I find it significant that the psychology behind assassination that the so-called clever Israelis find so satisfying has leaped into the strategy of Obama who uses the more violent and blatant technology of drones to satisfy his thirst for international murder. Whatever the instrument, the blowback defeats the intent.

ONL, I read last weekend about the discovery of polonium traces in his belongings and the plans to check his body for any signs of the nuclear material, as well. Given how nearly impossible it is to obtain this material the ramifications are bound to be huge and I'll be interested to see where the trail leads to as the story continues.

so what? killing arafat had little effect on the operation of the piecemeal conquest of palestine, but may have simply been a demonstration by mossad or shin bet that they were earning their salaries. the israelis couldn't even be sure that his replacement would be more pliable.

the conquest of palestine is in the mopping up stage, the muslims are beaten in any military sense.

there has been a great crime committed in palestine, but there is no society competent to punish this crime. the evil empire has sheltered its protege in the u. n. and supported it with arms and money, as it has done since the 1940's. just one more shame to the american people, who seem to be incapable of feeling shame.

I'm with Jan. It will be interesting indeed to exhume Arafat's body and examine for traces of Polonium.

r

Is there an assumption that an array of Near East orgs haven't attempted the assassinations of Israeli ldrshp over he years?

Jonathan, and yet not a single Israeli leader has been killed to my knowledge. Obviously, Israeli intelligence and security is much more efficient and capable of foiling any plots against them, were they to exist.

I don't know who killed Arafat, but I do know the Mideast has ALWAYS been a hotbed of instability, and yet we continue to fight wars there for control of oil there. If the trillions we wasted in those wars had been invested in alternative energy sources, we'd be energy independent by now. Indeed, if we had followed the path Jimmy Carter laid out, we'd be energy independent by now. But Big Oil would never have allowed that to happen.

So instead, we ended up with a Big Oil President named Ronnie Raygun, and we've have had one ever since. Obama has shown signs of wanting to get us off the oil teat, but James "Hokie from Muskogee" Inhofe and Joe "Oil Can" Barton and a host of other Big Oil lackeys in Congress will make sure it doesn't happen.

Meanwhile, citizens, enjoy the looooong hoooot summer while you can.

ONL ohhhhh...so now Isr is damned for being more efficient than its enemies? ;)

I believe the Israelis did kill Arafat, for good reason. He was behind many terror plots and bombings that killed hundreds of their people.

Was it the Israelis, or Iran through Hezbollah?

To be wholly fair abt this I have to say, whether or not Isr killed the man, I have no issue w targeted killings of people and the attempted destruction of orgs who over a long period of time make it clear that I should be dead bc I was born a Jew.

And I've no patience w any argument that suggests that when those historically-bullied and expelled and eradicated bc they are who they are (Jews in this case) get strong enough to take measures at sustained self-preservation that we should feel guilt over it.

What horseshit.

interesting story but I sort of think we ought to pull back and let history sort it out- at least until the First Nations here have something more equitable than their reservations.

@ kenneth: well-said.

When Arafat died, it was quite obvious that somebody killed him. It came so sudden. So, polonium wasn't any surprise? Who killed him, I don't know.

I would like to ask Tom Cordle how he would get a jumbo jet from Airport A to Airport B using alternative energy. Maybe a gigantic, tightly wound rubber band? Preferably one that is recyclable.

To Kenneth Houck:

What the settlers, backed by their government, did to the American Indians is too painful even to contemplate. If only there were a practical way to redress the multitude of wrongs.

But too much time has gone by, and too much has changed. There is no way that the occupants of practically every home and piece of land in the West are going to be evicted.

History is full of unjust conquests, and the survivors have to adapt. There is no court of appeal to reverse the tide of history.

Should the Normans give the British Isles back to the Anglo-Saxons? Perhaps they should, but no one is going to make it happen.

Having said that, I want to add the footnote that Israel did not conquer the Palestinian Arabs. (This is aimed not at Kenneth but at many of the other commenters here.) The Israelis were given their homeland by a consensus of the nations that ran the world at that time. They offered the Arabs the opportunity to stay and grow with them. The Arabs who instead ran away, prodded by the leaders of the surrounding nations, lost the opportunity to participate in the Israeli economic miracle. For that they can thank their brethren in Egypt, Jordan and you name it.

