blog.Tribulationperiod.com

Afternoon SUN Shines On Israeli Voters,

A Very Critical Election FOR Ballot Totters,

Hawks fly in as the doves are flying South,

All Make Promises Out Both Sides Of Mouth,

Only Messiah knows results without a Doubt,

What its results will in Israel soon bring About,

But I Think Twixt 2010 & 2015 We’ll All Find Out!

February 10, 2009

http://www.tribulationperiod.com/

Begin 3 PM CST Special Addition from Jerusalem Post to our AM BLOG which Follows It.

Livni may not be able to form gov’t due to large right-wing bloc

February 10, 2009

JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST

With voting stations officially closed, exit polls at 10 p.m. suggested that Kadima would win the general elections on Tuesday.

However, due to the dramatic rise in support of the Likud and Israel Beiteinu, it seemed that Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu would have a better chance than Kadima head Tzipi Livni of forming the next coalition.

According to Channel 1, the right-wing bloc won 63 Knesset seats and the left wing 57; Channel 2 predicted 64 for the right and 56 for the left; and Channel 10 predicted 63 and 57 like Channel 1.

The Channel 1 poll showed Kadima winning 30 mandates, and Likud trailing closely behind with 28 seat. Israel Beiteinu was predicted to earn 14 mandates, and Labor was slated to get 13 seats.

The Channel 2 poll narrowed the gap between first and second place, showing Kadima with 29 mandates, and Likud with 27 seats. Israel Beiteinu was predicted to earn 15 mandates, and 13 seats.

Channel 10 followed the same pattern, predicting Kadima with 30 mandates, Kadima with 28 seats, Israel Beiteinu with 15 mandates, and Labor with 13 seats.

Once the final results of the election are known, President Shimon Peres will begin a round of consultations with party leaders, to hear who they are recommending for prime minister. In the past, the task of forming a coalition has been given to the head of the largest party. But election legislation gives Peres wide leeway, and he can grant the first opportunity to the party leader who he judges has the best chance in forming a government, even if that party did not earn the most mandates in the election.

RETURN TO AM BLOG ISSUED PREVIOUSLY

The present spiritual condition of the leaders of Israel, as demonstrated by graft, immorality, and ungodliness in their ranks, sounds exactly like the condition of the leaders of Israel in the days of Jeremiah, which caused terrible judgment to come on the nation. The description of the spiritual conditions in Jeremiah 5:30,31 describes the spiritual conditions of the princes, prophets, and priests who were the leaders of Israel before the Babylonian captivity. Just as judgment came on Israel then for her departure from trusting and following her Lord for deliverance, so is a judgment in a horrible period of three and one-half years of great tribulation about to come on her now. I know I could be wrong, but I am of the firm opinion this last 1260 days will begin at some point in time between 2010 and 2015. If you think Israel’s leaders are in bad spiritual condition, by comparison to ours, they are saints, and while I do expect the worst horrors of war and geological upheaval to occur in the Middle East and Old World, let me assure you America will not escape great tribulation. So it really doesn’t matter who wins the election, Israel and the world are headed for the judgment the Lord said would come – the fullness of

the iniquity of both Gentile and Jew has come in. I hope you are ready for it!

THIS IS THE WAY IT

WAS IN ISRAEL BEFORE TERRIBLE JUDGMENT.

IT IS THE WAY IT IS NOW IN ISRAEL AS WELL AS WORLDWIDE.

Jeremiah 5:23-31 – But this people hath a revolting and a rebellious heart; they are revolted and gone. [24] Neither say they in their heart, Let us now fear the Lord our God, that giveth rain, both the former and the latter, in his season: he reserveth unto us the appointed weeks of

the harvest. [25] Your iniquities have turned away these things, and your sins have withholden good things from you. [26] For among my people are found wicked men: they lay wait, as he that setteth snares; they set a trap, they catch men. [27] As a cage is full of birds, so are their houses full of deceit: therefore they are become great, and waxen rich. [28] They are waxen fat, they shine: yea, they overpass the deeds of the wicked: they judge not the cause, the cause of the fatherless, yet they prosper; and the right of the needy do they not judge. [29] Shall I not visit for these things? saith the Lord: shall not my soul be avenged on such a nation as this? [30] A wonderful and horrible thing is committed in the land; [31] The prophets prophesy falsely, and the priests bear rule by their means; and my people love to have it so: and what will ye do in the end thereof?

THIS IS WHAT WILL SOON HAPPEN TO THE NATION OF ISRAEL.

Isaiah 26:20,21 – Come, my people, enter thou into thy chambers, and shut thy doors about thee: hide thyself as it were for a little moment, until the indignation be overpast. [21] For, behold, the Lord cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity: the earth also shall disclose her blood, and shall no more cover her slain.

Daniel 11:45 to 12:1 – And he shall plant the tabernacles of his palace between the seas in the glorious holy mountain; yet he shall come to his end, and none shall help him. [1] And at that time shall Michael stand up, the great prince which standeth for the children of thy people: and there shall be a time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time: and at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall

be found written in the book.

THIS IS WHAT WILL SOON HAPPEN TO ALL OF MANKIND

Matthew 24:21,22 – For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.

[22] And except those days should be shortened, there should no flesh be saved: but for the elect’s sake those days shall be shortened.

Luke 21:25-28 – And there shall be signs in the sun, and in the moon, and in the stars; and upon the earth distress of nations, with perplexity; the sea and the waves roaring; [26] Men’s hearts failing them for fear, and for looking after those things which are coming on the earth: for the powers of heaven shall be shaken.

[27] And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory. [28] And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.

Acts 2:19-21 – And I will shew wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath; blood, and fire, and vapour of smoke: [20] The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood, before that great and notable day of the Lord come: [21] And it shall come to pass, that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.

WHATEVER YOU INTEND TO DO WITH THE LORD, ABOUT THE LORD, OR FOR THE LORD, YOU HAD BETTER GET AT IT!

Acts 4:12 – Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved.

Begin Excerpt from THE AUSTRALIAN via World News

Polls open in Israel’s election

February 10, 2009

Article from: Agence France-Presse

ISRAEL voted today in what is billed as a tight race between hawkish former premier Benjamin Netanyahu and centrist Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, with the far-right expected to make major gains.

Polls opened at 0500 GMT and were to close 15 hours later, with more than 5.2 million voters eligible to cast ballots at 9,263 polling stations across the country. Heavy rains and gusting winds were expected to depress turnout.

