guts.

The health applications will drive a lot of people to the device (I’ve held off buying a tracker). Doctors may end up recommending it to track patient health.

But it’s the “Taptic” engine will make or break the watch. Either the world loves it, or we hate it. And I suspect the use cases will be legion. Including:

1. Taptic Booty calls: Yes, soon you’ll be sending one tap, pause, two tap sequence, instead of “U up?”.
2. Taps in class: Yep, high school kids are going to use it to pass notes in class. We may see a resurgence in morse code and then boy-scouts may get some play!
3. Someone will use it as a vibrator: That is, if one of the beta-testers hasn’t already done it. Perhaps the male use case is why Apple is offering the Milanese bracelet with self-adjusting magnetic closure…
4. Tapped in church: Yep, people are going to get together to be tapped by Jesus.
5. It’ll revolutionize the phone sex industry: Yes, expect to see offers to drive your taptic engine to a happy ending.

How cute, Tim Cook thought we’d be sending each other heartbeats. Someone should clue him in, we’re far more creative than that.

As the most cursory political conversation with an Israeli or Palestinian will make clear, past is present in their minds. The “pre-1967 lines”  which conventional wisdom states are the basis for any two state solution in fact gloss over more deep rooted issues. For many Palestinians, including those living outside Israel-Palestine, it is about 1948 and the Nakba. For many Israelis it is about the Shoah and creating a “Jewish refuge”. For a few Israeli Jews it is about 586 BC. There will be no lasting peace in Israel-Palestine that does not account for these sentiments.

That is why Palestinians have always insisted on a “right of return” for their ’48 refugees. This is why Israel has a “Jewish right of return” and the Israeli right has never lost an opportunity to expand settlements in the West Bank or Jerusalem.

This is why the parties winning majorities among the Israeli and Palestinian populations clearly say their goal is to control all the territory of Israel/Palestine. We know this is Hamas’s position (i.e. the “destruction of Israel/Zionist-entity”), but Likud has held this position from the day it was created.  Here’s the relevant excerpt of Likud’s 1977 platform (which brought them into power for the first time):

The right of the Jewish people to the land of Israel is eternal and indisputable and is linked with the right to security and peace; therefore, Judea and Samaria will not be handed to any foreign administration; between the Sea and the Jordan there will only be Israeli sovereignty.

This was 10 years before there was such a thing as Hamas or a “Hamas charter”. The platform then goes on to discuss the paramount importance of building settlements in the West Bank.

Successive Likud governments have continued to appropriate land for settlements and act consistently with this position. The 1,000 acre appropriation last week was consistent with their commitment to use every opportunity to appropriate land in the West Bank. Begin, Shamir, Sharon and now Netanyahu run for elections on a platform of sovereignty between the Jordan and the sea. No Likud leader has told them painful concessions of territory will need to be made. The two-state solution that would be acceptable to the party and its base is a middle-eastern version of San Marino, with Gaza as Monaco perhaps.

Not only is the two-state solution impractical, it is fatally flawed as well. It will leave the right-wing in both Palestine and Israel chafing at territorial concessions neither is willing to accept. This is why there’s been no agreemtn over 40 years of negotiations and no peace will hold between two states.

The “two-state solution” also suffers from a deeper and more insidious flaw. It is unjust to the people of Israel and Palestine. It is unjust towards Palestinians whose families were expelled from Haifa, Lydda, Beersheba and 500 small villages or communities they were intimately connected to. It will be unjust to the 500,000 Israeli settlers living in the West Bank and East Jerusalem who feel deeply, intimately connected to that land.

The only practical solution is a single, secular, democratic state in Israel-Palestine where all are equal under the law.

A single or bi-national state proposal is considered laughably naive by many. There is no dearth of voices who say there is no way for the Christian, Jewish and Muslim communities of Israel-Palestine to live in peace. This prejudice has left Israelis and Palestinians wandering diplomatic deserts for the past 40 years, chasing the mirage of a “two-state peace process”.

Perhaps the time has come to think with greater creativity than the current Israeli and Palestinian leaders can muster and consider a single, secular state in Israel-Palestine. Perhaps it is time to give a Mediterranean culture that includes Jewish, Muslim and Christian elements a chance to exist under a truly secular, non-denominational government.