I checked Ha'aretz so see what they had to say about this. Here's what I found:

"The controversy was reignited by an Al Jazeera expose last week in which the Swiss Radiophysics Institute said it found "surprisingly" high levels of polonium-210 on Arafat's clothing - the same substance used to kill former Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko in London in 2006.

"The Swiss institute said, however, that the symptoms described in the Palestinian president's medical reports were not consistent with the radioactive agent."

Obviously, we can't jump to conclusions yet. The Israelis are good, but I doubt they're good enough to kill someone with polonium while making the symptoms of polonium poisoning change.

That they might attempt to kill Arafat if they thought it would further their aims is not something I'd deny. The political costs of their doing so and being caught at it unambiguously would clearly be immense. Not that I think they'd feel particularly guilty about it - when it came to murdering civilians, Arafat's hands weren't exactly clean. He was the head of the PLO when "Palestinian" became the standard prefix for "terrorist."

It is exceptionally interesting that the real Zionist terrorists such as the Irgun and the Stern gang who who entered Arab villages and indiscriminately created frightful brutalities at the inception of Israel are excused for wiping out multiple Arab villages and causing people to flee before their ethnic cleansing invasions are simply excused because the UN accepted the creation of a racist Jewish state. Also that any resistance by the native population to this viciousness is characterized as "terrorist" while the actual terrorists are accepted as justified agents turns reasonable good sense on its head in a horrible twist of insane psychology.
Read http://www.yorkpsc.org.uk/a-nakba-diary

My take on the whole thing is that in Israel as in the USA there's a huge percentage of the population that has decent, sensible values. Unfortunately, both populations have been burdened by horrible governments with very narrow minded elites that have managed to hoodwink their way into a seemingly permanent position of power.

Racism, militarism, and hegemony are implemented by both governments. It remains to be seen as to what and when this will change.

ONL,

I couldn't agree more.

Jan,

I don't condone terrorism from that era perpetrated by the Irgun or Stern Gang.

Arthur,
Many answers. We can't use renewables for airborne transportation with the exception of bringing back dirigibles but using helium this time so we don't have Hindenburg issues. However, we can use a lot less fossil fuels if we use renewables where they do work.

Regarding Israel:
The Israelis are both more and less guilty that what you're portraying. Not all Palestinians who left what was becoming Israel did so voluntarily. However, the Jews also weren't outside conquerors to the extent that you (and almost everyone I've spoken to) seem to think. Firstly, how Jews coming from Europe initially got land was not by conquest but by purchase. Secondly, because European Jews tend to be dominant in Israel, they don't tend to acknowledge the extent to which there was an indigenous Jewish population already here when migration back started. This has been documented back at least four hundred years when, according to a visiting Dutch cartographer who did a demographic study of the population of Palestine, the majority was Jewish even then. This is not a simple story of conquest, because neither the popular conception of Jews not being here prior to the Zionist movement nor the other popular conception that the Palestinian population is completely indigenous and not descended from relatively recent Arab immigrants from elsewhere (particularly Syria) is true.

What is also left out of the equation is the extent to which Arab governments who complain about Israel either forced their own Jews out or made life inhospitable enough that they left, a population of Jewish refugees that actually exceeds the population of Arabs who left Israel (voluntarily and involuntarily combined).

.....
Regarding Jan's remarks:
The real terrorists? The idea that the Palestinians who have participated in terrorism don't meet that standard is beyond silly.

As to the idea of racist states, allow me to point out that the Palestinian Territories do not accept Jews at all. Gays either, for that matter. This is stated policy in interviews in the US with a Palestinian government representative on camera. That Israel has Muslim citizens and Muslims in parliament while the Palestinian Territories not only don't allow Jews as second class citizens, they don't allow Jews period says that singling out Israel as racist is, to put it more kindly than I should, odd.

Thanks for this informative, lucid post on an extremely timely subject. I also think Israel has miscalculated, but for a somewhat different reason. They have now so totally chopped up Palestine with their settlement activity that a two-state solution is no longer possible. They are left with a one state solution as their only option - the establishment of a secular state in which Arabs outnumber them. Ironically this is what they have tried so desperately to avoid by exiling Arabs from their Palestinian homeland.

@Arthur
Do you take me for a fool -- or are you the fool? There's no reason for me to answer your silly question, especially since you're claiming I said something I didn't say. I said become energy independent -- I didn't say get off oil completely, and neither did Jimmy Carter.