For weeks, opinion polls have given the lead to Netanyahu, the media-savvy leader of the right-wing Likud party whose campaign highlighted his credentials as a security hardliner.

But in recent days, Livni has clawed back some of the ground lost by her Kadima party which is still reeling from a series of corruption scandals that forced Prime Minister Ehud Olmert to resign.

The big surprise of the campaign has been the meteoric rise of Avigdor Lieberman, a tough-talking Soviet immigrant whose support swelled in the wake of the war on Gaza as he vowed to hit Israel’s enemies with an iron fist.

With opinion polls showing Lieberman’s Yisrael Beitenu party displacing Labour in third position, the former bouncer looks likely to play kingmaker in a government whose makeup will be crucial in determining the fate of Middle East peacemaking.

No single party is expected to secure more than a third of the seats in the 120-seat Knesset, the 120-seat parliament, and coalition negotiations promise to be an arduous task.

In the byzantine world of Israeli politics, the person asked to form a government is not automatically the one whose party garnered the most votes, but the one with the most chances of cobbling together 61 seats.

With the number of undecided voters estimated at a record 20 percent, party leaders went on a last-ditch scramble for votes. But forecasts for miserably wet and windy weather have raised fears turnout could be the lowest in Israel’s 60-year history.

Final opinion polls gave Likud 25 to 27 seats, Kadima 23 to 25 seats, Yisrael Beitenu 18-19 and Labour 14-17.

Netanyahu, 59, has vowed that if elected he would topple the Hamas rulers of Gaza and put a stop to rocket attacks which have continued sporadically since the end of Israel’s 22-day Gaza onslaught that killed more than 1,300 Palestinians.

He also wants Middle East peace talks to focus on improving life in the West Bank rather than the creation of a Palestinian state which he says can be discussed once conditions are ripe.

As premier from 1996 to 1999, he put the brakes on the peace process, in part by authorising a major expansion of Jewish settlements.

But he also made more concessions than his hardline rhetoric had led Israelis to expect, and under US pressure he concluded two agreements with the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat.

Opinion polls indicate he will emerge from the election in the strongest position to form a government, and he has made it clear he would rather form a broad alliance that would include Kadima and Labour.

“The l ast thing he needs now is to m

arry Lieberman, he would like to present a face of a moderate, pragmatic leader. He doesn’t need this right now,” said Yossi Beilin, one of the architects of the 1993 Oslo accords on Palestinian autonomy.

The election was called after Livni – a former staunch Zionist nationalist who has become a determined advocate of creating a Palestinian state – rejected demands of the ultra-Orthodox Shas to commit not to negotiate the future of Jerusalem as part of Middle East peace talks.

A 50-year-old lawyer and former Mossad spy, Livni has a reputation for integrity that kept her out of the corruption scandals that have sullied Israeli politics for years and that ultimately forced Olmert to step down.

In her two and a half years as foreign minister Livni spearheaded peace negotiations with the Palestinians which have produced little visible progress.

But she has distanced herself from statements by Olmert who said he favoured removing 60,000 settlers from the West Bank and giving Palestinians sovereignty over some sections of Jerusalem.

“Each prime minister chooses his way, what he had chosen is not mine. I am not associated with this proposition,” Livni said, also distancing herself from indirect talks with Syria.

The Palestinian Authority has been careful not to publicly voice a preference for any candidate, but is evidently hoping US President Barack Obama will help ensure that whoever becomes prime minister does not bury the already teetering peace process.

“I don’t know who will win the elections, but we will cooperate with any new Israeli government emerging from the elections on the basis of the bilateral accords and the international resolutions which have been adopted up to this point,” said Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas.

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The Iceland-Argentina-America Obama type planned Change

Played to the tune of: “And away goes sanity down the Drain,”

Meteorologically: “The RAIN in Spain Stays Mainly In The Plains!”

Politically: Obama’s Neo-Liberalism Bailout Failure Is Predestined!

Democrats digging deeper hole to jump into during the Depression,

While liberals are determined to hold on to great Obama Obsession!

Americans now headed into a time of losing most of their Possessions!

February 10, 2009

http://www.tribulationperiod.com/

Begin Excert from Middle East News Online via World News (TomDispatch.com)

2009-02-09

The Icelandic Volcano Erupts

Rebecca Solnit

In December 2001, the Argentinean economy collapsed. In its day, Argentina had been the poster child for neoliberalism, with its privatized economy guided by International Monetary Fund policy. The economy’s managers, foreign and domestic, were proud of what they’d done, until it turned out that it didn’t work, says Rebecca Solnit.

Can a Hedge-Fund Island Lose Its Shirt and Gain Its Soul?

In December, reports surfaced that Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson pushed his Wall Street bailout package by suggesting that, without it, civil unrest in the United States might grow so dangerous that martial law would have to be declared. Dominique Strauss-Kahn, Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund (IMF), warned of the same risk of riots, wherever the global economy was hurting. What really worried them wasn’t, I suspect, the possibility of a lot of people thronging the streets with demands for social and political change, but that some of those demands might actually be achieved. Take the example of Iceland, the first — but surely not the last — country to go bankrupt in the current global crash.

While the United States was inaugurating its first African-American president, Icelanders were besieging their parliament.

Youtube video of the scene — drummers pounding out a tribal beat, the flare and boom of teargas canisters, scores of helmeted police behind transparent plastic shields, a bonfire in front of the stone building that resembles a country house more than a seat of government — was dramatic, particularly the figures silhouetted against a blaze whose hot light flickered on the gray walls during much of the eighteen-hour-long midwinter night. People beat pots and pans in what was dubbed the Saucepan Revolution. Five days later, the government, dominated by the neoliberal Independent Party, collapsed, as many Icelanders had hoped and demanded it would since the country’s economy suddenly melted down in October.

The interim government, built from a coalition of the Left-Green Party and the Social Democrats, is at least as different from the old one as the Obama administration is from the Bush administration. The latest prime minister, Jَhanna Sigurdardَttir, broke new ground in the midst of the crisis: she is now the world’s first out lesbian head of state. In power only until elections on April 25th, this caretaker government takes on the formidable task of stabilizing and steering a country that has the dubious honor of being the first to drop in the current global meltdown. Last week, Sigurdardَttir said that the new government would try to change the constitution to “enshrine national ownership of the country’s natural resources” and to “open a new chapter in public participation in shaping the structure of government,” a 180-degree turn from the neoliberal policies of Iceland’s fallen masters.

Iceland is now a country whose currency, the krَna, has collapsed, whose debt incurred by banks deregulated in the mid-1990s is 10 times larger than the country’s gross domestic product, and whose people have lost most of their savings and face debts and mortgages that can’t be paid off. Meanwhile, inflation and unemployment are skyrocketing, and potential solutions to the crisis only pose new problems.

The present government may differ from the old, but not as much as the Icelandic people differ from their pre-October selves. They are now furious and engaged, where they were once acquiescent and uninvolved.

Before the crash, سlafur Ragnar Grيmsson, the figurehead president of Iceland, liked to compare his tiny society — the island nation has 320,000 people — to Athens. One of my Icelandic friends jokes darkly that, yes, it’s Athens, but not in the age of Socrates and Sophicles; it’s Athens now in the age of anti-governmental insurrection. The Iceland of last summer — I was there for nearly three months — seemed socially poor but materially rich; the Iceland I read and hear about now seems to be socially rich at last, but terrifying poor materially.

Iceland is a harsh, beautiful rock dangling like a jewel on a pendant from the Arctic Circle. Bereft of mineral resources, too far north for much in the way of agriculture, it had some fish, some sheep, and of late some geothermal and hydropower energy and a few small industries, along with a highly literate human population whose fierceness was apparently only temporarily dormant during the brief era of borrowing to spend. The people I’ve talked to since are exultant to have reclaimed their country and a little terrified about the stark poverty facing them.

After going hat in hand for bailout funds to Washington, the Bank of England, and the European Central Bank, Iceland turned to Russia and, reluctantly, to the global lender of last resort, the International Monetary Fund, that temple of privatization and globalization. Usually along with money, the IMF imposes its own notions of what makes an economy work — as it did in Argentina until that country’s economy collapsed eight years ago, leading to an extraordinary rebirth of civil society and social upheaval. In Iceland, the process was reversed: first upheaval, then the IMF. Now, you have an insurrectionary public and a new incursion of the forces of neoliberalism that helped topple the country in the first place.

As economic hard times have spread, so have a spate of protests and insurgencies across Europe — of which Iceland’s has only been the most effective so far — suggesting that a new era of popular power in the streets may be arriving.

Iceland’s upheaval poses the question of what the collapse of capitalism will bring the rest of us. Last fall, major financial newspapers were already headlining “the end of American capitalism as we knew it,””capitalism in convulsion,” “the collapse of finance” and “capitalism at bay.” The implication: that something as sweeping as the “collapse of communism” 19 years earlier had taken place.

Since then, the media and others seem to have forgotten that the body in question was declared terminally ill and have focused instead on how to provide very expensive first aid for it. This avoids the question of what the alternatives might be, which this time around are not anything as one-size-fits-all and doctrinaire as old-school socialism, but a host of existing localized, grassroots, and mostly small-scale modes of making goods, providing services, and serving communities — and remaining accountable.

Sod Houses to Private Jets and Beyond

Iceland is a strange country, as I found out.

Situated on the volcanically and seismically active seam between the North American and European tectonic plates, the place seems to belong to both continents, and neither. Usually regarded as part of Scandinavia, it was controlled by Norway, and then Denmark, from the collapse of its proudly independent parliamentary system in the thirteenth century to 1944. That year, while Denmark was occupied by the Nazis, it officially became an independent republic.

But the United States military had arrived three years earlier and would stay on another 62 years, until 2006, at its huge air base in Keflavik. Before the collapse last fall, some of the biggest protests in the republic’s history were about the occupying army, which broadcast its own television shows and brought a host of Americanizations and some prosperity to the island. More recently, Iceland became a place of wild neoliberal ambitions and Scandinavian welfare-state underpinnings. Ordinary people worked too many hours, like Americans, and took on too much debt to buy big cars, new condos, and suburban houses.

Poverty was not very far behind just about everyone in Iceland: person after person told me that his or her grandparents or parents had lived in a sod house, built out of the most available material in a country with scarce small trees, and that they themselves or their parents had worked in the fish-processing factories. The country’s best-

known artist showed me, with a deft flick of his wrist, how his grandmother could fillet a cod “like that,” and added that most of the island’s fish was processed offshore now. Until recently Reykjavik, the capital, was just a small town, and Iceland a rural society of coastal farms and fishermen.

The boom in this once fairly egalitarian nation created a new class of the super-wealthy whose private jets landed in the airport in downtown Reykjavik and whose yachts, mansions, and other excesses sometimes made the news, as did charges of corruption in business and in the government that countenanced that business. It wasn’t corruption, however, that did in the Icelandic economy. It was government-led recklessness and deregulation. I had expected to find that, in such a small country, democracy would work beautifully, that the people would be able to hold their government accountable, and that its workings would be transparent. None of those things were faintly true, as I noted in a cheerless pre-collapse report I wrote for Harper’s Magazine on “Iceland’s Polite Dystopia.”

A lot of people muttered then, in hapless dismay, about what the government was doing — notably destroying the country’s extraordinary wilderness to create hydropower to run the energy-intensive aluminum smelters of transnational corporations. A small group of dedicated people protested, but their sparks never seemed to catch public fire or do much to slow down the destruction. Icelanders generally seemed to tolerate privatizations and giveaways of everything from their medical histories and DNA to their fishing industry and wilderness, and a host of subsidiary indignities that went with this process.

Take, for example, the transnational retail empire of the Baugur Group (as of last week essentially bankrupt and owing Icelandic banks about two billion dollars), run by father and son team Jَn ءsgeir Jَhannesson and Jَhannes Jَnsson. Their Bَnus stores, with a distinctive hot-pink piggybank logo, had managed to create a near-monopoly on supermarkets in Iceland. They provided cheap avocados from South Africa and mangos from Brazil, but they’d apparently decided that selling fresh fish was impractical; so, in the fishing capital of the Atlantic, most people outside the center of the capital had no choice but to eat frozen fish.

Icelanders also ate a lot of American-style arguments in favor of deregulation and privatization, or looked the other way while their leaders did. Kolbrْn Halldَrsdَttir, then an opposition Left-Green parliamentarian, now Minister of the Environment in the new government, didn’t. She told me last summer, “The nation was not asked if the nation wanted to privatize the banks.” They were not asked, but they did not ask enough either.

Fortune magazine blamed one man, David Oddsson, prime minister from 1991 to 2004, for much of this privatization.

“It was Oddsson who engineered Iceland’s biggest move since [joining] NATO: its 1994 membership in a free-trade zone called the European Economic Area. Oddsson then put in place a comprehensive economic-transformation program that included tax cuts, large-scale privatization, and a big leap into international finance He deregulated the state-dominated banking sector in the mid-1990s, and in 2001 he changed currency policy to allow the krona to float freely rather than have it fixed against a basket of currencies including the dollar. In 2002 he privatized the banks.”

In 2004, he was replaced as Prime Minister, but in 2005 he took over the Central Bank. By the mid-1990s Iceland had, through dicey financing and lots of debt, launched itself on a journey to become one of the world’s most affluent societies. Fortune continues:

“But the principal fuel for Iceland’s boom was finance and, above all, leverage. The country became a giant hedge fund, and once-restrained Icelandic households amassed debts exceeding 220% of disposable income — almost twice the proportion of American consumers.”

Throwing Eggs at the Bank

The first of the hedge-fund-cum-nation’s three main banks, Glitnir, collapsed on September 29, 2008. A week later, the value of the krَna fell by nearly a third.

Landsbanki and Kaupthing, the other two banking giants, collapsed later that week. Britain snarled when Landsbanki froze the massive Internet savings accounts of British citizens and turned to anti-terrorism laws to seize the Icelandic bank’s assets, incidentally reclassifying the island as a terrorist nation and pushing its economy into a faster tailspin.

Not so surprisingly, Icelanders began to get angry — at Britain, but even more at their own government. The crashing country, however, developed one growth industry: bodyguards for politicians in a country where every pop star and prime minister had once roamed freely in public. An Icelandic friend wrote me, “Eggs were being thrown at the Central Bank.

Such emotional protests have not been seen since the early part of the twentieth century, although then people were too poor to throw eggs.” Soon eggs were also being heaved at Prime Minister Geir Haarde, whose policies were an extension of Oddsson’s.

A dormant civil society erupted into weekly protests that didn’t stop even when the government collapsed, since Icelanders were also demanding that the board of governors at the central bank be suspended. One of Prime Minister Jَhanna Sigurdardَttir’s first acts was to ask for their resignations. So far they have not cooperated.

Andri Snaer Magnason, whose scathingly funny critique of his country’s politics and society, Dreamland: A Self-Help Guide for a Frightened Nation, was a huge bestseller in this bookish country a few years back, told me this week:

“In economics, they talk about the invisible hand that regulates the market. In Iceland, the free market became so wild that it was not fixed by an invisible hand, but an invisible guillotine. So, in one weekend, the whole class of our newly rich masters of the universe lost their heads (reputation, power, and money), and all the power and debt of the newly privatized companies fell into the hands of the people again.

“So we have a very uncertain feeling about the future. At the same time, there is power in all the political debate and lots of political and social energy — endless [political] parties popping up, Facebook groups, cells and idealists, and possibly a new constitution (not that we have read the old one), and people are speaking up. So, economic fear, political courage, shaking economy, and search for new values — we need profound change… Now, businesspeople are losing their jobs, and they are scratching their heads and thinking that maybe politics do affect one’s life. We need less professional politics and more participation of the people. I hope people will not give up now just because one government fell.”

The economic fate of Iceland is uncertain and troubling. One friend there tells me that the already bankrupted banks may go bankrupt again, because their debt is so colossal. The billions in new loans from abroad are terrifying large for a country whose population is a thousandth the size of ours, and the Icelandic currency, the krَna, is probably doomed.

The obvious solution is for Iceland to join the European Union (EU), and the April elections include a referendum on that question. Doing so, however, would involve letting the EU manage the country’s fishing waters, its traditional and genuine source of wealth.

That, in turn, would presumably open those waters up to all European fishermen and to a bureaucracy whose interests and ability to manage Icelandic fisheries is dubious. Iceland fought the Cod Wars with England in the 1970s to protect just those waters from outside fishing, and even in the years when everyone seemed focused on technology and finance, fish still accounted for about 40% of the country’s exports.

Argentina and Iceland

A recent headline in the British Guardian read: “Governments across Europe tremble as angry people take to the streets.” From the perspective of those governments, a fully engaged citizenry is a terrifying prospect. From my perspective, it’s what disasters often bring on, and it’s civil society at its best. I’m hoping Iceland’s going the way of Argentina.

In mid-December 2001, the Argentinean economy collapsed. In its day, Argentina had been the poster child for neoliberalism, with its privatized economy guided by International Monetary Fund policy. The economy’s managers, foreign and domestic, were proud of what they’d done, until it turned out that it didn’t work. Then, the government tried to freeze its citizens’ bank accounts to keep them from turning their plummeting pesos into foreign currency and breaking the banks.

The poor had already been politically engaged, and the unions had called a one-day general strike (just as French unions last week called more than one million people into the streets to protest job losses in the latest economic crisis). When the banks were frozen, however, middle-class Argentineans woke up broke — and angry.

On December 19th, 20th and 21st of 2001, they took to the streets of Buenos Aires in record numbers, banging pots and pans and shouting “all of them out.” In the next few weeks, they forced a series of governments to collapse. For many people, those insurrectionary days were not just a revolt against the disaster that unfettered capitalism had brought them, but the time when they recovered from the years of silence and withdrawal imposed on the country in the 1980s by a military dictatorship via terror and torture.

After the crash of 2001, Argentineans found their voice, found each other, found a new sense of power and possibility, and began to engage in political experiments so new they required a new vocabulary. One of the most important of these experiments would be neighborhood assemblies throughout Buenos Aires, which provided for some of the practical needs of a now-cashless community, and also became lively forums where strangers became compaٌeros.

Such incandescent moments when people find their voices and power as part of civil society are epiphanies, not solutions, but Argentina was never the same country again, even after its economy recovered. Like much of the rest of Latin America in this decade, it swung left in its political leadership, but far more important, Argentineans developed social alternatives and found a new boldness that had previously been lacking. Some of what arose from the crisis, including workplaces taken over by workers and run as collectives, still exists.

Argentina is big in land, resources, and population with a very different culture and history than Iceland. Where Iceland goes from here is hard to foresee. But as Icelandic writer Haukar Mلr Helgason put it in the London Review of Books last November:

“There is an enormous sense of relief. After a claustrophobic decade, anger and resentment are possible again. It’s official: capitalism is monstrous. Try talking about the benefits of free markets and you will be treated like someone promoting the benefits of rape. Honest resentment opens a space for the hope that one day language might regain some of its critical capacity, that it could even begin to describe social realities again.”