The beginnings will not be easy, nor will they be painless. Two people who have been told for decades they are enemies will not overnight turn into pleasant neighbors. Yet there is hope for an eventual reconciliation, and it comes from the most unexpected quarters. Rabbi Hanan Schlesinger lives on a Jewish settlement in the West Bank and is part of a dialog group between settlers and their Palestinian neighbors. He was quoted last month in the Israeli daily Haaretz:

When you only live among your own and only know your own narrative, you are naturally very suspicious of the other who is just an intruder and just a thorn in your side and something that doesn’t belong there. But when you open up your heart and you see the other, you begin to see the truth is complex – that my truth is true, but it’s a partial truth and there’s another truth that’s also partial and I have to learn to put them together and make the larger truth. I believe we can do that.

The people of Israel-Palestine will have to choose between these voices and the unyielding rhetoric of Likud and Hamas. We all know, in our hearts, which points the way to a just and lasting peace.

Rockets and F-16s have stopped flying over Gaza and Israel, but the propaganda war continues. Netanyahu recently said “Hamas is ISIS, ISIS is Hamas”. Israeli spokesmen have routinely asserted that Israel holds the moral high-ground even when confronted with outcomes and policies that bring this into question. For instance, the bombing of homes and killing entire families to assassinate a single Hamas operative would be morally unjustifiable unless faced with an imminent threat. Yet Israeli forces have done this repeatedly. Criticism of the Israeli administration’s conduct in Operation Protective Edge has been muted, except in the most egregious instances. I suspect this is partly because too many fear being branded “Hamas supporters”. And few among us want to be seen as supporters of a party founded by terrorists. Netanyahu and his colleagues in the Likud coalition are ill-placed to claim the moral high ground since they themselves are inheritors of a party founded by terrorists.

The specter of Hamas’ 25 year old charter and the prior actions of its leaders has been raised repeatedly to question the organization’s current stance on negotiations and commitment to compromise. Hamas is a political organization, and like many others it can and has changed its positions over time. Netanyahu’s party, Likud has also modified its positions, but we can say with virtual certainty that if Likud were placed in the same position as Hamas, its behavior would be no different. We know this because we know that when Likud’s founders were looking to gain Palestinian territory, they did indeed turn to terrorism. Likud, like Hamas, was founded by people who used terrorism to further their political goals.

Likud was created in 1973 by Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir among others. It came to power for the first time in 1977, in an election that marked a  dramatic shift from left to right in Israeli politics. So much so, that it is often called “the revolution”. Begin became Prime Minister and Shamir served as Speaker of the Knesset. This was a remarkable change of fortune since for the two, who had been virtual pariahs in Israeli politics.

In the late 1940s, Begin led the Irgun, and Shamir was part of the leadership of the even more extreme splinter group Lehi. During the 1930s and 1940s, the two groups bombed hotels, markets and bus stops, killing hundreds of civilians. They had also targeted British soldiers and policemen. Most notoriously, in 1947, they kidnapped two British seargents. The parents of the two soldiers made personal appeals to Irgun leaders to release their children. Under Begin’s direct orders, both soldiers were hanged. The parallels with Hamas’ abduction of Israeli soldiers is striking.  Lehi, under Shamir, assassinated the UN appointed mediator, Folke Bernadotte in 1948 when it was clear he would recommend the unconditional return of all Palestinian refugees and a re-assessment of the UN partition plan. Bernadotte, by the way, had rescued hundreds, perhaps thousands of Jews from Nazi concentration camps. That’s part of the reason Israel had agreed to his appointment as mediator. The nascent Israeli government branded Lehi a terrorist group and briefly imprisoned all its members. They were pardoned within months.

Lehi and Irgun were also responsible for some of the worst violence during the expulsion of 750,000 Palestinians from what was to become Israel. This included multiple instances where civilian homes were bombed while residents were inside.

On May 22, shortly after Likud’s victory, William Farrell wrote in the New York Times:

“In 1946, the [Irgun] fighters blew up a wing of the King David Hotel in Jerusalem where British Government officials maintained offices, killing 91 persons and injuring at least 100. To this day, Mr. Begin maintains that the casualties were the fault of the British authorities who ignored a telephone warning to abandon the premises. During the fight for Jerusalem in 1948, Mr. Begin‘s band was involved in a battle in the suburban Arab village of Deir Yassin. Two hundred Arabs were killed. Again, he said, a warning to evacuate all non-combatants had been ignored.”

