Egypt

Ripped open by an iceberg!  read more »

Henry Siegman has again and again proved a leader on the Israel/Palestine issue. His review of Jimmy Carter's apartheid-in-Palestine book in the Nation offers breathtaking relief from the smear campaign against Carter. His piece concludes with an explanation of Carter's enormous contribution to Israel's security.

Accusations by Alan Dershowitz and others that Carter is indifferent to Israel's security only prove that no good deed goes unpunished. Arguably, the single most important contribution to Israel's security by far was the removal of Egypt--possessing the most powerful of the military forces in the Arab world--from the Arab axis that was intent on the destruction of the State of Israel in its early years. Egypt's peace agreement with Israel permanently removed the possibility of such a combined Arab assault against the Jewish State, something for which the late Syrian president Hafez Assad could not get himself to forgive Sadat, even after he was assassinated.... Carter's book provides an important reminder that the Camp David agreement not only created a durable peace between Egypt and Israel but served as a model for all of the major Israeli-Palestinian peace initiatives that were to follow. Oslo's concepts of a self-governing Palestinian Authority, of a five-year process that concludes with agreements on permanent-status issues, of negotiations on such issues that begin no later than in the third year of the agreement and of an armed Palestinian police force to maintain order are all spelled out in the Camp David agreement. And the outline of what an Israeli-Palestinian settlement would have to look like if an agreement is to be reached is also adumbrated in the Camp David accords of 1978, which included Begin's acceptance of Egypt's insistence on the return of all Egyptian territory held by Israel. The magnitude of that accomplishment places the pettiness of the critics of President Carter and his latest book in proper perspective.

In Tuesday's New York Sun, editor Seth Lipsky refers to the Six-Day war of 1967 in typical fashion, saying that Ariel Sharon "saved the Jewish state" by enveloping the Egyptians in the Sinai. Lipsky's view of the war is unreconstructed chauvinism; it shows no familiarity with Israel's new historians, who have described the '67 war as a terrible accident brought on by saber-rattling militarists on both sides. Neither side really wanted war. The Israelis were more powerful than the Arab forces, and though Israel justly feared for its existence in the face of Arab rhetoric, Israel over-reacted to threats out of a "psychosis of annihilation," writes former foreign minister Shlomo Ben-Ami.

"Yitzhak Rabin intentionally led Israel into a war with Syria... Egypt was definitely not ready for war and Nasser did not want a war... In Israel the road to war was paved by a genuine existential fear, a legacy of the Ben-Gurion years, which always led to perceiving crises in apocalyptic terms and reacting only according to worst-case scenarios." (From Ben-Ami's book, Scars of War, Wounds of Peace.)

The result of this war was a disaster: the Occupied Territories, which have destroyed Israel's idealism.

That brings me to the bomb. If you read the history of this disastrous war, a natural question is whether Nasser massed his forces on the Sinai border, thereby provoking the Israelis, because he feared Israel's nuclear ambitions. Why, just three years before, Nasser had told the U.S. that Israel's developing the bomb "would be a cause for war, no matter how suicidal."  read more »

I saw The DaVinci Code last night with a friend, a lapsed Catholic, after two other friends, also lapsed Catholics, raved about it. Even a lapsed Jew like me knows that this movie will be poison at the confession box. It's like the idea I discovered in college, that I didn't have to marry a Jew—an idea that did a number on my natal faith.

Again, I'd quarrel with anyone who says this film is antireligious. It's pro-religious. Tom Hanks and Audrey Tautou (What's that on her neck?) both seek spiritual knowledge. They want to know who and where the Holy Grail is, and they find out in the transcendent ending. Hanks is a lapsed Catholic but he believes in God. So does Audrey Tautou. It's just that their God is the one that Joan Osborne sang about in the anti-Catholic hit of 8 years back or so: "What if God was one of us?" God is in all of us, we just have to figure out where he/she/it is. The movie's over when Hanks understands that his belief is in This-thing-that-is-larger-than-him-but-also-in-him that he prayed to when he was trying to survive as a little boy in the well, and when Audrey Tautou accepts the blasphemous idea that she's a descendant of Jesus.  read more »

A queen who proclaimed herself king is the spectacular subject of a spectacular new exhibition at th  read more »

"If it had teeth, it would bite you," my mother used to tell me when I couldn't find something that  read more »

“If  read more »

To: God1@Yahoo.Com From: A Blue-State Democrat  read more »

I conned my 9-year old son into coming out with me to the Brooklyn Museum of Art on the pretext of v  read more »

Aida , the new Disney musical ("suggested by the opera") with music by the Liberace of Rock, Elton J  read more »

There's a frightening episode of the old Outer Limits TV show where, if memory serves me correctly,  read more »

Merrill Kramer, an attorney at the Washington, D.C., powerhouse firm of Akin, Gump, Strauss, Hauer &  read more »