The big question may be whether the rest of us, in our own potential Argentinas and Icelands, picking up the check for decades of recklessness by the captains of industry, will be resentful enough and hopeful enough to say that unfettered capitalism has been monstrous, not just when it failed, but when it succeeded. Let’s hope that we’re imaginative enough to concoct real alternatives.

Iceland has no choice but to lead the way.

Rebecca Solnit is a contributing editor to Harper’s Magazine and a Tomdispatch.com regular. Her book on disaster and civil society, A Paradise Built in Hell, will be out later this year. She is also the author of Hope in the Dark .

Begin Excerpt from Chicago Sun Times

Obama ushers in new age of ir responsibility

February 9, 2009

President Barack Obama is on the right track with his plan to cap at $500,000 per year the salaries of Wall Street big shots who get federal bailout money. But he is off by $499,999.99.

There is no reason for taxpayers to continue to reward unlimited ignorance and unbridled greed. These Wall Street firms were run into the ground by financiers who were too stupid to understand the true risks of what they were doing and too greedy to stop doing it.

And now they deserve a half-million dollars a year? Some of them deserve six to 12 in Allenwood.

But, as I said, Obama is on the right track. He said Wednesday: “We all need to take responsibility. And this includes executives at major financial firms who turned to the American people, hat in hand, when they were in trouble, even as they paid themselves their customary lavish bonuses. As I said last week, that’s the height of irresponsibility. That’s shameful.”

You know what else is shameful? Barack Obama pressing ahead with appointment of Cabinet secretaries who he knew were tax evaders.

Those people, despite their qualifications, were not taking responsibility for their actions, and neither was Obama.

Tim Geithner, our new secretary of the Treasury, knew he had evaded paying taxes for years, but he didn’t pay up until Obama appointed him to the Cabinet.

Tom Daschle knew he owed taxes on the round-the-clock limousine and chauffeur he got from a wealthy financier for two years, but he didn’t pay up until he was appointed to the Cabinet.

He now admits he was “naive”?

Naive? A guy gives me a car and driver for two years, I figure he wants something. I am not saying I will give it to him, but I figure he wants it. And I don’t whine afterward about being naive.

But that is not the problem. The problem is that President Obama continued to back Daschle after Daschle admitted that he had not paid his taxes.

That is not the “responsibility” that Obama talked about Wednesday.

Now I keep seeing all these talking heads on TV telling me how nice guys like Tom Daschle have fallen victim to the “new high standards” of Washington that the Obama administration has set.

But when did paying your taxes become a new high standard? Tens of millions of Americans do it every year. And they do it even before they get named to the Obama Cabinet.

And this is part of the reason that Obama’s bailout and stimulus plans are unpopular with so many Americans. To them, it is just another way to reward a special, privileged class.

Wall Street moguls who screw up get bailed out. Main Street shop owners who can’t afford to meet their payrolls go under.

Ordinary people who don’t pay their taxes get arrested. Big shots who don’t pay their taxes get government jobs (including, in Geithner’s case, being put in charge of the Internal Revenue Service).

We don’t need new standards. We just need to respect the old ones.

I like Tom Daschle. I don’t think anybody who has ever met Tom Daschle has not liked him. I also think he would have made an excellent secretary of health and human services and an excellent health care czar.

But Daschle needed one other quality: He needed to play by the rules. He needed to play by the same rules that the rest of America is asked to play by.

John Breaux, the former Democratic senator from Louisiana, was on MSNBC’s “Andrea Mitchell Reports” last week, and he said: “The standard has been raised so high that you have to be perfect. None of us is perfect.”

Maybe not. But most of us pay our taxes. And is President Obama saying the talent pool in America is so shallow that he can find only tax cheats with which to fill his Cabinet?

A New York Times editorial last week, which Daschle cited as a reason for his withdrawal, said, “We believe that Mr. Daschle ought to step aside and let the president choose a less blemished successor.”

I guess an unblemished successor is too much to hope for.

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FOLLOW UP ON PREVIOUS ELECTION BLOG

February 9, 2009

http://www.tribulationperiod.com/

The race between Likud (Netanyahu) and Kadima (Livni) is tightening up!

Begin Excerpt from Arutz Sheva

Polls: Likud to Win, but Yisrael Beiteinu the Likely Victor

Shevat 15, 5769, 09 February 09 08:35

By Tzvi Ben Gedalyahu

(IsraelNN.com) A summary of all of the latest polls indicates that the Likud will come in first place by a small margin but that the Israel Is Our Home (Yisrael Beiteinu) party, headed by Knesset Member Avigdor Lieberman will be the real victor on Election Day.

The five major polls of three Israeli dailies and two television channels show the lineup as follows:

Likud (Netanyahu), 26

Kadima (Livni), 23

Yisrael Beiteinu (Lieberman), 18

Labor (Barak), 16

Shas (Yishai), 10

Attention in the smaller parties has centered on the two national religious parties, Ichud Leumi (National Union), which a summary of the polls shows will win four to six m andates,

and Jewish Home, which is projected to win three seats.

Meretz will have six MKs and United Torah Judaism (UTJ) will have five, according to the surveys. The three Arab parties will remain with nine seats.

The big uncertain factor in the elections is the undecided vote, which is estimated to be around 15 percent, most of which is debating between Kadima and Labor.

An expected fierce winter storm on Tuesday might keep undecided and other less committed voters at home, strengthening Meretz, Ichud Leumi and Jewish Home, whose supporters are more likely to vote regardless of weather conditions.

The differences between the polls are significant, with

the Likud being projected to garner as few as 25 MKs, according to the Yediot Acharonot poll, and as many as 28 in the Dialog-Haaretz polls. All five polls awarded Kadima, headed by Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni, 23-25 seats.

Yisrael Beiteinu received 19 seats in four of the five polls, with

the fifth survey giving the party one less. If the results reflect the polls, MK Lieberman will be catapulted into a powerful influence over the makeup of the next government and will limit the flexibility of Likud chairman Binyamin Netanyahu, assuming his party wins the elections and heads the next coalition.

If the polls are correct and Labor stands behind most of its members’ refusal to sit in the same government as Yisrael Beiteinu, MK Netanyahu will have to include most of the religious and nationalist parties in the coalition.

The projected government would restrict his freedom to negotiate away parts of Judea and Samaria and would force him to meet costly demands for increased government expenditures.