To a modern reader, it is striking that Mr. Begin’s logic on the King David Hotel bombing is indistinguishable from Mr. Netanyahu’s assertions that he bears no responsibility for the deaths of civilians in Gaza, even that of children sleeping in their homes. I would suggest this is not accidental. It is an integral aspect of Likud’s stance, inherited from Begin and Shamir. It permits no introspection on actions deemed necessary to maintain control over the land between the Jordan and the Mediterranean, which Likud’s platform claims is “eternally and indisputably” a part of Israel . In the article, Mr. Farrell continued:

The Word “terrorist” incenses Mr. Begin and he chided newsmen who used the term when asking him about his experiences in the 1940’s… “Freedom Fighter” is the correct description, he insisted.

Mr. Begin’s actions in resisting the British mandate (which Irgun considered an occupation) were not that different from that of the most violent elements in the Palestinian resistance (including Hamas). Yet we can only imagine the howls of protest if we referred to Hamas activists as “freedom fighters”?

To round out the trinity, Ariel Sharon, another leading light of Likud, led the Israeli army unit responsible for the Qibya massacre in 1953. Most notoriously, it was on his watch that the massacres at Sabra and Shatila occured during the disastrous Lebanon war of 1982.

There are few political factions in this conflict whose hands have not been stained with blood. Few whose founding was not infected by vengeance of some form. We do not have to excuse or accept this, but we do have to recognize it to identify reasoning  that smacks of hipocrisy.

We also have to recognize that, like most indigenous people subjected to colonization, the Palestinians have borne the brunt of the suffering in this conflict. Only once we have recognized these facts can we evaluate the actions and statements of Palestinian and Israeli factions.

A friend asked me what I thought of this piece in Tablet titled An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story in the World. It claims the media establishment is obsessed with Israel, suggests everyone hates the Jews, and that there are a lot of other stories we should be talking about and covering. I agree with the last.

This is a very long rebuttal to the article. The short explanation of the obsessive interest though, goes like this:

1. Most people who buy newspapers and watch hard news are upper-middle class. Most gentiles in the UMS have friends who are Jewish, and rightly or wrongly that makes us interested. Few have Syrian or Egyptian or Iraqi or Irani friends (I do, some of them are even Jewish). Resources follow the interest of the audience, not vice-versa. The audience is interested, ergo the AP is interested. Matti’s editors told him to focus on Israel-Palestine because that’s the story that gets the clicks. When in doubt, follow the money.
2. The Western audience is sadly not interested in tales of woe and suffering from the third-world (i.e. Asia, Africa, South America), except for brief moments when our conscience is pricked. We’ve got parochial interests, like all humans. And for whatever reason, Israel “feels closer” than the Congo or Chiapas. That’s also why we’re dumping buckets of ice-water on our heads and cutting checks to find a cure for a disease that afflicts a few thousand people a year. Meanwhile we continue on our merry lives oblivious to the 600,000 thousand a year dying of malaria and 700,000 of dysentry. They’re mostly kids, and both are easily preventable. We suck mightily. Mad props though to Bill Gates who cares about the right stuff when it comes to humanitarian causes.
3. Most people know Wahabi clerics, ISIS, Al-Queda, Assad, Sisi or the al-Sauds don’t really care what we think about them (Hezbollah and Iran are not on this list, more about them later). The Israeli political establishment does, and it’s a two-way street. They give press conferences, they want the attention and get it. In any case there’s no debate about the others. Well, I did have one guy on my feed say “the Zionist media was misrepresenting ISIS”, but I took that to mean I’m not in an echo chamber.
4. Some Americans are also upset about military aid to Israel and feel this makes the US complicit. In my view that’s a misunderstanding, the military aid to Israel and Egypt come as a package deal after the resolution of the Suez/Sinai crisis. It’s 4bn in payola to keep the Suez canal open for American trade vessels and the Fifth/Sixth fleets. It is difficult to stomach seeing US bombs dropped on civilians in Gaza, but all the Middle-Eastern countries have our bombs and planes and they use them, on their own people too.
5. This is Israel-Palestine and once again, rightly or wrongly all three Middle-Eastern monotheist faiths consider the region and Jerusalem important. If everyone in the west were Buddhist or Hindu or Zoroastrian, we would be obsessed with Bengal/Bihar, Ayodhya/Hrishikesh or Iran/Turkey. But that is not the case, so we’re left with the obsession over Israel. Most people go to church every once in a while and hear stories that are set in that landscape. Their ears perk up when they hear the story in the news. Personally I think Cairo, Baghdad/Babylon, Istanbul/Constantinople and Tehran/Rey are as or more important historically and culturally. But I’m also agnostic.
6. Some people look at Israel as the last bastion of European colonialism in Africa/Middle-East.
7. There’s a huge discordance between the opposing views and their recollected histories of events. For what it’s worth, the “Israeli camp” hews to the account in Leon Uris’ Exodus. The “Palestinian camp” relates a different story, not as well known in the west, much of it corroborated by the New Historians (Benny Morris, Ilan Pappe, Avi Shlaim etc). People end up with very strong feelings about who’s telling “the truth”.
8. We’ve all been hearing and talking about Israel/Palestine for about 75 years. There are some huge themes involved if you live in the West. WW-2, The Holocaust, The Middle-East, The Clash of Civilizations, etc. etc. etc. These themes and the length of the conflict spark interest. It keeps flaring up every few years and for the past seven US administrations, there’s been some sort of “peace effort”. We’re all told we should be interested in this.
9. Many of us are shocked that a country that we consider a vibrant democracy has been running a brutal occupation for 50 years and is killing hundreds of children a few miles away seemingly without much debate and when the threat appears minimal. This is disproportional. We expect that from the Assads and Sisis of the world, we don’t expect it from Israeli leaders who claim to be democratic. Yes, the US has done these things and worse, there’s no excuse except they were in the past or far-away. And we elected a president who said he’d shut those wars down (though he’s kept the drones going). Also note when the US went in to get Osama, his wives and children were left alive.
10. Israel currently has a PM (I hope this is temporary) who evokes very strong partisan reactions in the US because he’s closely aligned with the hard right and uses American idiom (supplied conveniently by the same consultants who came up with such gems as Gingrich’s “Contract with America”). Suffice it to say, Netanyahu pushes a lot of American buttons.
11. But really it’s because everyone seems to have an opinion on Israel-Palestine and so Duty Calls:

