Observations, articles, opinions etc. in Dutch and English. The author, Bert de Bruin (Yonathan Dror Bar-On), is a Dutch-Jewish historian, who has specialized in modern Jewish history and in the history of the Middle East, and who in 1995 emigrated from the Netherlands to Israel. In July 2008 his first book, Israel en ik - Vijftien bekende Nederlanders over hun verhouding met een zestigjarige (Israel and I - Fifteen well-known Dutchmen and -women on their relationship with a 60-year-old), was published. He also edited Een veilig Israel in een vreedzaam Midden-Oosten (A Safe Israel in a Peaceful Middle-East), which contains speeches (by Paul Bremer, Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, Dan Meridor, Mark Rutte, Maxime Verhagen and others) held at an international conference in the Peace Palace in The Hague in March 2010. For feedback please post a comment, or send this blog's author an email.

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Archbishop Elias Chacour is right when he says that the incident yesterday evening in the Church of the Annunciation is embarrassing for Israel. Still, it is only embarrassing, not much more. Almost all religious officials, political leaders and security forces behaved in a very responsible way, and they did a good job of crisis management and cooperation. The only ones who should be ashamed of themselves, since they showed an absolute lack of responsible leadership by trying to use this incident - which was caused by troubled individuals, not by political or religious fanatics - for their own political gains, are men such as Mohammad Barakeh, Ahmad Tibi, Sheikh Salah and Azmi Bishara. The fact that less than half of the Israeli Arabs who are entitled to vote intend to go and us their democratic right on March 28th is not only an embarrasment for the State of Israel, it is also - and particularly - an embarrasment and should be a warning for those who pretend to be the leaders of the Arab minority in that state.

0 comments: