Hasta La Gadget!

You can never achieve a lasting peace if a major player in the conflict is excluded from the process.

Hamas’ impact on the Israel-Palestine conflict has been phenomenally destructive. The organization has made sure to undermine any positive dynamic that could have paved the way to a two-state solution. Its suicide bombings in 1996 made sure Benjamin Netanyahu won that year’s general election — and Netanyahu has previously taken pride in having destroyed the Oslo process during that 1996-1999 tenure.

Hamas’ shelling of the country’s south since Israel’s disengagement from Gaza in 2005 has become one of the main reasons Israelis are not willing to take the risk of the Israel Defense Forces’ withdrawal from the West Bank. Israelis rightly ask what would happen if Hamas took over the West Bank and could turn life in all of Israel’s population centers into a living hell.

These fears are only exacerbated by Hamas’ infuriating cynicism and its use of Palestinian civilians as human shields. Most rockets are launched from densely populated areas, and Hamas does everything to prevent the civilians the IDF has warned of imminent bombardment from leaving their buildings. Hamas has certainly earned being classified as a terror organization by the Free World: its disregard for human live — mostly Palestinian, but also Israeli — is appalling.

Israel’s extreme right-wingers bask in macho statements (some of them made by women) that Hamas must be destroyed, neutralized, disarmed, shattered or smashed. This makes for good rhetoric but is utterly useless. Naftali Bennett, Danny Danon (whom Netanyahu rightly fired from the government this week), Avigdor Lieberman and Co. can dispense such advice freely, since they know it will not be implemented. If they actually had to take responsibility for their inflammatory rhetoric, they would be in trouble, because then they would have to come up with a plan on how to do this — which, of course, they do not have.

Here is Israel’s conundrum: When we leave the realm of irresponsible rhetoric and enter the world of actual planning, there seems to be only one way out — and this way creates a problem for Netanyahu.

There is remarkable consensus, ranging from Haaretz commentator Zvi Bar’el to a recent Guardian editorial (a paper generally quite critical of Israel), that the unity government of Fatah and Hamas established in June is Israel’s only chance to stabilize the situation. It would allow Fatah gradually to regain control over the Gaza Strip, creating a situation in which Israel would have a partner for negotiations that has control not only in the West Bank but in Gaza as well.

Many a reader might now want to ask: “You just wrote that Hamas is a cynical organization that doesn’t shy away from horrendous acts — and now you’re telling us it needs to be involved in a future peace process, even if indirectly? Are you out of your mind?”

As much as I loath Hamas, its anti-Semitic charter and the brutality of its leadership, I have also studied the logic of peace processes around the globe, with the help of Lord John Alderdice. He is one of the world’s leading authorities on the topic, receiving his lordship for his contribution to the Northern Ireland peace agreement. One of the main lessons Alderdice has learned from his participation in that peace process, and his involvement in many other conflict areas, is that you can never reach durable calm if a major player of the conflict is excluded from the process.

The analogy with Northern Ireland is instructive. The Ulster conflict, generally known as The Troubles, lasted 30 years and cost about 3,500 people their lives — and the conflict had roots that went back to the 17th century. Britons viewed the Irish Republican Army with no less loathing than we currently view Hamas, and the IRA’s terror tactics were often horrifying. There are even more analogies to the Israel/Palestine conflict, including the hunger strikes of Republican prisoners that played a crucial role in the conflict. And yet the IRA’s political wing, Sinn Féin, became a central player in the peace process that led to the Good Friday Agreement in 1998.

Israel is currently not willing to recognize Hamas as a legitimate political party. Emotionally, I couldn’t agree more, and I have accused Hamas more than once for its destructive impact on the area and the terrible price it exacts from its own people. But if I look at Israel’s long-term interest, it is clear that without involving Hamas in some way, Israel will be under attack time and again in the coming years, and in the long run Hamas will undermine any attempt to achieve a durable agreement with Palestine if it does not get involved in the political process.

The Palestinian unity government would allow Israel to stabilize the situation in the short term, without directly talking to or recognizing Hamas for the time being. But this requires that Israel becomes serious about moving toward a durable agreement with the Palestinians, which places Netanyahu in an impossible situation. He is currently in open conflict with his own party and his “natural” allies from the right, including the settlers. His laudable restraint in the current round of conflict with Hamas has isolated him even further, and he does not have any political backing in his own camp for a constructive policy toward the Palestinians.

Danon, a powerful leading figure in Likud, has lately called him the “Labor Party’s subcontractor,” and it is unclear how much backing Netanyahu has in his own party — which has, for some time, ceased to be a mainstream right-wing party and moved toward the extreme right as represented by figures like Danon and Miri Regev.