Begin Excerpt from Haaretz

Lieber-fear and Bibi-phobia: How fear of the far-right could make Livni PM

February 9, 2009

By Benjamin Hartman

I have to confess, at times, these last two weeks, I’ve drifted off to sleep only to find myself in a halcyon Israel where the skin of every Israeli is painted blue and white, and the birds fluttering through the eucalyptus trees on Allenby Street chirp “Hatikvah” with a Russian accent at lines of flatbed trucks carrying Arab families away to points unknown.

The fear of a far-right (let’s just call it extremist) government headed by Bibi Netanyahu and his ghosts of Knessets past, in alliance with the surging Yisrael Beiteinu party, threatens to determine the results of tomorrow’s election.

In an election where truth has been stranger than fiction (see “Marijuana legalization-Holocaust survivors alliance”), no spectacle could be more bizarre than the meteoric rise of Avigdor Lieberman and his Yisrael Beiteinu party. Having raked in 15 votes in the last election, they now stand to bring in as much as 20 seats, and be the real power-broker in this election.

This is where the visions start of Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman banging his shoe a la Krushchev against the podium at the United Nations, crying out for Israel to bomb the Aswan Dam.

Or there’s Lieberman as Education Minister, teaching Israeli High School Civics classes that loyalty tests as a requirement of citizenship are essential to any functioning democracy. Sometimes I see Lieberman the Justice Minister, trying to force through poll taxes and Hebrew- (and Russian-) only literacy tests for the ballot boxes in future Israeli elections. Or Housing Minister Lieberman, whose first act is to build a moat around Umm al-Fahm.

This fear may very well be the best thing Tzipi Livni has going for her in this election. After all, even if you are the biggest Tzipi fan in the world not named Mr. Livni, you can’t deny that there’s a serious drop-off in Kadima after our esteemed Foreign Minister.

At #2 you have Worst-Transportation-Minister-Ever Shaul Mofaz, a man whose statements are so asinine and pointless he is rarely even quoted anymore. Further down you have compulsive subject of police investigations Tzahi Hanegbi, known in his younger days as a Likud prince and far-right activist. Then there’s former finance minister Avraham Hirschson, a man on trial for bilking tens of thousands of dollars from the ministry, in monthly payments of cash-filled envelopes. And did we mention that this is the party that gave us the double-billing travel expenses suspect Prime Minister Ehud Olmer

t?

Simply put, Kadima bears little resemblance to the party formed by Ariel Sharon in 2005.

The in-choice in the 2006 elections, the one driven by the ghost of Sharon, Kadima stared down a Likud Party that was nothing more than a swiftly sinking ship, and itself looked every bit a political force for years to come.

Now only a shell of that promise, Kadima must hope that enough people are terrified of a Likud victory that brings a coalition with Avigdor Lieberman, and will cast their fears about her experience and her party’s pending police investigations aside and drop the right little white slip in the ballot box.

After all, what other choices does a left-wing or moderate Zionist have?

You could vote the Arab-Communist party Hadash, whose slogan seems to be “Hey we’re Jews, and Arabs, and we speak Hebrew, and Arabic! This is crazy! I’m Jewish, and I’m wearing a Kaffiyeh!” Or you could vote Labor, good old Labor, led by ol’ warrior Ehud Barak, who seems to have had a leather jacket welded to his skin for the last 6 weeks. Barak showed great leadership during the Gaza operation and helped exorcise the defeat of the Second Lebanon War. But there is always the sinking feeling that since Labor, unlike Kadima, doesn’t have a chance of being the largest party and forming a coalition, so a vote for them is more or less a vote for Bibi, and thus a vote for Lieberman, a man who would definitely make the next Gaza war more interesting.

The sad reality of the 2009 election is that for many Israelis, it is not at all a matter of picking the candidate you like the most, it’s not even a matter of picking the lesser of many, many evils. Rather, your vote is really just a tool to help stave off the person you hate or fear the most. And with that in mind,

Da, Livni.

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America has now swung to the FAR LEFT with All its Might,

And IF Benjamin Netanyahu elected Israel swings far RIGHT,

And a point in time between 2010 & 2015 expect a final Fight!

Netanyahu and Obama’s ideas different as is the day from Night,

IF elected he may tell Israel’s enemies and America to go fly a Kite!

Key Word Is “IF” So Tomorrow Will tell IF A Ben Government In Sight,

Regardless how it goes 2010 to 2015 Middle East War will bring Blight!

The Bible indicates we are headed into a time where it will not be Alright,

But at the end of the terrible time Messiah

will come and bring us his Light!

Luke 21:27,28 – And then shall they see the Son of man coming in a cloud with power and great glory.

[28] And when these things begin to come to pass, then look up, and lift up your heads; for your redemption draweth nigh.

FIRST A TIME OF WAR AND TECTONIC CHAOS UPHEAVAL TO CREATE A MILLENNIAL STREAM, THEN THE COMING OF THE MESSIAH TO BUILD THE TEMPLE FROM WHICH IT WILL COME, AS HE ABIDES IN A TEMPLE FILLED WITH HIS GLORY AND LIGHT, WHILE HE RULES AND REIGNS.

YOU HAD BETTER DECIDE WHAT TO DO WITH THE REST OF THE TIME YOU HAVE IN THIS BODY OF FLESH. THERE IS NOT MUCH TIME LEFT IN THE AGE OF THE GENTILES.

Joel 3:9-18 – Proclaim ye this among the Gentiles; Prepare war, wake up the mighty men, let all the men of war draw near; let them come up: [10] Beat your plowshares into swords, and your pruninghooks into spears: let the weak say, I am strong. [11] Assemble yourselves, and come, all ye heathen, and gather yourselves together round about: thither cause thy mighty ones to come down, O Lord. [12] Let the heathen be wakened, and come up to the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there will I sit to judge all the heathen round about. [13] Put ye in the sickle, for the harvest is ripe: come, get you down; for the press is full, the fats overflow; for their wickedness is great.

[14] Multitudes, multitudes in the valley of decision: for the day of the Lord is near in the valley of decision.

[15] The sun and the moon shall be darkened, and the stars shall withdraw their shining. [16] The Lord also shall roar out of Zion, and utter his voice from Jerusalem; and the heavens and the earth shall shake: but the Lord will be the hope of his people, and the strength of the children of Israel. [17] So shall ye know that I am the Lord your God dwelling in Zion, my holy mountain: then shall Jerusalem be holy, and there shall no strangers pass through her any more. [18] And it shall come to pass in that day, that the mountains shall drop down new wine, and the hills shall flow with milk, and all the rivers of Judah shall flow with waters, and a fountain shall come forth of the house of the Lord, and shall water the valley of Shittim.

