This is an amazing story. The seed pre-dates the Roman invasion of Masada.
A 2,000-year-old seed recovered from the ancient Jewish fortress of Masada near the Dead Sea has become the oldest seed in the world to have germinated successfully, scientists said yesterday.
The seed, which grew into a date palm plant, was one of three recovered during archaeological excavations in the early 1960s, but it was only planted two years ago as part of an experiment to see if it could germinate and grow after such a long time.
I'm waiting for John McCain and George Bush to explain to the American people how the Israelis are actually Holocaust appeasers, that should be fun to watch. Seriously, the media has to ask John McCain and George Bush why their harsh words about Barack Obama don't apply equally to Israel itself? John McCain needs to be asked why his policies for dealing with the Middle East are directly opposite to what Israel is doing? More from Haaretz (via Ben):
Participants at a recent inner cabinet meeting were listening to details of the Egyptian mediation initiative between Israel and Hamas on a cease-fire in the Gaza Strip recently, when a senior minister reportedly reminded those present that Israel does not negotiate, directly or indirectly, with Hamas. Shin Bet security service head Yuval Diskin interrupted, saying there was no other way to describe the talks.
Some of the country's most prominent Jewish liberals are forming a political action committee and lobbying group aimed at dislodging what they consider the excessive hold of neoconservatives and evangelical Christians on U.S. policy toward Israel....
The lobbying group will be known as J Street and the political action group as JStreetPAC. The executive director for both will be Jeremy Ben-Ami, a former domestic policy adviser in the Clinton White House.
"The definition of what it means to be pro-Israel has come to diverge from pursuing a peace settlement," said Alan Solomont, a prominent Democratic Party fundraiser involved in the initiative. In recent years, he said, "We have heard the voices of neocons, and right-of-center Jewish leaders and Christian evangelicals, and the mainstream views of the American Jewish community have not been heard."
Admittedly, I'm not a religious person though I am always intrigued by religion and how cultures recognize religious events and locations. A few years ago while visiting a friend in a small village in the south of France, the village had their annual procession for the Stations of the Cross to start the Easter weekend. The villagers have been doing this for decades, dressing in costumes and leading the entire village to each station. It really was quite a site to see.
Last summer I had the opportunity to visit Israel including Jerusalem and spent time visiting the original Via Dolorosa and the Stations of the Cross right in to the Holy Sepulchre. Regardless of what you believe walking the streets of Jerusalem (in all districts) is one of the most amazing places on earth. It's heavy - very heavy - but every stone has history that scans history right up until today. Even entering the city through the (now closed, I believe) crossing point from Jordon through the DMZ and the West Bank was amazing. Anyway, the night photos are from Roquebrune village (officially Roquebrune-Cap Martin) and the rest, from Jerusalem. More photos after the jump.
Lighting the candles for one of the Stations of the Cross.
One of the Stations of the Cross during the procession.
The procession in the village on Good Friday.
A Jerusalem street sign for the famous street.
Above, Station VI on the Via Dolorosa where Veronica met Jesus and wiped his face as he carried the cross.
In the Holy Sepulchre where Jesus was cleansed after death. Crowds of people would gather to touch the stone, often crying and placing objects on it. The occasional outbursts of crying with hair pulling and laying parts of their body on the slab could be somewhat odd to an outsider like myself. Interesting to observe though.
I haven't said much about next week's Middle East meetings because, well, it certainly looks like it will just be a huge photo op. There doesn't seem to have been any significant diplomacy in preparation, and there are 46 countries and international organizations coming. But hey, don't take my word for it, apparently the Bush administration doesn't see it as particularly important either:
In fact, Mr. Bush and his aides still deplore what they view as President Clinton’s disastrously hands-on involvement in the peace process in 2000. And they insist that Mr. Bush does not intend to negotiate personally the two-state peace he has pronounced as his vision . . . For all the pomp of the Annapolis gathering, the White House is not calling it a summit meeting or anything else suggestive of substantive progress. Mr. Bush’s vision is ambitious, but his strategy is cautious — he may be repeating Mr. Clinton’s role, yet he rejects what he sees as the meddlesome quality of it.
To call this "repeating" the role that President Clinton played is hyperbole, to say the least -- while people can (and do) argue over particular Clintonian successes and failures, by all accounts he really, really knew his stuff when it came to Israel/Palestine issues. Down to the neighborhoods in Jerusalem, locations of settlements, etc. Somehow I don't think Bush has quite the same command of the details.
In any case, though, there's no real goal to the conference, the administration has ignored the issue for seven years, and it refuses to put any pressure on Israel, so it's not like anybody has high hopes. On the other hand, one *can* hope that it goes well, because as with most diplomacy, baby steps are needed at the beginning. Perhaps this can set the stage for further movement in the coming years, especially if a Democrat takes office in 2009 (anybody want to guess who might be names Special Envoy to the Middle East in a Clinton administration?).
Finally, kudos to the Times for including this paragraph:
Mr. Bush’s aides often point out that in 2002 he was the first American president to declare support for a Palestinian state. That is true, but they fail to mention that he did so while refusing to negotiate with Yasir Arafat, then the Palestinian leader, effectively endorsing a deadly stalemate.
Far too often, that kind of ridiculous administration claim is allowed to pass without context of, y'know, the facts. Nice to have them in this instance.