In a sense, it is difficult to feel much sympathy for Netanyahu, because the extreme right-wing party he currently heads is largely of his own making. In the 1990s, he did much to create Likud’s culture of hatred for the peace camp, and he didn’t do much to moderate his second government from 2009-2013.

Unfortunately, the same cautiousness that has led Netanyahu to keep escalations with Hamas within limits is also likely to keep him from courageous moves and to engage with the 2002 Arab Peace Initiative, reaffirmed lately by former Saudi Intelligence Chief Turki al-Faisal in the pages of Haaretz.

And if Netanyahu will not muster the courage for a creative long-term strategy, the next escalation with Hamas is only a matter of time.

WASHINGTON (AP) — Surveying a dizzying array of international crises, President Barack Obama stated the obvious: “We live in a complex world and at a challenging time.”

And then suddenly, only a day later, the world had grown much more troubling, the challenges even more confounding. The downing Thursday of a passenger plane carrying nearly 300 people spread the impact of the standoff between Ukraine and Russia far around the globe. The prospect of more Mideast casualties was assured when Israeli launched a ground offensive in the Gaza Strip after efforts to arrange a cease-fire between the Israelis and Palestinians.

Yet there was a ray of hope elsewhere at week’s end with the announcement that the U.S. and its negotiating partners had agreed to extend nuclear negotiations with Iran for four months rather than allowing the talks to collapse as a Sunday deadline neared.

Still, there’s no guarantee of overcoming stubborn differences with Iran and reaching a final agreement. Obama also will have to find a way to stave off pressure from members of Congress, including some fellow Democrats, who see the extension as a stalling tactic by Iran and are anxious to further penalize Tehran.

“Increased economic pressure would strengthen our hand, but the administration opposes it,” said Rep. Ed Royce, R-Calif., the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee. “It should welcome congressional efforts to ratchet up the economic pressure on Iran.”

The cascade of overseas developments comes as the American public’s views about Obama’s foreign policy have soured, turning what was once seen as his strength into a potential liability. For a second-term president already hamstrung on the domestic front, the world stage hardly looks like the refuge it sometimes has offered leaders in their final White House years.

Obama has said repeatedly that a world in turmoil demands American leadership, but this burst of new challenges is showing the limits of that leadership.

Fresh American economic sanctions on Russia couldn’t stop the missile attack on the Malaysian Airlines plane, which U.S. officials believe was carried out by pro-Kremlin separatists aided by Moscow. Obama was also unable to persuade the European Union to join him in penalties aimed at Russia’s most powerful economic sectors, settling instead for more tepid EU actions that strained efforts to portray a united Western front against Vladimir Putin’s government.

In the Middle East, Israel began its assault in Gaza despite objections by the U.S. and the prospect of mounting civilian casualties.

The urgent international issues add to the pile of foreign policy challenges already causing headaches for the White House: Syria’s persistent civil war, the rise of Sunni extremists in Iraq, China’s increased aggression in territorial disputes in Asia.

The White House insists the U.S. is better off under Obama’s foreign policy leadership, citing as one example his commitment to ending the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that he inherited from President George W. Bush.

“I think that there have been a number of situations in which you’ve seen this administration intervene in a meaningful way that has substantially furthered American interests and substantially improved the tranquility of the global community,” White House spokesman Josh Earnest said.

Obama and his advisers have tried to project a measured approach to dealing with the deepening instability. Obama stuck to plans to hold fundraisers in New York and a transportation event in Delaware on Thursday, after the plane was downed and Israel began military operations. Obama also carried on with plans to spend the weekend at Camp David, the presidential retreat in the Maryland mountains.

The strategy reflects the view of the White House that there is a danger in presidents believing they are presiding over circumstances or events that dwarf the challenges faced by their predecessors. Such thinking, Obama’s aides say, can lead to overreach as presidents think that extraordinary measures are required and that their decisions can bypass the normal checks and balances.

To Obama’s critics, that approach smacks of timidity and restraint that have left both foes and friends more willing to dismiss his warnings as empty threats.

For a brief moment over the past few days, it appeared the White House was on offensive, not just reacting to world events.

Obama’s remarks Wednesday on the world’s complexity and challenges came as he announced the most stringent American economic sanctions yet against Russia for its threatening moves in Ukraine. The package of penalties took aim at some of Russia’s most powerful banks, energy entities and defense companies, and received grudging praise from Republicans.

But within 24 hours, the landscape shifted on Obama again, as reports of the downed plane surfaced.