Ezekiel 47:1-5 – Afterward he brought me again unto the door of the house; and, behold, waters issued out from under the threshold of the house eastward: for the forefront of the house stood toward the east, and the waters came down from under from the right side of the house, at the south side of the altar. [2] Then brought he me out of the way of the gate northward, and led me about the way without unto the utter gate by the way that looketh eastward; and, behold, there ran out waters on the right side. [3] And when the man that had the line in his hand went forth eastward, he measured a thousand cubits, and he brought me through the waters; the waters were to the ancles. [4] Again he measured a thousand, and brought me through the waters; the waters were to the knees.

Again he measured a thousand, and brought me through; the waters were to the loins.

[5] Afterward he measured a thousand; and it was a river that I could not pass over: for the waters were risen, waters to swim in, a river that could not be passed over.

Zechariah 14:8,9 – And it shall be in that day, that living waters shall go out from Jerusalem; half of them toward the former sea, and half of them toward the hinder sea: in summer and in winter shall it be. [9] And the Lord shall be king over all the earth: in that day shall there be one Lord, and his name one.

Polls indicate this will be a close election, but predicting elections in Israel can at times be like guessing the number of gumballs in a fish bowl of irregular shape and unknown volume. IF Netanyahu wins it will have a tremendous effect on Middle East events for quite a while, and should provide an interesting spectacle on which to report. It appears one day before elections he is likely to win.

February 9, 2009

http://www.tribulationperiod.com/

Begin Excerpt from The Star Online via World News Updates

Sunday February 8, 2009 MYT 1:03:25 AM

Netanyahu aims to retake helm of jittery Israel

By Dan Williams

JERUSALEM (Reuters) – A decade after being ousted by Israelis entranced with his rival’s promise of peace accords and modest governance, Benjamin Netanyahu is poised to retake power in a country now in the throes of disaffection and war fears.

Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran’s nuclear designs and Israel’s economic ills provided all the grist Netanyahu has needed to end ideological drift in his hawkish Likud party and take a lead in polls ahead of Tuesday’s parliamentary election.

Though his former aide Avigdor Lieberman has been pulling voters away to the right of Likud, Netanyahu goes into the ballot with a lead over the centrist Kadima party of Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and looks best placed to form a coalition in a Knesset destined to be among the most rightist in memory.

The U.S.-educated son of an storied Zionist scholar, Netanyahu, 59, cast his comeback as vindication of the Likud’ s long view — that ceding occupied Arab land unilaterally had backfired by emboldening I

slamist foes of the Jewish state.

A former finance minister who had championed welfare cuts and free-market practices, he also presented himself as the man to keep Israel afloat above swelling global budget crises.

Yet stability has often eluded the career of the telegenic Netanyahu, who is known by his boyhood nickname “Bibi”.

He became the youngest Israeli prime minister in 1996, defeating the centre-left Labour party’s Shimon Peres, whose prized interim Palestinian peace deals had been all-but blown away by a spree of Hamas suicide bombings.

Netanyahu’s campaign pledge was “peace and security” but he faced a withering test over the opening by archaeologists of a new entrance to a tunnel in Arab East Jerusalem, sparking gun battles in which 60 Palestinians and 15 Israelis died.

Despite publicly reviling Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat, Netanyahu eventually handed him most of the divided city of Hebron in 1997, breaking with the Likud’s refusal to consider giving up biblical West Bank territory.

But when Netanyahu broke ground two months later for the Jewish West Bank settlement of Har Homa, at what Arabs call Jabal Abu Ghneim between Jerusalem and Bethlehem, he plunged U.S.-sponsored peacemaking into 19 months of crisis. That culminated in Netanyahu being toppled by Labour’s Ehud Barak.

Though Barak’s breakneck bids for rapprochement with Syria and the Palestinians failed, they were welcomed by a U.S. administration that saw a tiring truculence in Netanyahu.

Diplomat Dennis Ross described him as “overcome with hubris” and quoted then President Bill Clinton as complaining that Netanyahu acted as though Israel were the real superpower.

WASHINGTON WATCHFUL

What might this bode for Netanyahu’s ties with the new Democratic president, Barack Obama, and Clinton’s wife Hillary, who as secretary of state must deal with a region bracing for a threatened Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities and the possibility of Palestinian statehood negotiations being shelved?

Netanyahu has also been cool to the recently revived Israeli rapprochement efforts with Syria, though during his first term as premier he also sent an envoy to sound out Damascus’ demands.

Confidants insist there is no cause for concern, citing an appreciation in post-9/11 Washington, as well as in some parts of Europe, of the conservative strategies advanced by Netanyahu.

“We’ve all come a long way, and everyone now realises the extent to which Bibi’s predictions proved true,” said Yuval Steinitz, a senior Likud lawmaker.

Netanyahu will likely have to form a coalition government drawing on Labour and Livni’s centrist Kadima, though he also speaks favourably of including Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu.

A former military commando, Netanyahu is a self-styled terrorism expert, writing books and forming a think-tank after his elder brother Yoni was killed leading the raid to release Israeli hostages held at Entebbe airport in Uganda in 1976.

His fluency in English and mastery of the soundbite won him praise at home and abroad in the late 1980s and early 1990s when he served as U.N. ambassador and as deputy foreign minister.

In a 1993 scandal known as “Bibigate”, a mixture of sex, lies and videotape,

Netanyahu admitted cheating on his wife Sara, with whom he has two sons. But he patched it up, both with his wife — his third — and with voters.

Yet Netanyahu found himself the perennial focus of hostile press at home, with commentators seeing a crass populism in his claim to be battling national elites. Some pundits suggested that Israel’s dominant Ashkenazim — Jews of European descent — could not forgive “one of their own” for appealing so deeply to a Sephardi underclass with Middle Eastern and North African roots.

Netanyahu’s last cabinet portfolio was as finance minister in Ariel Sharon’s Likud-led government, a post in which he won praise from business leaders for free-market reforms.

He quit in protest shortly before the Israeli pullout from Gaza in 2005, which prompted a schism in which Sharon bolted to form Kadima.

Critics accused Netanyahu of a flip-flopping opportunism, noting that he had earlier supported the Gaza withdrawal in a parliamentary vote.