Anyone with a lick of sense -- which eliminates most of the Republican Party these days -- knows we can't get off oil completely; it's not only necessary for fuel, but it's a basic element in plastics and fertilizer, among many other things. That being the case, it's all the more essential that we develop and use alternative energy sources whenever possible. But you won't find the boys from oil districts making that case.

So, to answer your silly question, jumbo jet flies from Point A to Point B using jet fuel refined from our own oil, oil that now -- thanks to multi-national Big Oil running what passes for our national energy policy -- goes on the open market and could end up elsewhere.

Arthur Louis,your comment for Tom Cordle sounds infantil.
You know like everyone else that the oil resources are running out.Alternatives are the answer.

If Tom Cordle were to remove the insults from his reply to me, I would reply back to him. But that is not Tom's way.

Kosh, I apologize if I gave the impression that I considered the creation of Israel a conquest. The Jews were in no position to conquer anything at that point. They were handed the territory courtesy of Britain, backed by the good will of almost the entire world (where did that go?). Now I realize that this could open up a dialogue, trialogue or more about British imperialism, but anyway I know perfectly well that the Jews did not conquer what is now their homeland.

-- If conflict occurs, it will occur squarely because of Israel's machinations to effect regime change by exotic assassination of a Palestinian leader.

How very Christian of them.

For years, at least since the '67 War (at the time I was in high school, which was known as Palestine High in honour of the fact that nearly every Jewish kid in the area went to it), I've been aware that if the Jews deserve to run a piece of ground they ran for a couple of hundred years 3,000 years ago, then those who descend from those who lived on these continents for 20,000 years before being wiped out by white guys from an overcrowded Europe certainly have a better case. Being Jewish doesn't confer a right of conquest.

Arthur, your question to me was both insulting and condescending, an I replied in kind. If you can't stand the heat, stay out of the kitchen.

Just what the Middle East needs - a further murder (maybe) mystery. Thanks to kosh for digging out the Ha'aretz article. I wonder though how certain it is that Arafat's symptom were completely unlike radiation poisoning.

@Arthur - Those of us who think that far too much petroleum is being used aren't suggesting we convert jumbo jets to gliders and you know that well enough. How about though a carbon tax that fully covers the cost of cleaning up after it. These costs are already being incurred and it's a wholly conservative pricing methodology.

I think maybe Robert Young needs to learn a little more about the history of the area now known as Israel before he comments. If you revise the history of anything enough, you can come up with a case that suits your position.

jan sand-- terrorism is in the eye of the beholder.
re polonium. its amazing that there wasnt more intl outrage over this. as far as I know the litivenko polonium would have had to come from Russia, but one now wonders if israel has the ability to manufacture it. as for the death being "inconsistent" with polonium, well what exactly are the details on that? the guy is dead, what more detail is necessary? I mean obviously they matter but many symptoms of death tend to blur together. I also urge everyone to study the Dubai hit by the mossad-- they indeed did make the death seem to be something different than one it was, in multiple, very sophisticated ways....
I also think theres some bizarre irony that the western intelligence agencies use polonium as an assassination tool and yet are trying to destroy iran over the issue of nuclear reactors/energy/ and/or bomb creation.... it sounds silly but maybe they have a problem with that polonium getting loose.....

[r] Israel with US help wants to guarantee it is the only seriously nuclear power in the Middle East. So it screams vulnerability ridiculously with its 200+ nukes because Iran may WANT to build a nuke but have not (this proven) even begun to try. Is Israeli deliberately manipulative full out or how much paranoia is in there? Israel seems to play a terrific Iago in what used to be a chess game but is now a game of dominos (what hypocrits after all the domino talk about communism way back when) to whatever Othello is in the WH. But US doesn't need a Iago since Obama and the crazed military addicts and their greedy contractors are playing chicken now with China and Russia and put them on the bloody imperialism INSANE clipboard. Yes, vote for WWIII, folks. Step right up. The insane gamesmen may blow us all up before they devastate us economically. Whether from column A or column B. Legacy capitalism is for the blindest citizens.

