US soldier prime suspect in Okinawa hit-and-run

By Malcolm Foster

The Associated Press

TOKYO — Japanese police said Thursday that an American soldier is the prime suspect in a fatal-hit-and-run accident on the southern island of Okinawa and asked the U.S. Army to bring him in for further questioning.

The incident comes amid strains in U.S.-Japan relations as Prime Minister Yukio Hatoyama reviews the American military presence in the country. Some members of his administration have suggested they would like to see some U.S. bases moved off Okinawa, where more than half the 47,000 U.S. troops in Japan are based.

Many residents there have complained about noise, pollution and crime tied to U.S. troops.

Investigators have linked the U.S. Army soldier, whose name and rank has not been disclosed, to a Nov. 7 accident in which a 66-year-old man was hit by a car and killed, said Okinawa police spokesman Takashi Shiradou. Investigators say the soldier raised suspicions when he took his military-registered car, which had dents and blood stains, to a repair shop. Samples collected from the car matched those of the victim.

"We have obtained enough evidence to make the soldier the prime suspect," Shiradou said.

The soldier, who has not been charged, has been interviewed three times by prefectural police in relation to the incident, said Maj. James Crawford, chief of public affairs for the U.S. Army in Japan.

"We are cooperating with (Japanese police) and at the same time we're trying to respect the rights of the individual," said Crawford, referring to the soldier. "He hasn't been charged with anything yet, either by prefectural police or the U.S. Army."

Under the Status of Forces Agreement between the two countries, American servicemen suspected of committing a crime off base can be tried in a Japanese court, although the U.S. isn't obligated to hand over suspects before indictment.

The case has begun to get some political attention, with Hatoyama asking for a pre-indictment handover of the suspect to Japanese authorities.

The soldier has refused to come in for further questioning on the advice of his Japanese attorney unless the session is fully videotaped, said Shiradou. Generally, Japanese police are limited in their use of videotaping during questionings.

The attorney, Toshimitsu Takaesu, did not immediately respond to phone calls.

According to the local newspaper Ryuku Shimpo, Takaesu said the soldier denied any awareness of hitting a person, saying he wouldn't have taken the car to a repair shop if that was the case, and that he thought he had hit a tree.

Japanese police only identified the suspect as a soldier in his 20s belonging to Torii communication station in Yomitan, Okinawa. Kyodo News agency has said he is a 27-year-old staff sergeant.

Crawford said the soldier, who lived off base, has been required to remain on base until the situation is resolved.

Associated Press Writer Mari Yamaguchi contributed to this report.

Robert Fisk’s World: Scars of the past reveal Britain's doomed empire in Hong Kong

by Robert Fisk

The Independent

By the time the British surrendered in 1941, thousands of civilians had been killed

Up on Diamond Hill, the British Second World War pillbox looks like one of Enver Hoxha's frontier bunkers, a dome of pre-stressed concrete with rectangular gun slits, the last remnant of Britain's imperial disaster in Hong Kong, a reminder of that most terrible of Christmas Days in 1941. And here, amid the detritus of that ferocious Japanese victory, Kipling hits it to a T:

"Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!"

For the Chinese are building a 17-track rail yard on Diamond Hill and the bunker is likely to be bulldozed, along with an old RAF hangar and whatever else is left of Britain's imperium in the former village of Tai Hom. Even Repulse Bay down below takes its name from the ship which so often graced its azure, overfished waters, and participated in that greatest of all naval disasters, the sinking of HMS Repulse by Japanese aircraft – along with the Prince of Wales – on 10 December 1941. It doomed Singapore. Two days earlier, the Japanese had crossed into the New Territories of Hong Kong and in just over two weeks – accompanied by the usual massacres – they had conquered another sceptred isle.

But you can still see the Gin Drinkers' Line that Major-General Christopher Maltby thought might hold his enemies for a week or two – he was wrong, of course, but the very name tells you what was wrong with the empire. The Royal Scots and two Indian units, the Punjabis and the Rajputs, held on vainly there. It was meant to be held by six battalions. Only 60 members of the Royal Scots could make it. Within 24 hours, the Brits were abandoning Kowloon for the loneliness of Hong Kong island. Churchill knew it was doomed. You only have to look at the pitiful pillboxes, chewed over by bullets 68 years ago, now overgrown with creepers, to see why.

But the battle of Hong Kong has not entirely faded away. First, there is the magnificent 1937 blockhouse that served as an ammunition store, the very last British position to hold out on Shouson Hill on 25 December 1941. It was the last stand, but the building is still intact, its original massive iron doors now protecting a magnificent wine cellar into which a certain Mr Charles Lim, who helps to runs an equally magnificent restaurant beside the walls, took me on a tour of inspection. Even the ammunition racks are in place. And there are two defused shells standing in the corner of a cosy underground restaurant to which wine connoisseurs may repair – safe, no doubt, even in the event of giant tsunami or nuclear attack. General Maltby would have approved.

Not much else about the battle of Hong Kong won his approval. The Japanese shelled the police station, the naval hospital and most of the civilian residential areas of the island and – after slaughtering 20 surrendering soldiers and the medical staff at the Salesian Mission – went on to further atrocities. They tortured and killed more than 60 injured soldiers at St Stephen's College along with, again, medical staff. By the time the Brits surrendered at 3.15pm on Christmas Day, countless thousands of civilians had been killed, along with 1,589 British, Canadian, Indian and Hong Kong soldiers, 1,000 of them in a single day. The Japanese lost 2,000 of their men.

For what? Hong Kong was as strategically useless then as it was when we finally left 12 years ago. But its fall was another symbol of the end of empire, a fact nowhere more sadly recognised than in the Stanley Military Cemetery. It's one of the most curious graveyards of conflict in the world, for it contains not only those familiar Commonwealth war memorials and stones but also large numbers of civilians who died in their own little hell in the Stanley internment camp during three years and eight months of Japanese occupation. There are elderly British ladies, Chinese volunteers, children, even the victims of a misbegotten US air raid later in the war, the Americans being famous for own goals even then.

There's Ethel Kate Wilmers, "born 19 December 1880 at Clifton in England, died 22 August, 1944". After life's fitful fever, her gravestone tells us, "She sleeps well." Perhaps. Mary Williamson's grave is even sadder. She died in her seventies in the Japanese camp on 2 August 1942, close to her 20-year old grandson, Douglas Harvey Collins Taylor, who died on that awful Christmas day but who is "buried in an unknown grave". One gravestone marks the mass grave of 25 men who died the same day. There are Chinese memorials – they fought hard for the Brits and died for them, even in the Royal Navy; HMS Dauntless and HMS Tenedos figure on their memorials and a Brit has written in the visitors' book: "Be proud of Chinese soldiers."

In the Repulse Bay Hotel is Ernest Hemingway's typewriter and his expenses – about which the less said the better – and a picture of the great man, plump on the terrace just six months before the invasion, reporting the Sino-Japanese war. A newspaper of 17 June 1941 survives. "Ernest Hemingway Says China Needs Pilots as Well as Planes to Beat Japanese in the Air," its headline records. By December, he could have said that about Hong Kong.

I suppose the names mean it is for ever England if not empire. There's St John's Cathedral and Beaconsfield House and Chater Road, Jackson Road, Cotton Tree Drive and a statue of John Osborn of the Winnipeg Grenadiers who chucked Japanese grenades back at the enemy until he was too late for one of them and threw his body on top to save his men. "Tell my wife," were his last words. He got the VC.

But my favourite relic of the war are the two bronze British lions that stand today outside the Hong Kong Shanghai banking headquarters behind Queen's Road Central. "Sculptor: W W Wagstaff, 1935," it says on the base. The lions – named Stephen and Stott after early British bank managers – were shot through with shrapnel and bullets in the last battle in the city, but remain proudly unrepaired. You can stick your finger in the bullet holes and realise that the live rounds hit them from both sides. Typical Brits. Like the street names, they survived.

Australia rapped for violating aborigine rights

PressTV

Amnesty International has slammed the Australian government's inability to tackle the poverty the country's aborigines are facing.

The London-based organization's visiting Secretary-General Irene Khan said on Wednesday that the conditions aboriginals are facing are deeply disturbing and require a new approach.

"In the heart of the First World, I saw scenes more reminiscent of the Third World - of countries torn by war, dominated by repressive regimes or racked by corruption," AP quoted Khan, a Bangladesh-born lawyer, as saying.

She underlined that the aborigines are suffering from the violation of their basic human rights.

"... This violation occurs on a continent of such privilege that it is not merely disheartening, it is deeply disturbing."

The Amnesty boss said she was surprised to witness first hand the extent of their poverty.