Sharon, a flinty former general, dismissed Netanyahu as “unable to handle pressure”.

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of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. For more detailed information go to:

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PM-DM-FM SLIP IN COMPROMISE OIL,

MAKE THE IDF EFFORT A WASTED TOIL,

In GAZA to LOSERS BELONG the SPOILS,

GAME NOT PLAYED ACCORDING TO HOYLE,

HAMAS Using POTSHERDS to SCRAPE BOILS,

IT I s

As If The HAMAS ISRAEL FAILED To FOIL!

February 9, 2009

http://www.tribulationperiod.com/

While the Democrats are trying to push through all the programs they stored in a septic tank waiting for a Democratic President, some of the parties in the February 10th Israeli elections are giving away the store to the Hamas, like America’s “Fred.”

Begin Quote from Random House Dictionary

“To the victor belong the spoils. In a war or other contest, the winner gets the booty. The proverb originated in the United States and was first used in 1832 by Senator William Learned Marcy (1786-1857) of New York. ‘The victor gets the spoils’ and ‘To the victor go the spoils’ are variations of the proverb.” Senator Marcy was quoted as saying, in 1832, “They (Democrats) see nothing wrong in the rule that to the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.” From “Random House Dictionary of Popular Proverbs and Sayings” by Gregory Y.

Titelman.

Begin Excerpt from DEBKAfile

Outgoing Israeli government bargains away military success in Gaza

DEBKAfile Special Analysis

February 8, 2009, 9:32 PM (GMT+02:00)

All too quickly Israel’s three war leaders – prime minister Ehud Olmert, defense minister Ehud Barak and foreign minister Tzipi Livni – forgot the goals they set for the three-week military offensive launched against Hamas on Dec. 27, 2008: That Operation Cast Lead would not halt until security prevailed in southern Israel, that the eight-year Palestinian missile offensive be brought to an end and that Hamas never be allowed to rearm for a fresh assault of terror.

Six weeks later,

the Islamists terrorists are reaping the spoils of a war they lost.

Jerusalem is feeding Egyptian mediators with concession after concession to keep Hamas at the negotiating table in Cairo and talking about a long-term truce. Frustrated Israeli commanders warn their victory is being traded to buy undreamed-of gains for Hamas, such as the creeping recognition of the Palestinian Islamist group as the Gaza Strip’s legitimate ruling power and acceptance of the enclave’s status as a forward Iranian base on Israel’s southern border. The deal on the table in Cairo would moreover lead to perpetuating the separation between the pro-Western West Bank and the pro-Iranian Gaza Strip, generating a fixed impediment to any discussion of a potential Palestinian state.

Saturday, Feb. 7, defense minister Barak Hamas granted safe passage to Hamas leader Mahmoud A-Zahar to come out of hiding in Gaza for the first time since the hostilities began. He flew to Cairo and on to Damascus to deal with the release of the Israeli soldier Gilead Shalit, held since he was kidnapped in 2006. By this concession, Barak gave Tehran, from which Hamas-Damascus takes direct orders, the last word on all these transactions.

Barak is believed to have promised Egypt that other Hamas leaders may also safely emerge from their bunkers as long as the Cairo negotiations continue, even though Hamas has made no commitments of any kind and continues to shoot missiles into Israel as well as smuggling arms.

As Israel’s general election looms Tuesday, Feb. 10, Barak, who leads the Labor party, and his colleagues are disseminating pink clouds of optimism while pursuing steps that reverse the goals of Operation Cast Lead: They are solidifying Hamas’ strength and its grip on the Gaza Strip for years to come.

DEBKAfile’s military sources count eight areas in which the outgoing government is relinquishing assets to Hamas:

1. Military attacks on Palestinian military targets have been suspended in the Gaza Strip. Hamas has offered nothing in return except for an oral undertaking to Egypt to try and keep the level of missile fire down. The Israeli air force responds to each salvo by bombing empty Palestinian buildings and sand dunes.

2. Israel has suspended targeted strikes against Hamas leaders and commanders according to an understanding with Cairo.

3. According to another understanding, Israel will allow an increasing number of supply trucks and types of freights to enter the Gaza crossings daily.

This is a virtual surrender to Hamas’ demands for fully opened crossings (translation: end of Israel’s embargo of the Gaza Strip). Hamas has not been held to any guarantee f or ending its smuggling of arms –

or any other quid pro quo.

4. Israel has also promised Egypt to gradually lift its naval blockade of Gaza.

5. Jerusalem has given ground on its initial dem and to remove Hamas from the crossings

and pass them to Palestinian Authority control.

The deal emerging is for foreign monitors to be posted on those crossings and report to Hamas.

This is another form of Israeli recognition of the Palestinian extremists’ rule of the Gaza Strip and its control of Israel’s southwestern frontier.

If approved, it would also perpetuate the divide between the pro-Iranian entity in the Gaza Strip ruled by Hamas and the pro-Western territory of the West Bank under the control of its rival, Mahmoud Abbas’ Palestinian Authority, which Hamas kicked out of the Gaza Strip in 2007

Israeli military sources warn that the eventual upshot of these Israeli concessions will be the collapse of Abbas’ rule. Hamas will be able to use the Gaza Strip as a jumping-off base for taking over the West Bank as well.

It is a matter Israeli national policy to withhold recognition from the Palestinian Hamas – which the US and European Union also list as a terrorist organization for its commitment to violence and Israel’s destruction. Yet, by knuckling under on this point, Israeli authorities will find themselves engaging Hamas officials willy-nilly in the day-to-day management of the shared border crossings.

6. Many of the soldiers who took part in the Gaza offensive declared that their mission was unfinished because Gilead Shalit remained in captivity.

Instead of using its military feat to improve the chances for his release, Israel has allowed itself to be cornered here too.

Hamas has upped its demand for the release of 1,000 jailed Palestinian terrorists including convicted multiple murderers of the Fatah, Tanzim, Popular Front and Hamas, which Israel was inclined to accept. Now the price has gone up to 1,250 inmates, all of whom are to be released at the Gaza crossings. The West Bank residents will be sent home later.

7. Israel has agreed to leave the monitoring of Hamas’ arms smuggling in Egypt’s hands, although Cairo’s past record is notoriously wanting. For years, Egyptian police looked the other way as Hamas imported massive quantities of weapons through Sinai.

8. Not by a single word is Hamas required to dismantle its armed strength. Israel is therefore seen to be accepting the presence of an armed terrorist force on its border.

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