There is some hope among Obama aides that if a Russian role in the tragedy is proved, it may push European leaders to take the tough action against Moscow they have resisted. But presidential advisers also know that the questions of additional costs and consequences will be pointed back at Obama as well.

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Follow Julie Pace at http://twitter.com/jpaceDC

Politicians and most other residents of the United States alike, from every rung along the full political spectrum, generally agree on one issue: Our immigration system is severely broken and needs fixing. Seemingly insurmountable gaps in political solutions to repair the system along with Congressional inaction to the point of blockage have brought the country to the point of crisis.

Though politicians and members of their constituencies argue immigration policy from seemingly infinite perspectives and sides, one point stands clear and definite: Decisions as to who can enter this country and who can eventually gain citizenship status generally depends of issues of “race,” for U.S. immigration systems reflect and serve as the country’s official “racial” policies.

“Race”

Looking back on the historical emergence of the concept of “race,” critical race theorists remind us that this concept arose concurrently with the advent of European exploration as a justification for conquest and domination of the globe beginning in the 15th century of the Common Era (CE) and reaching its apex in the early 20th century CE.

Geneticists tell us that there is often more variability within a given so-called “race” than between “races,” and that there are no essential genetic markers linked specifically to “race.” They assert, therefore, that “race” is an historical, “scientific,” biological myth, an idea, and that any socially-conceived physical “racial” markers are fictional and are not concordant with what is beyond or below the surface of the body.

Though biologists and social scientists have proven unequivocally that the concept of “race” is socially constructed (produced, manufactured), however, this does not negate the very real consequences people face living in societies that maintain racist policies and practices on the individual, interpersonal, institutional and larger societal levels.

Official Immigration and Naturalization Policy

In the “American” colonies, 1705 Virginia statute, the “Act Concerning Servants and Slaves,” read:

“[N]o negroes, mulattos or Indians, Jew, Moor, Mahometan [Muslims], or other infidel, or such as are declared slaves by this act, shall, notwithstanding, purchase any christian (sic) white servant….”

In 1790, the newly constituted United States Congress passed the Naturalization Act, which excluded all nonwhites from citizenship, including Asians, enslaved Africans, and Native Americans, the later whom they defined in oxymoronic terms as “domestic foreigners,” even though they had inhabited this land for an estimated 35,000 years. The Congress did not grant Native Americans rights of citizenship until 1924 with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, though Asians continued to be denied naturalized citizenship status.

Congress passed the first law specifically restricting or excluding immigrants on the basis of “race” and nationality in 1882. In their attempts to eliminate entry of Chinese (and other Asian) workers who often competed for jobs with U.S. citizens, especially in the western United States, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act to restrict their entry into the U.S. for a 10 year period, while denying citizenship to Chinese people already on these shores. The Act also made it illegal for Chinese people to marry white or black U.S.-Americans. The Immigration Act of 1917 further prohibited immigration from Asian countries, in the terms of the law, the “barred zone,” including parts of China, India, Siam, Burma, Asiatic Russia, the Polynesian Islands, and parts of Afghanistan.

The so-called “Gentleman’s Agreement” between the U.S. and the Emperor of Japan of 1907, in an attempt to reduce tensions between the two countries, passed expressly to decrease immigration of Japanese workers into the U.S.

Between 1880 and 1920, in the range of 30-40 million immigrants from Eastern and Southern Europe migrated to the United States, more than doubling the population. Fearing a continued influx of immigrants, legislators in the United States Congress in 1924 enacted the Johnson-Reed [anti-] Immigration Act (“Origins Quota Act,” or “National Origins Act”) setting restrictive quotas of immigrants from Asia and Eastern Europe, including those of the so-called “Hebrew race.” Jews continued to be, even in the United States during the 1920s, constructed as nonwhite. The law, on the other hand, permitted large allotments of immigrants from Great Britain, Ireland, and Germany.

This law, in addition to previous statutes (1882 against the Chinese, 1907 against the Japanese) halted further immigration from Asia, and excluded blacks of African descent from entering the United States. It is interesting to note that during this time, Jewish ethno-racial assignment was constructed as “Asian.” According to Sander Gilman: “Jews were called Asiatic and Mongoloid, as well as primitive, tribal, Oriental.” Immigration laws were changed in 1924 in response to the influx of these undesirable “Asiatic elements.”

In the Supreme Court case, Takao Ozawa vs. United States, a Japanese man, Takao Ozawa filed for citizenship under the Naturalization Act of 1906, which allowed white persons and persons of African descent or African nativity to achieve naturalization status. Asians, however, were classified as an “unassimilateable race” and, therefore, not entitled to U.S. citizenship. Ozawa attempted to have Japanese people classified as “white” since he claimed he had the requisite white skin. The Supreme Court, in 1922, however, denied his claim and, therefore, his U.S. citizenship.