"They feel disempowered, robbed of their dignity, threatened with the loss of their identity and attacked on their own ancestral lands."

The UN had also criticized the Australian government's policies towards aboriginal communities earlier this year.

The life expectancy of indigenous Australians is 17 years lower than that of other Australians.

Resisting through education

by Marryam Haleem

The Electronic Intifada

“That was the happiest day of my life,” Ahmad explained, “I was freed that day.”

“Come on,” I laughed as we walked down the dusty Gaza street, the Mediterranean sun beating down hard on our faces. “It couldn’t have been that bad. I mean, we all dislike school to some degree, but it has its nice things too.”

His grave eyes looked wholly unconvinced. “The day I graduated from university was the best day of my life,” he firmly repeated. And then he added, more to himself than to me, “I wish I could erase all my memories of my time in school.”

Ahmad’s first day of school was in 1991 during the first Palestinian intifada. Then six years old and living in the northern Gaza town of Beit Hanoun, Ahmad was a good student who enjoyed school. He worked hard and was always the first in his year. After the Oslo accords were signed in 1993 and the Palestinian Authority was created, one could say that life in Gaza was approaching a degree of normalcy. And upon finishing middle school in 2000, as a reward for his scholastic achievement, Ahmad received the gift of a lifetime. He, along with 19 other students from Gaza, was selected by the Ministry of Education to join a Seeds of Peace summer camp in the US.

He had a wonderful time in America. What an adventure for the 14-year-old boy! He improved his English. He made new friends. He experienced a new and different world in the beautiful state of Maine — one that was open, free and full of opportunity. He returned to Gaza after this month-long excursion full of hope.

But the second intifada irrupted only two months after he returned home from the US, at the start of his first year of high school. Israel’s brutal attempt to crush the intifada was felt throughout the occupied West Bank and Gaza. “There was no space,” Ahmad explained, describing how the Israeli offensive affected every aspect of personal life for the Palestinian individual. Student life was only one such casualty.

It became dangerous to go to school. It became impossible to have a normal education. In his three years of high school, Ahmad’s school was shelled by Israeli tanks six times, twice while students were inside.

“Each day we would have demonstrations against the attacks in Gaza and the West Bank because we had so many martyrs … No school. Just demonstrations … You had to go and demonstrate against the horrible attacks against these children and kids everywhere.”

Still, despite all the madness, the students clung as much as they could to their vocation. They would loyally go to school, as much as circumstance allowed. But even this effort was frequently quashed. Too often the students would trek to school only to find it closed. They would ask the reasons for the closures. The answers became the soul-grating refrain of their lives.

Why?

Because Israeli tanks are getting close to the school and there is no school today.

Why?

Because people in our city have been martyred and there are demonstrations so there will be no school today.

Why?

Because the tanks have closed off Beit Hanoun and the teachers cannot come from outside. So we’ll have no school today.

It was in this environment that Ahmad and his classmates (the ones who were not killed) came to their third and final year of high school in 2003. It is during this final year that students take their tawjihi exam which determines their entire future studies and career.

“Tawjihi,” Ahmad aptly described, “is like a stage between life.”

Tawjihi year began normal enough — for a Palestinian in Gaza, that is. Normal attacks. Normal shootings. Normal curfews. But the last two months before the exams began the Israeli army laid siege on Beit Hanoun. No one could enter. No one could leave. Everyday there were attacks and explosions. Everyday there were injuries and martyrs.

“We didn’t study, actually,” said Ahmad, “Nothing. You cannot study [when] people are dying,” he explained.

Yet their exams were approaching. The first day of examination was 9 June 2003 — and the Israeli army was still in Beit Hanoun.

“What do we do?” said Ahmad. “We need to take our exams. So we decided to go to school even though the Israeli tanks were at the doors outside the school.”

So they went. Despite the fact that they hadn’t prepared at all due to the siege and the killings. Examinations went on for a month. Every day the students went. And every day the Israeli tanks were at the doors of the school.

It was the worst month, Ahmad said. All your time in high school you wait to prepare and do well on these final examinations, only, in the last moments, to be prevented from studying because your city is under attack.

The soldiers left after 67 days of siege. And then their exam results came in.

“I passed,” said Ahmad, “my average was 83.5. So very good.”

Yet, at the same time, he added, “You don’t know what is going on. You just go and study for a life you’ve been dreaming about. But then you find you can’t have it because of obstacles put up by enemies. And these are horrible obstacles. They’re not just any kind of obstacles that anyone could pass.