Latest pr game from Israel is that Syria has WMDs to be used on Israel. Lucy and the football one more time. Those useful and transitory WMDs. So Israel prods both Dems and Repubs already having only a hammer in its box of tools, diplomacy is not an option apparently for corporate US war lords including Ms. Clinton. I'm thinking voting Dem or Repub is a vote for WWIII, not that it already hasn't started. Anyway, re the Israel scenario I came across something interesting . John Mearsheimer wrote a book called "Why Leaders Lie ..." This is his take on part of Israeli history on page 73

"It is also sometimes feasible for a state with an influential diaspora to export its myths to the countries where the diaspora is located. Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon involves Israel and the American Jewish community. There was no way that the Zionists could create a Jewish state in Palestine without doing large-scale ethnic cleansing of the Arab populations that had been living there for centuries. This point was widely recognized by the Zionist leadership well before Israel was created. The opportunity to expel the Palestinians came in early 1948 when fighting broke out between the Palestinians and the Zionists in the wake of the UN decision to partition Palestine into two states. The Zionists cleansed roughly 700,000 Palestinians from the land that became Israel, and adamantly refused to let them return to their homes once the fighting stopped. Of course, this was a story that cast Israel in the role of the victimizer and would make it difficult for the fledgling state to win friends and influence people around the world, especially in the United States."

"Not surprisingly, Israel and its American friends went to great lengths after the events of 1948 to blame the expulsion of the Palestinians on the victims themselves. According to the myth that was invented, the Palestinians were not cleansed by the Zionists; instead, they were said to have fled their homes because the surrounding Arab countries told them to move out so that their armies could move in and drive the Jews into the sea. The Palestinians could then return home after the Jews had been cleansed from the land. This story was widely accepted not only in Israel but also in the United States for about four decades, and it played a key role in convincing many Americans to look favorably upon Israel in its ongoing conflict with the Palestinians. Israeli scholars, however, have demolished that myth and others over the past two decades, and the new history has slowly begun to affect the discourse in the United States about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in ways that make at least some Americans less sympathetic to Israel’s past and present actions toward the Palestinians."

Nothing like crony tribal propaganda spin. AIPAC is there to try to keep the lies alive after all this time. Hillary is there to do all she can to win friends and influence Jewish Americans for her ambitions. And Obama and Romney will do all they can to appease Israel and those same ever-denying and minimizing cronied Jewish Americans. What a world. The game is shoot the moon. US/Israel mad dogs of war are exploiting their insane violence for profit, hang the fate of the 99% family of men and women and children.

FWIW.

best, libby

As has been noted by many, terror is not a cause it is an agenda and it is a standard piece of equipment in all military efforts as well as a tool for relentless political elements. Whether a group wears steel helmets or keffiyehs, goes masked or in official state uniforms, whether they use roadside bombs or drones or tanks or bulldozers, if they commit acts of terror they are terrorists. That the Stern Gang was not uniformed or the current Israeli Army is uniformed makes them no less terrorists when they commit acts of terror. A war against terror is a delightful concept in a rather ironic foolish way.

This post has been haunting me, and I'd like to share some additional, random thoughts.

First, a scientific point. Polonium 210 has a half-life of 138 days, which means that the exhumation of Arafat might not yield conclusive proof that his body contained the nasty stuff. If there was polonium in there eight years ago, its strength has decreased to roughly .00000048 of what it was at the time of burial. The same would be true for any Polonium 210 left in his clothing or other belongings. Polonium occurs in nature -- including, get this, cigarette smoke -- so I am not sure what could be proved.

Second, fair-minded people should at least consider the possibility that the Arafat clique is lying about finding the poison. They do have their agenda. When the former Russian agent was killed with the stuff in 2006, it wasn't the Israelis who were blamed. Isn't it a bit too convenient that the very same poison now is alleged to have been used against Arafat -- and not by Russia? The Russian incident may have given the Arafat people a convenient peg on which to hang their case.

Third point: I gather that the poison is alleged to have been slipped into Arafat's food by someone trusted in his circle. Shouldn't he have attracted suspicious attention when he started walking around the Arafat compound carrying a fifty-pound lead box? Didn't anybody notice that he was wearing a head-to=toe radiation-resistant lab suit, and that he was carrying a long pair of tongs so he could safely handle the polonium that he was about to feed to Arafat?

It saddens me that some of the people commenting above are so eager to perpetuate what may very well be lies, seemingly in hopes that it will start a holy war against Israel. Why do you want that?


Third point.

sorry about the loose fragment at the end of my post.

@ Kosh, et. al. I have no issue, in context, w the Irgun. I have no issue w trying to rid the world of those who behave over and again that being born a Jew makes me liable for punishment or murder.

Nor should being born an American make every American prosecutable for killing innocents with drones. But somebody sure as hell is guilty of that.