In 1939, the United States Congress refused to pass the Wagner-Rogers Bill, which if enacted would have permitted entry to the United States of 20,000 children from Eastern Europe, many of whom were Jewish, over existing quotas. Laura Delano Houghteling, cousin of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and wife of the U.S. Commissioner of Immigration sternly warned: “20,000 charming children would all too soon, grow into 20,000 ugly adults.”

Following U.S. entry into World War II at the end of 1942, reflecting the tenuous status of Japanese Americans, some born in the United States, military officials uprooted and transported approximately 120,000 Japanese Americans to Internment (Concentration) Camps within a number of interior states far from the shores. Not until Ronald Reagan’s administration did the U.S. officially apologize to Japanese Americans and to pay reparations amounting to $20,000 to each survivor as part of the 1988 Civil Liberties Act.

Finally, in 1952, the McCarran-Walters Act overturned the “racially” discriminatory quotas of the 1924 Johnson-Reed Act. Framed as an amendment to the McCarran-Walters Act, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 removed “natural origins” as the basis of U.S. immigration legislation. The 1965 law increased immigration from Asian and Latin American countries and religious backgrounds, permitted 170,000 immigrants from the Eastern Hemisphere (20,000 per each country), 120,000 from the Western Hemisphere, and accepted a total of 300,000 visas for entry into the country.

The 1965 Immigration Law, however, was certainly not the last we saw “race” used as a qualifying factor. The Arizona legislature passed and Governor Jan Brewer signed SB 1070, which mandates that police officers stop and question people about their immigration status if they even suspect that they may be in this country illegally, and criminalizes undocumented workers who do not possess an “alien registration document.” Other provisions allow citizens to file suits against government agencies that do not enforce the law, and it criminalizes employers who knowingly transport or hire undocumented workers. The law is currently on hold as it travels through the judicial process challenging its constitutionality.

If we learn anything from our immigration legislative history, we can view the current debates as providing a great opportunity to pass comprehensive federal reform based not on “race,” nationality, ethnicity, religion, or other social identity categories, but rather, on humane principles of fairness, compassion and equity.

Patronage requests are usually made quietly, perhaps in a smoke-filled back room, but one Illinois Republican appears to have brought sunlight to the process on Monday, according to the Chicago Sun-Times.

After a bill signing, Illinois state comptroller Judy Baar Topinka (R), mentioned to governor Pat Quinn that her son wanted to teach at Southern Illinois University, apparently unaware that her microphone was still on.

It’s difficult to determine what exactly Topinka whispered in Quinn’s ear after the signing, but she can clearly be heard saying “…get my son to SIU, he wants to teach.” She then reassured the governor that “he’s got the qualifications to teach,” before repeating the name of the school and slapping the governor on the shoulder. In response, Quinn only told Topinka, “I know him too.”

Brad Hahn, a Topinka spokesperson, denied that the comptroller made any kind of request.

“She’s excited about the possibility of he and his family moving back, and nothing more,” Hahn told The Huffington Post. “She loves to talk about her son, if you were here right now, she’d talk to you about it.”

According to the Sun-Times, Quinn is not working to get Topinka’s son, an Afghanistan veteran, a job at the school.

“The governor didn’t hear all of what she said. He said that she mentioned her son and SIU, but it was loud, and he couldn’t make out what she was talking about,” said Katie Hickey, a Quinn spokesperson, in a statement to HuffPost. Hickey added that the governor’s office had followed up with Topinka to determine what she was talking about, but had never heard back.

Both Quinn and Topinka are running for reelection this fall. Quinn, who has tried to maintain a reputation as an anti-corruption reformer, is under investigation by the Department of Justice and Illinois lawmakers who are trying to determine whether he misused funds designated for an anti-violence program for political purposes.

Watch the interaction in the video above.

Is it a god? Is it a fashion guru? Is it a recently married celebrity? It is Kanye West.

West graces the cover of GQ’s August issue wearing a beige jacket and a white tee that probably costs more than any shirt you own. The issue, which hits stands on July 29, features West opening up about his recent wedding with Kim Kardashian, being a (self-proclaimed) god of fashion and how he keeps his lifestyle outrageous.

Kim also shared a photo of Kanye’s cover on Instagram and wrote “So sexy! My husband on the cover of GQ shot by Patrick Demarchelier!!!”

For more on West’s cover, visit GQ.com.