“It’s war everywhere. And people are dying everywhere. And you just don’t know. Maybe it’s your turn. I mean, we believe in God, and we know everyone is going to die. But when it goes on so continuously, every day there is attacks, you just keep worrying about it. So the feeling was, what should I be doing? Should I go fight and resist? Should I go study as a way to resist, as a better way of resistance? Should I just stay afraid, doing nothing, with my family?”

“I started to believe that maybe the power from my education in the future will be greater than the power of a stone against a tank. I asked myself a million times, if I should do the same [and take up throwing stones at the Israeli tanks like some of the Palestinian youth]. Even if it was a little thing.

“Some people say it’s stupid, a stone against a tank. But it’s their will and determination [that counts]. It comes from deep inside. That you are not afraid from anything, whatever it may be. You just want to fight, resist, for your rights. Even if it takes your life, takes everything; I believe that it’s my right and I have to do it.”

That is one way to resist. But Ahmad decided to resist through his education.

“I had to take care of my family. Reach what my parents wanted of me. They wanted us to be educated, get a good life, good jobs, have a good place in the community. They wanted us to help them and help people. So that was the final, or not the final, but a decision that I made.

“You are feeling many things, but you have to go on, to keep going. The only way is to just keep fighting, through your education, and your dreams, and your beliefs. That was the feeling.

“But I never felt like I have to give up. I didn’t find a way that told me, you just need to give up now. And every time a bad thing happened, or a disaster happened, it gave me more power to continue.

“Because this life became normal for us — an abnormal life for other people became the normal for us. So we had to figure out another way of life for us. It’s our reality. We had to face reality, however it was. So it helped us to figure out that life, in spite of all this.

“And all the challenges that we are facing, and all the power that is fighting and destroying everything here in Gaza, we still need to keep going. It’s not going to stop us. Because if we stop, it wont help us. [The Israelis] will keep going. Whether or not we stop, they will try to get what they want. So why give them more opportunities to get what they want? We need also to continue.”

He paused at the end of this grand soliloquy. “How difficult it was,” he said softly.

But the difficulty continued as he moved on to get his bachelor of arts in information technology at a university in Gaza.

“I faced troubles when I was in high school because of the intifada but they increased at university,” Ahmad explained. “Beit Hanoun is the most violent area in Gaza Strip because it is very close to the [Israeli] border so there were usually attacks. Every day we had events. People killed. People injured. Homes destroyed. Lands demolished. My father’s farm was bulldozed four or five times. Most of my relatives’ homes were targeted.

“Most of the semesters I couldn’t attend many lectures because of the usual attacks on my city. There were weekly attacks, sometimes daily attacks so I could not leave home; it was not safe to leave. And I’d also have to stay home when there were other attacks around the city, or around the university.”

Many times he wasn’t even able to attend final exams.

“I’d just keep studying throughout the semester and when it was exam time, attacks would happen in Beit Hanoun and friends and relatives were killed, [so I'd miss the exams]. I was supposed to graduate in 2008, but I graduated in 2009, one year late because of these attacks. Attacks which have never stopped. Even now. Especially in my city.”

Ahmad was finally set to graduate in December 2008, but once again larger events intervened.

“The end of December turned out to be the beginning of a war, not the beginning of final exams. It was a big, I don’t know how to describe it,” he said. “It was like, ‘here is a gift for graduation: You won’t graduate. Just keep waiting for death.’”

His month of exams was exchanged for a month of terror.

“It was 23 days,” he said, “but you can say 23 weeks. Twenty-three months. Twenty-three years. Twenty-three centuries. It never ends. You keep waiting, moment by moment. And you know nothing. You can only feel the darkness. There is no light, for any kind of hope, or safety, or human rights, or whatever. Just 23 days full of darkness. Full of horror. Full of victims. Massacres. Everything bad. I cannot find words to describe it.”

But those days did pass. And he found enough strength to pick himself up out of the rubble and finish the mission he began. He graduated, at last, this past spring. But not without sacrifice and loss that no one should ever have to endure.

“These five years in university, I said and will keep saying forever,” Ahmad concluded, “these five years were the most horrible years of my life. Even though they’re supposed to be the best years, the nice years. The time to go out and discover life. But it wasn’t discovering life. It was discovering disasters, actually, here in Gaza.”