While you’re here, do take a look at the White House petition to support a single, secular state in Israel-Palestine with equal rights for all. That’s what I would like to see.

Now for the long form rebuttal:  Continue reading “11 good reasons we’re all obsessed with Israel and Gaza…”

The Hollywood Reporter, Variety and The Jewish Journal ran an advertisement/letter, paid for by the Anti-Defamation League, which numerous Hollywood celebrities signed.

Unfortunately, Golda Meir was misquoted in the ad in a manner which twists the meaning of her statement. Two separate quotes were presented as one. In her oral autobiography “A Land of Our Own”, these quotes appear on page 242, in an section titled “Plain Talk – On Peace”:

Peace will come when the Arabs will love their children more than they hate us. (National Press Club, Washington, 1957)

When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. (Press conference in London, 1969)

The ADL’s ad changed the word “sons” to “children”. In addition, they combined the two separate quotes delivered on two separate occasions. This transforms the meaning of her words since Golda Meir was referring to soldiers when she said sons.

The only source for the “children” formulation is David Beiden, a right-wing Israeli blogger who in 2000 published a note claiming he heard Golda Meir use this formulation in 1972.  Golda Meir’s autobiography was published in 1973 and uses the word “sons”.

While we’re quoting her and discussing the Palestinian condition, this is what she had to say after she visited Arab Haifa right after the Nakba:

It is a dreadful thing to see the dead city. Next to the port I found children, women, the old, waiting for a way to leave. I entered the houses, there were houses where the coffee and pita bread were left on the table, and I could not avoid [thinking] that this, indeed, had been the picture in many Jewish towns [i.e., in Europe, during World War II]. (as quoted in “The birth of the Palestinian Refuge problem revisited” by Benny Morris, p.309/10)

Golda Meir recognized the Palestinian tragedy that accompanied the founding of Israel when she saw it with her own eyes. This expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians from their homes has been extensively documented by the Israeli “New Historians”(including Benny Morris, Ian Pappe, Avi Shlaim), as has the role that Israel’s leaders played in it. This tragedy continues in the form of the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.