As I've noted before, the U.S. political efforts in the Middle East have all but destroyed the very idea of democracy for much of the developing world, in addition to, of course, helping nascent democracies tumble headlong into anarchy. Remember the Arab Spring? Remember how elections in Lebanon, Iraq, and the Palestinian territories were supposed to bring peace, prosperity, and ponies to the region? It turns out that democracy requires more than voting, and certainly more than voting coupled with illiberal internal policies and external meddling.
Democracy requires institutions, infrastructure, security, and other structural factors. Shamefully, the U.S. has helped undermine many of these factors in the very places we held up as examples not so long ago. The disaster in Gaza is just the latest example.
The events of the past few days have driven a nail into the coffin of Bush's "democratization" program for the "Greater Middle East." The Haniyah Hamas government had come to power in free and fair elections, but was immediately boycotted, starved of resources, and actually often simply kidnapped by the Israelis; and is now being put out of office in a kind of coup. The people of the Arab world are not blind or stupid. If this is what the "Greater Middle East" looks like, it will too closely resemble, for their taste, the colonial 19th century, When Europeans dictated government to Middle Easterners.
I'm extremely skeptical of the idea that if the U.S. and Israel prop up Abbas and Fatah in the West Bank the Palestinians will see how much better life is under Fatah than Hamas; Fatah has basically controlled the territories for years and the population wasn't very happy, so for the U.S. to belatedly endorse Fatah and support it will reek of colonialism. No puppet government will have legitimacy, and Hamas can claim -- rightly -- that they were never given the ability to govern. That way Hamas gets to keep power in Gaza, maintain its popularity as fighters against Palestinian oppression, and avoid any actual responsibility for governance. Not exactly a recipe for diminishing their power or popularity.
This is also bad for Israel down the road:
What has happened is not good for Israel in the medium to long term, since I suspect it signals the end of the possibility of a viable Palestinian state. And, if you don't have a two-state solution, ultimately the likelihood is that Israel will be stuck with the Palestinians as citizens.
I certainly hope it does not mean the end of two-state viability, and things can change quickly in this situation. But the indicators are bad, and unlikely to be improved by the current administration.
Despite my frustration with seeing oppressed people fighting each other, rather than uniting (nonviolently, one would hope) against that oppression, it is absolutely true that the deteriorating situation in Gaza is in no small part due to mismanagement by the U.S. and Israel.
After proclaiming the benefit of elections everywhere, the Bush administration was faced with the realities of popular governance: Sometimes people don't vote the way we'd like them to. Hamas won the elections in the Palestinian territories, a victory that Secretary Rice claimed was entirely unpredicted by the U.S., and subsequent poor strategies and tactics led to a cascade of disaster resulting in a de facto Palestinian civil war.
Following the elections, the U.S. and Israel made every attempt to undermine Hamas, prevent a unity government from forming, cut off international funding, etc. Despite desperate attempts to prop up Fatah with funding and arms, Hamas has exposed Fatah as both politically and militarily inferior. Now, instead of dealing with a unity government, the U.S. and Israel are faced with a dominant Hamas, one which has consolidated political and military power even in the face of blundering efforts to blunt its influence.
As Tony Karon writes, in response to Tony Snow's disgraceful comments on the situation,
Everyone following the conflict in Gaza knows full well that the reason for the violence is not that Palestinians have not "sorted out their politics" -- they've made their political preferences abundantly clear in democratic elections, and later in a power-sharing agreement brokered by the Saudis. The problem is that the U.S. and the corrupt and self-serving warlords of Fatah did not accept either the election result or the unity government, and have conspired actively ever since to reverse both by all available means, including starving the Palestinian economy of funds, refusing to hand over power over the Palestinian Authority to the elected government, and arming and training Fatah loyalists to militarily restore their party's power. Unfortunately, after three days of some of the most savage fighting ever seen in Gaza, that strategy now lies in tatters. Fatah is, quite simply, no longer a credible fighting force in Gaza, where it has long been in decline as a credible political force.
This situation, like others in the Middle East, reinforces the point about justifiability versus wisdom. I suppose it's "justifiable" to refuse to interact with Hamas, based on its terrorist actions and support for eradicating Israel. But taking such a "justifiable" position leads to a terrible result.
All you moderate Republicans, you still think Lieberman is such a nice "moderate" guy? He wants to get us into a third war. I'm increasingly wondering if Lieberman is looking out for Israel's interests rather than America's. And I say that as someone who has been criticized for being too pro-Israel. And I am pro-Israel. But I'm pro-America first and foremost.
The commission accused him of having decided hastily to go to war, neglecting to ask for a detailed military plan, refusing to consult outside the army and setting “over-ambitious and unobtainable goals.”
His name would be... George Bush?! No. Well, yes, this clearly does apply to Bush - but in fact, it's a new report about the Israeli Prime Minister's ill-fated venture into Lebanon. And in Israel, unlike America, when the head of state screws up a war, his cabinet members start to resign (rather than publicly defend him and then later write "oops" books) and the head of state himself has to publicly explain why he shouldn't have to resign.
It was the first time Rephael, who had held a technical position in the ministry before his posting to San Salvador, had ever distinguished himself in any way, the official added.