Marryam Haleem is a senior at the University of Wisconsin studying philosophy and comparative literature and spent this summer in Gaza doing research for her senior thesis.

Uri Avnery's Column: Federation? Why Not?

by Uri Avnery

Gush Shalom

THESE DAYS mark the 5th anniversary of the murder of Yasser Arafat, and bring back to me our last conversation in his Ramallah compound, a few weeks before his death. It was he who brought up the idea of a threefold federation – Israel, Palestine and Jordan. “And perhaps Lebanon, too. Why not?” – the same as he did at our very first meeting, in Beirut, July 1982, in the middle of the battle. He mentioned the term Benelux – the pact between Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg that predated the European Union.

Lately, the term “federation” has come into fashion again. Some people believe that it can serve as a kind of compromise between the “Two-State Solution”, now a world-wide consensus, and the “One-State Solution” that is popular in some radical circles. “Federation” sounds like a miracle: there will be both “two states for two peoples” and a single entity. Two in one, one in two.

THE WORD “federation” does not frighten me. On the contrary, I was already using it in this context 52 years ago.

On June 2, 1957, my magazine, Haolam Hazeh, published the first detailed plan for an independent Palestinian state that would come into being next to Israel. The West Bank was then under Jordanian and the Gaza Strip under Egyptian occupation. I proposed helping the Palestinians to get rid of the occupiers. According to the plan, the two states, the Israeli and the Palestinian, would then establish a federation. I thought that its proper name should be “the Jordan Union”.

A year later, on September 1, 1958, there appeared a document called “the Hebrew Manifesto”. I am proud of my part in its composition. It was a comprehensive plan for a fundamental change of the State of Israel in all its aspects – a kind of complete overhaul. In its readiness to re-examine the fundamentals of the state and in the depth of the thinking involved, it has no parallel from the founding of Israel to this very day. Among its authors were Nathan Yellin-Mor, the ex-chief of the Stern Group, Boaz Evron, Amos Kenan and several others.

I was responsible for the chapter on Israeli-Arab peace. It proposed that a sovereign Palestinian state would be set up next to Israel, and that the two states would establish a federation, which would gradually assume more and more jurisdiction. I had to invent a Hebrew word to replace the foreign term “federation”: “Ugda” (grouping) and suggested that it should be called “the Jordan Federation” - “Ugdat ha-Yarden” in Hebrew and “Ittihad al-Urdun” in Arabic. (To my sorrow, this use the term “Ugda” did not take root. Instead, the army adopted it for a division, which is a grouping of regiments or brigades.)

On the morrow of the Six-Day War, after which the entire country between the Mediterranean and the Jordan was under the control of the Israeli army, a new political movement called “Israel-Palestine Federation” called for the immediate creation of a Palestinian state next to Israel. The founders were, more or less, the same people who had composed the “Hebrew Manifesto”.

When this historic opportunity was missed and with the occupation becoming gradually more and more oppressive, I abandoned the use of the term federation. I sensed that it frightened both parties. Israelis were afraid that the word covered a plot to establish a bi-national state – an idea that is rejected by the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis. Palestinians were afraid that it would serve as a disguise for a permanent Israeli occupation.

It should be remembered that the original partition plan adopted by the UN General Assembly on November 29, 1947, did envision a kind of federation, without using the term. It provided for the establishment of a Jewish state and an Arab state, and a separate entity of Jerusalem, administered by the UN. All these entities were to be parts of an economic union that would cover customs, the currency, railways, post, ports, airports and more. This would have, in practice, amounted to a federation.

THE MAIN problem with the word “federation” is that it has no agreed and binding definition. In different parts of the world, it describes wildly different regimes. The same is true for “confederacy”.

No two countries in the world resemble each other completely, and no two federations are the same. Every state and every federation has been shaped by its particular historical development and specific circumstances, and reflects the people that created it.

The word “federation” is derived from the Latin “foedus”, treaty. Basically, a federation is a pact between different states which decide to unite on agreed terms. The USA is a federation, and so is Russia. What do the two have in common?

The United States is, theoretically, a voluntary association of states. The states have many rights, but the federation is headed by a single president with immense powers. In practice, this is one state. When in 1860 the Southern states tried to secede and set up a “confederacy” of their own, the North crushed the “rebellion” in a brutal civil war. Every morning, millions of pupils in the United States swear allegiance to the flag and to “One Nation Under God”.

Russia, too, is officially a federation, but their use of the term has a very different content. Moscow appoints the governors of the provinces, and Vladimir Putin rules the country as a personal fief. When Chechnya tried to secede from the “Russian Federation”, it was crushed even more brutally than the confederacy in the American civil war. (This does not hinder Putin from supporting two seceding provinces of neighboring Georgia.)

Germany defines itself as a “federal republic (“Bundesrepublik”). It is composed of “Länder” that enjoy a large measure of autonomy. Switzerland calls itself a confederation in French and Italian (“Eidgenossenschaft” or “Oath Association” in German) and its cantons enjoy their autonomy. But it is also a very unified country.

It is generally supposd that a “federation” is a tighter association, while a “confederacy” is a looser one. But in reality, these differences are very blurred. It seems that Americans and Russians, Germans and Swiss, identify themselves first of all with their united state, not with their own particular province. (Except for the Bavarians, of course.)

The new Europe is for all practical purposes a confederacy, but its founders did not name it thus. They chose the less definite “European Union”. Why? Perhaps they thought that terms like “federation” and “confederacy” were outdated. Perhaps they considered such terms too binding. The term “union” does not commit its members to anything specific, and they can fill it with whatever content they all agree on and change it from time to time. If the “Lisbon agreement” is finally ratified, the union will change again.

IT MAKES no sense, therefore, to discuss the idea of an Israeli-Palestinian “federation” in general terms, without defining right from the beginning what is meant by this. The same word, used by different people, can express completely different and even contradictory intentions.

For example: I recently saw a plan for a federation here in which every person would have the right to settle anywhere in either state while holding the citizenship of one of them. I can hardly imagine that many Israelis or Palestinians would embrace that. The Israelis would be afraid that the Arabs would soon constitute the majority within Israel, and the Palestinians would worry that Israeli settlers would take possession of every hilltop between the sea and the Jordan.

In any discussion of federation, the matter of immigration looms large as an ominous bone of contention. Would millions of Palestinian refugees be allowed to return to Israeli territory? Would millions of Jewish immigrants be allowed to submerge the State of Palestine?

The same is true for the matter of residence. Could a citizen of Palestine settle in Haifa, and an Israeli citizen in Nablus, as a Pole can now settle in France, a New Yorker in Miami, an inhabitant of canton Zurich in canton Uri?

EACH ONE of us who considers the idea of federation must decide what he or she wants. To draw up a beautiful plan on paper, which has no chance at all of being realized because it ignores the aspirations of both “partners” - or to think in practical terms about real options?

In practice, a federation can come about only on the basis of a free agreement between the two parties. This means that it can be realized only if both – Israelis and Palestinians – consider it as advantageous to themselves and compatible with their national aspirations.

In my opinion, a practical way to realize the idea could look like this:

Stage 1: A sovereign Palestinian state must come into being. This must precede everything else. The occupation must end and Israel must withdraw to the Green Line (with possible mutually agreed swaps of territory.) That goes for Jerusalem, too.

Stage 2: The two states establish a pattern of fair relations between them and get used to living side by side. There will be a need for real steps towards reconciliation and the healing of the wounds of the past. (For example: the creation of a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” on the South African model.) On the practical level, fair arrangements of matters like movement between the two states, the division of water resources etc. are put into place.

Stage 3: The two states start negotiations for the establishment of joint institutions. For example: the opening of the border between them for the free movement of people and goods, an economic union, a joint currency, a customs envelope, the use of ports and airports, coordination of foreign relations, and so on. There will be no automatic right for citizens of one state to settle in the other. Each state will decide for itself on its immigration policy.

The two parties can jointly decide whether to invite Jordan as a third partner to the proposed treaty.

Such a negotiation can succeed only if the population in each of the partner states is convinced that the partnership will bring it positive benefits. Since Israel is the stronger economically and technologically, it must be ready to make generous proposals.

Stage 4: The more trust between the parties develops, the easier it will be to deepen the partnership and to widen the powers of the joint institutions.

Perhaps, at this stage, conditions may be ripe for the founding of a wider association of the entire region, on the lines of the European Union. Such an association may include the Arab states, Israel, Turkey and Iran. The name I suggested for it in the past was “Semitic Union”. (Turks and Iranians are not linguistically “Semitic” nations, but Islam is a Semitic religion and plays a major role in their culture.)

This is a vision for the future, and it can be realized. To paraphrase Barack Obama’s slogan, even if it has lost some of its luster: Yes, we can!